Of MARs and Men - Barak Obama pays Sam Francisn justice
Sean Scallon
May 25, 2008
If you didnīt like the way all-but-ordained Democratic presidential nominee Barak Obama talked about how middle and working class voters cling to their guns and religion while being bitter about their economic circumstances, then perhaps you may find to you liking a passage written by the once-great chronicler of presidential politics Theodore H. White about the same subject in his book Making of the President 1968:
"What George Wallace demonstrated was that all of those alienated with the set of American government, perhaps the largest group were the white working men of America and in so demonstrating, George Wallace uncovered a reality that will be of concern for years.
Abandoned by the liberal voices and their intellectual sponsors who made the white working man their wards in the 1930s, white workingmen find now, in the public dialogue of America, almost no expression of their problems. The whole rub of the past eight years in American experimentation has been a run against the condition of the white workingmen.
The white workingmen, at least the union men, have now all but conquered the conditions of their work. For most, their unions have made their hours in their working places the best part of the day air-conditioned, clean and safe. At the plant, the condition of life is better controlled for American workingmen by their union leaders than in any country in the world. But when they go home from work, they enter another world the community of neighborhood, of their kin, of their ethnic groups. And this home community world is no longer under any control they can affect.
In the age of experiment, as social theorists press government on to ends yet untested, it is the white workingman whose sense of community is most abused. From the tree-shaded streets of suburbia, the white middle class can insulate itself by zoning and money from the stress and strain of experiment, from the fear of violence. The white working man and the white poor feel defenseless against such experiments; and since the cutting edge of all such experiments seem to subject them, as powerless test-tube material, to an intermingling of race for which nothing in their education has prepared them. It is their neighborhoods that must be broken up by public housing that will drive them out and install blacks; it is their children, not middle-class children, who must be bussed; it is the streets on which their old ladies walk to midnight mass that become dangerous because of the purse-snatchers; it is they who must, in their lives, pay in daily worries for the guilt of white slavers centuries ago. The fathers of these workingmen had come from Europe a generation ago or they themselves had fled the South. What they had earned the fat paycheck, the house, the school, the quiet neighborhood they had earned by playing by the rules. Now, from Washington, for eight years, the rules had been undergone change. But change not for the rich of the well-to-do or the comfortable, only for them and their communities."
What White describes and what Obama tried to clumsily talk about basically describes American politics from 1964 to today: White, middle-class resentment. This is where the whole term MAR (Middle American Radicals) springs from. And itīs a resentment born of then sense that people who live in small towns (like Arkansaw, Wisconsin, population 300, where I currently reside) mid-sized factory towns (like the one I grew up in, Beloit, Wisconsin) and urban ethnic neighborhoods have no control over their lives and are at the mercy of trends economic, cultural and political.
In this, Obama owes a great debt to late writer Sam Francis (although itīs doubtful he would pay Francis back) who was the first to popularize the term invented by sociologist Donald Warren back in 1976. MARs represented the great American middle class from Northeast and Midwest ethnic Catholics to Southern Protestants, skilled and semi-skilled blue collar workers and with high school educations. The exact same constituency Hilary Clinton now supposedly represents (although if Francis were alive today heīd wretch at the thought). What set MARs apart were their attitudes towards government which he described:
"What defines them as a movement is an attitudinal quality and what Warren finds most distinctive of them is their view of government and, in a broader sense, their view of the establishment and their role in it. Unlike adherents of the Left, MARs do not feel the government as favoring the rich and unlike adherents of the Right, they do not regard the government as giving to the poor. This attitude is resonant with significant political and social situations. It points to a sense of resentment and exploitation, but also broader which is directed upwards and downwards. It points to a distrust of decision-makers in state and economy as well as to the fear of the economically depressed. It points to the fears of aspiration, to alienation of loyalties, to a suspicion of established institutions, authorities and values. The economic frustration of MARs spill over into political, cultural and moral expressions."
Obama couldnīt have said this any better and it turns out he didnīt.
