Europe on Segregation in America

[Hunter Wallace]

Some interesting polling data from 1957. This poll was taken in the midst of the controversy over the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Europeans were overwhelmingly critical of segregation and were far more liberal in their racial attitudes than Americans. In fact, it was concern over the damage the incident was doing to America's reputation abroad that compelled Eisenhower to send in troops.

USIA Survey of Foreign Opinion Regarding U.S. Race Relations, 1957

Do you have a very good opinion, good, fair, bad, or very bad opinion of the treatment of Negroes in the United States?

Brussels (Very Good, Good, 12%), (Fair, 13%), (Bad, Very Bad, 67%), (No Opinion 8%)

Copenhagen (Very Good, Good, 5%), (Fair, 11%), (Bad, Very Bad, 82%), (No Opinion 2%)

Helsinki (Very Good, Good, 2%), (Fair, 26%), (Bad, Very Bad, 63%), (No Opinion 9%)

Paris (Very Good, Good, 2%), (Fair, 12%), (Bad, Very Bad, 74%), (No Opinion 12%)

Frankfurt (Very Good, Good, 39%), (Fair, 23%), (Bad, Very Bad, 17%), (No Opinion 21%)

London (Very Good, Good, 13%), (Fair, 20%), (Bad, Very Bad, 59%), (No Opinion 8%)

Athens (Very Good, Good, 21%), (Fair, 23%), (Bad, Very Bad, 33%), (No Opinion 23%)

Italy (Very Good, Good, 12%), (Fair, 18%), (Bad, Very Bad, 34%), (No Opinion 36%)

Amsterdam (Very Good, Good, 4%), (Fair, 15%), (Bad, Very Bad, 79%), (No Opinion 5%)

Oslo (Very Good, Good, 5%), (Fair, 11%), (Bad, Very Bad, 79%), (No Opinion 5%)

Stockholm (Very Good, Good, 1%), (Fair, 7%), (Bad, Very Bad, 87%), (No Opinion 5%)

[Fred Scrooby]

Notice that with the exception of the Dutch it was the Scandinavian populations of Europe who had the stupidest, wrongest, most illegitimate reaction to the race situation in the States. There's something the matter with Scandinavians in this regard: they have appallingly defective sight where race is concerned, and that grave defect will result sooner or later, as night follows day, in their permanent exit from the world stage -- their racial extinction -- if they don't start cleaning up their act and figuring things out racially. Scands are incredibly obnoxious in the smugness of their cluelessly wrongheaded notions of race. They're simply insufferable where this topic is concerned. Their racial-egalitarian ringleaders deserve to be shipped to Soweto for a good ten or twenty years of on-the-ground education in some important facts of life. See if their eyes don't open then. And if they still don't, to hell with them -- may the Scandinavians be damned and make a hasty exit permanently from the world stage -- just get it over with already! I for one am starting to get sick-and-tired of these pathetic racially-clueless Scand incorrigibles, I really am.

If it were just their women I'd give them a pass, women in general being genetically devoid of the neural/hormonal equipment needed to conceive of race: that women can't conceive of race isn't their fault any more than it's my dog's fault he can't play the violin -- they weren't born with the right equipment.

But with the Scands it's not just the women, it's the men as well! If you can call them men ... What kind of man is incapable of conceiving of race? A sad excuse for one, that's what! In the entire country of Sweden there are maybe three or four men who can conceive of race, the rest as incapable as your average woman! Sweden is a nation of walking talking bloodless hormoneless sexless amoral spiritless cardboard non-entities who are headed straight for auto-eradication. Good! Go to oblivion! Work genocide on yourselves and be quick about it! Disappear, and let the rest of us concentrate on populations that are salvageable!

[Bardamu]

Notice that with the exception of the Dutch it was the Scandinavian populations of Europe who had the stupidest, wrongest, most illegitimate reaction to the race situation in the States.

Strange too considering the Scands, as you call them, are of same racial stock as the Germans.

[Englander]

How many Scandinavians (or other Europeans on the poll for that matter) actually had to live with significant numbers of blacks among them, in 1957? Not many.

[Hunter Wallace]

Why was the U.S. federal government pushing desegregation before the civil rights movement even got started with the Montgomery Bus Boycott? It was because American planners perceived segregation as being dangerous to America's foreign policy in the Cold War. Expanding on this theme:

---------------

As President Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act on September 9, events in Little Rock, Arkansas confirmed the depth of white racial resentment suggested in these letters. When school authorities began the court-ordered desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School, Governor Orval Faubus called out the state's National Guard to block the action. Reluctant to confront him publically, Eisenhower tried at first to negotiate with Faubus. The governor agreed to remove the Arkansas Guard and allow the black students to enter the school, but he stood by as a white mob attacked blacks and white journalists. The escalating violence finally forced black children to leave the school.

