 Okay, welcome to Trump Week on Think Tech. I'm your host, Jay Fidel. Our show today is called Hate in America. Why are we going to talk about it? Why can't we all be friends? It's time we take a hard look at ourselves and find a way to come together for the benefit of all of us. And to do that, we have to appreciate the history. And we have Professor John David Ann, who is a history professor at HPU, to help us understand what has happened in this country and what the history is. And so we can appreciate the context for Donald Trump's remarks, his varying remarks, his remarks here and there and hither and beyond over the past few days, including today, where he said he felt liberated by his open expression of what was in his heart a couple days ago in the lobby of Trump Tower, doubling down on his previous position, which did suggest to a lot of people in this country, a majority of the people in this country, that he favored, relatively speaking, he favored white supremacy. And indeed, that kind of... Sympathetic to... Sympathetic to white supremacy, yeah. And indeed, you know, that comment and the comments he's made has somehow engendered, you know, a public uproar, but also a coming together of the white supremacist group in this country. And there's a whole study about how, as president, you can foment unrest with just a few words, and he's done that. He's been doing it for six months now. Yes, he has. So, John David Ann, thank you for coming. Sure. This important show. Yes. We need to put it in context to understand, you know, all the historical events in this country that have led to the special situation we're at now, where people are proud to be white supremacists, they say a lot more is coming, that they're getting together and they're relying the Second Amendment to have guns, and they marched in formation with military helmets and weapons. Right. And there was a piece over the weekend about a Jewish temple that was in Charlottesville. They were terrified because some of those guys were out in front with AK-47s during their weekend service. So what we have, and you know, the question they put, and I put it to you, is, wait a minute, is this the United States or somewhere else? What is going on? It's hard to believe what's going on. Right. Well, first of all, it's shocking. It's pretty horrible stuff. And unfortunately, I do think the rhetoric of the president has empowered this group. We've talked about this before, but, you know, he's not, he tried to, right? He tried to condemn them. And then the next day he said, nah, I don't think so. So he clearly has some sympathy for white supremacists, and it's terribly embarrassing to the Republican Party. It's embarrassing to the great majority of Americans in the country. I think 25% said what he said was good enough. 75% said, no, no, this is terrible. And so, yeah, this is, it's very disturbing stuff, but it has a very deep history with it in our country. And that's what we want to study today, that deep history that has been revealed, and we are reminded of it by virtue of these events over the past few days. So let's talk about the history. Where did this all begin, this white supremacy thing? Right. So then, yeah, I mean, that's the right question is, how can it be that in 2017 you have white supremacists in the United States who are proclaiming their superiority to other races? How is this possible? Well, there's a history to this which is quite important. And in order for us to understand this, we have to go back to the Civil War and reconstruction. So the Civil War was, of course, a battle about slavery. It was actually a battle about a particular race and the oppression of that race. And coming out of the Civil War, you have the country embracing new freedom, Lincoln embraced new freedom. And then the entire country did through the Civil Rights Amendments, through the Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments freeing slaves, establishing a new civil rights basis for all citizens in the country. And then allowing banning discrimination for the 15th Amendment, banning discrimination on voting except for criminals. And so we thought, okay, that lays the basis for the country going forward, not so fast. Actually, this is where there's a kind of counter force to this, what I would call an emancipationist version of reconstruction. I hear in between your remarks the essence of it is that maybe the North did not do reconstruction properly. Maybe they were pushing too much. Well, that's some white supremacist actually would argue that what the North did was a military dictatorship in the South which imposed these Reconstruction Amendments upon the South. And then now we're getting into actually this, so you have the emancipationist narrative and then you have the white supremacist narrative. Even way back then. Absolutely. Right after 1865. This is during Reconstruction and these two narratives are competing for space in the country. And the white supremacist narrative argues you know what happened in the Civil War was just a big mistake, a war between brothers. And then in Reconstruction you have a dictatorship of the South, a union between the Republican Party and African Americans, a big mistake allowing African Americans voting rights and the right to serve in office. And then the Ku Klux Klan comes in and it saves the day. This is a simplified version of a narrative which actually as it develops from the late 1870s onward it actually becomes the dominant interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Civil War was a mistake and so you have these, through the years you have these reunions, reunions of Northern and Southern soldiers and expressions of the tragedy of the Civil War and then you have this narrative about African Americans that they should not have equal rights, that they are inferior. And this carries through the 20th century, it's only in the 1950s that you have historians who begin to embrace a different narrative, a narrative of Reconstruction as a positive, as a positive one. What you're saying I think is that you know the war ended, the North won, but the war wasn't really over. That's right. They were still fighting it decades and decades later and that fight included the Ku Klux Klan. That's right. But also you use the word dictatorship of the North. So if we can just hang on a second, can you bring up the first slide? Yes. And this is of course the Ku Klux Klan, which today comprises about 180 open members and probably another 3,000 total. Throughout what states? Well, it's mostly in the South. There might be a couple of members in the, in Indiana, Southern Indiana, Ohio, that area. But it's really mostly in the South. But there were times when the Ku Klux Klan was really out of business where it faded off the scene. That's correct. We're talking about the continuum there? Right. So the Ku Klux Klan, which in this white supremacist version of Reconstruction is actually the liberating force of the South. The Ku Klux Klan first starts in the late 1860s. It actually starts as a veteran's organization for Confederate soldiers. And so then it develops in the early 1870s as a force to try to intimidate these new voters, African-Americans, away from the polling place. And it also causes some violence. There are some, there are some assassinations of African-Americans who are attempting to vote and so on. But you said before that it was a dictatorship of the North and the South. Well, it's, the situation in the South is complicated. I would see it. I think, again, that's the white supremacist interpretation. But what are they referring to? But what they're referring to is the Republican Party, the Republican Congress actually passes a very strong Reconstruction with these Reconstruction amendments and then sends Northern troops back down into the South. It revokes an earlier Reconstruction by President Andrew Johnson, who took power after Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson was a southerner. It turns that back and then implements this new Reconstruction. A higher level of enforcement. Well, with using the military. With Americans, with Union soldiers in the South and enforcing these new Reconstruction, watching over the reabsorption of these states into the Union, because the states now have to pass these Reconstruction amendments and then trying to protect those civil rights that have just been given to African-Americans. So it kind of was a war, sort of. The military from the North imposing these new amendments and the Klu Klux Klan is responding to that. But my question though is, I wonder, wouldn't it have been possible for the North to do a better job in Reconstruction to sell it socially somehow? There's several versions of Reconstruction. Let's look at Lincoln's version. So we've looked at the Republican plan and Andrew Johnson's plan. We didn't spend a lot of time on that. But Lincoln's plan was that you had to have 10% of any southern state, any rebel state, pledging allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, the Union. And then office holders and officers would be, they could not vote and they could not hold office from the Confederacy. They could not do either of these. For life. That's right. They would be banned for life from that. The 10% plan was a very lenient Reconstruction. Lincoln wanted to re-knit the Union as quickly as possible. He saw the devastation of the war and wanted to reunify the country as quickly as possible. That did not prevent it. Well, Lincoln was assassinated and then Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction plan involved requiring planters, the wealthy planters, to apply to him in person for a pardon. He pardoned all of them. And so the Republicans in Congress came to hate Andrew Johnson and then they went forward with their own Reconstruction. Which was much tougher. That's where these constitutional amendments come into play. It's tougher. I would say it is Lincoln's new birth of freedom. The constitutional amendments are so important. He wanted those amendments. Yeah. Well, Lincoln was on board. Yeah. Lincoln actually helped to, he was still alive when the ending of slavery happened in the Congress. And then, of course, the 14th Amendment, that's our civil rights amendment. That's the amendment we use today to protect, to process, for all Americans to protect civil rights. And the 15th Amendment was simply banning the, stopping the banning of voting except on the basis of whether or not you've committed a crime. Which was apparently happening in the South. Well, actually, what happens in the South then is that immediately after this amendment is passed, then southern states define a crime as just being on the street. You don't have a job and you've committed a crime and so they can throw African Americans back into slavery and to form slavery with that. So, the Republican constitutional amendments, that was liberation. I don't think there's any other way to define that. Was it too onerous on the South to be liberated in