| fMasatomo Ayabe, "Ku
Kluxers in a Coal Mining Community: A Study of the Ku Klux Klan Movement in Williamson County, Illinois, 1923-1926." (Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 102, No. 1, Spring, 2009) Donald Holley, "A Look Behind the Masks: The 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Monticello, Arkansas" (The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Summer, 2001) James H. Madison, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland (Indiana U. Press, 2020) Mich grand jury investigation into black legion on racism, black legion, klan, Homer Martin Bud Simons, interview (Skeels): on grifters, Press room Flint Fisher Body Cliff Williams interview (PF) on Bert Harris; phone call (Neighborhood Improvement Association) Bill Jenkins on Pontiac "Tar-dipping" party Pontiac Fisher Body Kraus interview on Bert Harris Norm Bully on the "Americans" (PF) Frank Fagan on the "Americans" Harry Kujawsky Tiedermann Reuther on Anderson, Indiana Simons on Saginaw, Michigan The Elder report |
| From
January 7, 1974 to August 21, 1974, Cliff Williams (Yellow Truck and Bus, Pontiac) and I had a series
discussions about the situation in the Auto plants in Pontiac and
Flint during the 1930s. Among other documents, he gave
me two news clippings: the Detroit News clipping at the right, and a clipping titled Auto Union Here Votes to Reject Lewis Proposal (Newspaper unknown. Article published about August 31, 1938). He also gave me a handwritten draft of a telegram he and five others sent to john L. Lewis dated August 3, 1938. 1971 school busing The context of these discussions can be seen in the New York Times article of August 30, 1971 (shown at the right), in Ken Coleman, "On this day in 1971: KKK bombs empty Pontiac buses set to racially integrate schools" (Michigan Advance, August 30, 2021), in Antibusing Pickets Close 2 Car Plants (New York Times, September 15, 1971), and in Local Chapters Unite: The UAW and its Divided Opinion on Busing in Pontiac Schools (Reuther archive). This is what the "southern strategy" looked like on the ground. The "southern strategy", linked forevermore with the names George Wallace and Richard Nixon, showed its "populist" rage in the anti-busing riots and demonstrations that followed the Supreme Count ruling of 1971 that led to forced busing. During these discussions, something occurred that can be appreciated only now, in the time of Trump. At the time of our disucssion the events of August 30, 1971--the KKK bombing of Pontiac school buses--had left its mark: a “white citizens’ council” was formed, sometime between the riots of Aug 30 1971 and my interviews with Williams beginning on Jan 7, 1974. Duriing one of our sessions Cliff got a phone call. Unlike other time when he got calls while were were talking, this time he said to me, “ I’ve gotta take this call.” I turned off my recorder, but I remember the circumstances and Cliff’s discussion of the call right after he hung up. (On Cliff’s end of the converstion, all he said was uhu, uhu: the other party did most of the talking.) https://reuther.wayne.edu/node/15096 Pontiac Workers Warned He immediately spoke to me about the call. He felt a need to explain to me what it was about. I don’t know what the group was called, but it was an anti-busing/neighborhood improvement group that met regularly. It was a further evolution of white supremacy, and followed in the footsteps of the southern white reaction to Brown vs. the Bd. of Ed. Williams was one of the participants. (Mothers of Massive Resistance, 221-2) The group in Pontiac followed the Lacan-Atwater playbook. Travis report. Flint April 1937 Travis report. Flint September 1937 Mortimer-Geiger-Case The Master of Seventh Avenue (New York University Press, 2005) Cliff Williams page He seemed troubled by his participation in the group. He explained to me that his daughter, who worked for the UAW at Solidarity House, thought it was wrong. He didn’t disagree with her. On the other hand, it seemed clear to me that if he had failed to participate he would have been ostracized. (recall the diner scene in Bridges of Madison County) That was the clear impression he gave. Bear in mind that it was Williams who went head to head with the UAW’s most significant Black Legionaire, Bert Harris, the alpha male of the Press Room at Fisher Body in Flint. In fact, Harris had thewomen in sew and cut make the robes fo the Black Legion. (How many workers were involved, and how many robes they made, I don't know.) This is the text of a telegramresponse Williams sent to John L. Lewis regarding the factional situation. Lewis’ response to Williams was to send two men too meet with williams. Williams got in the car and the Lewis reps asked Williams to point out Bert Harris on the street. Williams did so . . . and Harris disappeared from the scene. Williams thought he might have been an accessory to a crime (in this cse murder). Harris, however did not disappear from michigan, only from anyplace the uaw was strong. Harris ends up in the Thumb are of Mmichiagan (as rural an area as one can find in mid-michgan) selling real estate. Since Lewis’ usual method for “eliminating” troublesome individuals was not violence,, but rather financial incentives, that indeed may well have been the cse here. I know this becasue subsequent to my work in the 1970s Neil Leighton and the U of M/Flint orallhistory project intervied harris in 198-. David Riddle, "Race and Reaction in Warren, Michigan, 1971 to 1974: "Bradley v. Milliken" and the Cross-District Busing Controversy" (Michigan Hstorical Review, Fall, 2000) ade it easy for the local NAACP to charge the board with de jure segregation. The case, Davis v. School District of the City of