Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain

By Catherine McNicol Stock

Through its history, populism has meant hope and progress, as well as hate and a desire to turn back the clock on American history. In her new preface, Catherine McNicol Stock provides an update and overview of the conservative face of rural America. She paints a comprehensive portrait of a long line of rural activists whose crusades against big government, bug business, and big banks sometimes spoke in a language of progressive populism and sometimes in a language of hate and bigotry. Rural Radicals breaks down the populism expressed by activists, confronts our conventional notions of right and left, and allows us to understand political factionalism differently.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501714054

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Preface to the Paperback Edition

TWO DECADES have passed since Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols detonated seven thousand pounds of explosive material outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring more than six hundred others. It is the event at the heart of this book. Since that time, nothing similar has happened in the United States. In other words, since April 19, 1995, no American citizens have perpetrated a single event inspired by hatred for the government or fear of the rising power of people of color that has killed as many Americans on our soil. In fact, for a few years after the bombing and subsequent execution of McVeigh, the growth of antigovernment and other hate groups seemed to have slowed.

Since 2008, however, the number of these groups has risen drastically—increasing, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, by as much as 700 percent.¹ Murders and attempted murders of gays, blacks, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, government officials, and police officers by members of white nationalist, citizen sovereign, or patriot organizations are far too numerous to list here. They include, nevertheless, the attempted bombing of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Washington, in 2011, the murders in the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center of Overland Park, Kansas, and the shooting spree by antigovernment extremists in Las Vegas, Nevada, both in 2014. In 1995 I ended this book with words of hope, saying that perhaps one day the great American song would be heard over more familiar angry chants and threats (176). For the rerelease of Rural Radicals, I must lament that we now live in a time of even more extremist violence and a larger number of political movements founded on hate than ever before. At this moment, what is needed is not a song of hope but a full accounting of the hate that remains.²

None of the tragedies that have taken place since Rural Radicals was first published is any worse than any other. But one does stand out—both for the ruthless clarity of its political purpose and for what it can tell us about the radical right today. Dylann Roof knew exactly why he would go to the Mother Emmanuel Church, the oldest African American congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, armed with a .45 caliber Glock. He wrote in his manifesto:

I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is [the] most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks [sic] to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.³

Roof also made it abundantly clear to the nine parishioners engaged in Bible study on a Wednesday evening, including the Reverend Clem-enta Pickney, why he had to kill them: You are raping our women and taking over the country, he is alleged to have told one man just before shooting him.⁴ His views, expressed on his self-published website lastrhodeisan.com, drew directly from the right-wing culture of vigilantism that I first began to examine twenty years ago in this book. He described blacks as subhuman, slavery as a positive good, and segregation as a way that whites could be protected from blacks. He also discussed his views of Jews, East Asians, and other ethnic and sexual minorities. Images on the website included neo-Nazi symbols, numerous photographs of the Confederate flag, and at least one image of a white man, supposedly killed by a black man, which Roof lifted from a white nationalist website in Australia.⁵ Roof’s proclivities easily evoke similar tropes of hate and prejudice that triggered, among countless other events, lynchings, gatherings of the Ku Klux Klan, genocidal attacks on Native Americans, and the construction of a fertilizer bomb destined for Oklahoma City.

Despite these important similarities, Roof does not perfectly fit the picture of a rural radical presented in this book, and those differences are also critical to note. They suggest, first of all, that the ideas of the right, owing to the near-universality of the Internet, are now both disaggregated from the experience of rural America and easily reinforced and normalized in isolated areas of the countryside.

Dylann Roof, after all, did not grow up in an isolated rural enclave where radicals from the countryside had learned to resent the power of distant governments, corporations, or international organizations. He was not a Regulator, a Whiskey Rebel, a Farmers’ Holiday man, or even a member of a 1990s-style antigovernment state militia. Instead his family moved around in South Carolina seven times, so he knew the state well, but for most of his youth he lived in or around Columbia, a major urban area. As a result, he did not learn his politics or plan his killing spree within a rural or small-town community of like-minded folk or even in a small, secret subgroup of that community. He was instead, as the New York Times put it, self-radicalized, becoming interested, indeed obsessed, with issues of race after learning about the protest that followed the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. To find a political home, all he had to do was to click around on the Internet, seeing first the website for the Council of Concerned Citizens and then the many other websites in what is now sometimes called the alt-right. For Roof, unlike many millions of other visitors on the web, just talking on the internet was not enough. Well, he wrote, someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.⁶

