Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series by Manfred Henningsen, formerly a political science professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he taught for fifty years until his retirement in 2020.
by Manfred Henningsen
The extent of violence to which the freed slaves in the southern states were exposed to on a daily and open basis since the end of the war exceeds all comparable situations in the fascist societies of Europe.
Even in Nazi Germany, before the outbreak of the Second World War in September of 1939 and the beginning of the Holocaust, there were no daily manifestations of murderous excesses of violence against Jews and communists, comparable to the bloody lynching campaigns against blacks and occasionally against their white Republican allies. The refusal of the southern political and social elites to accept defeat and to continue to mourn the “lost cause” of the autocratically ruled slave society and to pursue it with the organized, murderous terror of Ku Klux Klan gangs, fulfills the characterization of fascism.
If one looks at the history of the USA after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, the negative role of his successor Andrew Johnson, who was chosen by Lincoln as a former southern slave owner to politically balance the ticket, is emphasized. Johnson’s plan to torpedo the laws passed by the Republicans to create equal political conditions in the former slave states and the subsequent but failed impeachment attempt by the Republicans against him are addressed, but the widespread terrorist actions that began during his presidency are not seen as symptoms of a genuinely American form of fascism.
Johnson’s successor Ulysses Grant, who enjoyed great respect as Lincoln’s Civil War general, recognized the danger of the terrorist phenomenon for the policy of Reconstruction and began to send Federal troops to the endangered states.
Even though Grant’s energetic intervention policy during his two terms in office from 1869 to 1877 helped to break the KKK terror, his successor Rutherford Hayes won the votes of the southern states in the Electoral College in 1877 with his promise to withdraw Federal troops. This began the legalization of racial segregation in the USA, which was approved by the Supreme Court in 1896 with the decision Plessy vs. Ferguson and only overturned in 1954 with a new decision of the court, Brown vs. Board of Education.
The promises of legal and thus also political equality, which had been guaranteed by Congress in Amendments 14 and 15 to the Constitution in 1868 and 1870, had to wait until 1964 for their fulfillment with the Voting Rights Act during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.
If one wants to talk about American fascism in the 19th century, an important distinction must be made in contrast to the European phenomenon. In the case of the Action Francaise and the Dreifuss affair in France in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and especially in Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism played the foundational ideological role. In the USA, the anti-Semitic syndrome began to spread in the 1920s, but especially in the mass movements of the 1930s.
From the end of the Civil War into the 20th century, American fascism manifested itself primarily in anti-black racism. In his monumental biography of Grant (Grant, 2017), Ron Chernow cites an exchange of letters from October 1864 between General Grant and his southern opponent Robert Lee, which concerned the exchange of prisoners.
Since Lincoln had declared the approximately 4 million slaves in the southern states free with the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, and many of them had volunteered for the federal troops, there were many black soldiers among the southern prisoners. Grant wanted to know from Lee whether the black prisoners would also participate in this exchange. Lee’s response was a clear rejection, writing to Grant that the escaped slaves “belonged to our citizens and therefore were not the subject of the exchange.” In further correspondence, he described the southern position by insisting that the southern “…government had obligations to the owners of this species of property.” This position, rooted in white supremacy, was maintained for a long time, occasionally even demanding financial compensation after the end of the war.
White supremacy thinking, which has been a natural part of the trans-Atlantic African slave trade since 1519, first manifested itself in the southern part of the continent colonized by Spain and Portugal and then continued in the northern part colonized by England since 1619. This white supremacy thinking has never lost its prominence in the USA. Trump, the grandson of German and Irish immigrants, has extended this internalized ideological syndrome to all migrants who do not fit his racial ideal of a white American.
The extent to which his autocratic regime is now trying to turn this racist model into political reality is one of the topics that is being discussed with increasing vehemence in the media and in private circles. What is interesting about these discussions, however, is that the genuine fascist aspects of American society and its history are rarely, if ever, addressed. It remains to be seen whether the Trump phase in American politics, which began in 2016, will lead to an American coming to terms with the past, comparable to the German process of ‘Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung’ or processing of the past. Trump’s electoral success at least proves that a majority of American voters are not interested in such a reappraisal and many of them still consider their country to be the best of all worlds.
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Manfred Henningsen Bio:
A prolific author, Henningsen’s latest book is Regimes of Terror and Memory: Beyond the Uniqueness of the Holocaust (Political Theory for Today).
Manfred Henningsen was born in 1938 in Germany’s northern-most city, Flensburg. He grew up in a post-war country that was occupied by the victors of WWII and whose citizens refused to come to terms with the terror Nazi Germany had perpetrated on the Europe it had conquered. The experience of this deafening silence, which was caused by denial, shaped his interest in political legitimacy and authority in Germany and other societies. Apart from returning frequently to German history in the 20th century and the processing of Germany’s violent past, his interest shifted to the U.S. when he became a fellow at Stanford’s Hover Institution. In 1970 he became a professor at the University of Hawai‘i.
His research interests were originally centered on themes in political thought and the philosophy of history. He still publishes essays and articles in European and American publications on political thought. His main focus at this time, however, is concentrated on a project dealing with terror and memory. (This is the subject of his latest book). How do societies that have been governed by regimes of terror deal with the aftermath of this violence? Most societies practice denial when it comes to acknowledging macro-criminal chapters in their history and refuse to confront the impact of this history on their own people and peoples they conquered and terrorized. In addition to Germany, South Africa is an exception, whereas Germany’s ally during WWII, imperial Japan, is the best illustration of the general rule.