Or, why did so many late 20th C. Americans feel like we had to give a pass to historical figures who committed their lives to undermining the foundational values we claimed the US stood for?
As someone born in 1974 in rural Central Ohio, my lived experience echos yours remarkably well. The town I grew up in was 90% white with a high union membership, and it voted 80% in favor of Trump in 2016. The widespread Confederate/fascist apologia of our youth means it took me until 1995 to start to question why my hometown looked the way it did, and why locals were so angry about union jobs going away after 12 years of Republicans in the Oval Office.
I believe my introduction to American memory culture was similar to yours.
Lindbergh Terminal was so named (around 1960) because Lindbergh grew up in Minnesota. Now called just Terminal 1, according to the airport's website. As a school child in central Minnesota I took a field trip to Lindbergh's house. I assume kids are still doing that. The Minnesota Historical Society webpage for the house does treat his "flawed" and "complex character", but emphasizes his aviation exploits.
I’m from Ireland and immigrated here aged almost 42, 22 years ago. I was aware of the very ‘seedy’ side of Lindbergh for quite some time and it never ceased to intrigue me having his name on that terminal every time I flew through there.
I was born in the late 1970s and raised in Jefferson Davis’ hometown. This is a basically fair and accurate portrait of a local museum where we took many, many field trips:
We talked a lot in my history classes--all at decently integrated public schools, not seg academies--about the major Civil War battle that marked our town’s history. We talked not at all about the Reconstruction era massacre that happened approximately 12 years later and became a defining incident in the “redemption” of Mississippi from having to try to be a multi-racial democracy.
Accordingly, I didn’t find your post solipsistic at all. It’s a faithful reflection of how popular American history was being made until very recently.
I grew up in the 1950s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so my experience was the flip side of yours. When my dad was in his 80s, he astonished me by casually remarking that back in the 30s, almost all my parents’ friends had been socialists or communists. Growing up, I’d never had a clue, but I’ve since concluded that their generation of New York Jews were scared shitless by the Rosenberg trial and by McCarthyism in general and were doing their best to hide their pasts. The overt antisemitism of the 1930s, which people like my parents remembered vividly and which my father definitely expected to return, was not just a historical footnote by the 50s but a looming shadow that kept those who could have named and shamed the fascists from speaking out.
Great point...McCarthyism definitely was a major factor in disincentivizing people from speaking out against those far right anti-communists lest they be accused of being Communists themselves. I also think you're right that many 2nd and 3rd generation Jews in the post-war era were keen to avoid being associated with leftist politics in the name of assimilating into the dominant white culture. There were a few distant relatives in my family who had reputations for being leftists and who, from what I understand (this was before I was born), were kind of ostracized because people thought they would reflect badly on the family.
This is truly fantastic. You write very well and convey incredibly interesting historical information that is often quite shocking given how overlooked it has typically been. Fr Coughlin is someone I’ve known about for some time and as my son and his wife & daughter live in Royal Oak it’s something I remind them of frequently. Thanks for the article, which I’ve shared with family members, and the pointer to Rachel Maddow’s new book.
I was born in Idaho in 1954. My public school experience was not unlike yours. On how Americans do their corporate remembering: I remember both being taught in the mid-60s the "states rights not slavery" version of the Confederacy, but ALSO that McCarthyism was totally bad, blacklisting was bad - because as citizens of the exceptional country that America is, that we all believed in free speech etc. This. In a state where certainly 15 years earlier the majority had been supporters of Joe McCarthy.
