The Politics of Losing
Page 1
THE POLITICS OF LOSING
THE POLITICS OF LOSING
Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment
RORY MCVEIGH AND KEVIN ESTEP
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54870-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McVeigh, Rory, author. | Estep, Kevin, author.
Title: The politics of losing : Trump, the Klan, and the mainstreaming of resentment / Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018048997 (print) | LCCN 2018056015 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231190060 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: White nationalism—United States—History. | White supremacy movements—United States—History. | Ku Klux Klan (1915-)—History. | Whites—Race identity—United States—History. | United States—Race relations—Political aspects. | Trump, Donald, 1946– | United States—Politics and government—2017-
Classification: LCC E184.A1 (ebook) | LCC E184.A1 M356 2019 (print) | DDC 320.56/909—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048997
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Cover design: Noah Arlow
Ignorant, superstitious, and filthy Mexicans are scattering far and wide throughout the country, taking the place of American laborers. They are reported as far north as the sugar beet fields of Michigan, where they are ousting white families, and thousands are settling in the southwest. Our immigration laws are still far too lax. Something should be done, and speedily, to curb this evil.
—Imperial Night-Hawk, the newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan, May 30, 1923
CONTENTS
1 Introduction
2 The Ku Klux Klan in American History
3 Power and Political Alignments
4 Economics and White Nationalism
5 Where Trump Found His Base
6 Politics and White Nationalism
7 Status and White Nationalism
8 White Nationalism Versus the Press
9 The Future of White Nationalism and American Politics
Conclusion: Making America White Again
Appendix: Methods of Statistical Analysis
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
1
INTRODUCTION
On a hot July day in central Indiana—the kind of day when the heat shimmers off the tall green corn and even the bobwhites seek shade in the brush—a great crowd of people clustered around an open meadow. They were waiting for something. Their faces were expectant, and their eyes searched the bright blue sky.
Suddenly, they began to cheer. They had seen it: a speck that came from the south and soon grew into an airplane. As it came closer, it glistened in the sunlight, and they could see that it was gilded all over. It circled the field slowly and seesawed in for a bumpy landing. Soon a man emerged, to a new surge of applause, and a small delegation of dignitaries filed out to the airplane to meet him. With the newcomer in the lead, the column recrossed the field, proceeded along a lane carved through the multitude, and reached a platform decked with flags and bunting. He mounted the steps, walked forward to the rostrum, and held up his hand to hush the excited crowd.
This is the account, almost word for word, of a journalist named Robert Coughlan on the Fourth of July, 1923.1 This was a Klan rally—arguably the largest in history—a tristate Konklave that brought members from Ohio and Illinois to gather together in Kokomo, Indiana. Some reports place the attendance at one hundred thousand. For Coughlan, who had been born and raised Catholic in Kokomo, “there was special reason to remember the Ku Klux Klan.”
The man at the rostrum was David C. Stephenson, though he went by “D. C.” Once a lowly Indiana coal dealer, on that day he was installed to the “exalted” position of Grand Dragon, granting him control over the thriving northern realm of the Klan. With millions of faithful members, he had gained tremendous political power.2 With his ambition, knack for salesmanship, and the Klan behind him, even a future run for the presidency seemed to be in the cards.3 But before that day would come, he would first build a political machine headquartered in Indiana.
Coughlan continues: “The Grand Dragon paused, inviting the cheers that thundered around him. Then he launched into a speech. He urged his audience to fight for ‘one-hundred-percent Americanism’ and to thwart ‘foreign elements’ that he said were trying to control the country.” He spoke about how our once great nation had veered from the course charted by her founders, and he railed against political corruption, a rigged electoral system, and the undemocratic power of the Supreme Court to nullify the will of the people. “Every official who violates his oath to support the constitution by betrayal of the common welfare through any selfish service to himself or to others spits in the soup and in the face of democracy. He is as guilty of treason as though he were a martial enemy.”4
As he finished, and stepped back, “a coin came spinning through the air. Someone threw another. Soon people were throwing rings, money, watch charms, anything bright and valuable. At last, when the tribute slackened, he motioned his retainers to sweep up the treasure. Then he strode off to a nearby pavilion to consult with his attendant Kleagles, Cyclopses, and Titans.”5
This rally was in the midst of the phenomenal rise of the Klan during the early 1920s. By 1925, Klan membership was anywhere from 2 to 5 million members, not counting the millions who supported the Klan without ever joining up.6 The total population in 1925 stood at approximately 115 million, which means that as many as 1 in every 23 Americans was a member. In Kokomo, “literally half” the town had joined at its height.7
Like the original Klan, which was created during Reconstruction in the late 1870s, and like the Klan that mobilized to thwart the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Klan of the 1920s existed to advance and maintain white supremacy. But it also had a broader agenda, and it stunned contemporary observers as it attracted millions of followers and grew particularly strong outside of the former Confederacy, in states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana.