The incident compelled a reluctant Eisenhower to act. Not only had a state governor defied the orders of the federal courts, but the pictures of the incident flashed around the world powerfully contradicted America's self-proclaimed committment to justice and equality. Historian Mary Dudziak has shown that foreign coverage of Little Rock was widespread and highly critical. A Singapore newspaper contained a typical response: "What shocks the public conscience is that this rotten state of affairs is permitted in a country which, according to Eisenhower, 'has the responsibility of the free world's leadership laid upon it by destiny.' What manner of men inhabit that country?"

Commentary such as this caused Secretary of State Dulles to tell Attorney General Brownwell during the crisis that "this situation was ruining our foreign policy," and that its impact "in Asia and Africa will be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians." The president was well aware of these global considerations. After Faubus used the National Guard to block integration, one report to Eisenhower claimed, "Soviet media single out the Little Rock situation for special attention and take pains to point out that armed national guardsmen are not there to protect Negro children from the fanatics of the Ku Klux Klan, but to prevent them from entering school." In addition it quoted Radio Moscow as saying that U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, "tells lies stuffed with slander and makes a great deal of fuss trying to prevent the Hungarian people from living in peace and quiet, but the cries of hundreds of Negro children, ill-treated by the whites, rises from the Southern states and drown out his voice." Later, in his memoirs, Eisenhower wrote, "Overseas, the mouthpieces of Soviet propaganda in Russian and Europe were blaring that 'anti-Negro violence' in Little Rock was being committed with the clear connivance of the United States government . . ." If the crisis had continued, it would have continued "to feed the mill of Soviet propagandists who by word andd picture were telling the world of the 'racial terror' in the United States."

Faced with domestic discord, a constitutional crisis, and an international embarrassment, Eisenhower finally called in federal troops to restore order around Central High and enforce the desegregation order. Cutting short a vacation, Eisenhower flew back to Washington to speak to the nation on the crisis.

As he prepared his speech, Secretary Dulles called to suggest that the president "put in a few more sentences . . . emphasizing the harm done abroad."

That evening, as the first truckloads of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division pulled up in front of Central High, the president told the nation:

In the South, as elsewhere, citizens are keenly aware of the tremendous disservice that has been done to the people of the Arkansas in the eyes of the nation, and that has been done to the nation in the eyes of the world.

At a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred that Communism bears toward a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world.

Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation. We are portrayed as a violator of those standards of conduct which the peoples of the world united to proclaim in the Charter of the United Nations . . . .

If resistance to the Federal Court orders ceases at once, the further presence of Federal troops will be unnecessary and the City of Little Rock will return to its normal habits of peace and order and a blot upon the fair name and high honor of our nation in the world will be removed."After the speech, wrote historian Robert Burk, "the Eisenhower administration immediately took steps to ensure maximum international propaganda benefit from the action . . . President Eisenhower's television address . . . was translated into forty-three languages, and the Voice of America broadcast details of the troop intervention."

Press reactions to the Little Rock crisis stressed its foreign policy implications. The New York Times declared, "Red Press Gloats Over Little Rock." Newsweek called the incident "a propaganda windfall of truly major proportions for the Communists" and carried reproductions of various foreign headlines reporting the crisis and their English translations. It also wrote that "Moscow's Pravda noting that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles has said U.S. foreign policy was based on moral and religious principles, commented acidly: 'The reports and pictures from Little Rock show graphically that Dulles precious morals are in fact bespattered with innocent blood." According to Time, "In Little Rock . . . the racist crowds hounded those who opposed them as pro-Communist. But it was, in fact, Orval Faubus and his followers who gave aid and comfort to Communism . . . In Budapest, Hungary's ruthless Premier Janos Kadar fairly kicked his heels in joy. Cried he: 'Those who tolerate that a people should be persecuted because of the color of their skin have no right to preach human liberty and human rights.' In the United Nations, after a dark skinned Ceylonese delegate denounced Soviet intervention in Hungary, Bulgaria's Peter Voutov retorted: 'Something worse could happen to you in Little Rock.' Later, the magazine editorialized that "Little Rock was a name known wherever men could read newspapers and listen to radios, a symbol to be distorted in Moscow, misinterpreted in New Delhi, painfully explained in London."

