by Rory McVeigh
Trump’s campaign shook the Republican Party at a time when political scientists have been trying to account for our unprecedented political polarization. Parties are more close-knit and oppositional on issues than they have been since the Civil War.23 His campaign appealed particularly to Americans who were losing power and privilege and felt that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans cared. He ruptured the seemingly stable alliances that united Republicans and energized a faction of voters that had at last grown large enough to determine the outcome of Republican primaries.
Our comparison of the Trump movement to the rise of the Klan illuminates a phenomenon that extends beyond both cases. White nationalist sentiment has erupted periodically in the United States and, at different times, intersected with politics. These movements are even now challenging democratic processes in countries elsewhere around the world. Only by identifying what causes these movements can we understand what cures them.
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The Klan owed its stunning popularity in the 1920s, in large part, to opportunism. Evans and Stephenson were most interested in enriching themselves and securing political influence. In the early years, they were unbeholden to any particular political ideology.24 Stephenson ran for Congress in Indiana as a Democrat in 1922, but would soon align the state Klan with the Republican Party.25 At the national level, Evans professed the Klan’s neutrality, hoping to draw support from Democrats as well as Republicans, until the Democratic nominee rejected the Klan. Clarke and Tyler instructed recruiters (who worked on commission) not to show up in town with a diagnosis but instead to infiltrate local communities and suss out what was bothering ordinary people. And then frame the Klan as a solution to those problems.26
In 1922, for example, Klan leaders attached themselves to a hotly contested compulsory education bill in Oregon that required children to attend public schools—a thinly veiled bid to criminalize Catholic parochial schools.27 This was a perfect issue for them, as it capitalized on Protestant resentments. Klansmen used this issue to shoehorn the organization into the state, where Protestants vastly outnumbered Catholics and were primed for the Klan’s anti-Catholic agenda.
Trump, in the same way, has not been constrained by the core ideologies of his party, frustrating pundits and mainstream Republicans. For most of his life, he voted Democrat and casually expressed liberal views. When he began to seriously consider a run for the presidency, he moved into the Republican Party and began pilot-testing often outlandish claims and proposals. He found a responsive audience in Americans who felt neglected by politics as usual. In essence, he was doing what Klan recruiters did nearly a century before him: identifying—through trial and error—sources of resentment. When he struck a nerve with a particular issue, he would offer forceful but ill-defined promises to address it, like a “big beautiful wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border.
He had the element of surprise. Neither politicians in either party nor the press took his campaign seriously at first. Caught unawares, they struggled to catch up when he handily defeated a crowded field of sixteen competitors in the Republican primaries and secured the nomination. Even on the night of the general election, a victory for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, seemed a forgone conclusion. On election eve, the Princeton Election Consortium listed Clinton’s win probability at 93 percent.28 Statistician Nate Silver gave Clinton a 73 percent chance.29 And on Election Day, the New York Times gave her an 85 percent chance or, as they put it, “Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an NFL kicker misses a thirty-seven-yard field goal.”30
But she did lose.
Trump racked up overwhelmingly positive tallies outside of major cities throughout most of the country—even within traditional Democratic strongholds. While the results were nail-bitingly close in swing states, rural and small-town support for Trump offset Clinton’s cities, and in this way he eked out victories even in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—states that seemed to be safely in Clinton’s camp.
Business mogul Donald Trump announces his candidacy at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, in New York City. Photo © Christopher Gregory / Getty Images.
WHO ELECTED DONALD TRUMP?
Soon after Trump appointed Steve Bannon to head his campaign, Hillary Clinton delivered a stump speech in Reno, Nevada. She accused Trump of allowing the radical fringe of the political Right (which some call the “alt-right”) to wrest control of the Republican Party. “A man with a long history of racial discrimination,” she warned, “who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military.”31
Weeks later, at a fund-raiser in New York City, she commented on how Trump supporters fall into two baskets. Half of Trump’s supporters, she said, could be placed in what she called the “basket of deplorables”: those who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”32 And while some of these people were simply “irredeemable,” she empathized with those in her unnamed second basket, “people who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures.”33
Not surprisingly, the press and the Trump campaign picked up the “basket of deplorables” comment and took her to task for denigrating millions of hard-working Americans. She regretted her “grossly generalistic” comments, but her supporters and some in the press suggested that her characterization, while politically clumsy, was true. They pointed to poll numbers, for example, showing a majority of Trump supporters—at least 52 percent—believed in the “birther” fabrication.34 And 40 percent reported that white identity was “extremely important” to them, compared to only 15 percent of other Republican respondents.35
Trump lashed out at the media and vilified leaders of his own party and Republican officeholders who denounced him or failed to defend him when his chances of winning seemed to be slipping away. The war he waged against his own party ruptured ostensibly strong Republican unity built over eight years of staunch resistance to Obama. His victory indicates that the issue consensus among Republican voters was, at least somewhat, an illusion. With all of the resources that the party leaders had at their disposal, and with all of the effort invested in stopping him, they failed to nominate a more orthodox conservative candidate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Trump prevailed, even while thumbing his nose at the standard-bearers of traditional conservatism. Perhaps most surprisingly, he bucked conventional wisdom that one must pander to evangelical Protestants to secure the Republican nomination. They ended up favoring his candidacy even though he was a proven outsider to the faith and his lifestyle was at odds with family-values political Christianity. Even Fox News, supposedly so formidable in shaping the conservative agenda that no Republican candidate dared challenge it,36 found it was no match for Donald Trump. Ultimately, it too fell in line behind—and not in front of—the Trump movement.
