America had the world’s most racist government until Hitler came along.
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22 November 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
This was first pointed out by Yale’s professor of comparative and foreign law, James Q. Whitman, on 13 December 2016, under the headline “Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration”. It opened:
On 5 June 1934, about a year and half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the centrepiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime. The meeting was an important one, and a stenographer was present to take down a verbatim transcript, to be preserved by the ever-diligent Nazi bureaucracy as a record of a crucial moment in the creation of the new race regime.
That transcript reveals a startling fact: the meeting involved lengthy discussions of the law of the United States of America. At its very opening, the Minister of Justice presented a memorandum on US race law and, as the meeting progressed, the participants turned to the US example repeatedly. They debated whether they should bring Jim Crow segregation to the Third Reich. They engaged in detailed discussion of the statutes from the 30 US states that criminalised racially mixed marriages. They reviewed how the various US states determined who counted as a ‘Negro’ or a ‘Mongol’, and weighed whether they should adopt US techniques in their own approach to determining who counted as a Jew. Throughout the meeting the most ardent supporters of the US model were the most radical Nazis in the room.
The record of that meeting is only one piece of evidence in an unexamined history that is sure to make Americans cringe. Throughout the early 1930s, the years of the making of the Nuremberg Laws, Nazi policymakers looked to US law for inspiration. Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf (1925), described the US as ‘the one state’ that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist society, and after the Nazis seized power in 1933 they continued to cite and ponder US models regularly.
He expanded that in 2017 into his book from Princeton University Press, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.
In the article, he observed that
the reality is that, in the early 20th century, the US, with its vigorous and creative legal culture, led the world in racist lawmaking. That was not only true of the Jim Crow South. It was true on the national level as well. The US had race-based immigration law, admired by racists all over the world; and the Nazis, like their Right-wing European successors today (and so many US voters) were obsessed with the dangers posed by immigration.
The US stood alone in the world for the harshness of its anti-miscegenation laws.
Since he teaches comparative and foreign law, he writes with an authority on this topic (the comparative status of America’s versus other nations’ laws regarding race) which falls within his specialty as a historian. Consequently, it is no longer credible to assert that prior to Hitler coming into power in Germany, America’s Government was less racist than was Germany’s. Something in America’s historical background had produced the world’s most racist Government, and Hitler greatly admired that aspect of this Government. I shall hypothesize what the source of this racism might have been:
Although Abraham Lincoln was successful in ending American slavery, the former Dixie states, the Confederacy of slave-states, continued with their racist-supremacist cultural ideology, and at a national level this country needed constantly to make compromises with them in order to proceed together with them as one country. Consequently, “the South” has been and actually is America’s ideological leader. Consequently, too, lynching was legal in America until it was made illegal in the U.S. by the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act of 2022, which made it a federal hate crime. This was passed and signed into law by President Joe Biden on March 29, 2022. Maybe Hitler would not approve of today’s American Government. However, Joe Biden had been the leading Democrat in the U.S. Senate to block enforcement of the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision that was supposed to (but that, due to Biden and Senate Republicans still has failed to) end institutionalized racial segregation in America’s schools. So, even he had a mixed record on this. (And, of course, Trump is even worse than the Democrats, on all issues of racism.)
In any case, America’s Founders aren’t to blame for this. Most of the Members at the U.S. Constitutional Convention wanted to eliminate slavery, but doing that would have meant southern states rejecting the Constitution. So, the slavery problem had to wait until Abraham Lincoln to become resolved. And, at the deeper level of American culture, a substantial amount of racism still persists; and so, in a government that uses popular votes in order to select Government officials, people such as Joe Biden are elected, and people like Teddy Kennedy (who led the opposed side, which favored implementing Brown v. Board of Education) become passed over for higher office (as the lifelong anti-segregationist Bernie Sanders did in his race against Biden).
America’s Founders would still be dissatisfied with what their country has achieved.
Interestingly, Whitman’s father, Martin J. Whitman, led the struggle for honest corporate accounting standards in the U.S.; and, just like Teddy Kennedy lost his battle to enforce the Brown decision, Whitman lost his battle against corporate corruptness.
