We've been here before
However crazy – and things are crazy – I keep seeing history repeat itself.
My old friend Wayne Slater, is the former senior political writer for The Dallas Morning News and co-author of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. He now lives in a vineyard in Florence, a small town north of Austin.
by Wayne Slater
As a long-time journalist and author watching our fractious politics and tribal divide, I cannot escape the idea that we’ve seen this movie before. However crazy – and things are crazy – I keep seeing history repeat itself.
The controversy over the Washington Redskins, for example. Critics have long denounced the name as racist. Fans vowed never to change it. Passions ensued. In the end, they’re changing it. Whatever the new name – the Washington Presidents, the Washington Dentures, whatever – it’s a storyline I’m familiar with.
Take the Pekin Chinks. Before joining The Dallas Morning News, I worked for the Associated Press in Illinois and was dispatched to cover a looming apocalypse – the day the school board decided to change a high school mascot long known as the Pekin Chinks.
Pekin is small town southwest of Peoria. Somewhere in the hoary past, local boosters thought it was a good idea to promote the town as an anglicized version of Peking (Beijing). The high school mascot was born: the Chink. Each year, a male and female student were picked, Chink and Chinkette. At home games, as the band played ersatz Chinese music, corn-fed Midwestern children dressed in red silk jackets and coolie hats would shuffle to the center of the basketball floor with their arms folded and bow before the visiting team’s representative. When the basketball team won the state championship in the 1960s, the city council issued a resolution declaring it “Chinks Week.”
In September 1980, the school board decided it was time for a change. I covered the board meeting.
The gym was packed with parents. The room felt as if the slightest error could set off an explosion. Some agreed with the change. But many did not, and they lined up to denounce as sacrilege changing the venerated name from the Chinks to the Dragons. It was matter of heritage, of tradition.
I remember one man. “I’m a chink. My parents were chinks and, by God, my children will be chinks,” he vowed.
The school board changed the name anyway and while there were some hard feelings for a while (a few hardliners kept wearing Chinks t-shirts to the games), the school and its teams seem to have done just fine. I’m guessing that whatever Washington does, there will still be some Redskins jerseys in the stadium for a while.
I remember one man. “I’m a chink. My parents were chinks and, by God, my children will be chinks,” he vowed.
Donald Trump is sui generis, no doubt. But forceful politicians aren’t exactly unprecedented. Gov. Bill Clements had an autocratic streak. Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock was no shrinking bluebonnet. But a former West Virginia governor, Arch Moore, seems in retrospect more akin to the current occupant of the White House.
Moore used to bully the press corps with impunity. Moore was a swaggering, powerful figure. I was a fledgling reporter with the AP, barely 23 when I was dispatched to cover a Moore news conference at the Capitol in Charleston.
Moore had long refused to acknowledge the correspondent from the Charleston Gazette, the Democratic newspaper investigating possible corruption. The publisher of the Gazette asked me to attend the news conference and ask Moore a question: what was he doing with bundles of cash in a file drawer in the governor’s office. I did. Moore’s face reddened; he seemed to lift off the chair and dressed me down so ferociously I’ve never forgotten it. I was a terrible reporter, he said, nasty, low-IQ, fake news or whatever words he used.
Years later, I was traveling with George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign and, arriving one day for a rally in Charleston, I bumped into Moore. Moore’s daughter was running as a Republican for Congress and was on stage. Moore was just wandering among the crowd. He had been convicted in 1990 of federal charges of mail fraud, tax fraud and obstruction of justice. I introduced myself and he pretended to remember me.
Later, on the campaign plane, I mentioned to Bush that the ex-governor was in the crowd.
“Really?” Bush asked. “Why didn’t he come up on the stage?”
“Prison, you know,” I said. Bush put on a thoughtful expression and then nodded.
Trump’s evangelical support seems like a mystery. But every time Christian leaders tout Trump as God’s gift to the country, I remember a lesson a savvy Southern Baptist taught me years ago. Evangelical leaders are transactional; they’ll deal.
I mentioned to Bush that the ex-governor was in the crowd.
“Really?” Bush asked. “Why didn’t he come up on the stage?”
“Prison, you know,” I said.
A case in point: Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political Svengali, worked hard to win over Christian evangelicals to secure the nomination of Harriet Miers of Dallas to the Supreme Court. Miers was Bush’s attorney and he wanted her on the high court. The president dispatched Rove to get evangelical leaders to back his pick, which Rove did in conference calls with some of the biggest names on the American Christian right. Rove and an ally privately assured the leaders that Miers would vote their way on issues they cared about like, say, abortion. But in the end, it didn’t work.
I asked Richard Land, a top Southern Baptist leader known in D.C. as God’s Lobbyist, what went wrong. He explained that Miers might have voted right, but she lacked one quality the Christian-Industrial Complex treasured. She was not ideological enough to be a good subject of fundraising appeals to the faithful. “They couldn’t make any money off of her,” he explained.
Most evangelicals are deeply, honestly religious in their faith. But many of their leaders are transactional. Trump not only backs their agenda, he’s a fundraising bonanza. Which helps explains why, when leaders of large evangelical organizations praise a thrice-married adulterer who spouts obscenities on stage, pays off porn stars and crudely bullies people, their support is a transaction. No mystery; it’s what he can deliver.
Most evangelicals are deeply, honestly religious in their faith. But many of their leaders are transactional. Trump not only backs their agenda, he’s a fundraising bonanza.
In similar fashion, the social tribalism of our politics isn’t new. When people say they’ve never seen anything like it, I think of Kanawha County.
In the mid-1970s, as a reporter in West Virginia, I covered an uprising in which protesters demanded that books with bad words or unacceptable ideas be expelled from public schools. Offending works included those by Mark Twain, George Orwell, Sigmund Freud, playwright Arthur Miller, beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg and fiction writer Shirley Jackson.
The war produced an army of Christian soldiers: the Rev. Ezra Graley (known as Holy Graley); the Rev. Marin Horan, who organized a boycott; and an iron-willed Phyllis Schlafly-lookalike named Alice Moore. Passions ran hot, very hot. Bombs were placed at an elementary school and the school board building. School buses were attacked, teachers were threatened.
Watching the current tribal divisions, I’m reminded how divided we can be. In Kanawha County, the social and ideological gulf was stark – you were on one side or the other. There was no middle ground.
The books were reinstated in the classroom or the library. The Rev. Horan was sentenced to three years in prison related to the bombings. Eventually, things got back to normal.
I remember one day, as protesters were rocking the van of a local TV station, a man turned to me and, noticing my pad and pen, he asked angrily: “Who are you with?”
The names of the local TV stations and the newspapers burned like scarlet letters among the anti-textbook crowd.
“I’m with the Associated Press,” I said.
He clearly had no idea what that was. I might as well have said, “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
He blinked a moment, then nodded. And then he said something I’ve heard hundreds of times since then covering political conventions, campaigns, small squabbles, big conflicts and news events in which people feel passionately on one side or another.
“Well,” he said, “tell the truth.”
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