Introduction -- Chapter 1: The contours of local history -- Chapter 2: Crashing the city -- Chapter 3: "Methods and operations" -- Chapter 4: Reform and reaction; Part I: A tendency to split; Part II: The persistence of anti-Catholicism -- Chapter 5: Kith Kin Klan; Part I: Who?; Part II: How many? -- Chapter 6: Politics -- Chapter 7: "Everything that is good -- A glossary of Klanspeak -- Appendix A: Klan political candidates, 1921-1930 -- Appendix B: Wyandotte Klan No. 5 membership roster and occupational status comparison -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author.
For decades the most frightening example of bigotry and hatred in America, the Ku Klux Klan has usually been seen as a rural and small-town product–an expression of the decline of the countryside in the face of rising urban society. Kenneth Jackson's important book revises conventional wisdom about the Klan. He shows that its roots in the 1920s can also be found in burgeoning cities among people who were frightened, dislocated, and uprooted by rapid changes in urban life. Many joined the Klan for sincere patriotic motives, unaware of the ugly prejudice that lay beneath the civic rhetoric. Mr. Jackson not only dissects the Klan's activities and membership, he also traces its impact on the public life of the twenties. In many places—from Atlanta to Dallas, from Buffalo to Portland, Oregon—the Klan agitated politics, held immense power, and won elective office. The Ku Klux Klan in the City is a continuing and timely reminder of the tensions and antagonisms beneath the surface of our national life. "Comprehensively researched, methodically organized, lucidly written...a book to be respected."—Journal of American History.
The Ku Klux Klan's persecution of Hispanics during the early 1920s was just as brutal as their terrorizing of the black community--a fact sparsely documented in historical texts. The KKK viewed Mexicans as subhuman foreigners supporting a Catholic conspiracy to subvert U.S. institutions and install the pope as leader of the nation, and mounted a campaign of intimidation and violence against them. Drawing on numerous Spanish-language newspapers and Klan publications of the day, the author describes the KKK's extensive anti-Hispanic activity in the southwest.
A memoir of the author's involvment with the Ku Klux Klan. He introduced the KKK to Tennessee while recruiting new members there and later became disenchanted with the group after learning about their racist ideology. The book begins with a history of the origins of secret societies in medieval Germany and the KKK.
A study of the career of the KKK and its appeal in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas in the early twentieth century. This is a study of a disturbing phenomenon in American society—the Ku Klux Klan—and that eruption of nativism, racism, and moral authoritarianism during the 1920s in the four states of the Southwest—Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas—in which the Klan became especially powerful. The hooded order is viewed here as a move by frustrated Americans, through anonymous acts of terror and violence, and later through politics), to halt a changing social order and restore familiar orthodox traditions of morality. Entering the Southwest during the post-World War I period of discontent and disillusion, the Klan spread rapidly over the region and by 1922 its tens of thousands of members had made it a potent force in politics. Charles C. Alexander finds that the Klan in the Southwest, however, functioned more as vigilantes in meting extra-legal punishment to those it deemed moral offenders than as advocates of race and religious prejudice. But the vigilante hysteria vanished almost as suddenly as it had appeared; opposition to its terrorist excesses and its secret politics led to its decline after 1924, when the Klan failed abysmally in most of its political efforts. Especially significant here are the analysis of attitudes which led to this revival of the Klan and the close examination of its internal machinations. “The Ku Klux Klan is not a single phenomenon. It is three different organizations, which sprang up three different times, for three different reasons. Charles Alexander focuses this study—and it’s a good one—on the middle Klan, the so-called Invisible Empire extending from 1915 to 1944, flourishing in the mid-twenties with a membership estimated at 5 million, at one time or another dominating to some degree politically every city in the Southwest. . . . A forthright and definitive account, to be read along with David Chalmers’s recent Hooded Americanism . . . for the complete national picture.” —Kirkus Reviews
A women’s chapter of the KKK in the early twentieth-century Midwest is uncovered in this fascinating and meticulously researched social history. In the xenophobic atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s, Ku Klux Klan activity spiked in Wisconsin and gave rise to Women’s Klan no. 14, also known as the Grey Eagles of Chippewa Falls. Against a national backdrop that saw the Klan hurl its collective might into influencing presidential elections and federal legislation, quotidian matters often stole the attention of the Grey Eagles. Drawing on never-before-seen materials, author John E. Kinville unfolds their complex legacy. For every minute spent upholding Prohibition and blocking Catholic Al Smith’s path to the White House, the Grey Eagles spent two raising funds for their order and helping neighbors in need. What unfolds in Kinville’s work is the complex legacy of these Chippewa Falls women who struggled to balance care for their community against the malicious ideology of the Klan.
In The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Rory McVeigh provides a revealing analysis of the broad social agenda of 1920s-era KKK, showing that although the organization continued to promote white supremacy, it also addressed a surprisingly wide range of social and economic issues, targeting immigrants and, particularly, Catholics, as well as African Americans, as dangers to American society.
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection An urgent examination into the revived Klan of the 1920s becomes “required reading” for our time (New York Times Book Review). Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon’s disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this “second Klan” spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant “hordes” landing on American shores. “Part cautionary tale, part expose” (Washington Post), The Second Coming of the KKK “illuminates the surprising scope of the movement” (The New Yorker); the Klan attracted four-to-six-million members through secret rituals, manufactured news stories, and mass “Klonvocations” prior to its collapse in 1926—but not before its potent ideology of intolerance became part and parcel of the American tradition. A “must-read” (Salon) for anyone looking to understand the current moment, The Second Coming of the KKK offers “chilling comparisons to the present day” (New York Review of Books).
The Second Ku Klux Klan’s success in the 1920s remains one of the order’s most enduring mysteries. Emerging first as a brotherhood dedicated to paying tribute to the original Southern organization of the Reconstruction period, the Second Invisible Empire developed into a mass movement with millions of members that influenced politics and culture throughout the early 1920s. This study explores the nature of fraternities, especially the overlap between the Klan and Freemasonry. Drawing on many previously untouched archival resources, it presents a detailed and nuanced analysis of the development and later decline of the Klan and the complex nature of its relationship with the traditions of American fraternalism.
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.