Could he have worded it better? Perhaps. But Iīm sure we know of or are folk who "cling" to their Bibles as hard as they can because we have faith and when Charlton Heston (RIP) says "You can take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers." you can bet heīs clinging to it pretty hard. To "cling" means to hold on tight and Iīm sure we either are or know people who hold fast to their guns and Bibles.
And why do they? Because in many cases, itīs all theyīve got. And such persons have every right to be bitter. Bitter about seeing their jobs go to Mexico. Bitter about seeing their kids bused from their neighborhood schools to ones across town. Bitter about seeing their values mocked in the wider culture. Bitter about being lied to about the benefits of NAFTA or the Iraq war and the supposed $1.00 a gallon gas we told we would be paying. Bitter about seeing THEIR kids go to war and die while the elites stay in the club box cheering them on. Bitter about seeing their towns socially engineered with the influx of immigrants without any kind of discussion as to whether this was good idea or not. Bitter about being let down by both the Democrats and Republicans, who supposedly talk good games on the issues they care about but in the end do nothing to help despite such empty promises.
Why else would Hilary Clinton repudiate the one concrete accomplishment of her husbandīs Administration, the passage of NAFTA through Congress, unless she knew that bitterness existed? Shouldnīt she be celebrating NAFTAīs benefits? She knows full damn well if she did that in Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio theyīd run her out of town on a rail. So sheīll down a boilermaker and pretend sheīs one of the guys, this gal born of the upscale Chicago suburbs, a former Goldwater Girl and Wellesley and Yale Law School graduate. Yes, she truly is the salt of the earth. And of course thereīs man-of-the people John McCain, the son and grandson of admirals who was born on a tropical estate in the Canal Zone, the gold-digger whoīs wife is a beer baroness and who once told a South Carolina textile worker concerned about keeping his job and I quote "I didnīt know your biggest ambition in life is to work in the mill." How is this any less condescending that what Obama said?
So Obama clumsily said what everyone knows to be true but doesnīt want to admit because that would spoil some sort of twisted image of Heartland America being a happy place of pure American values and virtues instead of pockets of seething bitterness. Yes the former can be true but the latter as just as true and if it wasnīt then the populist movement, the KKK, the religious right, the Prohibition movement, the veterans movement after World War II, Harlan County, Kentucky, labor strife, Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comintatus, Tim McVeigh, Oklahoma City and militia movement, the George Wallace, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and David Duke campaigns, none of these things would have happened. If we deny what Obama said, then we deny that MARs exist in the first place.
(Hell, one can even argue the bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970 was the work of at least two partial MARs as the Armstrong brothers, Karleton and Dwight, grew up in a middle class home on the east side of Madison and whoīs father was a union steward at the old Gisholt Machine Works. Many of the student radicals they associated with were upper-middle class or well-to-do like Bill Ayers for example.)
But what Obama did not say, or even hint at, is the fact such fears, bitterness, and reaction did not take place in a vacuum, as we can see from the very first battle of the culture war, the textbook controversy of the Kanawha County School District, West Virginia in the early 1970s.
The first shots of the culture war were fired in Kanawha County, West Virginia, the home of the state capital and the stateīs largest city Charleston. Author William Martin, a sociology teacher at Rice University, details this battle in his 1997 book With God on our Side:
"In {1974}, Kanawha County, West Virginia was predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. But cutting across those broad categories were division of religion, class and world-view that made real community for whites, much less whites and blacks together, all but impossible. By its residents own account, the county had at least two distinct populations of whites: the reasonably well-educated middle-class citizens of Charleston and the rural Appalachians who worked in the chemical plants and refineries of Nitro, St. Albans and Dunbar or carved out a living out of sometimes wild, coal-filled mountains gorged by hollows and creeks that drain into the Kanawha River.
The closing of dozens of small schools during the 1950s and ī60s had thrown more rural children into contact with urban children, thereby undermining their own folkways. The changes wrought by the upheavals of the 1960s also threatened the fragile peace that masked quite different ways of perceiving reality."
