The classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet took its inspiration from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. It imagined a creature, based on the Tempest’s ghoulishly Freudian Caliban, that it called “the Monster from the Id.” As you might guess, the monster is an alien-technology enabled projection of an accidental creator’s troubled subconsciousness. It almost eats everyone before the creator’s remorse becomes its own projection and kills it.
I can’t think of a more useful artistic analogy for the year of Trump, except that the American Caliban/Id monster has always been with us in one form or another. We have never killed it with our remorse. Many times we felt no remorse at all about unleashing it.
In fact, there really is no Trump. He is only the latest political and social projection of America’s basest, angriest, most indulgent instincts. These Calibans generally follow and attempt to smash America’s greatest moral aspirations and accomplishments.
Let me show you on a chart.
Notice the generational regularity of the violence and conflict spikes. Look how far back they go. If you think that Trump represents a sort of linear American deterioration, rather than a regular American cycle, well…you’re as poorly schooled in American History as I was 10 years ago.
That’s why we should just stop teaching the worthless American history we teach in our schools. It provides none of the sorrow, contextual comfort, or joy that honest study of history does. It does nothing to explain Trump, when it’s actually quite easy to explain.
Commonly understood American history lets America off the hook for what it conjures into existence with its lurid dream states. It treats Trump as some alien form, not the thoroughly American creation and caricature that he is. It treats the unsettling, irrational rage of the people around him as his creation. But it’s the other way around.
The Trump voters of 1920
Let’s illustrate this with a practical example. Take a look at the American and Floridian virtues that Trump supposedly betrays. The 1920 presidential election came in the midst of one of the spikes in the chart above. You were never taught about it in your schools. Neither was I.
It’s the time when real life American fascists in Florida smashed incredibly brave efforts of black citizens to vote. And yes, these fascists were called Democrats in that time, a point I will come to in a moment. But first, let’s look at what happened in 1920 in your state and mine.
No one will ever know the full body count. The campaign violence culminated on Election Day itself, when between 30 and 60 blacks were murdered statewide, according to an NAACP estimate. That included the pogrom and massacre in Ocoee, near Orlando, which killed or exiled virtually the entire black population of the town.
But Ocoee was only the final blow. In his seminal book, Emancipation Betrayed, the great Florida historian Paul Ortiz produced paragraph after paragraph of contemporary accounts of firefights and bombings and abductions and beatings and murders that preceded the voting. He documented them with dates and times and comments. The fight raged from Miami to Jacksonville to Tallahassee to Pensacola.
This 1920 battle had a clear context: the wrenching economic, social, and political change bred by World War I, which ended in late 1918.
In a general sense, the popular and successful assault on multi-racial democracy in 1920 came as a response to the the overwhelming patriotic response of black Americans to the war effort. America’s white fascists wanted to make clear that the extraordinary segregated service of Black Americans in France earned them no citizenship rights upon returning home. And they wanted to punish any black Americans who thought differently and sought to assert themselves as citizens.
Let me repeat that, Trump people. Your grandparent and great grandparents, the stuff that became you, made Jane Fonda look like Lee Greenwood. At least when it came to black military service.
If the war loaded the gun, women’s suffrage pulled the trigger.
The U.S. Congress adopted the 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote on June 4, 1919. That was about seven months after the end of WW I. It came at the beginning of what’s known as the “Red Summer” of racial pogroms that struck city after city across the country. About a year later, Tennessee became the necessary 36th state to ratify the amendment — by a single vote — on Aug. 18, 1920. Just like that, 26.8 million American women suddenly became eligible to vote.
African-American women took immediate advantage. They spearheaded a doomed voter registration drive that terrified the white establishment of the day. Because of its large black population and strong leadership, Florida became Ground Zero for the effort.
The NAACP saw the Florida effort as a means to challenge one-party white Democratic rule in Florida and eventually the south. Indeed, virtually all of the black political activity channeled itself toward support of the Republican party and its eventual presidential nominee Warren Harding. White Republicans in Florida reacted ambivalently — at best — to this new surge of support from black voters and activists. But that didn’t matter much. Blacks wanted to create a block of votes that could influence Florida’s elections. They were really their own party.
Black leaders fully expected vote suppression and violence. And they hoped to use Florida as a test case for enforcing the constitutional voting rights provisions. If registered black voters were denied their vote through violence or skullduggery, the 14th amendment could reduce Florida’s representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. So the 1920 voter drive could succeed simply if blacks attempted to cast ballots and were turned away.
When Mary McLeod Bethune convened a secret meeting of black ministers and activists on her campus to plan the voter drive, she reportedly told the attendees:
“Use your minds, but keep your lips closed. Eat your bread without butter, but pay your poll tax! Nobody ever told me to pay my poll tax. My dollar is always there on time! Do not be afraid of the Klan. Quit running. Hold your head up high. Look every man straight in the eye and make no apology to anyone because of race or color. When you see a burning cross, remember the Son of God who bore the heaviest.”
