The Politics of Losing

by Rory McVeigh

  During the campaign, the Klan worked to smear the reputation of Pierce’s opponent, incumbent Republican governor Ben Olcott. He lost the election to Pierce with only 43 percent of the vote compared to Pierce’s 57 percent. Summing things up, Olcott said, “I believe that two-thirds of the people of Oregon, despite all we could do to offset the malicious lies told by the Klan, believed that I was a Catholic, simply because I had wanted to be fair to the Catholics as I have been to everyone.”28

  The potency of the education issue in Oregon, no doubt, inspired Imperial Wizard Evans to bring public education into national discourse. Evans began to argue that America’s public education system was in crisis: Foreign influences were diminishing its quality and the United States sorely needed a federal Department of Education to enforce universal standards. He claimed that in the United States there was “thirty times as much absolute illiteracy as in Germany and Denmark.” “In the face of such facts,” he wrote, “I maintain that no citizen can oppose Democratic Education in America unless he be an un-American enemy of our institutions.”29 The culprit, he claimed, was Rome. “Children taught in parochial schools, Roman Catholics or otherwise, cannot grow up with open minds. They have been taught what to think … rather than how to think. Memory has been developed at the expense of reason.”30 Klan chapters in Indiana protested the adoption of textbooks “full of Roman Catholic theories” and claimed that two history texts in particular were “chuck full of doctrine and propaganda favorable to the Roman Catholic Church.”31

  But was the American educational system in crisis?

  In 1869, only about 2 percent of seventeen-year-olds held a high school degree. That number had increased to nearly 30 percent by 1929, and most of that increase was concentrated in the years directly before the Klan’s revival. As close to that time as 1909, fewer than 10 percent of seventeen-year-olds held a high school degree.32 While the number of high school graduates rose, the education gap between white and nonwhite Americans narrowed. In 1900, close to 55 percent of whites between ages five and nineteen were enrolled in school, compared to only 30 percent of nonwhites. By 1920, the percentage for whites had risen slightly to 65 percent, but the percent of nonwhites rose far more dramatically—to almost 55 percent.33

  Klansmen saw the growth of parochial schools in the United States as a bellwether for the general ascendancy of Catholics in social class. The number of parochial schools in the nation nearly doubled between 1900 and 1930, from about 3,800 to almost 7,400.34 While Klansmen were sounding the alarm about deteriorating public schools, parochial schools had not only expanded but also raised their standards to attract students from upwardly mobile Catholic families.35 Before, many Catholics had relied on parochial schools simply to preserve the culture of their home country, but by the 1920s the schools had aligned with the regulations imposed on public schools.36 “At the turn of the century Catholic education was a patchwork of school experiments,” writes historian Timothy Walch, “held together by a common belief in the value of daily Catholic moral instruction as part of the educational process…. [O]ut of this chaos came a search for order during the first three decades of the twentieth century [and] Catholic education in 1930 was more efficient, more structured, and more ordered than it had been thirty years earlier.”37

  So why did the Klan fabricate an educational crisis in America? They drew their ranks largely from a broad middle-class base, and the typical Klansman was better educated than the average American.38 But if his status was anchored to education, then that status was undermined as education became common. Not only was the absolute number of Americans graduating high school rising substantially, this rise was most pronounced among groups who had previously lagged behind: immigrants, Catholics, African Americans, and women. By claiming that the education they received was inferior, Klansmen could preserve the status of their own superior training.39 By constructing a crisis, Klan leaders preserved their status, a status rooted in the republican tradition they valued—a tradition that cast education and autonomy as prerequisites for democratic participation.

  In an article titled “Public Schools Should Be Carefully Guarded Against Un-American Influences,” the Klan issued this warning: “The school question exists wherever Roman Catholicism exists. Every people that is concerned for the right training of its youth regards with suspicion and alarm any undue influence of Roman Catholicism over its educational systems.”40

  PROHIBITION AND VICE

  Ratified in 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment banned the manufacture, transportation, and sale of liquor. In October, Congress passed the Volstead Act, which provided guidelines for enforcing Prohibition. It was controversial from the start, and support and opposition fell along ethnic, religious, and class lines. White middle-class Protestants were largely for Prohibition, which they saw as the government’s endorsement for their values of temperance and abstinence.41 But the working-class and Catholic immigrants deeply resented it.42 It soon became another loci of Klan recruitment.43 Klansmen appointed themselves as enforcers of Prohibition and vigorously and, at times, violently battled violations of this and other Protestant moral codes.44 They seemed especially obsessed with policing young libidos. They agitated to shut down dance halls, movie theaters, and other “vile places of amusement.”45 They were particularly concerned with the uses teenagers had discovered for automobiles. “Parties of masked and hooded Klansmembers (presumably, but not certainly, men) patrolled highways and backroads in search of young couples parked.” Couples “caught in an embrace” were subject to “threats and beatings by night-riding Klansmen.”46

