Last Gasps of the ‘White’ Man

He has a complicated history when it comes to slavery – married into a slave-owning family and eventually purchasing a human himself. However, Ulysses S. Grant’s words on the issue resonate today as America reckons with its systemic racism.

Commanding general of the Union Army during the Civil War and afterward President of the United States, the unassuming Grant is an enigmatic figure, largely misunderstood; remembered mostly for being a drunken general and a hapless president with a corrupt administration. He was not perfect in either role, but, to the contrary, neither was he inept or corrupt. 

 

As general, he understood his Confederate opponents, their strengths and weaknesses, and confounded them with risk-taking strategies that often won the battle. He refused the surrender of Confederate officers unless they released their slaves. As president, he advocated for the 15^th Amendment that gave African Americans the right to vote, created the U.S. Department of Justice, which fought the Ku Klux Klan, and the agency that is today’s National Weather Service.    

In September of 1875, President Grant appeared in Iowa for a gathering of about 200 members of the Army of the Tennessee, the former band of Union soldiers named for the Tennessee River who fought under Major-General Grant during the Civil War.

 

Grant said to the veterans, “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” 

 

The very contest that he predicted began almost immediately after the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 with cries of “the South will rise again” and rise of the Klan. Fear, ignorance and ambition has bedeviled society and politics since; duly elected officials of all stripes and station have sought to deny African Americas the rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution.

 

Since the war ended 157 years ago, some “historians” have framed the Confederate’s lost cause as a “states’ rights” issue rather than a slavery issue. The Constitution grants states the power to govern at the local level; not create a confederacy and wage war. According to legal historian Paul Finkelman, Southern states seceded because free states exercised “their states’ rights in opposing slavery.”

 

In its purity and essence, the Confederacy was about slavery, the economic system that provided cheap labor to enrich already wealthy landowners. The men who led the sedition, and the generals who fought for the cause under the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars flag, were traitors to the nation they once swore oaths to defend—against enemies, foreign and domestic. 

 

General Grant at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1864.

As an Ohioan from an abolitionist home, Grant understood that President Lincoln’s reason for war was foremost to keep the nation, North and South, whole; Lincoln knew the union of the state could not survive with slavery. 

 

Grant himself was ambivalent about slavery, he stood neither for nor against it. Much to Grant’s abolitionist parents’ dismay, his wife’s family believed, righteously, in owning humans. Some of those slaves helped build their home, during which Grant worked alongside them, treating them as his equal, which his in-laws and neighbors sorely disapproved. A year before the Civil War, Grant’s father-in-law sold him one slave, 35-year-old William Jones, who Grant freed before the outbreak of hostilities. 

 

In 1862, the war’s second year, Lincoln issued a presidential decree, which changed the legal status of slaves to free. Many of them fled north to enlist in the Union Army because of the Emancipation Proclamation’s promise. The decree hardened the Confederate’s resolve to fight for an institution that never benefitted the average Southerner. 

 

In his memoir, penned shortly before his death in 1885, Grant wrote, “The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country. Their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.” 

Confederate dead on the battlefield at Antietam

In September of 1875, President Grant appeared in Iowa for a gathering of about 200 members of the Army of the Tennessee, the former band of Union soldiers named for the Tennessee River who fought under Major-General Grant during the Civil War.

 

Grant said to the veterans, “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” 

 

The very contest that he predicted began almost immediately after the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 with cries of “the South will rise again” and rise of the Klan. Fear, ignorance and ambition has bedeviled society and politics since; duly elected officials of all stripes and station have sought to deny African Americas the rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution.

 

Since the war ended 157 years ago, some “historians” have framed the Confederate’s lost cause as a “states’ rights” issue rather than a slavery issue. The Constitution grants states the power to govern at the local level; not create a confederacy and wage war. According to legal historian Paul Finkelman, Southern states seceded because free states exercised “their states’ rights in opposing slavery.”

 

In its purity and essence, the Confederacy was about slavery, the economic system that provided cheap labor to enrich already wealthy landowners. The men who led the sedition, and the generals who fought for the cause under the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars flag, were traitors to the nation they once swore oaths to defend—against enemies, foreign and domestic. 

 

As an Ohioan from an abolitionist home, Grant understood that President Lincoln’s reason for war was foremost to keep the nation, North and South, whole; Lincoln knew the union of the state could not survive with slavery. 

 

Grant himself was ambivalent about slavery, he stood neither for nor against it. Much to Grant’s abolitionist parents’ dismay, his wife’s family believed, righteously, in owning humans. Some of those slaves helped build their home, during which Grant worked alongside them, treating them as his equal, which his in-laws and neighbors sorely disapproved. A year before the Civil War, Grant’s father-in-law sold him one slave, 35-year-old William Jones, who Grant freed before the outbreak of hostilities. 

