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

A third similarity is that in both cases the success of
emancipation depended on the fortunes of a liberal-to-radical
political movement. It is one of the great commonplaces
of modern German history that the fate of the Jews was
linked to the fate of liberalism. Emancipation occurred at
a time when Bismarck was allied with the center-left National
Liberals. When he repudiated the Liberals in 1879
and associated himself with conservative and aristocratic
political elements, the situation of the Jews immediately
worsened and political antisemitism emerged for the first
time. 58 The rights of blacks were similarly dependent on
one of the majority political parties or factions—the Radical
Republicans—who had passed the Reconstruction Acts of
1867 and 1868, partly out of idealism and partly out of political
calculation. (They hoped to use black votes to gain political
leverage in the southern states.) Analogous to the
way that the decline of liberalism in Germany had made
Jews vulnerable to antisemitic assaults, the Republicans’
failure to prevent the South from becoming solidly Democratic
after 1876, along with a decline of the influence of
the Radical element within the national party, exposed
blacks to white supremacist terror and Jim Crow segregation.
German liberalism and American Radical Republicanism
were by no means identical. The former was more
elitist and less committed to popular democracy than the
latter. But if newly freed African Americans could think of
themselves as fully enfranchised citizens of a democratic
polity, German Jews had good reason to think of themselves
as part of a new elite based on achievement rather than
birth. By the early twentieth century, liberalism had lost
much of its ideological influence in Germany and Austria,
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