The Centuries of History Behind Political Appeals to White Grievance

While many commentators have focused on how Donald Trump’s dramatic increase in Latino support helped fuel his successful campaign to regain the Presidency, others have argued that, at its core, his political career has relied heavily on white grievance, aimed at mobilizing those white voters who perceive they have been victimized, whether moderately or severely, because they are white. Indeed, many conservative white Americans feel scorned by a liberal “establishment” they believe governs American politics and culture. Some of them yearn for revenge.

Now that Trump’s headed back to the White House, it may be more difficult for him to blame his problems on liberal elites. But provoking liberal moral outrage—and then playing the victim card when the left erupts—is vital to Trump’s strategy for both campaigning and governing. And that strategy sometimes taps into something centuries old: the belief that white people suffer because of their race. That potent and productive lie first emerged during the late 18th century, a byproduct of opportunism and the print revolution colliding with the material struggles of workers in unfree and expanding labor markets. While the origins of this myth reflect a past ostensibly different from our own, they help explain this facet of today’s political reality.

The origin story for that brand of white victimhood just might begin with Peter Williamson. A printer from Scotland who was kidnapped as a boy and sent to Pennsylvania as an indentured servant, Williamson played a key role in creating a particular kind of masculine rage centered on white innocence, patriarchal privilege, and anti-elite grievance. He first published French and Indian Cruelty in 1756, a story of his life that linked several kinds of captivity: indentured servitude, Indian captivity, and military conscription. He hoped to use his book to build public support for a fight against the trafficking of children as indentured servants to the Americas, a calamity he condemned as slavery.

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Yet, because he was also engaged in legal battles with the merchants who had sent him to the colonies, they banned and burned Williamson’s book. This left him searching for a way to generate buzz and make his book accessible. He hit on sensationalized white victimhood. In 1758 he released a revised and expanded edition of the book, which added lurid and fabricated scenes of white suffering, including the torture of a young white woman at the hands of Delaware Indians, whom he and his fellow British soldiers subsequently butchered. Williamson did not, in fact, kill any Delaware people, nor was he ever captured by them. But no matter — his captivity narrative boosted book sales. 

While the new edition generated rage against the Delaware, Williamson cared far more about exposing the hypocrisy of the shipping merchants who made money by transporting hundreds of children like him to the Americas. Williamson made his legal battles central to his revised narratives, adding a compendium of 40 depositions from parents whose children had been kidnapped to yet another edition of the book in 1759. This duality created one of the hallmarks of the brand of white victimhood that Williamson pioneered: people of color were often villains, but so too were white elites. 

Each successive attempt by those elites to ban Williamson’s book backfired, with the printer releasing ever more sensationalized versions of his story. Hyperbolizing white suffering led critics to condemn him as a “professional liar.” But efforts to stifle him only prompted Williamson to pioneer new ways of marketing white suffering, including dressing as a Delaware Indian and singing war songs that threatened Scottish shipping merchants. While he remained in Scotland during the American Revolution, his narrative continued to circulate, a potent mixture of white victimhood and political radicalism that had deep influence on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Williamson’s narrative helped spur the spectacular growth of stories about white slavery around the world over the ensuing half century, even as the enslavement of Black people expanded in the American South. Although Williamson opposed the existence of slavery within the British empire, stories about white slavery helped opponents of abolition. Such tales enabled them to charge that abolitionists were hypocrites who ignored the plight of England’s factory workers. 

These charges reflected how the trope of white slavery would generate enduring dilemmas for working-class organizers. Some refused narratives of white victimhood. But key architects of the British and American working classes ignored efforts to fuse the labor and abolitionist movements and instead linked labor militancy to white suffering. 

The Tory Radical Richard Oastler built his political career during the 1820s and 1830s by describing child laborers and working-class factory workers as “white slaves” in order to pillory abolitionist politician William Wilberforce for his alleged elitism. That example was copied by American radical George Henry Evans, editor of The Workingman’s Advocate, who wielded claims about white slavery to denounce wealthy abolitionist Gerrrit Smith for overlooking the plight of white male workers. Oastler and Evans both argued that white slavery was far worse than Black slavery, ignoring Black leaders and weakening support for both abolitionism and a multi-racial, inclusive labor movement.

The twining of white victimhood and labor militancy created conflicts within the working class that would persist for decades. Those challenges were most vividly displayed in the career of populist Tom Watson, leader of the People’s Party in the 1890s. A ferocious orator, Watson demanded women’s suffrage while also calling upon Black and white producers to confront together the violence of corporate power across America.

Yet the failures of the People’s Party to win national office in 1896 prompted Watson to recalibrate and follow the lead of race traffickers like Oastler and Evans. Watson began to blame not just corporate power, but also Black farmers and their white Republican allies for the suffering of white working people. He soon became an avowed white supremacist who helped build the segregationist order in Georgia, eventually winning a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1920. 

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Watson exemplified how reactionary populism redirected working people’s political energy toward racist and patriarchal ends. This sapped the original populist movement of its moral clarity and thwarted its capacity to fight on behalf of working people. 

The long, tortured relationship between this particular brand of white victimhood and labor militancy contains several lessons for understanding Trump’s appeal and the many dangers it poses. While those decrying white suffering often attack racial minorities — with devastating consequences — they also have another target: white elites. Much like Williamson, Oastler, Evans, and Watson, Trump has gained power by demonizing white elites and building racialized hierarchies of pain that marginalize working-class people of color. This tactic provides duel enemies for the working class white people, and it offers them a simple, powerful explanation for their economic struggles.

Embracing white victimhood also has an additional benefit for someone like Trump: it goads elites into using rhetoric that historically has backfired. This is clear from the case of Williamson. Being known as a professional liar did nothing to weaken his appeal. Instead, each attack on his character enlarged his visibility and his audience. 

Something similar has happened with Trump. When critics mock the intelligence and character of Trump and his followers, they simply stoke the historical grievances that are the oxygen for white victimhood. Fact-checking Trump’s repeated lies has not opened the hearts of his supporters but rather burnished their faith in him as the unvarnished voice of truth fighting against the very elites who thumb their noses at working class whites. By placing blame for racism on working-class people, moreover, Trump’s critics ignore the complex history of white victimhood and the fact that the myth has never been confined to a single culture, class, region, or nation.

This history illuminates why Trump’s opponents have had such a tough time weakening his appeal. It also explains why Democrats have increasingly struggled with white working class voters during the Trump era: white victimhood displaces labor militancy, as well as broader visions of multi-racial democracy and a just political economy. 

That doesn’t mean Trump’s opponents are facing a hopeless task. As the young Tom Watson demonstrated, it’s possible to combine anger against injustice with a transformative vision of political and economic emancipation for all oppressed peoples. If white victimhood has damaged the working class and weakened American democracy, the opposite corollary also holds true. Inclusive labor movements have fostered multi-racial democracy across American history, whether organizing Black and white workers into the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the New Deal coalition of the 1930s or uniting poor people in Reverend William Barber’s contemporary campaign for a third Reconstruction. Such efforts offer potent alternatives to white victimhood and suggest that everyday Americans can inoculate themselves against that toxic virus once and for all.

Gunther Peck lives in Durham, N.C., where he works as a voting rights activist and teaches history and public policy at Duke University. He is the author of Race Traffic: Antislavery and the Origins of White Victimhood, 1619-1819.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.