There's really a bizarre tendency to smooth over big conflicts (and eliminate facts in the process) to maintain a story of unity (unity of a particular dominant-culture-is-always-both-good-and-right sort of way). At the same time, I remember watching all the World War 2 movies and other cultural stuff which entirely showed the Germans/Nazis in a cartoonish & inexplicable way. A way that was dissociated from their origins or the dynamics of how they got there. Later studying sources about the 30s & 40s in Germany, the thing that was most disturbing to me, was that they resembled less the images in the movies, and more what I saw in various facets of America. (I worked at the largest theological library in the U.S. which had extraordinary sources in German theology, including ecclesiastical stuff. This includes church magazines from the Deutsche Christen, the pro-Hitler majority faction of the German church -- these are hardly available anywhere. The shocking thing was how banal they truly were--almost identical to American church magazines of the period, except for the occasional picture of the Fuhrer accompanied by admiring articles)
I think that inaccuracy in remembering the Nazis is an important part of forgetting the uncomfortable fascist history in the U.S. After all, it's important that we're always the good guys.
This was a fascinating piece that really resonated with me. I grew up in suburban Los Angeles in the 60's-70's. My par
ents were so conservative I remember going to a Nixon rally in San Clemente when we were on a family vacation! Around Middle School I started questioning and was nearly expelled because I dared question why the school newspaper referred to sports teams as either "girls" or "mens". Thank you for filling in more detail. Actually going to see Rachel Maddow tonight in San Francisco!
Seeing "laetrile" triggered the memory of the mother of my fourth grade best friend, a rabid John Birch Society member who always wore a gold DAR medallion. I remember her pushing laetrile and now I know a bit of the genesis of her obsession.
And while my grandad and granny had some virulently racist views, he was an Oldsmobile man, not a Ford man, so there's that, at least!
This is so good! I’ve been following you for a little while now and everything you write is so incredibly relatable to my own experience. It’s been quite cathartic to read your stuff.
I grew up in Metairie, Louisiana, the town that elected David Duke into Congress in the late 80s. My dad was a silent generation pro-life activist but he didn’t like Duke much. However my older siblings did, and they weren’t shy about why.
Racism was so commonplace and so unguarded in my upbringing that when I was finally exposed to the outside world (college age) I was *surprised* that anyone thought “racism was a thing of the past.” I understood it to be taboo, sure, but I also knew better than to dismiss it as ‘fringe’ or a ‘joke.’
Very curious, have published anything on Leander Perez? If he’s not on your radar he should be. If you have I’d love to read it!
Thanks for those kind words. I'm familiar with Leander, but haven't written anything about him. Metarie comes up a lot in Huss's archive because there was a white supremacist org based there called "Sons of Liberty" from whom he received a lot of reading material. He was also a big fan of David Duke's in the late 80s and early 90s. Another Louisiana politician he respected (who you've probably heard of) was John Rarick.
It’s a little nuts how little is discussed about Judge Perez, because he was a towering figure in Louisiana politics for decades. He was essentially the Joe Arpaio of his day, only way more powerful, and he went much further in his rhetoric and actions that Arpaio, believe it or not. He was actually ex-communicated from the Catholic Church in the 60’s over his civil rights violations, only to be posthumously re-instated on request from his family—after which he was given an enormous funeral that took up entire city blocks, attended by thousands.
Soon after, they named a major highway after him. I can tell you, most people in Louisiana have no idea who he was, or if they do, they don’t remember him as a lifelong unrepentant racist—just that he was a small town sheriff, and that his family are good Catholics who never hurt nobody.
Also, John Rarick, holy cow, what a peach. I’m familiar with the name, but he was a little before my time (I was born in 78). There’s a NYT piece from 1971 about his antisemitic rants in Congress. It’s impressive in how blunt and plain the language they use is. But as we know, in America, the occasional critical NYT article is no match for America’s ongoing right-wing historical/memory culture.
GLK Smith is barely mentioned in T. Harry Williams’s biography “Huey Long”. He appears a handful of times in 900 pages, and is only substantially covered on two (pp 699-700 in my edition), where the last line is “Huey finally decided, in 1935, that he would have to fire Smith.” (More from a sense that Smith was getting more personally ambitious than Long cared for than any of his views.) Some accounts I’ve read say Smith claimed to be with Long when he was shot, but he’s not mentioned in Williams’s account. Then again, Smith’s antisemitism is not mentioned at all by Williams.
