Klan Sweeps Texas Election

Another thread of history that we're following through 1922 is the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

A Klan candidate for the U.S. Senate, Earle B. Mayfield, led the results in Texas's Democratic primary for the seat held by Charles Allen Culberson. Culberson had been the state's Attorney General, then Governor, before being elected Senator in 1898. Culberson came out strongly against the Klan and was supported by the anti-Klan Dallas Morning News; but the four-term senator was in ill health. In the six-candidate Democratic primary on July 22, 1922, Culberson came in third, behind Mayfield and impeached former Governor James "Farmer Jim" Ferguson.

"Something to Kick About" by Bill Sykes Philadelphia Public Ledger, July 26, 1922

Because none of the candidates garnered a majority of the vote, there would be a run-off election between the top two. Ferguson was barred by the legislature from seeking office in Texas because of his impeachment and conviction on ten counts of misapplication of public funds and receiving $156,000 from some unnamed source. (The accusations stemmed from Gov. Ferguson's veto of funds for the University of Texas in retaliation against political rivals among the faculty.) Sen. Culberson tried to get Ferguson stricken from the run-off ballot, but to no avail.

"I'll Sure Be Glad When This Primary Season Is Over" by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, August 3, 1922

Incidentally, the Klan also backed incumbent Governor Patrick M. Neff, who cruised to renomination. Neff did not campaign on Klan issues, however, unless you count his declaring marshal law against striking railroad workers in Denison as a Klan issue.

"The Day After" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, July 23, 1922

I had hoped to include some wisdom here from John Knott, who, to the best of my knowledge, was the only working editorial cartoonist in Texas at the time. I'm disappointed that the only cartoon of his that I have been able to find was this offering from the Sunday morning immediately after the Saturday primary.

Chances are that Knott drew this cartoon before the results were known; but even in the weeks before the July 22 primary, I found nothing from Knott about the senate race in Texas. He did, on the other hand, find inspiration to draw two cartoons in July about the apparently hotly debated topic of whether or not quail eat boll weevils.

Oh, well. We'll come back to Knott's August cartoons about the campaign, but I'm afraid that wisdom I was hoping for from him is less insightful than I had expected.

"The Menace" by H. Bensten in Minneapolis Star, Aug. 3, 1922

As the Texas run-off campaign chugged on, Mayfield accused Ferguson of being an "unrepentant perjurer," and of having received 3,500 Black votes in Bexar County in violation of Democratic primary rules. Ferguson charged that Mayfield "might vote dry, but drank wet," and was “guilty of conduct with the opposite sex that I cannot, in decency, mention when ladies are present in the audience.”

Supported by Texas's other U.S. Senator, Morris Sheppard, Mayfield won the August 26 run-off election for the Democratic nomination and subsequent endorsement at the state party convention.

Republicans, still associated with the so-called "Northern War of Aggression" and Reconstruction, were a negligible force in Texas politics at this time. The GOP lent its support to an anti-Klan Democrat running as an independent, George Peddy, whose write-in campaign netted 33.1% of the vote on November 7 to Mayfield's 66.9%.

Charging irregularities in Texas filing deadlines, Peddy challenged the November results, which only delayed Mayfield from assuming the Senate seat until December 3. Mayfield would serve only one term, ousted in 1928 by Democrat Tom Connally.

And just to the north, the Klan — despite its protestations to the contrary — was also active in Oklahoma's Democratic primary, with some success.

The Tulsa World includes another story on the left side of the front page that would make bigger headlines later on.

Few editorial cartoonists put out anything about the Klan candidates that summer. The coal and railroad union strikes were a more immediate issue for nearly all of them, as was the topic of summer vacations. Besides, there were plenty of local primary races all over the country, closer to the drawing board than down Texas way.

"Pollyanna's Patter" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 31, 1922

Q Toon: Great Is Thy Cravenness

Led by Merck's Kenneth Frazier, eight business and labor leaders resigned from Donald Trump's Manuafacturers' Jobs Initiative Council over Donald Trump's tardy, begrudging, and muddled condemnation of Nazis, Klansmen and unspecified radicals "on both sides, on both sides." Leaders of another council, the Strategic and Policy Forum, announced it was disbanding because Charlottesville had become "a distraction" to their purpose.