this way? Well, I suppose history tells us that it was too much for the South to take. And this is why the Ku Klux Klan arises. Was the American military, the Northern military that came, the Republican military, came down there to enforce these new amendments. Was there violence? Were there incidents? There was violence between white supremacists and mostly between white supremacists and African Americans who were new voters and new office holders. Yeah, there were a few pitched battles over whether or not a state could come back in under one of these new emancipationist constitutions. Yeah, there was quite a bit of violence. Okay, and so now you have the North dominating on these points. They have the military there. Right. And then these veterans from the Civil War, the Confederate side, are putting on white outfits and riding all across the South. And it's not just veterans, it's sympathizers. It's white supremacists who sympathize with the cause of the Ku Klux Klan. But the Klan is put down in the 1870. The Klan disappears by the 1880s. Because? Well, in part it's because the military in the South has given power to actually put down the Klan and to arrest Klan members. But the other part of it is they kind of achieved their goals. By 1877 then, the Congress passes a law, and the President signs it, which says that there's home rule. Home rule said that the South can make its own laws without federal interference. This changes things. And this allows segregation and disenfranchisement, segregationist laws to come into place, disenfranchisement laws, and segregation laws, laws that are separation and laws that disenfranchise not only African-Americans, but poor whites as well. So the Ku Klux Klan kind of achieved its goal. The Klan does not emerge again until World War I. So let's hold it there. We'll take a short break. John David Dan, history professor at HPU, will come back and see the reemergence of the Klan, and will connect the dots from after World War I until now. When it's obvious they are still in existence, and in fact, some say they're growing. Oh my God. We'll be right back. Aloha, welcome to Hawaii. This is Prince Dykes, your host of The Prince of Investing. Coming to you guys each and every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Right here on Think, Take, Hawaii. Don't forget to come by and check out some of the great information on stocks, investings, your money, all the other great stuff. And I'll be your host. See you Tuesday. Aloha, a richer conception. The host of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we'll tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think, Take, Hawaii. Aloha. Hi, we're back live here on Trump Week, and we're talking about hate in America. We're talking about white supremacy, the Klu Klux Klan, and with John Davidan, who is telling us about the Klan, perhaps as a metric, a canary in the coal mine, if you will, to help us understand white supremacy. Yeah, that might be a good way of describing it, because of course the Klan, as I said, is very small today. But other groups, and sympathy towards white supremacy in general, that it might be growing, really it's hard to know how prominent it is, but it clearly has captivated some small part of the American public. So, you mentioned before the break that after World War I, it re-emerged. And I guess that's both. Both of those things re-emerged. That's correct, the Klan and white supremacy. Really, the late 19th century is the heyday of segregation and disenfranchisement. It's also the heyday of racialist ideologies, in which pseudo-scientists study African Americans and whites, and conclude, of course, that African Americans are inferior to whites and never could reach up to the level of whites. This is very prominent in the late 19th century. Almost as a science already, social science. No, actually, some of them, who are in fact southern planters, describe themselves as scientists and proclaim their work as scientific. And there's a connection there between the racist thing about the blacks, but also the immigrants coming from Europe in that same period. That's correct. So, from the 1890s onward, then you have this huge, this massive influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, in the range of 30 million over several decades. And there's a reaction against this influx, and you have the Ku Klux Klan arising once again in 1915 in southern Indiana. And this Klan now not only hates blacks, they hate Catholics, they hate Jews, they hate immigrants of any kind. What about Asians on the West Coast? Oh, yeah, yeah, but that's kind of a whole... It's distant. It's distant. Well, it's a different anti-movement. So, enter Woodrow Wilson. Right, right. Oh, this is so interesting. Your head will spin hearing about Woodrow Wilson's picture. Let's see, yeah, there's Woodrow Wilson. Right, so Woodrow Wilson, of course, became president of the United States in 1913 and became kind of set a template in place of defining American internationalism for the entire 20th century, really, became one of the most powerful people in the history of the world. But Wilson was also a white supremacist. He believed in segregation. He was the first president to segregate the White House of African-American maids and servants who would have to now sleep in separate quarters from the White. It had not been segregated before Wilson. It had not been segregated before Wilson, so... And also, Wilson wrote a book, right, before he became president, called