Ah yes, the Klan. That was the catch-all name for the popular racial and sectarian Caliban that openly fought black democracy in Florida and elsewhere. The so-called “revival” Klan of the 1920s stormed onto the scene in Florida in response to the 1920 black voter registration drive. Pulled from the everyday white people of Florida’s towns, cities, and Protestant churches, these men might have been your plumbers, or shoe salesmen, or bridge tenders, or train conductors.
They mercilessly and anonymously attacked the black Floridians who fought to assert voting rights. And they won. The crushed and suppressed the black vote on and before Election Day. Black lives were taken just for trying to act in concert with American values. There was no happy ending.
Perhaps most fatal for the Florida voter movement, the state’s black votes didn’t really matter in the presidential race. Warren Harding, the Republican, won the white vote nationwide and swept into office, replacing the ailing Woodrow Wilson. Republicans had little incentive to push hard for investigation or sanction of southern states when they didn’t need the South.
Nonetheless, the NAACP managed to force a late December 1920 hearing before the Census Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. The NAACP’s presentation, led by James Weldon Johnson and Walter White, brought almost naively meticulous documentation of what happened in Florida.
But Johnson and company were talking to a five-man committee consisting of members from Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, and Missouri. According to the Congressional record, the Missouri congressman, Jacob Milligan, repeatedly used the word “nigger” during the hearings, which, of course went nowhere. As a bizarre and decadent footnote to the hearing, James Weldon Johnson later accused the congressman of inserting “nigger” into the Congressional record as a way of appearing more racially forceful to their constituents back home. It never happened, he claimed in an official NAACP statement.
Anyway, if you’re a multi-generational white Floridian like me, these are our great grandparents. Or our great grandparents sympathized with them openly. Or they cowered quietly while fascism and murder raged. Or they sought no justice after the fact if they opposed these actions. That’s your heritage and mine. You can either face it or hide from it or lie about it.
They are the great grandparents of today’s Republican party. They just called themselves Democrats at the time. It wasn’t until the Harry Truman integrated the armed forces and national Democrats committed to Civil Rights that their offspring began switching to the Republican party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
When Donald Trump’s Republican party Caliban lusts for the time when mobs could carry people out on stretchers, this is what it’s talking about. Except that our ancestors often had no need for stretchers.
And 1920 is what Trump voters mean when they say: Make America Great Again. Maybe, charitably, they don’t know it. But we are all implicated in this “Greatness” of our past. And I have no interest whatsoever in saying anything kind or understanding about the beliefs of people who openly relish the idea of “Again.” The best I can say is that you’re ignorant and incurious.
Many of you are decent people in your immediate personal circles and deeply productive members of your communities. But you’ve shown yourself terrible citizens of a diverse country. You think you’re entitled to inherit money, land, and status without encumbrance. But you believe fervently that other people should pay the death taxes on your generational debts of citizenship.
The regular rhythms of the neverending civil war
Moreover, the evidence shows that white Florida thought of the battle against black citizenship as an extension of the work of their fathers and grandfathers in the Civil War and Reconstruction.
For instance, the Grand Master of the Florida Ku Klux Klan on October 28, 1920 warned the secretary of Republican campaign committee not to continue organizing and registering blacks of Orlando.
“If you are familiar with the history of the days of reconstruction…you will recall that the Scalawags of the north, and the Republicans of the south proceeded very much the same as you are proceeding, to instill into the negro the ideal of social equality. You will also remember that these things forced the loyal citizens of the south to organize clans of determined men, who pledge themselves to maintain white supremacy and to safe guard our women and children.
“And now if you are a scholar, you know that history repeats itself, and that he who resorts to your kind of a game is handling edged tools. We shall always enjoy WHITE SUPREMACY in this country and he who interferes must face the consequences.”
The United Confederate Veterans changed the timing of their Orlando convention so they could visit Ocoee’s smoldering ruin and bask in the Election Day carnage — to bask in victory.
This, of course, is what Lakeland is actually celebrating and honoring with Annie’s Darracot’s 20th century monument to herself in the center of our city. One can almost hear her saying, “Make America Great Again” as she wistfully harkens back to the political force and slave power that wanted to destroy America.
But the Grand Master was partially right.
One need only consider the repetitive history of black pursuit of citizenship, which is the core story of America.
It’s the only story that makes America the America of the fantasies contained in our written founding documents. Without the constant testing of the black American struggle, America’s declaration of independence and Constitution are meaningless marketing material. Economic and military power are not moral power — even though they can be used for that at times.