Pontiac, was assigned to Damon Keith, an A frican-American federal district judge. In 1969 Keith found that the Pontiac School Board. was guilty of de jure segregation and ordered the busing of about eight thousand of the school district's twenty-four thousand students to begin at the start of the 1971 school year. White parents formed a resistance group, the National Action Group (NAG). After the school board lost its appeal of Keith's order, NAG sponsored a rally attended by five thousand people featuring NAG leader Irene McCabe and Alabama Governor George Wallace. Pontiac was in a state of near rebellion the week before the busing plan was to go into effect. On 30 August 1971 ten of the school district's buses were blown up in a nighttime attack. Acting on an informer's tip, the Pontiac police soon arrested six members of the local Ku Klux Klan, including Michigan Klan leader Robert Miles. On 7 September six women padlocked themselves to a fence surrounding the school bus parking lot. A week later five hundred pickets blocked three gates at the Pontiac General Motors Fisher Body plant to protest busing. UAW officials, including Irving Bluestone, the director of the GM Department of the union, tried unsuccessfully to get workers to cross the picket lines. |
CONCLUSION: We are now engulfed in the implosion of neo-liberal "society". The term
"society" is bracketed because, in the conventional use of the term, an ontological stability
is implied, whereas in reality this society is in the process of blowing its brains out, and
that along four axes of ontological catastrophe:
| 1.
First, the disintegration of the cognitive performativities of
modernity itself: the "human" side of human capital.
Decognification, disindividuation: Trump's rhetorical performances seen
from the standpoint of literacy and cognition as contingent not
normative cultural-historical developments. This disintegration
is comprehended within the framework of Figure 0. The election of
Donald Trump is a lagging indicator of this disintegration of cognitive
performativities. Preceding his election ws the decline of
mathematics competence indexed by the PISA data, which indicate that a
catastrophic decline in cognitive performativity preceeded and made
possible the fascist-patrimonial victory of Novemmbe 2016. 2. the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP (Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism: "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism."). The brutishness in language and behavior that are the chief characteristics of Trump's mass-oriented performances must be understood as manifestations of something of great ontological significance. The sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities goes back to the Know-Nothing roots of the GOP (Gniepp), later 19th century anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political rhetoric, the lynching for rape discourse, the southern strategy, and the infamous Willie Horton episode in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign. Trump's performance coming down the stairs ("They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.") and the plaint of one of his supporters ("He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting") should be placed in this broader context. Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment (the inner logic of GOP sado-sexual rhetorical performativity). The paranoid-schizoid position (Klein). Fascism and racism. Fascism and patrimonialism. Fascism reconsidered as a theoretical construct. | 3.
Third, the assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions--an assault on
the very idea of science-based professionalism and public
service. Max Weber's concept of patrimonialism covers the
phenomena labeled as corruuption and cronyism in the Trump
administration. Marie Yovanovitch describes how a modern polity
is being subverted by fascist insurgencies within the state.
Patrimonialism does not imply fascism, but fascism American style circa
2016 -- ?? replaces rational-bureaucratic formations with patrimonial
networks. The assault on the Capitol was the most dramatic
. . . , but at its most profound (and here one must take Steve Bannon
seriously) the deconstruction of the state is the destruction of the
major institutions of modernity. 4. Fourth, the triumph of nihilism as the socio-cultural engineering project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power, generating an entropic process of disindividuation. Mass consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the organism. The fiction of freedom, the subversion of individuation, the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of distress, the infantilization of public discourse . . . in short, the dissipation of the species homo sapiens sapiens into a proliferation of effects. DSM-V as the operating manual of the post-human ontology. The incredible shrinking self. This is the new Democratic party whose rhetorical vector is liberal not progressive (the triumph of commerecial republicanism over the civic republicanism of the New Deal). *Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750-1914 (Cornell, 2003). In a nutshell: civic republicanism incorporates a concept of bildung (republican virtue); commerial republicanism does not. |
Reformation Roots
|
(December 21, 2023: the danger looms)
DATA: SOCIOLOGICAL KE
UAW Some Arrestees . . . Michael Wolf DATA: HERMENEUTICAL
Semiotic Regimes
Bildung Stalinism Fascism Nihilism FDR to Trump: language and audience Tank SADO-SEXUAL EIGENVECTOR OF GOP PERFORMATIVITY
Stupid%252520PartyMAY
Rabidspage LowndesLong DOVER Imus PHILOSOPHY
Cartesian presuppositional matrix
Language-Thinking-Education Philohistory |