In the month following Little Rock, the United States Information Agency pollled people around the world regarding the Little Rock incident and American race relations in general (see Table 7). The results showed that these claims of international impact were not imaginary. The report concluded that the "losses" to U.S. prestige resulting from Little Rock were "of such magnitude as to outweigh the effects of any recent factors which have contributed to increases in U.S. standing." President Eisenhower requested that United Nations ambassador Lodge come up with suggestions on how to counter the damage.

The federal government was not the only institution that was made aware of how incidents like Little Rock were hurting its efforts abroad. The Southern Baptist missionaries in nonwhite nations also made sure to inform their brethren at home of the problems they faced. Shortly after the Little Rock crisis, the Louisiana Southern Baptist Covention was rocked when two retired African missionaries introduced a resolution calling for "law and order" and thus implicitly condemning Governor Faubus. In Little Rock, a prominent Baptist minister was overwhelmed with critical letters from missionaries around the world.

Concerns over America's image abroad pushed President Eisenhower to ask for additional civil rights legislation in 1959. In his State of the Union Address that year, the president declared, "If we hope to strengthen freedom in the world we must be ever mindful of how our own conduct reacts elsewhere. No nation has ever been so floodlighted in world opinion as the United States is today. Everything we do is carefully scrutinized by other peoples throughout the world . . . In other areas of human rights -- freedom from discrimination in voting, in public accomodations, in access to jobs, and in other respects -- the world is likewise watching our conduct. The image of America abroad is not improved when school children . . . are deprived of their opportunity for an education . . . By moving steadily toward the goal of greater freedom under the law, for our own people, we shall be better prepared to work for the cause of freedom under law throughout the world." The president's proposal eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1960." (Klinker and Smith, pp.248-253)[/quote]

[WFHermans]

After 15 years of judeo-yankee occupation, Europeans were taught to believe that negroes were whites with tanned skins and that jews were whites with big noses.

Without the media choosing to broadcast worldwide films of the Little Rock situation, no one would have bothered.

[Hunter Wallace]

That doesn't make any sense. If the U.S. media was the cause of the change in European racial attitudes, then certainly the U.S. itself would have been the most affected by its own propaganda, but that wasn't the case. Also, how many Europeans were English-speakers who could even understand such foreign broadcasts (and which were these, specifically)? Television didn't become widespread in America itself until the mid-1950s. That leaves print and radio. In the U.S., the most popular radio show touching upon race was Amos 'n' Andy. Look closer at the data I posted above. Of all countries, Germany was the most supportive of segregation in the United States; the only country where an "occupation" as such existed. The most anti-racist country in Europe was Sweden which was occupied by neither the Allies or Axis.

[WFHermans]

You're right. Television was as far as I know still rare in the Europe of 1957 and most of the people in Europe would have gotten their opinion about the Little Rock incident by newspaper. The impact of film material, if any, would mostly have been through cinema newsreels.

I'll see if I can find some newpapers online of that time, or some newsreels or diaries.

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/7/7b/200px-Liberators-Kultur-Terror-Anti-Americanism-1944-Nazi-Propaganda-Poster.jpg

This well-known SS-poster of 1944 is interesting because it attacks the KKK and therefore racial seperatism. It never has been satisfactorily explained.

[Hunter Wallace]

I pointed out in the other thread that even the Third Reich attacked lynching in their propaganda.

[WFHermans]

I've been looking for descriptions in the media of the Third Reich of America and in particular themes like racerelations and lynching, and have been quite surprised. Hitler declared that Uncle Tom's Cabin was one the greatest books of world literature.

The opposition in the Third Reich against the practice of lynching, and the complete lack of sympathy for the Confederacy (this changed fortunately somewhat in 1944) is, I think, caused by the abhorrence of the Germans for "lawlessness".

I will post in this thread extracts in the english language from the german press of 1933-1945 when I find and/or translate them.

[WFHermans]

The german writer Karl May (http://www.cowboysindians.com/articles/archives/0999/karl_may.html) (1842-1912) had an enormous influence in shaping the european view of America (and the Middle East as well). As far as I know he is completely unknown in english speaking countries, but his books describing his (totally fictitious) travels in America and the Near East were the source of most Europeans' knowledge of America. He sold 100 million books! Karl May was a staunch anti-racialist and pro-Federalist.

[Hunter Wallace]

What did they have to say about the Confederacy?

[Germanic]

Karl May was a staunch anti-racialist

Funny, I've seen his work described as [neo]colonialist by critics. I only read one of his books about America, and that was as a kid, so I don't remember too much of it myself.

[IlluSionS667]

Race simply wasn't an issue in Europe before the '60s. Back then, the vast majority of European communities was still free of foreign influence. Liberalism had also barely shown its face. This, in combination with early anti-racist propaganda is the explanation for the poll results.