When Georgia Senator Thomas E. Watson died in September 1922, a New York Times writer described a "violent career" marked by "a certain mental instability, and over excitability of temperament, even the presence of actual delusions, such as the hallucination of persecution." It should not be surprising to pick up more than a whiff of many current appraisals of President Donald J. Trump in this long-ago assessment of Watson, whose troubled life suggests many striking and ultimately disturbing similarities in the traits, temperament, and personalities of two men who came to symbolize the darker side of populism.
Born
in Georgia in 1856, Tom Watson transcended his impoverished childhood to
establish a thriving legal practice before emerging in the 1890s as the most
prominent and perceptive spokesman for the downtrodden rural masses of the
South, daring even to advocate political cooperation between the races as the
best strategy for combatting their corporate and financial oppressors (whose
hand, of course, President Trump now undertakes to strengthen.) Elected to
Congress in 1890, Watson authored the congressional resolution that paved the
way for the Rural Free Delivery system, only to see three consecutive
re-election bids thwarted by outright fraud, including the coercion and bribery
of the black constituents whose votes he courted. When his fellow Populists
were scammed into co-endorsing Democratic presidential candidate William
Jennings Bryan in 1896, Watson was left with the futile and humiliating task of
running unaccompanied as the party's vice-presidential nominee.
Watson
withdrew from the active political scene in the wake of this debacle only to
re-emerge in less than a decade calling not for interracial cooperation but
brutal political and social repression of black Americans. Not only did Watson
now want to disfranchise the black Georgians who votes he once courted and
reduce them to a "recognized peasantry," but the man who once urged that
lynching be made "odious" to whites was now insisting that "lynch law is a good
sign . . . that a sense of justice yet lives among the people." Not content
simply with persecuting black people, by 1910 he was using his weekly newspaper
and monthly magazine to foment scorn and suspicion of the Roman Catholic "Hierarchy"
and the "fat Dago" atop it and reveal how "The Confessional Is Used by Priests
to Ruin Women." A few years later, Watson locked on to another vulnerable
target, unloosing an incendiary anti-Semitic torrent that figured critically in
inciting the infamous 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, the "young libertine Jew"
dubiously convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a young girl worker in the
Atlanta pencil factory he supervised. When the governor commuted Frank's death
sentence, Watson declared that Georgia "HAS BEEN RAPED!" by a conspiracy of
"rich Jews" determined that "no aristocrat of their race should die for the
death of a working-class Gentile." When
Frank was seized by a mob and hung, Watson
praised the lynchers and defiantly warned outraged northerners that
their "vilification" might prompt the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan in order
to defend the South's right to "HOME RULE." Watson's prophecy was fulfilled a
few months later, and, as his biographer C. Vann Woodward noted, that if "any
mortal man" were responsible for "releasing the forces of human malice and
ignorance and prejudice, which the Klan merely mobilized that man was Thomas E.
Watson."
Writing
in 1938, Woodward left the impression that Watson's seemingly abrupt embrace of
bigotry and intolerance was the mark of a man ultimately driven mad by the
incessant frustrations of his earlier career. Yet, he also presented
considerable evidence of Watson's mental illness that surfaced well before he
burst on the political scene. It is here that, despite their disparate
backgrounds, certain critical similarities between Thomas E. Watson and Donald
J. Trump become more apparent. Unlike the
born-on-third base Trump, the poverty-stricken young Watson, was unable to
swing more than a couple of years of college education. Yet Watson was nearly nine when the Civil War
ended, old enough to recall the much cushier circumstances he enjoyed until
emancipation took his wealthy grandfather's slaves and his own drunken and
dissolute father quickly squandered what remained of the family's land and
financial resources. Gripped by an indelible and at times self-destructive
nostalgia for the near-idyllic comfort and security of his early childhood, as
a young collegian, Tom compensated for his shabby clothing with intimidating displays
of oratorical prowess and a boisterous, often bullying campus persona that
screamed "chip on my shoulder."
Even as a practicing attorney, Watson's
thin skin and combustive pride had triggered altercations with colleagues and
verbal abuse of those close to him. "The better part of me is poisoned," he
lamented at age twenty-six .He had "imagined enemies where there were none, [and]
been tortured by indignities which were the creatures of my own fancy." The same
might well be said about Donald Trump,
though it is a virtual certainty that it will never be said by him.
