Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  But murder for entertainment and political gain was a common feature of the old Klan and the new. And the one little detail Anderson leaves out is that these were murders typically organized in league with the local Democratic Party, with Democratic crowds in attendance, and conducted in large part to send a message to black Republican voters.

  The Klan reached its zenith in the mid-1920s, when membership in the organization stood between three and five million. During this period the Klan controlled Democratic primaries in many states. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention, informally known as the Klanbake, Klansmen defeated a motion even to condemn KKK violence. After this, enrollment in the Klan declined, but not before it largely achieved its goal of suppressing blacks and in particular the black vote, thus keeping the Southern vote solidly white and solidly Democratic throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

  And what happened to Thomas Dixon? Progressive accounts typically leave their discussions of him around 1915, the date Birth of a Nation was released. Dixon, however, went on to a prominent career as a writer and Democratic Party activist. He was a zealous campaigner for FDR in 1932, gave numerous speeches championing FDR’s National Recovery Act—the signature program of the New Deal—and was rewarded by the FDR administration with an appointment as clerk of the United States Court, Eastern District of North Carolina. Although Dixon later soured on the New Deal, he retained his judicial position from 1938 to 1946, the year of his death.28

  MAN IN A CAGE

  Now that Wilson and the progressive Democrats had found a way to beat blacks down through racial intimidation and murder, they needed a way to keep them down. If racial terrorism suppressed the black vote, something was needed to insulate white Democrats from economic competition with blacks. Here the Democratic solution was state-sponsored segregation, imposed throughout the South between the 1890s and 1910. Segregation laws required blacks and whites to attend separate schools and use separate sections in buses, trains, theaters and churches, and even to drink out of separate water fountains in public places.

  While state-sponsored segregation was a Southern phenomenon—giving some support to the progressive campaign to blame racial evils on the South—it should also be noted that every Southern segregation law was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed by a Democratic governor and enforced by Democratic officials. There are no exceptions to this rule. So segregation was the work of the Democratic Party in that region.

  Wilson’s contribution was to take segregation to the federal government. It is not widely recognized that prior to Wilson the federal government was not officially segregated. African Americans have successive Republican administrations going back to the Civil War to thank for that. Progressive scholars don’t want Republicans to get the credit, so they downplay or leave this fact out of their textbooks. It remains a fact, nonetheless. Wilson, however, expanded racial segregation from its local Southern precincts to the nation’s capital. From the Treasury Department to the post office, whites and blacks were required to eat separately and use separate bathrooms.

  Somewhat comically, Du Bois in 1913 wrote an open letter to Wilson in which he complained about segregation. Du Bois wrote of “one colored clerk who could not actually be segregated on account of the nature of his work has consequently had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years.”29 Wilson did not respond, but Du Bois must have realized what his endorsement of Wilson and the Democrats had produced: blacks were now being put into cages!

  Around the same time, a group of activists associated with Du Bois—most of them backers of Wilson in 1912—met with the president. Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, bitterly challenged Wilson on segregation. Wilson informed him that “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” One may call this the positive-good argument for Democratic segregation. And with this ended Trotter and Du Bois’ hopes of having a central role in administering Wilson’s emerging Democratic plantation.

  If racial terrorism and segregation are the first two elements of Wilson’s progressive plantation, the third and final one involves what may be termed “race conservation.” Race conservation has two elements: racially restrictive immigration laws and eugenic sterilization of the supposedly “unfit,” mostly poor whites and racial minorities. Wilson supported both and saw them as closely connected. Immigration restrictions would keep the racial inferiors from getting into the country, and forced eugenic sterilization would prevent those who were already here from reproducing.

  The Immigration Act of 1924 was actually signed after Wilson left office, but he and other progressives—most of them Democrats, but also some Republicans—had pushed for such measures for more than two decades. It may seem odd to find Republicans in this connection making common cause with Democrats, but we see that today also. The progressive Republicans were basically half Democrats, just like their counterparts now. Thus we would not be wrong to dub these early Republican progressives the original RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).

  The racist rhetoric of progressive RINOs like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard shows that progressivism of all stripes—even Republican progressivism—was imbued with racism. Stoddard and Grant were both close associates of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger; Stoddard served on the board of her Birth Control League. Grant was a well-known conservationist—a cofounder of the environmentalist movement—and his racism grew out of that: he believed that just as America conserved its natural resources, it should conserve its valuable racial stock by restricting both immigration and racial intermarriage.30

  To some degree, the zeal of the progressives is not surprising. The early twentieth century unleashed a second wave of mass immigration, this time not from Ireland and Germany but largely from southern and eastern European countries. And with the arrival of these new people, the progressive doctrines of racism and white supremacy took a new and to some degree unexpected turn. Incredibly, the same racist progressives who had previously proclaimed blacks to be inferior now declared that these southern and eastern European whites were also inferior and their numbers should be minimized.