As the chart shows, starting with the Civil War, one sees that testing play out in an amazingly regular generational pattern of black patriotic aspiration and violent white/governmental backlash.
Over and over again, essentially once-a-generation, blacks (and later Hispanics) pursue mass citizenship, freedom, and power through time-honored American mechanisms. They follow the moral and political rules America claims to set. And over and over again, America says nope — and punishes them.
Here’s a recap:
Civil War/Overthrow of Reconstruction
In the Civil War, nearly 200,000 black Americans fought bravely for their own freedom against an enemy that simply did not believe “all men are created equal.” And then America, to thank them, chose reconciliation with that enemy over its black allies. Bottom line: America did not have the stomach to enforce Reconstruction; and because of it, it sacrificed black American freedom and safety for 100 years.
The Great War/Great Migration/Revival Klan
A generation later Black America tried again. It bravely answered the call to serve in World War I in 1917. Then it tried to pursue American democracy at home. And failing that, it left the South in a massive and brave historical migration. Black America’s country — north and south — rewarded all of that with lynching, the Klan, pogroms, and racial insults in Congress. I’ve described the viciousness of this above.
At no point in this era did America reward its black subjects for working hard and playing by the rules — even when the rules were deeply crooked. I actually consider the World War I era’s white viciousness as America’s greatest national sin, even worse morally than slavery and the overthrow of Reconstruction.
That’s because the behavior of our great grandparents was so voluntary and gratuitous, so nasty and criminal. They already had power. And they knew better. So much could have been different if white America had decided to reward black agency. But it was too much fun to attack it. Nobody partied like Klansmen. Just spend a little time with them; and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.
The evidence suggests that America agrees with me about this, because we work quite hard not to know a fucking thing about this era. Florida’s schools will never teach in any detail about the 1920 election or World War I patriotism or the Great Migration. To do so would simply blow up our children’s ideas of America — and their own families. Better to lie about it through ignoring it.
And thus black Americans continue to smile through a fake history in order to keep the American dream alive. And Trump’s white people get to whine about all we’ve lost.
Civil Rights/Mass incarceration/Drug War
The Depression and World War II were such massive national events that they, in a sense, prevented a single national racial flashpoint. The conflict continued underneath the larger travails of the country. And then the successful Civil Right movement began with Brown versus Board and Harry T. Moore and Rosa Parks and peaked in the 60s. The backlash brought us the Drug War on black neighborhoods, mass incarceration of people of color, and white flight from integration and national institutions.
If you doubt me, listen to what John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon’s top domestic policy advisor, had to say about the Drug War.
“You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This was and is the point of the Drug War that Polk Sheriff Grady Judd believes in so fervently today.
Obama/Trump
A generation after that, the black American voting power won in the Civil Rights era (minus that prevented by mass incarceration) combined with Hispanic voting power to deliver Barack Obama as president. Rather than violently revolt against their ongoing historical treatment — which would be completely justified — black America yet again honorably chose participation in American democracy. You’ve seen the backlash.
White Republicans have done everything they can to render that democratic action illegitimate and prevent black and Hispanic people from voting. It’s morally disgusting. Virtually every white Republican I know has fought the black agency that Obama represents with as much moral bad faith as their great grandparents in the 20s.
You fought Obama on many things you actually support. Just because. You’ve enabled a political coalition that wants to give Donald Trump or Ted Cruz power. You shout “All Lives Matter” because you can’t stand the morally resonant sting of the people who created “Black Lives Matter.”
The point of studying history
So take a look at this picture again.
I see sorrow and comfort in those lines.
Ten years ago, I would have seen neither because I wouldn’t have understood what I was looking at. I didn’t know much about my country then, even though I wrote about elements of its government for a living.
Ten years ago I would have looked at the rise of Trump — and his white reparations coalition with bewildered bafflement. I would have seen nothing but national decay and decline in it. I would have seen a betrayal of American values. And I would have been wrong. I know better now.
Four years ago, I had a much better handle. But I still would have missed something. I would have seen the diminishing peaks of the spikes as evidence of “progress.” And I’m not entirely sure that’s wrong.
But it fails to reckon with the two giant spikes of American state violence that would rocket off this page if included: the Civil War itself and mass incarceration. These two explosions of state violence bookended Jim Crow — one earned freedom on a mass scale, one took it away. The social symmetry is sort of breathtaking.
And it also suggests that the predictable Obama/Trump cycle is playing out in an unpredictable new context.
Rather than decay, it suggests something new: explicitly white political coalition versus an explicitly multi-racial coalition. We’ve never had that before in America. I don’t know how it will play out. And I doubt I can affect it meaningfully. But I know what side I’m on — the one that wants to kill Caliban and make America great.