Along with its disaggregation from an isolated rural experience, the almost universal, almost instantaneous condemnation of Roof’s crimes also distinguished the murders at the Mother Emmanuel Church from others that I recount in the following pages. Even the editors of the alt-right websites and newsletters such as the Northwest Front and the Daily Stormer, whose materials Roof used, disavowed his crime (if not all of his views).⁷ Far more thoroughly repelled were local citizens of Charleston. Thousands, blacks and whites, marched in tribute. Hundreds of others gathered to demand the removal of the Confederate flag from the state courthouse, an act that many southern whites had resisted for decades.⁸ Within days, the South Carolina governor Nikki Haley admitted that the flag should have never been there. . . . These grounds are a place that everybody should feel a part of.⁹ A week after the murders, President Barack Obama gave the eulogy for Reverend Pickney and, seemingly spontaneously, led the congregation in the singing of Amazing Grace, which was broadcast throughout the country. For a moment, it seemed possible that Roof’s dreadful actions were but the last gasp of a dying white nationalism, one that had been vanquished by a new national consensus around diversity, by the new reality of an Indian American governor and an African American president, and by the grace of and forgiveness offered by the survivors themselves.

That moment did not last long. The months that followed brought new outrages from the extreme right, including the murders of three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by an avowed member of the Army of God, as well as the Charleston Massacre. Moreover, as the historian Jelani Cobb points out, the grounds of the South Carolina capitol may no longer fly the Confederate flag, but they still display statues and plaques that honor a gynecologist, J. Marion Syms, who experimented on slaves, the Populist-turned-lynch-mob-member Ben Tillman, and the diehard segregationist Strom Thurmond. Furthermore, widespread calls for the return of the flag—and the radical white racism it stands for—are articulated by even more groups such as the Paleo Conservatives and the 1488. Outside of South Carolina, the nomination of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president and his subsequent election—the man who called for maintaining law and order, banning Muslims, and building a wall to keep out Mexicans—has cheered white supremacists and helped them feel that the Republican Party had shifted, perhaps permanently, in their direction.¹⁰ In short, if Roof was not as rural as some of the figures in this book, he was also not as radical, not nearly so far on the fringe of American politics as Tim McVeigh had been two decades before. Today, Cobb writes, Dylann Roof remains in the custody of the state, but the principles for which his actions are the logical conclusion remain vital and incendiary.¹¹ On January 10, 2017, Roof was condemned to death by a federal jury who found him guilty of thirty-three counts in the attack. He expressed no remorse and admitted to the crimes.

Even if the radical right has moved beyond its historic roots in the countryside and blended into what Carol Anderson recently constructed as white rage, it would be a mistake to leave the story of rural America behind entirely.¹² In fact, some of the best known political actions of this period still took place there and had deep connections to the issues described throughout this book.

In talking about his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, on a recent podcast, J. D. Vance suggests that although 9/11 briefly brought out feelings of pride and patriotism in rural families, the long-time simmering resentment of rural people toward both the government and the distant elites erupted with the financial collapse of 2008. In his view, economic decline fostered more anger and even violence than racial fears did: September the 11th really delayed the reckoning about how strongly disconnected [white people in wider Appalachia] were from their own country. . . . But that resentment that has always existed at some level was really brought out in the financial crisis, because a lot of the trends that people had seen—you know manufacturing [was] shedding some jobs, factories weren’t doing super well—really accelerated and hit everyone in the gut in a way that really brought to the foreground a lot of these resentments.¹³

Vance writes of southern Ohio and Kentucky, but economic decline hit rural regions throughout the nation beginning in the 1980s and accelerated after 2008. In the Midwest, the consolidation of agriculture into huge corporate farms cut off families from land that had been the center of their working, family, and community lives for decades and increased depopulation and outmigration of young people in particular. Throughout the mid-section of the country, industries such as meat packing and poultry processing have become dominated by international conglomerates, with laborers more poorly paid and more likely to be immigrants.¹⁴ A few more fortunate rural regions have seen their economies grow through tourism and recreation, the spread of nearby metropolitan areas, privately constructed prisons, military facilities, or new energy industries such as fracking or windfarming. But even they have struggled to meet the challenges over which local people have had little control: overpriced land, lack of housing, and the environmental impact of growth.¹⁵

