The Politics of Losing

Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment

Rory McVeigh, Kevin Estep

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231548700
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Governo americano

The Ku Klux Klan has peaked three times in American history: after the Civil War, around the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and in the 1920s, when the Klan spread farthest and fastest. Recruiting millions of members even in non-Southern states, the Klan's nationalist insurgency burst into mainstream politics. Almost one hundred years later, once again the pent-up anger of white Americans left behind by a changing economy has directed itself at immigrants and cultural outsiders and roiled a presidential election.

In The Politics of Losing, Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today's right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan's earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan's outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. The experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals. The Politics of Losing offers a rigorous and readable explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.

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...