The issue at hand was over the textbooks the school district agreed to purchase. Many of the rural parents and their religious leaders objected to them because they felt they would be a bad influence on their kids and because they believed such books attacked their way of life. School board member Alice Moore, who was the wife of a fundamentalist Church of Christ preacher in St. Albans, became the leader of the anti-textbook forces who organized a school boycott. Soon they would have powerful allies:
"The following day the boycott received a tremendous boost when an estimated 3,500 coal miners struck in a show of solidarity with the protesters, despite orders from the United Mine Workers not to do so. Within a week, the number of striking miners in Kanawha County and seven surrounding counties ran as high as 10,000. Meanwhile protestors picketed schools, school-bus garages, businesses and various other sites, sometimes erecting barricades to keep people and vehicles from passing through. Thousands of people mounted daily demonstrations at the schools districtīs main administration building. On September 10, Charleston bus drivers honored the picket lines; leaving more than 10,000 regular riders without service Alice Moore credited the miners with having forced the semi-capitulation of the school board. "They added power," she said. "That coal main strike was cost millions of dollars a day. And shutting down the mines, of course, grabbed national attention. That was probably the first and only time they ever went on strike for anything other than their salaries or their working conditions."
The money quote of this passage is in bold. The miners werenīt striking over pay or working conditions. Such issues had been dealt with years and years before. This is something completely different. The boycott forced the school board to relent. It set up a commission to study the textbook issue. Soon things turned ugly and people acted in ways that give lie to a notion of a rural America united and at peace with itself. In fact the whole thing resembled the labor struggles that took place in Appalachia during the early part of the 20th Century.
"The protests not only continued after the rally, but quickly turned to ugly violence over the next few weeks. While the Textbook Review Committee was formed and began its work, once school was dynamited, two others were firebombed and several were damaged by gunfire and vandalism. Two men were wounded by gunfire, on as he tried to cross a picket line and the other, a protestor, shot through the heart by a pro-book demonstrator who said he thought he was being attacked. CBS News reporter Jed DuVall and his television crew were badly roughed up. School buses were fired upon while returning from their rounds and at one point most of the buses in the upper part of the county were disabled by vandals. Protestors stoned the houses and broke car windows of parents who defied the boycott and sent their children to school. Teachers and administrators were repeatedly threatened. Shots were fired into a car belonging to the president Classroom Teacherīs Association. And someone set of fifteen sticks of dynamite under the gas meter at the school board building. Supporters of the books were also guilty of violence. The car of one protestor was destroyed by fire. Alice Moore was repeatedly threatened. Guns were fired in front of her house and sugar was put in her gas tank. Police bodyguards stayed with her during times of greatest threat and she had to leave town for reasons of personal safety."
Rev. James Lewis of St. Johnīs Episcopal Church in Charleston was on the textbook commission and aptly described what was going on:
"People were warring with one another. This was Bosnia. This was a deeply tribal struggle and there was not a way to stay out of it...The anti-textbook people of Kanawha County are confused and angry about everything from marijuana to Watergate. Feeling helpless and left out, they are looking for a scapegoat. They are eager to exorcise all that is evil and foul, cleanse or burn all that is strange and foreign. In this religious war, spiced with overtones of race and class, the books are an accessible target.
Mike Edds, an evangelical youth pastor in Kanawha and a textbook opponent said that the elitism of the textbook supporters with their better education and cosmopolitan ways did much to cause the mistrust that built up among provincials who felt their social "betters" were trying to shove textbooks down their throats that their old rural district school boards would never think of adopting. That loss of power, of control over their lives, is what fueled their, yep you guessed it, "bitterness."
"Thatīs where the split came. There was elitism in the central office that saw the majority of the population as ignorant, uneducated folks. Iīm sure some of the folks didnīt use proper English. I speak with a little bit of hillbilly lingo and slang. Some of these folks maybe didnīt finish high school, maybe some of them didnīt go to college, but thatīs not a mark of a personīs intelligence. People in Kanawha County are very pro-American, very patriotic; itīs apple pie, Mom, the flag, and the church. These textbooks struck at every area of that belief system and the parents felt like "We cannot just avoid this terrible conflict. We have to face it. We have to do something about it."
