 Welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host. Thank you very much for joining us. And by us, I mean my guest, Cal Potter, who has, for this program and the next three programs this month, we're gonna be talking about issues that are important to all citizens of this country, was the issues that took place in Virginia and the deaths of an unfortunate person because certain groups wanted to have their right to free speech turned out to be not so free for the person that got beat up and the person that got killed. And so it is important for people in the public to discuss issues when they become serious. And this is a series one, Cal Potter. Yes, it is. Anytime you have people who are subject to violence, we don't have to talk about it. And from my communication with people on this topic and others, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about particularly what has happened after the Civil War and what has happened in the society relatively recently. When we talk about racial equality, the big change that occurred in this country was in the 1960s. I mean, we're talking about 50, 60 years ago. That's not a history of mankind. And a lot of people haven't progressed very much since the 1960s. Unfortunately, I run into a lot of people and I have to bite my tongue sometimes because I know that person or it's a situation where you're sort of a social situation and you don't wanna tell that person, you're as dumb as a box of rocks, you don't know your history, you don't know the situation, but yet you have a big mouth and you can't say that. You like to say it, but you don't. But the only thing you could do is very conservatively try to educate people and have them be aware of the fact that there's a lot going on in why we're in, the both we're in today. Sure. Well, one of the things I wanna do in this week's program is we have about nine white supremacists group in Wisconsin. Three of them are the bigger ones, the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi, then the white supremacists which sort of is part and parcel of a group of them, but there is one that is a little larger. So that when we can remind people that some of the stuff for the citizens is so new they haven't been involved in the, around when the Ku Klux Klan was formed or the neo-Nazis. So let me just start out with the neo-Nazi. This is a group that formed according to the after World War II. And people continued some of the seams that Nazi Germany had, you know, the Jews are bad, you know, the minorities, the handicapped are not. And most of these people that got involved in the neo-Nazi things were never in Germany, never saw the concentration camps. They didn't fight in the war. I know, they just hate people. I mean, because they're whatever reason, they haven't been given a good shake with maybe an education that they could have gotten or good paying jobs and now they're looking to blame Jews and Catholics. Yeah, Jews and Catholics. And this is a common theme that goes way back in our history that when somebody hasn't fared well, they look for a reason other than themselves or the economy where people have most of the money and they call the tunes and the little guy in the bottom can only blame blacks and Jews. So anyway, the neo-Nazi thing, I saw an item in the paper of a political cartoon showing two young people watching TV asking apparently the grandfather, he was sitting in his wheelchair with his World War II hat on and he was saying, oh yeah, I have objected to the Nazis all the way through Europe. I was talking about World War II and willing to stand up and be counted. And so maybe you can add a little bit to this phenomena of the neo-Nazis. Well, they are many times very dysfunctional people. Like you said, low on educational level, have a lot of problems, maybe holding a job and they're looking for a camaraderie in viewpoint that someone else is to blame and they look around the world and they concoct solutions and conclusions that are not based on any fact. We talked today about people who don't like black people because they say, well in the inner city there's crime and there might be poverty and so on. But when we look at why these situations exist, these poverty situations are because we have segregated the society. Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. We don't talk about it, but we oughta. And you look at Ozarki County and Waukesha County and Washington County. Those people are mostly white, a lot of them white flight from the city Part of the cause for the black. And they don't say, they don't give a damn once they get out of the city. And then they say, well Milwaukee gets too much in social service money or they get too much from school aids or too much in shared revenue or whatever it happens to be. Well in many cases, considering the problems that Mayor Barrett has in that city, you oughta have more money to try to address some of these problems so that the people who are impacted most by poverty are given some help. And actually, Mayor Barrett in bringing back the city back to life has done an amazing job with in a sense that he hasn't a lot to work with at times. Just the high unemployment and the violence that takes place, the people, one person family leader and children and I guess they're incompetent. 