His unusual campaign made it easy to underestimate his chances of winning. In 1988, Democratic candidate Gary Hart’s promising presidential campaign came to an abrupt end when the voting public learned of his extramarital affair. And while earlier presidential hopefuls like George Wallace and Pat Buchanan picked up niche support by appealing to racist ideals, they fell far short of winning.
So how did he win?
Trump tapped into an intense dissatisfaction in voters that traditional Republican candidates overlooked—he appealed to those in the second basket. It was not so much the support of the deplorables, or the alt-right, or the out-and-out white supremacists, even though they may be the loudest of his supporters. Rather it was the huge swath of voters, on average more rural, more white, and less educated than the average voter, but who mostly don’t consider themselves political extremists, who carried him through the primaries. Although his approach turned off some traditional Republicans—who fell in line only once
he received the nomination—it attracted a significant number of other Republicans, along with some independents and former Democrats and even some who had never been active in politics before.
In the 1920s, while Klan recruiters roamed the nation’s towns and cities to yoke anger and resentment into a political movement, they discovered that linking the economic grievances of millions of white middle-class Americans to racial, ethnic, and religious resentments could fuel a powerful insurgency. Transformations in the structure of American society had eroded the economic power, political pull, and social status of native-born white Protestants. The Klan enlisted them by the millions, and they successfully advocated for the most restrictive immigration laws the country had ever seen, and helped re-elect Coolidge—the only candidate who did not disown the Klan—to the White House in 1924.
When Donald Trump ran for president, he hit upon this formula again. He found a loyal base, patiently waiting for a candidate who would finally close the borders and return manufacturing and mining to American shores. Waiting, in short, for a candidate who would embrace white nationalism.
2
THE KU KLUX KLAN IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Every significant rise of the Ku Klux Klan—the first in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the second in the early 1920s, and the third in the 1960s—coincided with a restructuring of the American economy and the extension of suffrage to Americans previously ineligible to vote. Society was shifting. These shifts undermined the economic, political, and social standing of a particular part of the white population. These conditions can fray political alliances, encouraging those whose privilege is at risk to move in defense of their advantages. This is the observation at the heart of our theoretical framework—which we call “occurrence of power devaluation”—that we use to compare the Trump ascendency with the rise of the 1920s Klan.
By comparing Trump’s rise with that of the Klan we do not mean to equate the two, or exaggerate the extremism of Trump or the people who voted for him. Each time the Klan erupted, it attracted huge followings, drawing in members and supporters who were, in many ways, quite ordinary. On a Saturday night, a Klansman might light a cross and march down Main Street in full hooded regalia. And on Sunday morning he might go to church and picnic with his family in the afternoon. Our comparisons help us explore when and how white nationalist movements emerge, but also how their goals enter the mainstream. We look at the Klan of the 1920s because it was the most effective in attracting broad support, spreading farther and faster than the others. Its growth surprised its contemporaries and still puzzles us today. Understanding it will crack the code of Trump’s own surprising rise to power. But first, we revisit all the Klans of the past.
