A Strongman Republic

Maarten Zwiers

The political rise of Donald Trump not only had ramifications at the national level, but also for U.S. foreign policy. Trumpism constitutes a sharp break with the official policies of previous administrations since World War II, yet authoritarian proclivities have always been part of U.S. political culture. Strongman tendencies, which were often racialized, form an intrinsic element of American politics, both at home and abroad.

By the end of World War II, many Europeans naturally saw the United States of America as the antifascist defender of freedom and democracy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt forcefully articulated his country’s global mission in the 1941 State of the Union address. In that speech, he defined the four freedoms the U.S. stood for: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. When the United States entered the war later that year, finally overcoming domestic isolationist opposition to military intervention, these universal freedoms offered a stark contrast to the antidemocratic and discriminatory politics of the Third Reich and its allies. Besides calling for higher taxes, unemployment insurance, better access to medical care, and an end to privilege for the few, FDR used the State of the Union to call for a new world order. “The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society,” the president said. As the Second World War transitioned into the Cold War, the United States continued to present itself as the embodiment of liberty and popular sovereignty — the complete opposite of the communist totalitarianism the Soviet Union advanced.

Fast forward to the early 2020s: one of the two major American political parties is now under the control of a strongman populist who does not hide his predisposition to rightwing authoritarianism. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans aim to “drain the swamp” and “make America great again” on the basis of a nostalgic yearning for a time when everything appeared to be orderly and in place, from a racial, gendered, and geopolitical point of view. Trump and his followers have not hidden their sympathy for traditionalist leaders with authoritarian tendencies, like Viktor Orbán of Hungary. After meeting with communist dictator Kim Jong Un of North Korea in 2018, then U.S. president Trump spoke of a “great relationship” between him and Kim and that they “fell in love.” The difference between the Rooseveltian worldview and Trumpism obviously appears tremendous. How can this transformation be explained? To what extent does the Trump agenda constitute a clear break in U.S. domestic and foreign policy?

Homegrown authoritarianism

Authoritarian desires did not suddenly emerge during the Trump years, but shaped American politics long before him. Journalist Jacob Heilbrunn makes a comparable point in his recent book America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. “This deification of foreign dictators is not ‘un-American,’ as the Right has long professed about liberals and the Left,” Heilbrunn writes. “To make such a claim would be to ignore a tradition of homegrown authoritarianism in this country.”[1] Although Heilbrunn mentions that the Jim Crow South formed the archetype of the authoritarian tradition in the United States, his discussion of post-World War II American authoritarianism primarily focuses on national (and not necessarily regional) conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr., the influential founder of National Review.

A bus station in Durham, North Carolina, 1940. In the U.S. South, “Jim Crow” laws provided a systematic legal basis for segregating and discriminating against African Americans. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Jack Delano)

In this article, the U.S. South takes center stage, in particular its ideas and impact on American foreign policy between 1945 and 1965, a critical period in the development of Cold War politics. From the 1890s until the 1960s, the southern states had its own apartheid regime nicknamed Jim Crow, a system of racial segregation that defined African Americans as second-class citizens. Because of its racist social structure, the South has often been described as decidedly un-American. However, southern segregationists saw their region as the heartland of Americanism and politicians from the southern states wielded substantial control over U.S. policymaking during the Cold War era. According to historian Joseph Fry, “the South quicky developed a self-conscious sectionalism and, acting from a perceived sense of regional interest, exercised a vast and often decisive influence on U.S. foreign policy.”[2] What was the nature of the racialized authoritarianism emanating from the Jim Crow South and how did it affect American politics abroad?

Bloodline relations

One of the most important questions that emerged toward the end of World War II was the fate of Germany: what to do with the country after the defeat of the Nazis? In 1944, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau proposed to strip Germany of its heavy industry and turn it into an agricultural nation, a pastoral state unable to ever start a major conflict again. Morgenthau’s plan met fierce opposition, including the Jim Crow South. When the war was over, southern lawmakers traveled to Germany as members of congressional investigative committees. What they saw there conjured up images stored in the regional collective memory of the destruction the southern states witnessed during the American Civil War (1861-1865). What these politicians wanted to prevent in Germany was the kind of radical reconstruction the South underwent after the Civil War, which many white southerners considered a tragedy. One of the reasons why Jim Crow legislators opposed the Morgenthau Plan and wanted a lenient treatment of postwar Germany, was the ethnic bond they felt with the Germans. In their eyes, a strong and industrialized Germany was necessary to halt the advance of Slavic communism. According to U.S. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi for instance, Germany “was the neutralizing agent between the Oriental hordes [i.e., Russian communists] and a western civilization 2000 years old”.