One connection to this week comes to mind: the GOP House members voting against Gym Jordan receiving death threats. I don't recall any of them expressing much concern about death threats or actual physical attacks on others. They've certainly dismissed these actions as coming from the fringe and better to be ignored, until they became the targets
Seriously? How can you now complain about, say, a right-wing media figure being given airtime when you celebrate a terrorist assault which killed 1200 people? How do you pass moral judgement on anything without being massive hypocrites?
Neither the Democratic party, nor I, nor anyone commenting here has endorsed Hamas. That was the point of the request for a citation. The post you are commenting on had nothing to do with Hamas. You are perfectly free to chase Hamas-loving monsters put into your head by the media you consume (or perhaps just conjured up by your own imagination), but I'd appreciate it if you didn't do your monster hunting here, where the goal is to speak with accuracy and insight about the past.
I'm sorry you don't understand the concept of a citation. That means you should point out where I, or the Democratic Party, celebrated the actions of a terrorist organization. Because claiming that that happened, without evidence, is a dick move. Not sure what you think will happen on that date you mentioned, except for Biden being re-elected and Trump watching from the jail cell he'll be sitting in. Cheers.
I should have remembered the restoration of citizenship for Davis, although in my defense I was probably stoned at the time. But we do have a long history of authoritarian right wingers in power and "liberals" caving in to their wishes.
This makes me think of living in DC and the absurdity of seeing buildings every day named for people who shouldn't be memorialized. Reagan is a big example, but also Dulles, and I'm sure many more. Every once in a while I'll read a little history and realize that naming buildings for politicians and other historical figures goes a huge way toward normalizing them. Many (myself included) would think "they must have done something good to be honored in such a way".
As someone born in 1974 in rural Central Ohio, my lived experience echos yours remarkably well. The town I grew up in was 90% white with a high union membership, and it voted 80% in favor of Trump in 2016. The widespread Confederate/fascist apologia of our youth means it took me until 1995 to start to question why my hometown looked the way it did, and why locals were so angry about union jobs going away after 12 years of Republicans in the Oval Office.
I believe my introduction to American memory culture was similar to yours.
Lindbergh Terminal was so named (around 1960) because Lindbergh grew up in Minnesota. Now called just Terminal 1, according to the airport's website. As a school child in central Minnesota I took a field trip to Lindbergh's house. I assume kids are still doing that. The Minnesota Historical Society webpage for the house does treat his "flawed" and "complex character", but emphasizes his aviation exploits.
https://www.mnhs.org/lindbergh/learn/controversies
I’m from Ireland and immigrated here aged almost 42, 22 years ago. I was aware of the very ‘seedy’ side of Lindbergh for quite some time and it never ceased to intrigue me having his name on that terminal every time I flew through there.
I was born in the late 1970s and raised in Jefferson Davis’ hometown. This is a basically fair and accurate portrait of a local museum where we took many, many field trips:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/10/18/1707583/-Photo-Diary-The-Vicksburg-MS-Old-Courthouse-Museum
We talked a lot in my history classes--all at decently integrated public schools, not seg academies--about the major Civil War battle that marked our town’s history. We talked not at all about the Reconstruction era massacre that happened approximately 12 years later and became a defining incident in the “redemption” of Mississippi from having to try to be a multi-racial democracy.
Accordingly, I didn’t find your post solipsistic at all. It’s a faithful reflection of how popular American history was being made until very recently.
I grew up in the 1950s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so my experience was the flip side of yours. When my dad was in his 80s, he astonished me by casually remarking that back in the 30s, almost all my parents’ friends had been socialists or communists. Growing up, I’d never had a clue, but I’ve since concluded that their generation of New York Jews were scared shitless by the Rosenberg trial and by McCarthyism in general and were doing their best to hide their pasts. The overt antisemitism of the 1930s, which people like my parents remembered vividly and which my father definitely expected to return, was not just a historical footnote by the 50s but a looming shadow that kept those who could have named and shamed the fascists from speaking out.