 

In 1862, the war’s second year, Lincoln issued a presidential decree, which changed the legal status of slaves to free. Many of them fled north to enlist in the Union Army because of the Emancipation Proclamation’s promise. The decree hardened the Confederate’s resolve to fight for an institution that never benefitted the average Southerner. 

 

In his memoir, penned shortly before his death in 1885, Grant wrote, “The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country. Their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.” 

Interestingly, the socio-economic status of the Southerners that Grant described sounds similar to many of former President Donald Trump’s core white supporters. On election night 2016, the Republican declared, “We won the evangelicals, we won with young, we won with old, we won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated! I love the poorly educated.”

 

Trump exploits the ignorance and fears his poorly educated supporters have of the 21^st century’s whirlwind of social, economic and technologic change that have left them, particularly those who are white, no longer feeling that sense on invulnerability they once could rely on, even if it was always an illusion. Their ignorance leads them to believe in non-existent racial superiorities and unfathomable, but dangerous, conspiracy theories. Remember Pizzagate?

 

Trump’s narrow election win that year was not by popular ballot, where Democrat Hilary Clinton won with 2.8 million more votes, but by the Electoral College, where about 78,000 voters in three white counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin handed it to him, according to data scientist Hamdan Azhar and the Cook Political Report. The Electoral College, by the way, was formed in part so slave-holding states could have equal representation because roughly 40 percent of the South’s population was comprised of slaves who, of course, could not vote. 

 

Trump’s four years as president sharpened racial tensions stoked by his social media rants on Twitter and rally speeches: increased killings by police of innocent African Americans and Hispanics, voter suppression in Republican strongholds, a ban on Muslims who seek to enter the country, separating Central and South American immigrant children from their parents, gassing peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors, a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. during which a white supremacists killed a white woman activist, and on. 

Trump’s divisiveness emboldened some of his gun-toting racist, anti-Semitic supporters to attack non-whites and non-Christian whites. As they did in 2016, the Klan again endorsed him in 2020.

 

Trump’s election in 2016, the subsequent increase in white supremacist organizations and activities, and the insurrection by his (predominantly) white supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 that followed his defeat for a second term in both the popular and Electoral College vote—all dying gasps from a white cohort that believes whites should always dominate American society.

 

This misguided belief that the United States is reserved for white European descendants to rule socially and politically was diminished by Democrat Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump, 51.3% to 46.9%, in 2020. 

 

Nonetheless, it remains a dangerous belief in the minds of a minority of white voters. Since the 2020 election, just nine months ago, predominantly white conservative Republicans in GOP-controlled states such as Georgia, which Biden won narrowly and where Democrats took two U.S. Senate seats (one of them Georgia’s first African American senator), are gulping for air as they take extraordinary steps to pass one bill after another to suppress minority voters. 

 

Like elections, legislation has consequences. Enacting restrictive-voting laws is one thing, but put into practice, these laws could have an unintended consequence such as suppressing the vote for everyone, not just minority voters. Nevertheless, voting reform legislation now under debate in Congress should nullify some of the worst impulses of these state laws to ensure voting his accessible and fair for everyone. 

 

White supremacy was never a general view of the Founding Fathers, although 17 of them owned slaves as did the nation’s first 12 presidents. However, they affirmed unequivocally that “all [people] men are created equal.” Despite this aspiration, racism has eaten away at the American soul for well over 200 years.

Black Lives Matter protestors in Ohio in 2020.

A rude awakening awaits—within 10 years, demographic changes in the nation will cause about a 4% decline in the white majority (this does not include Hispanic or Latino), from about 59.7% to 55.8%. By 2045, the white population is expected to become a minority.

 

The cry of “The South will rise again!” seemed possible not too long ago: Confederate flags flew from the capitol buildings of Southern states, U.S. military bases were named after Confederate generals, and across the South (not to mention parts of the north and west) stone and bronze edifices had been erected to honor slave owners, politicians and generals of the Confederacy. 

 

Despite Trump’s attempts to stop this movement last year, flags and monuments came down; Mississippi’s governor signed legislation to take down their Stars and Bars, and in Richmond, once the capital of the Confederacy, protestors toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, while the city’s mayor ordered the removal of other Confederate statues.

 

The military promises to change military base names and the once dismissed Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality became a nationwide and international movement of people of all colors in 2020. In his post-presidency, as he toys with supporters about running for president again in 2024, Trump regretted not sending the military out to stop BLM from protesting, no doubt some red meat for his white supremacist supporters. 

