by Rory McVeigh
A candidate like Trump could easily exploit this division in American media. From the beginning of his candidacy, Trump attacked mainstream outlets, even at one point referring to them as “the enemy of the people.”106 His attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the press seemed to intensify with increasing press scrutiny of his presidential aspirations.
FIGURE 8.1 “Great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the mass media among Republicans, Independents, and Democrats, 1997–2016.
Source: “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low,” Gallup, September 14, 2016.
But distrust of the media did not begin with Trump. He simply harnessed it. Gallup polls show that public trust in the press has been in steady decline since the late 1990s. More telling, however, is this: While those who identify as Republicans have consistently distrusted the mass media, that trust plummeted in 2016 to an unprecedented low of 14 percent—compared to 51 percent among Democrats.
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Conservative criticism of the “liberal media” typically characterizes it as elite and out of touch with ordinary Americans. These attacks have gone hand-in-hand with accusations that American colleges have become liberal strongholds that shut down conservative voices on campus and discriminate against conservative students. Like public opinion about the media, attitudes about higher education show a deep partisan split. Pew Research surveys from 2017 show that 72 percent of those who identify as Democrats or who lean Democratic tend to believe that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.107 Those who identify as Republican or who lean Republican, on the other hand, tend to think less of higher education. Until 2016, roughly half of Republicans indicated that colleges and universities had a positive effect on America. By 2017, only about a third of Republicans had a positive view of higher education institutions, and 58 percent indicated that these institutions have a negative effect on the country.
FIGURE 8.2 Public opinion on American higher education by political party.
Source: Pew Research Center survey conducted June 8–18, 2017. Hannah Fingerhut, “Republicans Skeptical of Colleges’ Impact on U.S., but Most See Benefits for Workforce Preparation,” Pew Research Center, July 20, 2017. Note: Don’t know/Other responses not shown.
In the 1920s the Klan blamed their lost power on racial, ethnic, and cultural outsiders, who were undeserving of the rewards that native-born white Protestants enjoyed. Most white Americans took their supremacy for granted, and hostility toward Catholicism already ran deep in American society. Klan leaders like Evans and Stephenson, however, still had to be wary of counterarguments which, along with their own indiscretions, could undermine the Klan’s claims to piety and justice. So they used alternative media to insulate supporters and worked to secure favorable coverage from friendly papers. When hostile outlets critiqued them, they accused those outlets of misunderstanding and outright misrepresenting the true nature of the Klan.
The Trump campaign linked power loss to identity politics and found ways to deliver his message, unfiltered, to core supporters. He courted favorable coverage from friendly news sources, and he attacked the mainstream media, which he called “fake news.” While Trump contributed to the skepticism many Americans hold toward the mainstream media, he also benefited from shifts that had been underway for decades in how the media covered politics.
Republican skepticism of the Fourth Estate—those news institutions with a mandate to faithfully inform the American population on current events—paved the way for Donald Trump. In the campaign for the Republican nomination, Trump energized Americans in communities with stagnant economies. He promised what he could not deliver, while undermining the institutions that held him accountable. Once elected, he stoked the flames of culture wars. And he staked out controversial positions to assure his base that he was still driven by the sort of white nationalist goals that first attracted them to him.
9
THE FUTURE OF WHITE NATIONALISM AND AMERICAN POLITICS
Why do movements that we thought were defeated years ago keep returning? The sociologist Verta Taylor called this movement abeyance. According to her, abeyance is “a holding process by which movements sustain themselves through unfriendly political environments and provide continuity from one state of mobilization to another.”1 Movements that appear to be dead, in other words, are instead simply laying low until the time is right. Each new eruption is not a reaction to sudden changes in public sentiment. Instead, the abeyance concept reminds us that even when movements fail, they leave behind veterans, a remnant who will keep the flame burning. And when one day conditions change, new leaders emerge, and fresh supplies of discontent fuel new political struggle, they will return.
Up to now, we have looked at the particulars of right-wing movements to make sense of the climate that gave us Donald Trump’s candidacy. Our comparisons to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s show that even though the historical circumstances were different, the general conditions were the same. Now it’s time to look forward.
Can political parties find a home for this nationalism? Will the conditions that fostered it change? What will happen next?
