Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

vide for a restoration of self-esteem, for satisfaction for the
assertive impulse of a will to power by tyrannizing over an
enemy within the gates who was certainly more accessible
and less dangerous to tackle than a reputed enemy across
the national frontiers.” 19
Hirschfeld’s posthumous work attracted relatively little
attention. More widely noticed were the first efforts of a
historian based at a major American university to address
the subject of racism. French-born but American-educated,
Jacques Barzun of Columbia began his very long and distinguished
career as a cultural historian by studying European
ideas about race. His first book, The French Race (1932),
took up the theories and disputes among the French about
the racial origins of their population. It was especially critical
of efforts going back to the seventeenth century to establish
the Germanic roots of the upper classes. 20 His second
and more ambitious book, Race: A Study in Modern
Superstition, originally published in 1937, was written with
the urgency aroused by Hitler’s coming to power in Germany.
21 In the preface Barzun’s didactic purpose was made
clear: “[T]he particular end or object of the work is to show
how equally ill-founded are the commonplace and the
learned views of race.” 22 Using the adjective “racist” (which
was still relatively rare) to describe the ideas of Arthur de
Gobineau, Houston Chamberlain, and others whose views
he was dissecting, he noted in the first chapter that racism
was not unique to German attitudes toward Jews but could
be found in the widespread assumption that “the whites
are unquestionably superior to the colored races,” in the
fears of a “yellow peril” from Asia, and in the belief that
“the great American problem is to keep the Anglo-Saxon
163