As a strong defender of Germanic peoples and the Jim Crow system, Eastland equated communism as the antithesis of “western civilization,” an oriental ideology swarming in from the East. The Mississippi senator described communist rule as “the first time in the Christian era that the doctrine of slavery has been adopted as applied to the white race” (p. 553). Such racialized foreign policy ideas, based on a presumed bloodline relatedness between the white Anglo-Saxons of the U.S. South and Germanic populations in Europe, reverberated in debates on postwar immigration and displaced persons legislation. In these debates, Jim Crow politicians often voiced a preference for granting asylum to German refugees fleeing Russian-occupied territories in Eastern Europe, at the expense of Jews displaced during World War II. Ethnicity-based explanations served as the rationale for the preferential treatment of German exiles—the idea was that people of Germanic stock were better adjusted to the U.S. system of government, especially compared to Jewish and Black persons, who were supposedly more inclined to embrace “anti-American” ideologies like communism.[3]

Race, authoritarianism, and anticommunism

In addition to this conflation between racial and ethnic identity and (anti)communism, southern segregationists regularly displayed an outspoken affinity for reactionary authoritarian leaders abroad. Congressman F. Edward Hébert, a Democrat from the Deep South state of Louisiana, had no qualms about the U.S. supporting the Spanish military regime of Generalissimo Franco. In a 1951 letter to a constituent, Hébert acknowledged he did not like dictatorships, “but in this age of survival of the fittest we have to protect ourselves, and we cannot be choosy about our allies if they serve our purpose.” In contrast with the Yugoslav leader Josip Tito, Franco “at least had not cast God out of the window.”[4] Because of its anticommunist credentials and continued colonialism in Africa, the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal could likewise count on southern support. “Are we trying to pressure Portugal into vacating a position of long standing in Angola, just to please the anti-colonialists,” a resident of Memphis, Tennessee asked in 1961. “We cannot afford to create additional political vacuums for the benefit of the Bolsheviks.”[5] During the post-World War II period, when civil rights groups in the United States began to intensify protests against the Jim Crow system, segregationists conceived attacks on their “Southern Way of Life” as part of a global communist-inspired movement against white rule. To ward off such attacks, they deemed strong leadership necessary.

‘Characteristic of their race’

The faith in strongman politics tended to persist in the political culture of the Jim Crow South. This conviction continued even after the U.S. foreign policy establishment reevaluated the benefits of backing anticommunist authoritarian regimes in light of the negative fallout of such support among allies and newly independent countries in Africa and Asia. A case in point is the rightwing government of Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961) in the Dominican Republic. Despite his brutal totalitarian politics, the Caribbean dictator could count on U.S. support throughout most of his reign, on the basis of his anticommunist credentials. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the State Department could no longer stomach Trujillo’s increasingly erratic behavior, especially after he ordered the (failed) assassination of his rival, President Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela. Undeterred by such mafia tactics, prominent southern politicians remained steadfast in their endorsement of Trujillo. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, the longtime and powerful chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, considered Trujillo a friend of the United States and positively compared the perceived orderliness of his dictatorship in the Dominican Republic with the situation in neighboring Haiti, which Ellender perceived as chaotic. “The people here are shiftless,” he described the Black citizens of Haiti, “which is more or less a characteristic of their race.”[6]

In his book American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation, historian Matthew Pratt Guterl demonstrates how during the pre-Civil War era, planter-enslavers from the U.S. South considered themselves part of a larger, transnational plantation community in the circum-Caribbean region. To a certain extent, such border-crossing connections persevered in the Cold War years, for instance the political rapport Jim Crow agents like Senator Ellender had for Rafael Trujillo. Historians Arthur Schlesinger and T. Harry Williams thought prominent Louisiana politicians such as Huey Long (1893-1935) and Leander Perez (1891-1969) closely resembled Latin American caudillos, again emphasizing their ‘un-American’ (in the sense of U.S. American) character. However, the politics of Perez in particular can be considered an early blueprint for Trumpism. During most of his political life, Leander ‘Judge’ Perez was the absolutist leader of Plaquemines, a parish in the swamplands of southern Louisiana. Fishing and fur-trapping were the most important economic activities there until the 1920s, when oil was discovered in the area. Because of Perez’s dominant position, petroleum companies had to negotiate with him if they wanted to drill in the parish, making ‘the Judge’ a very rich man. Perez used this oil money to reward his followers and fund the local system of racial segregation.