Disunion and Reunion. And in this book, he talks about reconstruction and talks about the effects of reconstruction. And the book becomes an inspiration for another book by a guy named Thomas Dixon, called Birth of a Nation, or the Klansman, it's about the Ku Klux Klan. And this was turned into a movie in 1915. Famous movie. That's right, or infamous movie. Thank you. Called Birth of a Nation, which was shown around the country, and in fact, Wilson had a special showing at the White House. And the movie quotes Woodrow Wilson. So if we could bring up that quote. That quote. I'm going to read this quote because it's very important to understand when I say that Wilson was a white supremacist and supported the Klan, he said it himself. The white men were roused by, and this is during reconstruction. The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last they're sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country. Scary, chilling. It was a Southerner. Wilson was a Southerner. He was from Virginia. And he sided with white supremacists on this issue. And he believed that the Ku Klux Klan was a liberating force, that it had in fact liberated the South from this military occupation and the oppression of these constitutional amendments. What's odd about it is that he's the father of the League of Nations. He was trying to knit the world together after World War I. It's a glaring contradiction in Wilson's thinking. But the issue is that Wilson was dipping into this white supremacist narrative about reconstruction. And then this narrative goes forward into the 20th century. It's not until, actually, W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 publishes a book about reconstruction, in which he really deconstructs this white supremacist narrative. But it's really not until the 1950s and 60s that other historians jump on this and begin to do studies of the oppression during the Jim Crow days and of the liberation of reconstruction after the Civil War. So it takes a very long time. And that narrative is not dead. What we're seeing today is that narrative of white supremacy still populating, still drawing white supremacists to it, people with resentments against African-Americans or other races, people with a political agenda. So using that narrative, which has been pumping just quietly underground here for several decades, actually probably since the Civil Rights Movement, when it flared up again. So I would say this is another flair in that narrative, that ideology of white supremacy. So I think that helps to explain in historical terms what we're looking at today. Well, I think a lot of white people in the South were disadvantaged during the Depression. They didn't have prospects. They had to be mad at somebody. They were in competition with the blacks for jobs. And it fed the racism there. And the racism never disappeared. And I'm interested in this reemergence, if you will, or the reattention to the issue in 1950s and 60s. I guess what was happening there? I mean, we had Brown versus Board of Education come in there. We had a new national awareness. And it was an awareness that said, let's not be racist. That's true. And yet this was emerging again. That's right. Well, so I mean, this is really quite interesting, because the Brown versus Board of Education decision, the justices actually have read a book called An American Dilemma. And it's a book that's a study of racism in the South. And this economist goes into the South. And he writes up this study. He's not an American, by the way. I think he's from Sweden. And he does this study. And it becomes this big kind of book in the United States. And Supreme Court justices actually referenced that book in their decision. Saying that even if separate was actually equal, there is a moral high ground which has to be recognized that cannot condone any sort of separation of the races, because it implies that it indicates the inferiority of one race to another. So that's why Brown versus Board of Education is such a powerful decision, because it has a moral in prime. Great moral statement. But we just say, I mean, it's hard to make judgments value judgments now. But did it work? Did it work? Well, there's a lot of debate about that. The integration of schools. That's for another show, Jay. Many shows to come here. This probably hasn't worked like some people thought. So OK, so Brown versus Board of Education and there's a struggle through the 60s. And you mentioned before the show, in the Civil Rights Act days, there was a lot of resistance and feedback. But so in the 1960s, you had two presidents who embraced the Civil Rights Movement. And this is quite important, because the Civil Rights Movement is winning some local judicial victories, victories in court cases. They are winning those. And they're winning a few state decisions. But it's really, they can't make much progress without the federal government getting involved. And once Eisenhower sends troops in the South in 1957 to protect students going to Little Rock High School. George Wallace, was it? No, this is Fawbus. Fawbus, yeah, Fawbus, yeah. Orville Fawbus, who is the famous, infamous person. Yeah, that's right. Governor of Arkansas and a white supremacist. So that makes a difference. And then you have John F. Kennedy, who supports the Civil Rights Movement increasingly, because he recognizes in it. I think as it goes forward, he recognizes a moral imperative. And he doesn't at first. He sees it in terms of politics at first. But by 1963, he