(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)
How is it, Fredrickson asks, that “pre-Darwinian scientific racism flowered in France and the United States” (p. 68)—nation-states that were heirs to revolutions based on the notion of equal rights for all citizens—much more so than in a constitutional monarchy like England?
His answer is that it is partly because of this emerging civic nationalist ideology that Western racism continues to rise throughout the nineteenth century.
“The one exclusionary principle that could be readily accepted by civic nationalists was biological unfitness for full citizenship. The precedent of excluding women, children, and the insane from the electorate and denying them equality under the law could be applied to racial groups deemed by science to be incompetent to exercise the rights and privileges of democratic citizenship. In France, the question was theoretical because there were no significant racial minorities. But in the United States a true ‘Herrenvolk democracy’ emerged during the Jacksonian period, when the right to vote was extended to all white males and denied to virtually all blacks, including some who had previously voted under a franchise restricted to property holders.” (p. 68-69)
Germany in the 1800s was, for Fredrickson’s purposes, largely defined by its reaction against Enlightenment universalism and the new civic nationalism of the French—not surprisingly, given what Napoleon’s armies did to the Germans.
“During the course of the nineteenth century, the Germans, more than any other western Europeans, repudiated the civic nationalist ideal inspired by the Enlightenment and the eighteenth-century revolutions in favor of a concept of national membership based predominantly on ethnic origins rather than human rights. Defining themselves culturally and linguistically rather than in terms of territorially based rights of citizenship originally served as compensation for the failure of the German-speaking peoples to unify politically and become a single nation-state.” (p. 69)
In looking at the development over time of racism as an ideology, Fredrickson observes that “racism is always nationally specific” and then narrows his focus to “…the United States and Germany in the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth…” when the political projects that “…brought racism to ideological fruition and gave it the independent capacity to shape the societies and polities of the United States and Germany…” arose as “…organized efforts to reverse or limit the emancipation of blacks in the former country and of Jews in the latter.” (p. 75)
After tracing the outlines of the (ultimately failed, or at best, limited) attempts at emancipation in each country, Fredrickson looks at the similarities and differences between the two cases. First, the similarities:
- “In both cases…federalism served as an obstacle to equal citizenship.” (p. 82)
- “(R)apid industrialization and economic growth gave rise to situations where members of the majority were in competition or at least potential competition with members of the outgroup for jobs or other economic opportunities—something that would have been inconceivable in the era of the ghetto and the slave plantation.” (p. 82)
- “(T)he success of emancipation depended on the fortunes of a liberal-to-radical political movement.” (p. 83)
- As those liberal movements waned, both countries experienced “the rise of parties and factions committed to exploiting Negrophobia or antisemitism.” (p. 84)
- Finally, “although it is more accidental or contingent than the other similarities, both German Jews and American blacks were impeded in their struggles for equality by the international economic downturn that began in 1873.” (p. 84-85)
And then the differences, which Fredrickson argues, “are even more significant” (p. 86):
- “(T)he economic and social competition set off by emancipation involved different classes or strata of society.” (Freed slaves in the US competing mainly with poor and working-class whites, German Jews competing with middle-class and professional gentiles.)
- “In Germany, volkisch nationalism was explicitly promoted as antithetical to liberalism and the heritage of the Enlightenment…. (meanwhile) American white supremacist ideology was based on an interpretation (or distortion) of the Enlightenment philosophy on which the nation was founded. Science was expected to determine a group’s unfitness for full citizenship before it could be excluded. German antisemitism, on the other hand, was based on a rejection of rationalism, universalism, and the political values that went with them.” (p. 91-92)
In comparing the two nations, Fredrickson concludes that in a national snapshot taken in 1900 CE, “there is no question that the American color line was much more rigid than the barriers between Jews and gentiles in Germany” and then suggests, with a touch of foreshadowing, that the “logical outcome of the blood-based folk nationalism increasingly embraced by the Germans was the total exclusion or elimination of the Jews” whereas “the American conception of citizenship had to include blacks once their full humanity was acknowledged“. (p. 93-94)
He hastens to add that 20th century developments—Germany’s “Final Solution” and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the United States—were not inevitable. “Historical preconditions do not usually become determinants unless there are some intervening circumstances or contingencies“. (p. 94)
Crossposted at: MassCommons.wordpress.com
