With regards to the Civil War, some folks have lamented that there wasn’t a more “heavy-handed” (for lack of a better way to put it) approach by the North with regards to the post-war occupation and education of the South - that if the North had “educated” the South more harshly, we wouldn’t have racism in the South to the extent that there is today - the example used for argument was post-WWII Germany and Japan (today, Germany is as anti-Nazi a country as there is, and Japan is very pacifist.)
But does this model always work? The argument is that 1) Prolonged occupation + 2) Vigorous “education” of the occupied country about their evils during the war + 3) Legal penalties for people who promote the bad attitudes during the war (i.e., slavery, Nazism, Japanese militarism) will, over the period of decades, gradually eradicate the noxious views that need to be eradicated.
But I would argue that the carrot is just as important as the stick - Germany and Japan were immediately needed by the Allies, to help counter the Soviet/Communist threat, so they quickly became allies, which is quite different from what the Confederacy would have been to the Union - the Union didn’t immediately “need” the South. And also I don’t think human nature is so simple that merely heavy-hand occupation is the magic trick. Plus - if the argument is true, then it could just as easily work the other way - if the Axis or Confederacy were victorious, they could have re-educated the conquered Allies or North, too.
I dont think their really was a precedent in 1865 for “re-education”. And remember blacks were not welcome in the north either plus many in the north also had slaves. So their really wasnt any one particular figurehead or ideology one could point out and work on rooting out.
What they really wanted was to bring the country back together as one.
Actually, there was no model. There were different plans discussed before the end of the war - while the Morgenthau plan was apparently not taken serious by the Allies it was used as good Propaganda against the Allies by the Nazis.
The Marshall plan was mostly because Germany was needed against the Soviets, not because there was a Change in mind and hearts.
Because Germany was needed again, the de-nazification process didn’t work very well: most People got off with Persilscheine (whitewash papers), and never adressed their guilt. Basically, everything was swept under the rug in order to get things back on their feet. Remember that for the first years, 1945 till 1948, People were living in bombed-out ruins: cities destroyed 70 to100%. Food was rationed to the Point of hunger. Most of the industry and railway was destroyed, making production and Distribution difficult. Plus integrating the millions of refugees from the East. Plus the traumatized soldiers from the Eastern Front.
There was no Major discussion of “What did we do wrong? How can we make a better, democratic Germany?” It was more like “Should I barter my winter coat for Food now, and freeze later, or Keep it for later and starve now”. It was “Should I go out with that US soldier who has Food and Looks nice, but be labelled a whore, or stay alone in my flat and go hungry?” for women. It was “Clench your teeth and Keep going”.
It was only the 68 Generation, the children, who stood up and asked “What did you do during the Nazi time?” and “Why did all the Nazi judges Keep their Jobs? Why were all the Nazis hired back into high positions? Why didn’t the Justice System persecute anybody?” and tried to get justice much later.
Basically, experts don’t really know why Germany and Japan worked as they did. Nobody expected it beforehand. Some factors helped (like already having a state to fall back onto), but many factors should have doomed it.
If you can’t really explain how it worked, you can’t copy it to a different Situation.
You’re conflating different goals. The North was just as successful at preventing future aggressive war by the South as the Allies were at preventing future aggressive war by Germany and Japan. The South has never again come close to making war upon the North.
The Allies weren’t trying to integrate Germany and Japan into the existing American polity, which the North did need quickly from the South. Apart from the Radical Republicans, there was little constituency in the North for “re-educating” the South away from its racist attitudes, and much more for coming together as one country. While the North did not have slavery or much of the same legal machinery of discrimination, it had plenty of general racism of its own, and its willingness to overlook Jim Crow lasted several decades.
I think one factor was that you had a foundation to work with in Germany and Japan. They had been plural democracies in the past. We basically had to just scrape off the wartime dictatorships and restore the prewar traditions that were there.
That wasn’t going to work in places like Afghanistan or Iraq where we were trying to build up democratic institutions from scratch.
Could it have been done in the southern states after the Civil War? Yes, I believe so. A lot of progress was made in the first few years after the war before the federal government reversed course and decided to abandon black southerners and reach an accommodation with the surviving antebellum power structure. And as we saw in the mid-20th century, it was possible to impose legal equality from above.
I don’t entirely buy this - neither nation ever had a fully-functional democracy, and in neither case did it last very long. However, both were full of people disgusted with the regime and who had, at one point, enjoyed a lot more freedom and certainly a lot less hardship.