James Moffett, editor-in-chief of some of the textbooks summed nicely what happens when you try to push people around without listening to them. And doesnīt have to be in the West Virginia mountains. Any place where the common folk feel powerless against the powers that be will suffice:
"Mountaineer folk donīt like central government because it disrupts their folk ways and never, throughout their history, seriously come to their aid. They felt their children were being mentally kidnapped by people of a larger, dominant culture. Theyīve always been pushed around. Outsiders have always come in and grabbed the land and siphoned the money from the mines, so theyīve never felt included or protected by the federal government or larger social entities. They had their own culture and wanted to keep it that way."
And guess who happened to be in Kanawha County writing all of this down? The Heritage Foundation. The oldest right-wing think tank started in 1973 and funded by beer baron Joseph Coors, had its operatives in Kanawha County working with the anti-textbook forces and bringing in such right-wing figures as Bob Dornan, Rev. Carl McIntyre and Mel and Norma Gabler. These were people who smelled an opportunity as Moffett pointed out:
"Political conservatives donīt have a lot of practical appeal to the working class. They donīt have much to offer them and they know that. They want them to deflect them from thinking about the practical disadvantages of conservatism. They want to win them over and the only way they can do they can is through social or moral issues...I do feel liberals are making a big mistake in ignoring the spiritual dimension. They have too much faith in the courts and legislatures. They leave themselves open by having nothing to offer people who want some kind of spiritual dimension and to whom liberals seem materialistic. Liberals have a big hole there and some adept conservatives are taking advantage of it."
Thereīs your answer Thomas Frank as to your question "Whatīs the matter with Kansas?"
I hate to break the news to everyone, but politics in the U.S. is primarily about stoking fears and resentments. Itīs about using such fears and resentments to mobilize voting blocs in your favor. It always has been. Both sides do it. Anyone who believes (as many neocons apparently do) that politics is this grand clash of ideas is foolish and stupid because as we have seen both parties believe in a grand consensus of free trade, foreign interventionism and big governments. Anyone who questions this consensus (like Ron Paul and Mike Gravel for example) is regarded as a loony not to be taken seriously. So politics is not about ideas, itīs about using fear and resentment to motivate different blocs of voters to vote for the candidates that only winds up hurting their interests in the end. Fear and resentment are very powerful motivators. Obama basically said what political consultants already know. We just donīt like to hear it.
MARs fear. And they have good reason to fear, because they donīt know what blow is coming next. What they want more than anything is some sort of stability, so they donīt have to worry if theyīre going to be out of work, or if their gun will be confiscated or they canīt pray even in their own churches. Maybe such fears seem irrational, but given the amount of cultural, economic and political changes over the past 45 years that has buffeted such communities, such fears canīt be discounted. The political consultants and politicians and exploit those fears every election cycle, because they know they exists and they know they can exploit them.
Itīs good in a way that the primaries in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia focused on the problems of Americaīs industrial heartland, rural areas and the Scots-Irish region known as "Appalachia." But those persons in the media covering it have done so in their usual ham-handed and clumsy way, like they were commenting on the antics of an animal exhibit at the zoo. Itīs hard for elites in the MSM to truly understand Americanīs small towns and rural areas because they donīt live there. They donīt know people there. Perhaps a few of them grew up in such places but they decided that working in the mill or on the farm or at the convenience store or the auto garage wasnīt for them so they moved out and upwards to Ivy League educations and posh East Side apartments or Georgetown town homes. Maybe its true that Obama, like Daniel Larison said in his blog Eunomia, sees himself as sort of ambassador for MARs to the elites to try an explain why they vote the way they do. But Iīll at least give Obama credit for being more perceptive about American politics than a thousand brain dead political reporters have been.
There are a couple of books Iīve mentioned in this article that I urge people to read to understand the political framework of the 2008 elections. Kevin Phillipsī The Cousinsī Wars is another. I also want to plug Bruce Miroffīs book on the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern The Liberalīs Moment. A lot has been said about the 1972 McGovern campaign by people who were either barely alive when it happened or never born at all or whose memories of it are pretty hazy. Miroff does an excellent job of cutting through all of this to give a detailed portrait of McGovernīs insurgency within the party, why it happened, why he won and his long-term impact on our nationīs politics which has been considerable. Make up your own minds about McGovern instead of being spoon-fed stereotypes and myths about his campaign from a lazy media addicted stereotyping and labeling everything it doesnīt want to take the time to truly understand.