Furthermore: America’s Founders were, themselves, deeply torn, within themselves, about the ethical issue of racism and supremacism, because in their own time, conservative values dominated throughout the world. On 31 May 1779, during the American Revolution, General George Washington wrote to Major General John Sullivan, who was leading the American Revolution in the western territories (where the indian tribes allied with the British King who had promised them protection in order to get them as allies): “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more. … You will not by any means listen to any overture for peace before the total ruin of their settlements is affected.” He wasn’t demanding their extermination, but he was demanding their support for the war against the King’s forces. The indians there would either be subordinate to the United States or else killed. The colonists in these areas were settlers who were clearly stealing the land and property of indian families, taking indian towns, where some of the abodes were actual houses — not mere huts — and many of the indians were successful farmers. With this order from Washington, those people would have only what the American Revolutionists did not forcefuly take from them — steal from them. Till this time, the Revolutionists had not formally been carrying out imperialism of their own — U.S. imperialism in order to help them defeat the British empire here — but, now, with this order from General Washington, they were. The American Revolution was in desperate straits where Americans would either allow the King to remain their ruler (and so become defeated thmselves in a far worse tyranny than they had previously been subjected to from that King), or else they would subordinate the indians to the control by the new U.S. Government. Those two options had become the only realistic possibilities. General Washington made the choice to subordinate the indians. For a long time afterward, imperialism — to the extent that it existed in the U.S. Government — was more by necessity than by choice. However, after 25 July 1945, imperialism has been entirely by the U.S. Government’s choice.
It makes sense, then, that today’s U.S. Government supports supremacism, not equality, of rights, all over the world, and that after Obama’s bloody U.S. coup hidden behind anticorruption demonstrations in Ukraine in February 2014, the U.S. installed pro-Nazis to run Ukraine, and that today’s Ukrainian regime is raiding Russian Orthodox Churches. There is no freedom-of-religion in today’s Ukraine, and the U.S. Government has controlled Ukraine since February 2014. Today’s Amerika is NOT what America’s Founders had intended — not the type of nation they thought and hoped that they had founded.
America’s crucial turn into outright Hitlerism (but without the anti-Semitism) was made by President Harry Truman, on 25 July 1945, barely three months after Hitler’s suicide. That’s when he picked up for America what had been Hitler’s torch for Germany, of his nation’s ultimate goal beng to rule the entire world — not mere imperialism, but hyper-imperialism: the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire, global “hegemony.” This has been the U.S. Government’s aspiration ever since then.
You can see the evidences for each allegation here by simply clicking onto the given allegation’s link. I don’t merely allege these things; I provide, to the online reader, immediate access to the evidences that stand behind my allegations, so that you can judge it for yourself.
Clearly, then, there is something rotten in the state of America. No one yet has figured out a way to eliminate that rottenness at America’s core. It started out with slavery, but persists to this day. Sadly (because of Truman’s having picked up Hitler’s supremacist torch on 25 July 1945), it still runs deep — it became institutionalized as America’s Deep State, America’s being ruled ever since by the agents for (on behalf of) its billionaires. This will be the condition of America until (if ever) such foreign usurpations by its Government as its many foreign coups and many purely aggressive foreign invasions and aggressive lie-based foreign sanctions and all other types of foreign aggressions, will not only cease, but be publicly admitted as having been the character of the U.S. Government ever since 25 July 1945. For example, President Trump would have to publicly admit that the war in Ukraine was started not on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but instead on 20 February 2014 when the U.S. coup, under President Barack Obama, grabbed control over and installed the rabidly anti-Russian government that has existed in Ukraine from that time till now. He would have to admit that the aggression there was by the U.S. Government, not by the Russian Government when it finally responded to that by invading there to replace the U.S.-created-and-controlled government of Ukraine. I don’t expect him to do this. Russia will thus need to defeat that U.S.-created-and-maintained Ukrainian government on Russia’s doorsteps, militarily, in order to free itself, to free the Russian people, from that U.S. threat to Russia’s vital national security. America needs to apologize. Who will do it? Hardly (I think) Trump. He is hardly the type of person who would drop the imperialist, supremacist-nationalist, torch, that Truman had picked up from Hitler.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
