Donald
Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education is revealing of more
than trouble ahead for public education in the United States. Because she wants
to turn much of public instruction private, it also reveals how profoundly the
politics of white supremacy has changed since the 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan
was a mainstream social movement and had broad political influence. There is no better way to understand
today’s Trump phenomenon than by comparing him with the Klan, but to do this we
must rid ourselves of the idea that the early twentieth century Klan was
identical to that of the mid-nineteenth century or the one of our day.
The
Klan was re-founded in 1915 in the Deep South not long after the release of the
popular movie, Birth of a Nation, which was itself based on an earlier novel
The Klansman. The expansion of the
Klan relied on techniques now associated with multi-level marketing firms such
as Amway as well as the synthesis of exotic rituals such as those earlier
popularized by fraternal societies such as the Shriners.
White
supremacy has always been a basic element of Klan ideology or Klankraft as it
was called with the organization. Despite its constant concern to avoid being
labeled as an organization whose members took the law into their own hands, the
Klan always employed violence as political terror and social discipline. Between 1915 and 1928, however, the
Klan was a broadly representative fraternal organization insofar as it mirrored
the beliefs of many white native-born Protestants and insofar as it projected
those beliefs into the political realm.
Despite
the initial association of the Klan with the Confederate states, in the 1920s
it was an organization well beyond the South. Seeking to understand the spread of the Klan, contemporary
observers and later historians utilized the same causal links that have been
deployed to explain the Trump vote in 2016: fear of labor market competition by
immigrants, the transition to a new economy (more industrial) and new society
(more urban), as well as changes in social mores about sex and
intoxicants.
There
has been considerable scholarly debate about who joined the Klan in the 1920s. A once dominant tendency was to believe
that Klansmen were marginal members of society: uneducated and impoverished
whites with a propensity to violence and profound ignorance about economic
structures and politics. In part
this was simply a stereotype based on an esthetic that less attractive politics
must be held by less attractive people.
In part it arose from the desire of middle-class and professional
opponents of the Klan who held similar ideas to differentiate themselves and
their social milieu from the organization.
Recent
studies, employing internal Klan documents, have shown that the Klan in the
1920s was broadly representative of white society, but that its members were
disproportionately drawn from semi-skilled labor and lower level civil
servants. Klan members were more
likely to have had modest incomes and modest educations than to have been
unskilled, illiterate, or well-off professionals with college degrees. Klan members, to a greater degree than
society at large, benefited from receiving education at a period in American
history when most pre-baccalaureate instruction was provided by public schools.
A moment’s
reflection dismisses the idea of the Klan in the 1920s as an organization of
the impoverished and dispossessed.
Unlike the Klan ‘s first incarnation in 1868 as an avowedly terrorist
group, the Klan’s revival in after World War I was the work of publicists and
advertising agents working out the basic elements of multi-level marketing in
the context of a fraternal organization.
Members paid the klecktoken or annual dues of $10 at a time when Henry
Ford had made himself nationally famous by offering skilled assembly workers $5
a day, which was twice the normal daily wage for factory employees. Members were also expected to buy their
own robes, other paraphernalia, and printed literature. Formal membership in the Klan was
beyond the means of the impoverished and the economically insecure. Paid organizers, the kleagles, retained
$4 of every klecktoken they received.
Higher officials retained smaller amounts but from a larger pool. By the mid-1920s the national Klan
leadership often attained incomes of hundreds of thousands of dollars in
today’s money.
Klan
membership was restricted to white Protestant native-born men although the
creation of the auxiliary Women’s KKK in 1923 opened up an avenue for women to
participate. The Klan is best
known for the violence with which, especially in the South, it enforced white
supremacy and suppressed any bids for political or economic equality by Black
Americans. The Klan also sought,
through legal and extra-legal means, to affect American society in a variety of
other areas: immigration, education, drugs, sexual relations, child support,
and divorce.
Since the
1960s, Americans have thought of drugs in terms of marijuana and a handful of
powerful stimulants and depressants such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine,
and briefly LSD. All of these are
available through illegal markets.
The hard drugs are sufficiently available to create public health
problems and they all contribute to the existence of an unregulated economy
that engenders wealth and violence.
Recently many states have effectively legalized marijuana although Federal
law continues to sanction its use.