Sean Scallon is a journalist and freelance writer living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin
"What George Wallace demonstrated was that all of those alienated with the set of American government, perhaps the largest group were the white working men of America and in so demonstrating, George Wallace uncovered a reality that will be of concern for years.
Abandoned by the liberal voices and their intellectual sponsors who made the white working man their wards in the 1930s, white workingmen find now, in the public dialogue of America, almost no expression of their problems. The whole rub of the past eight years in American experimentation has been a run against the condition of the white workingmen.
The white workingmen, at least the union men, have now all but conquered the conditions of their work. For most, their unions have made their hours in their working places the best part of the day air-conditioned, clean and safe. At the plant, the condition of life is better controlled for American workingmen by their union leaders than in any country in the world. But when they go home from work, they enter another world the community of neighborhood, of their kin, of their ethnic groups. And this home community world is no longer under any control they can affect.
In the age of experiment, as social theorists press government on to ends yet untested, it is the white workingman whose sense of community is most abused. From the tree-shaded streets of suburbia, the white middle class can insulate itself by zoning and money from the stress and strain of experiment, from the fear of violence. The white working man and the white poor feel defenseless against such experiments; and since the cutting edge of all such experiments seem to subject them, as powerless test-tube material, to an intermingling of race for which nothing in their education has prepared them. It is their neighborhoods that must be broken up by public housing that will drive them out and install blacks; it is their children, not middle-class children, who must be bussed; it is the streets on which their old ladies walk to midnight mass that become dangerous because of the purse-snatchers; it is they who must, in their lives, pay in daily worries for the guilt of white slavers centuries ago. The fathers of these workingmen had come from Europe a generation ago or they themselves had fled the South. What they had earned the fat paycheck, the house, the school, the quiet neighborhood they had earned by playing by the rules. Now, from Washington, for eight years, the rules had been undergone change. But change not for the rich of the well-to-do or the comfortable, only for them and their communities."
What White describes and what Obama tried to clumsily talk about basically describes American politics from 1964 to today: White, middle-class resentment. This is where the whole term MAR (Middle American Radicals) springs from. And itīs a resentment born of then sense that people who live in small towns (like Arkansaw, Wisconsin, population 300, where I currently reside) mid-sized factory towns (like the one I grew up in, Beloit, Wisconsin) and urban ethnic neighborhoods have no control over their lives and are at the mercy of trends economic, cultural and political.
In this, Obama owes a great debt to late writer Sam Francis (although itīs doubtful he would pay Francis back) who was the first to popularize the term invented by sociologist Donald Warren back in 1976. MARs represented the great American middle class from Northeast and Midwest ethnic Catholics to Southern Protestants, skilled and semi-skilled blue collar workers and with high school educations. The exact same constituency Hilary Clinton now supposedly represents (although if Francis were alive today heīd wretch at the thought). What set MARs apart were their attitudes towards government which he described:
"What defines them as a movement is an attitudinal quality and what Warren finds most distinctive of them is their view of government and, in a broader sense, their view of the establishment and their role in it. Unlike adherents of the Left, MARs do not feel the government as favoring the rich and unlike adherents of the Right, they do not regard the government as giving to the poor. This attitude is resonant with significant political and social situations. It points to a sense of resentment and exploitation, but also broader which is directed upwards and downwards. It points to a distrust of decision-makers in state and economy as well as to the fear of the economically depressed. It points to the fears of aspiration, to alienation of loyalties, to a suspicion of established institutions, authorities and values. The economic frustration of MARs spill over into political, cultural and moral expressions."
Obama couldnīt have said this any better and it turns out he didnīt.
Could he have worded it better? Perhaps. But Iīm sure we know of or are folk who "cling" to their Bibles as hard as they can because we have faith and when Charlton Heston (RIP) says "You can take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers." you can bet heīs clinging to it pretty hard. To "cling" means to hold on tight and Iīm sure we either are or know people who hold fast to their guns and Bibles.
