Historiography of the Second KKK

Counter-intuitively, the historiography of the Second KKK begins ten years before it was founded, with Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, The Clansman – the story of how in the 1870s the Klan protected white Southern women against rape and murder by freed black gangs, and a tyrannical Federal government determined to make the South suffer.  The story was picked up by the film-maker DW Griffiths in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation (which invented the white robes and hoods – to represent the ghosts of the fallen Confederate heroes – and the fiery cross) … the year that William Simmons founded the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. 

***

The first body to write about the Second Klan was the newspaper, the New York World newspaper, which in 1921 ran a series of 21 articles revealing its violence, hard-sell, vile principles, criminal activity and corruption.  The World claimed that it had killed the Klan; in fact it just rocketed it to prominence.  Hundreds of thousands of people joined. 

In 1924, JM Mecklin explained why. 

“Perhaps the fundamental mistake of the newspapers is that they failed to grasp the Klan's real significance.  The World described the Klan as something alien to American life, a cancer eating its way into the vitals of society.  The Klan is painted as thoroughly un-American.  The Klan, with equal confidence, asserts that it stands for ‘one hundred percent Americanism’.  If the Klan were utterly un-American it could never have succeeded as it has … The Klan is but the re-crudescence of forces that already existed in American society, some of them recent, others dating from the more distant past.”

“The Klan is essentially a defense mechanism against evils which are often more imaginary than real.”

And then he wondered who joined the Klan, and why:

“The Klan makes a powerful appeal to the petty impotence of the small-town mind… He is tossed about in the hurly burly of our industrial and so-called democratic society.  Under the stress and strain of social competition he is made to realize his essential mediocrity.  Here is a large and powerful organization offering to solace his sense of defeat by dubbing him a knight of the Invisible Empire for the small sum of ten dollars.  On the whole, the high-minded and independent members of the community do not identify themselves with the Klan.  It is a refuge for mediocre men, if not for weaklings.”

Mecklin thus created an interpretation of the Klan which was to become the standard for sixty years, and which Thomas Pegram described in 2011 as:

“the image of the 1920s Invisible Empire as a violent, racially oppressive fringe movement populated by rootless and defeated stragglers left behind by the nation’s march to modernity … an irrational rebuke to modernity by undereducated, economically marginal bigots, religious zealots, and dupes willing to be manipulated by the Klan’s cynical, mendacious leaders.”

and which David Horowitz (1992) dismissed as “unthinking predispositions, stale formulations and unwarranted stereotypes.”

***

It was not until the 1960s that this image of the Second KKK as a lashing-out against modernity by losers and left-behind poor whites began to be challenged. 

Historians like David Chalmers (1965) and Kenneth Jackson (1967) highlighted how the Klan was not a Southern rural poor white phenomenon, but was embedded in Northern and MidWest cities and supported by middle-class Americans.  Jackson argued that there was a difference between the idealistic supremacism of small towns with tiny ethnic minorities, and the daily friction between urban Klansmen and the large numbers of their Black and immigrant neighbours. 

Also, interestingly, Norman Weaver (1954) could not find evidence of significant KKK violence in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio & Michigan; and Charles Alexander (1965), studying the KKK in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, found that – although there was indeed violence towards blacks, Catholics, Jews and immigrants – much more pervasive were the systematic punishments, warnings and intimidation towards local white Protestants for moral offences such as bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, defiance of parents, adultery, neglect of family and cross-race relationships. 

***

The development of social histories from the 1980s changed the traditional interpretation of the Klan completely. 

The American historian Shawn Lay describes how, doing his thesis on the KKK in El Paso in 1985, he found that it did not fit the traditional stereotype at all.  Yes, it was racist and “did much to poison community relations”, but it was middle class, “subsumed its bigotry within a number of important and legitimate local issues”, and he “found no evidence that the group engaged in violent vigilantism and racial terror” … to the point where he wondered if El Paso was unique. 

It turned out that it was not, and that historians were finding the same thing in places as far apart as Colorado, California, Utah and Oregon. 

In 1991, Leonard Moore floated the idea of “Citizen Klansmen”– “a kind of interest group for the average white Protestants who believed that their values should be dominant in their community”.  In Indiana, a third of white Protestant men joined their local Klaverns, which ran campaigns to enforce prohibition, improve schools, lobby the local Council, and repair local infrastructure.  The KKK, he found, was “a means through which average citizens could resist elite political domination and make local governments more responsive”. 

Historians found that the “typical Klansman” was “a mainstream, grass-roots community activist” who would most likely be a small businessman, lower-middle-class employee, or skilled worker.  He rejected religious modernism but did not belong to a fundamentalist sect – he belonged rather to mainstream Protestantism. 

And Fryer and Levitt (2007) fond that, far from being uneducated “losers”, Klansmen in most areas tended to better-educated and less-likely to be unskilled than the rest of their community. 

