The Interwar "Colour" Line: the American blueprints of racial empire

World War Wednesday: The Global Jim Crow

Photo by Filip Bunkens on Unsplash

The consolidation of European and colonial racial regimes in the early twentieth century was characterized by a profound and deliberate global exchange of legal mechanisms, ideological justifications, and administrative techniques.

In the interwar years, the American example spread across the seas, as educated and “civilized” regimes sought formal regulations to enforce their racial hierarchies through law, codified in both the dictatorships and the so-called democracies. America’s Jim Crow South was the model. But not only Jim Crow, between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, the United States served as the example of a functioning racial hierarchy, providing a blueprint for citizenship based on blood, the internal deportation and territorial confinement of indigenous populations, the criminalization of “interracial” families, race-based immigration restrictions, and the clever disenfranchisement of undesirables.

Leaders built the foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 on the clear goal of keeping a "White Australia." This policy was more than a local answer to Chinese migration; it was a planned move to build a "British race" stronghold based on and joined with other "white men's countries," mainly America. During the 1901 debates on the Immigration Restriction Bill, Alfred Deakin—the first attorney general and second prime minister—said that Australians would be "unpardonably neglectful of our obligations" if they failed to "lay to heart" the "never-to-be-forgotten teachings from the experience of the United States." For Deakin, the American Civil War was a warning of the problems White men faced when they left non-whites into their democracies. Americans have taken a rather different lesson from their civil war. Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, shared Deakin’s viewpoint and they borrowed language policies first tried in California to exclude the Chinese from Australia.

"There are those who mock at the demand of a white Australia, and who point to what they consider our boundless opportunities for absorbing a far greater population than we at present .possess, who dwell, if commercially-minded, on the opportunities for business we are neglecting by failing to import the cheapest labour to develop portions of our continent which have not as yet been put to use. But the apprehensions of those abroad, even when cursorily examined, are soon seen to proceed from a far narrower outlook than that which belongs to those who feel themselves charged with the future of this country. We should be false to the lessons taught us in the great republic of the west ; we should be false to the never to be forgotten teachings from the experience of the United States, of difficulties only partially conquered by the blood of their best and bravest; we should be absolutely blind to and unpardonably neglectful of our obligations, if we fail to lay those lessons to heart...The unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race. A united race means not only that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas, and an aspiration towards the same ideals, of a people possessing the same general cast of character, tone of thought - the same constitutional training and traditions - a people qualified to live under this Constitution - the broadest and the most liberal perhaps the world has yet seen reduced to writing - a people qualified to use without abusing it, and to develop themselves under it to the full height and extent of their capacity. Unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia. It is more, actually more in the last resort, than any other unity." —Alfred Deakin, Attorney General of Australia, 1901

The British Empire’s South Africa was not far behind Australia.

While the term apartheid (separateness) officially applies to the South African era after 1948, this rigid time frame misleads, as its leaders built the South African state on exclusion from the beginning. The South Africa Act of 1909 denied black African peoples the right to sit in Parliament. While a few black African men in the Cape Province retained a restricted franchise, the White government spent the next three decades trying to scrap this exception. The Mines and Works Act (1911), often called the “Color Bar Act,” legally kept skilled mining jobs for whites. It ensured that Black South Africans remained a source of cheap, unskilled labor and stopped a Black middle class from growing through industrial labor. The Natives Land Act (1913) was perhaps the most crushing pre-1948 law. It banned Black people from buying or leasing land outside named reserves, which at first made up only 7% of the country’s land. This was the model for the later “Bantustans.” Then, the Representation of Natives Act (1936) dealt the final blow to voting before the formal apartheid era. It moved Black voters in the Cape from the main list to a separate, powerless one where they could only pick three white members to the House of Assembly.

It was almost Dixiecrat in its efficiency.

Moving on to the Third Reich reveals a curious connection to the State of Arkansas. Heinrich Karl Krieger was a German lawyer who in the early years of the Nazi regime was an exchange student at the University of Arkansas where he studied American Indian Law, concluding that "Indian Law" was race law, it was a system that created a unique extra-constitutional legal domain where rights were determined by bloodlines.

Furthermore, the Nazi assessment of the Southern solution to the "Negro problem" in the United States was incorporated in their initial efforts to solver their Jewish problem. However, they also felt that America could ironically be too harsh as the one-drop rule was impractical for Germany where the Ashkenazi Jewish population had emerged in central Europe in the medieval period was much more integrated than the African American population of the South. In the end, the Nuremberg Laws took a more "moderate" rule for who was Jewish. The treatment of Americas original minorities, the Indigenous and the African Americans were examples the Nazis pulled from to create their regime of terror.

Far from the Nazis being the innovators, they were only the last in a series of Western governments copying the segregationist and exclusionary policies of the Americans. Because racism and eugenics were common, the first cruel acts of the Nazis often went without comment. Stripping Jews of their rights and citizenship was not necessarily odd to a foreign audience. Why should a Tennessean who lived under Jim Crow, or an Oklahoman who farmed stolen native land or sacked North Tulsa in 1921, care if the Jews of Germany had no state? It is morally odd to expect the average White American to be angry with Germany for what America was itself doing before 1939. Were they supposed to oppose early proto-Apartheid and White Australia as well?

However, in the New Dealers, slowly, all too slowly, the spirit of 1776 would awaken, and trouble the imitators across the seas. It was darkest before the dawn. The Second World War would be a messy reckoning.