In the past two decades, these economic changes and the poverty that accompanied them have literally cost rural whites their lives. They have done so to an extent that has shocked researchers and urban Americans alike. In 2014, Anne Case, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, led a team that first demonstrated a major new rural urban divide in the death rates of middle-aged Americans, with women’s mortality and morbidity increasing even faster than men’s.¹⁶ Obesity, alcoholism, suicide, and drug overdoses—made even more lethal by the shuttering of local rural hospitals and outmigration of local doctors—spiked in counties as geographically distant from one another as Cass County, Minnesota, and Victoria County, Texas. Case used this data to show how much class and geography, rather than race alone, influence life outcomes today: [The women in this study] may be privileged by the color of their skin, she said, but that is the only way in their lives they’ve ever been privileged.¹⁷ When urban Americans saw what rural Americans endured—what rural poverty really looked like—whether in this study, the popular documentary Making a Murderer, or Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, they were shocked. The countryside of the urban imagination was bucolic and serene—or at worst comic in its backwardness as displayed on reality TV. It was instead a vast land of trailer homes, dead teenagers, drug addicts, suicidal mothers, and hungry children—many of whom were white.

The decline in the rural economy and the prospect of wide-scale white poverty gave rise to two widely publicized recent antigovernment actions: Cliven Bundy’s call to arms in the Nevada rangeland over the issue of grazing fees; and his son Ammon Bundy’s occupation, with others, of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon over the issue of both fees and the sentencing of local ranchers who had set fires to public land. To be clear, the Bundys were anything but poor. Moreover, their political ideas and strategies were not new but instead derived from the legacy of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and other groups that protested federal power and control over rural land. As James Suroweiki of the New Yorker put it, Bundy’s tactics make him easy to dismiss as a kook, but his ideology is squarely in the mainstream of Western conservatism, with its hostility to government ownership, skepticism about environmental rules, and conviction that individual enterprise is being strangled by government regulations.¹⁸ Similarly, their actions grew out of the radical tradition of the newer groups described in chapter 3: militia groups, sovereign citizen organizations, survivalists, and others. As such they kept their predecessors’ deadly encounters in the 1990s firmly in mind. In Nevada, armed militia members from throughout the West patrolled the Bundy property, preparing for any attack by the FBI or ATF that resembled Waco and Ruby Ridge. In Oregon, the only man killed by the FBI had told his wife, upon leaving to join the occupation, that he knew he would never return.¹⁹

What was new about the Bundys’ occupations was their willingness to name their fear of the decline of rural America into a vast region of white poverty and government dependence. Since at least the New Deal, many whites in rural America have depended on federal land programs, agricultural subsidies, and other forms of government support, while they have also denied that they are welfare recipients. Groups on the left, such as the American Agricultural Movement, continued a long tradition of demanding more local control over government regulations, of making the government work on their behalf, rather than the other way around. These farm rebels talked of freedom and liberty; they never openly discussed poverty. Ammon Bundy did. Bundy and others pointed out that in Haney County, the largest employer was the government itself. The protesters discussed the prospect of former ranchers and ranch hands who had to take county jobs and others who had no meaningful work at all. Ammon Bundy put it this way: The people cannot survive without their land and resources. All comfort, all wealth, everything that we have as a people, to live, to eat, come from the earth. We cannot have the government restricting the use of that to the point where it puts us in poverty.²⁰

Of course, it was not just rural areas but large sections of the United States, particularly manufacturing regions, that suffered the economic decline that has accompanied deindustrialization and globalization in the twenty-first century. This exfoliation of white discontent and the explicit linking of economic and racial resentments have in effect normalized the political associations discussed in this book that were often described as fringe movements. Rust Belt communities such as the one Timothy McVeigh called home—Lockport, New York—lost manufacturing jobs that never returned, as have blue-collar towns in places far outside the Northeast like Butte, Montana.²¹ Home prices in once-booming regions of the Sun Belt were devastated by the financial collapse and have only barely recovered, if at all. More and more young people who are down on their luck don’t see the sense in participating in many of the social institutions that promote stability and economic improvement—marriage, religious institutions, education.²² Like the European working class, blue-collar Americans wonder what the promise of global trade has really brought them and when the strength and stability that they remember as children of unionized factory workers will return to their nation’s and their personal lives.²³

