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history. Documenting what became the largest social movement of the
first half of the twentieth century, The Second Coming of
the Ku Klux Klan exposes the ancestry and helps explain the
dangerous...
Pełen opis produktu 'Second Coming of the KKK - The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition' »
A new Ku Klux Klan arose in the early 1920s, a less violent but
equally virulent descendant of the relatively small, terrorist Klan
of the 1870s. Unknown to most Americans today, this "second Klan"
largely flourished above the Mason-Dixon Line-its army of
four-to-six-million members spanning the continent from New Jersey
to Oregon, its ideology of intolerance shaping the course of
mainstream national politics throughout the twentieth century. As
prize-winning historian Linda Gordon demonstrates, the second
Klan's enemies included Catholics and Jews as well as African
Americans. Its bigotry differed in intensity but not in kind from
that of millions of other WASP Americans. Its membership, limited
to white Protestant native-born citizens, was entirely respectable,
drawn from small businesspeople, farmers, craftsmen, and
professionals, and including about 1.5 million women. For many
Klanspeople, membership simultaneously reflected a protest against
an increasingly urban society and provided an entree into the new
middle class. Never secret, this Klan recruited openly, through
newspaper ads, in churches, and through extravagant mass
"Americanism" pageants, often held on Independence Day. These
"Klonvocations" drew tens of thousands and featured fireworks,
airplane stunts, children's games, and women's bake-offs-and, of
course, cross-burnings. The Klan even controlled about one hundred
and fifty newspapers, as well as the Cavalier Motion Picture
Company, dedicated to countering Hollywood's "immoral"-and
Jewish-influence. The Klan became a major political force, electing
thousands to state offices and over one hundred to national
offices, while successfully lobbying for the anti-immigration
Reed-Johnson Act of 1924. As Gordon shows, the themes of 1920s Klan
ideology were not aberrant, but an indelible part of American
history: its "100% Americanism" and fake news, broadcast by
charismatic speakers, preachers, and columnists, became part of the
national fabric. Its spokespeople vilified big-city liberals,
"money-grubbing Jews," "Pope-worshipping Irish," and intellectuals
for promoting jazz, drinking, and cars (because they provided the
young with sexual privacy). The Klan's collapse in 1926 was no less
flamboyant, done in by its leaders' financial and sexual
corruption, culminating in the conviction of Grand Dragon David
Stephenson for raping and murdering his secretary, and chewing up
parts of her body. Yet the Klan's brilliant melding of Christian
values with racial bigotry lasted long after the organization's
decline, intensifying a fear of diversity that has long been a
dominant undercurrent of American history. Documenting what became
the largest social movement of the first half of the twentieth
century, The Second Coming of the Ku Klux Klan exposes the ancestry
and helps explain the dangerous appeal of today's welter of
intolerance.