And why do they? Because in many cases, itīs all theyīve got. And such persons have every right to be bitter. Bitter about seeing their jobs go to Mexico. Bitter about seeing their kids bused from their neighborhood schools to ones across town. Bitter about seeing their values mocked in the wider culture. Bitter about being lied to about the benefits of NAFTA or the Iraq war and the supposed $1.00 a gallon gas we told we would be paying. Bitter about seeing THEIR kids go to war and die while the elites stay in the club box cheering them on. Bitter about seeing their towns socially engineered with the influx of immigrants without any kind of discussion as to whether this was good idea or not. Bitter about being let down by both the Democrats and Republicans, who supposedly talk good games on the issues they care about but in the end do nothing to help despite such empty promises.
Why else would Hilary Clinton repudiate the one concrete accomplishment of her husbandīs Administration, the passage of NAFTA through Congress, unless she knew that bitterness existed? Shouldnīt she be celebrating NAFTAīs benefits? She knows full damn well if she did that in Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio theyīd run her out of town on a rail. So sheīll down a boilermaker and pretend sheīs one of the guys, this gal born of the upscale Chicago suburbs, a former Goldwater Girl and Wellesley and Yale Law School graduate. Yes, she truly is the salt of the earth. And of course thereīs man-of-the people John McCain, the son and grandson of admirals who was born on a tropical estate in the Canal Zone, the gold-digger whoīs wife is a beer baroness and who once told a South Carolina textile worker concerned about keeping his job and I quote "I didnīt know your biggest ambition in life is to work in the mill." How is this any less condescending that what Obama said?
So Obama clumsily said what everyone knows to be true but doesnīt want to admit because that would spoil some sort of twisted image of Heartland America being a happy place of pure American values and virtues instead of pockets of seething bitterness. Yes the former can be true but the latter as just as true and if it wasnīt then the populist movement, the KKK, the religious right, the Prohibition movement, the veterans movement after World War II, Harlan County, Kentucky, labor strife, Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comintatus, Tim McVeigh, Oklahoma City and militia movement, the George Wallace, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and David Duke campaigns, none of these things would have happened. If we deny what Obama said, then we deny that MARs exist in the first place.
(Hell, one can even argue the bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970 was the work of at least two partial MARs as the Armstrong brothers, Karleton and Dwight, grew up in a middle class home on the east side of Madison and whoīs father was a union steward at the old Gisholt Machine Works. Many of the student radicals they associated with were upper-middle class or well-to-do like Bill Ayers for example.)
But what Obama did not say, or even hint at, is the fact such fears, bitterness, and reaction did not take place in a vacuum, as we can see from the very first battle of the culture war, the textbook controversy of the Kanawha County School District, West Virginia in the early 1970s.
The first shots of the culture war were fired in Kanawha County, West Virginia, the home of the state capital and the stateīs largest city Charleston. Author William Martin, a sociology teacher at Rice University, details this battle in his 1997 book With God on our Side:
"In {1974}, Kanawha County, West Virginia was predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. But cutting across those broad categories were division of religion, class and world-view that made real community for whites, much less whites and blacks together, all but impossible. By its residents own account, the county had at least two distinct populations of whites: the reasonably well-educated middle-class citizens of Charleston and the rural Appalachians who worked in the chemical plants and refineries of Nitro, St. Albans and Dunbar or carved out a living out of sometimes wild, coal-filled mountains gorged by hollows and creeks that drain into the Kanawha River.
The closing of dozens of small schools during the 1950s and ī60s had thrown more rural children into contact with urban children, thereby undermining their own folkways. The changes wrought by the upheavals of the 1960s also threatened the fragile peace that masked quite different ways of perceiving reality."
