The Undivided Past (31 page)

At the same time that these race hierarchies were being domestically embedded, the policies of racial exclusion were increasingly embraced in the British dominions to ensure they continued to be “white men’s countries,” by restricting
immigration of blacks, South Asians, and (especially) Chinese. The fear of cheap “Asiatic” labor was common to white settler societies bordering the Pacific, where the Chinese were willing to work for lower wages than white men. These immigrant populations were tiny, but as the global economy turned down during the late nineteenth century, such foreigners were often made the scapegoat, and the rights of white labor mutated into the entrenching of racial privilege. In the Australian colonies, for instance, immigration was closely restricted during the 1880s.
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New Zealand
moved in step, and successive prime ministers were determined to have “the purity of our race maintained.” In
Canada, similar legislation was passed in British Columbia against Chinese migrants who had come to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. On confederation in 1901, the
Australian parliament expelled Pacific Islanders and prevented “non-whites” from entering the country to settle, thereby inaugurating the “White Australia” policy, and in 1913
South Africa carried an
Immigration Restriction Act, consolidating legislation earlier passed in Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State.
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From this perspective, the British Empire was a
white man’s empire, in which inferior people of color were denied political and legal rights where they lived, and were prevented from moving from one part of the empire to another. In 1901, the Australian attorney general,
Alfred Deakin, defending the White Australia policy, described the motive for establishing this great racial divide as “the instinct of self preservation,” for it was “nothing less than the national manhood, the national character and the national future that are at stake.”
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To be a colored person in these white men’s countries was demeaning, humiliating, and degrading.
Mahatma Gandhi would never forget the insults he suffered when he visited Natal in 1893; appalled at the
segregation between whites and blacks, on trains and in hotels and even in public baths, he concluded that the whole colony was afflicted by “the deep disease of colour prejudice.”
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And what was true of the British Empire was no less true of the French or Belgian or German empires at the same time. In the latter case, and uniquely among early-twentieth-century Western
imperial powers, marriages between German colonists and nonwhites (including those of mixed blood and “Christian half-castes”) were banned.
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There were similar developments in the United States, where in the aftermath of the
Civil War and
Emancipation, the issues, identities, and hierarchies of race became, paradoxically,
more
pronounced and more central to American public discourse. This was partly because in the era of
social Darwinism and high imperialism, race thought and talk and the desire to reaffirm racial divisions and rankings were widespread; but it was also that with the formal end of Reconstruction in 1877, the position of
blacks got worse, not better, as southern whites ruthlessly reasserted their collective racial supremacy, while the federal government, refusing to commit sufficient resources or apply enough force to overcome violent white resistance, failed to enforce civic and
political equality for blacks.
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In the South, one of the unintended consequences of Emancipation was that black males were no longer depicted as childlike innocents, who needed firm but benevolent guidance; instead they were increasingly regarded as subhuman beasts who were widely believed to be sexual predators, lusting after white women, and who deserved to be lynched or burned alive in the interests of natural justice.
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Here was a new racist culture, of negative
stereotyping, as embodied in “white supremacism” and the
Ku Klux Klan. The result was that in the American South, the forty years after Reconstruction witnessed the most sustained and coherent effort yet made to order society on the basis of racial identities and divisions, hierarchies, and subordination.

Although they were unable to resurrect the slave system, southern whites soon devised legal and extralegal measures that deprived blacks of their recently won rights to vote, hold public office, and engage in politics. By the 1890s, segregation was the law and the custom in towns and cities throughout the South, encompassing all aspects of public living (and dying), for it was enforced in hotels, prisons, schools, restaurants, stores, factories, hospitals, buses, trains, toilets—and cemeteries. The majority of blacks were systematically reduced to positions of dependency, poverty, and restricted aspirations in a brutally bifurcated social order: intermarriage between blacks and whites was prohibited, and during the 1880s and 1890s white lynchings of blacks averaged 150 a year.
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The segregation and subordination of blacks was accompanied by political disenfranchisement. Beginning in Mississippi in 1890, all southern states enacted legislation that meant only whites would be eligible to vote in Democratic primaries, which effectively excluded blacks from the political process, for the white supremacist Democrats were the majority party across the South. The
Supreme Court might have declared such racist laws unconstitutional, but it failed to protect blacks from this new form of what became known as “Jim Crow” discrimination,
which effectively nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the South.
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This determination to subordinate blacks was accompanied by renewed efforts by the
Anglo-Saxons to reassert that America was a “white man’s country.” The first was the decision to join with
Canada,
New Zealand, and
Australia in restricting Asian immigrants, and in 1882 the
Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed after loud demands from organized
labor, barred any sizable
immigration of Chinese workers. The second was the parallel demand to limit the new immigrants pouring in from southern and eastern Europe, peoples who were dismissed by the economist
Francis Amasa Walker in 1890 as “beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.” One bill to keep such people out of the United States was vetoed by President
Grover Cleveland in 1897, but a second became law in 1924, and thereafter immigration from southern and eastern Europe was severely limited (and it was barred from Asia altogether). “America must be kept American,” declared President
Calvin Coolidge: the “huddled masses, yearning to be free” now had to try their luck elsewhere.
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The third development was the growing racial assertiveness of the United States overseas. As one American soldier put it, having participated in the conquest of the
Philippines, “we all wanted to kill ‘niggers.’” The result of these policies was what the historian
Eric Foner has termed the “re-racialization of America” and “the resurgence of an Anglo-Saxonism that fused
patriotism, xenophobia and an ethno-cultural definition of nationhood in a renewed rhetoric of racial exclusiveness.”
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In Germany, the
anti-Semitism preached by writers such as
Lapouge and
Chamberlain would eventually lead to even worse horrors than those seen in the American South. Throughout the North German Federation from 1869, and across the entire Reich two years later,
Jews only formed 1 percent of the population, and they enjoyed full rights of citizenship. But those who had not become
Christians were often denied access to jobs in the civil service, academe, and the military. By the late nineteenth century, however, as German politics moved decisively to the right, there was a marked rise in
“volkish nationalism” and popular anti-Semitism, especially among the lower middle class.
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Defeat in the First
World War led to a search for explanations, and the Jews, with their alleged internationalist conspiracies and their rootless disloyalty to the Reich, were for many the obvious scapegoats. During the 1920s, German nationalists continued to believe that the “Volk” defined their nation as a unique and exclusive community, one that should incorporate all Germans inside and outside the formal frontiers of their recently reduced territory, but deny the German nationality of anyone who was not of the “Volk,” even if formally a German citizen. Popular social biology lent support to such views, by reinforcing the Aryan myth that all authentic Germans, whether living in the fatherland or outside it, shared a common physical origin, which explained their cultural distinctiveness, spiritual affinity—and racial homogeneity.
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The young
Adolf Hitler had fully assimilated these inclusionist and exclusionist racial views, and he would later implement them with unique intensity, fanaticism, belligerence, and terror.
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Each nation, Hitler believed, should be made up of “a multitude of more or less similar beings,” who were thus
“linked by blood” and by a shared racial consciousness. Because races and nations were (or should be) thus aligned, it followed that the world was divided into two distinct
categories: the “higher races,” imbued with the urge for self-preservation and continuance, and capable of creating and sustaining a superior culture; and the “lower races,” destined for
biological degeneration, cultural sterility, and ultimate disappearance. Accordingly, Hitler’s nations were collective communities that were racially based and locked in permanent confrontation and perpetual struggle, they were exclusive and belligerent from nature and necessity, and the Aryan nation or “Volk” was the supreme form of racial awareness and expression of racial superiority.
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The state, in Hitler’s view, must be coterminous with the nation, the “Volk,” and the race, and its purpose was to promote and protect the biological purity of its population, to raise levels of racial consciousness, and to consolidate a greater Germany by incorporating those
Aryans who lived beyond its own borders.

