Omer Aziz reviews Whitman's book in America Through Nazi Eyes Dissent Winter 2019, which provides some useful perspective on that historical phenomenon.
Before getting more into Aziz' essay, I want to emphasize that this historical influence shouldn't be seen as some particularly perverse case of American Exceptionalism, in which other countries were just following the bad example set by the United States. Europe and Germany had their own histories of white racism and anti-Semitism long before Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, long before Jonestown and the Puritans landing in Massachusetts.
The Studies in Prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee in the 1940s is best known for the publication The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodore Adorno and others. Another volume in that series is Rehearsal For Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (1949). I did a series of five posts about Massing's book, starting with Political anti-Semitism in Germany, 1871-1914 (1 of 5): politics in the Kaiserreich 06/27/2011. As I noted in that series, organized anti-Semitism as it manifested itself in Imperial German politics in the second half of the 19th century up to 1895 revolve around two movements: the Berlin Movement led by Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909) and the pseudo-scientific racial agitation, led by characters like Hermann Ahlwardt (1846-1914), Otto Böckel (1859-1923), Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), Ernst Henrici (1854-1915), Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911). Eugen Dühring (1833-1921), who is mainly remembered today as the target of fierce polemics by Nietzsche and Engels, was also a significant promoter of racial anti-Semitism.
Despite the limits of specifically racial anti-Semitic politics during that period, the advocacy of racial anti-Semitism promoted a prejudice that later and more successful advocates of peusdoscientific racial anti-Semitism would effectively exploit. Nazi anti-Semitism in the 20th century was notably influenced by ideologues like the Brit Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Hitler himself was heavily influence by the toxic brand of anti-Semitism he sought out during his youthful years in Vienna, which included the political example of longtime mayor Karl Lueger (1844-1910), as well as fringy crackpots like former monk Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) and Guido von List (1848-1919).
George Masse extensively documented the evolution of Nazi ideology in books like Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1978).
The American examples of racist legislation and attitudes were processed by the Nazis through a particular European and German viewpoint heavily influenced by extreme German nationalism, pseudoscientific racism, and the rightwing cultural-political völkisch movement.
But there was plenty for them to find useful in the legal structures of white racism in the US. Aziz writes that in June 1934:
Nazi lawyers, jurists, and medical doctors gathered under the auspices of Justice Minister Franz Gürtner to discuss how to codify the Prussian Memorandum [of 1933 on Nazifying the German legal code]. The very first item discussed was U.S. law: “Almost all the American states have race legislation,” Gürtner averred, before detailing a myriad of examples, includingthe many states that criminalized mixed marriages. Roland Freisler, the murderous Nazi judge, stated at the meeting that U.S. jurisprudence would “suit us perfectly.” All the participants displayed either an eager interest in, or an avowed knowledge of, U.S. law. This went beyond specific legislation. The Nazis looked to an innovative legal culture that found ways to relegate Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and others to second- and third-class status; the many devious pathways around the constitutional guarantees of equal protection; the deliberate textual ambiguity on the definition of race itself; the draconian penalties for sexually consorting with a lesser race, or even meeting publicly. The United States in the 1930s was the apogee of a racist state. [my emphasis]This is also a sobering reminder:
From a contemporary U.S. perspective, however, the most interesting area of influence that Whitman explores is in immigration law. From the outset, the United States had a racially restricted immigration regime. The Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the First Congress, limited immigration to “free white person[s].” In the 1800s, the United States passed more racially exclusionary immigration laws because of the perceived threat of Asians. As Whitman notes, the Nazis “almost never mentioned the American treatment of blacks without also mentioning the American treatment of other groups, in particular Asians and Native-Americans.” The Chinese were excluded from citizenship in the late 1800s, and the Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917 expressly banned immigration from a whole swath of Asia. Finally, the Immigration Act of 1924 set racial quotas for those who could enter the United States, and banned Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians outright, along with nearly all Arabs. Under the Cable Act of 1922, if a woman married an Asian man, her U.S. citizenship would be revoked. [my emphasis]I'm cautious about casual optimism about American democracy. Because taking democracy too casually inevitably weakens democratic institutions. But I like the way Aziz frames the dynamic contradictory ideas and practices that have always been part of the American experience:
The United States is a nation with two radically different ideas at its heart: white supremacy and equality under the law. A nation that currently has more immigrants than any country in the world but is undergoing traumatic convulsions at the very mention of immigrants. A nation with a pessimistic mind and an optimistic soul, founded and codified by white men, whose geographic expansion was made possible by the violent clearing out of the original inhabitants, whose economic growth was purchased through slavery, but also a land where millions of immigrants have come in search of work and opportunity. The question of who counts in the “we” and who belongs to the “them” is being argued and fought every day, from the courtroom to the classroom to the streets. It is a conversation that has been taking place since the founding of the United States, and one that was taking place in Germany when the Nazi cabal seized the state. How this nation answers that question will determine which of the two American ideas lives on. [my emphasis]And he also describes the broad sweep of American history in a way that is both realistic and informative when it comes to what has been called a "usuable past":
It is not white supremacy that differentiates America from Nazi Germany, but rather the constitutional architecture of this country - a democratic system tested, broken, remade, rewritten. Racism in the United States is counterbalanced by an emancipatory spirit. The Constitution enshrined slavery, but this same Constitution was transformed as a result of the bloodiest war in U.S. history, which ended the Southern slave empire. The Civil War was a second American founding, and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments advanced the American spirit of equality before the law. Even amid the racist terror that lasted long after the Civil War, African Americans made room in the United States to fight for their freedom, equality, and dignity. Nazi Germany, by contrast, was a totalitarian state, and its express objective was the erasure of the Jewish people. These differences cannot be minimized. [my emphasis]
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