The Klan’s national leader, Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, was also there the day of Stephenson’s speech, introducing him with “a ringing message of optimism and good cheer.”8 A week later, Evans gave a speech at Buckeye Lake in Ohio, musing on the origins of this second coming of the Klan.
“Among the students of the old Reconstruction,” he said, “there was an itinerant Methodist preacher who, living in the atmosphere and under the shade of the former greatness of the Klan, dreamed by day and night of a reincarnation of the organization which had saved white civilization to a large portion of our country.” This preacher was Colonel William Joseph Simmons, who had refounded the Klan outside Atlanta, Georgia, in 1915. “Slowly, under the dreamings of a wondering mind, the Klan took some hazy kind of form. As this man wandered in the streets of the Southern city in which he lived, preaching the doctrine of a new Klan in his emotional manner, there slowly came to the standard men of dependable character and sterling worth, who were able to lend some kind of concrete form to the God-given idea destined to again save a white man’s civilization.”9
Evans’s tribute to Simmons winked at the Klan’s slow
growth and aimlessness in the years following its rebirth. By the early 1920s, however, a new leadership had hit upon a formula for rapid expansion. Simmons had hired two publicists, Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, who enlisted a team of recruiters they called “Kleagles.” The Kleagles traveled the country, forging close ties with fraternal lodges and Protestant congregations to attract members and money. As they ventured beyond the South, they discovered deep pockets of discontent among white Americans. Clarke and Tyler decided that this discontent could be harnessed into a fearsome political movement. They instructed Kleagles to promise new members that only a powerful “one-hundred-percent American” organization such as theirs could save them.10
The Klan spread quickly then, as much a social club as a political operation. Local chapters staged public marches, rallies, and speeches, but also baseball games, plays, and concerts. They put on “Klan Days” at state fairs and even Klan circuses and rodeos.11 “Spectacle was a device for establishing the Klan as a mysterious presence and for winning converts to the Invisible Empire,” historian Thomas Pegram writes, “but it was also a tool for community-building among white Protestants.”12 Local chapters were on hand to celebrate the birth of Klansmen’s children, and they staged elaborate funerals for those who passed on.13 In Terrell, Texas, the Klan’s national newspaper, the Imperial Night-Hawk, reported on the funeral of one C. T. Cochran, who died from a run-in with a wood saw. “The Kaufman and Terrell Order of the Ku Klux Klan had charge of the burial, full honors being given. The Terrell drum corps attended, together with about two hundred robed Klansmen. The ceremony was a most impressive one, and was said to have been attended by the largest number of people ever present at a burial in the Kaufman cemetery.”14
When sociologist Kathleen Blee interviewed former members of the Women’s Ku Klux Klan for her 1991 book, they spoke of it fondly, and recalled the excitement of watching Klansmen march solemnly through their towns: “A hush fell on the crowd. They seemed to sense a force of something unknown.”15
But the Klan relied on more than spectacle to attract members. Together, Evans and Stephenson developed a message that struck a chord with middle-class white Americans who lived in towns depressed by the economic transformations of the time. While many Americans were prospering in the new economy of the 1920s, others suffered. An agricultural depression had settled on America after the European export boom of World War I fell off, and transformations in manufacturing production accelerated the use of unskilled factory labor, making skilled manufactures and artisans uncompetitive if not nearly obsolete.
Like the first Klan of the Reconstruction Era, the 1920s Klan proudly waved the banner of white supremacy. But the target of their animosity this time was more Catholics and immigrants than black Americans. Klan leaders linked these ethnic and religious enmities to economic nationalism in a way that was particularly appealing to the Klan faithful. “I am rather disgusted today that the masterminds of politics and many of the really thinking patriots seem vastly more interested in the diseases of Europe and Asia than they are in the problems which are pressing in America today,” said Evans in 1923. “Let us go out and begin to teach and preach and practice the doctrine of Americanism. And let’s make the word ‘Americanism’ mean America’s business. And let’s make it come to be the primal duty of every citizen to practice Americanism in a broad way.”16
Klansmen gather with other mourners in front of St. James Lutheran Church in Verona, Wisconsin, for the funeral of Herbert C. Dreger, a police officer who was shot to death on December 2, 1924. Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-35726.
As part of this “Americanism,” Klansmen adopted a practice they called “Klankraft” or “vocational Klannishness.” This meant prioritizing fellow Klan members in all business dealings and boycotting companies and merchants whose owners were not native-born, not white, or not Protestant.17 Evans promised that, in this way, they might reclaim the nation from alien forces and advance the cause of only “one-hundred-percent Americans.”