Great point...McCarthyism definitely was a major factor in disincentivizing people from speaking out against those far right anti-communists lest they be accused of being Communists themselves. I also think you're right that many 2nd and 3rd generation Jews in the post-war era were keen to avoid being associated with leftist politics in the name of assimilating into the dominant white culture. There were a few distant relatives in my family who had reputations for being leftists and who, from what I understand (this was before I was born), were kind of ostracized because people thought they would reflect badly on the family.
This is truly fantastic. You write very well and convey incredibly interesting historical information that is often quite shocking given how overlooked it has typically been. Fr Coughlin is someone I’ve known about for some time and as my son and his wife & daughter live in Royal Oak it’s something I remind them of frequently. Thanks for the article, which I’ve shared with family members, and the pointer to Rachel Maddow’s new book.
I was born in Idaho in 1954. My public school experience was not unlike yours. On how Americans do their corporate remembering: I remember both being taught in the mid-60s the "states rights not slavery" version of the Confederacy, but ALSO that McCarthyism was totally bad, blacklisting was bad - because as citizens of the exceptional country that America is, that we all believed in free speech etc. This. In a state where certainly 15 years earlier the majority had been supporters of Joe McCarthy.
There's really a bizarre tendency to smooth over big conflicts (and eliminate facts in the process) to maintain a story of unity (unity of a particular dominant-culture-is-always-both-good-and-right sort of way). At the same time, I remember watching all the World War 2 movies and other cultural stuff which entirely showed the Germans/Nazis in a cartoonish & inexplicable way. A way that was dissociated from their origins or the dynamics of how they got there. Later studying sources about the 30s & 40s in Germany, the thing that was most disturbing to me, was that they resembled less the images in the movies, and more what I saw in various facets of America. (I worked at the largest theological library in the U.S. which had extraordinary sources in German theology, including ecclesiastical stuff. This includes church magazines from the Deutsche Christen, the pro-Hitler majority faction of the German church -- these are hardly available anywhere. The shocking thing was how banal they truly were--almost identical to American church magazines of the period, except for the occasional picture of the Fuhrer accompanied by admiring articles)
I think that inaccuracy in remembering the Nazis is an important part of forgetting the uncomfortable fascist history in the U.S. After all, it's important that we're always the good guys.
This was a fascinating piece that really resonated with me. I grew up in suburban Los Angeles in the 60's-70's. My par
ents were so conservative I remember going to a Nixon rally in San Clemente when we were on a family vacation! Around Middle School I started questioning and was nearly expelled because I dared question why the school newspaper referred to sports teams as either "girls" or "mens". Thank you for filling in more detail. Actually going to see Rachel Maddow tonight in San Francisco!
Oof, the knowledge blindness.
Seeing "laetrile" triggered the memory of the mother of my fourth grade best friend, a rabid John Birch Society member who always wore a gold DAR medallion. I remember her pushing laetrile and now I know a bit of the genesis of her obsession.
And while my grandad and granny had some virulently racist views, he was an Oldsmobile man, not a Ford man, so there's that, at least!
This is so good! I’ve been following you for a little while now and everything you write is so incredibly relatable to my own experience. It’s been quite cathartic to read your stuff.
I grew up in Metairie, Louisiana, the town that elected David Duke into Congress in the late 80s. My dad was a silent generation pro-life activist but he didn’t like Duke much. However my older siblings did, and they weren’t shy about why.
Racism was so commonplace and so unguarded in my upbringing that when I was finally exposed to the outside world (college age) I was *surprised* that anyone thought “racism was a thing of the past.” I understood it to be taboo, sure, but I also knew better than to dismiss it as ‘fringe’ or a ‘joke.’
