[Marxism] George Fredrickson

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, March 7, 2008
George Fredrickson, 73, Historian, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

George M. Fredrickson, a historian who cast new light on the study of 
race and who helped define the field of comparative history with a 
penetrating examination of racial relations in the United States and 
South Africa, died on Feb. 25 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 73.

The cause was heart failure, his wife, Hélène, said.

Mr. Fredrickson is often credited with breaking ground in the use of 
comparative history to escape provincialism and suggest broader, more 
thematic judgments about historical forces. This was particularly 
evident in his book "White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American 
and South African History" (1981), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

David Brion Davis, a Yale historian, said in an interview Thursday 
that "White Supremacy" was "a landmark book and a model that has not 
been superseded" in the field of comparative history.

In the early history of the United States, Mr. Fredrickson wrote, 
whites needed an ideology of racial superiority to justify importing 
slaves and uprooting and killing American Indians while pushing to 
establish an agrarian economy in their new land.

South Africa, by contrast, historically had more tolerance of racial 
mixing and a more pragmatic definition of whiteness, in large part 
because of a shortage of "pure" Europeans, especially women, Mr. 
Fredrickson wrote.

The countries differed in laws governing race. The United States had 
founding documents promising equality that over many years it tried, 
fitfully, to live up to. In Mr. Fredrickson's view, the United 
States, with its history of slavery before the Civil War, had a worse 
racial past than South Africa did but a better means, in law, to move 
on to better relations.

South Africa's early race relations, while never smooth, were more 
benign, he said. But in contrast to the American experience, the 
country's race relations dramatically worsened, with the 
establishment of apartheid in 1948, laws that required irrevocable 
racial segregation. (In 1992, more than a decade after Mr. 
Fredrickson's book, South Africans voted to end apartheid.)

Yet in Mr. Fredrickson's judgment both countries had a huge 
similarity: both required an ideology of equality of white males to 
justify "dehumanization of blacks."

It is this sort of examination of historical differences that 
constitutes comparative history, with the aim of recognizing patterns 
and making generalizations. Mr. Davis said the approach had been used 
to "globalize" the understanding of American history.

In a review of "White Supremacy" in The Washington Post, Jim 
Hoagland, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper for his coverage of 
apartheid in South Africa in 1971, wrote that the book "deftly picks 
apart the tangled threads of two brands of white power and traces 
them back to their sources."

In Mr. Fredrickson's first book, "The Inner Civil War: Northern 
Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union" (1965), he dug through 
mountains of original documents to tell of the dilemma abolitionists 
faced during the war: whether to criticize the Lincoln administration 
for lagging in its antislavery commitment or to remain silent in the 
hope that a Northern victory would free the slaves.

One of Mr. Fredrickson's most-discussed books was "Racism: A Short 
History" (2002), in which he used specific examples like the 
Holocaust, apartheid and legal segregation in America's South to 
reach theoretical conclusions about the subject. He believed, for 
example, that the idea that racial differences are inherently 
unbridgeable could be traced to the Enlightenment.

The argument of an earlier age, that all men are equal before God, 
lost force once rationality was seen to rule, Mr. Fredrickson wrote. 
Only by postulating scientific explanations for racial differences 
could slavery and colonial subjugation be justified.

"A line had been crossed that gave 'race' a new and more 
comprehensive significance," he wrote. His research showed that the 
word racism first came into present usage under the Nazis.

George Marsh Fredrickson was born on July 16, 1934, in Bristol, Conn. 
He spent his high school years in Sioux Falls, S.D., graduated magna 
cum laude from Harvard in 1956, studied in Norway on a Fulbright 
scholarship, then served in the Navy for three years.

He earned his doctorate from Harvard in 1964. He taught there for 
three years, then moved to Northwestern University, where he became 
the William Smith Mason professor of American History. In 1984 he 
became the Edgar E. Robinson professor of United States history at 
Stanford University, from which he retired in 2002.

In addition to his wife of 52 years, the former Hélène Osouf, Mr. 
Fredrickson is survived by his daughters Anne Hope Fredrickson, of 
Grass Valley, Calif., Laurel Fredrickson, of Durham, N.C., and 
Caroline Fredrickson, of Silver Spring, Md.; his son, Thomas, of 
Brooklyn; his sister, Lois Rose, of Great Barrington, Mass.; and four 
grandchildren.

Mr. Fredrickson wrote eight books and edited four more. His last was 
published this year. It concerns Lincoln's changing, often ambiguous 
views on slavery, emancipation and states' rights. Mr. Fredrickson 
took the title from W. E. B. Du Bois's comment on the subject: "Big 
Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race."


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