2325. Make America Great Again for the People It Was Great for Already

By Bryce Covert, The New York Times, May 16, 2016

G.I. Bill of Rights College Students

DONALD J. TRUMP has promised to Make America Great Again, and people have listened. He is the presumptive Republican nominee. He got there with that one consistent campaign imperative splashed across his website, on loud red baseball caps, on stickers, yard signs and other slogan-ready paraphernalia.

This is the one true, unwavering message Mr. Trump offers his supporters. He may avoid direct answers on his taxes, but he has never backtracked on the need to return the country to its previous glory.

Which America is he promising to us? If you ask his supporters, they say life has gotten worse for people like them over the last 50 years. It seems safe to assume that, in the eyes of Mr. Trump’s overwhelmingly white male fans, America was greater a half-century ago. Indeed, it was pretty great — for them.

It’s not just that factory jobs were more plentiful or that women and minorities were largely kept from positions of power. Large national programs that radically changed the country kept America great specifically for white men. New Deal-era systems like Social Security and unemployment insurance; rules that demarcated minimum wages and maximum work hours and protected unionization; and the G.I. Bill at the end of World War II substantially transformed the country and created a booming middle class. But they all purposefully left out most women and minorities.

Social Security’s main program, which has become known by the name of the original bill, was old-age insurance. It was meant to ensure that old age wasn’t synonymous with poverty. The Social Security Act of 1935, which created this and other key programs, was groundbreaking: It is the most comprehensive and influential social program the country has ever enacted.

But it was implemented with enormous loopholes. To gain the votes of Southern Democrats who wanted to protect the Jim Crow structures of the South, agricultural and domestic workers were cut out. Given that more than 60 percent of the black labor force in the 1930s could be found in these jobs — including nearly 85 percent of black women — about two-thirds of all black people were denied, as Ira Katznelson writes in his book “When Affirmative Action Was White.” Those exclusions stood until the mid-1950s.

The political scientist Suzanne Mettler has shown in her work “Dividing Citizens” that women, who made up more than 90 percent of domestic workers at the time, were also cut out by the exclusion of “casual” or temporary workers. And these were the very workers who were making such low wages that saving for retirement was virtually impossible.

Unemployment insurance served as a true safety net, catching someone without work for the first time. But the same agricultural and domestic employee exclusions also applied. This program went even further, requiring a history of steady work before someone was laid off in order to get benefits — an advantage most black workers didn’t have.

Women, on the whole, fared even worse. “Policy makers operated on the assumption that the primary function of unemployment insurance was to replace the wages of male breadwinners, who were understood to earn a ‘family wage,’ ” Professor Mettler writes. Most women who worked were in intermittent or part-time jobs that didn’t qualify, nor did they make enough to meet the thresholds. Those who left work because of home obligations, such as raising children, were deemed to have left “voluntarily” and were ineligible.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which for the first time created a floor under wages and a roof over hours, ensuring that people weren’t worked to death for a pittance, again excluded farmworkers and maids. Domestic workers weren’t added until 1974, and only last year did home health aides get the same treatment.

Unionization created another economic foothold — but that, too, was mostly available to white men. The National Labor Relations Act enshrined a number of labor rights that significantly increased the movement: While just four million Americans were union members in 1929, by 1948 that reached 14.2 million. But the N.L.R.A. excluded agricultural and domestic workers. Women made up less than one-tenth of union members through 1940.

Perhaps no program was as important in creating the middle class of the 1950s and ’60s, though, as the G.I. Bill. The government spent more than $95 billion on it between 1944 and 1971, and millions of people used its benefits to buy homes, go to college, start businesses and find jobs. Women could get benefits if they served, but they made up just 400,000 out of the more than 16 million people who served during World War II.

Black men enlisted in great numbers; more than 900,000 of those who served in the war were African-American. And once they returned home, many of them applied for G.I. benefits. This time there were no formal exclusions. But the government handed implementation of the veterans’ programs down to states and localities, including those in the grips of Jim Crow.

Black veterans’ applications for business assistance were routinely denied. Those seeking a college education were crowded into limited slots in segregated institutions. Even though the mortgages were guaranteed, black borrowers had to get a bank to lend to them, and most refused. In the suburbs of New York and New Jersey, less than 100 of the 67,000 G.I. Bill-insured mortgages were for nonwhites. “The G.I. Bill did create a more middle-class society, but almost exclusively for whites,” Professor Katznelson writes.

Many of the barriers that were baked into government policy are now relics of the past. There are still enormous racial and gender wealth gaps across the country, but it’s no wonder that most minorities say things have gotten better for them compared with a half-century ago.

