Jonathan P. Baird

I expect that for the next one hundred years historians of all stripes will be analyzing and debating our last presidential election. It was pivotal and it marks a turning point where a plurality of voters decided to move the nation backwards.

While there are many lens through which to view the last election, I wanted to look at the election through the lens of sexual politics. One question that has jumped out: how could so many Americans ignore the reality that the Republican candidate had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by over two dozen women?

A jury held against Donald Trump in the E. Jean Carroll case both for committing sexual assault and defamation. In a second New York case, he was convicted of 34 felonies, paying hush money to a porn star to cover up an extra-marital affair. Then after winning the presidency for a second time, he nominated others for high office who also faced allegations of sexual impropriety. Having sexual abuse allegations against you appears to be a Trump job qualification. Why didn’t voters care about any of that?

Let me offer an answer: sexism. Sexism is not just an ideology of male supremacy. Historically, it is an institutional practice embedded in laws, business, government and religion. Neither men nor many women want to face the fact of sexist violence against women. It is deeply rooted in sex roles and male supremacy where, until recently, men did not have to answer for piggish or criminal conduct.

The term “domestic violence” (which is an inadequate description for the phenomena) is a relatively recent naming. Before that it was wife-beating. Much violence against women was tolerated and viewed as a private affair, not subject to law. In 1970, marital rape was legal in all fifty states. It was not until 1993 that all states withdrew the spousal exception to rape laws.

The women’s liberation movement had a profound consciousness-raising impact as did #MeToo but in the last few years, #MeToo has receded.

Trump’s behavior reflects the prevailing misogyny that has minimized the importance of violence against women. As he said on the Access Hollywood tape:

“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful…I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

He has long thought he has the prerogative and can take unwanted and uninvited sexual initiatives and mostly he has gotten away with it.

If you view the allegations of many of the women who have complained about Trump’s sexual harassment, there is a sameness about the charges. They are catalogued in an article by Mariel Padilla in the 19th. Forcibly reaching under skirts, groping breasts and butts, pushing women up against the wall while grasping for erogenous zones, trying to force his tongue down throats and kissing on the lips without consent were the most common forms of assault.

Of course Trump has said all his accusers are “horrible horrible liars” but the Access Hollywood tape is an unrefuted expose. Trump has also said very revealing things. As the owner of beauty pageants he had a practice of unexpectedly walking into contestants’ dressing rooms when they were changing. He would be the only man in the room while women were standing there with no clothes. In a 2005 interview on the Howard Stern show he said, “I sort of get away with things like that”.

Voters may have had other priorities but they gave a pass. They did not see the women victimized as equivalent to their mothers, wives, daughters or sisters. If their family member was a victim, maybe they would have felt differently. Even women, particularly white women voters, let Trump off the hook for his sexual offenses. Psychiatry professor Judith L. Herman has observed:

“Most women do not in fact recognize the degree of male hostility towards them, preferring to view the relations of the sexes as more benign than they are in fact. Similarly women like to believe that they have greater freedom and higher status than they do in reality.”

Domestic violence remains a major public health problem. In the United States, women experience 4.8 million incidents of physical or sexual assault annually. However, the true prevalence of domestic violence is unknown because many victims are afraid to disclose their personal experience of violence. Many abusers get over in perpetrating because of the challenges in holding them accountable and because of fear on the part of the victim in speaking up.

Beyond the ingrained societal sexism which enabled Trump, there is a deeper factor. The Christian right treated this serial sexual harasser and multiply alleged adulterer like he is a deity. They are also promoting a male supremacist world view with the man as the head of the household. The job of the woman is to be a submissive wife, passive and obedient. These women do not leave their abusers, no matter how violent. They learn to swallow their anger.

A part of the reason for why Trump’s history of sexual abuse was overlooked and forgiven is that the religious sector of his base can justify it. Men who are abusers escape accountability. Even worse, the abuse actually gets a nod of religious approval like it is somehow blessed. There is an allowance for men to abuse. Trump is an example of that.

After the election, the phrase “your body, my choice” appeared online and surged across the internet. The slogan was coined by a little Nazi Incel. It was meant to mock the phrase from the women’s movement “my body, my choice”. It has been followed by posts calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote. We are talking a cave man mentality.

For women, Making America Great Again is recreating a 1950’s Stepford Wife movie. Turning the clock back serves neither women nor men. The fact that voters overlooked sexism is not a positive statement about America. It is saying women don’t matter. Predatory behavior like Trump’s should not be excused or rewarded. It will only encourage more of the same.

As people sort through election results, one thread that has commonly emerged is the idea that Trump won because he was the “change” candidate. He was the disrupter, who was anti-establishment. This supposedly enabled him to corner the market on voters who wanted to blow up the status quo.