There is no scarcity of references to a
youthful Donald Trump as combatively "headstrong "and an aggressive "loudmouth
bully." Banished to military school in the eighth grade, he was given to exaggerating
the earnings from his father's real estate deals for the benefit of his classmates.
Driven "to be number one," fond of "compliments,"
and eager "to be noticed," he made sure of the latter as a senior by
ostentatiously strolling the campus in the company of "gorgeous women, dressed
out of Saks Fifth Avenue."
Whatever their ages, both men
revealed an insatiable hunger, at once pathetic and pathological, for
vindication and acclaim, cloaked in an ego every bit as oversized as the deep-seated
inferiority complex that fueled it. No
accomplishment, however exalted, seemed to offer either of them more than the
most fleeting satisfaction. Neither of Tom Watson's respective elections to the
Georgia legislature and both houses of Congress, gave him more than ephemeral
happiness before giving way to perpetual
agitation and discontent. Even after
capturing a U.S. Senate seat in 1920 at age sixty-five, Watson spent the final
eighteen months of his life in that traditionally august body lashing out at
colleagues, largely for perceived personal slights. What vitriol he had left
was directed at mysterious conspirators, like the Iowa-born Secretary of
Commerce, Herbert Hoover, whom Watson dubbed an "Englishman" while demanding to
know "the secret influence which suddenly put him at the head of things in this
country."
In Trump's case, the warm afterglow of his
inauguration as President of the United States lasted scarcely twelve hours
before he was complaining of a vengeful media conspiracy to underrepresent
turnout for his big moment, only to move quickly to charging that it took
several million "illegal" ballots to deny him a popular vote majority. As
columnist Maureen
Dowd
observed, "Those who go into the Oval Office with chips on their shoulders and
deep wells of insecurity . . . are not suddenly aglow with self-assurance."
Clearly, like Watson entering the Senate, Trump did not check "the tantrums,
the delusions, the deceptions, the self-doubts and overcompensation," that
comprise his not inconsiderable emotional baggage at the White House door...
There is no concrete evidence that Donald
Trump's sustained and ill-concealed appeals to prejudices, fears, and
frustrations has yet led directly to anything so horrific as the lynching of
Leo Frank. Yet the sharp spike in reports of gratuitous verbal and emotional
abuse of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities that accompanied his campaign
and ascent to the Oval Office fairly reek of sulfurous portent. Woodward
thought Tom Watson's scurrilous sensationalism gained purchase primarily among increasingly
marginalized whites "frustrated in their age-long, and eternally losing
struggle against a hostile industrial economy" and thus eager for new, "more exciting
crusades against more vulnerable antagonists [especially] anything strange and
therefore evil." This characterization is surely more than moderately evocative
of Donald Trump's malleable core constituency of white voters whose economic
status and prospects, not to mention social and political standing, have been
on the decline for some two generations.
Trump's reliance
on what he calls "truthful exaggeration" is amply documented in a good-sized
and still-accreting mountain of grossly exaggerated claims about his
popularity, wealth, influence, philanthropy, etc. Tom Watson was not exactly a
slouch in this department either. Disseminated strictly at his direction, a mere
"rumor" that an angry mob was threatening his life was sufficient to draw
hundreds of followers to stand guard at his home around the clock. Like our
current president, Watson also gloried is his near-dictatorial sway over his
supporters, routinely ordering them to vote for a certain candidate in one
election and, often as not, against him in the next, or commanding them to show
up whenever and wherever he wanted to make a grand entrance to a thunderous
welcome akin, one journalist thought, to what might have greeted "proud
Caesar" upon entering the gates of "Imperial Rome."
It
is not difficult to see in Watson the "anti-social
behavior, sadism, aggressiveness, paranoia and grandiosity" that underlie some
psychotherapists' drive-by diagnoses of the President's "malignant
narcissism," a condition they deem "incurable."
This unfortunate prognosis may explain why, instead of being elevated by the
high offices they attained, both Watson and, thus far, Trump, managed to reduce
the dignity and stature of their respective positions. In the end, the critical difference between
those positions simply underscores the ominous implications of the similarities
in psychological makeup between the two men, one a lone, ineffectual outlier
hemmed in by ninety-five bored and dismissive peers, and the other, also
delusional, but uniquely empowered to destroy national and global stability
whenever it serves his purpose, or, one suspects, simply tickles his fancy.
This is an expanded version of a piece first posted on the History News Network.