Mr. Trump is no small-government Republican; he’s frequently said he wants to protect some of these same programs that once excluded so many Americans. For Mr. Trump it’s about whom the government helps, not whether the government helps at all. He is promising to make the country great again, for the people who had it pretty great in the first place.

Bryce Covert is the economic policy editor at ThinkProgress and a contributor to The Nation. This is an article from Campaign Stops at nytimes.com/campaignstops.

2151. Racial Identity and the American Politics

By Eduardo Porter, The New York Times, January 5, 2015

Donald Trump, whose strongest support is from less educated, lower-income white men, would beat Hillary Clinton among those without a college degree, according to a Quinnipiac poll. Photo: Ray Whitehouse for The New York Times.

Why do working-class Americans vote as they do?

The question has long bedeviled analysts on the left, troubled that people who would largely benefit from a more robust government seem so often to vote for right-leaning politicians eager to cut federal programs to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

The unusual Republican presidential primary, evolving from one surprise to the next, has revived the debate, but with an important racial coda. As Donald Trump and Ted Cruz surge in the polls, buoyed by the enthusiastic support of angry white men, they raise a narrower question: What’s going on with working-class whites?

Though subtle, this variation reflects an important shift in American politics: Perhaps even more than economic status, racial, ethnic and cultural identity is becoming a main driver of political choice.

It suggests that the battle over the purpose and configuration of the American government — what it’s for, who it serves — may become more openly about “us” versus “them,” along ethnic lines.

Consider the Trump phenomenon. While polls find that he also leads the Republican pack among women and higher-income voters, by far his most solid support comes from less educated, lower-income white men, according to a Pew Research Center analysis conducted in October.

Donald Trump is backed by 43 percent of Republicans with at most a high school education, but only 28 percent of those with bachelor degrees and 21 percent of those with some graduate school, according to an analysis of the most recent New York Times/CBS poll.

Similarly, a Quinnipiac University poll last month found that Hillary Clinton would readily beat Mr. Trump in a general election among college-educated voters, while Mr. Trump would eke out victory among those without a college degree. This is also true of the other angry Republican at the top of the list, Senator Ted Cruz.

Their supporters are overwhelmingly white. White non-Hispanics are the only ethnic group that leans Republican, according to a study of party affiliation by the Pew center. White men who have not completed college favor the G.O.P. over the Democratic Party by 54 to 33 percent.

President Obama and Bernie Sanders have speculated that frustration over lost jobs and stagnant wages can explain much of the blue-collar support for Mr. Trump and conservative populists more generally.

The explanation, however, is not quite satisfactory. As Matthew Yglesias at Vox suggests, many white Americans are most likely drawn to Mr. Trump’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant message because they agree with it.

Such voters are nostalgic for the country they lived in 50 years ago, when non-Hispanic whites made up more than 83 percent of the population. Today, their share has shrunk to 62 percent as demographic change has transformed the United States into a nation where others have a shot at political power.

Their fear is understandable. In general, the concerns of Hispanic and black American voters are often different from those of white voters. But the reaction of whites who are struggling economically raises the specter of an outright political war along racial and ethnic lines over the distribution of resources and opportunities.

Race, of course, has shaped political choices for a long time. The Republican takeover of the South is understood by scholars as a reaction to whites’ sense of betrayal after the Democratic push for desegregation under President Lyndon Johnson.

Racial animosity has long helped foster a unique mistrust of government among white Americans. Nonwhite voters mostly like what the government does. But many white Americans, researchers have found, would rather not have a robust government if it largely seems to serve people who do not look like them.

Americans owe their unusually minimalist state in large measure to racial mistrust. As the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote put it in an important paper, European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the United States mainly because of American racial heterogeneity. “Racial animosity in the U.S. makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters,” they wrote.

The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson described two decades ago how race and economics collided. In the United States, he wrote, white taxpayers have opposed welfare because they see themselves “as being forced, through taxes, to pay for stuff for blacks that many of them could not afford for their own families.”

Scholars have found evidence for these attitudes all over the place.

For instance, Julian Betts of the University of California, San Diego and Robert Fairlie of the University of California,Santa Cruz found that for every four immigrants entering public high schools, one native student switched to a private school.

Daniel Hungerman from the University of Notre Dame found that all-white congregations became less charitable as the share of black residents in the community rose.

Perhaps because they have relied more on government programs and protections, members of minority groups have decidedly different beliefs about supporting social solidarity. Another study published by the Pew center in November found that 62 percent of white Americans would like the government to be smaller and provide fewer services. Only 32 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics agreed.