THE RECONSTRUCTION KLAN
The first Ku Klux Klan emerged as Southerners dealt with the devastation of the Civil War. Historians estimate that six hundred thousand Americans died in the war, which also destroyed the South’s transportation infrastructure, property, and local economy.1 The Southern elite, in particular, faced the challenge of rebuilding their fortunes—fortunes made through property ownership and slave labor.2 They worried about the economic consequences of emancipation, and feared violent retribution from former slaves and, worse, a coming political revolution that could seize their land.3 Before the Klan came into being, white Southerners already anticipated black threats to institutional white supremacy—and reacted with violence.4
This violence was itself an extension of practices developed before the war, when “night riders” patrolled the countryside to capture escaped slaves and intimidate those who might be contemplating escape.5 Slaves were geographically concentrated. A relatively small proportion of Southerners owned the vast majority of slaves, who worked primarily in cotton-growing regions of the Deep South. To ward off rebellion, slave owners would sometimes don white sheets, pretending to be ghosts, in an effort to scare slaves into submission.6 Folklorist Gladys-Marie Fry writes that whites in the South were terrified of the prospects of slave uprisings: “Slaves posed a constant threat, a storm cloud that could erupt at any moment into a hurricane of disaster.”7
In 1865, in Pulaski, Tennessee, six Confederate war veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan. It’s not clear how they came up with the name. Two of the original members would later claim that it was meaningless but sounded mysterious.8 These first Klansmen were relatively prosperous and styled themselves as intellectuals: Frank McCord was the editor of the local newspaper; Calvin Jones, John Lester, and Richard Reed were attorneys; James Crowe was a cotton broker; and John Kennedy, it appears, was a well-off farmer, though not a plantation owner.9 Historical accounts say that the men started the group, at first, to relieve boredom. They staged plays and concerts in Pulaski:10 McCord played the fiddle, and Jones played the guitar.11 Some evidence suggests that they were part of the minstrel tradition, performing locally under the name of the “Midnight Rangers.”12
But the first Klan was also inspired by anxiety—anxiety about the incorporation of former slaves into the social order.13 “The men who conceived of the Ku Klux Klan were naturally worried not only about public order in the streets of Pulaski,” historian Elaine Frantz Parsons writes, “but more generally about the explosive political situation in Tennessee, the dire situation their community found itself in, and the extent to which former Confederates would have the right to participate in the new state and national governments.”14
The Klan expanded slowly in those early years, not reaching far beyond the borders of Pulaski. There was little need yet of the Klan as an organization to suppress black Americans. The postwar schemes of the Southern elite to restore white supremacy, which would once again restrict the economic opportunities of former slaves, were largely successful. In 1865 and 1866, state legislatures in the eleven states of the former confederacy passed a series of laws known as the Black Codes. These laws defined any black man, woman, or child found unemployed or without permanent residence as a vagrant. The penalty for this vagrancy was arrest, often jail time, or, more commonly, forced plantation labor.15 The Black Codes were, then, de facto re-enslavement.
But the subordination of the black population prompted the self-described “radical wing” of the Republican Party to act, as they feared the South might slip backward into antebellum conditions. The Reconstruction Acts passed in 1867 and 1868 forced Southern states to rewrite their constitutions, grant civil and voting rights to black Americans, and placed the South under the military supervision of Northern armies. These acts provided black Southerners new opportunities, of which they took full advantage. White Southerners had denied slaves education, but by 1870, nearly a quarter of a million black students were enrolled in more than four thousand schools in the South.16 They made political gains too. From 1870 to 1901, twenty black Americans were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and two from Mississippi were elected to the U.S. Senate.17
It was Reconstruction and the striking down of the Black Codes, rather than the initial destruction and uncertainty of the Civil War, that transformed a small social club in Tennessee into a terrorist organization. The Southern response to Reconstruction was rapid, and the Klan provided a ready-made vehicle for its diffusion. Historian David Chalmers describes it like this:
The method of the Klan was violence. It threatened, exiled, flogged, mutilated, shot, stabbed, and hanged. It disposed of Negroes who were not respectful, or committed crimes, or belonged to military or political organizations such as the Loyal and Union Leagues. It drove out Northern schoolteachers and Yankee storekeepers and politicians, and “took care of” Negroes who gained land and prospered, or made inflammatory speeches or talked about equal rights. It assaulted carpetbag judges, intimidated juries, and spirited away prisoners. It attacked officials who registered Negroes, who did not give whites priority, or who foreclosed property.18
Based on the limited available evidence, it appears that the early Klansmen hoped to impose some order on the organization and maintain a membership of only t
he better-educated white Southerners. In 1867, the Klan held a meeting in Nashville, where they drafted a Prescript—a sort of constitution.19 The Prescript mainly described a complex organizational chart, perhaps best known for the curious titles of its officers: Grand Wizard, Grand Dragon, Grand Giant, Grand Goblin, and Grand Cyclops.
They elected former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest as their first Grand Wizard.20 Forrest, a wealthy slave trader before the war, was not a leading figure among Confederate generals. He earned his notoriety, however, as the commander in charge of the massacre of a small Northern military unit at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. The Union garrison housed many black soldiers, some rumored to have been Forrest’s former slaves.21 According to historian Richard Fuchs, “The affair at Fort Pillow was simply an orgy of death, a mass lynching to satisfy the basest of conduct—intentional murder—for the vilest of reasons—racism and personal enmity.”22 Soon thereafter, “a congressional committee deemed the affair ‘an indiscriminate slaughter,’ and African Americans and many Northerners came to know Forrest as the ‘Butcher of Fort Pillow.’”23
In spite of the Prescript and Forrest’s efforts, however, the Reconstruction Klan never became a tightly organized movement. But the “idea” of the Klan spread far and wide, fanned in part by newspaper coverage that tended to exaggerate its size and cohesion.24 White Southerners who wanted to terrorize blacks could do so under the banner of the Klan. And they did not need to attend meetings, join, or have any real connection to it to do so. The violence escalated, and in 1869 Forrest called for the Klan’s dissolution: “It is therefore ordered and decreed, that the masks and costumes of this Order be entirely abolished and destroyed.”25 The call was followed by some, and ignored by others.26 By 1870, Congress passed two laws—the Enforcement Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act—intended to guard against intimidation of voters and prevent conspiracies designed to deny equal protection under the law. They also authorized the president to deploy the federal army to enforce the law.27