The issue at hand was over the textbooks the school district agreed to purchase. Many of the rural parents and their religious leaders objected to them because they felt they would be a bad influence on their kids and because they believed such books attacked their way of life. School board member Alice Moore, who was the wife of a fundamentalist Church of Christ preacher in St. Albans, became the leader of the anti-textbook forces who organized a school boycott. Soon they would have powerful allies:
"The following day the boycott received a tremendous boost when an estimated 3,500 coal miners struck in a show of solidarity with the protesters, despite orders from the United Mine Workers not to do so. Within a week, the number of striking miners in Kanawha County and seven surrounding counties ran as high as 10,000. Meanwhile protestors picketed schools, school-bus garages, businesses and various other sites, sometimes erecting barricades to keep people and vehicles from passing through. Thousands of people mounted daily demonstrations at the schools districtīs main administration building. On September 10, Charleston bus drivers honored the picket lines; leaving more than 10,000 regular riders without service Alice Moore credited the miners with having forced the semi-capitulation of the school board. "They added power," she said. "That coal main strike was cost millions of dollars a day. And shutting down the mines, of course, grabbed national attention. That was probably the first and only time they ever went on strike for anything other than their salaries or their working conditions."
The money quote of this passage is in bold. The miners werenīt striking over pay or working conditions. Such issues had been dealt with years and years before. This is something completely different. The boycott forced the school board to relent. It set up a commission to study the textbook issue. Soon things turned ugly and people acted in ways that give lie to a notion of a rural America united and at peace with itself. In fact the whole thing resembled the labor struggles that took place in Appalachia during the early part of the 20th Century.
"The protests not only continued after the rally, but quickly turned to ugly violence over the next few weeks. While the Textbook Review Committee was formed and began its work, once school was dynamited, two others were firebombed and several were damaged by gunfire and vandalism. Two men were wounded by gunfire, on as he tried to cross a picket line and the other, a protestor, shot through the heart by a pro-book demonstrator who said he thought he was being attacked. CBS News reporter Jed DuVall and his television crew were badly roughed up. School buses were fired upon while returning from their rounds and at one point most of the buses in the upper part of the county were disabled by vandals. Protestors stoned the houses and broke car windows of parents who defied the boycott and sent their children to school. Teachers and administrators were repeatedly threatened. Shots were fired into a car belonging to the president Classroom Teacherīs Association. And someone set of fifteen sticks of dynamite under the gas meter at the school board building. Supporters of the books were also guilty of violence. The car of one protestor was destroyed by fire. Alice Moore was repeatedly threatened. Guns were fired in front of her house and sugar was put in her gas tank. Police bodyguards stayed with her during times of greatest threat and she had to leave town for reasons of personal safety."
Rev. James Lewis of St. Johnīs Episcopal Church in Charleston was on the textbook commission and aptly described what was going on:
"People were warring with one another. This was Bosnia. This was a deeply tribal struggle and there was not a way to stay out of it...The anti-textbook people of Kanawha County are confused and angry about everything from marijuana to Watergate. Feeling helpless and left out, they are looking for a scapegoat. They are eager to exorcise all that is evil and foul, cleanse or burn all that is strange and foreign. In this religious war, spiced with overtones of race and class, the books are an accessible target.
Mike Edds, an evangelical youth pastor in Kanawha and a textbook opponent said that the elitism of the textbook supporters with their better education and cosmopolitan ways did much to cause the mistrust that built up among provincials who felt their social "betters" were trying to shove textbooks down their throats that their old rural district school boards would never think of adopting. That loss of power, of control over their lives, is what fueled their, yep you guessed it, "bitterness."
"Thatīs where the split came. There was elitism in the central office that saw the majority of the population as ignorant, uneducated folks. Iīm sure some of the folks didnīt use proper English. I speak with a little bit of hillbilly lingo and slang. Some of these folks maybe didnīt finish high school, maybe some of them didnīt go to college, but thatīs not a mark of a personīs intelligence. People in Kanawha County are very pro-American, very patriotic; itīs apple pie, Mom, the flag, and the church. These textbooks struck at every area of that belief system and the parents felt like "We cannot just avoid this terrible conflict. We have to face it. We have to do something about it."
James Moffett, editor-in-chief of some of the textbooks summed nicely what happens when you try to push people around without listening to them. And doesnīt have to be in the West Virginia mountains. Any place where the common folk feel powerless against the powers that be will suffice:
"Mountaineer folk donīt like central government because it disrupts their folk ways and never, throughout their history, seriously come to their aid. They felt their children were being mentally kidnapped by people of a larger, dominant culture. Theyīve always been pushed around. Outsiders have always come in and grabbed the land and siphoned the money from the mines, so theyīve never felt included or protected by the federal government or larger social entities. They had their own culture and wanted to keep it that way."