There are a number of variants on that theme. Trump was allegedly authentic because he told it like it was. He was unlike other politicians, more plainspoken. He intended to drain the swamp and purge the Deep State. Trump’s minion, Steve Bannon, said he would deconstruct the administrative state. He appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and is friendly with Dana White and UFC fighters.

Trump’s misogyny and his archaic notion of masculinity are held up as a form of rebellion. The ridiculous memes of blubbery Trump as a highly muscled Rambo figure appeared all over social media. Trump’s history of repeated sexual assault is passed over and is not seen as disqualifying. Instead, his machismo is held up as a virtue. He nominates others accused of sexual impropriety to high office. This is about change as anti-feminism and about silencing women.

Being a soulless entrepreneur who makes millions and is surrounded by beautiful women is what now passes for rebellion. It is a sad perversion of the honorable role of anti-establishment rebel and there is nothing that is in the slightest rebellious about it. It is more like an archetype of the capitalist robber baron. To be more specific, Trump fits the archetype of the huckster and con man who preys on the weak.

Whatever the efforts to repackage Trump and his MAGA movement as “rebellious”, they are, in fact, a movement of, by, and for the billionaire class which spared no expense to see him elected. These billionaires were buying the politician who would feather their nests and not interfere with their private pursuit of endless billions, mansions, mega-yachts, island hideaways and even space odysseys. Trump was the “greed is good” candidate.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, gave Trump’s campaign over $130 million. Timothy Mellon, heir to the Mellon family, donated as least $115 million to the campaign. A laundry list of other billionaires including Peter Thiel, Miriam Adelson, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, Vivek Ramaswamy, Bill Ackman, Diane Hendricks, John Paulson, Scott Bessent, Woody Johnson and Marc Andreessen went all in. The circle of billionaires supporting Trump is similar to the oligarchs around Putin.

The fact that Trump won many working class voters means nothing about the trajectory of his administration. His advisors told Axios that on day one he is going to push “a business-friendly agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and expanded energy production” and “will fill his top ranks with billionaires, former CEOs’, tech leaders and loyalists”. The veneer that the GOP was for workers will be quickly stripped away.

As someone who lived through the 1960’s, I know something about what it means to be anti-establishment. It is not about posturing a fake image of cool. The American ruling class has created a society of vast economic inequality where grossly disproportionate wealth goes to the top 1%. Today the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 92%. We don’t guarantee health care. We fail to recognize the urgency of the climate crisis. The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote:

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

Being anti-establishment is about fighting the distorted priorities of unfettered capitalism. 60% of us live paycheck to paycheck. One survey found 63% of workers were unable to pay a $500 emergency expense. On the other hand, things have never been better for billionaires. They have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes.

I would suggest my own definition of being anti-establishment and it is not about having tattoos. It is caring about the pain and suffering of the millions of working class Americans who have been screwed by the system. The labor leader Eugene V. Debs put it best:

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

Being anti-establishment is not about getting rich, unjustified hatred against immigrants, indifference to others, being sexist, racist or homophobic or being opposed to science. Change comes in different varieties and the shaking up the status quo Trump offers is an illusion.

As distraught Democrats consider the reasons for Trump’s gains and their electoral losses, I would counsel against despair. Democrats can certainly come back. It is important that there is wide debate about the reasons for the Democrats’ poor performance but some things are clear and they have been best articulated by Sen. Bernie Sanders. To quote him:

“There was no appreciation – no appreciation – of the struggling and suffering of millions and millions of working-class people. And unless you recognize that reality, and have a vision of how you get out of that, I think you’re not going to be going very far as a political party.”

In the last election, the Democrats failed to recognize peoples’ anger or their suffering. Saying the economy was good when it was hurting so many was inexcusable.

We can do so much better. Democrats have the great example of FDR. While certainly not a flawless figure, his example of uniting a broad majority still provides a model for how Democrats can rebound. It is only a matter of time before Trump and his administration are more widely despised. Many people seem to like authoritarians but they will soon be dissatisfied with outcomes. That is entirely predictable.

I admit to a fascination with the holes in American history. That is, the time periods outside our blockbuster events like the Revolution, the Civil War and the 20th century world wars. There are periods where historical memory has failed and our collective past is lost.

One such period is the time after the betrayal of Reconstruction in the 1890’s. What is remembered, if at all, might be the name of a President or a Supreme Court decision. President-elect Trump cited President William McKinley who served from 1897 to 1901 to promote his tariff ideas. Lawyers remember Plessy v Ferguson, the separate but equal decision. The narrative thread about the 1890’s is non-existent. It is a black hole.