Very curious, have published anything on Leander Perez? If he’s not on your radar he should be. If you have I’d love to read it!
Thanks for those kind words. I'm familiar with Leander, but haven't written anything about him. Metarie comes up a lot in Huss's archive because there was a white supremacist org based there called "Sons of Liberty" from whom he received a lot of reading material. He was also a big fan of David Duke's in the late 80s and early 90s. Another Louisiana politician he respected (who you've probably heard of) was John Rarick.
It’s a little nuts how little is discussed about Judge Perez, because he was a towering figure in Louisiana politics for decades. He was essentially the Joe Arpaio of his day, only way more powerful, and he went much further in his rhetoric and actions that Arpaio, believe it or not. He was actually ex-communicated from the Catholic Church in the 60’s over his civil rights violations, only to be posthumously re-instated on request from his family—after which he was given an enormous funeral that took up entire city blocks, attended by thousands.
Soon after, they named a major highway after him. I can tell you, most people in Louisiana have no idea who he was, or if they do, they don’t remember him as a lifelong unrepentant racist—just that he was a small town sheriff, and that his family are good Catholics who never hurt nobody.
Also, John Rarick, holy cow, what a peach. I’m familiar with the name, but he was a little before my time (I was born in 78). There’s a NYT piece from 1971 about his antisemitic rants in Congress. It’s impressive in how blunt and plain the language they use is. But as we know, in America, the occasional critical NYT article is no match for America’s ongoing right-wing historical/memory culture.
Keep up the great work!
GLK Smith is barely mentioned in T. Harry Williams’s biography “Huey Long”. He appears a handful of times in 900 pages, and is only substantially covered on two (pp 699-700 in my edition), where the last line is “Huey finally decided, in 1935, that he would have to fire Smith.” (More from a sense that Smith was getting more personally ambitious than Long cared for than any of his views.) Some accounts I’ve read say Smith claimed to be with Long when he was shot, but he’s not mentioned in Williams’s account. Then again, Smith’s antisemitism is not mentioned at all by Williams.
Your work on these essays is exceptionally valuable, sir.
One connection to this week comes to mind: the GOP House members voting against Gym Jordan receiving death threats. I don't recall any of them expressing much concern about death threats or actual physical attacks on others. They've certainly dismissed these actions as coming from the fringe and better to be ignored, until they became the targets
Yeah, no. The Democratic party's endorsement of Hamas and its actions removes whatever moral high ground you ever had to stand on.
[citation needed]
Seriously? How can you now complain about, say, a right-wing media figure being given airtime when you celebrate a terrorist assault which killed 1200 people? How do you pass moral judgement on anything without being massive hypocrites?
You'll get your citation on 11/5/24...
Neither the Democratic party, nor I, nor anyone commenting here has endorsed Hamas. That was the point of the request for a citation. The post you are commenting on had nothing to do with Hamas. You are perfectly free to chase Hamas-loving monsters put into your head by the media you consume (or perhaps just conjured up by your own imagination), but I'd appreciate it if you didn't do your monster hunting here, where the goal is to speak with accuracy and insight about the past.
I'm sorry you don't understand the concept of a citation. That means you should point out where I, or the Democratic Party, celebrated the actions of a terrorist organization. Because claiming that that happened, without evidence, is a dick move. Not sure what you think will happen on that date you mentioned, except for Biden being re-elected and Trump watching from the jail cell he'll be sitting in. Cheers.
I should have remembered the restoration of citizenship for Davis, although in my defense I was probably stoned at the time. But we do have a long history of authoritarian right wingers in power and "liberals" caving in to their wishes.
This makes me think of living in DC and the absurdity of seeing buildings every day named for people who shouldn't be memorialized. Reagan is a big example, but also Dulles, and I'm sure many more. Every once in a while I'll read a little history and realize that naming buildings for politicians and other historical figures goes a huge way toward normalizing them. Many (myself included) would think "they must have done something good to be honored in such a way".