  In Indiana and Ohio, vigilante Klansmen operated under an old law that deputized citizens to combat horse theft. Under the banner of the “Horse Thief Detective Association,” they performed vice raids, often with the involvement or approval of local police.47 The original Horse Thief Detective Association formed in the early 1800s near the small town of Wingate, Indiana, after gangs stole so many horses that farmers couldn’t plow their fields.48 In 1848, the state granted the Detective Association extraordinary authority to apprehend and punish thieves—sometimes “at the end of a rope.”49 As horses were replaced by automobiles, and as automobiles were used to smuggle liquor, Klansmen used the horse thief laws to legally capture and punish bootleggers. In Indiana and Ohio, “more than 20,000 Klansmen thereby became special constables authorized to carry weapons and detain suspects without warrants.”50

  The Klan devoted at least as much energy persuading Americans that Prohibition violations had reached crisis proportions as they did combating this “crisis.” One Klan writer, for example, described the difficulties that Klan recruiters faced when they ventured into territories that were not predominantly Protestant: “Practically all of the merchants in [the unnamed town] are Jews. They control the town. It is the general opinion of all the best citizens that the bootleggers had paid officers to try to run us out. And it is also the opinion that the Jews were paying them…. It is impossible to rent a hall there on account of the influence of the Jews.”51

  Defense of Prohibition, physically or rhetorically, was a central task for Klan chapters throughout the nation. “The Klan projected its anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism onto violations of Prohibition,” writes historian Linda Gordon, “presuming that those religions and demon rum were exactly coterminous: Catholics and Jews drank and purveyed alcohol.”52

  Thousands of Americans did, in fact, violate Prohibition. Nevertheless, “we forget too easily,” writes historian Jack Blocker Jr., “that Prohibition wiped out an industry. In 1916, there were 1300 breweries producing full-strength beer in the United States; ten years later there were none. Over the same period, the number of distilleries was cut by 85 percent, and most of the survivors produced little but industrial alcohol.” He adds, “The 318 wineries became the 27 of 1925. The number of liquor wholesalers was cut by 96 percent and the number of legal retailers by 90 percent.”53 Still, Klansmen characterized Prohibition violation as a pandemic orc
hestrated by Catholics and immigrants. To understand this strategy, remember that the Klan advocated temperance only after Prohibition mandated temperance through legislative fiat.54 Creating a scarcity of moral, law-abiding citizens allowed Klansmen to monopolize virtue.

  A ceremony in Portland, Oregon, circa 1922. The Klan’s claims that Catholic schools were disseminating “un-American” values appealed to many white Protestants and resulted in the 1922 passage of the Oregon Compulsory Education Act, which required children to attend only public schools (the law was struck down by the Supreme Court before going into effect). Photo courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society.

  “Too long,” wrote Hiram Evans, “we have watched the growth of a liberalism which bids fair within a decade to become license, and when a population, feeling no responsibility for fundamental principles, gets a wrong perspective, countries lose their liberty, civilizations pass, and the sea of time again has upon its shores the wreck of human endeavors.”

  THE STATUS CRISIS

  Early in Donald Trump’s career as a real estate developer, the Justice Department sued him and his father for discriminating against African American renters. The Trumps settled the suit with no admission of guilt, but the courts ordered them to address the discriminatory practices they had uncovered.55

  About fifteen years later, in 1989, five African American and Latino teens, labeled the “Central Park Five,” were charged for the brutal rape of a jogger. Four of the five teens confessed to the crime under duress but later recanted. They were all exonerated after more than a decade in prison, when the real rapist confessed and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt.56 But in the immediate aftermath of the crime, before the teens were even convicted, Trump ran full-page ads in the New York Daily News calling for the state to “Bring Back the Death Penalty.”57

  As far back as 1990, when former Grand Wizard David Duke captured 43 percent of the vote in the U.S. Senate election in Louisiana, Trump understood the power of racial backlash. “It’s anger,” he said then. “That’s an anger vote. People are angry about what’s happened. People are angry about the jobs. If you look at Louisiana, they’re really in deep trouble.”58

  Like the Klan of the 1920s, this is again a question of status. Consider Trump’s appeal to African Americans. In August 2015, Trump boasted of strong support from African Americans, even though a Quinnipiac poll showed only 3 percent of African American respondents intended to vote for him.59 During a stump speech in late August, Trump asked African Americans why: “What do you have to lose?”60

  In front of nearly all-white audiences, Trump received enthusiastic cheers for what appeared to be direct appeals to African American voters. Unsurprisingly, these appeals did little if anything to persuade black voters. Nor did they raise the hackles of spokesmen for the alt-right or white separatists like former Klan leader David Duke, who had endorsed him. Trump reached out to African American voters in the same way the 1920s Klan talked about public education.

