For Trump, demonization is good politics

But now, unlike after the Civil War, the federal government is not combating injustice.

The Ku Klux Klan Watertown, N.Y., Division circa 1870. (Hart/Library of Congress)

By Guy Gugliotta

In 1870, the Civil War had been over for five years, but the hatreds that tore the country apart lingered. Slavery ended, but the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan rampaged through the South, pillaging the homes of newly freed Blacks—murdering fathers and sons, raping mothers and daughters, and beating children.

The Klan derived its inspiration from political resentments not unlike those that prevail today. Chief among these is America’s disgraceful willingness to dramatize white grievance by demonizing the sins of the “other.” In 1870, the freed Blacks were the other, but the role has had many players over the years—Chinese railroad workers; Japanese-Americans during World War II; pregnant mothers crossing the southern border; Jews and Blacks, again and again. Since President Donald Trump’s political rise, “those people” have also come to include any non-white immigrants, most Muslims, and, more recently, anyone whose sexuality or gender identification defies the MAGA “norm.”

Demonization, as Trump understands it, is good politics, and with the help of a White House full of henchmen and a lapdog Congress, he has managed to make hatred and cruelty officially sanctioned behaviors.

This, too, is similar to the morass into which the nation had sunk during the Civil War’s aftermath. Local law all but ignored the predations of the Ku Klux, prosecuted few, and jailed nearly none.

The difference in 1870, however, was that the federal government under President Ulysses S. Grant decided to combat these injustices instead of condoning or even promoting them, as we see all too often today.

In mid-1870, Grant appointed Amos T. Akerman, the U.S. Attorney for Georgia, as his attorney general. Akerman, a former slaveowner and Confederate home guard militiaman who converted to Republicanism immediately after the war, was the only Southerner ever to serve in a Reconstruction Cabinet.

Amos Akerman (Max Rosenthal/Library of Congress)

Akerman had plenty of experience with the Klan, both as a defender of Black suffrage in private practice and as a federal prosecutor. He had been threatened, refused meals and lodging, spat upon, pelted with rocks, targeted for beatings, and worse.

But he had an idea. The newly ratified 14th Amendment, which guaranteed due process and equal protection under the law to “any person” in “any state,” could bring down the Klan, he told a congressional committee. Prosecute Klan outrages as federal civil rights violations and try the perpetrators in federal court.

As attorney general, Akerman set out to do exactly that. First, he needed a federal enforcement law that embodied 14th Amendment rights. The 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, almost certainly written by Akerman, was that law. It remains today as a key obstacle in Trump’s efforts to ship immigrants off to foreign dungeons without even a hearing.

Second, Akerman needed to set an example. He picked York County, S.C., on the state’s northern border. York was the most violent county in the South’s most violent state. If Akerman could terrorize the terrorists there, he would terrorize them everywhere.

And it worked. Federal lawmen started arresting York County Klansmen in August 1871 and throwing them in jail. By year’s end, more than 50 pleaded guilty and many were convicted in court and sent to federal prison. And panic spread throughout the South. Within six months in 1871-72 the Klan, as originally constituted, ceased to exist as an organization.

This was the dawn of the civil rights movement in the United States—the first time since the Civil War itself that the federal government chose to defend a persecuted other. It worked then, and it has worked—when the government decides to make it work—ever since.

The bad part is that Akerman’s victory was short-lived. Grant, a ruthless civil rights advocate during much of his first term, by late 1871 was campaigning for reelection and needed support from Republican moderates jaded by Reconstruction’s shortcomings. In December, Grant fired Akerman, regarded by then, with justification, as an intractable radical. Politics, then as now, frequently sends justice to the back of the bus.

And through the trials of 1871-1872 essentially erased the Klan for 50 years, white terrorism continued unabated. Convicted Klansmen were eventually pardoned, the 14th Amendment was ignored, and apartheid took root throughout the South until the 1950s.

Worst of all, the civil rights gains obtained in the last century have been horribly damaged only five months into Trump 2.0. It might be time to wonder whether demonizing the other is America’s default position.

Can we fix this? Do we even want to?

Guy Gugliotta is a former national reporter for The Washington Post. His new book, ”Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan,” describes the career of Attorney General Amos T. Akerman and his efforts to destroy the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of the Civil War.

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