Kathryn McGarr on Trumpism and Lessons From American History

Frederica Freyberg:
How does president-elect Donald Trump make America great again? There are certainly signposts, beginning with his promises of mass deportations, tariffs and America First policy like not wanting the U.S. to fund Ukraine. And how does this MAGA movement align with days of yore? We turn to an expert on the 1940s and ’50s UW-Madison professor of journalism, Kathryn McGarr. And thanks very much for being here.

Kathryn McGarr:
Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:
So what are the historical kind of parallels to current political issues in your mind, that risk repeating America’s loss of civil liberties?

Kathryn McGarr:
There are two main areas for concern, I think. The first is loss of free speech rights and free press. And so we have a long history of passing sedition laws in this country, starting with 1798, the Alien and Sedition Act, when John Adams wanted to silence his political opponents in the Democratic-Republican party. That one lapsed but then again, World War I, the Woodrow Wilson administration gets another Sedition Act passed, and it’s really a draconian measure to punish anyone who speaks, not just against the government, but even questioned the war effort, the draft, anything at all, and was upheld by the Supreme Court. The second area is loss of civil liberties by minority groups. And so one of the most significant in the 20th century would be the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. And Franklin Roosevelt accomplished that entirely through executive order. So we need to remember that the president does have a lot of power and that some of this happens through Congress, and some of it happens through executive order.

Frederica Freyberg:
So the America First Movement has been a populist political theory through history. In fact, it became Donald Trump’s kind of foreign policy doctrine as president. What does America first hold?

Kathryn McGarr:
America First really came out of the 1930s and was a movement to keep the United States out of war in Europe, and this was coming off the heels of World War I, when the United States had participated in World War I and an effort to prevent participation in World War II. They established an America First Committee in 1940. It ended up disbanding after Pearl Harbor, but the sentiment never went away, and it was sort of revived as a political party here and again. And it’s really about putting American security first in foreign policy but so many of the spokespeople at the time and over the years have been pro-fascist and antisemitic that those have been major cornerstones of the America First movement.

Frederica Freyberg:
Were there positives to it?

Kathryn McGarr:
Small — a small “f” — America first has been pretty much the policy of every president who puts American security first. The capital “A” America first because that other part of it is already settled that the president will put first in foreign policy. It really does seem to be more about putting a certain type of America first. And it’s a white Christian nationalist America.

Frederica Freyberg:
There’s been a lot of talk about Donald Trump seeking revenge against his political enemies and his words “the enemy within.” When a historian like yourself hears those words, what kind of parallels do you see?

Kathryn McGarr:
It sounds so much like the 1940s and 1950s. The second Red Scare and the Lavender Scare that came along with it. So the Red Scare, as most of your viewers will know, is the effort to root out communists in the federal government, but it really spread to other institutions and businesses throughout the nation and a lot of people lost their jobs for having just been associated with communism. And then the Lavender Scare, which was eliminating any homosexuals from the federal government and again, spread to other institutions. And so it’s really about any kind of subversion, political subversion, or at the time, what was considered sexual subversion. Now, Donald Trump has specifically mentioned Marxists and Communists. He talks about that a lot. He talks about journalists as enemies of the state. And while I don’t think there would be a repeat of the Lavender Scare, he certainly considers trans people to be enemies of the state. And so I think we often see these parallels between sort of political subversion and subversion of what’s considered traditional gender roles.

Frederica Freyberg:
What lessons from history can we learn as we go forward?

Kathryn McGarr:
I try to always remind my students of two things. One is that history is not inevitable, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can’t predict it. Another is that it’s not linearly progressive, so we like to think of America as always progressing, people getting more rights, but rights expand and contract all the time. And the culture expands and contracts all the time. So we saw this most recently with reproductive rights contracting. We’re also now seeing voting rights contracting again. So keeping in mind that we’re not necessarily on a one way path.

Frederica Freyberg:
Kathryn McGarr, thanks very much.

Kathryn McGarr:
Thank you for having me.