 

That Trump decided not to issue the order is telling on two levels. First, the nation’s military leaders, in particular Gen. Mark Milley, told Trump BLM protests against racism were just that, protests, not an insurrection. That made him aware that “his generals” would not follow his order. Second, Americans of all color are standing up to what Time Magazine called the “Overdue Awakening” to systemic racism. 

 

Grant, despite having crushed the slave-holders’ rebellion, is nonetheless called out not only for owning a slave, but for his treatment of Jews during the Civil War and for waging an illegal war against the Plains Indians as president. In San Francisco, protestors toppled his statue. Grant was humble and compassionate. I wonder whether he would have thought.

 

In his memoir, Grant recalled the 1865 meeting at Appomattox, Va. when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to him: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” 

 

This present period in our history may well be the final battle of the Civil War, when a South reckons with its slave-holding history instead of wallowing in a mythical past, and we enter the final days of systemic racism in the United States.

 

 

America’s Endless Nightmare

 More than three weeks ago, after a gunman killed 10 people in a Colorado supermarket, Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney was quoted at a press conference saying, “This is a tragedy and a nightmare for Boulder County.”

Since I started to write this piece, another mass shooting occurred April 16, eight dead at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. Since the year began, more than 12,000 people have died or have been murdered by guns in the United States. In that time, there have been 151 mass shootings that have left 156 killed – including the horrific incidents in Boulder and Indianapolis – and 485 injured. 

 

It’s not just a nightmare for a single community, it’s a nightmare for the nation, and it has been a nightmare since at least the 1980s when the body count from gun violence began to grow to 2021’s epidemic levels.

 

The Boulder DA repeated the same observation made after every mass shooting: “These were people going about their day, doing their shopping.” He repeated the same pledge made after every mass shooting: “I promise the victims and the people of the state of Colorado that we will secure justice.”

 

Yet he knows, as every other law enforcement officer in this country knows, that it’s an empty promise, one law enforcement is unable to fulfill, despite their strongest desires to do so. The dead cannot return to life, to their loved ones. The trauma will linger with those who were injured, as well as the community as a whole, forever.

 

The promise of justice against gun violence is an impossible promise to keep—prosecutors are blocked by weak laws, police are outgunned. This nation, awash in more guns than people, chose long ago to accept the violence wrought by guns as necessary to their safety and the protection of their constitutional right to own a gun.

 

In truth, no matter the number of guns sold nor the number concealed-carry and open-carry and stand-your-grounds laws enacted, no one has been or is safe from gun violence. No one. As long as guns remain unregulated, available any time, any place to anyone, no one safe. 

 

As long as gun makers and their lobbyists help lawmakers craft legal loop holes in regulations, thus ensuring anyone can have as many guns as they want, no one is safe.

 

In truth, neither in the Second Amendment nor anywhere else in the U.S. Constitution are Americans granted the right to own a gun. In fact, there is no mention of the word “gun” in the document. The Second Amendment only entitles the nation – not individuals – to a well regulated Militia (i.e. state and local police forces, the national guard, the military). 

 

The other part of the amendment, the right of the people keep and bear Arms, also does not refer to individuals. In this context, “the people” again refers to the nation. Former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “the people” is an 18^thcentury term of art, used the century the amendment was written, to refer to the military. Scholars believe the founders wanted to ensure diffusion of resources so governors did not have to rely on the federal government to deploy military resources for state emergencies.

 

Yes, scholars also believe the founders wanted individuals to have the right to self-protection, particularly in a new country where most communities did not have a police force.

 

Yet, it’s more than doubtful the founders, including James Madison, the Second Amendment’s author, would agree with today’s status of gun ownership in the 21^st century, where every community has a police force but where the members of some communities have more guns, and more powerful guns, than the police.

 

Nor would they agree with the trade-off—endless violence and random death for the right to “bear arms.” A select group, a minority of individuals, mostly conservative legislators in Congress and state houses across the country who, along with presidents and governors, decided the majority, which poll after poll supports gun control, should live this endless nightmare.

 

Why? For some, their political fortunes are more important; for others, a lack of principle. The common refrain from politicians with the power but not the courage to act is “that’s not a hill I’m willing to die on.”

 

Instead, they have left their county to die on that hill for no other reason than their fear of telling their constituents the truth and fighting for the nation’s welfare. We live in a democracy. The majority should rule. With guns, it’s the gun makers and their political arms, the National Rifle Association and The Gun Owners of America, who rule. Everyone else be damned. 