I was reading an article by Sherillyn Ifill, the civil rights activist, who quoted a historian who had called the period after the end of Reconstruction “the nadir”. She mentions lynching, convict leasing and sharecropping as aspects of that era. It was a period of racial fascism in the South and it was a time when white supremacy ruled the country as a whole. Protest against racism, certainly as reflected in the two major political parties, was at a low ebb.

However, contrary to the shreds of history we have inherited, there was more opposition to the prevailing order than Is now remembered. When I was down South in September, I learned about the 1895 anti-racist struggle in South Carolina. The story has been sidelined but it is important to remember because it contradicts the misleading impression that people didn’t fight back.

After the Civil War and during Reconstruction in 1868, South Carolina passed a new progressive state constitution that gave rights to all. For over 30 years, blacks ran for and were elected to high political office in South Carolina. Under the 1868 constitution, South Carolina removed discrimination and allowed voting rights for black men. An effort to extend suffrage for women was defeated.

The Reconstruction government in South Carolina created a public school system. Nothing like that existed before. It was the first law passed in the South to desegregate public schools. For the first time, black and white students attended public school together.

It would be hard to overstate the racist reaction engendered by the desegregation effort. Following the example of Mississippi, South Carolina’s Governor, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, organized a constitutional convention designed to strip black citizens of the right to vote even though the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S.Constitution had been passed to prevent exactly efforts like this.

Tillman had a long history stirring up racial hatred. He was part of a mob that massacred blacks in 1876 at Hamburg, South Carolina and he bragged about murdering black South Carolinians during Reconstruction. Later as a U.S. Senator, he defended lynching on the floor of the Senate. He ran on a goal of eliminating black political power.

In the 1890’s, civil rights, particularly voting rights, had deteriorated so much that on August 29, 1892, this notice appeared in the Charleston News and Courier:

“A separate list of all Negro voters must be kept and returned with the poll list. Every Negro applying to vote must produce a written statement by ten white men who will swear that they know of their own knowledge that such voters voted for [Governor Wade] Hampton in 1876 and have voted the Democratic ticket continuously ever since. This statement must be placed in the ballot box by the managers.”

On July 10, 1895, several months before Tillman’s convention was to take place, 60 black leaders convened in Columbia. Six black delegates were elected to attend the constitutional convention. These included Robert Smalls, a Civil War hero and later a Congressman and William J. Whipper, a lawyer. Both had played a role in drafting the progressive 1868 state constitution. Smalls had been the architect of the amendment creating public schools in South Carolina.

Both Smalls and Whipper had distinguished records. Smalls smuggled his family out of slavery when he commandeered a Confederate transport ship in Charleston Harbor in 1862. He piloted the ship to a Union-controlled area. He became famous for that and his example helped to persuade President Lincoln to accept black soldiers into the Union army. Smalls went on to a political career serving in the Louisiana State House and Senate and then Congress.

Whipper was an abolitionist, a state legislator, a circuit court judge and an outstanding trial lawyer. He was one of the first black lawyers practicing before a legal tribunal in South Carolina. In the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention Whipper made a motion, ultimately unsuccessful, to extend the right to vote to women.

In the face of racist insults and ridicule, the six black leaders eloquently made the case for universal suffrage. They contended with white delegates voicing racist slurs and with a vicious press campaign accusing blacks of incompetence, criminality and corruption.
A number of the most powerful speeches are quoted in a book by Damon L. Fordham, The 1895 Segregation Fight in South Carolina. Fordham cites Whipper’s speech in response to Tillman’s allegations of black corruption:

“The car of Negro progress is coming, and instead of allowing it to come on, you wish to stop it. You may just as well make up your minds that the Negro will rise. He will not be crushed. The Negro will rise, sooner or later, crush us as you may.”

The final vote on the Convention was 116-7 in favor of Tillman’s constitution. The black delegates refused to sign the completed constitution. Smalls said he would rather “walk home” to Beaufort before signing such a document. Not only were black voting rights curtailed but under the new constitution schools and public facilities were segregated again.

Tillman’s constitution didn’t explicitly say blacks couldn’t vote to avoid a Fifteenth Amendment violation but it included a requirement of owning $300 in property and a literacy requirement targeted at blacks. The requirements effectively precluded black voting. Fordham writes that the literacy test allowed registrars to allow illiterate white voters while denying most literate black voters. Tillman and his allies stacked the deck.

The bravery of the black leaders in the context of that nadir exposed the barbarism of South Carolina’s power structure. They resisted nobly and inspired those who learned about their speeches and actions. We are now in a new nadir. We can learn about the imperative of courage and resistance from those who faced a far more difficult situation than what we face today.

Outside New Orleans, there is a historical site, the Whitney Plantation, dedicated to showing the history of slavery. It is an indoor and outdoor museum. For many years, the place operated as a sugar, indigo and rice plantation. There are a series of exhibits on the property showing slave trade maritime routes, a memorial honoring the over 350 enslaved people who worked the plantation between 1752-1865 and markers describing local historical events.