This is a book about the circumstances that catalyze white nationalism in America and carry it into electoral politics, a pattern that has repeated itself many times in our history. When we use the term “white nationalism,” we mean a merger of nativism and economic protectionism. Structural conditions, considered through the lens of what we call power devaluation, brought these politics out from the shadows of the Klan dens and Konklaves and into the mainstream.18 Exactly one hundred years after Simmons climbed Stone Mountain and lit a fiery cross to inaugurate the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, the United States was once again gripped by an insurgent white nationalism. While the particulars are different in many ways, the roots of both movements, as we demonstrate, are not.
THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION
In the 1920s, the Klan capitalized on the anger and frustration of the middle-class when significant changes in American society undermined their economic power, political influence, and social status. Millions embraced the Klan, which used cultural weapons to fight back against these losses.
Immigration was the thorn in their side. In the early 1900s, millions of immigrants arrived on American shores, mostly Catholics and Jews from central and southern Europe. They provided the labor that fed the factories, and they fueled rising political constituencies and carried with them cultures and practices and beliefs that set them apart from the native-born white Protestants who were predominant in America. To recruit members, the Klan used race, religion, and nativity to cobble together a new constituency of those seeking redress for their lost power, and scapegoated immigrants for their losses.
Almost a century later, Trump appealed to the resentments of a new segment of mostly white Americans, primarily those in towns bypassed by the global economy. While this changing economy offered new and lucrative opportunities to the better educated, jobs that paid well had disappeared from the towns that didn’t have the highly educated workforces to retain them. Some of these jobs moved overseas where labor was cheaper. Mechanization eliminated others. Service-sector and retail jobs filled the vacuum, but they were a poor substitute for the jobs that once provided respectable wages and full-time hours. Immigration, which generated new Democratic constituencies and seemed to be slowly changing American culture, once again became a political whipping post.
Only by looking closely at the changes taking place in American society can we make sense of Trump’s rise to the presidency. His campaign was almost impossibly resilient. He survived accusations and missteps that would have crippled anyone else. He had, after all, been at the forefront of the birther movement, generating and spreading rumors that Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible for the presidency. During his campaign, he stumbled when asked about the endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Later, the Klan formally endorsed him. Other of his supporters and surrogates said things that were blatantly racist, which he declined to renounce.19 When his poll numbers slipped in the aftermath of the Republican and Democratic conventions, he appointed Steve Bannon as the CEO of his campaign. Bannon had formerly been the executive chair of Breitbart News—a conservative news outlet known to traffic in right-wing conspiracy theories. In ordinary times, any of these actions would have been enough to destroy a candidacy.
D. C. Stephenson’s own ambitions came crashing down in 1925 when he kidnapped, raped, and murdered an acquaintance, a young state official named Madge Oberholtzer, on a train from Indianapolis to Chicago. After the rape, Stephenson bit through her skin, causing a staph infection that soon worked its way through her body. During her captivity, she tried and failed to commit suicide with mercury chloride tablets. They caused her kidneys to fail but did not kill her. Stephenson’s henchmen delivered her to her family home, confident she would soon die of her wounds. She lived long enough only to give a signed statement to the police. Stephenson was found guilty of second-degree murder, rape, and kidnapping, and sentenced t
o life in prison.20 News of his crime and coverage of the trial catalyzed the collapse of the second Klan.
Scandal, albeit not nearly of the scale of Stephenson’s crime, jeopardized but did not end Trump’s prospects. On October 7, 2016, a videotape surfaced of him unknowingly speaking into a hot mic. In the tape, filmed in 2005 for a feature for the TV show Access Hollywood, Trump is heard boasting about how his celebrity allowed him to make unsolicited sexual advances on women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”21 Soon after, several women claimed to be victims of this behavior.22 But his campaign survived.
In this book, we move beyond the personalities of characters like Trump and Stephenson and instead explore something more fundamental about American political institutions, American inequality, and intergroup conflicts that erupt and subside in predictable (but not always obvious) ways. We will ask why so many Americans remained fiercely loyal to Trump in spite of, and even because of, what he said and did. And why, despite their dissatisfaction with Trump as a man and as a candidate, many others cast their vote for him. And we will explore how the Trump candidacy disrupted alliances in political parties and the implications of that disruption for the future of white nationalism in America.
D. C. Stephenson was appointed Grand Dragon of the northern realm of the Ku Klux Klan in 1923. Fueled in part by his charismatic leadership, the Klan of the 1920s successfully enlisted millions of members across the United States. Photo courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.
The election of Donald Trump will undoubtedly go down as one of the nation’s most remarkable political outcomes. But this book is not primarily an analysis of his campaign. Instead, it explores his candidacy for what it reveals about the nature of American politics and social divisions. Like the political challenge of the Klan in the 1920s, Trump’s campaign both revealed and disrupted the underlying alliances within political parties. In both cases, important structural changes were taking place in the United States that cut a path for a white nationalist agenda—an agenda that not only entered our political discourse, but found a warm reception from Americans, most of whom did not think of themselves as political extremists.