"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values. We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans."

A pouting Trump seized his ball and flounced home. (Or, rather, to a campaign rally in Arizona.)

Before he could disband them himself, the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities  resigned en masse in a letter crafted so that the first letter of each paragraph spelled out the word "resist."

State Department Science Envoy Daniel M. Kammen followed suit with his own acrostic letter of resignation. At this point, the only reason the rest of the career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers are still in Washington is that they're still working on how to hide clever messages in their resignation letters.

The only resulting resignation from Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board, on the other hand, was New York City pastor Rev. A.R. Barnard. If his resignation letter contained any secret message, it has not yet been found. (A Chicago area pastor had resigned from the board last year over the Billy Bush interview tape.)

Prior to Rev. Barnard leaving the 24-member board, Matthew Dowd, a strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, tweeted "Not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. We have learned corporate America has a greater moral compass.  So so sad."

The remaining members of the commission, the most prominent of whom had had no hesitation to criticize Democratic presidents, crept to the defense of Mr. Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, praised the president for his "bold truthful statement" about Charlottesville. Mark Burns, pastor of Harvest Praise and Worship Center in South Carolina, retweeted a link to a television interview in which he declared his support for Trump and criticized the counterprotesters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, blamed the news media for misrepresenting Trump's comments.

The Evangelical Board hold-outs have defended standing by their man by claiming that it's their Christian duty to give Trump their aid and counsel. By contrast, that Chicago pastor who quit the board last year, Rev. James MacDonald, posted this Facebook message to his congregation:

"The greater your influence the greater your complicity if you don't call the Charlottesville rally and attack what it really is: a heinous act of domestic terrorism entirely rooted in racial hatred.
"It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that people use the proper term 'Islamic terrorism' ... then turn around and refuse to use similarly candid terms when referring to racial hate crimes."

Q Toon: Loaded Response

I settled down in front of my drawing board last weekend after one of those weeks when LGBTQ issues just seemed insignificant relative to all the other news.

The week started with Donald Joffrey Trump responding to North Korean threats of nuclear attacks against the U.S. with overheated "fire and fury" rhetoric of his own. Nuclear war seemed so likely that even Wall Street suddenly snapped out of its giddy response to Trump's lazy faire economic policies.

Then fascists wielding semi-automatic rifles, swastikas, Ku Klux Klan banners and tiki torches marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, where one of their number ran over a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 19. Trump blurted out that "many sides, many sides" were responsible, driving the Korea story right off the front page (to the relief of Wall Street).

After two days, Trump begrudgingly read a statement assigning blame to the Nazis and Klansmen, but then stunningly revoked that statement at an unhinged press conference the next day. Beggaring credulity, Trump insisted that some participants in the march organized by the website The Daily Stormer, the Neo-Confederate League of the South, the National Policy Institute, and the National Socialist Movement are actually "very fine people." Perhaps those people were only Nazi sympathizers.

Why would Trump leap to the defense of the indefensible?

With his approval ratings down to 33% of the electorate, Trump can't afford to piss off Nazis and the Klan. As the sane, reasonable portion of the minority of voters who elected him slowly develop buyer's remorse, Nazis, Klansmen and their ilk become an evermore significant part of Trump's remaining base.

He is losing support among previously sympathetic corporate and labor leaders. Led by Merck chief executive Ken Frazier,  eight members of Trump's Strategy & Policy Forum and his Manufacturing Council resigned from them over his inability to distinguish a moral difference between his fascist base and anti-fascist protesters; Trump then disbanded the councils before any more businessmen could defect.

At this point, however, not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. They have no problem associating themselves with a Nazi sympathizer sympathizer.

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As long as I've brought up Bathroom Bills, let's pause for a moment to celebrate one gleam in the sh¡tstorm: the Texas legislature adjourned its special session without passing Senate Bill 6. A legislative priority for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and the theocratic right, the Texas Bathroom Bill was opposed by the Republican House Speaker Joe Straus, as well as by the Texas business community and the state's professional sports teams.

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On Monday, I invited you to guess who that was kibitzing over my shoulder in this week's cartoon. For the answer, look through the list of keywords at the end of this post.

And should you wish to share or link directly to this week's cartoon, throw some traffic to the news outlets which run my cartoon. Try here, here, or here.