TY - JOUR
AU - Pegram, Thomas, R.
AB - In The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, the distinguished historian Linda Gordon examines the 1920s Ku Klux Klan as a social movement of both historical and current relevance. This second manifestation of the Klan reflected mainstream American assumptions of white supremacy and Protestant hegemony, but intensified them through hooded ritual, spectacle, and conspiratorial fearmongering to create what Gordon calls “a populism focused on defending a privileged status” of whiteness and Protestantism as the core of American identity (36). Although the Klan movement fell to pieces in the late 1920s, and even though some designated Klan enemies such as white Catholics over time achieved mainstream American status, the “populist, racist, demagogic, and incitatory orientation” (208) exemplified by the Klan survived to influence “some contemporary political movements” (xiii–xiv). In the hands of a lesser historian and in circumstances less distressing, an argument linking the 1920s Klan with Trumpism might strike other historians as being tenuous or polemical. Gordon’s work, however, is grounded in the extensive historical scholarship on the second Klan. She recognizes the contradictions in the Klan movement, its mixture of progressive and repressive policies, and its local variations. Nevertheless, she contends that the Klan cultivated in its several million members both an exaggerated notion of themselves as pure embodiments of Americanism and an acute sense of grievance against the corrupting presence of immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and African Americans, none of whom the men and women of the Klan considered capable of achieving the status of authentic Americans. Gordon is particularly attuned to the interplay of ideas and emotions in the Klan. American patterns of racism, nativism, temperance, fraternalism, Christian evangelicalism, and populism fed into the Klan. Using Raymond Williams’s notion of structures of feeling, Gordon argues that demagogic Klan expression of these traditions reshaped ideas into powerful emotional convictions among Klanspeople that they were the victims of sinister Others. Rituals inside the klavern reinforced the sense of belonging among members, and the lavish public spectacles, parades, and picnics put on by the “Invisible Empire” expressed the power of the Klan movement and its legitimacy as an instrument of Americanism (25). Alliances with Protestant ministers underlined that impression. Despite Klan criticism of elites, Gordon does not find evidence that the Ku Kluxers opposed capitalism, wealthy businesspeople, or the profit-seeking of Klan officers. Instead, she argues, Klanspeople stigmatized urban sophisticates, cultural elites who denigrated the authentic people of America. As one would expect, Gordon provides a sophisticated analysis of gender in the Klan movement. Klan vigilantism became a way for Klansmen to perform as men and citizens. Vigilantism ranged from violent acts in the South, the Southwest, and scattered locations elsewhere to voluntary prohibition and moral enforcement across the nation, sometimes in cooperation with public authorities and other times acting in their place. Vigilantism provided a masculine thrill and allowed Klansmen, including the majority who never personally took action, to feel that they were defending their community and their culture just as they exercised control over their families. Following the lead of sociologist Kathleen Blee, Gordon treats the half million or more Klanswomen in the Women’s Ku Klux Klan and other Klannish female organizations not as Klan auxiliaries but as independent participants in the Invisible Empire. Klanswomen exhibited a maternalist feminism, resisting attempts at male domination while acting within the existing gender order. According to Gordon, Klanswomen were at the forefront of Klan family activities, charitable work, and boycotts against Catholic, Jewish, and other “alien” businesses in local communities. One of Gordon’s major points addressed to well-educated modern liberals is the need to acknowledge the existence of right-wing feminism in a populist context. Gordon’s final chapters follow public policy and political initiatives of the 1920s Klan and examine the appeal and legacy of the Klan movement. She puts the spotlight on her home state of Oregon to document its racist foundations in the nineteenth century and the Klan’s short-term success in enacting a mandatory public education law aimed at eliminating Catholic schools. More than most scholars, who stress the legislative setbacks that plagued Klan-controlled state governments, Gordon emphasizes the political organization, electoral successes, and legislative influence of the Klan at both state and national levels. A short but well-argued analysis of the Klan’s appeal to lower-middle-class and skilled working-class white Protestants concludes that the Klan movement broadened middle-class identity and united white-collar workers, police officers, Protestant ministers, farmers, and some union members in an organization that “simultaneously denied class differences, asserted a class position—middle-class—and repudiated class conflict” (189). Gordon concludes the book with a thoughtful, nuanced evaluation of the Klan’s relationship to fascism, the right-wing populist alternative in Europe during the heyday of the second Klan. Certain features of fascism recurred in the Klan, but critical differences distinguished the two movements. Klan conspiracy-based oratory and its pageantry matched the verbal and visual demagoguery of fascists, as did its racialized conception of nationalism. But unlike fascism, the Klan was not hostile to democracy and did not seek to upend the American political system. Klanspeople perceived themselves as a majority and expected to win power through existing democratic procedures. In contrast, Gordon suggests that current American right-wing populists are more marginalized and oppositional. Gordon is making an argument about the 1920s Klan, and her analysis sometimes diverges from important themes in Klan historiography. Klan community studies in Indiana and Colorado have stressed hooded conflict with local economic elites over concrete issues of roads, taxes, and schools that clash with Gordon’s interpretation. Gordon also tends to minimize Klan moral policing of fellow white Protestants. Small errors or exaggerations occasionally crop up. Although Congressman Albert Johnson, author of the restrictive 1924 immigration bill, was a nativist, there is no firm evidence that he was also a Klansman, as Gordon reports. Still, Gordon is careful to keep her analysis historical, connecting to the Trumpian present by means of terminology, such as “fake news,” that invites comparison. Significant as history, the book is also an act of scholarly citizenship. © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Linda Gordon. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.
JO - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz1278
DA - 2020-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/linda-gordon-the-second-coming-of-the-kkk-the-ku-klux-klan-of-the-sE0L65e1GU
SP - 247
VL - 125
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -