The Second World War came to an end in the summer of 1945. In the summer of 1946, Fred C. Trump had a son named Donald. Seventy years later, he would become the forty-fifth president of the United States, promising in his campaign and inaugural speeches to put ‘America first’ because ‘sadly, the American dream is dead’.
What happened to the American dream in the intervening seventy years would take many more volumes to recount properly – but volumes have been written. After the Second World War, the ‘American dream’ was retooled as shiny middle-class comfort and ease, a tale of upward social mobility and infinite generational progress – the ‘fatuous optimism’ Dorothy Thompson had railed against in her Pearl Harbor column, warning it would always demand a scapegoat when things went wrong.
‘America first’ had sunk rapidly into obscurity. Although there were a few half-hearted attempts to revive the motto – in 1942, one newspaper reported that a handful of people were ‘Still America Firsting’ – it seemed discredited beyond survival, as did the word ‘isolationist’, which became similarly disreputable.1
In 1947, the same year that the title of Walter Lippmann’s eighteenth book made the ‘Cold War’ a household phrase, President Harry S. Truman delivered a speech at Baylor University in Waco, Texas – less than a mile from where Jesse Washington had been publicly burned to death a little over thirty years earlier. In it, Truman revised Roosevelt’s four freedoms, speaking instead of three essential forms of freedom. Freedom of speech and religion remained, but Truman replaced the final two – freedom from want and fear – with a promise of ‘freedom of enterprise’.
It was an alteration with profound symbolic consequence, as Truman insisted that the ‘first two of these freedoms are related to the third’. Capitalism was being enshrined as an essential freedom, central to American concepts of democracy: American notions of freedom would never more be disentangled from free markets.
Substituting freedom of enterprise for freedom from want and fear meant replacing social democracy with capitalism, as historians have noted.2 It was a rhetorical shift that reflected a cultural shift, as freedom of enterprise became intertwined with the American dream from that point forward. Ever since, freedom of enterprise has been viewed by virtually all Americans as a fundamental American right, the foundation of all other American freedoms. Truman did not single-handedly create that cultural shift, as this history has already shown – but his speech legitimised and codified it.
Roosevelt’s establishment of ‘freedom from fear’ as a human right had been an attempt to end the ‘fear economy’ that Walter Lippmann had named as the product of unchecked capitalism. Replacing freedom from fear with freedom of enterprise effectively returned America to the fear economy, and it’s been in charge ever since.
By the 1950s, the American dream had shrugged off all sense of moral disquiet, becoming a triumphalist patriotic assertion. The Cold War ensured that a new wave of internationalism and interventionism swept through American politics, becoming the norm. What Hearst and his followers had long feared did indeed shape American policy for decades: as the military-industrial complex took hold, America formed permanent – or, at least, enduring – alliances with Western Europe, and continued to wage war. The American dream of spreading the American way of life became the principle (or pretext, depending on your perspective) driving US foreign policy. With the coming of globalisation, a protectionist, isolationist America seemed even further away.
The American dream became a key rhetorical weapon in the Cold War, in which US post-war prosperity was held up, in quasi-Calvinist terms once more, as evidence that American society was morally superior, that its values led to security and comfort. Part of the internationalist campaign of soft power was the American dream as a vision of democracy upheld by individual consumerist prosperity.
* * *
As part of America’s post-war recovery, the Federal Housing Administration offered loans to incentivise the development of housing projects. Developers were encouraged to keep neighbourhoods racially ‘homogeneous’, a code word we’ve seen many times before.3 One of the investors taking advantage of the housing loans was Fred C. Trump, who began using federal funds to develop residences around the New York area.
The singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie lived in one of Fred Trump’s Brooklyn housing projects for two years in the early 1950s. Guthrie was so outraged by what he saw as the overt racism of Trump’s policies as a landlord that he wrote a song about ‘Old Man Trump’, who ‘knows just how much racial hate / He stirred up’. In ‘Trump’s Tower … no black folks come to roam’.
Fred Trump was investigated in 1954 by a US Senate Committee for ‘profiteering off public contracts’ in his housing developments. Under oath, he admitted having ‘wildly overstated the costs of a development to obtain a larger mortgage from the government’.4 Some might call it fraud.
* * *
Throughout the 1950s, the cause of civil rights was gaining real legal and political traction. In 1955, Justice Hugo Black joined the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark civil rights case that declared the segregation of American schools unconstitutional. To the surprise of many, Black was in fact distinguishing himself as a remarkably liberal member of the bench.