  White supremacy now became Nordic supremacy, and progressives distinguished between the superior Nordics and inferior Alpine and Mediterranean types. In order to demonstrate how America was being infested by immigrants, a Carnegie Institution report offered, as its main illustration “The Parallel Case of the House Rat,” which traced rodent infestation from Europe to the ability of rats to make their way to America “in sailing ships.”31

  No doubt fearing economic competition from new workers willing to do the same job for less, unions were at the forefront of the movement to exclude immigrants. The socialist leader Eugene Debs accused “the Dago” of underbidding union workers by living even more “like a savage or a wild beast” than the hated Chinese immigrant.32 For progressives in those days, blacks were niggers, Mexicans were wetbacks, Asians were chinks, Italians were wops and dagos, and all those people deserved to be kept out of America or prevented from reproducing.

  Wilson was fully on board. In his last volume of the History of the American People, published in 1902, Wilson warns that America is faced with the threat of being flooded by “men from the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland.” These undesirables, Wilson argues, are part of a great wave of undesirables from southern and eastern European countries that are “disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”33

  Wilson left little doubt he thought the wave should be stopped, and in 1924 it was. The Immigration Act of that year was explicitly cast in racial terms. It essentially banned immigration to America from South Asia, the Middle East and the Far East. It severely restricted the immigration of Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe by imposing national origin quotas equivalent
to 2 percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1890. For fifty years, from 1924 through 1965, progressives essentially shut the door on immigration on the basis of white supremacy.

  Wilson was also a pioneer in the area of progressive eugenic sterilization. In 1911, as governor of New Jersey, he signed into law one of America’s first forced-sterilization laws. The law created a “Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics and Other Defectives” charged with determining whether prisoners and those residing in poorhouses and other charitable institutions should be coercively sterilized. Through progressive prodding, eventually some twenty-seven states enacted similar forced-sterilization laws, and some 65,000 Americans were prevented, against their will, from reproducing.

  THE PROGRESSIVE ROOTS OF NAZISM

  I cannot conclude this chapter without pointing out that three of the schemes of the progressive plantation—race-based immigration restriction, racial segregation and forced sterilization—provided models for the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. Hitler himself praised progressive immigration restrictions in America, noting that “by simply excluding certain races from naturalization” they displayed “in slow beginnings” Hitler’s own move toward the Nazi idea of a racially supremacist state.

  Hitler also praised antimiscegenation laws championed by American progressives. “The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, “who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall victim to the defilement of the blood.”34

  James Whitman shows in Hitler’s American Model that the Nazis explicitly modeled their Nuremberg Laws—laws that segregated Jews into ghettos, prevented them from intermarrying with other Germans and excluded them from citizenship—on the Jim Crow laws of the Democratic South. Whitman’s documentation is thorough. He even has the records of the Nuremberg meetings, showing how the Nazis basically took the Democratic laws, crossed out the word “black,” wrote in the word “Jew” and had their work largely done for them. In the crushing words of Roland Freisler, state secretary of the Nazi Ministry of Justice, surveying the Democratic segregation and state-sponsored discrimination laws, “This jurisprudence would suit us perfectly.”35

  Here was the actual scene. A senior group of Nazis is gathered around a table, with a stenographer present, to record what one of them termed a historic occasion: they were in the process of founding the world’s first racist state. Then one of the Nazis, Heinrich Krieger, who studied in the United States, sheepishly raised his hand and informed his colleagues that they could not do this because the Democratic Party in the United States had beaten them to it.

  The Nazis were incredulous. But Krieger was right. The Nazis wanted to segregate Jews into ghettos, and the Southern Democrats had already done this. The Nazis wanted to prevent intermarriage between Jews and other Germans; this mirrored what miscegenation laws passed mostly by Democrats did in many American states. Finally, the Nazis wanted state-sponsored discrimination that would permit confiscation of Jewish property; precisely this type of state-sponsored discrimination was the norm throughout the Democratic South.

  So the Nazis reviewed the Democratic laws of the Jim Crow South and framed their Nuremberg Laws specifically on them. In doing so the Nazis knew full well they were adapting the policies of the Democrats. Yet tellingly there is no textbook in the United States to my knowledge that describes this Nazi-Democratic connection. Never once has CNN or NPR or the History Channel documented the role of the Democratic Party in shaping Nazi racism.

  Whitman, a progressive legal scholar, is also reluctant to assign blame where it is due. He talks about “American white supremacy,” “American racism,” “American law” and “American influence on the Nuremberg Laws.”36 Surely he knows that the Democratic laws were bitterly contested under the nation’s two-party system. Yes, there were antimiscegenation laws in a couple of Republican states, but America in general didn’t do this; the Democrats did. Yet as the very title of Whitman’s book suggests, he resorts to the familiar tactic of blaming America—not the Democratic Party—for inspiring Nazi policies.

