In answering this question, historians have generally left the United States as an exceptional case of moral certitude, determined by a particularly national experience. However, I suggest that laws governing race relations in the twentieth century tended to change in line with authoritative knowledge in the social sciences, and that such knowledge was international. An examination of the relationship between philanthropists, social scientists, and the policy makers they tried to influence is key to understanding the relationship between these different national policies.
In this paper, I describe the roles a network of American philanthropists and American and European social scientists played in determining the course of public policies on race in the U.S. and South Africa in the 1930s and early 1940s, and explain why they were rejected from Hitler’s Germany. I argue that South African apartheid in the 1930s, like the postwar U.S.’s integrationist movement reflected this network’s authoritative knowledge on race at each point in time, while the Nuremberg laws did not.
My reading of this period not only brings into conversation these three national case studies, and suggests the limits of Americans to determine public policies abroad; but, it also puts to question the moral singularity of the U.S.’s postwar integrationist efforts. In the postwar, Americans (like South Africans in the 1930s) were quite simply changing their public policies to reflect authoritative American social scientific knowledge on race relations.
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