Leander Perez as Tulane Law School graduate, 1914. (Foto: Wikimedia Commons)

Civil rights historian Adam Fairclough called Plaquemines Parish “the most repressive parish” in Louisiana and Perez “the most powerful ultrasegregationist” in the state. As an outspoken advocate of Jim Crow, Perez was active in various segregationist groups, such as the Dixiecrats and the Citizens’ Council. Although he started his political career as a Democrat, Perez abandoned the national Democratic Party and supported Republican presidential candidates in 1952 (Dwight Eisenhower) and 1964 (Barry Goldwater). The Plaquemines strongman advanced elaborate conspiracy theories about communist infiltration in groups and institutions that challenged the racial status quo in the U.S. South. In the case of Perez, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “drain the swamp” took on a different (and quite literal) meaning; by draining the swamp of Plaquemines, oil companies destroyed its wetland ecosystem and sponsored the Perez regime, whose politics was based on nepotism, racism, and authoritarianism. Yet Perez himself believed he was a true defender of American values: “there is no hope unless the people of the States exercise their right and sovereignty,” he told a crowd in Dallas, Texas in 1950. “We have the heavy responsibility and a solemn duty to perform so that our birthright inherited from our founding fathers… may be handed down to our children and our children’s children.”[7]

An integral part of U.S. politics and foreign policy

Like Trumpism, the South frequently received the epithet “un-American,” disregarding the important role the region played in shaping U.S. politics and society. Founders of the United States like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison hailed from the South (and owned plantations there) and southern plantation agriculture—especially cotton farming—boosted national economic growth and U.S. exports in the nineteenth century.[8] Northeastern Ivy League schools invested in slavery. American soldiers dispatched across the world to defend freedom and democracy got their training on southern bases like Parris Island in South Carolina and gas and oil coming from fields in Louisiana and Texas fueled the U.S. Cold War economy. By the end of the 1960s, the so-called Silent Majority in other parts of the country appeared receptive to southern-style political ideas. With the exception of the Civil War, the South has always been an integral part of the United States and so have its racial ideology and proclivity towards authoritarianism.

When Trump denounces Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” and expresses his preference for immigrants coming from Scandinavia; when conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation draft the authoritarian and conspiratorial Project 2025 program to take down a presumed Deep State; and when the Republicans call Kamala Harris a communist, it is not very productive to simply label these words and ideas as the rants of a lunatic fringe located outside American political culture. In order to understand the racialized authoritarianism of the MAGA movement, we should instead move our gaze southward, to the hinterlands of states like Mississippi and Louisiana, and investigate how their worldview shaped national conservatism and became an intrinsic part of U.S. politics and foreign policy.

This article emerged from “Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation,” a multi-year research project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 891936.

Header foto: Shutterstock / Philip Yabut

Footnotes

[1] Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2024), 13.

[2] Joseph A. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 4.

[3] Maarten Zwiers, “Jim Crow Democracy: The U.S South and Racialized Policy-Making in the Aftermath of World War II,” International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity, vol. 7 (2019): 555-560, https://doi.org/10.18352/hcm.570.

[4] F. Edward Hébert, letter to O.F. Kuebel, 24 August 1951, in F. Edward Hébert Collection, Box 698, Folder 3, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

[5] Willis E. Ayres, Jr., letter to James O. Eastland and J. Strom Thurmond, 20 August 1961, in James O. Eastland Collection, File Series 3, Subseries, Folder 83-55: Foreign Policy – 1961 – Portugal, Archives and Special Collections, J.D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS.

[6] Allen J. Ellender, Draft Report, 1958. in Allen J. Ellender Papers. MS.00001, Box 1540, Folder: Haiti. Archives and Special Collections, Ellender Memorial Library, Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, LA.

[7] James Conway, Judge: The Life and Times of Leander Perez (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 93.

[8] Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 119.