1 “Ideologies in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on the Pro-Slavery South and Nazi Germany Michael O’Brien Professor of American Intellectual History University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College Draft, not for quotation without permission. Based on remarks on a panel on “Racial Ideologies: A Comparative Panel Discussion on 19th-Century American Pro-Slavery Arguments and 20th-Century Nazi Propaganda,” The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, September 18, 20062 There are several ways of approaching this topic of the proslavery argument and Nazi ideology: defining direct influences, establishing the degree of cousinhood among these reactionary ideologies, and comparative analysis. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, but, for the purposes of exposition, I would like to consider them separately. Least promising, perhaps, though not uninteresting is establishing direct links between the proslavery argument and Nazi ideology. Here I will need to rely upon Professor Herf’s knowledge, but I would very surprised to learn that Hitler and other Nazis were knowledgeable about George Fitzhugh, William Harper, and other proslavery writers in the American South before the Civil War. It is more likely that they knew a little about the South’s racial ideologists, most probably Josiah Nott the racial ethnologist, who was one of the few Southerners whose writings were well known in Europe in the mid and late nineteenth centuty, and who certainly formed part of that immense body of racial theory — from Blumenbach to Gobineau to Houston Stewart Chamberlain — which was an indispensable influence on the Nazis. More promising is the question of what these two social and cultural moments say about responses to modernity. For, certainly, if one were cataloguing those societies since the eighteenth century which have tried, with no little ruthlessness, to use modern technology while resisting what were often claimed to be its progressive social and political implications, the antebellum South and Nazi Germany would be conspicuous on the list, though it is a very long list — indeed, it would be hard to find societies not on that list, to one degree or another. I will try to come back to this issue at the end, because it does seem to me to raise the most profound issues. But it is an issue difficult to discuss without first undertaking the comparative analysis which might help us to gain our bearings.3 The first thing which needs to be said is that we are not really comparing like with like, or at least I do not think so. For good or ill, Nazi ideology claimed to be comprehensive. It was not merely a vision of politics or of economic organization, but a vision of human history, of human nature, of the family, of art and science, of the cinema and dance, of poetry and music. Although I know there are historians who think that slavery was so fundamental to the antebellum South that it comprehensively explains everything that Southerners did and thought — I am not one of those historians, I need to say — nonetheless, even those historians would concede, I think, that the proslavery argument never claimed to offer a comprehensive social and aesthetic program. It certainly offered ideas about history and human nature, and had firm views on economics and politics, but it coexisted with and did not usually seek to dominate an eclectic body of other ideas, common in Southern and American society — religion, republicanism, laissez–fair economics, and so forth. Indeed it was more remarkable for presuming the validity of these other ideas and finding ways to make slavery compatible with them, than for presuming that slavery made those ideas moot. Secondly, as is familiarly known, the Nazis were impresarios of modern techniques of communication, media, and propaganda, but antebellum Southerners were not. The proslavery argument was, on whole, a dry and even scholarly enterprise, inferior as propaganda even to that offered by American abolitionists, who understood the usages of the popular press and even the utility of melodrama. The proslavery argument did occasionally reach a broad audience, usually when it took the form of oratory — sermons, political speeches — but even these forms more usually had small, local audiences. For the most part, the proslavery argument was made in print, in books with very limited print runs, in periodicals with small readerships, in pamphlets with smaller readerships which reprinted speeches to philosophical societies. It was a fairly elitist business. I suspect that, if4 you had pulled aside an ordinary Southerner in 1850 and asked him or her to name a proslavery theorist, Calhoun might have got a mention, but hardly anyone else, and Calhoun’s popular identity was as far more than a proslavery thinker. The proslavery argument had no charismatic public rituals, certainly no Nuremburg rallies, and not even American marches and brass bands, not even the sort of rituals invented by the Ku Klux Klan in the twentieth century. In a culture that threw off many partisan artifacts — party political banners about Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, pottery with slogans about Oregon, clothing buttons enthusiastic about Andrew Jackson, pins with images of Henry Clay — candid proslavery artifacts are rare, if not non–existent, although derogatory visual representations of African Americans are commonplace. Partly this absence of populist propaganda was a function of an earlier moment in the technologies of communication and the fact that the Old South was not a mass society. It would be pleasant to think that this absence was a proof of weakness. But, to the contrary, I suspect the unimaginative lassitude of the proslavery argument was evidence of its strength, the fact that what it said was what most white Southerners took for granted, anyway. On whether the reverse is true, that the relentless inventiveness of Nazi propaganda was a measure of its weakness, I defer to Professor Herf. The response to Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners suggests that the degree to which the German public accepted or was skeptical of Nazi ideology is much contested among historians and I am not competent to arbitrate. Thirdly, Nazism was preeminently a theory of the authoritarian state and of how individuals belong to a collectivity; it flourished