Thread by @thatgingerish

Story time: I promise this is relevant to the Mueller Report.

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In 1922, as the Ku Klux Klan was reaching its peak of preeminence in the United States, the state of Texas held an election for US Senator. Many candidates publicly voiced their opinion on the issue of the Ku Klux Klan.

Earl B. Mayfield was identified as the pro-klan candidate for the Democratic nomination in the Senate race and, in 1922, Texas held all-white Democratic primaries. Mayfield beat out five other candidates for the nomination and then beat his Republican opponent.

Mayfield beat the GOP candidate (George Peddy) in the general election 2:1 and prepared to go to Washington. Peddy called for the US Senate to investigate Mayfield for accepting illegal campaign contributions from the KKK.

The US Senate refused to seat Mayfield and conducted an investigation. The investigation began in January 1923 and ran for two years. After two years, Mayfield was seated.

I know how the members of the Senate must have felt. There was a violent, exclusionary movement in their country and the mere seating of Mayfield must have felt like it would embolden the klan and cause more violence.

They must have felt like they were on a precipice. Perhaps they felt the only way to make the klan disappear was to make their candidate invalid. Maybe they felt the most surefire way to defeat the KKK was in the court rather than the ballot box. I get that. Maybe you do too.

Its terrifying to be in a nation where our fellow citizens elected someone who emboldens hate. Its scary to think there might be things that Trump will do that will take a long time to undo.

Mayfield ran for reelection in 1928, but by the time 1928 came, klan support was dwindling across the nation. He lost his primary, ran for Governor in 1930 and came in 7th out of 11 in his primary.

While Mayfield was in office, the nation had realized there were major problems with klankraft. While there have been additional rises of klan membership, they have never even approached the size and power briefly wielded in the early 1920s.

Leonard Moore argues that we should not view far-right events like attacks and instead see them as movements which wax and wane over time. They can still be hateful. They can still be morally wrong.

Perhaps Leonard Moore calls to us to look at the Trump phenomenon a bit differently. Its possible that Trump is not the whole illness but instead, he’s merely a symptom of a broader movement that is scary and can be violent but will soon pass.

Mueller’s report doesn’t mean another six years of Trump. Like Mayfield, he might find that 2020 looks quite a bit different from 2016. Maybe we have spent too much time fighting the cough and not enough time defeating the infection. /end

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