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The Klan of the 1920s was an American brand of fascism.2 Not unlike the fascist movements of Europe during the mid-twentieth century, it drew its strength primarily from a segment of the middle class angry with large-scale industrialists for dominating markets with cheap unskilled labor. At the same time, it was angry with the laborers for making this industrial expansion and consolidation possible. This was the bête noire of that Klan. “A large percentage of the foreign immigrants pouring into this country,” wrote a Klansman from Louisiana, “during the past few years have been Roman Catholics and a big percent of these immigrants are from the lowest strata of Italy, Poland, and other Roman Catholic countries…. The policy of the Klan is to stop this stream of undesirables and thus prevent the glutting of the American labor market, and the Romanizing and mongrelizing of the United States.”3
At first, Klan leaders like William Simmons, Edward Clarke, Mary Tyler, Hiram Evans, and D. C. Stephenson had no well-thought-out political ideology. But when their recruiters traveled the nation in the early 1920s, they stumbled upon deep and widespread pockets of resentment—resentment that could be harnessed into a powerful political movement. They promised members they could solve their problems by restricting the rights of cultural enemies and advancing the interests of native-born white Protestants. They operated largely outside of institutionalized politics, and so they needed the strength of numbers to influence politicians. They recognized that the problems their members faced were national problems, and so they turned their attention to the presidential election of 1924.4 The trouble was, the interests and grievances of their constituents didn’t align with either party.
Before 1924, the Klan’s members were roughly half Democrats and half Republicans.5 Klansmen were expected to place loyalty to the Klan above any partisanship, and they were prepared to back the party or candidate most willing to legislate on their behalf.6 This was difficult in national politics, since the Republican Party was strongly pro-business and the Democratic Party had pulled in Catholic and immigrant voters in the Northern cities. In 1924, the Democratic nominee, John W. Davis, faced the incumbent Republican president, Calvin Coolidge. But there was also a third candidate, Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette, running under the banner of the newly formed Progressives. He appealed to middle-class progressives, but also to the left-leaning farmer-labor coalitions of the time.
La Follette, or “Battling Bob,” was known for his fiery oratory, railing against corporations and monopolies on the stump.7 In a sense, he was the Bernie Sanders of his era, as he spoke to many of the complaints of Klansmen, but without the bigotry. In a Labor Day address at the beginning of his campaign, he diagnosed America’s economic malady. “Farmers, driven from the soil at the rate of more than one million a year under the present administration,” he claime
d, “can earn their bread only in competition with the wage earners. Such an enormous annual reduction in the number of producers on the farm inevitably means a decreased production of food, lower wages, higher prices, stagnant business and widespread discontent.”8
Almost immediately after La Follette announced his presidential bid, the press was anxious to know where he stood on the Klan. In a letter to Robert P. Scripps published in the New York Times, he wrote, “You ask where I stand on the Ku Klux Klan. Similar inquiries have come to me from others. I take the liberty of making my answer to you public.” The Klan, he thought, was something of a distraction from what really mattered: “But first and before all else, I am bound to say that in my view the one dominant, all-embracing issue in this campaign is to break the combined power of the private monopoly system over the economic life of the American people.” As for the Klan, “I am unalterably opposed to the evident purposes of the secret organization known as the Ku Klux Klan.”9 In response, Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans declared La Follette “the arch enemy of the nation.”10
This left the Republicans and the Democrats. For decades, Southern Democrats had stood steadfastly for white supremacy.11 Their traditional sympathies for agrarian interests in the West and the South had no quarrel with the Klan’s middle-class interests. Although the Klan drew relatively few farmers into its ranks, in states like Indiana, many middle-class fortunes—especially those of skilled artisans, professionals, and merchants—depended on the strength of local farm economies. But Catholic urban working-class voters in Northern states were bringing new energy to the Democratic Party, troubling its alliance with the Klan.
The Democratic nominee, Davis, was in a no-win situation. If he rebuked the Klan, he risked losing the votes of millions of Klansmen, Klanswomen, and Klan sympathizers. If he failed to condemn them, he would lose the votes of millions of Catholics and immigrants.12 At a campaign rally in Sea Girt, New Jersey, just days after receiving the nomination, he made his decision. “If any organization,” he began, “no matter what it chooses to be called, whether the Ku Klux Klan or by any other name, raises the standard of racial and religious prejudice or attempts to make racial origins or religious beliefs the test of fitness for public office, it does violence to the spirit of American institutions, and must be condemned.”13 In response, the Klan press announced that Davis was “under the thumb of the Roman corporation.”14
And so they were left with the Republicans. Ironically, the Klan’s strategy of linking the economic grievances of industrialization to cultural enemies led them right into the open arms of the party of big business. Coolidge, who had taken over the presidency after the unexpected death of Warren Harding, was popular with Republican voters. They credited him with cleaning up the party’s reputation in the aftermath of the Teapot Dome scandal—a bribery scheme in which the Harding administration had leased Navy petroleum reserves to private business at impossibly low rates—that came to light after Harding’s death. But he, a former governor of Massachusetts, strongly favored business interests and a limited role for the government.15 Davis, Coolidge’s Democratic opponent, called on Coolidge to join him in condemning the Klan. He received no response. Instead, the day after Davis’s denunciation of the Klan, the president’s running mate, Charles G. Dawes, criticized the Klan’s violent methods. In doing so, however, he described the Klan as “an instinctive groping for leadership, moving in the interest of law enforcement, which they do not find in many cowardly politicians and officeholders.”16