  In a speech in the small North Carolina town of Kenansville, he said that black communities were “absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before.”61 He spoke about the nation’s inner cities, where “you get shot walking down the street. They’re worse—I mean, honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities.”62 Violence in American cities is high compared to other wealthy nations, but urban violence has been steadily declining in most major American cities for decades.63 In fact, from 1990 to the 2010s, homicide rates dropped by more than 50 percent in more than one-third of the country’s largest cities.64 But Trump focused on Chicago, which was in the midst of a rash of shootings and homicides. Even with the uptick in violence, those homicide rates remained lower than they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had been, like other cities, declining steadily through most of the prior twenty years.65 When he talked about problems facing his white supporters, it was in the language of disappearing jobs. When he talked about the problems facing African Americans, he presented a caricature of life in the inner cities—a crisis of drugs, violence, and lawlessness.

  This doesn’t mean that black communities don’t suffer disproportionately from real problems of poverty, discrimination, and crime—problems for which Trump offered no concrete solutions. When he took office in January 2017, his administration took steps that ran counter to the demands of black inner-city residents. Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed Obama’s efforts to reduce sentences for minor drug offenders and instead instructed prosecutors to seek the most severe penalties.66 “Congress has passed several statutes that provide the Department with the ability to seek capital punishment for certain drug-related crimes,” Sessions announced. “I strongly encourage federal prosecutors to use these statutes, when appropriate, to aid in our continuing fight against drug trafficking and the destruction it causes in our nation.”67

  Like the Klan’s exaggerations of problems with public education—exaggerations that ignored positive trends—Trump’s misrepresentations of African American communities shored up support among his core white constituency. It made it easier for white voters to overlook the campaign’s racism because they could assure themselves that their candidate cared about the problems plaguing African Americans. But these voters first had to buy into the stereotyped depictions of black communities that Trump pedaled. At a rally in Pennsylvania, a Trump supporter told journalist Adam Serwer, “I believe that everybody has a right to be in the United States no matter what your color, no matter what your race, your religion, what sex you prefer to be with.” Asked about Trump’s comments on race and religion, she added, “I think the other party likes to blow it out of proportion and kind of twist his words, but what he says is what he means, and it’s what a lot of us are thinking.”68

  Trump’s caricatures of black communities were particularly potent considering what’s been happening in Trump country. For years, white opposition to government efforts to address poverty has been rooted in the belief that minority groups receive preferential treatment. Racial stereotypes reinforce these views—stereotypes suggesting that tax dollars are wasted on those who engage in immoral behavior and are unwilling to work to support themselves.69 Yet just as the exodus of well-paying jobs devastated inner cities,70 by 2016 many predominantly white communities faced the same trouble. “Over the past decade,” writes sociologist Shannon Monnat,

  nearly 400,000 people in the U.S. died from accidental drug overdoses and drug-induced diseases. Nearly 400,000 more committed suicide, and over 250,000 died from alcohol-induced diseases like cirrhosis of the liver. Approximately a fifth of these drug, alcohol and suicide deaths involved opiates (prescription pain relievers or heroin), suggesting that opiates are part of a larger problem. Mortality rates from these ‘deaths of despair’ are much higher among non-Hispanic whites than among other racial ethnic groups. This decade-long increase in deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-induced diseases has been substantial enough to significantly increase the overall mortality rate for middle-age non-Hispanic whites, especially those without a college degree living in small cities and rural areas.71

  Compounding the problem of opioid addiction, after a brief decline, methamphetamine abuse is once again on the rise.72 Although meth use is widespread, the problem has been most severe in places like rural Wisconsin, Ohio, Montana, and South Dakota. Many of the same communities that were hit hardest by the economic restructuring and the Great Recession have been struggling to combat the health consequences and public stigma of what journalist John Shuppe calls the “twin plagues” of meth and opioids.73

  Trump tended to outperform the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, in counties that were above the median (or halfway point) in drug, alcohol, and suicide mortality rates.74 Our claim is not that the opioid epidemic increased support for Trump, but the correlation can explain the enthusiastic response from core Trump supporters when he claimed that he would solve the problems of African Americans—these “prob
lems” being exaggerated constructions of life in black communities. Like Klan leaders’ claims about public education, Trump’s rhetoric artificially preserved the status of whites by overlooking pathologies in their own communities.

  Lyndon B. Johnson understood this strategy well. Driving through Tennessee in his motorcade, he saw racial slurs scrawled on signs. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man,” he said, “he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”75

  THE STATUS OF GENDER

  In 2005, Trump was interviewed on the Howard Stern Show. He said he would walk into the dressing rooms, unannounced, of contestants at the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, which he owned. “You know, they’re standing there with no clothes…. And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”76 In an Access Hollywood tape leaked later, he talked about how his celebrity status allowed him to make unsolicited sexual advances on women. News of this during the campaign repulsed and shocked many Americans. But even then, and later when several women reported his inappropriate behavior, his campaign did not implode. A CNN poll taken in the immediate aftermath of the tape’s release indicated that 70 percent were bothered by how he treats women, but 30 percent of those same people who were bothered said they would vote for him anyway.77 His core supporters were unfazed, and even traditional Republican legislators mostly fell back in line behind him after they realized his campaign was, surprisingly, still viable.