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

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
loved liberty and showed an aptitude for self-government,
not so much because these were universal human traits, as
because their Anglo-Saxon ancestors invented democratic
institutions in the forests of Germany, carried them to England,
and then to the United States. Whether such Anglo-
Saxon virtues were inherited in the blood or acquired
through upbringing and education was an issue that was
left unresolved during the antebellum period. Supporters
of the Democratic Party, which appealed to Irish immigrants
and kept alive the residue of Anglophobia left behind
by two wars with England, preferred to think of a newly
emerging “American race,” which would be a vigorous hybrid
of all the European immigrant nationalities. But these
same Democrats were likely to be white supremacists who
were horrified at the prospect of any amalgamation of this
emerging white American race with any non-European or
colored races. 40
Before the turn of the century, when advocates of restricting
immigration from eastern and southern Europe
began to promulgate the idea of northern European racial
superiority, Americans tried to embrace the democratic
universalism of the Enlightenment, while at the same time
being proud bearers of a specific ethnoracial identity that
was sometimes conceived of as Anglo-Saxon, sometimes as
northern European, but most often as simply European or
white. 41 The particularistic and universalistic impulses
could be reconciled, at least superficially, if it were understood
that the capacity for self-government, and the claim
to equal political and social rights that went with it, came
more naturally to some peoples or “nations” than to others.
Germany by contrast came to embrace an ethnoracial
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