[ It made a kind of perverse and dangerous sense that some
settler-homesteaders like my great-grandfather would seek to relocate
the source of their legitimacy from where they lived and what they did
to who they thought they were, that is, from the land to the blood.]
[[link removed]]

CONFRONTING THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN-STYLE FASCISM IN ONE FAMILY’S
HISTORY  
[[link removed]]


 

Julie Carr
April 30, 2023
History News Network [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ It made a kind of perverse and dangerous sense that some
settler-homesteaders like my great-grandfather would seek to relocate
the source of their legitimacy from where they lived and what they did
to who they thought they were, that is, from the land to the blood. _

Omer Madison Kem (standing) with his family and their sod house,
Nebraska 1886,

 

No one talks much about the populists these days. In the age of
DeSantis and MTG we’re more likely to see the MAGA crowd, or at
least some of their leaders, referred to as fascists
[[link removed]].
But back in 2016, Trump’s followers were routinely described as
populists, though hardly anyone seemed sure of what that meant.
Because my great-grandfather, Omer Madison Kem, was a founding member
of the original Populist Party, formed in the 1890s from the Famers’
Alliance in the South and West in protest against the vast abuses and
inequalities of the Gilded Age, I thought I did know something about
it. I knew that the Populists had fought against political corruption
and capitalist greed and for the rights of workers, farmers, and the
poor.

When in 1892 Omer Kem and ten other Populists entered Congress as
Senators and Representatives, mostly from the Plains states, they took
radical and pro-worker positions in debates surrounding tariffs,
taxes, and the rights of the poor. During the 1892 session Kem and the
other Populists called for the forfeiture of railroad land grants, an
eight-hour workday law, and the nationalization of transportation and
finance. After Pinkerton agents killed at least seven strikers during
the Homestead Strike that July, Kem supported a resolution to
investigate the corporate use of violent strikebreakers. He advocated
for direct election of U.S. Senators (rather than election by state
legislatures), demanded safeguards against land speculation in the
West so that “men of very meager means” could have the
“privilege of making for [him]self and [his] family a home,” and
in 1894, while the country faced a devastating depression, Kem argued
passionately for a graduated income tax so that the rich would be
compelled to support the needs of the vulnerable.

At a time when 9 percent of American families owned 71 percent of the
country’s wealth, when the average industrial worker lived on $406 a
year, and when striking workers were routinely beaten and shot at by
hired thugs, the Populists had actively and energetically sought
justice for the working poor. As Black Kansas Populist Benjamin F.
Foster [[link removed]] wrote, the Populists
“are in favor of the masses and against monopolies. It is the party
of the poor man ... and would give him a chance to live and heal his
present misery.”

And yet, less than a decade after his time in Congress, my
great-grandfather became a passionate advocate for eugenics, including
the forced sterilization of people he considered “unfit to breed.”
In the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, he eagerly trafficked in the
scientific racism that has long influenced U.S. immigration and
criminal justice policies, and both European and American fascism to
this day.

What is the connection between the Populist cry for equality (“equal
rights for all, special privileges for none!” was their slogan) and
the turn toward a proto-fascist belief that some people are worthy of
life and reproduction and others not? Was it simply that Omer Kem,
along with much of the country, got caught up in the pseudo-science of
the day (social Darwinism mixed with Mendelian genetics)? Or was there
something deeper in Kem’s Populist roots that would lead him in 1926
to write a letter to the _Oregonian_ in which he advocated (as he
had many times in letters to family, friends, and other papers) for
the forced sterilization of the poor, and then a decade later to go
even further with a quasi-endorsement of infanticide?

That letter to the _Oregonian_ earned Kem an admiring response from
a man named Mr. Schuman, a member of a Portland-based fascist
organization, the Nordic Aryan League of America, who addresses Omer
“with Aryan greetings.” Kem finds the writer a little batty but
does not hesitate to respond, noting that he and his interlocutor are
in general agreement about the value of the “Great White Race”
(with this phrase my great-grandfather makes me wonder if he’d been
reading Madison Grant
[[link removed]]). “The
time will come,” he writes, “when so-called white couples marry,
they will not know whether their children will be black, white,
ringed, streaked, striped, bronzed, or spotted. The only way now left
by which this calamity can be averted, is to sterilize all
participants in these mixed marriages.”

In a recent talk sponsored by the April Institute for Antifascist
Research and Education [[link removed]], Cynthia
Miller-Idriss spoke about the factors that can lead someone to become
radicalized by White Nationalism or Fascism. Citing dates drawn from
the biographies of participants in the January 6 insurrection,
Miller-Idriss notes that those who are vulnerable to fascistic
thinking (though she does not use that term) tend to be people who,
having experienced precariousness, fear losing what power they do have
(even if they are currently perfectly well-off): “I call it a kind
of precariousness plus entitlement,” she says, “because in order
to be afraid of something being taken away from you, you have to think
you’re entitled to have it.” 

Indeed, this quality defines my great-grandfather and many of the
white agrarian Populists from plains states, the vast majority of whom
had found their way to Kansas or Nebraska by way of the Homestead Act.
As poor laborers from mostly the Midwest, they’d been promised the
privilege and security of property, but for many it had not turned out
that way. Unregulated railroads, falling crop prices, terrible weather
conditions, and an aggressive lending industry meant that in 1890s
Nebraska there was one mortgage for every three persons
[[link removed]]—thus,
more than one per family—and most of the farms were mortgaged for
all they were worth. It was in these conditions that the Populist
party arose; white men, having been promised security at the expense
of Native populations deemed unworthy or worse, found themselves
nevertheless buried in unpayable debt. 

The internal contradiction—between a desired and assumed
independence and an actual, though decried, dependence—can be
readily seen in the (familiar to us) phrase Kem used to describe his
feelings upon first acquiring his homestead: “I had passed my 26th
birthday somewhere on the way, acquired 320 acres of fine land and you
may rest assured that I was one _proud boy_.” Plains Populism arose
out of a condition in which the white settler-farmer was deeply
insecure in his relation to the land, which was nonetheless the
foundation of his identity (and his survival). In this context, it
made a kind of perverse and dangerous sense that some
settler-homesteaders like Kem would seek to relocate the source of
their legitimacy from _where _they lived and _what _they did
to _who they thought they were_, that is, from the land to the blood.
When, in September of 2020
[[link removed]],
Donald Trump told a crowd of white supporters that they hailed from
“good genes,” and referenced “the racehorse theory,” he was
offering a clue to where the GOP would go next. One root to this
frankly fascistic rhetoric lies in the soil of Kansas and Nebraska, in
the settler-history of families like mine.

_Julie Carr is a poet and Professor of English at the University of
Colorado-Boulder, and the author of Mud, Blood, and Ghosts
[[link removed]]: Populism,
Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West, which will be
published in May by University of Nebraska Press. _

* populism
[[link removed]]
* MAGA
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]