And guess who happened to be in Kanawha County writing all of this down? The Heritage Foundation. The oldest right-wing think tank started in 1973 and funded by beer baron Joseph Coors, had its operatives in Kanawha County working with the anti-textbook forces and bringing in such right-wing figures as Bob Dornan, Rev. Carl McIntyre and Mel and Norma Gabler. These were people who smelled an opportunity as Moffett pointed out:
"Political conservatives donīt have a lot of practical appeal to the working class. They donīt have much to offer them and they know that. They want them to deflect them from thinking about the practical disadvantages of conservatism. They want to win them over and the only way they can do they can is through social or moral issues...I do feel liberals are making a big mistake in ignoring the spiritual dimension. They have too much faith in the courts and legislatures. They leave themselves open by having nothing to offer people who want some kind of spiritual dimension and to whom liberals seem materialistic. Liberals have a big hole there and some adept conservatives are taking advantage of it."
Thereīs your answer Thomas Frank as to your question "Whatīs the matter with Kansas?"
I hate to break the news to everyone, but politics in the U.S. is primarily about stoking fears and resentments. Itīs about using such fears and resentments to mobilize voting blocs in your favor. It always has been. Both sides do it. Anyone who believes (as many neocons apparently do) that politics is this grand clash of ideas is foolish and stupid because as we have seen both parties believe in a grand consensus of free trade, foreign interventionism and big governments. Anyone who questions this consensus (like Ron Paul and Mike Gravel for example) is regarded as a loony not to be taken seriously. So politics is not about ideas, itīs about using fear and resentment to motivate different blocs of voters to vote for the candidates that only winds up hurting their interests in the end. Fear and resentment are very powerful motivators. Obama basically said what political consultants already know. We just donīt like to hear it.
MARs fear. And they have good reason to fear, because they donīt know what blow is coming next. What they want more than anything is some sort of stability, so they donīt have to worry if theyīre going to be out of work, or if their gun will be confiscated or they canīt pray even in their own churches. Maybe such fears seem irrational, but given the amount of cultural, economic and political changes over the past 45 years that has buffeted such communities, such fears canīt be discounted. The political consultants and politicians and exploit those fears every election cycle, because they know they exists and they know they can exploit them.
Itīs good in a way that the primaries in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia focused on the problems of Americaīs industrial heartland, rural areas and the Scots-Irish region known as "Appalachia." But those persons in the media covering it have done so in their usual ham-handed and clumsy way, like they were commenting on the antics of an animal exhibit at the zoo. Itīs hard for elites in the MSM to truly understand Americanīs small towns and rural areas because they donīt live there. They donīt know people there. Perhaps a few of them grew up in such places but they decided that working in the mill or on the farm or at the convenience store or the auto garage wasnīt for them so they moved out and upwards to Ivy League educations and posh East Side apartments or Georgetown town homes. Maybe its true that Obama, like Daniel Larison said in his blog Eunomia, sees himself as sort of ambassador for MARs to the elites to try an explain why they vote the way they do. But Iīll at least give Obama credit for being more perceptive about American politics than a thousand brain dead political reporters have been.
There are a couple of books Iīve mentioned in this article that I urge people to read to understand the political framework of the 2008 elections. Kevin Phillipsī The Cousinsī Wars is another. I also want to plug Bruce Miroffīs book on the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern The Liberalīs Moment. A lot has been said about the 1972 McGovern campaign by people who were either barely alive when it happened or never born at all or whose memories of it are pretty hazy. Miroff does an excellent job of cutting through all of this to give a detailed portrait of McGovernīs insurgency within the party, why it happened, why he won and his long-term impact on our nationīs politics which has been considerable. Make up your own minds about McGovern instead of being spoon-fed stereotypes and myths about his campaign from a lazy media addicted stereotyping and labeling everything it doesnīt want to take the time to truly understand.
Sean Scallon is a journalist and freelance writer living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin
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