The normalization (what we may also see as the partial derural-ization) of hate cannot be explained with economic or even public health charts alone. As Cliven Bundy revealed when he, like Dylann Roof, discussed the benefits of slavery, the rage of white Americans is also linked, as it has been for centuries, to their resentment of the very presence, much less the power, of people of color. For researchers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, one event had a far greater impact on the growth of hate groups than the collapse of the economy: the nomination, election, and reelection of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States.²⁴

Some expressions of the rage that followed the McCain/Palin defeat and the Obama/Biden victory are well known, as are the ways in which Fox News and other conservative media and Internet outlets promoted them. We know, for example, that on inauguration night itself, Republican Congressional leaders met to agree they would block any legislation the president ever brought to the floor.²⁵ Meanwhile, for months and even years beyond 2008, Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and many others continued to question the president’s status as an American citizen. As late as 2015, polls showed that more than 60 percent of Republicans either believed that President Obama was a Muslim or were not sure.²⁶ In 2010 the Tea Party revolution put into Congress even more conservative Republicans who brought fire to the fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act, to block gay marriage, to roll back the Voting Rights Act, and to be sure the president was fully discredited as a real American. As Evan Osnos has written, For a while, the Tea Party channeled some of [the] frustration [of blue-collar America]. Tea Party leaders denounced racism, but their rallies contained posters that depict Obama as an African witch doctor and a character from ‘Planet of the Apes.’ The politics of loss—of desperation and decay and failure—was embedded in the movement’s slogan: ‘Take it Back.’²⁷

The increasing normalization of the views of the radical right and the power of social media to enforce them are, alas, part of my own story. When, in August 2008, John McCain chose the previously unknown Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate, I wrote an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer suggesting that some of her political ties, including to the Alaska Secessionist Party, were dangerously close to those of extremist groups on the rural-based radical right of American society depicted in Rural Radicals.²⁸ Later I heard in her use of terms such as the real America an implicit support for ideas of white nationalism. When the essay was published, I did not expect any unusual response.

I had written several opinion pieces since publishing Rural Radicals including one in the Denver Post when Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001. I had also done live interviews on AM talk radio shows with militia members who distinctly disagreed with my views and characterizations. My surprise turned to concern and then fear when this piece, unlike any of the others, elicited more than one thousand hostile responses to my college e-mail account from members of far-right groups—none of whom lived anywhere around Philadelphia. Several writers respectfully, if ardently, disagreed with my characterization of Palin. Some made reasonable points. But others belittled me; still more threatened me. A handful of readers e-mailed or phoned the president’s office of Connecticut College demanding that I be fired. What accounted for this onslaught of rage? I had, perhaps with less nuance than needed, associated a major political candidate—and instant celebrity—with racists, anti-Semites, anti-Muslims, and antigovernment militia-style groups. By doing so, I had also discovered the hard way that some of the radical right now organized online as much as in local meeting places and that, going forward, they would have the power to silence many who would speak against them. I am ashamed to admit that I would think twice before writing anything like it again—even though I stand by my words now more than ever.

As the Republican primary intensified in early 2016, the right wing political rhetoric that had been gradually moving off the margins of American politics since 2008 burst into the open, leaving the isolated countryside far behind and catching pundits from all sides completely unprepared.

Ted Cruz appeared at a fundraiser in Iowa with an evangelical preacher who openly advocated the execution of gays and lesbians.²⁹ Cruz called for closing down multiple agencies of the federal government including the Environmental Protection Agency; he refused to fully repudiate rumors that the government was planning on taking over the state of Texas; he called for sweeps of Muslim neighborhoods to locate potential terrorists. Trump, the eventual winner, carried his even more hateful rhetoric from the primaries into the early months of the general election season. In February 2016 he refused initially to repudiate David Duke, a former leader of the KKK, who had endorsed Trump—and who finds the political climate perfect for a candidacy for office himself. In June 2016 he tweeted an anti-Clinton image that had originated on a white nationalist website, a Star of David over a pile of cash. In August he hired a former editor of Breitbart news, a website with close ties to the alt-right to manage his campaign. Just a few days later in Olympia, Washington, a self-described white supremacist stabbed an African American man after he had seen the man kiss a white woman. When apprehended he spoke of his devotion to Trump’s ideas, his attendance at a recent rally, and his belief that we should take America back. Among his many tattoos was a Confederate flag.³⁰ The adoption of a symbol of the Confederacy by a hate activist in an urbanized area of the Pacific Northwest demonstrates both how nationalized the language of the right has become and how delinked it often is from local or even regional concerns.