For hundreds of years, however, Americans thought of alcohol as the most
dangerous drug for its economic, social and moral effects on society. In the latter 19th century
increasingly effective movements sought to ban the production and consumption
of alcohol and they were ultimately successful immediately after World War I
with the passage of the 18th Amendment to the constitution and the
Volstead Act.
Mention
Prohibition today and it conjures up quaint images of flappers and speakeasies
or exchanges of gunfire between square-jawed federal agents and gangsters with
ominously Italian names along with the easy admission that it was obviously a
terrible policy. Yet prohibition
had long been a staple demand of American Protestant churches. The Klan, along
with the Women’s Christian Temperance Organization and the Anti-Saloon League, also
fought for it. Like so many
issues, Prohibition was not directly a matter of intolerance or prejudice but
it sharpened opposition between immigrant groups and nativist whites. For Jews and Catholics from southern
and eastern Europe wine was a sacramental item as well as an item of cultural
conviviality along with hard liquor. The inability of the Federal and state governments to
enforce Prohibition also gave the Klan license to enforce it by itself. It did so with assaults on drinking
establishments and, in parts of the South, with public whippings.
If
alcohol was one popular issue that deeply concerned the Klan, education was another. It invariably supported the expansion
of the public schools and frequently also supported higher taxes to enhance
them. From the Deep South to the
Midwest and the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast the Klan fought consistently
to extend compulsory public education.
In Oregon in 1922 elected Klan officials passed a law requiring that all
children between eight and sixteen attend public schools. Progressive as this might seem, the aim
of this and other similar legislation backed by the Klan was use the schools to
shape the values and allegiances of American citizens. As one Klan official put it in 1923, “the Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan should be the vehicle for this Bible reading and instruction and that
no atheist, infidel, skeptic or non-believer should be allowed to teach in the
public schools.”
The
Klan’s opposition to the Catholic Church was rooted in beliefs that the culture
and society of the US were uniquely Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. The Klan viewed the massive immigration
that characterized the US from the 1890 to 1920 and had brought large numbers
of Southern and Eastern Europeans to the US (as well as Jews) as an existential
threat. The Catholic Church
possessed a formidable institutional presence. Its members owed allegiance to the Church and were enmeshed
in an institutional framework that included schools, parishes, and charitable
organizations. Unlike the various
Protestant sects that dominated the religious scene in the US, the Church had a
well-organized hierarchy and could mobilize its primarily urban worshippers for
elections. Long before academics
thought about the reproduction of culture, the Klan grasped the importance of
controlling early education to affect the ties of citizens to the institutions
of civil society and the state.
The
Klan viewed the religious threat to American society as the primary result of
immigration. The Klan viewed with
concern the large number of Catholics who had entered the US in the preceding
decades and especially that “a big percent of these immigrants are from the
lowest strata of Italy, Poland, and other Roman Catholic countries.” The Klan strongly supported immigration
legislation that in 1924 ended the policy of nearly unlimited entry into the US
in order, in its words, to “prevent the glutting of the American labor market
and the Romanizing and mongrelizing of the citizenship of the United States.”
No
one would deny that the Klan in the 1920s was committed to white supremacy, but
this is popularly thought to be a nearly unconscious reflex. For most white Americans, we are often
told, being white was a background condition and whites were rarely aware that
whiteness was itself a singular condition. This is not how the Klan presented the relevant issue. As noted above, the Klan undoubtedly
saw white dominance as intimately connected with Protestantism and
Protestantism they certainly believed to be under attack from Catholics and
Jews.
It
can be difficult to separate the Klan’s racism with that of white society at
large in the period between the two world wars. The Klan was committed to maintaining the legal and economic
separation and subjugation of African-Americans. It held, as did many Americans in the era of “scientific
racism”, that Blacks were an inferior group. Criticism of the Klan at the time from those who believed
equally in white supremacy was often based on concern that the Klan provoked
violence both as a short-term policy and in order to spread fear among whites
that would bring more recruits to the Klan. Writing in 1922, Henry Fry discussed the Tulsa race riot the
previous year in which whites killed some 300 Black people, destroyed property,
and drove citizens into exile. Speaking of what was probably the worse pogrom
in American history Fry, in his book The Modern Ku Klux Klan, noted that the
Klan at no time rallied to support the maintenance of law and order despite its
claims to be an organization committed to such goals. Oklahoma, Fry pointed out, was a stronghold of the Klan. Despite its state support for law and
order, the Klan was a constant source of disorder both through its propaganda
and through its mobilization of members for extra-legal and illegal
activity. Inciting and organizing
popular violence while piously asserting that its commitment to legality was a
hallmark of the Klan.