In 1963, the American dream as it was first imagined – a dream of democratic and economic equality – was powerfully revived by Martin Luther King Jr, who invoked the American dream to suggest that it has never been extended to black people in the United States.
‘I still have a dream,’ King proclaimed at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. ‘It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”’ It is something of a truism among civil rights historians that King’s ‘dream’ was a ‘subversive’, even ‘prophetic’ repurposing of the Founding Fathers’ ideas in connecting civil rights to the nation’s founding promises of democratic equality, a promise from which the framers had specifically excluded black Americans. (King could ‘see things the rest of the nation [couldn’t] make out’, as one expert on King told the Huffington Post in 2013.)5 But whether King was aware of it or not, he was in fact far from the first to suggest that the ‘American dream’ of equality had a principle of civil rights built into it, as we have seen. While no one would deny the force and influence of King’s vision, it was not unique to him.
The Second Klan had disbanded in 1944, but the civil rights movement of the 1960s provoked a white supremacist backlash: local Klans re-formed across the South, inflicting violence against black and white activists alike. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson publicly condemned the Klan, the same year that the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924 was finally reversed by the Immigration Act of 1965, as part of the domestic programme of liberal civil reform known as Johnson’s Great Society.
Through the 1960s and 70s, ‘America first’ remained a slogan of the underground Klan, emblazoned on insignia such as a commemorative coin struck in 1965.6
The American fascist movement reared its ugly head again as well, primarily in the form of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, which grabbed some headlines between its founding in 1958 and Rockwell’s assassination by a disgruntled member of a splinter group in 1967. The National States’ Rights Party was also established in 1958, which opposed racial integration in the South using Nazi slogans and insignias. The affinity between fascists and the Klan remained clear.
Fred Trump handed the management of his property development business to his son Donald in 1973. That year the US Department of Justice sued Trump Management for racial discrimination: by 1967, New York State investigators had established that of approximately 3,700 apartments in Coney Island’s Trump Village, just seven were rented to African-Americans. Complaining that the government was trying to force him to rent to ‘welfare recipients’, Donald countersued for defamation, hiring Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer, to represent him. He ultimately signed a consent decree, with pages of stipulations designed to ensure the desegregation of Trump properties. In 1978, the Trumps were accused of violating the consent decree, and continuing their racially discriminatory policies.
In the 1970s, a Klansman named David Duke campaigned for senator in Louisiana; he would run for president in 1988. He had joined the Klan in 1967, and as a student at Louisiana State University had established a neo-Nazi group called the White Youth Alliance, which was associated with the American Nazi Party. In 1974, Duke founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1989, five young black men were wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park, New York. Donald Trump took out signed full-page advertisements in four of the city’s newspapers calling for the death penalty. Thirteen years after their convictions another man confessed to the crime; DNA confirmed his guilt, and the convictions were vacated. Far from apologising, Trump wrote an opinion piece for the New York Daily News calling the acquittal of the Central Park Five ‘the heist of the century’.
* * *
‘America first’ suddenly returned to the headlines in 1992, thanks to the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, widely recognised as representing the values of the paleo-conservatives of the early twentieth century. He announced his candidacy with a speech declaring that America must not lose its ‘sovereignty’ in response to the economic challenges ‘presented by the rise of a European super state’. Calling for ‘a new patriotism’ and ‘a new nationalism’, he promised to ‘put the needs of Americans first’.
Buchanan’s opponents ‘would put America’s wealth and power at the service of some vague New World Order’, he charged. ‘We will put America first.’ Buchanan’s campaign was unsuccessful, his xenophobic platform generally viewed as having backfired and ultimately benefitting Bill Clinton’s candidacy.
In October 1999, Buchanan announced he would run on a newly created ‘Reform Party’ ticket in the 2000 presidential campaign, and Donald Trump declared his intention to challenge Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination.
‘I really believe the Republicans are just too crazy right,’ Trump said, explaining why he was withdrawing his Republican registration. He went on to call Buchanan ‘a Hitler lover’. ‘I guess he’s an anti-Semite,’ Trump added. ‘He doesn’t like the blacks. He doesn’t like the gays … It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.’ But then, Trump observed, it was obvious that Buchanan was going after the ‘really staunch right wacko vote’.7
In the end, Trump didn’t run, and in 2000 he left the Reform Party, issuing a statement that said: ‘The Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. [Lenora] Fulani. This is not company I wish to keep.’8 A spokesman for the Reform Party responded that Trump was merely a ‘hustler’ who had pretended to have political aspirations to promote a book: it was all just ‘a serious hustle of the media’.9 A few days later Trump repeated the rejection. ‘Well, you’ve got David Duke just joined – a bigot, a racist, a problem. I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party.’10 It was ten years after a Vanity Fair profile had revealed that Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches in his office.