 

For more than half a century, the NRA and GOA have perpetuated a lie that guns keep people safe. That lie created America’s endless nightmare: routine mass shootings and, after decades of inaction, a body count of 1.5 million that is climbing every week.

 

As I close this piece on Sunday, April 18, two days since the last mass shooting, another has occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Three dead. Three injured. 

 

No one is safe.

It Happened Here

On a bitterly cold February night in 1939, as Adolf Hitler prepared to launch the Second World War in September of that year, an estimated 20,000 Americans filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden for a rally organized by the pro-Hitler German American Bund.

In the 1930s, the Bund was the most influential of the pro-Nazi German groups, which included the Christian Front, a far-right organization inspired by Father Charles Coughlin, a priest with a nationwide radio broadcast to voice anti-Semitic views and fascist sympathies. 

Since 1922, when Italy became the world’s first fascist-run nation, fascism has had appeal in some quarters. A decade later, fascism replaced democracies in Germany, Japan and Spain while fascist organizations emerged in other European and Asian nations. 

 

In the Great Depression era, with tens of millions of Americans struggling to find work and feed their families, many feared fascism would eventually grip the United States. Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian novel, “It Could Happen Here,” was about a U.S. dictator’s rise to power in much the same way Hitler rose to power in once democratic Germany.

Indeed, many wealthy Republicans suspected the president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, of being a wannabe dictator because his New Deal policies that he designed to help lift the nation out of its economic depression included increasing their taxes. 

 

Despite American fears of fascism, which competed for their fears of communism, the Madison Square Garden rally, billed as a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” did not lead to a massive turnout of fascist supporters ready to storm the nation’s capital. 

 

Nonetheless, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a short, fireplug of a man known as “The Little Flower,” dispatched a law-enforcement army to ensure order: 1,700 uniformed police patrolled outside the Garden with 35 firefighters, armed with high-powered hoses; 600 undercover detectives and non-uniformed officers circulated inside.

 

La Guardia, an unorthodox Republican whose mother was Jewish, was an early, outspoken critic of Hitler. However, after a threat to blow up the rally, bomb squads were dispatched beforehand to check for explosives. The Little Flower was as much concerned with those attending the rally as those opposing it.

 

An estimated 100,000 anti-Nazi protestors gathered outside the Garden as the Bund took to a stage with American flags and a giant image of George Washington as a backdrop. None of the Bund speakers called for the overthrow, violent or otherwise, of the U.S. government.

 

Instead, led by their German-born now naturalized U.S. citizen, Bundersfuhrer Fritz Julius Kuhn, they espoused their ideological, anti-Semitic views including suggesting that George Washington, if he were alive, would be pals with Hitler. 

 

“My fellow Christian Americans! It is my privilege to welcome you to this impressive mass demonstration sponsored by the German American Bund,” the Bund’s national secretary, J. Wheeler-Hill said, opening the event. 

 

Wheeler-Hill went on and said, “George Washington, whose birthday we are celebrating today, when bidding farewell to the people, said: “Be united! Be Americans! … I must confess that we are utterly and completely disregarding the admonitions of George Washington today.”

 

One Bund speaker after another extolled the virtues of Nazism in everyday life and finally Kuhn stood to give the keynote address, proclaiming, “We with American ideals demand that our government should be returned to the American people who founded it!”

 

Kuhn said, “If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a socially just, white, Gentile-ruled United States.” 

 

The dramatic moment of the night was when a 26-year-old Jewish man, Isadore Greenbaum, tired of the white supremacist pablum, rushed the stage. He was stopped by Bund members, to a relieved Kuhn, and dragged off by police, somehow losing his pants during the commotion.

 

The violence that did occur, occurred outside the rally between mostly protestors, police and some of the Bund members who were exiting the Garden. About a dozen people were arrested, Greenbaum among them, charged with disorderly conduct.

 

Concern that “It Could Happen Here” dissipated. Within less than two years, the United States would be at war with the world’s fascists powers.

 

Fascism today remains an attractive ideology to some people around the globe. The New York rally in 1939 was neither a social nor historic anomaly for the United States. Kuhn’s idea that America is, and should remain, a white, Christian nation is one that at least half the voters apparently believed then, and apparently believes today. 

 

The violent insurrection in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 was orchestrated by an outgoing U.S. president who throughout his four-year-term demonstrated time and again that he valued authoritarian rule over democratic governance. 

 

Like social media algorithms, Donald Trump appealed to the mobs’ fears and values: the other, whiteness, Christianity—all hard-wired. They already possessed the kindling of fascist tendencies as they stormed the Capitol with their Jesus Saves!, Trump 2020 and American flags.

 

Trump just put a match to it. 

 

It finally happened here.