The
Klan was, however, solicitous of the police and local law enforcement. It was
here that the Klan, especially in the South but elsewhere as well, had its
greatest impact on local government.
The Klan in the 1920s, even in the South, did not deploy the Confederate
flag. To the contrary, although it
deplored what it called an over-reaching Federal government during
Reconstruction, in the 1920s the Klan presented itself as a bastion of
Americanism and a supporter of American institutions.
In
2016 the Klan is no longer an organization of any importance in American
politics, but the so-called Alt-Right and political currents that swirl in and
around it such as the Tea Party and sections of the Republican party remain
strongly motivated by the issues and policies that the Klan pioneered in the
1920s. Trump himself sometimes
articulates views very close to those of the Klan. Whether this is chance is
far from clear. Just because they
were once common views among white Americans of his father’s generation means
he likely heard them growing up.
That his father was arrested at a Klan demonstration in 1927 and may
have been attracted to their nativist message and thus raised his son on it is
also possible.
Trump
is closest to evoking the Klan of the 1920s in his views on immigration. Indeed Trump’s call for a moratorium on
immigration sounds remarkably like a 1923 statement by a South Carolina Grand
Dragon to restrict immigration for a decade while the US took “an inventory of
human assets and liabilities” with its border. His view of Mexicans resembles those of Klan quoted above.
In
the 1920s the Klan was concerned primarily with Jewish and Catholic immigration
and secondarily with Japanese immigration. Muslim immigration was insignificant and the Klan never
mentioned it. The prevailing
infatuation with the Orient at the end of the 19th century may even
have played some role in the Klan’s ritual meetings which, unlike cross
burning, took place indoors.
Citizens of the “invisible empire” entered a separate space from the
“alien” world of everyday America when the Klavern assembled. The Klan constitution was officially
known as the Kloran and the sergeant-at-arms was a Klaliff which may have been
a portmanteau of bailiff and caliph.
Anti-Semitism
and anti-Catholic animus, major themes of the klancraft of religion, were more
than mere personal prejudice although they certainly included it. The persistence of anti-Semitism in
countries such as the US and Germany which had relatively tiny Jewish
populations owes more to its role as a discourse of mobilization than as a
lived experience for most people.
Modern anti-Semitism is a way of transforming economic grievances into
ethnic ones. As the German social
democratic leader August Bebel once put it, anti-Semitism is the socialism of
fools. Anti-Catholic sentiment was
more directly aimed at mobilizing sentiment against institutions that
necessarily sought to expand pluralism and what we would today call
“multi-culturalism” in American society.
Many Protestants perceived the Church as an enemy to their dominance of
society and as recently as the 1960 presidential election it was possible to
argue that John Kennedy would, if elected, take orders from the Pope about how
to govern the US.
Anti-Catholicism
is no longer a main theme in American politics and anti-Semitism, while significant,
has not been a primary motivating tool of the American right. The religion most in the public eye
today in American politics is Islam and Trump has echoed many themes of the
older anti-Catholic discourse when he speaks of Islam. This sounds peculiar because antagonism
to Islam and to Arabs is often described as similar to anti-Semitism. Considering the nature of the Klan’s
antagonism to the Catholic Church (and indeed the history of conflating anxiety
about Catholic and Muslim challenges to Protestant polities going back to the
16th century) it should be clear that much of what is called
“Islamophobia” resembles anti-Catholic sentiment. Muslims, like Catholics, are said to be incapable of
integrating into the American political community: they are beholden to
religious leaders outside our national territory; they are subordinate to a
particular textual tradition; they have not experienced the Reformation; in
addition to their religious incapacity to assimilate they are members of
equally problematic ethnic groups; they seek to transform American institutions
through subjecting them to alien religious norms. These complaints are rarely if ever addressed to Jews in the
United States but they have been commonly applied both to Muslims and Catholics.
What
then of education? If Trump spoke
the fears of the Klan to a new generation of white Protestants (and of course
to some other Americans as well) his embrace of Betsy DeVos shows how different
our world is than that of the 1920s.
