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

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
leaving middle-class Jews without powerful political allies.
In the United States, the Republicans had become a probusiness
party with little further interest in the rights of
blacks, while the Democrats appealed to a coalition of
southern whites and northern working-class immigrants
and were therefore even less friendly to black aspirations.
Concomitant with the loss of political allies was the rise
of parties and factions committed to exploiting Negrophobia
or antisemitism. White supremacy was the central rallying
cry of the post-Reconstruction southern Democrats,
to be stressed whenever disadvantaged whites unfurled the
banner of class grievance and challenged the elite of planters
and businessmen who controlled the party machinery
and the state and local governments that served their interests.
59 In Germany, an antisemitic party first had an impact
in the election of 1881, but its success was engineered from
above by Bismarck and the Conservatives, who were using
hostility to the Jews to lure middle-class voters away from
the Liberals. In the 1890s a more spontaneous and populist
antisemitism entered the electoral arena with enough success
to induce the Conservatives to emulate their tactics.
The incorporation of an antisemitic appeal into the Conservative
program led to the decline and disappearance of the
single-issue anti-Jewish parties by the late 1890s. Like the
Democrats in the southern United States, the German Conservatives
learned that racism could be used, whenever expedient
or necessary, to steal the thunder of their populist
rivals and keep themselves in firm control. 60
Although it is more accidental or contingent than the
other similarities, both German Jews and American blacks
were impeded in their struggles for equality by the interna-
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