“One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This” is the title of a new book by Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian journalist and novelist. His title has in view the Israeli war in Gaza. But his compelling line is one that has multiple resonances today.
El Akkad’s phrase suggests the way people can be swept up in something that violates any normal sense of right and wrong or human decency, but they go along because at the time it has become socially acceptable to do so. Then at some point the spell is broken and it turns out “everyone” was against it all along.
I came across El Akkad’s memorable line and title as I was reading Tim Egan’s 2023 book on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, a movement of which I was ignorant until reading Egan’s Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and The Woman Who Stopped Them. I had pegged the Klan to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and to the Jim Crow South. But the story it tells is a different one. It is of the Klan’s rapid growth in “The Roaring Twenties” in the Midwest, in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, but principally in Indiana. (And, sadly, for this Oregonian, Oregon was also a state that had a large KKK movement in this period.)
The Klan’s explosive growth in this period was led by a gifted conman, D. C. Stephenson, who was also a vicious sexual predator. The latter proved his undoing. But what is striking about the story Egan tells is how pervasive the Klan became in Indiana as it identified itself as protecting “the American way of life.” Its racism and violence were dressed up in “motherhood and apple pie,” with the Klan presenting itself as a group for civic uplift. Members included the Governor, mayors, judges, bank presidents, clergy, and in many towns virtually all of the police force. “Everyone,” it seemed was on-board . . . until they weren’t. After Stephenson was found guilty of the murder of Madge Oberholtzer in Indiana and another trial in Pennsylvania exposed other Klan leaders, the Klan declined as rapidly as it has risen. The story was hushed up and soon “everyone was always against this.”
Towards the end of his story Egan quotes the Hoosier writer, Meredith Nicholson, who in retrospect asked, “Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages so many Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?” In hindsight it seemed absurd and inexplicable. But at the time, in the moment, it enlisted thousands of Hoosiers in a web so pervasive that Stephenson could credibly boast that in Indiana, “I am the law.”
Nicholson’s question, with alterations, seems apt for our own time. It might be rephrased, “Isn’t it strange that with our proud heritage as a democracy and with the values enshrined in our Bill of Rights, Americans we are now willing to elect as a President a man who neither understands nor respects any of that?” How has it come to a point where due process is out the window, where historic allies are gratuitously alienated, where de-facto alliances are made with mass murders and war-criminals, and where cruel and heedless displays of dominance and retribution have replaced any sense of decency or magnanimity?
In Indiana in the 1920s a handful of very gutsy people including a gadfly journalist, an oddball lawyer, a brave rabbi, an African-American doctor who refused to be cowed, a jury of 12 men (which included several Klan members), and most of all, a strong and independent young woman, Madge Oberholtzer, brought down the Klan. A plaque in Noblesville, Indiana reads, “A jury of Hamilton County citizens convicted Ku Klux Klan leader D. C. Stephenson in this building in November 1925 for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. The outcome of the trial resulted in the rapid decline of the heretofore powerful Klan influence in state government.”
You can almost hear, in that second sentence, the whole thing being swept under the rug. For by then, well, “everyone had always been against this.” And yet as Egan’s account makes clear that wasn’t really the case. Quite the opposite in fact.
Will the Trumpian spell, with its disregard for all that Americans once held sacred, be at some point broken? Will there come a day when, “Everyone will always have been against this?”
When I was a kid it was common, for reasons I never knew, that if you were testing out a typewriter or exhibiting your keyboard skills you would bang out “Now is the time for all good men (sic) to come to the aid of their country.” It is becoming ever clearer, with each passing day and each new outrage, that we are living in that time.
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There was a similar phenomenon in France after WWII. “Everyone” remembered that they or some close family member had been a member of The Resistance, yet during the war itself collaboration was the norm.
Nobody voted for Nixon.
We have to hope that all will come to the aid of the country. But, to set the record straight, the phrase we typewriter jockeys typed was “Now is the time for all good men (sic) to come to the aid of the party.” The original idea was test all the letters in the alphabet. At this time, ‘country’ seems the better choice. Sorry to nitpick a good thought.
There were three Klan periods – the reconstruction, the ’20s and the post-war. Their mistake was the secrecy. That allowed it to get too hard-core too fast, and it allowed adherents to easily turn away before they’re found out. The MAGA thing doesn’t have that problem, it’s working right out in the open, and with every little outrage its adherents become a little more calloused, corrupted bit by bit while their sense of righteousness is only inflamed by the conflict vs. their collective identity.
The periodic recurrence of the Klan phenomenon tells us how integral a part of America this is, and now they’ve found a successful way to wield it and are working hard at that.
They’re smarter than they look, but not by a lot, and that may be our only hope. Many of the elements of this don’t just seem toxic to others, they really are toxic, to the intellect. Denial, faith in things that obviously aren’t true, moral rigidity, opposition to science, etc. We stumbled and now we’re ruled by the stupid, but we should have the advantage, if we can rule ourselves to use it.