Despite disagreeing with you above, I do agree with you here, but for different reasons:
I think the biggest problem with Reconstruction was that it didn’t reconstruct anything. It changed things politically - but it left the South broken economically. A key feature, and maybe THE key feature, of the postwar German and Japanese economies was that economic aid mitigated the immediate pain, while also helping to rebuild the economic foundation. This not only set the stage for future success, but helped reduce internal and external tensions.
I would also suggest that perhaps the familiarity with these events, and the failure fo the post-WW1 settlement, was what allowed the effective post-WW2 rebuilding of the German and Japanese political landscape.
But at least they had some history of things like elections and private property and the rule of law.
It’s true that the south emerged from the Reconstruction era in an economically backward state. But it had entered the Reconstruction in that state. To a large extent, it entered the war in that state. The South essentially picked the wrong side during the industrial revolution and got left behind while other parts of the world were rapidly moving forward.
But I feel economics was secondary to politics in explaining the south’s post-war problems. I think their real problem was institutionalized racism. Southern whites were spending too much effort into maintaining a system to marginalize southern blacks. It’s true that institutionalized racism existed in the rest of the country but the rest of the country didn’t have to use it against such a large population. For the rest of the country, oppressing black people was a minor project. In the South, oppressing black people used up pretty much all the resources there were. It’s notable how the South began to prosper economically right after it began tearing down its old racist institutions. Racism, on top of all its more obvious flaws, was bad for business.
The North was racist, but there weren’t many slaves. 400,000 in the north vs almost 22 million free people. In the south, 3.5 million slaves vs 5.6 million free people. Most northern states abolished slavery via the courts or legislature decades before the civil war.
The Germany/Japan model works only if the war leading to the occupation results in such utter destruction and defeat that it makes a country question EVERYTHING about their identity. That’s why two such disparate countries had such successful occupations and rebounds. They were basically born again, becoming completely different countries than they had been before.
It also helped that there was a common enemy after the war. Fear of the Soviets made the defeated and the victorious work together, since they had become allies virtually overnight.
And as someone else pointed out, they weren’t Afghanistan or Iraq. These were two hyperefficient countries and that was a part of their culture that they did not give up and it made rebuliding a lot easier for them. We didn’t have to nation build, we just had to give them money and they built with a vengeance.
If we ever go to war with the Muslim world, it probably won’t be as pretty. Russia also has a long history of ethnic tensions and crappy government. China we might be able to make work though if it ever came to that.
Bringing the relatively backwards northern blacks into 1870s-and-later society was a doable project. By soft analogy it was like West Germany absorbing East Germany. The US north didn’t do as good a job even yet as did the West Germans. But at least they tried and had and continue to have some success.
OTOH bringing the relatively backwards southern blacks into 1870s-and-later society was *not *a doable project. By soft analogy it was like South Korea absorbing North Korea. Which nobody expects to go smoothly when it eventually happens. In fact IMO it’ll be an abject shambles.
Given that it was economically impossible in 1870 that made it politically tenable for the southern hierarchy to sit on the issue for a century once the Feds sorta turned their backs.
As **Little Nemo **said in the earlier unquoted part of his post, the South bet against the Industrial Revolution. Sucks to be them.
For sorta logical (but still morally reprehensible) reasons they doubled down on that bet in 1870 when they decided black repression was the better short term play than embracing education, industry, and a grudging path towards equality. And we’re still paying for that regional backwardness today.
Going back to Japan or Germany immediately post WWII.
Consider for a minute what would have happened if the US had decided that the UN, NATO, and the Marshall Plan and the corresponding activities in Japan were all too expensive and too complicated. Such that in early 1946 we simply decamped back to the States leaving those countries in ruin while surrounded by wrecked and vengeful neighboring states.
What would Germany look like today? Japan? Assume the Soviets decided to sit tight behind the end-of-war borders snarling now and again but mostly rebuilding their own shattered country?
IMO they’d both still be in pretty ratty shape if they haven’t already been dismembered by their neighbors. For damn sure places undergoing massive humanitarian disasters don’t develop effective peaceful governments nor effective powerful economies. Behaving nicely is a luxury only the fairly well-fed can afford.
Back to the Civil war era:
The 1870s US North could have carried the Confederate South out of its cesspit. They chose not to. The South would have had to be carried kicking and screaming and being restrained most of the way. But it cold have been done. Sadly, it wasn’t.
