Right in Michigan's Grassroots: From the KKK to the Michigan Militia (review)

Michigan has long been regarded as an incubator of right-wing extremism. If its reputation in this respect is arguably exaggerated—the state was politically progressive for much of the twentieth century—JoEllen Vinyard faced no lack of material when it came to compiling her survey of right-wing movements in Michigan from the 1920s to the present. She devotes well-documented chapters to the Ku Klux Klan, the diffuse movement led and personified by Father Charles Coughlin, the John Birch Society, the antibusing movement of the 1970s, and the notorious Michigan Militia.

The breadth of Vinyard's coverage—the several movements she surveys, the wealth of detail she affords—is a principal strength of the book. But it is also a weakness. The various movements she discusses were loosely united by a deep distrust of established authority and a predilection for conspiracy theories. All had authoritarian tendencies as well. In other important respects, however, these movements were very different. Catholics did not join the Ku Klux Klan, which pushed hard in Michigan to pass a law that would have closed most Catholic schools in the state. The movement led by Coughlin, although ecumenical in its rhetoric, appealed more strongly to Catholics than to any other group. Nor was Coughlin's odd fusion of populist monetary theory and Catholic social teaching remotely congruent with the small-business orientation of the local Klan. The John Birch Society in Michigan attracted mostly the affluent and functioned primarily as a radical caucus within the Michigan Republican Party. The Michigan Militia, by contrast, seems to have flourished largely in response to the state's late-century economic implosion. Unlike the highly organized Birchers, the Michigan Militia—for all its trafficking in military metaphors—appears to be remarkably inchoate in its structure and functioning.

Given the variety in the movements she studies, Vinyard finds it hard to talk systematically about causality. She frequently cites rapid economic and demographic change in Michigan as critical to the sense of unease obviously experienced by her various subjects. Characterized through the 1940s by rapid economic growth—interrupted for a time by the Depression—and a continuous influx of ethnically varied new residents, the state since the 1950s has suffered disproportionately from de-industrialization and slowed population growth. Both growth and decline,Vinyard argues, were potentially anxiety-producing, especially given the rapidity with which change occurred. Fair enough. But why do certain kinds of people gravitate to certain kinds of movements to assuage their unease? Did membership in a union or a particular church affect the likelihood that one would respond to change in a particular way? And why have African Americans, who as a group have suffered most from the state's economic decline, been so notably absent from right-wing activism in recent decades? As to the categories of "right" and "left," one wonders whether they are adequate for purposes of analyzing grassroots movements. How shall we characterize the anti-abortion movement, a genuinely popular phenomenon in Michigan that spurred an impressive amount of citizen-activism, especially among women? Rather like the initial stages of the Coughlin movement, the anti-abortion movement in Michigan was both conservative and progressive in its goals and ideology.

Vinyard's book does teach a great deal about Michigan. She analyzes her frequently unattractive subjects in nonjudgmental fashion, trying hard to see the world from their point of view. This is true even of the Michigan Militia, some of whose members she came to know in the course of her extensive research. Vinyard's book is both a model of scholarly balance and a tribute to her zeal as a researcher.