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By Root 1911 0

technique for establishing white minority rule in the American South was to set up barriers to voting such as property or literacy qualifications, and then to create exemptions that only white males could satisfy. Between 1895 and 1910, variations of this scheme were incorporated into the state constitutions of South Carolina, Louisiana, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Georgia, and Oklahoma. Although these restrictions were highly effective in reducing the black vote, many Southern states adopted poll taxes as further obstacles. Violence, intimidation, and racially motivated redistricting took care of most remaining blacks. As late as the 1960s it was physically dangerous for blacks as well as whites to demonstrate on behalf of black voter registration or to try to organize blacks to register and vote; some were killed for doing so.

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The Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution notwithstanding, disenfranchisement of black majorities during the Jim Crow period was highly successful. In Louisiana, for example, the number of registered African-American voters fell from 130,334 in 1896 to only 1,342 in 1904. In 1896, African-Americans represented a majority in twenty-six districts; by 1900 in none. At the same time, “separate but equal” laws were proliferating. During the First World War, Maurice Evans, an Englishman who lived in South Africa, visited the American South. He found the situation there “strikingly similar” to the one he had left behind at home: “The separation of the races in all social matters is as distinct in South Africa as in the Southern States. There are separate railway cars . . . and no black man enters hotel, theatre, public library or art gallery.” In addition, there were “the same separate schools, the same disenfranchisement, and the same political and economic subordination of the black man.” Wealthy Southern whites were aware of the parallel as well. “There are more Negroes in Mississippi,” wrote Alfred Stone, a plantation owner from the Yazoo Delta of Mississippi, “than in Cape Colony, or Natal, even with the great territory of Zululand annexed to the latter; more than in the Transvaal, and not far from as many as in both of the Boer colonies combined.”

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After the Second World War, with the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States, the paths of the American South and South Africa dramatically diverged. Nevertheless, the bottom line remains. After the Civil War, whites in a number of Southern states suddenly found themselves in the position of a starkly market-dominant minority, fearful of “black domination,” revenge, confiscation, and radical redistribution at the hands of a newly empowered black majority. Facing what it saw as the unresolvable conflict between a black-dominated democracy and the maintenance of their own wealth and status, Southern whites opted aggressively for the latter, doing everything in their power to undercut the former.

By contrast to the developing world today, Americans generally have not had to deal with the problem of sudden democratization in the face of pervasive poverty and a deeply resented, market-dominant minority. But several post–Civil War Southern states did face this precise problem, and Americans hardly rose with dignity to the challenge. As in apartheid South Africa or Rhodesia, market-dominant whites in the American South responded to the prospect of black majority rule by mass disenfranchisement.

Thus, along with the developing-world illustrations I gave in chapter 6, the American South during the Jim Crow era is a classic example of a backlash against democracy, in which a market-dominant minority, fearful of confiscation and redistribution, seizes political power. Unfortunately, the historical record of the West is darker still.

Weimar Germany and the Nazi Holocaust

Weimar Germany is a rare example of a Western nation that pursued—with catastrophic ethnonationalist consequences—free market democracy under conditions strikingly analogous to those characteristic of many developing countries today. Caution is required