Audiobook5 hours
Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
Written by James Q. Whitman
Narrated by James Anderson Foster
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this audiobook
Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.
As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws-the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.
Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.
As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws-the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.
Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.
Related to Hitler's American Model
Related audiobooks
American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News--From The Revolutionary War to The War on Terror Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hard White: The Mainstreaming of Racism in American Politics Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fascism: A Warning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Second Amendment: A Biography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsForce and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Paranoid Style in American Politics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untold History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chokehold: Policing Black Men Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History of America in Ten Strikes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Law For You
Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The End of Policing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Win Your Case: How to Present, Persuade, and Prevail--Every Place, Every Time Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Law Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jews Don’t Count Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Executive Juris Doctor: Learn to Think Like a Lawyer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Law of Law School: The Essential Guide for First-Year Law Students Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Arrest-Proof Yourself: Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Articulate Advocate: Persuasive Skills for Lawyers in Trials, Appeals, Arbitrations, and Motions Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Estate & Trust Administration For Dummies Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us about Crime Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free: And Other Paradoxes of Our Broken Legal System Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation's Top Advocates, Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All You Need to Know About the Music Business: 11th Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Law of the Land: The Evolution of Our Legal System Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Buy It, Rent It, Profit!: Make Money as a Landlord in ANY Real Estate Market Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for Hitler's American Model
Rating: 3.97333334 out of 5 stars
4/5
75 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Provides a clear and precise description of New Deal America and Nazi Germany differences and surprising (to me) similarities from a perspective of legal realism.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book is written in what I think of as "academic recursive," a writing style most frequently exhibited by post-secondary professors. It stems, I believe, from the traditional essay structure employed by university students everywhere wherein the writer tells you what they are going to say, and then they say it, and then they remind you of what they just said. It annoys the crap out of me.
Allow me to save you the trouble of having to read this book: the Nazis thought American laws relating to marriage between people of different "races" were inspirational. Its tarted up like a bigger scandal than it is frankly, and the book focuses on what the Nazis said about the laws rather than discussing the restrictions themselves. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Repeatedly, Nazis looking for inspiration looked to the US system of racial discrimination, primarily in the treatment of immigration, the rights of those in non-state territories, and anti-miscegnation laws. Whitman emphasizes that the Nazis’ crimes were their own and that they also rejected liberal and democratic parts of American law. They also appealled to racist practices among other European colonial powers. Still, Whitman argues that, because the Nazis didn’t envision the Holocaust when they started out, they found compelling analogies in American discriminatory practices, even though these practices were often not aimed at Jews. As with everything about America, it was possible to be selective, and the Nazis had no problem claiming that New York City had “very little to do with ‘America’” because of all its race-mixing and Jews.Hitler was able to see the US as a model of Nordic supremacy, and he wasn’t alone; a Nazi historian described the Founding, in what Whitman says was the received wistom of the time, as “a historic turning point in ‘the Aryan struggle for world domination.’” One detailed scholarly work, Race Law in the United States, had as heroes Jefferson and Lincoln—Jefferson because of his insistence that blacks and whites couldn’t live under the same government if both were free, and Lincoln because of his early calls for black resettlement outside the US. Similarly, “Nazi expansion eastward was accompanied by invocations of the American conquest of the West, with its accompanying wars on Native Americans…. Indeed as early as 1928 Hitler was speechifying admiringly about the way Americans had ‘gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage’ ….” Jim Crow segregation, Whitman contends, wasn’t all that important to the Nazis, but citizenship and sex/reproduction were, and it was there that they took lessons from the US. In fact, “Nazis almost never mentioned the American treatment of blacks without also mentioning the American treatment of other groups, in particular Asians and Native Americans.” American immigration and naturalization law was, almost uniquely, racist and race-based, and Hitler praised it for being so in Mein Kampf. And there were various forms of de jure and de facto second-class citizenship for African-Americans, Filipinos, and Chinese, to which the Nazis could look as they created second-class citizenship for Jews—drawing on, for example, the distinction between “political rights” and “civil rights” that American whites offered to excuse segregation. Indeed, some Nazis considered openly race-based laws to be more honest about keeping “alien races” from getting the upper hand; they had no need for grandfather clauses, and they devised the Nuremberg Laws in part to “institute official state persecution in order to displace street-level lynchings,” which offended the facist need for state centralization. The US was also unique in anti-miscegnation laws, with careful rules about blood quantum—in fact, there were no other models for such laws for the Nazis to consult. And it mattered, Whitman suggests, that America was seen as a dynamic country—confirmation for the Nazis that the future was going in their direction. Among other things, American creativity on the definition of race showed that one didn’t need a purely scientific or theoretical definition of race, despite the leanings of German law; one could proceed with a political, pragmatic definition in enforcing anti-miscegenation and other discriminatory laws. Indeed, that’s ultimately what the Germans did when they defined Jews as including people with one Jewish parent if and only if they practiced Judaism or married Jews (rejecting, along the way, the even more aggressive American one-drop rule). Whitman concludes that we have to acknowledge that the Nazis practiced a particular kind of Legal Realism, whereby the law was supposed to assist in the process of social transformation, throwing formalism aside and recognizing reality—and reality, in both countries, was racist. “[T]o have a common-law system like that of America is to have a system in which the traditions of the law do indeed have little power to ride herd on the demands of the politicians, and when the politics is bad, the law can be very bad indeed.” Whitman finds the most prominent modern manifestation of this in the US in its harsh criminal justice system.