Did I say ‘Klansmen’?  Kathleen Blee (1991) found that women also were deeply involved in the Klan, planning, preparing, and staffing their rallies, celebrations, parades, and carnivals.  Alma White, author of Heroes of the Fiery Cross, was also the first woman bishop in the United States … a fact which emphasises how representative and mainstream the KKK was in American society at the time. 

Linda Gordon's recent Second Coming of the KKK (2017) has revealed just how “representative and mainstream” the KKK had become.  The Klan sponsored baseball teams, county fairs and beauty pageants (‘Miss 100 Percent America.’) It was successful politically – for of the 1920s, the majority of elected officials in Oregon were Klansmen – “in smaller towns Klansmen often ruled absolutely” – and the Klan claimed that, nationally, 26 governors and 62 percent of Congress were Klansmen. 

Gordon shows how the Klan's ideology became intertwined with so-called ‘Americanism’: xenophobic, nativist, patriarchal, turned-inward, small-minded and cruel political and social values, advocating for white Protestant supremacy, and vehemently anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-immigrant. 

Thomas Pegram (2011) labelled these post-1980s social interpretations as the ‘populist’ approach which, he writes:

“revealed the degree to which the Invisible Empire flourished at grassroots level, reflecting a sense of American identity and civic engagement that was shared by many white Protestant Americans in the aftermath of WWI.  [These ‘populist’ interpretations] presented vigilantism as a minor theme in the grassroots Klan movement, confined mainly to violence-prone regions in the South and Southwest.”

And there, of course, lay the danger – that portraying the KKK as a racist version of the Rotary or Freemasons forgives the evil of an organisation whose stated aim was to maintain the dominance of white Protestants and which, in some areas, did not hesitate to lynch and burn non-white Americans. 

In 1994 Nancy MacLean’s Behind the Mask of Chivalry detailed the violence – and, worse, the belief that it had the right (her italics, not mine) to violence – in places like Alabama, revealing a sinister brand of reactionary populism which indeed protected white property-holders and merchants from chain stores and big banks, but which included terrorising independent-minded women as well as non-white Americans.  MacLean argued that the KKK was a prototype for American fascism. 

Lay (2004) regretted that his earlier work had not provided “a better sense of the Klan’s adverse impact on community relations”:

“Although Klansmen may have attempted to address legitimate problems and many were sincerely striving to create a better community for their families and fellow citizens, they also knew full well that they belonged to an organization that conspired, spied, lied, and deliberately provoked fear among innocent people.  That Klansmen were largely rational and well-established citizens makes their decision to affiliate with the Invisible Empire all the more reprehensible.”

***

In 1925, membership of the Second KKK collapsed.  Historians differ on why.  Many mention the conviction in 1925 of Grand Dragon DC Stephenson for abduction, rape and murder.  Pegram noted tensions between the national organisation and the local Klaverns, and suggested that the persistent violence eventually turned away the community-based members.  Lay suggested that the KKK's demise lay in its political success – its appeal lay in its challenge to the local political establishment and, when it became the local political establishment, its appeal foundered.  Whatever, he comments darkly:

“It would be a mistake to regard the Klan’s gradual downfall as a victory of enlightened liberalism over the forces of reaction and intolerance.”

The KKK was bankrupted in 1944 when the Commissioner of Internal Revenue demanded unpaid taxes on subscriptions during the Klan’s 1920s membership boom. 

***

In 2017 Felix Harcourt’s Ku Klux Kulture reflected the trend in modern historiography to look at cultural trends, to see if they throw a different light on events.  He rejected the ‘organizational’ model of the Klan, seeing it instead as a “cultural movement”: a “Klannish cultural Identity”. 

Ku Klux Kulture revealed just how fully the Klan had embedded itself into American popular culture.  It was not just that the Klan owned radio stations and newspapers, and that its members created films, novels, music, and more.  Harcourt reveals how Klan ideals influenced the movies, music, sports, and even everyday social activities of the time.  Hard-bitten commercial writers would add “a dash of KKK for spice”.  In this way, the Klan’s racist and nativist ideology became normalised, and subsumed into general American culture.  The 1920s, suggests one review, was not the Jazz Age, but the Age of the Klan, and the Klan did not so much die as melt into America’s prevailing culture. 

***

The huge membership, and geographical and social variations of the Klan make interpretation no easier today than it was in 1948 when Robert Moats Miller mused:

“it remains our task to comprehend what there was in the social and psychic air of the early 1920s making many Americans so terribly anxious as to compel them to seek release in a secret, hooded order which, if spawned in Europe, would have carried the designation ‘fascist’. 

Pegram found the contradictions of the 1920s KKK “a puzzle”, and Lay declared it “an enigma … an exceedingly complex social phenomenon” which demonstrates that “many of the accepted explanations for the growth of so-called intolerance in this period are of limited usefulness”. 

Rory Mc Veigh (2009) found that the nature of the KKK depended on the context, and that we will just have to accept the contradictions.