Trumpism's Antecedents: White Flight by Kevin Kruse

Hopefully you had a chance to try out some of the strategies I described last week in reading our first book, Kevin Kruse’s White Flight. Although it was not on the Trump Syllabus that formed the backbone of our reading list, I enjoy following Professor Kruse’s twitter feed where I learned his book would fit well with the first week’s theme “Trumpism’s Antecedents.”

If we follow our reading strategy of beginning with the full title of the book we can already see this link to Trumpism’s past, as the subtitle promises us an explanation for “the making of modern conservativism.” From the title we also learn the book will focus on Atlanta and its suburbs, providing us with a substantial amount of information on the type of argument and thesis we can expect (for a copy of my notes, see here).  The introduction elaborates the book’s argument in greater detail.  Here we learn that Kruse will focus not on the words and actions of political leaders who are so often placed at the center of history, but instead on the relatively “ordinary” Americans who chose to move to suburban Atlanta during the 1950s and 1960s.  Kruse argues that what some might think of as a relatively apolitical decision to move to the suburbs actually illustrates white working and middle-class frustrations that ultimately led them to embrace conservative ideas in the 1960s and beyond. Kruse is able to make this type of an argument because of his sources – he relies on the papers of individuals and community organizations, as well as newspapers – that collect the varied opinions of Atlanta residents and their response to African Americans to moving nearby.

In the introduction Kruse also frames Atlanta as an example of wider trends across the entire country. While his study is limited to Atlanta, he argues that suburban Atlantans’ increasing interest in tuition vouchers, low taxes, and privatized public services to avoid subsidizing African Americans was similar to what unfolded in other cities following World War II.  By focusing on one city, he hopes to illustrate that there were many factors that encouraged Atlantans to embrace conservativism, and examine where these interests aligned and deviated. Kruse also recognizes the limits of this claim, comparing his findings to those by scholars who studied desegregation in other cities around the country. He observes that desegregation in the north was actually more violent than in the south because of smaller African American populations, that white flight in northern cities was also a result of the collapse of multi-racial labor unions during the 1960s and 1970s, and that school desegregation was a contentious issue far earlier in the south than it was in the north.  While these differences are important, they are not so different that they obscure similarities with other cities across the country.

After reading the introduction and learning the book would focus on desegregation and conservativism, I turned to book’s index and searched for these and other related terms before deciding to read chapters one, three, five, seven, and nine; I’m sure Professor Kruse would have preferred if I read the entire book, and if you read other chapters I welcome your comments below.  From the odd-numbered chapters we learn that in the 1930s and 1940s, Atlanta was actually very progressive for a southern city, where it was governed by a coalition of white and African-American businessmen, as well as African-American religious and scholarly leaders.  This coalition relied on both white and black Atlantans to provide votes, and in exchange contented itself with a slow pace of change towards racial equality; when black leaders demanded better parks, public services, or jobs as police and firemen, steps were taken to include them, but on a relatively small scale.

This coalition began to unravel during the 1950s as urban development projects began to reshape the city’s demographics.  White Atlantans had one clear goal – they did not want to live near African Americans who they believed would drive their property values down, and they expected community organizations to work on their behalf to achieve this.  They hoped that so-called “gentlemen’s agreements” built around “community integrity” could secure the borders of their neighborhoods; if they failed, white Atlantans formed civic associations that bought homes sold by a white family to a black family, hoping they could instead collectively sell it to a white family and preserve the sense of a white community.  However, these community-oriented ideas failed to achieve their goals as white families repeatedly tired of low bids for their homes and decided to sell to African Americans for larger profits.  White families also sought to keep their schools white in the face of desegregation, and were annoyed that moderate white leaders permitted even small levels of integration.  Finally, white businessmen were frustrated by a younger generation of African Americans who protested their businesses practices and forced them to desegregate in the early 1960s. 

Collectively, these events inspired the white families who moved to the suburbs to embrace values that would become the hallmark of modern conservativism. If community organizations would not look after their homes and schools, perhaps individualism was the solution.  If outside protests were able to force businesses to change (and abandon segregation), perhaps the values of private property, free enterprise, and freedom of association were under attack.  Moving to the suburbs brought these like-minded individuals together where they developed a vision of individual rights that eschewed the social responsibility to provide tax revenues and government services to others. By the 1970s, Richard Nixon embraced a “southern strategy” that rode these suburban voters to the White House, and in return he appointed several justices to the Supreme Court who declined to order the integration of suburban communities.  In Atlanta, African Americans assumed political leadership during the 1970s, which only further exacerbated white flight – by 1985, white students made up only six percent of the city’s schools as most enrolled in suburban or private education.  As Kruse argued, this development of African-American/urban-white/suburban does seem to fit most cities around the country.

As you read the book, perhaps you were able to reflect on some of the questions I posed in my last posts; I welcome any questions you might have thought of in the comments below.  As I read the book, I though about the timeframe of the book.  In the introduction, Kruse argues that he is pursuing the roots of conservativism beyond the 1960s, the era many would consider its starting point.  I wondered if these roots could be pushed back even further, and how that might impact his argument – some historians have suggested that modern conservativism has its roots in business leaders’ opposition to the New Deal during the 1930s and 1940s. Would this longer timeline invalidate Kruse’s thesis?  Hardly.  Instead, I see these two timelines working hand-in-hand, illustrating the development of a conservative coalition; business leaders in the 1930s and 1940s might have developed the language of opposition to government services, but it was not until they found voters interested in these same issues during the 1960s and 1970s that they could hope to enact their programs; these voters arrived after the experiences Kruse describes in his book.

It is also important to note the limits of Kruse’s thesis. Is he arguing that living in the suburbs automatically makes one a racist? No – in fact, I think he would be among the first to argue in favor of the diversity of suburbanites’ thinking.  However, Kruse’s introduction and conclusion do cast doubt on the idea that conservativism’s policy proposals are color-blind; by studying the movement’s history, we see that many of its policies were in fact directly inspired by race, and that the modern racial divide between urban-suburban communities obscures their true roots and legacy. Donald Trump placed conservative policy at the center of his campaign and he actually won suburban areas by a margin even greater than Mitt Romney, despite making little effort to claim his policies would be colorblind. Kruse’s study suggests that rather than being shocked by Trump’s success courting suburban voters with a message tinged by racism we could instead see what first attracted suburban voters to conservative ideals over fifty years ago.

Hopefully you enjoyed this first post – I want to make these books as approachable and interesting as possible for readers who might not engage with history on a regular basis so if you have any suggestions or ideas for how to improve this blog, feel free to comment below. I’ll try to incorporate these suggestions next week as we read Carol Anderson’s White Rage.