Further complicating any effort to name and eradicate domestic terrorism in the first decades of the twenty-first century was the growth of terrorist attacks around the world. Suicide bombings, many planned by ISIS, quickly moved from marketplaces in the Middle East to nightclubs in Paris, subway stations in London, and conference rooms in San Bernardino, California. In the minds of many Americans, the term terrorism could now only mean acts by extremist Muslims against Westerners.³¹ Even Dylann Roof’s attack in Charleston did not immediately merit such a categorization. Moreover, many Americans could not imagine a reason for any terrorist crime perpetrated in the United States by an American of Muslim background as anything but part of the larger international conspiracy. When Nidal Malik Hasan, an American citizen, killed thirteen people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, his religious faith was immediately suspected as his motivation. Likewise, when Omar Mateen, also a citizen, killed forty-nine in Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub in 2016, his homophobia was not linked to his upbringing in the United States but to his Islamic faith. For public figures and private citizens alike, these events and the fears they aroused led public figures, Republicans in particular, to question whether Muslims, and perhaps all immigrants, could ever be considered true Americans. Deportation, internment, disenfranchisement—no measure was too extreme for consideration for identifying dangerous others among us.

For some historians, these events prove that the only real populism worthy of the name is populism on the left—the one that bridges social divides among working people.³² Fortunately, that kind of rural radicalism remains today as well. Even in the midst of the newly normalized culture of hate, some Americans have been drawn to the politics of protest against bigness once practiced by groups as far flung geographically and chronologically as Regulators, the Populist Party, and the Nonpartisan League. The 2008 financial collapse, for example, did not propel people just to hate and resent immigrants—it also propelled people to rise up against the power of the big banks, corporations, Wall Street firms, and politicians with close ties to all of them. Likewise, millions of voters in the 2016 Democratic primary supported Bernie Sanders’s calls for higher taxes on the rich, a living wage, and free college educations. These messages—and the messenger, a former Socialist—spoke loudly to voters in the countryside, as Democrats in Maine, Vermont, North Dakota, Idaho, Kansas, and Washington chose Sanders over Hillary Clinton by large majorities.³³ In these recent movements people of different backgrounds worked together rather than against one another. In North Dakota in the summer of 2016, native people and local citizens worked together to halt the construction of the North Dakota pipeline, which was both an economic and environmental threat to their communities.³⁴ Throughout the nation the #blacklivesmatter movement empowers communities of color to take on the more powerful forces of structural racism in the criminal justice system and demand a democratic voice for the powerless.

And yet, death threats and flags and neo-Nazi signs have power to dissuade us of such hopeful imaginings of a diverse and democratic future, of the beloved community of which Martin Luther King Jr. often spoke. That was also true in the past—many Populists were avowed anti-Semites—as it is today. Now in the era of Trump and his kind, we must admit that the hate we associate with the radical right, the fringe of American society, and what we once could locate in isolated rural places, has found expression and support among millions of Americans, a large portion of the media, and large portions of the Republican Party. Trump’s suggestion that second amendment people might solve the problem of left-leaning judges and the president who appoints them shows how far from the left wing Populist tradition of local democracy we have traveled.

Dylann Roof faces death for the crimes he has committed and to which he has confessed. Many commentators have said that once Roof was apprehended, state police were thoughtful enough to buy him some food at the local Burger King because he seemed hungry.³⁵ Did they feel some small pang of sympathy for this unmoored young white man, clearly in more trouble than most white men could imagine? Roof did not represent America in what he did in the Mother Emmanuel Church. But he did represent hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Americans past and present who hate and fear, both in the countryside and very much away from it. As one commentator at the time put it, "The