The Weekly Screed (#596)

“White panic” in Paul Ryan’s hometown
by David Benjamin

    “In its hostility toward minorities, exploitation of racism, antipathy toward government and suspicion of science, today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.”
                                                          — Harold Meyerson, Washington Post

BROOKLYN — Over a span of two days and two articles this week, the New York Times’ election analysts broke down the Republican Party into at least 11 distinct sectarian factions. Among these, the Times charitably included the party’s almost non-existent neoconservative wing and the GOP’s “Northeast moderate” posse led by — well, consisting almost entirely of — Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (and Snowe is quitting).

Nowhere on this taxonomy was I able to find the huge, triumphal faction for which almost every Republican National Convention speech thusfar has been blatantly tailored. This unmentionable GOP subspecies is, of course, the immense throng of resentful white people whose whiteness is their single proudest accomplishment in life and who will vote for a black candidate, for any office, several generations after Hell freezes over.

Republicans are loath to admit this reality, but they have become — and seem resigned to being — the National White People’s Party. Today, in a country barely 50 percent Caucasian, Republicans are 92 percent white. A recent, shocking poll of African-Americans showed no — zero percent — support for Mitt Romney, whose Mormonism is among the features that distinguish him as probably the whitest presidential nominee in U.S. history.

But, as pasteurized and homogenized as Romney is, my contention is that his running-mate, Congressman Paul Ryan, is even whiter. Since Ryan’s rise began, I’ve been fascinated by his origins in one of the stranger cities in my native state. Romney said of Ryan that “his beliefs remain firmly rooted in Janesville, Wisconsin.”

What does that mean?

Janesville belongs to a cluster of small cities on the Illinois/Wisconsin border that mark the western extent of the great American Rust Belt. Each city, Kenosha, Racine, Beloit, and Janesville in Wisconsin, and Rockford, Illinois was historically anchored and enriched by huge manufacturing plants. Janesville’s two mightiest engines of prosperity were Parker Pen and General Motors.

But the oddity that sets Janesville apart from these sister cities is that all the others — throughout most of the 20th century — had a significant black population. This was a natural result of the diaspora from the Mississippi Delta, straight north on legendary highways, Routes 41, 51 and 61, as ex-slaves and displaced sharecroppers sought good jobs, decent wages and, above all, an escape from Jim Crow.

But none of these refugees settled in Janesville — which had, around the millenium, an African-American population of less than 1 percent. Compare that to Beloit, 10 miles south, whose black population approaches 20 percent.

Herein lies the tale.

Around 1916, John McCord and Eugene Burlingame, two employees of a burgeoning foundry in Beloit named Fairbanks, Morse & Co., ventured south to recruit young black men of good character to work in their undermanned factory. Within ten years, that small outreach had turned Beloit into a popular destination in what we call today the Great Migration. Nowadays, a stable and reasonably prosperous black community in Beloit is raising its fifth generation. Other cities whose African-American numbers grew during that period were Kenosha, Racine, Rockford and, further up the coast of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee.

But not Janesville — because, as any physicist will tell you, for every action, there s an equal and opposite reaction.

Beloit is the southernmost city in Rock County. The arrival of a steady flow of Negroes into a region that had been exclusively white set off a race panic throughout the county. Less than ten years after the McCord-Burlingame expedition to bring black workers from the Delta, Rock County had anther southern import—the Ku Klux Klan. Janesville was the Klan’s state headquarters. Klan rallies were regular events in towns all over Rock County, including Clinton and Turtle Township just outside Beloit, and farther north, Evansville, Brodhead and the aptly named town of Whitewater.

Mike DuPres, a reporter for the Janesville Gazette, interviewed Ella Dunbar, a 103-year-old Footville resident who had been a teen-ager in Beloit. “Good, prominent people were Klan members… There were people in church I knew were members. They were educated people. I guess they thought they had to keep America just for true-blood Americans… They were more or less against colored people.” According to DuPres, Ella Dunbar  “attributed the whites’ racism and apprehension to a ‘large influx of untrained colored people’ coming to work in Rock County factories.”

The most chilling element in DuPres’ research, which shows up on a website of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, recounts a pre-emptive strike by the Janesville Realty Board. While the KKK was still sewing sheets and stocking up on kerosene, the realtors were saddled up and ready to ride. “To relieve Janesville of conditions such as are arising in Beloit and other rapidly expanding industrial cities of the north, the Janesville Realty Board… placed itself behind a movement to devise a plan to keep the colored man in his place,” the Gazette reported on July 14, 1920.

DuPres added this quote: “…the Gazette reported… ‘That the negro, both industrially and socially, is not wanted in Janesville by the realty men, and from their personal observations not wanted by the people of the city’…”

After this remarkably candid dispatch, DuPres notes that local newspapers fell silent on the racial policies of the Janesville Realty Board and never reported another word.

So, what happened?

Put simply, the realtors of Rock County found it more comfortable, when drawing red lines on maps, to operate in the dark. Beloit remained the only city in Rock County with any discernible black population for the entire duration of the 20th century. I talked to Sam Liebert about this.

Liebert, 27, is the first African-American city council member in Janesville history. Originally from Milwaukee, he grew up in Janesville and says he experienced little overt racism. But he recalled talking about the “Janesville/Beloit divide” with older black people, among them a man from South Beloit. He told Liebert that black people always ventured cautiously into Janesville, preferably in daylight, and felt unwelcome while they were there.

“It was as though an invisible line had been drawn around Beloit,” said Liebert.

In many ways, Wisconsin — still a very white state — is Janesville on a grand scale. The state has a softspoken, but persistent undercurrent of prejudice. One need not venture far to find its manifestations. Last month, on the Capitol Square in liberal Madison, I steered my way around two redneck drunks sparring and insulting each other in the middle of the street. The ugliest expletive either could think of to spit at the other — over and over — was “Nigger!”

Of course, in Wisconsin, racist expression is rarely so refreshingly explicit. People — like the Janesville Realty Board in 1920 — have learned to talk whisperingly about “keeping the colored man in his place,” preferably someplace else.

Today, Janesville’s black population has ballooned to 1.7 percent (compared to 17 percent in Beloit) and — as indicated by Sam Liebert, the city has loosened up enough to elect an African-American councilman.

Still, it’s instructive to note that Paul Ryan’s “firm roots” in Janesville happen to be planted in perhaps the palest soil in all of Dairyland. Match Ryan up with Mitt Romney, whose church until 1978 regarded black skin as a curse from God, and you’ve got — appearing nightly at the GOP convention — the whitest presidential ticket since Jeff Davis and Alexander Stephens.