Sixteen years later, Trump launched his campaign as a Republican nominee. ‘I’m not an isolationist,’ he announced on the campaign trail in 2016, ‘but I am ‘“America First,”’ he said. ‘So I like the expression. I’m “America First.”’11
The phrase was taken up by his supporters, many of whom were most likely unaware of its history.
But not all of them were. In February 2016, David Duke said he supported Donald Trump for president of the United States. ‘I’m overjoyed to see Donald Trump and most Americans embrace most of the issues that I’ve championed for years. My slogan remains America first.’12
Asked to disavow Duke’s support, Trump said: ‘David Duke endorsed me? Okay, all right. I disavow, okay?’13 Two days later, pressed to repudiate Duke more forcefully, he tried to sidestep. ‘I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong … But you may have groups in there that are totally fine, and it would be very unfair. So, give me a list of the groups, and I will let you know.’ Told that the only people in question were the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, he responded: ‘I don’t know David Duke. I don’t believe I have ever met him … And I just don’t know anything about him.’14
Trump’s non-committal replies cost him neither the nomination nor the election.
* * *
If history is to the nation as memory is to the individual, Arthur Schlesinger Jr once observed, then all history is contemporary history.
In August 2017, seven months into Trump’s presidency, American fascists staged a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Many American citizens who were outraged at the sudden upsurge of so-called ‘alt-right’ fascism under Trump went to protest. When a car ploughed into anti-fascist protesters, nineteen were injured and one, Heather Heyer, was murdered.
In the following days, Trump declined to condemn unreservedly either the alt-right rally or the fascist attack on peaceful protesters. It came as a shock to many observers that the Klan and neo-Nazis could stage a march in modern America, shouting, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ It came as an even bigger shock to them that Trump refused to denounce extreme right-wing violence, issuing instead a boilerplate condemnation of ‘hate from many sides’ that was clearly calculated to suggest that the protesters – the ones there to object to fascism and white supremacy – were also ‘haters’. Trump claimed there were ‘many fine’ people on both sides, when one side was made up entirely of neo-Nazis, Klansmen and white nationalists.
‘Alternative right’ had been adopted as an early-twenty-first-century euphemism, rebranding ‘neo-Nazi’ in more socially acceptable terms. The Unite the Right movement in Charlottesville insisted they were not Nazis, all the while shouting bona fide Nazi slogans like ‘Blood and Soil’. As Dorothy Thompson warned, no one ever forms the Dictator Party.
The alt-right movement had joined forces with a loose faction of other far-right groups, including conspiracy-minded libertarians who feared the rise of an internationalist new world order run by a shadowy cabal of powerful elites (who may or may not be Jewish); armed militias who cast themselves as freedom fighters against an oppressive (usually socialist) state; the Tea Party movement and its most prominent spokesperson, Sarah Palin; the right-wing politicians and pundits who deliberately stoked post-9/11 xenophobic fears of Muslim terrorism and the rise of Islamic State; and evangelicals who had, with increasing success, driven what had recently been viewed as extremist agendas into the Republican mainstream.
These disparate but sympathetically minded groups, who found a national outlet in Fox News, which served to normalise their views and communicate them to conservatives around the country, all united around a common enemy when Barack Obama became president in 2008. The election of the first African-American president incited a racist backlash across the country.
Trump’s rise as a politician was profoundly intertwined with Obama’s presidency. He gained political purchase by spreading the nativist ‘birther’ conspiracy theory that Obama was foreign-born, and thus disqualified for the presidency. The bottom line was the effort to delegitimise the first black president. When Obama retaliated by mocking Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner, Trump’s rage was visible; many observers concluded that his entire presidential campaign was provoked by his affront at being publicly humiliated by a black man.
Trump’s accommodationist response to the violence in Charlottesville therefore did not come as a shock to everyone. During the campaign Trump had circulated anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi symbols and tropes on social media, and incited violence at his largely white rallies against protesters, many of whom were black. Despite the clear racial lines being drawn, Trump and his supporters insisted their concerns were economic, and that any racism was being injected into the discussion by their critics – much as the America First Committee had blamed their critics for objecting to Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism in 1941. While denying that the contest was driven by racial politics, Trump relentlessly focused his campaign on the resentments of white people, just as Hiram Evans had done when defending the Klan back in 1926.