For clarification, I’m not asking only or specifically about Reconstruction and the Confederacy; I’m asking if any occupation, if long and “vigorous” enough, can successfully “reeducate” a conquered populace, which is what some folks seem to believe.
It can, but it’s not the occupation that does it, it’s the war. A war in which your country is utterly defeated causes everyone to rethink things, whereas a war that is lost when you thought you were winning, and then you think you got stabbed in the back somehow by internal traitors, that will only further radicalize a population. Germany in WW1 lost while still occupying French territory. They were suffering, but they were not really defeated. Well, they kinda were, but not in the way that the populace could see. When your cities are being decimated by bombs and the only thing you want is for it to just end, then a populace feels defeated. A defeated populace also doesn’t resort to guerilla warfare. They are just relieved it’s over.
This. Those nations already had a sort of tradition of representative government, and prior to that, an even longer tradition of functioning governmental bureaucracy. So there was an expectation on the part of the populace that the government would be effective in doing certain things, and cooperated such that those things would be done in the post-war periods.
Iraq, OTOH, had no functioning government apparatus to speak of prior to the war. It was all Baath party and favoritism/cronyism from what I’ve read. And the people didn’t expect much from their government, and relied instead on local strongmen/sheiks to handle things locally. The concept of a functioning government and democracy just wasn’t there in their minds, so they just sort of paid/pay it lip service and go on about their business.
The problem for the South was not that segregation used up resources but rather that they allowed the resources of a huge part of the population to go unused. There were between 4 and 5 million people who were denied access to the economy and the economy was denied access to 4-5 million people. The south was never going to be economically prosperous before the eradication of malaria and the invention of air conditioning, there was just not the population density for it.
(I think it was a link from Slacktivist some time ago, can’t find it quickly) I read an article which explained that the South was more an aristocracy than a Democracy esp. compared to the North. It was not oppression of blacks, but that White rich old men were at the top of the System, and everybody else was less - White but poor, White but female, White but Young, black … - was not just part of reality (like it happened and happens in the North, too) but was deliberatly part of the legal System even.
So that a Person high on the ladder could do anything he wanted to a Person lower on the ladder and not only did Society allow it, the law allowed. A White rich old man could beat his wife and children, or beat and kill a black Person, or catch and make a slave of a black Person, and nobody forbid this.
Part of the Argument of the whole non-democratic structure of southern Society that continued was not only economy, but attempts to improve infrastructure and Society were deliberatly thwarted: eg. building libraries everywhere because educated citzens can improve the workforce - but they also stand up for their rights. So the rich White old men in power prevented this when Northern Groups tried it.
The Weimar Democracy had failed for a variety of reasons, not only the back-stabbing myth and putschs from both left and right, and economic recession, and lack of real-world cynicism when writing the constitution, using an ideal dream instead, but also things like: of 22 newspapers, 20 were writing against the republic. So even when the government was making Progress against the treaties, and getting its feet again after the Depression, slowly starting the economy again, the Population didn’t believe it. (Sound familiar to today Fox et al?)
And then the Nazis spent 12 years brainwashing People into how leadership is much better than the squabble of Democracy. So a lot of experts believed that following a leader was deeply embedded - from before under the Kaiser, too - in the German Psyche to ever learn to be democratic again.
I wish I could recall where I read it so I could point to it, but I believe General Sherman had some writings to this effect about the south. He wanted to inflict such tremendous damage on the south that they would feel the same way and re-examine themselves over the process of picking themselves back up and building. If I remember correctly, he felt that they were let off too easily, which he believed would allow them to find excuses for their loss rather than taking a hard look at themselves and actually changing in any way.
If that’s correct and he felt that way, it does seem that he might’ve been right.
The loss of the full use of the population was certainly part of the problem. But there was a lot of excess resources being wasted as well.
Consider the basic economics of segregation. Obviously, blacks didn’t get the same facilities that whites got but they did get something. That meant black towns had to build two schools and two churches instead of one; every drinking fountain and bathroom and park bench had to have another one build next to it; trains and buses had to schedule the use of extra vehicles.
Of course it can. Those areas where Islam is predominant were something other than Islamic before Islam arrived. Same with Christianity. Not all of these changes were voluntary. Iraq and Afghanistan could have been turned into secular democracies given a long enough governorship to remove the affects of religion and tribalism to an extent where what was left wouldn’t jeopardize what had been changed.
It took us twelve years to end the Malayan Emergency (though it was effectively all over by 1958). I doubt opinion would allow us twelve years to do it today.