One striking exhibit on the walk path outside was a garden full of sculpted heads on poles commemorating leaders of the 1811 German Coast Uprising. Although it is little known, the German Coast Uprising in an area near New Orleans was the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States. The story is well told in American Uprising, a book by Daniel Rasmussen.

The uprising began on January 8, 1811 on the plantation of Colonel Manuel Andry, who was a commander of the local militia. Over a period of months prior to the uprising, enslaved people secretly organized cells at a number of plantations over a 40 mile range. They planned an audacious scheme to capture New Orleans, free all the people enslaved there and emancipate themselves. They knew failure meant death.

On the evening of January 8, 25 insurgents broke into the Andry mansion, killed Andry’s son and they took muskets and ammunition from the armory. From that plantation it was a 41 mile march to New Orleans. On the march, the insurgents burned several plantation houses, killed two planters and picked up many recruits. The number of enslaved who joined the rebellion swelled to between 200 and 500.

A number of “maroons” (enslaved people who had escaped slavery and lived in the woods) joined the march along the way. The white planters, finding out about the revolt and being massively outnumbered, deserted their plantations and fled with their families to New Orleans.

The leader of the revolt was Charles Deslondes, a Creole mulatto, who had been a plantation overseer. That position allowed him more freedom to move and surreptitiously organize. It was a position of trust from the planters but Deslondes had his own agenda. He, along with a small group of co-conspirators, meticulously planned the uprising.

Contrary to any mythology about contented slaves and benevolent masters, the chattel slavery system in Louisiana was known for brutal conditions. A sugar plantation was run like a military camp and Deslondes had operated like a general. He inflicted punishments like whipping for any infraction of the behavioral code.

Death and inhuman torture were endemic to slavery. 40% of those captured in Africa died before boarding slave ships. 10% died in the Middle Passage or shortly after arrival. Only 30% of slaves captured in Africa survived past the third or fourth year of laboring as slaves. The plantation work was grueling and the hours were long. Once harvest began, slaves worked 16 hours or more a day, 7 days a week.

One significant problem in the German Coast Uprising was the enslaveds’ inability to obtain enough weapons and ammunition. Only one half of the slave army were armed with bullets and fusils. Many had to rely on sabers, machetes, axes, and cane knives.

On January 10 and 11, the planters’ militia counter-attacked. They had a great military advantage with their weaponry. They drove the insurgents into the woods. Many enslaved people were killed in battle and others fled into the swamps.

Charles Deslondes was among the slaves driven into the woods. The slaveholders used bloodhounds to track the rebels and Deslondes was caught. The militia men chopped off Deslondes’ hands, broke his thighs and shot him. They then roasted his remains on a pile of straw.

The reprisals against the insurgents were savage and unrelenting. The militia cut off heads of the slave corpses and put them on display. By the end of January, around 100 dismembered bodies appeared on pikes in the center of New Orleans. The garden at Whitney Plantation is intended to remember this atrocity.

A special tribunal presided over by prominent planters ordered summary executions. The insurgents were referred to as “brigands”. Beheadings were the prime method for injecting fear and terror in the oppressed and for putting down slave revolts. Rasmussen writes:

“The public destruction of the rebels was, in slaveholders’ minds, a necessary precondition for the safety of the plantation regime and the prevention of a ferocious revolt along the lines of Haiti.”

There can be little doubt the Haitian revolution, the first successful slave insurrection led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and fought between 1791-1804, had a profound effect on enslaved people living in the American South. The story got around and it offered inspiration that slavery could be overcome and defeated. Haiti declared its independence in 1804 after defeating three European armies, including Napoleon’s powerful military. Haiti was the first nation to permanently ban slavery.

The slaveholders did not respond to the uprising with any reconsideration of slavery. They doubled down. The Louisiana legislature compensated the slaveholders $300 (a very significant sum in those days) for each and every slave killed in the insurrection. Money was also appropriated by the state to pay the slaveholders’ damages for the mansions burnt by the enslaved.

You have to ask: why has this story been disappeared? It was the largest slave revolt in American history. I see it as a cover-up, part of the effort to minimize slavery’s history and pretend racism was not central to America’s story. The German Coast Uprising shows both the evil of slavery and the ferocious opposition it engendered. Conditions were so intolerable that the enslaved opted for violent revolution rather than the living death of slavery.

The slaveholders saw their slaves as no better than cattle. Heads on pikes was their response.

Teaching American history honestly means ending unforgivable silences around events like the German Coast Uprising. It is not a divisive concept to tell this story. It Is not about making white people feel uncomfortable. Intellectual integrity demands we know about it.