Posted on by rjonakait

Ken Burns and Trump the Outlier

Many people have been enthralled by Ken Burns latest film, this one on the American Revolution. Burns and his crew are tremendous filmmakers. The script always flows seamlessly, incorporating visuals, talking heads, and narration seemingly based on extensive research. He has a winning technique, which he employs no matter the subject matter– jazz, baseball, the Roosevelts, the Dust Bowl or the Revolution. The subject matter is forced to fit the technique, but that technique always seems to leave viewers feeling as if they have learned a lot, that they are intellectual, with little effort on their part.

In a well-prepared presentation at our current events discussion group, a fellow resident talked about Burns’s The American Revolution. Among her points was that the history was more complex than what she was taught when in school; that the outcome may now seem inevitable, but it was not at the time; and that the American “story” is one of a journey that continues. In response to comments, she said that President Trump was only temporary and that she had great confidence in the wisdom of the American people, or at least of her grandchildren. I thought that suggesting Trump was sort of an outlier and that good-sense Americans would soon prevail missed some of the points she drew from the Burns’s documentary. Our history is complicated, but good results are not inevitable.

Unfortunately, Trump is not some outlier. Many if not most mainstream Republicans before Trump took over supported tax cuts skewed to the rich; did not support healthcare for the many; threw up scares about immigrants; opposed “wokeness”; bashed universities; bashed science; suggested there was unconstitutional discrimination against whites, especially white males; maintained that there was rampant discrimination against Christians; promoted islamophobia; and so on. Trump did not create these positions; he just said them more stridently and colorfully than other politicians.

This made me think of Timothy Egan’s, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (2023), the story of the rise of the twentieth century Ku Klux Klan. This a story not of the deep south, but of Indiana and of D.C. Stephenson, who in effect ruled the Hoosier State in the 1920s. Stephenson did not build this new Klan by himself. Egan points out that the Klan of the 1920s was built with blessing of Protestant clergy. Stephenson, however, had abilities and shamelessness that still exist in modern demagogues. Egan tells us that D.C. Stephenson “had the touch and the charm, the dexterity with words and the drive. He understood people’s fear and their need to blame others for their failures. He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with a conviction.”

The Klan was seeking to make America great again by returning the country to a previous time. It supported eugenics and mandatory sterilizations to limit America to the “right” kind of people that used to be the only Americans. It blessed the restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which prevented the “wrong” kinds of people from entering the country. It denied the shared humanity of people, and thus the Klan opposed the teaching of evolution because evolution implies that all people had a common origin.

Stephenson’s downfall came when a brave prosecutor arrested and tried him for a horrific rape and murder. Although the disgusting evidence was clear, he still retained power because his followers “believed the trial was a hoax and witch hunt.” The true heroes were the twelve average men of the jury who convicted him leading to a life sentence.

There is much worth studying in this story. The prosecutor pointed out that “‘Stephenson forced a super oath’ on public officials. This super oath was greater than the oath of constitutional authority.” When loyalty to an individual becomes stronger than to the greater good or the constitution, society is in danger. Stephenson demonstrated that “democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.” And our journey continues. Stephenson’s downfall was not inevitable. Because he committed a horrific crime, he was the eventual cause of his own downfall. But it took a brave prosecutor and brave jurors to make sure that downfall occurred.

As unusual as Stephenson may now seem, Timothy Egan asks the still relevant question: “What if the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode it? A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s still there, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland.”

What if Trump does not drive public sentiment but rides it? A vein of hatred will exist after Trump departs. Glass-more-than-half-full optimism about the American people and seeing Trump as an outlier will not change that. I wish I were mistaken.