When he was inaugurated, Trump promised to put ‘America first’ by ‘transferring power from Washington’ and ‘giving it back to you, the people’. Those people – his followers and voters – were overwhelmingly white. Immediately following his inauguration Trump installed outspoken white nationalists in his administration, including Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, as well as bringing in Sebastian Gorka (whose membership of the Hungarian Nazi Party journalists had firmly established, although Gorka denied it) as an adviser.15
In January 2018, Trump made international headlines when he demanded during discussions of immigration from Haiti and African nations why he would want ‘all these people from shithole countries’, adding that he thought the United States should ‘admit more people from places like Norway’.16 Although most commentators saw that Norway is ethnically white, others were puzzled by what seemed an arbitrary white country to name. ‘Why Norway?’ asked a Houston Chronicle report, highlighting the ‘racialism’ of the choice; it added that the neo-fascist website Daily Stormer had approved Trump’s remarks, saying they showed that ‘Trump is more or less on the same page as us’.17 The Chronicle did not, however, mention that followers of the page in question continue to support Nordicism per se as a racial ideal for America.18
It was all, as Dorothy Thompson said of Charles Lindbergh, ‘old stuff’. Meanwhile summary violence against black people escalates, as unarmed black Americans continue to be shot in cold blood with impunity by white police officers, a national scourge of executions that have been described, with good reason, as lynchings.
* * *
The signals – dog whistles – of white nationalism were everywhere, and converged with a history of accusations of systemic racism against Trump and his father.
When the story emerged during the 2016 campaign that Trump’s father had been arrested in 1927 at what was often erroneously described as a ‘Klan rally’, Trump at first denied that the Fred Trump in question was his father, saying they’d never lived at the address named in the newspaper reports, 175–24 [sic] Devonshire Road, in Queens. But as other newspaper reports verify, although Donald never lived there, the Trump family did.
There is no evidence that Fred C. Trump was at the 1927 Memorial Day parade to support the Klan. What is remarkable is that of the parade’s 20,000 spectators, only seven were arrested, and one instantly released. The other six were five ‘avowed Klansmen’, and Fred Trump.
Donald has spoken often, and proudly, of having inherited the world view of his father, whom he idolised. ‘My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy,’ he stated in 2015.
An important aspect of that legacy, according to at least one of Trump’s biographers, is eugenicism. ‘The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,’ the biographer said. ‘They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.’19
Trump himself endorsed a garbled version of eugenics (without appearing able to recall the word), when he explained in a 2010 interview with CNN: ‘Well I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.’ His example could have come straight from the 1922 Saturday Evening Post article on Nordicism that compared people to horses: ‘Hey, when you connect two race horses, you usually end up with a fast horse. I had a good gene pool from the standpoint of that.’20
In October 2017, Trump was widely ridiculed for his reply to reports that his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had referred to him as ‘a fucking moron’. Trump responded: ‘I think it’s fake news. But if he did [say] that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.’21 Although presumably Trump is unaware of the eugenicist theories behind IQ tests that Walter Lippmann denounced back in 1923, his faith that they will show him to be a genius is not unrelated.
The world view Fred Trump bequeathed to his son came from a eugenicist America in which Klan members marched, 1,400 strong, down the street where he lived, loudly proclaiming that they were for one hundred per cent Americanism and America first. It was a world of nativism and the one-drop rule, in which being one hundred per cent American meant being one hundred per cent white. It was a world in which self-styled American fascists fought on the streets with anti-fascists. It was a world in which the German-American Bund drew a crowd of 20,000 Americans to a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939. (There are unsubstantiated rumours that the German-American Fred Trump was a member of the Bund, but no evidence has yet surfaced to support this claim.)
And while it is true that no one knows why Fred Trump was arrested along with five self-identified members of the Klan at the Memorial Day parade riots in Queens in 1927, it is also true that his later record would not suggest he was there to protest against the Klan.
Maybe it was all just a coincidence.
* * *
But this story has been full of coincidences, which is another name for the patterns created by hindsight, which is another name for history. Indeed, this book was motivated by such patterns of resemblance, and they kept appearing.
