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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Dec. 10 2017
The Ku Klux Klan’s Surprising History
By CLAY RISEN
THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK
The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition
By Linda Gordon
Illustrated. 269 pp. Liveright Publishing. $27.95.
The cover of Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the KKK” shows a
procession of men marching in full Klan regalia up Pennsylvania Avenue,
the Capitol dome looming behind them. It would be a disturbing image in
any era, but in 2017 — after the attack on an African-American church in
Charleston, S.C., after the neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville,
Va., after the alt-right poured into Washington for President Trump’s
inauguration — it is terrifying.
The photograph was taken in 1925, during the decade when membership in
the so-called Second Ku Klux Klan — the first was put down during
Reconstruction — swept the country. In all, 30,000 men participated in
that parade. What the photo leaves out are the throngs lining the
avenue: The Klan didn’t just march in the nation’s capital; it received
a warm welcome. Unlike the first and third Klans (the third appeared
during the civil rights era), the 1920s Klan was well integrated into
American life. “The K.K.K. may actually have enunciated values with
which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed,” Gordon writes.
One of Gordon’s tasks is to show that the 1920s we think we know — a
Gatsbyan bacchanal of speakeasies, flappers and mob hits — was just an
urban, coastal bubble. For most Americans, it would appear, the decade
was more like something out of “Babbitt” or “Elmer Gantry”: a country
turned inward against the world, small-minded and cruel. A country in
which the Klan and its values — so-called Americanism, xenophobia, white
nationalism and patriarchy — were the norm. An America, Gordon all but
says, not unlike today.
The second Klan was national in scope, with a surprisingly small
footprint in the South — its highest per-capita state memberships were
in Indiana and Oregon. In New Jersey, Klansmen burned a cross in the
black section of Metuchen, today a liberal commuter suburb of New York.
The Klan was so powerful in Southern California that it nicknamed
Anaheim “Klanaheim.” Its main focus was, as always, on spreading hatred
against blacks, Jews and Catholics, but its agenda always fit the local
context: In the Southwest, it turned its ire on Hispanics and Latino
immigrants; in the Pacific Northwest, it took aim at Japanese.
Like the alt-right today, the Klan was never a political party, but it
wielded sizable influence in politics. Klan members or Klan-endorsed
politicians held the governor’s office in Oregon, Texas and Colorado; it
controlled mayor’s offices from Portland, Me., to Portland, Ore. And
lest we criticize the current president for being uniquely unable to
condemn the alt-right, bear in mind that no president in the post-World
War I era from Woodrow Wilson to Herbert Hoover would condemn the Klan
either, for fear of losing public support.
But the Klan’s real power lay not in politics but in its reach into the
everyday. Gordon paints a picture like something out of a Vonnegut
novel, an America seen in a fun-house mirror: The Klan sponsored
baseball teams (one played the Hebrew All-Stars in a 1927 game in
Washington, D.C.), county fairs (she includes a striking photo of
Klansmen in full hooded regalia riding on a Ferris wheel in Colorado),
college fraternities and beauty pageants, in which young women competed
for the title of “Miss 100 Percent America.”
A historian at New York University, Gordon has written books on a broad
range of topics, from 16th-century Ukraine to birth control, and she is
one of only a few historians to twice win the Bancroft Prize, the
profession’s highest honor. But in this book, she rejects the academic’s
commitment to history for history’s sake in favor of a perspective on
the past that explicitly comments on the present. “In my discussion of
the Ku Klux Klan I am not neutral,” she writes, adding later in the same
paragraph, “I am offering an interpretation, not a scholarly monograph.”
Gordon wants readers to consider the second Klan in light of recent
American politics, but it’s important to parse what that era does and
doesn’t say about our current situation. Today’s alt-right — and I use
this term broadly, ranging from Richard Spencer and those even further
to his right, to “mainstream” politicians, like the Senate candidate Roy
Moore of Alabama and Representative Steve King of Iowa, who espouse a
slightly laundered version of Spencer’s nationalist, traditionalist
xenophobia — is nowhere near as broad or pervasive as the Klan was then.
Nor is the alt-right as well organized. Readers’ jaws will drop at how
expansive and structured the Klan was, from its code words to its
machine-like control over City Councils and state legislatures. In many
small towns, belonging to the Klan was a means of career advancement for
political strivers — among them Hugo Black and, apparently, Harry
Truman. It’s hard to imagine anyone, anywhere, saying the same of the
alt-right today.
But underneath those differences are similarities that point to a
recurrent tendency in American history. It’s hard to finish a single
page in Gordon’s book without a slight tingle of fearful familiarity, of
reverberations in rhetoric and public opinion — a recognition that,
maybe, it has always been thus. “Precisely because the second Klan was
so mainstream,” she writes, “examining it also reveals continuing
currents in American history, currents at times rising to the surface,
at other times remaining subterranean.”
Like today’s alt-right, the second Klan envisioned an American past cut
from mythical cloth: an America without immigrants, an America ruled by
Anglo-Saxon whites, an America that prayed in unison to an
evangelical-Christian God. The Klan rejected scientific claims that
challenged its worldview. It railed against the cosmopolitan, liberal
elite, but it tried to make common cause with moneyed interests. It
played on white people’s sense of “fear, humiliation and victimization.”
And it spread misinformation about its enemies, planting false news
stories about conspiratorial Jews and greedy Catholic priests. These
echoes are not coincidental.
The second Klan fell as fast as it rose; with several million members at
its height in the mid-1920s, it had collapsed later in the decade to
350,000, brought low by internal corruption scandals. Something similar
could, perhaps, happen today. Should a scandal turn Steve Bannon and
Breitbart toxic, is there any doubt that their movement would suffer a
body blow?
There are two ways to think about this. One could say, great — we’ve met
the enemy before, and defeated him. We’ll do it again. Or we could
realize that we’ve met the enemy, and he is us. That the plague of
xenophobia, racism and nationalism is always present, “that it can lie
dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests,” as Camus
wrote, ready to re-emerge, given the right conditions.
They say the job of an anthropologist is to make the familiar strange
and the strange familiar, and something similar goes for the historian.
I can think of few books that accomplish this task as well as Gordon’s:
In her telling, the second Klan is at once utterly bizarre and
undeniably American. The 2010s may not be the 1920s, but for anyone
concerned with our present condition, “The Second Coming of the KKK”
should be required reading.
Clay Risen is the deputy Op-Ed editor for The Times. He is writing a
book about Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.
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