Notably, minorities in the United States have never held much power. They are unlikely to feel that political influence to direct and constrain what government does is slipping away.

The rich democracies of the West are living through strange times. In Europe, voters are increasingly drawn to xenophobic politics, driven, according to the former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, by fear “based on the instinctive realization that the ‘white man’s world’ — a lived reality assumed by its beneficiaries as a matter of course — is in terminal decline.”

Right-wing parties, Mr. Fischer added, are replacing the notion of a nation built on a shared commitment to a common constitutional and legal order with an ethnic definition of nationhood, derived from common descent and religion. White Europeans, in other words, are circling the wagons.

A few years ago it looked as if the United States — long more tolerant of immigration, with a more fluid sense of national identity that readily allowed for hyphenation — could avoid this turn.

But judging by this year’s political debate, held against the background of improving but still insufficient prosperity, Americans are moving in the same direction. Racial identity and its attendant hostilities appear to be jumping from their longstanding place in the background of American politics to the very center of the stage.

1744. American History: The Lynching of Mexicans

By William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, The New York Times, February 20, 2015

THE recent release of a landmark report on the history of lynching in the United States is a welcome contribution to the struggle over American collective memory. Few groups have suffered more systematic mistreatment, abuse and murder than African-Americans, the focus of the report.

One dimension of mob violence that is often overlooked, however, is that lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.

Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes. One case, largely overlooked or ignored by American journalists but not by the Mexican government, was that of seven Mexican shepherds hanged by white vigilantes near Corpus Christi, Tex., in late November 1873. The mob was probably trying to intimidate the shepherds’ employer into selling his land. None of the killers were arrested.

From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.

Some of these cases did appear in press accounts, when reporters depicted them as violent public spectacles, as they did with many lynchings of African-Americans in the South. For example, on July 5, 1851, a mob of 2,000 in Downieville, Calif., watched the extralegal hanging of a Mexican woman named Juana Loaiza, who had been accused of having murdered a white man named Frank Cannon.

Such episodes were not isolated to the turbulent gold rush period. More than a half-century later, on Nov. 3, 1910, a mob snatched a 20-year-old Mexican laborer, Antonio Rodríguez, from a jail in Rock Springs, Tex. The authorities had arrested him on charges that he had killed a rancher’s wife. Mob leaders bound him to a mesquite tree, doused him with kerosene and burned him alive. The El Paso Herald reported that thousands turned out to witness the event; we found no evidence that anyone was ever arrested.

While there were similarities between the lynchings of blacks and Mexicans, there were also clear differences. One was that local authorities and deputized citizens played particularly conspicuous roles in mob violence against Mexicans.

On Jan. 28, 1918, a band of Texas Rangers and ranchers arrived in the village of Porvenir in Presidio County, Tex. Mexican outlaws had recently attacked a nearby ranch, and the posse presumed that the locals were acting as spies and informants for Mexican raiders on the other side of the border. The group rounded up nearly two dozen men, searched their houses, and marched 15 of them to a rock bluff near the village and executed them. The Porvenir massacre, as it has become known, was the climactic event in what Mexican-Americans remember as the Hora de Sangre (Hour of Blood). It led, the following year, to an investigation by the Texas Legislature and reform of the Rangers.

Between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes, local law officers and Texas Rangers executed, without due process, unknown thousands of Mexicans for their alleged role in a revolutionary uprising known as the Plan de San Diego. White fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in July and August 1915, after Mexican raiders committed a series of assaults on the economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in resistance to white dominance. The raids unleashed a bloody wave of retaliatory action amid a climate of intense paranoia.

While there are certainly instances in the history of the American South where law officers colluded in mob action, the level of engagement by local and state authorities in the reaction to the Plan de San Diego was remarkable. The lynchings persisted into the 1920s, eventually declining largely because of pressure from the Mexican government.

Historians have often ascribed to the South a distinctiveness that has set it apart from the rest of the United States. In so doing, they have created the impression of a peculiarly benighted region plagued by unparalleled levels of racial violence. The story of mob violence against Mexicans in the Southwest compels us to rethink the history of lynching.

Southern blacks were the group most often targeted, but comparing the histories of the South and the West strengthens our understanding of mob violence in both. In today’s charged debate over immigration policy and the growth of the Latino population, the history of anti-Mexican violence reminds us of the costs and consequences of hate.

William D. Carrigan, a professor of history at Rowan University, and Clive Webb, professor of modern American history at the University of Sussex, are the authors of “Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928.”