I’m reading a lot about Reconstruction and The Gilded Age of American history right now – the period between 1865 and 1900 – and I am coming to appreciate more deeply how thoroughly the Civil War “broke” the United States. It is easy, I think, to gloss over this time, assuming that recovery was relatively smooth, and, besides, at the end of it the United States stood on the brink of becoming the dominant World Power of the 20th century, so we shouldn’t complain.
I have also been thinking about how Adolph Hitler (I wish I had a number I could use in place of his name) “broke” Germany.
I’m thinking about this today because I fear for my country’s future if #PO1135809 is successful in his run to re-occupy the White House in 2025. He and his MAGA cult may not have broken the US during his first term, but his challenges to laws, norms, and morality have shaken the country to its roots. Another term would break it.
Let’s compare the other two events to see what we can learn from them.
Post-Civil War Reconstruction
From everything I’ve been reading for the last few months, the American Civil War was as revolutionary as the earlier American Revolution. The United States that emerged in the last decades of the 19th century was fundamentally different from the nation that had been created in the last decades of the 18th century. It went from a nation whose politics was dominated by the landowning and slaveholding southern plantation gentry to a nation whose politics was led by urban and industrial elites.
But the promise of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments and the bold reconstruction efforts in the first decade after the war was not fulfilled during the rest of the century, as the nation tired of the expense and disruption of truly reconstructing the South and decided that economic prosperity was more important than racial justice. The result was a nation that never really healed the wounds that the Civil War exposed. Rather, the country allowed the former slaveholders to return to positions of power. After 1876, there was little hope that formerly enslaved people would achieve social, economic, or political justice in the country that had ripped itself apart over arguments about their status.
As a reminder, the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery. Arguments about “states’ rights” emerged after the war as reconstruction gave way to redemption, which included justifying the peculiar institution of the antebellum South as a cherished time and the war as The Lost Cause.
I guess it’s a good thing that wedding planners and short-term rental businesses are recognizing that this use of generational genocidal enslavement is no longer acceptable. This recognition came only in 2019, after the murder of George Floyd. Really???
Post-Third Reich Germany
After Hitler took his own life in that bunker in Berlin, Germany was forced to face up to its complicity in enabling the rise of a man who fundamentally broke Germany. As a reminder, Germany had been an intellectual and cultural center of Europe for centuries. The country that produced thinkers like Goethe, Humboldt, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant had fallen to fascism. The country that had produced artists like Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schumann, Strauss, Mozart, and Liszt was reduced to listening to the Horst Wessel Lied.
Prior to Hitler’s rise to power, Germans felt (much as Americans today feel) that it “couldn’t happen here.” But we know it could because it did.
After the war, Germany’s need for reconstruction was more urgent than in the post-Civil War United States. But today – only 80 years later – Germany is a powerful and wealthy nation, sitting near the top of nations of the world according to a wide number of criteria. How did this happen?
Not surprisingly, the World War required global solutions. Three organizational entities were established after the war to work toward solutions to the three problems that had contributed to the war.
The United Nations, formed in 1945, was intended to encourage multination diplomacy so disagreements didn’t evolve unchecked into combat.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in 1947 to bind the nations of Europe together in the face of the next threat, which was perceived to be the Soviet Union.
The Marshall Plan and other plans for economic recovery provided aid to the war-torn nations of Europe (including wartime enemies and the eastern European countries of the USSR-led Warsaw Pact). This was not undertaken simply for humanitarian reasons; America’s productive capacity had spun up rapidly to meet the war’s demands, and the postwar economy would fall into deep recession unless demand could be generated in other countries. Americans expected that much of the money given to other countries would be spent on goods produced in the United States. The US, after all, was the only world power that the war had not decimated. This estimate was correct, by the way. The economies in both America and Europe boomed in the postwar years.
Germany is often praised for facing up to its Nazi past. When the world marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in 2020, Germany’s Prime Minister Angela Merkel embodied how Germany has faced its passed when she referred to “a deep sense of shame for the barbaric crimes that were committed by Germans.”
Let’s review the history a little. After the war, Germany was stripped of its prewar territorial acquisitions. It was then divided into four military occupation zones; by 1949, the zones in the east were aligned with the Soviet Union and the zones in the west were part of the emerging structure in western Europe. This division continued until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
During the period of occupation, a major focus of the occupiers was denazification – including the banning of the swastika and other outward symbols of the Nazi regime. However, before 1960, there was little public condemnation of the Germans who had supported the nation during the war. However, a new spirit dominated Germany after Konrad Adenaur’s years as President. It became increasingly common to see public criticism of the war crimes committed in the name of the German people as the nation came to grips with its sordid recent history. There remain pockets of pro-Nazi sentiment in the rural parts of Germany, but the economic, social, and political elites have joined in their condemnation of the Nazi regime.
Today, you don’t find public memorials to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The cities boast impressive monuments, museums, and centers dedicated to the study of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Germany has found a way to deal with its past sins while moving forward in a productive present. To move forward from its past, Germany embraced the idea of “Never Forget.” And this did not mean creating an Eichmann Elementary School or Adoph Hitler Highway.
As I’m writing this, I’m struck by the difference between the US in the last half of the 19th century and Germany in the last half of the 20th century. Americans commemorate its slavery-dominated era, by touring southern plantations (which, after all, were just work camps) that have been transformed into wedding venues or short-term rentals in renovated slave cabins. Germans visit Auschwitz to be reminded of a time when men incarcerated, tortured, and killed other human beings out of a sense of racial superiority. It’s not prettified and sanitized. The Germans have not turned Auschwitz into a pizza restaurant (it already has ovens, right?).
Germany faced global isolation and exclusion if it had not fallen in line. The South was threatened with similar restrictions in the decade after Appomattox, but the country weakened and failed to follow through on its threats. After initially restricting political participation by the Southern leaders who had engaged in insurrection, the United States decided that the South had been punished enough. After ending the formal institution of chattel slavery by constitutional amendments and supporting law, the United States decided that it didn’t have to worry about what happened in the South any longer.
Imagine if the world had become this bored with efforts to prevent the re-emergence of something like the Third Reich. With all of its flaws, the postwar international order has prevented a third world war. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Although the provenance of this quote is a little dubious, the sentiment is not. We can all be grateful that there is no organization called The United Daughters of the Third Reich.
So what does this have to do with today in the United States? A lot, I think. I know that some people think that we’re being alarmist when we equate #PO1135809 with Hitler or Alexander Stephens. But I can’t imagine that future historians will ignore the similarities. The United States could follow Germany’s lead and work diligently over decades to eliminate the disease of MAGA, or it could follow post-reconstruction America’s lead and paper over corruption and criminality to achieve a second Gilded Age. We should remember that gilding provides the illusion of value, not its reality.
As a nation, we have a choice. But we have to make that choice, now, before the opportunity to choose is taken away from us. #PO1135809 is trying to create a fact-free irrational world in which he can triumph. If he is successful, the American experiment in democracy is over.
I so agree with you, Karen. It is terrifying to me to see that people still rally to his gatherings and emote on the "wonders" that the next term will bring. I came close to leaving the country during the first term, and I don't think I could survive another one. How have we fallen so far?
Wish there were a button to say "great essay but scary as f**k.".