“Respecting the Separateness of Others:” Segregationist Opposition to American Foreign Aid and the Formation of a Southern Internationalism, 1946-1973

Abstract

The end of World War II, decolonization, and the emerging Cold War made forming an antiracist foreign and domestic policy an imperative for the United States. This context meant that segregation at home tarnished the American image to potential allies in the Third World because the nation claimed to be the defender of freedom and equality against Soviet totalitarianism. This dissertation explores the development of a southern internationalism in response to the antiracist liberal international policies following World War II. I define southern internationalism as a belief in racial citizenship that defined efforts to maintain white supremacist global racial hierarchies, which manifested itself in support for segregation at home and neocolonial relationships abroad. The result of this global vision led to southern internationalist support of nationalistic, unilateral, and militaristic foreign policy and attached racial significance and motives to those foreign policy methods. This dissertation uses foreign aid as an entry point into understanding how the liberal internationalist programs of the Cold War faced opposition from representatives in the American South. It argues that southern politicians, such as Otto E. Passman, Allen J. Ellender, and George C. Wallace, opposed foreign aid not only for fiscal reasons, but also because they had an alternative vision for national security and controlling the decolonizing world. Their vision, southern internationalism, attempted to combat the connection between the American civil rights movement and nationalist movements throughout the Third World and gradually gained strength during the 1950s and 1960s. Segregationists refined their message against foreign aid and eliminated direct mention of race during the 1960s so that their objectives were more palatable to a national audience. Therefore, they crafted foreign aid into a symbol for both domestic and international racial disorder. The result was a political rhetoric that attached racial meaning and symbolism to foreign aid. Imbuing foreign aid with racial meaning allowed segregationists to take their regionalist international vision to a national audience while maintaining appeal to their southern base. Southern internationalism became one of many political traditions that formed a conservative internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s around shared interests and objectives.