American Politics in the 1930s

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Carl Eric Scott reviews some books on the period, including Fear Itself by Ira Katznelson.

Katznelson shows us that there were German Nazi efforts in the 1930s to find and cultivate political allies in the American South, i.e., ones willing to emphasize the similarity of their racial ideology to that of Hitler, and that these efforts came away entirely empty-handed. Perhaps with the offense bred by a recognition of an unwelcome similarity, the Democratic South found Nazi Germany utterly repugnant. This had something to do with greater felt kinship to Britain in the Southern states, and to stronger military traditions and hopes for federal military bases, but it goes well beyond those factors. For whatever reasons, it seems the world might owe the survival of Britain in 1940 and then the defeat of Nazi Germany (42-45) to the South. To that South.

6 thoughts on “American Politics in the 1930s”

  1. Niall Ferguson, I recall, discussed in one of his books how Europeans on both the left and the right where appalled by Nazism, even avowedly racist colonialists. The Jews aside, the Nazis were pretty frank about their plans to enslave and/or exterminate much of Eastern Europe. If you’re a typical ethnocentric European, the mass murder of one group of Europeans by another is still a massive crime. There’s one set of rules for how you can treat, say, the Congolese, but there’s an entirely different set of rules for how you can treat Poles and Slavs, and the Nazis violated both. I am guessing folks from the old Solid South held the same opinions.

  2. This seems unsurprising for at least two reasons:

    1. there was and remains a nontrivial Jewish population in the South more or less completely accepted as part of the white community; there was a Jewish minister in the Confederate government.

    2. The Nazis were modernists who aimed to build a New Order to which “inferior” races were a threat. White Southerners saw themselves as aristocratic guardians of an Old Order in which “inferior” races could get along fine as long as they “knew their place.” If leftist historians have trouble seeing the difference, that may have more to do with their uncomfortable recognition of the similarities between Nazism and Communism than any Southern recognition of similarity to the Nazis.

  4. There’s a scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where they learn at school about how bad Hitler was.
    http://www.shmoop.com/to-kill-a-mockingbird/chapter-26-summary.html

    I’m from Alabama. Southerners have generally tolerated Jews. Today they are big supporters of Israel. I think the tolerance is for religious reasons, as Southern protestant (baptist, presbyterian, etc.) culture takes the old testament seriously, whereas in Catholic and Lutheran cultures my impression is that the new testament is very much emphasized over the old. Even slavery was often justified, rhetorically at least, with Bible passages, rather than a scientific theory like Nazi ideology. From my elderly relatives, I think the attitude was that Jews were almost magical…figures right out of the Bible doing the same ceremonies and talking the same way as from thousands of years ago. They were gods people, though misguided, and any sort of interference with them beyond proselytizing would offend God. Knowing what I do of Germany’s intellectual atmosphere at the time, I believe it would be hard for the Germans to understand that southerners took religion very literally even when their day-to-day behavior contradicted their ideals.
    Considering all the old folks I grew up around, it’s almost comical to imagine them in their primes listening to these enthusiastic Nazis. Southerners are generally suspicious of bureaucracy, unions, complicated systems, and—above all—people who talk quickly and loudly. The Nazi faith in the state would strike them as bizarre, as southern politics had been blatantly corrupt since reconstruction.

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