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Kevin M. Kruse Profile picture
Kevin M. Kruse
@KevinMKruse
Historian: White Flight; The New Suburban History; Spaces of the Modern City; Fog of War; One Nation Under God; Fault Lines; Voter Suppression in US Elections.
35 subscribers
Oct 9, 2018 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
“The tradition going back to the 1880s has been if a vacancy occurs in a presidential election year, and there is a different party in control of the Senate than the presidency, it is not filled."

This line from @senatemajldr is utter garbage. washingtonpost.com/powerpost/mcco… Normally, when we talk about a "tradition going back to [year]," that means that we started doing something in [year] and -- now, @senatemajldr, this is the *really* important part if we call it a "tradition" -- it also means we have been doing it regularly ever since [year].
Oct 7, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
McConnell claims that instance of an election-year SCOTUS appointment doesn't count because-- while a Democratic Congress *did* confirm the GOP nominee -- it was originally a recess appointment and the formal confirmation didn't happen until early 1957. This has all been part of a series of steadily shifting goalposts.

The original claim was that there hadn't ever been an election-year confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee, which was just flatly untrue.
Sep 11, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Nothing dramatic, but still an interesting story I didn't get into in the book.
By the late 1940s, Fifield had become a little burned out with all the national political work.

He originally tried to hand Spiritual Mobilization off to his friend Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale ultimately decided he could make more money staying in NYC and writing books.
Sep 7, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Great question.
The role of white southern businessmen as a factor in the civil rights movement has been addressed by a number of people, largely following the lead of this edited collection: amazon.com/Southern-Busin…
Sep 1, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If you've had a rough week, check out "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"

It's a beautiful documentary. Out now on demand. Among others, the documentary features thoughts from @TomJunod, talking about what he learned about, and learned from, Mister Rogers while interviewing him for one of my all-time favorite profiles: esquire.com/entertainment/…
Aug 22, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
No, Mr. Schlapp, I don't know that.

There's no single "charge" here, There's an array of criminal acts that has now -- through the guilty plea and sworn statement of Trump's own lawyer -- implicated Trump directly in a federal crime. And that's serious.
Nixon's critics wanted to impeach him over the illegal war in Cambodia, but articles on that issue went nowhere.

The House Judiciary Committee still advanced articles of impeachment for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. (Not treason!)
Aug 20, 2018 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Let's talk for a second about how we count murders, and how numbers hide the real story.
When I talk about lynching, I give my students the numbers.

As part of my first lecture in my course, I note the rising trend of African Americans lynched before 1920 – telling students there were 36 African Americans lynched in 1917, another 60 in 1918, and another 76 in 1919.
Aug 20, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Trump’s SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh got his start working on Republican Ken Starr’s inquiry into Bill Clinton, as lead author of the Starr Report.

But Trump insists that Republican Bob Mueller’s investigation is illegitimate because it (allegedly) has “Angry Democrats” on it. By historical standards, the inquiry into Trump is *less* partisan than any presidential inquiry in the modern era.

Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox had been solicitor general for JFK.

Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr had filled that role for George HW Bush.
Aug 19, 2018 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Last time I lectured on Joe McCarthy, several students came up after to ask if I’d written it with Donald Trump in mind, because they saw so many comparisons between the two men.

I’d written it six years earlier and hadn’t changed a word. As @TheTattooedProf noted briefly here, the two had quite a lot in common.
Aug 18, 2018 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Ooh, counterfactual time. Sure, let's do this.
Two clear paths here, obviously -- Reagan gets the nomination and loses to Carter, or Reagan gets the nomination and wins.
Aug 17, 2018 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
No, as a professor, I understand the Civil War was fought over slavery, because that's what the South repeatedly said the Civil War was about. In its simplest terms, the Civil War came about because the southern states seceded.

And the southern states seceded to protect and defend slavery.

And we know this because they said so at the time.

Proudly. Openly. Repeatedly.
Aug 16, 2018 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Does anyone know how to get a restraining order for a stalker? It's just the saddest thing ever.

"Well, I found his historical claims to be contradicted by reputable scholars and reams of hard evidence. It was really laughable -- I mean, he made up a senator! But, hmm, this random MAGA guy says it's good, so I guess I had it all wrong!"
Aug 15, 2018 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Fascism is "dictatorship against the Left amidst popular enthusiasm." - R. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (p. 3)
It's amazing how bad he is at this.

Here's the full paragraph from the introduction to Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism, a text that wholly refutes D'Souza's idiotic claim that Nazis were somehow on the left.
Aug 15, 2018 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
Let's talk about why context matters, using this stupid zombie of a lie that somehow keeps coming back from the dead. First of all, it's important to remember this lie originated when Michael Cohen posted this image back in October 2016 -- somehow managing to get the year, the organization *and* the focus of the awards all entirely wrong.
Aug 15, 2018 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
No, he didn’t. This is completely wrong. As I noted in this thread, the awards — arranged by a real estate developer friend of Trump’s — were awarded to eighty different individuals from diverse backgrounds for their success in their own fields, not for their work promoting diversity.
Aug 12, 2018 • 8 tweets • 5 min read
@DineshDSouza I wrote a book detailing southern Dems support for segregation and repeatedly noted that obvious fact on Twitter.

You, meanwhile, invented a fake Dixiecrat senator and implied that politicians who died in the 1940s and 1950s were still Democrats in the 1960s. That's #FakeHistory @DineshDSouza If I'm trying to hide the Democrats' racist past as the defenders of segregation, I'm really doing a horrible job.

Here are just a few quick samples from my book.
Aug 12, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
While @davidfrum does an excellent job tracking the devolution of D'Souza over the decades, he also offers another excellent example of how hackishly clumsy his use of the historical record generally is. Also, as I noted here, the Oklahoma Democratic Party in the 1920s was also internally divided between a racist pro-Klan faction that dominated the state legislature and an anti-Klan group led by the governor.
Aug 11, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
An associate producer for Laura Ingraham says white nationalists and Republicans aren't friends.

This might be news to the white nationalists who celebrated Trump's election and all the ones who are literally running for office this year as Republicans. I mean, this seems sort of friendly. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
Aug 9, 2018 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
This bears strong echoes of the racist screeds of the 1910s and 1920s that paved the way for the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan and immigration restriction at home, and much worse abroad. Consider Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which complained about unwanted demographic changes in the same terms.

Older Americans from the "Nordic race," Grant warned, were increasingly being displaced by newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
Aug 7, 2018 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
This is a very fair question I've gotten a lot this month, so I guess it's worth answering.

(And I'm speaking for myself here, but I'm sure others will chime in.)
First and foremost, if you think this is an effort to get D'Souza or his loyal followers to admit that they're actually mistaken, I'm afraid you've misunderstood what's going on here.

Believe it or not, I do recognize he's arguing in bad faith and running a con.
Aug 6, 2018 • 4 tweets • 12 min read
Thanks!

But there are lots of historians on here working hard too. Check out @rauchway @HC_Richardson @richterscale @DavidAstinWalsh @TheTattooedProf @pastpunditry @pashulman @jbf1755 @ProfMSinha @ProfCAnderson @GilmoreGlenda @brianros1 @Ed_Baptist And also @jelani9 @drewmckevitt @robgreeneII @loumoore12 @LeahRigueur @allofmilov @RichAndHistory @m_r_glass @KevinLevin @LarryGlickman @prof_gabriele @DrIbram @KeishaBlain @Dr_ChadWilliams @marydudziak @drhonor @SassyProf @bradleyrsimpson @RosinaLozano @BethLewWilliams and more