At first, the Klan press offered Coolidge cautious praise, noting, for example, that Coolidge shared their opposition to immigration.17 During the week of the election, the Imperial Night-Hawk even defended Mrs. Coolidge against accusations that she was Catholic: “Mrs. Coolidge has been a Congregationalist since her girlhood, and the report that she is a Catholic is entirely unfounded. This rumor was apparently circulated by the enemies of President Coolidge with the intention of doing him political harm. But it is to be hoped that Americans are not misled by such underhanded methods.”18 In Indiana and Ohio, where the movement had deeply penetrated the Republican machinery, Klansmen canvassed for him.19 Yet despite criticizing his opponents, the Night-Hawk typically claimed neutrality, in this way keeping the door ajar to other candidates if Coolidge failed them. The Night-Hawk regularly published an “Announcement,” which claimed, “We will permit no political party and no group of politicians to annex, own, disown, or disavow us. Where our conscience leads us, we will be found.”20
The Klan’s proclamations of neutrality ended abruptly when Coolidge won. “I firmly believe that with the new year, a new era is dawning for America,” wrote Evans. “Our people are returning to the safe paths charted by our forefathers. America swerved under a mighty burden of foreign thought brought to her by those who do not realize the responsibility of freedom, but, thank God, America has awakened.”21 Another Klan writer quoted Coolidge’s inaugural address directly: “We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions, of society and government will fail, unless America be kept American.”22
Endorsing Coolidge was intended as a demonstration of the Klan’s potency, a move to spur recruitment and keep the movement growing. But in hindsight, the fatal miscalculation here is easy to spot. After taking credit for electing a president, they could no longer convince Klansmen that they still needed a powerful social movement acting outside of normal political institutions. They had set out to change politics, and they believed they had succeeded. President Coolidge would solve their problems now, without the Klan.
Political cartoon by D. R. Fitzpatrick, 1924, on the popularity of President Calvin Coolidge’s laissez-faire economic policies among American business leaders. The Klan’s support for Coolidge in the general election was an awkward alliance, given the organization’s opposition to industrial expansion. Photo courtesy of Granger Historical Picture Archive.
Klan membership waned after the election. In Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, California, and Oregon, precipitous drop-offs in membership were already underway by late 1924. But the death blow came in 1925, through the highly publicized murder trial that sent D. C. Stephenson to prison for the death of Madge Oberholtzer. But this was merely the last straw; membership was already in steep decline when the murder became public. By 1928, historians estimate only a few hundred thousand members remained in the nation as a whole, whereas there were between two and five million members at the organization’s peak in 1923 and early 1924.23
The nomination of Democrat Al Smith, a New York Catholic out of Tammany Hall, for the 1928 presidential election spawned a minor but short-lived Klan resurgence. They backed Smith’s Republican opponent, Herbert Hoover, whose “great administrative success and his splendid training” seemed perfectly suited for the interests and values of normal Americans. Smith, on the other hand, neglected “the principles, the desires, and purposes of the Southern and Western Democracies for the sole benefit of the Northeastern, city-dwelling, unassimilated Democrats.”24
When the Great Depression arrived the next year, Klansmen found themselves anchored to a sinking party. The Klan did not formally disband in the years during and after the Depression, but it was a shell of its former self. For decades it struggled on, anemic and largely inconsequential in national politics.
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What becomes of white nationalist movements? The answer depends on how well political parties can reintegrate the movements’ members. Power losses disrupt political alliances, shaking loose constituencies, which begin to look for new homes. To keep their parties viable, party leaders must repair this damage. This means bringing white nationalists back into the fold. Remember how the Reconstruction-era Klan ended. The Southern elite forged a strong alliance with non-elite white Southerners within the Democratic Party. Class privilege once again allied with race privilege to create an all-white Southern Democratic Party. Northern Republicans lost the will to protect black Southerners, leav
ing them oppressed and disfranchised for another hundred years.
Only the Republican Party could absorb the racial, religious, and cultural resentments of the 1920s Klan. The elite business class in the party was, like the Klan, composed of native-born white Protestants. They continued to assert their dominance in the party while making room for the newcomer Klansmen. Similarly, the Klan of the civil rights era dwindled away once the Republican Party realigned to capture disaffected Southern Democrats. These voters, in the aftermath of civil rights gains, looked to the Republicans to protect racial privileges. Between them and the emerging Religious Right, the Republican Party forged a new coalition—one that would carry some of the most lopsided electoral victories in American history.
The first Klan found a home in the Democratic Party; the second and third Klans found one in the Republican Party. In all three, the economic elite could accommodate these disgruntled voters—who cared mostly about racial and religious privileges—because the elite were overwhelmingly from the same dominant racial and religious groups: often Protestant, always white. Once safely incorporated into the party, the Klan, as an organization outside politics, withered. Inside, the economic elite made few concessions on their own agenda, but integrating these racial and religious conservatives inevitably moved the party to the right on social issues.