Hitler’s American Model
by James Q Whitman, Princeton, £19.95
You wonder what this book is about until you read the subtitle: “The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law”. We forget recent history – that the US has not just been the home of “liberty and democracy”, but also of its own brand of racism, particularly in the South. Whitman, a law professor at Yale Law School, puts it starkly: “In the early 1930s, Jews in Germany were hounded, beaten and sometimes murdered – the same goes for blacks in the American South.”
