The Ultimate Political Product
I recently started reading Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland, a non-fiction account of the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. The book centers around D. C. Stephenson, who was Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana, and the most effective promoter of the Klan north of the Mason-Dixon Line. President Ulysses S. Grant wiped out the original Klan in the 1870s, but didn’t manage to drive a stake through its heart; it was reborn fifty years later, after the release of the film Birth of a Nation, and for a time was larger and more powerful than ever before. It was not only strong in the South: per capita, the Klan had more members in Indiana than in any other state.
In 1925, the governors of Indiana, Colorado and Oregon were all Klansmen or Klan loyalists, as were fifteen senators and seventy-five congressmen. The Klan had huge numbers of adherents and enormous political clout in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania and California. (The city of Anaheim, California acquired the nickname Klanaheim.) D. C. Stephenson would entertain senators and governors on his yacht, and the Klan exerted a strong influence on the 1924 platforms of both the Democratic and Republican parties, with Time magazine calling the Republican convention that year “the Kleveland Konvention.” An Indiana U.S. senator was known to be in poor health, and when he died, Stephenson expected to be appointed his successor, at which point, he told confidantes, he would be “the biggest man in the country.”
I haven’t yet read the entire book, so I haven’t seen how Stephenson and the Klan got their comeuppance. I look forward to finding out. But the chapters I’ve read have started me thinking about white supremacy, and how, as this piece’s title implies, it is the ultimate political product. By this I mean not that it is true, or virtuous, or in any way good for the country – it is the opposite of those things – but that if you are unhindered by scruples, it is extremely easy to sell.
Think about it like a marketer.
1) You don’t need brains to understand it. Most political creeds require you to grapple with some degree of complexity. Capitalism or socialism? Libertarianism or interventionist government? Internationalism or isolationism? To choose a side in any of those disputes, you need to know something. You need some knowledge of history, economics, foreign policy – you at least need to know some big words. A white supremacist doesn’t require any of that. He is being asked to subscribe to one opinion, and one alone: that the white race is superior to all others. It is not a heavy intellectual lift. Anyone can grasp the concept.
2) It explains everything. Life not going as you’d hoped? White supremacy explains whose fault it is. Blaming Group X is a lot pleasanter than blaming yourself, or your near and dear. A friend of mine had a brother who would say things like “Hitler had some good ideas.” This brother had lived a difficult life, and experienced considerable emotional pain, virtually none of which, however, had been caused by Blacks or Jews, who were the groups he liked to vent about. His real pain had been caused by his mother and father. But it is far less troubling to hate a bunch of strangers than to hate your mother and father.
3) It offers a wide range of emotional gratifications. Not only does white supremacy allow you to displace your angers, but it is pleasing to your ego. A white supremacist never has to be at the bottom of the barrel. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s father Pap, the town drunk, who beats and robs his child and literally sleeps in pig-sties, has a long, drunken, brilliantly-written rant about Blacks (whom he calls, prolifically, by the n-word) and how the government lets them do all sorts of unacceptable things, like dress in nice clothes and own pocket-watches. What would Pap do without Black people? Who else could he possibly consider beneath him?
The 1920s were a time of rapid social change, with women wearing short skirts, smoking cigarettes, and dancing to ‘animalistic’ music, i.e. jazz, which of course was associated with Blackness. The Klan posed itself as a successor to the Temperance Movement, and did a lot of effective recruitment by giving envelopes of cash to Protestant ministers, who would fulminate from the pulpit about predatory, degenerate foreigners and praise the Klan as defenders of morality. (Ironically, Stephenson himself was a drunk, a wife-beater, and a serial rapist, and his parties for the eminent “would have shamed Nero,” as a lackey put it, but for years that was kept quiet, thanks to Stephenson’s ties with the local police.) Immigrants were landing on both coasts, and Blacks were moving up from the South. One of the Klan’s strongest selling points was as a barrier to change. People were afraid their country, or their hometown, would cease to be White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant – would cease to be pure.
The political philosopher Henry Adams once called politics “the systematic organization of hatreds,” and if you are American, and politics is your line of business, white supremacy is the ideal organizing principle. It has a huge potential customer base. It is easy to market – you can just do what Birth of a Nation did, and spread images of hideous, dark-skinned men slobbering over delicate white females. You barely even need to use words: most of your message can be conveyed with pictures. The key, commercially-speaking, is that people will pay for hate. Next to lust, it may be the most marketable human emotion. Like lust, hate is stimulating – it makes you feel alive. Bored? Stagnant? Discouraged? Rage and hate are invigorating.
According to Timothy Egan, D. C. Stephenson seems to have been less a racist than a charismatic, opportunistic sociopath, and he became rich – boats, mansions, fleets of cars – selling Klan memberships, costumes, and paraphernalia to his marks. In the Internet age, merchandising opportunities have improved enormously. Research your favorite political hate-monger, and you will probably find that he’s made big money, as well as acquired other basic satisfactions such as attention and power. If you want money, attention and power, hate is a fabulous product, and in the United States of America, its most efficient delivery system has always been white supremacy.
Are there any commercial drawbacks to this product? Only two: it is based on a pack of lies, and it inevitably leads to nauseating cruelty. Those are the reasons why American public opinion has ever swung against it. But when people find the truth unenticing, and when the memory of the cruelty has dimmed, or awareness of it can be kept distant, the old mainstay makes its comeback. Qualities that might compete with it, like honesty or compassion, are less convenient and more demanding, especially with people you don’t feel you understand very well. Any fool can get angry. Empathy takes work.
What worries me most about white supremacy – this hateful, idiotic doctrine, which tore the country in half once, and threatens to do so again – is how easy it is to sell.
~ STUDEBAKER (Studebaker@studebakerguy.bsky.com)