Posted on by rjonakait

This, Too, Is America

         When some horrific act of hatred, intolerance, prejudice, exploitation, or violence occurs in this country, someone almost always says that the atrocity is “not American”; it’s not “who we are.” A friend of mine who has read deeply in American history rejoins that the Panglossians have a limited understanding of America and its history, for Americans have done atrocious things regularly throughout our history. My friend, however, is not truly surprised by the glib comments. He knows that standard American mythology seldom incorporates the bad from our history. For example, few of us were aware of the events depicted in David Grann’s riveting 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which has now been made into a powerful film by Martin Scorsese. I won’t be a spoiler and go into many details of what happened for those who may see the movie or read the book (now back on the bestseller lists), but both the book and movie recount how Oklahoma Osage Indians in the 1920s became rich from oil discovered under their lands. However, a sickening conspiracy of murders (at least, twenty and perhaps hundreds) arose so that whites could control the wealth.

          Reviewers praised the book as a compelling narrative of forgotten American history, but that is misleading. If the history was forgotten, it was forgotten by few of us because few of us had ever learned of these acts in the first place. We don’t teach the bad things in our history much.

          At almost the same time as the Osage murders (which, of course, were meant to be hidden), a mass movement based on bigotry, fueled by greed and egotism, and inviting violence was also burgeoning in the country. Even though it was public, few know of it today.

The movement was the middle incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Most of us are aware that the Klan arose after Reconstruction to suppress the constitutional rights and other freedoms of Blacks. And we know that KKK resurfaced in the Civil Rights Era after World War II. Fewer of us know, however, of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.

The early twentieth century KKK was different from the post-Civil-War incarnation. It was not limited to the South, and it expanded its hate. The nineteenth century KKK acted primarily against Blacks, but the early twentieth-century Klan targeted Catholics, Jews, Asians on the Pacific Coast, Mexicans in the Southwest, and immigrants everywhere in addition to Blacks. With this expansiveness, the Klan, professing Americanism, pronounced hatred for one in three Americans. They loved America, as some today also proclaim, but only a segment of it. (Of course, even without a Klan behind them, Americans have often acted violently against minorities and immigrants. For example, in1891 eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans.)

This 1920s Klan entered the political arena, and it had both state and nationwide power and influence.  It opposed the teaching of evolution because that science implies that all people have a common origin. This KKK movement supported eugenics and mandatory sterilizations that became law in many places. (The eugenics movement in the U.S. was widespread and influential, but it had some trouble reconciling religious faith and American heroes with eugenics. Daniel Okrent in The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generation of Jew, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America reports my favorite mental gymnastics from these supposedly principled people: A eugenicist concluded that Jesus was not Jewish, and that Columbus was Nordic.) The Klan sought to prevent immigration from “non-Nordic” countries, and it blessed the National Origins Act of 1924 which restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The law, with its Klan support, passed overwhelmingly in the House and garnered only six dissenting votes in the Senate. The Klan’s national power was perhaps most visible on August 8, 1925, when the KKK held a parade in Washington with 50,000 marchers. An estimated 250,000 spectators watched.

This new Klan’s power was most evident not in the South but in the midwestern state of Indiana, as documented in Timothy Egan’s excellent book, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. (The 1920s Klan also controlled Oregon, whose legislature passed laws to outlaw Catholic schools, a measure that was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Eighty years earlier, when still a territory, Oregon forbade all Blacks within its lands.) Every level of the Indiana government was run by Klan members, and that history, although it may not be widely known, seems familiar.

The movement was encouraged and often led by evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant clergy. It should not surprise anyone that American religion and hate can go together.

The KKK members were wedded to guns and other weapons. An observer of Klan meetings reported “weapons were passed among Klansman as freely as illegal hooch. I have never met a Klan member who didn’t have a gun, a knife, or often a blackjack.”

The leader of the evangelically blessed, gun-loving, America-first Indiana KKK was D.C. Stephenson. Perhaps Stephenson truly believed in the causes he espoused, but he also saw a way to make money — and lots of it — from the Klan. He got a cut of each $10 fee that state Klan members paid, and he was the supplier of the sheets and conical (comical?) hats each Klan member bought. In a few years, Stephenson was rich, owning fabulous homes, cars, and boats.

