Sam Smith – There is an increasing inclination – not without reason – to associate Donald Trump with the behavior of the Nazis and fascists, but this ignores another part of his heritage that we don’t talk about much, namely the tradition of con men and leaders using the American myth as justification for them to badly distort it and gain abusive power.
Coming into teenhood in the 1950s, I was fortunate enough to read a number of books that dealt with this such as The Man in a Gray Flannel Suit, Death of a Salesman and The Organization Man. I also was an avid reader of comic books which gave more than a little insight into powerful hustlers.
But this was just before the full arrival of television. At the beginning of the 1950s there were only about one million America TV owners, by the end there were 55 million, as opposed to 125 million now. My parents bought their first TV when I was in tenth grade.
With this change came a revision of the American myth to fit the needs of television networks just as TV dramatically has changed the nature of political corruption from community based sleaze to national disasters and used the working class mainly for comedy series.
If you look back over American history for periods in which our national myth showed some striking reality you are left with a pretty short list such as Reconstruction, the New Deal, the rise of labor unions, and the civil rights movement.
On the other hand, there are periods of stunning evil we hardly mention. A strong example is that, while we talk about slavery, we hardly mention indentured servitude. Google estimates that “the total number of European immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was 500,000–550,000; of these, 55,000 were involuntary prisoners. Of the 450,000 or so European arrivals who came voluntarily, [an estimated] 48% were indentured.”
Wikipedia notes:
Indentures could not marry without the permission of their owner, were subject to physical punishment (like many young ordinary servants), and saw their obligation to labor enforced by the courts. To ensure uninterrupted work by the female servants, the law lengthened the term of their indenture if they became pregnant. But unlike slaves, servants were guaranteed to be eventually released from bondage. At the end of their term they received a payment known as "freedom dues" and become free members of society. One could buy and sell indentured servants' contracts, and the right to their labor would change hands, but not the person as a piece of property.
While indentured servitude was less evil than slavery, typically lasting four to seven years, what is notable is that we neither teach or discuss it. And there are other bits of the early story that get forgotten, such as this item about the Massachusetts Puritans cited in Colin Woodard’s excellent new book, Union:
Quakers were particularly despised by the Puritan leadership…. Captured Quakers were disfigured for future reference, having their ears lopped off, their nostrils slit or their faces grated with the letter H for “heretic.”
A little while later we had a nation, a constitution and a bunch of “originalists” to set our course. One example, as Time Magazine reported:
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Just in the last two decades we have had two presidents – George Bush and Donald Trump – elected thanks to the electoral college despite losing in the popular vote.
Another bitter gap in our history that is still affecting our lives today is the post-Reconstruction era. Except for slavery and succession, one can argue that the South won the Civil War, witness the decades of segregation, the long southern control of Congress and a power of the electoral system that gave Trump 42% more votes than he would have gotten without the former Confederacy.
These are just a few examples of how distorted the story we tell about America can be and that there were Donald Trumps, e.g. abusive and powerful white males, regularly running the show for four centuries.. And one of the tricks of these abusers of other Americans was to convince them that a different ethnicity or culture was to blame for their troubles. It is for this reason that I think of Trump acting like a southern slyster trying to convince underserved whites that blacks or latinos are the cause of their problems.
To use poverty as an example of how this affects us, there are almost as many whites in financial misery these days as blacks and latinos combined, yet this common ground is ignored by all but a few like the Poor People’s Campaign. Even liberals have been quiet as labor unions have lost over three quarters of their share of the labor market since the 1950s
Even if Trump is evicted, we still face the heritage that helped to bring him to the White House. We may not agree on how to move forward, but we can at least agree to try to tell the truth about the past.