Take Trump’s political resemblance to many of this story’s figures, including William Randolph Hearst, the ‘America first’ tycoon who became the model for Charles Foster Kane in the 1941 film Citizen Kane. When Trump accepted the Republican nomination in 2016, he did so in front of a giant image of himself that quoted almost exactly the visuals of Kane’s political rally – and cult of personality – in the film. Trump once told an interviewer that Citizen Kane was his favourite film, adding that he identified with Kane. Whether Trump realised that Orson Welles was deliberately likening Charles Foster Kane to fascists – and that Welles himself was visually referring to Leni Riefenstahl’s images from Triumph of the Will – is a different question.
Hearst’s efforts to keep America from fighting fascism in Europe were, for people like Welles, indistinguishable from supporting fascism. In the opening scene of Citizen Kane, Welles invokes Hearst’s 1934 visit to Hitler: Kane declares there will be no world war, and then the voiceover adds that Kane would often support and then denounce a given world figure, showing Kane on a balcony with Hitler.
Kane’s authoritarianism may not be why Trump liked Citizen Kane, but he certainly realised the political power that Hearst’s newspaper chain gave him, for he told the Guardian in 2012 that social media worked for him like owning a newspaper.
My Twitter has more followers than the New York Times has readers. I have a newspaper – I literally have my own newspaper and it’s called @iamdonaldtrump. Literally. Now when someone attacks me, I attack them right back. I used to have to make speeches to attack people, now I don’t even have to do that.22
(As the interviewer noted, this was not ‘literally’ the name of his Twitter account, which Trump narcissistically misnamed.)
Introducing the phrase ‘America first’ to the world in 1915, Woodrow Wilson had also warned that the forces of propaganda were creating ‘fake news’, a phrase that became a hallmark of Trump’s political career (undergoing a remarkable reversal from a charge levied against him for his brazen lies, distortions and fabrications, to a complaint he turned on his accusers, claiming that any unflattering fact about him was just ‘fake news’).
Then there is Sinclair Lewis’s President Windrip, preening himself on how successful his media appearances are and the loyalty of his crowds in terms that sound eerily like Trump. ‘You forget that I myself, personally, made a special radio address to that particular section of the country last week! And I got a wonderful reaction. The Middle Westerners are absolutely loyal to me. They appreciate what I’ve been trying to do!’ Or the fact that Lewis uses the word ‘deplorable’ – controversially used by Hillary Clinton to characterise Trump’s followers – to describe a conflict on the Mexican border, where Trump notoriously promised to build a wall during his campaign.
And let us not forget Warren G. Harding, who ran on an ‘America first’ platform, insisted being a president would be so easy, and promised to run America like a business before actually running it like a disorganised crime syndicate. The ‘birther’ conspiracy surrounding Harding proved an uncanny reverse image of the one against Obama that Trump used so despicably to launch his own national political career. (The claims of ‘black blood’ continued to follow Harding’s descendants, and were not finally disproven until they did a DNA test in 2015; one of them ‘confessed to a little disappointment. “I was hoping for black blood,” he said.’)23
Then there is the fact that press coverage of Trump accepted rationalisations disturbingly similar to those used by Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans to defend the Klan in 1926: the ‘economic distress’ of Klan members ninety years ago was almost identical to the ‘economic anxiety’ obsessively held by the media to have motivated Trump’s voters, rather than racial resentment. Likewise, Evans explicitly called for ‘a return to power’ (‘We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock’), just as white supremacists would later chant in Charlottesville: ‘Jews will not replace us.’
These symmetries go beyond Trump himself, extending to members of his administration. ‘Economic nationalism’, the phrase appropriated by his campaign manager and chief adviser Steve Bannon, emerged from the ‘America first’ debates over internationalism and the Versailles Treaty. The outcry that met the confirmation of Hugo Black following his history as a Klansman mirrored that which greeted the confirmation of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as Attorney General in 2016 despite his well-documented opposition to civil rights, down to their shared home state of Alabama, and Dorothy Thompson’s sarcastic reference to Black’s inability to ‘recall’ his racist past, an inability that Sessions also repeatedly demonstrated in his testimony before Congress in 2017.
Sessions had also praised the Johnson–Reed Act during a 2015 radio interview with Steve Bannon. ‘In seven years we’ll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the Republic … It’s a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly. We then assimilated through the 1965 [Immigration Act] and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America. We passed a law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we’re on a path to surge far past what the situation was in 1924.’24 He sounded remarkably like the 1923 Chicago Tribune editorial arguing that assimilation could only occur ‘without a perpetual flux of new elements’ if the country were to achieve racial ‘homogeneity’: once again, old immigrants were in, new immigrants out.