What is most striking today is not just the grifting — that, of course, has modern parallels — but the methods he used to expand the Klan. Egan writes that D.C. Stephenson “had the touch and the charm, the dexterity with words and the drive. He understood people’s fear and their need to blame others for their failures. He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with a conviction.” Stephenson could tell lies, lies, and more lies, and through the lies he attracted crowds, admirers, and followers thereby gaining power. In short order, the Klan under Stephenson controlled town after town and the Indiana state government.

Moreover, Stephenson expected that he, not the Klan, would control Indiana. Stephenson took credit for every KKK member who was elected and concluded that those officials owed him a personal loyalty that outweighed governmental duties, an oath to the Constitution, or even Klan “principles.” As a prosecutor later said, “Stephenson forced a super oath on public officials. This super oath was greater than the oath of constitutional authority.” Loyalty to an individual that supersedes fealty to sworn duties then as now is always a great threat to democracy. Egan states that Stephenson’s Indiana experience reveals that a truly representative government of the people and for the people cannot be taken for granted. Instead, it demonstrated that “democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.”

Stephenson’s downfall came from a criminal conviction, not one for corrupting government or unconstitutionally trying to retain power. Instead, he was convicted for murder and rape coming out of his sexual perversities, which were well known to many. Even so, in what also sounds familiar today, Stephenson’s followers “believed the trial was a hoax and witch hunt.” However, the heroes of the day, the twelve average men of the jury, knew otherwise, and Stephenson was sentenced to life in prison.

Stephenson may have been a charismatic person, but he could not have created a Klan that controlled a midwestern state unless he was tapping into a wellspring that already existed. Timothy Egan asks, “What if the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode it? A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s still there, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland.”

          There was a strain of hatred then as there is now, but there have also been other American traits fueling dangerous mass movements. One is a search for a scapegoat. Although conservative groups may pronounce a belief in personal responsibility, that is often a personal responsibility for people other than themselves. Instead, as Dara Horn writes in People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, “People will do absolutely anything to blame their problems on others.” Somehow blaming Blacks and immigrants, Jews and Mexicans makes many people feel able to explain the shortcomings in their own lives.

          These conservative movements tap into hatred and scapegoats, but they also ride on a particular fear, a fear of change. John M. Barry also writing about the 1920s in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America says that the KKK’s target was not so much Blacks—no politician at the time was arguing for equality—but change. Barry points out that American populism has always had an “us” and “them”—not only an enemy above but also below. That dynamic remains.

          Interwoven with the fear of change is the myth that some earlier time was idyllic, and we must return to that period by eliminating aspects of present America. These Americans often deride global influences, but it’s ironic that they fit into an international conservative trend. As Peter Hessler writes in The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, such a movement “is like the modern Islamists, whose revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt always envisioned a return to some distant, purer past.” Make America Great Again seeks a similar mythical path.

          Almost anything bad that happens in this country out of hate, envy, insecurity, or greed has had too many precedents in our history. We may say that they are as American as apple pie. We could also say they are as American as bigoted violence.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

The Worst of Times? The Indiana Pope, Fluoride, Daniels, and Wilmington

          Does anyone think it is the best of times? Many of my friends seem to think it is the worst of times. They refer to the Big Lie claims of a stolen election, the insurrection of January 6, 2021, trying to prevent the consequences of a valid election, conspiracy theories from pedophilia to the great replacement, to racists in office, and so on. They believe that the internet and social media have made America’s worst tendencies worse and that they will continue to spread misinformation, hate, and divisiveness among us. My pessimism about America may not be as great as my friends’, not, however, because I don’t share their feelings, but because I realize that racial hate and violence, attacks on our elections, and dangerous conspiracy theories have been imbedded in this country from its beginnings. American exceptionalism has always contained a heavy dose of craziness.

