Aryans and Anglo-Saxons: Segregationist Visions of the Postwar World

Segregationist politicians from the U.S. South had a profound impact on policy design concerning the direct aftermath of World War II. They played key roles in devising plans for the reconstruction of Germany, the Marshall Plan, and the drafting of displaced persons legislation. My paper discusses how Jim Crow ideology calibrated the global and domestic order that emerged from the ashes of World War II. Southern conservatives dealt with national and foreign issues from a regional perspective, which was based on the protection of agricultural interests and a nascent military-industrial complex, but above all, on the defense of white supremacy. My paper concentrates on the idea of Germany in the southern imagination, related to the position of this country in the early Cold War. In general, southern politicians followed a lenient course toward Germany after the country’s defeat in World War II, for various reasons. The shared experience of postwar reconstruction, containment of communism, and feelings of kinship between the Germanic people and the Anglo-Saxons of the U.S. South were some of the motives why white southerners did not endorse punitive measures against the former enemy. “The foreign policy of the segregationists was never elaborate or comprehensive,” historian Thomas Noer claimed. He thought segregationists were more interested in domestic race relations than in international issues and that they exerted no significant influence on foreign affairs. My hypothesis is different. For white southerners, an obvious connection existed between the local and the global, which strongly reverberated in the formation of U.S. foreign and domestic policy in the postwar world. The rebuilding of Germany and the fugitive question were shaped on the basis of a Jim Crow blueprint