40% unemployment rate in the University? Yeah, and right across the border is almost nonexistent unemployment and why hasn't our society been able to bring them together so that that mix can take place where some of those individuals that have the skills can benefit from the same benefits that are right across that border. Sure, and you know, the area of discrimination of based on religion, I mean, one of the reasons why a lot of these groups have been at that Catholic is because the initial migration into this country was the Wasps, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants that came from Northern and Western Europe. Later on came the Polish and the Italian Catholics and the Irish Catholics. This very poor people needed to have a place to go because they were very disadvantaged or in case of the Irish starving in death literally and they came in the communities and oftentimes took jobs that were difficult to do. Now it's like Mexicans today oftentimes take difficult jobs. The Washington issue then? Sure, and people look at that and all of a sudden there's a difference in religion, difference in culture and all of a sudden people, they become the scapegoats. You know, you look at Jewish people, for example. They lived, they had a different culture. European culture oftentimes forbade involvement in banking and charging of interest for money. The Jewish community didn't have that prohibition. They got into the financial community and they became the bankers. And so people look at that and say, well, somehow those people are screwing us because they're in that profession. Well, there's a cultural and religious reason why this developed the way it did. So, you know, knowledge is important. The problem is we've got, I see in our society a very high level of civic illiteracy and historical illiteracy. And these people oftentimes in their illiteracy don't know, they don't know. Well, and we have the historic society in the museum and when programs come up to inform, you see some people there but not a lot of people to educate themselves. Let's touch a little bit on the Klu Klux Klan before we run out of time. They began, founded in 1866 shortly after the Civil War. And by 1870, all the Southern states had chapters of the Klu Klux Klan. And they went and suppressed and victimized newly freed slaves and Republicans, people who were in charge shortly after the war. And it became a fight for power. And initially the Klu Klux Klan didn't have the power. And so it was night time and hangings and burnings of crosses. Intimidating blacks that couldn't enslave them. They weren't enslaved anymore, but they needed them. Yeah, they needed them to work and pick cotton in the fields. And yet, if they look at a white woman going by the wrong way, they could be hung the next evening. And that happened because there were times in the south especially later on when the power had shifted where there were hangings almost weekly down in the south. And that was what was reported and not what was not reported, which was probably many more. Well, the American society handled the posts of a war very, very poorly. Right after the war, the Union soldiers did occupy the south, but it wasn't for very long after when Johnson and ensuing presidents just didn't want to do that anymore. So they kind of turned the south back to the south. Right after the war, there were some blacks that were elected to Congress and into public office. And after that, once the Union soldiers and the occupation left, the Southern whites took over again. And the KKK was an example of intimidation to keep back blacks in their place. And then of course, the Arab, the Jim Crow laws, which were separate drinking fountains and separate schools and couldn't vote and all the codified basic... Before you had to pass a difficult test to be able to vote. And if you couldn't read because you didn't have schools, you're likely not been able to vote. Right, and the KKK was something that occurred after the war. But interestingly enough, one of the strongest times was the 1920s under a very conservative political scene under Coolidge, Hoover, and Harding. The Ku Klux Klan would march in Washington, D.C. Thousands of people would walk with these hoods and these white robes down the streets of Washington, D.C., and even New York in some places like that had those type of activities. And interestingly enough, the Donald Trump's father was arrested in New York in the 1920s as one of those who was involved in the KKK. Well, and my father was a little 40-acre farmer in the town of Gibson in Madder Rock County. Mentioned one time he was standing along the road that went by our farm. And one evening, and this Model T or whatever it was went by and it four or six people dressed in Ku Klux Klan's outfit. So because of the depression, because of the power struggle, the Ku Klux Klan became very powerful and nobody spoke against the deaths and destruction that was taking place. And we get later on the results of our inactivity and that's why it's important for us to take a little time to talk about the issues and the historic aspect of it in true terms rather than the emotional terms like Catholics are bad, Jews are got all the money rather than the way it really is. Right, the whole issue of the Ku Klux Klan is one of those that was allowed to fester and become institutionalized because both parties didn't do very much about it in the 1920s. Matter of fact, Woodward Wilson is a nice man he was. He was a Democrat, progressive individual, but he was a president of a Southern college. He was a racist. He was sexist. He was against the 19th amendment allowing women to vote. So you had the Hoover Coolidge administration's Harding in the 20s who were supportive of the KKK and not civil rights. And you had Democrats sitting under hands because in many cases you had Democrats in office down south including Congress and why were they Democrats? They were really Dixie Crats is because Abe Lincoln was a Republican. And so you had an era there where there was no spokesman for civil rights. It didn't come around really of any merit until Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. I wanna thank Cal Potter for joining me and I wanna thank you for joining us. Take time to listen to what people with good scholarly backgrounds have on these subjects because you have to be involved or else we have problems that we shouldn't have. And I wanna thank you for coming until next week. This has been Legislative Update.