  Much in the same vein, the German historian Stefan Kuhl, whom I interviewed in Munich, shows in The Nazi Connection that Hitler’s forced-sterilization policies of 1933 were lifted almost verbatim from blueprints supplied earlier in the century by American progressive eugenicists. Under the Nazis, forced sterilization gave way to compulsory euthanasia for the sick and disabled, and later those same killing facilities were expanded into the gas chambers that were used for Hitler’s “final solution.”

  Did American progressives know that they had shaped Hitler’s policies? Kuhl shows they certainly did. In fact they “understood Nazi policies as the direct realization of their scientific goals and political demands.” In 1934 Leon Whitney, secretary of the American Eugenics Society, confessed that American progressive eugenicists “have long been working earnestly toward something very like what Hitler has now made compulsory.”

  Kuhl reports that Clarence Campbell, another close associate of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, attended the 1935 International Population Congress in Berlin, where he raised a toast “to that great leader, Adolf Hitler!” Sanger herself gave speeches in the mid-1930s praising the Nazi sterilization laws and recommending that America move faster in this direction to keep up with what Hitler had done.37

  A progressive himself, Kuhl knows how damning it is to trace Nazi sterilization and mass murder to the inspiration of American progressives. Thus, to spread the blame around, he insists that the responsibility for these atrocities falls equally on the left and on the right. Kuhl declares it ironic that a progressive Democrat like Woodrow Wilson and an avowed socialist like Margaret Sanger inspired the “right-wing” Nazis. But there is no irony involved because, as I’ll show in the next chapter, the Nazis were themselves left-wing socialists with an ideological agenda closely parallel to that of their American progressive counterparts.

  In the end, Wilson’s progressive plantation—the centralized state—remained an incomplete project. The conditions weren’t right, and Wilson himself was too much of a pointy-headed intellectual to get it done. The distinctive racist elements of Wilson’s plantation—racial terrorism, federal segregation and eugenic sterilization—would eventually become a progressive embarrassment. Yet they would be retained, in modified and more palatable form, in the Democratic plantation scheme as it evolved in the 1930s and beyond.

  It would require more propitious circumstances—ideally a major crisis of some sort—to make that plantation scheme a reality. It would take another Democrat with the same tyrannical impulse as Wilson, but less educated and more cunning, to get the job done. Such a man would have to be a creative improviser of the Van Buren type, but even more unscrupulous, a mafia boss unhampered by conscience. Only such a man could achieve the practical realization of the progressive plantation. In New York, there was such a man.

  7

  The State as Big House

  What FDR Learned from Fascism and Nazism

  If Fascism ever comes to America, it will be in the name of Liberalism.

  —Ronald Reagan, 60 Minutes interview, 19751

  In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which envisioned the coming to power of a fascist regime in the United States. Little did Lewis, progressive leftist and former socialist, know that even while he was writing the book, the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was consciously importing fascist ideas to America.

  Lewis of course knew that American fascism would not be identical with Italian or German fascism. It would not feature swastikas or “Deutschland Uber Alles”; it would be built on homegrown symbols and take on a uniquely American character. Even so, Lewis completely missed what was happening in front of him because he could not see the fascist elements
on his own ideological side.

  This chapter is about FDR and the fascist plantation. In it I will show that during the 1920s and 1930s, the Italian fascists under Mussolini and the German fascists under Hitler developed a new type of plantation governed by the all-powerful, centralized state. FDR then imported that fascist model to America, modifying it into a shape that was distinctively American. FDR created what we may call democratic fascism, fascism that could win popular support and sustain the president in office for four terms. In the process FDR permanently transformed the Democratic Party and remade the Democratic plantation.

  FDR’s fascist plantation is not merely recognizable in its key elements; it also supplies the basic operational template for today’s Democratic Party. I recognize that for many people the very notion of a fascist plantation will come as a surprise. Fascism is a European ideology; what does it have to do with the plantation system of American slavery?

  An even bigger surprise is the notion that an American president—indeed the leading progressive figure of his time—was actually influenced by fascism, let alone that he emulated the fascist leaders that he is famous for fighting and defeating in World War II. Some progressive Democrats won’t just take issue—they will take umbrage—at my attempt to link FDR with the fascist and Nazi horrors of the twentieth century.

  Hitler, however, was quite familiar with the slave plantation. The progressive historian Ira Katznelson writes, “Hitler denigrated blacks, admired American racism, and regretted the South’s defeat in 1865.” Hitler also hated Lincoln and blamed him for how “the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war.”2

  Many scholars have noted the similarities between Nazi concentration camps and slave camps of the Democratic South. I grant that it seems wrongheaded, even obscene, to compare death camps where millions died to Democratic slave plantations. The former existed for the purpose of extermination; the latter for forced labor. The two are not morally equivalent.