          Long before the internet and social media, this country was crawling with controversies. Looking back many of them seem comical. But many weren’t. They were taken seriously. Many harmed individuals and families. Many harmed the country. A few examples. Consider North Manchester, Indiana.

          The 1920s saw an extensive resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. We may think of the Klan today as a group of anti-Black organizations, and racism has always been a dominant ideology of the KKK, but a hundred years ago, the Klan also heavily featured antisemitism and anti-Catholicism. The anti-Catholicism was a component of an anti-immigrant animus. The Klan followed a Great Replacement theory. Native-born whites were being replaced by dark immigrants from Southern Europe who held a foreign, dangerous, and anti-Christian ideology, that is, Roman Catholicism, and of course, the leader of this Devil’s brigade, and therefore, the figure for reviling, was the Pope. The politics of many northern states were heavily influenced by anti-Catholicism, including attempts to ban Catholic parochial schools. Bizarre conspiracy theories were rampant, including one that affected North Manchester, then and now a small town in north central Indiana.

          The 2,700 residents of North Manchester in 1923 saw much Klan activity including a cross burning in February that apparently gave concern only because it was windy that night, and a fire might have spread from the oil-saturated burlap that covered the twenty-foot construction of two-by-four timbers. In April, the local newspaper reported a talk by Reverend Blair to a “large audience,” who explained that the Klan was founded in the South during Reconstruction “when the negroes, controlled by unscrupulous white men, were creating terrorism.” He said that the Klan had been recently reorganized and it was now “composed of American-born Protestant citizens to combat existing evils in the U.S. The Klan never took the law into its own hands, but that it obtained evidence and then turned that information over to the proper authorities.”

          A Klan parade in May clogged the roads, and the North Manchesterites saw 129 hooded people participate. In September, 2,500 people attended a Klan picnic and heard Klan speakers.

          And during these times, a Klan lecturer warned that the arch-villain, the Pope, was coming on the morning train to Chicago the next day. To protect the native-born Protestants who were exceptional defenders of the country, a thousand people met the train and confronted the one person who disembarked. That man spent an uncomfortable half-hour and finally convinced the concerned citizens that he was not the Pope in disguise but only a corset salesman. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side the Klan acolytes put him on the next train out of town. (See Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan by David Mark Chalmers.) No one was hurt although one corset salesman had to have been terrified and could not do his job, but this craziness was a mere sliver of what affected the country.

          A different conspiracy theory affected my hometown while I was growing up. In the 1940s, scientists learned that fluoride could help prevent tooth decay. Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has not been a national leader in many things, but according to the Sheboygan Water Utility Company, in 1946 it became the first water company in Wisconsin and the third in the country to fluoridate its water supply. I drank that water from infancy and do have good teeth. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, far right politicians maintained that fluoridation was a plot to impose a communist regime in this country by sapping the brainpower and strength of a generation of kids. I would explain the logic behind this movement, but I was mystified by it then, and I still am. Even as a pre-teen, I thought that if the communists sought to take over this country by targeting Sheboygan, then those Bolsheviks were a long way away from dominating the world. But the spread of this paranoia had significant success as referendums around the country defeated fluoridated water, and it was not until the 1990s that most of the country had the benefits that it brings.

          We tend to forget now how often the communist label was spread to oppose progress. Rachel Carson writing about imminent ecological damage was a tool of the communists. Martin Luther King, Jr., if not an actual communist, was a dupe of them. The National Council of Churches had communistic tendencies. Medicare is communism. Teachers teaching anything that a red-blooded American might object to was a communist. Rock ‘n roll fostered communism. And so on. The right wing in the era of McCarthyism and beyond trotted out fears of a giant communist conspiracy again and again with as much basis as the Big Lie today, and many individuals and this country suffered because of it. Conservatives then and now could not tell the difference between radicalism to be feared and an idea.

(concluded May 27)