The US was loved...

A strange opinion that I have run across frequently in Skypeland, which is espoused by both Americans and foreigners, is that somehow, before the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and Americans were universally loved around the world. This is one of the strangest fantasies I have ever encountered.

My understanding is that the United States has been the object of fear, envy, revulsion and disgust for decades and decades. The book "The Ugly American", about official US misbehavior overseas during the Cold War, was published in 1958. There were proxy wars between the US and the Soviet Union for decades, and there was no love lost between them. The Europeans were positively panicky about "Echelon", a purported secret US eavesdropping project, in the 1990s. There have been Islamist terrorist attacks against the US for decades, and huge protests against the Great Satan after the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979. There were fatwahs issued by Bin Laden calling for the slaying of all Americans everywhere on planet Earth in 1996 and 1998, and no Islamic leader spoke out against these. There were numerous protests in Latin America for decades and decades with signs and chats of "Yanqi go home". There was even a song called "Yankee Go Home" that was written by Richard Thompson in 1988. The US has been involved in a major war every 2.5 years during its entire existence. There were labor riots in the early 1900s in the US that were put down violently that caused all kinds of negative publicity for the US. Americans were involved in "rum running" to the Indians in Western Canada, leading to the formation of the RCMP in the mid-1800s. Admiral Perry from the US forced Japan to open up to trade in the mid-1850s, causing many hard feelings. The slavery issue and the subsequent racial segregation policies of the US caused very bad publicity for the United States up through the 1960s.

I could give many many other examples, with links. So when people make this claim, that the US was universally loved sometime in a mythical past, I want to know when this magical time was?