From 1933 to 1945, Hitler sought to define, preserve, extend, and defend the racially pure German “Volk”: “the aim of German policy,” he observed in November 1937, “is to make secure and to preserve the racial mass and to enlarge it.”
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The essence
of this racial bond was a common racial blood (“Volksblut”), and from the beginning of his dictatorship, legislation was carried laying down who was and who was not a racial German. In 1935, he passed an act “for the protection of German blood and German honor,” which meant Germans could marry only Germans; he also enacted a new citizenship law, which defined who Germans were—and were not. By this definition, non-Germans could not be full members of Hitler’s “Germanic state of the German nation.”
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At the same time that Hitler was defining the German nation in terms of blood, he was also defining—and extending—it in terms of territory, as he sought to create a greater, racially homogeneous Reich by incorporating those Germans living beyond its borders in the former
Habsburg Empire; hence the occupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of
Austria and
Czechoslovakia, and the attack on
Poland. In October 1939, Hitler named
Heinrich Himmler as the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German Race, and he soon established a German Racial Register as the first step in identifying anyone living outside the Reich who might qualify on the basis of blood as being authentically German.
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Hitler also sought to purify the Reich by excluding the Jews:
biologically inferior, devoid of territorial roots or a geographical homeland, they might be international
capitalists obsessed with profits, or
Communists espousing global revolution. But whatever their agenda, they were the malevolent and incorrigible enemy of the racial state, sucking its culture dry, polluting its biological heritage, and undermining its collective willpower.
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In the six years from March 1933, more than 250 laws and decrees were passed, depriving Jews of their German citizenship, expelling them from professional life, forbidding them from marrying Germans or having sexual relations with them, and expropriating their assets. The idea that Germany should be cleansed of Jews was a cardinal axiom of Nazi policy: “the Jews must get out of Germany,” Hitler told
Joseph Goebbels in November 1937, “in fact out of the whole of Europe.”
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Two years later, he empowered Himmler to deport all Jews from Greater Germany to the east, and from expulsion to elimination was but a step: in the summer of 1941,
Hermann Göring authorized
Reinhard Heydrich to
find a “Final Solution” to the problem of the Jewish population, and the way was open for “the biological extermination,” as one Nazi put it, “of the whole of European Jewry.” Just as
Lenin had believed it was his duty to assist the preordained
historical process by helping to bring about the proletarian
revolution against the Russian
bourgeoisie, so Hitler believed he must throw the power and weight of the German state behind the Aryan
race to ensure its predestined victory in its
Manichean struggle for world mastery against the Jews.
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In the same way that Hitler’s regime lethally implemented the racial thought that had intensified in Germany during the forty years before the
First World War, so too did the Afrikaner leaders of
South Africa appropriate the pre-1914 racial theories of white empire and turn them into virulent public policies, based on the idea of an authentic and homogeneous (and embattled) Afrikaner “Volk” standing against the lesser black race. The initial impetus for more complete
segregation was the migration of
blacks from the countryside to the cities during and after the First World War, which resulted in the imposition of “influx controls” on migrants, along with confinement to segregated townships or compounds for those allowed to remain in urban
industrial areas. Beginning in 1924, laws were passed giving
working-class whites a measure of security against black competition: “industrial colour bars” were constructed, setting the wages of whites at artificially high levels and giving them exclusive access to skilled jobs. Further repression of blacks soon followed: the Masters and Servants Act imposed greater controls on the nonwhite workforce; the
Immorality Act declared intercourse between white and nonwhite a criminal offense; and the Native Administration Act allowed the government to deport any African who was judged to be promoting hostility between blacks and whites.
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