recognizes that this country really has a problem. Does he believe it? Or just recognize it? No, I think he did by 1963. And then, of course, Kennedy is assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson becomes president. Johnson actually grows up as a white supremacist. And Johnson actually has a conversion to the civil rights. And maybe that makes him the strongest advocate of civil rights, because he becomes an incredibly strong advocate of civil rights. So we had those two presidents who led the federal presence, protecting those marchers in the south, prosecuting white supremacists in the south on federal charges when counties and states refused to do prosecutions, because you had so many white supremacists in the south, or so many who, if they weren't white supremacists, they at least supported the system of segregation. And so the civil rights movement is about destroying segregation and disenfranchisement. So you have presidents who support this. You see my point here. You have leadership at the top that helps make the civil rights movement popular. They could do pop into justice to enforce those laws through the south under the federal power. In a different situation, with a different president, the civil rights movement might have failed. And I think that's a very important point to think about. Right now. Yes, that's correct. So what happened between, say, 1968 and Johnson Civil Rights Act and now? Where were we when Trump just emerged? So the white supremacist movement never disappeared. The Ku Klux Klan never disappeared completely, although prosecutions against it really ratcheted up in the 1960s. But it's very small. It's a discredited organization for the most part. And civil rights became a call to enfranchise all kinds of different people, people with disabilities, gays and lesbians, people of different sexual orientation. So it became what I would call an era of rights consciousness. And it's this idea, this cultural idea that everybody has a right, everybody has civil rights, that Trump has used effectively in the 2016 campaign to say, hey, this is political correctness. And we don't need to, this is just nonsense. And we want ourselves to be recognized. And so it's like an inversion of this rights consciousness. Trump is actually using this, using rights consciousness to say, hey, white people have rights too. So it's this kind of weird distortion of what has been a very strong move by the country towards freedom and liberation, which is kind of at the basis of all this. Sort of social equality, social justice. And all of a sudden it seemed to stop its tracks. And he was early on stroking the white supremacists. And now it's come out in the open. He's come out. Right. So we don't live in 1877. We don't live in 1915. We don't live in 1963 either. We live in 2016, and a lot of attitudes have changed. And so Trump's clear sympathy for their fine people in the Ku Klux Klan. Clear sympathy towards white supremacists is out of sync. It's out of sync with the vast majority of the American people. Even people who, according to the polling, said that what Trump said was OK, they probably were thinking more about what he said on Monday in his White House press conference when he read from a teleprompter, I condemned white supremacists. It gets confused, doesn't it? That's right. That's right. They probably are thinking more about that than they are about what he said on Tuesday, which is, you know, and afterwards. So what's happened with him is that he's shaving off his base every time he tweets or opens his mouth. He's offending more and more people, the republics. So he offended financial republicans, business leaders. They're staunch republicans. They would never consider. They would never consider voting Democrat. But they left his manufacturing and his other policy councils in droves. They decided themselves to shut it down. He later on tried to claim credit for that. But the truth is, in a concerted effort, they said, you know what? This is wrong. And we're out of here. We're not supporting this guy. Well, I think that's great. And that's a residual of the enlightenment, if you will. And it followed the Civil Rights Act in the 60s. But you know, one thing, and we need to discuss this is what did he do in terms of the white supremacist group? Because he seems to have galvanized them. They're coming out. They're speaking of coming together, becoming stronger, and more violent. They'll tell you that. And this could have a huge effect on the country. It only takes a few violent people to turn history around. So that's an important point, a few. Because this is a very small group. It's a very small movement. And they might have people, other people in the background who are sympathetic, who are willing to use racial epithets, but are not willing to march. So this is a very small group. And you know, will they turn violent? You know, the good news is the Attorney General has said, hey, what happened in Charlottesville is a hate crime. That ups the ante for the guy. That's correct. So that ups the ante for convicting this guy and punishing him much more severely. So I think, I mean, let's hope that there's not more violent. Let's hope. But we need to follow it, John. We need to see where it goes from here. Because one thing is we are on a historical transformation of some kind. And we always need a historian to help us understand it and get through it. Thank you, John David. Hawaii Pacific University, Professor of History. Thank you very much.