Fred Klonsky writes here about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent visit to Illinois. She came to support a member of Congress who is running for re-election and shares Greene’s extremist views.
She campaigned in the most conservative part of the state, where the Ku Klux Klan was popular in the 1920s. Note the sponsors of one of their rallies, whose rally brochure is portrayed on Fred’s blog. Ford Motor Company was one prominent sponsor. There was no shame attached to being an outright racist and anti-Semite and all-around bigot at that time.
Fred described the setting as follows:
It turns out that Effingham and nearby Sangamon County – home of our state capital in Springfield – once held giant Ku Klux Klan rallies, including at Illinois the state fair grounds.
It was common for Klan rallies in the area to draw tens of thousands of locals.
I’m not picking on downstate Illinois. In the 1920s Chicago had the largest KKK membership of any metropolitan region in the United States.
According to WBEZ journalist Dan Mihalopoulos, Greene spoke for nearly an hour, and true to form, she spent most of her time mocking other members of Congress. She ridiculed another Illinois Congresswoman because she has a transgender daughter.
Greene peppered her speech with other bigoted comments about “the great Chinese pandemic” and Muslim members of Congress and their allies, who she called “the jihad squad.”
The Midwest director of the Anti-Defamation League said it’s time to end the politics of hate, but it’s unlikely that Greene has any other mode of expressing her views. That’s who she is.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Modern conservatives owe their ideas to the 1920s, with its nativism and blind faith Americanism
those nattering nabobs!
Exactly right, Roy. Very much appreciate your awareness of the history that gave us the present!
And here I thought most of today’s alleged conservatives (I think they are kleptocrats, not real conservatives) wanted to return to the way things were in the early 19th century when there were still slaves in the U.S. and only non-Jewish white men that owned property were allowed to vote.
There is only one thing they want to change and that is the fact that back when the 2nd Amendment was written, the only firearms were muskets. Now, the GOP’s kleptocrats want their mindless MAGA mob to have easy access to modern military weapons of mass destruction.
Lloyd, the danger of arming the mob is they might wake up and look for the kleptocrats.
This is straight from her Twitter feed:
In every single state I visit, these are the top issues to Republican voters & donors: 1. Election fraud & integrity 2. Communist type government forced control over masks & vaccines 3. Biden admin & Big Tech censorship 4. National security crisis from Biden’s open border
Big Tech censorship….. this is what she is worried about? Who funded her campaign and is giving her talking points?
There must be a way to hold her DISTRICT accountable for electing her.
Oops – I misread/understood #3. Now I understand that she means Big Tech is censoring voices like hers.
There was no shame in being an outright bigot and Henry Ford certainly fit the bill.
Sadly today a minority of Americans are more loathsome than Henry Ford.
A large portion of the 75 million people who voted for an authoritarian demagogue are as repugnant as the antisemite and Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford.
Part of American history we refuse to acknowledge, is that slavery was mostly confined to the South but racism was never confined to the South.
I grew up in the profoundly bigoted Midwest. When, as a young man, I moved to the Northeast, I expected things to be better. Nope. If anything, more virulent and even nastier. This was a shock to me,.
F-ingham. How appropriate.
Henry Ford was an enormous antisemite. He published the plagiarized and incredibly antisemitic book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his newspaper Dearborn Independent. So it’s no surprise that Ford Motor Company sponsored things like that back in the day. I have not seen much in the way of contrition from Ford.
In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was active in almost every state, and in 1926, 40,000 Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington DC.
Henry Ford was considered a bigot but he did hire Blacks in his plants, although many of Ford’s Black employees worked as janitors and cleaners or in the dirty and dangerous blast furnaces and foundries at the growing River Rouge Plant’s massive blast furnaces and foundries. However, some were employed as skilled machinists or factory foremen, or in white-collar positions. Ford paid equal wages for equal work, with Blacks and Whites earning the same pay in the same posts. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Ford Motor Company was the largest employer of Black workers in the city.
But he was virulently anti-Semitic, and considered lawyers and accountants parasites as the majority of same were Jewish. He once fired the entire Accounting Department at Ford Motor Company on a whim. He then took a box of invoices and added up the total amount in the box, then weighed the box and used that figure to determine how much the invoices were in the other boxes after weighing them.
He was nuts.