What's Tony Thinking

One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This

“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 this 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 phrase and title at the same time as  I was reading Tim Egan’s 2023 book on the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s, a movement of which I was ignorant until reading 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. 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 1920’s a handful of very gutsy people including a gadfly journalist, a 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 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 more clear, with each passing day and each new outrage, that we are living in that time.