My book report: It can't happen here?

James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model:  The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Princeton University Press, 2017

The men who framed the so-called Nuremberg Laws proclaimed at the "Party Rally of Freedom" in 1935, setting forth the terms of German citizenship, were highly intelligent and educated, many with doctorates.  They were experts in law, history and "race science" as they understood it.  They could have laid the groundwork for the Holocaust with no help from an upstart nation not two centuries old.  The example of the United States just made it easier for them.  

Hitler in Mein Kampf expressed great admiration for America, where the Nordic settlers had eliminated most of the savage inhabitants and created a society based on white supremacy.  He dreamed of doing the same in the east, where rich soil was wasted on Slavs and Jews, making Germany forever self-sufficient.  In Ukraine as in Mississippi, an enslaved race would toil for German pioneers.  But first Germany must put its house in order.  

James Whitman's short, quietly brutal book details how American racism both inspired and differed from the German variety.  The first Nuremberg law created two classes of citizenship, Aryan and non-Aryan, spelled out more deliberately than the US Constitution.  The Germans knew that the post-Civil War amendments, especially the Fourteenth, guaranteed the citizenship of anyone born in the country.  They also knew that the very first Congress limited naturalization to "free white persons" in 1790, and that the immigration laws freshly written in the 1920s created quotas for the immigration even of white people from Russia, Italy, and other places; and that Chinese, Filipinos, Malays and Puerto Ricans were legally beyond the pale.  And of course nearly all states limited options for education, residence and voting for African Americans.  The indigenous people were not even citizens.  Whatever the Constitution said, the decentralized American system and the deeply conservative judiciary had the last word.  Germany would save time and incorporate discrimination into national law.

The second law was designed to preserve the "purity" of German blood by criminalizing all sexual relations, including marriage, between Germans and Jews.  Here the American example of miscegenation law was intriguing but, in their view, too harsh.  A German with only one Jewish grandparent could be considered a German provided he neither married a Jew nor practiced the Jewish religion.  By contrast American states went by the principle of "one drop" of blood to determine black or white.  Nor did the Nazis, until years later, try to create a system of Jim Crow segregation.  Ideally, Jews would be made so miserable that they would emigrate.  If not -- well, America by custom separated the races through a system of lynch law.  There were attacks on Jews, certainly, climaxing with Kristallnacht in 1938, but these offended the German sense of order and discipline.  Lynching would be the business of the national state.

Why did America never experience an equivalent to the Holocaust?  The labor of African Americans was still too valuable even after they ceased to be chattel.  Nobody wanted them to emigrate, with occasional exceptions like Marcus Garvey.  Post-bellum Black Codes kept most of them tied to the land like Russian serfs.  To the bemusement of the Nazis, American Jews were considered white; the law never singled them out for discrimination, though plenty of universities, employers and landlords did.  The "gentleman's agreement" would be spelled out in the German law code.  

Germans knew perfectly well that most Blacks were impoverished and disenfranchised, while in their minds all Jews were rich and powerful.  Both groups, somehow, were trying to "gain the upper hand" in their respective societies.  It's always a matter of self-defense for the Volk or white culture or whatever the term of art is.  The Nazis looked around the world, including South Africa, but found no racist model as useful as ours. 

This book was written before "critical race theory" became code for "anything that might make white children uncomfortable," anything that causes Americans to question their homeland's claim to hold that "all men are created equal."  If it doesn't ruin your sleep, you haven't read it correctly.