The Ku Klux Klan has received much attention for its violent activities, but comparatively little research has been done on its musical legacy. The printed music that still exists is spread throughout the nation in both public and private collections. This work presents, chronologically, the music associated with the Klan from 1867 to 2002, thus enabling readers to sense the arguments and attitudes of the Klan as they developed and changed over time. Because of the relative scarcity of Klan-related music, non-Klan music that mentions the word "Klan" is included. These obscure references help place the Klan in a larger social perspective and are very important in documenting anti-Klan musical reaction. In instances where a song merely mentions the Klan, usually in only one verse or in the chorus, then only that verse containing the Klan reference, plus appropriate context, is included. The catalogue also includes Klan-related music that does not have lyrics, such as marches, waltzes, two-steps, and several Klan-related pieces that were published in Europe. Sheet music was virtually nonexistent after the 1930s, so in order to capture a feeling of Klan-related music today, a limited discography of Klan-related recordings from 1920 to 2002 is also included.
The Ku Klux Klan has received much attention for its violent activities, but comparatively little research has been done on its musical legacy. The printed music that still exists is spread throughout the nation in both public and private collections. This work presents, chronologically, the music associated with the Klan from 1867 to 2002, thus enabling readers to sense the arguments and attitudes of the Klan as they developed and changed over time. Because of the relative scarcity of Klan-related music, non-Klan music that mentions the word "Klan" is included. These obscure references help place the Klan in a larger social perspective and are very important in documenting anti-Klan musical reaction. In instances where a song merely mentions the Klan, usually in only one verse or in the chorus, then only that verse containing the Klan reference, plus appropriate context, is included. The catalogue also includes Klan-related music that does not have lyrics, such as marches, waltzes, two-steps, and several Klan-related pieces that were published in Europe. Sheet music was virtually nonexistent after the 1930s, so in order to capture a feeling of Klan-related music today, a limited discography of Klan-related recordings from 1920 to 2002 is also included.
In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization. In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement. Ku Klux Kulture reveals the extent to which the KKK participated in and penetrated popular American culture, reaching far beyond its paying membership to become part of modern American society. The Klan owned radio stations, newspapers, and sports teams, and its members created popular films, pulp novels, music, and more. Harcourt shows how the Klan’s racist and nativist ideology became subsumed in sunnier popular portrayals of heroic vigilantism. In the process he challenges prevailing depictions of the 1920s, which may be best understood not as the Jazz Age or the Age of Prohibition, but as the Age of the Klan. Ku Klux Kulture gives us an unsettling glimpse into the past, arguing that the Klan did not die so much as melt into America’s prevailing culture.
The creation of the Confederate States of America and the subsequent Civil War inspired composers, lyricists, and music publishers in Southern and border states, and even in foreign countries, to support the new nation. Confederate-imprint sheet music articulated and encouraged Confederate nationalism, honored soldiers and military leaders, comforted family and friends, and provided diversion from the hardships of war. This is the first comprehensive history of the sheet music of the Confederacy. It covers works published before the war in Southern states that seceded from the Union, and those published during the war in Union occupied capitals, border and Northern states, and foreign countries. It is also the first work to examine the contribution of postwar Confederate-themed sheet music to the South's response to its defeat, to the creation and fostering of Lost Cause themes, and to the promotion of national reunion and reconciliation.
In 1920s Middle America, the Ku Klux Klan gained popularity not by appealing to the fanatical fringes of society, but by attracting the interest of “average” citizens. During this period, the Klan recruited members through the same unexceptional channels as any other organization or club, becoming for many a respectable public presence, a vehicle for civic activism, or the source of varied social interaction. Its diverse membership included men and women of all ages, occupations, and socio-economic standings. Although surviving membership records of this clandestine organization have proved incredibly rare, Everyday Klansfolk uses newly available documents to reconstruct the life and social context of a single grassroots unit in Newaygo County, Michigan. A fascinating glimpse behind the mask of America’s most notorious secret order, this absorbing study sheds light on KKK activity and membership in Newaygo County, and in Michigan at large, during the brief and remarkable peak years of its mass popular appeal.
From tent revivals to radio and records with a gospel music innovator Homer Rodeheaver merged evangelical hymns and African American spirituals with popular music to create a potent gospel style. Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo examine his enormous influence on gospel music against the backdrop of Christian music history and Rodeheaver's impact as a cultural and business figure. Rodeheaver rose to fame as the trombone-playing song leader for evangelist Billy Sunday. As revivalism declined after World War I, Rodeheaver leveraged his place in America's newborn celebrity culture to start the first gospel record label and launch a nationwide radio program. His groundbreaking combination of hymnal publishing and recording technology helped define the early Christian music industry. In his later years, he influenced figures like Billy Graham and witnessed the music's split into southern gospel and black gospel. Clear-eyed and revealing, Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry is an overdue consideration of a pioneering figure in American music.