The struggles to integrate and secularize the public schools in the
1960s ended the dream that they could be used to create a citizenry steeped in
white supremacy and Protestant religiosity. Catholics increasingly turned to the public schools to
educate their children as did Jews and school boards and local governments
increasingly withdrew Bible reading from morning exercises. Teaching became both a profession with
a pluralist workforce and increasingly committed to cultural pluralism as a
value.
The
rise of private schools as a safe space for the values of middle as well as
upper class white Protestants grew in tandem with the integration of the public
schools. In the south, but less so
in the north, the Klan existed in tension with an older, wealthier oligarchy
frequently rooted in land ownership.
That oligarchy also believed in white supremacy and required cheap Black
labor. Conflicts between the Klan
and the oligarchy frequently arose over education and the leasing of convict
labor. Because much of the
prison population was Black, convict leasing threatened the wages of
impoverished white workers. Not
until 1928, with the support of the Klan, did Alabama finally eliminate convict
leasing. It was the last state to
do so. Schools remained
chronically underfunded, however, and the same literacy tests and poll taxes
that prevent almost all African Americans from voting also limited white
electoral participation. The
public schools were the only possible path for upward mobility.
The Klan
hoped, with some success, to force all Americans into the public school system
and also hoped, with some success, to control the curriculum. White
supremacists and the political activists from the far right of the political
spectrum can no longer hope to accomplish that. Nor indeed do they, as did many of their predecessors, send
their own children to public schools.
Whether today’s wealthy constitute an oligarchy is an open question, but
the wealthiest Americans send their children to private schools and sponsor the
privatization of public schools as an ideal. Thus Betsy DeVos will play an important role in making
education policy for the next several years.
If white
supremacists have turned against a public school system they can no longer
control, the schools remain an important locus for political power. They continue to shape citizens and
provide many young Americans with whatever skills and human capital they can
acquire as they seek to find employment.
Another way to look at the most recent election is to realize that
although unions in the private sector have been largely eliminated those in the
public sector remain potent economic and political actors. In the 1920s many lower level civil
servants were attracted to the Ku Klux Klan but that has ceased to be true. Today public employees are divided into
two main groups: those who deal with security and those who deal with human
services. There are about 1.3
million police in the US and about 3.1 million teachers. Police unions appear to have endorsed
Trump and teacher’s unions supported Clinton. Transforming the public schools has an ideological purpose
but it also will have political consequences. Unions that are no longer primarily white and no longer have
primarily white constituencies no longer benefit from the support of
organizations, mainstream or extreme, that further white supremacy. Privatizing schools will decrease
organized support for public schools by teachers as well as among parents. Strong support for the police will have
the opposite effect.
Although
Americans at large and some supporters came to distrust the Klan as its leaders
grew wealthy and engaged in egregious acts of self-aggrandizement one of the
most important causes of the collapse of the Klan was the 1925 abduction of
Madge Oberholtzer by Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson. In a horrific incident that was once
widely known but is now largely forgotten Stephenson kidnapped Oberholtzer and
held her at his mansion where he raped her repeatedly. Stephenson released her
after her attempt to escape him by committing suicide failed. Stephenson returned Oberholtzer, bruised
and bloodied, to her mother’s house.
Her death several weeks later was attributed to a combination of
infected deep bites by Stephenson and kidney failure from the suicide
attempt. Stephenson was convicted
of rape and second degree murder.
Stephenson’s
conviction led tens of thousands of men to leave the Klan and, after being
denied a parole, he provided evidence that led to the conviction of Indiana
officials, including the governor, Ed Jackson, on bribery charges. Within two years the Klan, which in
1924 had nearly a quarter of a million members, ceased to exist as an organized
force in Indiana.
The leaders
of the second Klan came to believe they could act with impunity, but the Madge
Oberholtzer’s death and the subsequent revelations showed their limits. Donald Trump is not D.C. Stephenson and
it remains to be seen if his administration will show similar venality to Jackson’s. Like the Klan, however, he has ridden a
cresting wave of populist white supremacy, religious discrimination,
anti-immigrant politics into office claiming to be the opponent of a financial
oligarchy. Trump’s use of social
media to incite violence that he then claims to oppose resembles the Klancraft
of the 1920s which was seriously concerned about the dissemination of their
message and dealing with the public media. The Klan is an insignificant organization today but its
ideas, appeals, and base of support appears to live on. Whether its weaknesses will prove to be
Trump’s as well remains to be seen.
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