In October 2017, the New York Times reported that on Stephen Miller’s high school yearbook page he quoted Theodore Roosevelt on ‘one hundred per cent Americanism’. ‘There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.’25 Unsurprisingly, the quotation was taken out of context.
The parallels go on and on. Seventy-five years before the Unite the Right movement would march on Charlottesville and kill Heather Heyer, there was a ‘Union Party’ in 1941 that brought together white supremacist groups. In 1940 Americans were hanging swastikas on Confederate monuments in Virginia. The 2017 rally at Charlottesville had been staged in protest at the planned removal of a Confederate monument, a statue of Robert E. Lee.
The myth of the Confederate Lost Cause, an act of deeply revisionist history, had been disavowing for 150 years the idea that slavery had anything to do with Southerners’ reasons for the Civil War. The Confederacy was motivated by states’ rights, Northern aggression, the Unionists’ perfidy, anything but the savage protection of a white privilege that owed its existence to the bloody inheritances of slavery.
This deliberate separation of the Confederacy from the institutional slavery it was established to preserve led to defenders of Lee’s statue even insisting that Robert E. Lee wasn’t a white supremacist, either. His decision to lead the Confederate army to war in order to defend slavery and the white supremacy it upheld was apparently just another coincidence. Ironically, few have ascribed the South’s secession to ‘economic anxiety’, although the threat of losing plantation slavery and the capital it concentrated had indeed created profound economic anxiety in white Southerners. It’s why they waged war against their fellow Americans – to protect their entitlements to the profits created by the labour of the black people they brutalised.
* * *
Most Americans today assume that Confederate statues were put up after the Civil War in simple white supremacist pride, or fury, by people who didn’t realise how history would one day judge them. For some of the statues, that is indeed the case – but not all.
Almost exactly a hundred years before Trump was elected, a debate arose in the South about whether to put up a white supremacist statue – a debate framed precisely in terms of how history would judge them.
In September 1916 the novelist Thomas W. Dixon tried to erect a statue in North Carolina, in honour of the uncle who was the inspiration for the hero (‘the little Colonel’) of The Clansman, the novel that inspired The Birth of a Nation. Dixon wanted Colonel McAfee’s statue clothed in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, but a newspaper in nearby Charlotte objected, arguing that the colonel should be wearing a Confederate uniform.
The Charlotte Observer’s leader maintained that, while a statue of Dixon’s uncle in Confederate uniform would meet ‘unquestioned acceptance’, to put him in the robes of the Klan was an entirely different matter.
‘It would be hard to conceive of a statue more grotesquely treated,’ the editorial protested. ‘It is history that belongs to the past, that should be of record and stored in the archives as a sealed book … The erection of a statue of the class proposed would impose upon the people of this and succeeding generations the duty of perpetual explanation and defense, a duty that might become irksome with the passing of the years and that might in the end be repudiated.’26
To be sure, there were no doubts expressed about commemorating the Confederate cause; on the contrary. The Observer concluded that it would be fine to memorialise Colonel McAfee ‘as a Confederate officer, in which role for all ages there would be none to give his name other than acclaim’.
So they were only drawing the line at the Klan: but they did draw that line. And even as they told themselves that a Confederate statue would meet nothing but acclaim through the ages, they also admitted that any paean to white supremacism might in the end be ‘repudiated’.
The controversy made it to the pages of the New York Times, where it appeared next to an (unrelated) article about ‘America First’. The Times began with a counter-editorial written by the Advertiser, in Montgomery, Alabama, who called the Observer’s position ‘ridiculous’, arguing that if McAfee was famous for organising the Klan, that’s what he should be memorialised for.
The American paper of record then weighed in, saying that where Southerners disagreed, Northerners might ‘express opinions’. The New York Times’s opinion? ‘It was with the better part of the Klan’s history, its fight for the preservation of civilization in the South, that this soldier was connected,’ it declared, endorsing the Lost Cause myth that the Klan fought for something other – ‘better’ – than white supremacy. ‘If he is to be honored by a statue, it should be one that will recall his real work. It was, as the Advertiser says, a phase of Southern civilization which has passed.’
‘The Observer is perhaps too touchy,’ it concluded.27
Perhaps.
* * *
We have achieved Scott Fitzgerald’s ironic vision in ‘The Swimmers’ of a country that thinks it can dispense with history altogether, as if it is a handicap weighing us down, when in fact it is the common ground upon which we walk. Historical amnesia is certainly liberating, in one sense – but a knowledge of history can be emancipatory, too.