Wisconsin Historical Society
About 200 Klansmen, many of them police officers, march to a King Street funeral home for the services of a policeman gunned down in a Greenbush ambush in 1924. East High students learned last week how the Klan's history intertwined with Madison's.
On a chilly Friday afternoon, hundreds of students are shuffling in to East High School’s new Margaret Williams Theatre to hear a series of lectures on World War I. “It’s 100 years ago,” says history teacher Bill Gibson, introducing one of the speakers. “None of us were alive back then, but those events 100 years ago cast a very long shadow over our world today.”
The event is part of the school’s Human Rights Week, organized annually by Gibson and his students. This year’s lectures coincide with citywide events commemorating the “Great War”; Nov. 11 was the centennial of the Armistice that ended it.
As Madison College professor Jonathan Pollack wraps up a lecture titled “The Death of the Ottoman Empire and the Birth of the Modern Middle East,” the students are engaged, asking pointed questions about the redrawing of the map in the Middle East after World War I. “The maps are drawn in conference rooms 1,000 or more miles away from where people actually live,” Pollack says, explaining that many of today’s conflicts in the Middle East stretch back to the period when Britain and France divided up the Ottoman Empire’s territory following the war.
When the lecture wraps up, Gibson brings it around to ISIS, asking about the significance of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, a secret agreement between the U.K. and France that defined spheres of influence in the Middle East in the post-Ottoman era.
“Their goal was to break up that thing,” Pollack replies. “What was so threatening was that over time the colonies led to independent nations, using these kinds of arbitrary borders. In the United States we tend to run things under a short time cycle. We think of 2016 as a really long time ago, or 2010, or 2008 or 2000, it’s like wow, it’s way back there. But ISIS was animated by a treaty signed in 1916. Ninety to 100 years after that treaty that animated this enormous and violent movement.”
After a question from a student about maps being drawn by people outside the region, Pollack describes the post-Ottoman period as “fake independence” for many of the newly formed nations.
“It’s like being independent as a kid where you get to choose which fast food restaurant to go to for dinner,” he says, “You can’t say ‘I want to go to L’Etoile for dinner.’ It’s your choice, but you get a limited sphere of opportunity.”
UW-Madison professor Stephen Kantrowitz explains the history of the Ku Klux Klan to East High students. "[The Klan] always asserts that only a particular group of white people should rule society."
Between periods, Gibson explains to Isthmus why he and the students organized the event. “It’s hard to get high school students to sit still for any presentation, but making sense of the world is not easy. It’s pretty baffling,” says Gibson. “So as history teachers we try to find some departure points to do this. And World War I lends itself tremendously. So, presentations like the one you just heard about the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the birth of Israel, the map that was made after World War I is basically the same map we have today. World War I has become kind of a forgotten war in the shadow of World War II, but it’s much more consequential. It set up World War II and it helps us understand the world today. Like the example of Sykes-Picot. Nobody knows about Sykes-Picot except ISIS.”
After Pollack, there’s a condensed history of US-Russian relations by UW-Madison history professor David McDonald, titled “Putin’s Long Shadow: Russia and the U.S. since 1917.”
There’s a palpable change in the room when UW-Madison professor Stephen Kantrowitz begins the final lecture, “The Resurgence of White Power in America: Post-WWI and Today.”
“What do you need to know about the Ku Klux Klan? The most obvious thing is the KKK stands for white supremacy,” says Kantrowitz, while East’s racially diverse students fall silent. “It’s taken different forms over the last 150 years but it always asserts that only a particular group of white people should rule society. And it uses violence and the memory of previous acts to rally its members and intimidate its foes.”
Kantrowitz has his audience spellbound, taking us back through the end of the Civil War and through three different waves of Klan activity, including the Klan’s presence in Madison. The Klan flourished after World War I. (In the 1920s, nearly all of Madison’s police officers belonged to the Klan.) He speeds through our country’s sordid history of racism, leading up to the present day when former Grand Wizard David Duke declared his support for Donald Trump’s presidency. He shows a photo of Klan members and Nazis marching together at the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Aug. 11-12, 2017.
Afterward, I talk to several students about their takeaways from the event. “[Kantrowitz] did a really good job of summing up what we have been seeing recently, understanding the historical and more contemporary roots of what’s going on in the world today where we see a resurgence of white supremacy,” says Em Goldman, a senior at East. “I think that being able to have that kind of dialogue where you can have actual historical analysis of some of the most prominent and terrifying elements of contemporary society is a very cool thing to be able to have in a high school.”
Poppy Smallman, a junior, adds that she appreciated Kantrowitz’s analysis of how the internet has helped certain strains of racism and white supremacy flourish in anonymity “That’s definitely something I’ve encountered with a lot of people my age, and it’s so frightening,” says Smallman. “So it’s important to go back and be like this is where your ideology is coming from.”
Kantrowitz says Gibson has tapped him to speak at East for at least five years. “This is my favorite audience. They’re here because they’re hungry for it and they’re living this emergency in real time and it’s getting to the point that they’re going to help us fix it,” says Kantrowitz. “Giving them ways of thinking about the world that aren’t just about reacting and aren’t just about feeling but about analyzing and understanding how we got where we are feels like an important part of what they learn about how to be citizens now.”
