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

tional economic downturn that began in 1873. In Germany
the crash raised doubts about who benefited from financial
capitalism, and drew attention to the Jews who had been
involved in some of the failed financial schemes of the day.
The notion that Jewish swindlers had fleeced German investors
became a staple of antisemitic propaganda from
that time on. 61 No one blamed African Americans for the
Panic of 1873, but some of the remaining Republican-dominated
state governments in the South, with which blacks
were associated as supporters and officeholders, had overextended
themselves and were forced into insolvency.
Northerners seeking reasons to abandon the Radical Republican
experiment in biracial democracy were given a
stronger justification by evidence pointing to the corruption
or fiscal extravagance of the “black and tan” governments.
62 The depression that followed the panic gave rise
to violent confrontations between labor and capital in the
industrializing North. As a result, fears of class warfare
helped to smother what was left of the middle-class humanitarianism
inherited from the antislavery movement and expressed
in the activities of the freedmen’s aid societies during
the immediate postwar years. 63
These similar or analogous developments provided
contexts favorable to the rise of racist ideologies. In the
United States “racial Darwinism” made a stronger case for
innate black inferiority than the older polygenetic theories
that had seemed implausible or heretical to many. The theory
of evolution provided an explanation of how new species
could emerge over a vastly extended period of time
and become permanently differentiated in their capacities.
It also suggested that human races were in competition,
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