On January 6, 2021, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and other supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The insurrection was widely denounced as an attack on the Constitution, and the subsequent impeachment trial was framed as a defense of constitutional government. What received little attention is that the January 6 insurrectionists themselves justified the violence they perpetrated as a defense of the Constitution; after battling the Capitol police and breaking doors and windows, the mob marched inside, chanting “Defend your liberty, defend the Constitution.” In Real Americans: National Identity, Violence, and the Constitution Jared A. Goldstein boldly challenges the conventional wisdom that a shared devotion to the Constitution is the essence of what it means to be American. In his careful analysis of US history, Goldstein demonstrates the well-established pattern of movements devoted to defending the power of dominant racial, ethnic, and religious groups that deploy the rhetoric of constitutional devotion to express their national visions and justify their violence. Goldstein describes this as constitutional nationalism, an ideology that defines being an American as standing with, and by, the Constitution. This history includes the Ku Klux Klan’s self-declared mission to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” which served to justify its campaign of violence in the 1860s and 1870s to prevent Black people from exercising the right to vote; Protestant Americans who felt threatened by the growing population of Catholics and Jews and organized mass movements to defend their status and power by declaring that the Constitution was made for a Protestant nation; native-born Americans who resisted the rising population of immigrants and who mobilized to exclude the newcomers and their alien ideas; corporate leaders arguing that regulation is unconstitutional and un-American; and Timothy McVeigh, who believed he was defending the Constitution by killing 168 people with a truck bomb. Real Americans: National Identity, Violence, and the Constitution reveals how the Constitution as the central embodiment and common ground of American identity has long been used to promote conflicting versions of American identity and to justify hatred, violence, and exclusion.
In 'Klansville, U.S.A.', David Cunningham tells the story of the astounding trajectory of the Klan during the 1960s by focusing on the pivotal and under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina. Why the KKK flourished in the Tar Heel state presents a puzzle and a window into the complex appeal of the Klan as a whole.
On Thanksgiving night, 1915, a small band of hooded men gathered atop Stone Mountain, an imposing granite butte just outside Atlanta. With a flag fluttering in the wind beside them, a Bible open to the twelfth chapter of Romans, and a flaming cross to light the night sky above, William Joseph Simmons and his disciples proclaimed themselves the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, named for the infamous secret order in which many of their fathers had served after the Civil War. Unsure of their footing in the New South and longing for the provincial, patriarchal world of the past, the men of the second Klan saw themselves as an army in training for a war between the races. They boasted that they had bonded into "an invisible phalanx...to stand as impregnable as a tower against every encroachment upon the white man's liberty...in the white man's country, under the white man's flag." Behind the Mask of Chivalry brings the "invisible phalanx" into broad daylight, culling from history the names, the life stories, and the driving passions of the anonymous Klansmen beneath the white hoods and robes. Using an unusual and rich cache of internal Klan records from Athens, Georgia, to anchor her observations, author Nancy MacLean combines a fine-grained portrait of a local Klan world with a penetrating analysis of the second Klan's ideas and politics nationwide. No other right-wing movement has ever achieved as much power as the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and this book shows how and why it did. MacLean reveals that the movement mobilized its millions of American followers largely through campaigns waged over issues that today would be called "family values": Prohibition violation, premarital sex, lewd movies, anxieties about women's changing roles, and worries over waning parental authority. Neither elites nor "poor white trash," most of the Klan rank and file were married, middle-aged, and middle class. Local meetings, or klonklaves, featured readings of the minutes, plans for recruitment campaigns and Klan barbecues, and distribution of educational materials--Christ and Other Klansmen was one popular tome. Nonetheless, as mundane as proceedings often were at the local level, crusades over "morals" always operated in the service of the Klan's larger agenda of virulent racial hatred and middle-class revanchism. The men who deplored sex among young people and sought to restore the power of husbands and fathers were also sworn to reclaim the "white man's country," striving to take the vote from blacks and bar immigrants. Comparing the Klan to the European fascist movements that grew out of the crucible of the first World War, MacLean maintains that the remarkable scope and frenzy of the movement reflected less on members' power within their communities than on the challenges to that power posed by African Americans, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and white women and youth who did not obey the Klan's canon of appropriate conduct. In vigilante terror, the Klan's night riders acted out their movement's brutal determination to maintain inherited hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Compellingly readable and impeccably researched, The Mask of Chivalry is an unforgettable investigation of a crucial era in American history, and the social conditions, cultural currents, and ordinary men that built this archetypal American reactionary movement.
