The American Political Tradition

×

Expand

Most of us associate the Ku Klux Klan with humid small towns in the Deep South. However, in her new book, New York University’s Linda Gordon, puts the magnifier on 1920s Madison, Wis., and finds the Klan operating under cover of the “Loyal Businessmen’s Society,” a Klan fraternity on campus called Kappa Beta Lambda and the ranks of Madison police thoroughly infiltrated by Klansmen.

The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (Liveright) is a disturbing book not only for events recounted from a century ago but for what it says about today. Originally organized in the post-Civil War South to resist federal occupation and the emancipation of blacks, the Klan was a dormant secret society until revived in 1915 under the spell of a blockbuster movie, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. It went nationwide under the entrepreneurial leadership of men seeking to make a fortune. The Klan was good business, Gordon points out, between commissions on membership dues, mandatory purchase of hooded garments and a plethora of discretionary jewelry and tchotchkes. At its height in the mid-1920s, the Klan may have had as many as six million dues paying members. It published newspapers, elected politicians, paraded through the streets of Washington D.C and held fairs complete with Ferris wheels. The Klan had a record label. It had airplanes.

And let’s add another item to the agenda of Confederate statue removal: a Klansman, Gutzon Borglum, carved the faces on Mount Rushmore.

What’s alarming is how similar the similar the hooded order’s agenda sounds to rhetoric of resentment that helped elect Donald Trump. The Klan wasn’t just anti-black but was virulently anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant. They branded immigrants as criminals and claimed they stole American jobs. They railed against elites in media, academia, culture and politics. They wanted, according to their lights, to make America great again.

One thing is different: in the 1920s the Klan’s views, based on the premise of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant racial and religious superiority, were often taken for granted as mainstream opinion. The Klan differed from the norm mainly in their choice of costume and their unseemly vulgarity. The mainstream has shifted since then—after all, Trump lost by 2.9 million votes—but the structure of feeling underlying their assumptions remains a strong current in American life.

First Founding Father: Richard Henry Lee and the Call to Independence (Da Capo), by Harlow Giles Unger

One should always be skeptical when someone claims anyone was “first” at anything. However, Harlow Giles Unger makes a good argument that Richard Henry Lee came early to the ideas that triggered the American Revolution. The Lees were among the first families of Virginia; Richard Henry was well schooled in the liberal currents of European thought. Early on, he denounced the slave trade (while continuing to keep slaves); he developed the Revolution’s “no taxation without representation” rhetoric. His gift of eloquent speech (as well as his wealth) made him an important politician in the Continental Congress, lending crucial support to his old friend, George Washington. Afterward, he pressed for many items that became building blocks of the U.S. Constitution, including a federal government and a bill of rights to enshrine the principles he gleaned from reading the works of Europe’s intelligentsia.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (Viking), by Robert Dallek

At this time, the chief value of yet another biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt is to help keep him in the forefront of the national dialogue about our past—to keep his memory from the clutches of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and the like. Although Robert Dallek adds little to the already enormous stock of knowledge on FDR, A Political Life is an eloquent reminder of his critical role in restoring hope during the Great Depression, instituting Social Security, defeating Hitler during World War II and insisting on America’s ongoing role in the world. Roosevelt was a progressive with keen albeit not unerring political judgment. He moved in shockingly bold strokes when he could get away with it, and by crablike steps when he felt the tide against him. As for hiding his physical handicap, “He understood that the image of him as in decline would compromise his ability as a leader.”

How We Won and Lost the War in Afghanistan: Two Years in the Pashtun Homeland (Potomac Books), by Douglas Grindle

Americans are a people in a hurry while the Taliban and similarly minded Islamist militants think time is on their side. That’s one message underlying Douglas Grindle’s account of his time in Afghanistan as a war correspondent and, more tellingly, an employee of various U.S. agencies. America was ill prepared for its role in the country: billions were spent, lives were lost, but the Afghan regime proved corrupt, predatory and incapable of earning hearts and minds. “We could have pulled out the stops to institute a vibrant system of local government,” he writes. But little was accomplished before the U.S. pulled back. Grindle doesn’t blame the locals. “When Afghans complained about the system the United States helped to build, we told them it was their fault for building such a lousy system in the first place.”

Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (Penguin Press), by Lawrence O’Donnell

The upheaval outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago helped Herbert Humphrey lose the White House and is the most recalled event from the 1968 presidential election. But, as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell points out, perhaps more significant in the long run was the encounter between Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes, then a 26-year old producer at “The Mike Douglas Show.” Coaching Nixon to be as telegenic as possible, Ailes gained entrée into the centers of power and “became more influential in Republican politics than Nixon ever was.” Lawrence reminds us of the threat Robert Kennedy posed to both Nixon and Lyndon Johnson but passes over any speculation on his assassination. As for populist instigator George Wallace, his voters “sounded like Trump voters in 2016. Most of them denied race had anything to do with their choice… he told it like it was and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.” The right-wing coalition of “antitax, antigovernment, antiabortion, pro-law-and-order feeling” was just beginning to coalesce.

Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (W.W. Norton), by Russell Shorto

That life seldom turns out as planned is a subtext of Revolution Song. Russell Shorto retells aspects of the American Revolution through the lives of six participants, only one, George Washington, will be known to most readers. Washington had hoped to become a high ranking officer in Britain’s army but instead, changed the world by defeating the country he longed to serve Lord George Germain, Britain’s minister responsible for North America, became Washington’s determined foe and continued the war as if to compensate for an embarrassing defeat earlier in his career. Germain’s machinations drew a reluctant Seneca chief, Cornplanter (Kayethwahkeh), into the fray on Britain’s side. There is also an African slave on Long Island (Broteer Furro), a woman who saw the Revolution as analogous to her struggle for personal autonomy (Margaret Coghlan ) and a populist scourge of British and Revolutionary elites alike (Abraham Yates). Shorto’s overlapping biographies are meant to complicate our commonplace understanding of the events that followed 1776.