[Note to readers:Â Part I of this essay can be found here.]
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Mark Twain isn’t the only close observer to have noted that history has its own cycles, especially of human folly. The philosopher George Santayana wrote the famous line, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it.” The social theorist Karl Marx put it this way: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The famed American attorney Clarence Darrow said that, “History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.”
One hundred years after the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s, American history is again rhyming. Sometimes in precise iambic pentameter, sometimes in shambolic doggerel.
No one since DC Stephenson in the 1920s has so mimicked and pursued the Indiana Klan leader’s recognition that “he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman”1 than has Donald J. Trump. Continue reading “Trump, Miller, and the Indiana Klan, Part II: History Revisited”
- Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.  Viking, 2023, p. 338.[↩]
