In 'The Second Coming of the KKK,' a Timely Lesson in the History of American Hate
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Fed up with world affairs, Americans rejected internationalism and closed their doors to immigrants. As they got used to new communications technologies, they found themselves susceptible to believing the outright lies that national media networks fed them and they gleefully consumed. Demagogues whipped up white people’s race resentments and status anxieties and rode them to electoral victories. Hate groups thrived like never before.
The decade was the 1920s, and the most popular of the hate groups was a rehash of the original Ku Klux Klan. Former Confederates formed the first Klan in the South during Reconstruction explicitly to terrorize would-be black voters. They were successful for a time, but white Americans outside the South rejected the KKK’s murderous tactics. Congress passed new laws to protect freedmen’s civil rights and President Ulysses S. Grant’s newly formed Department of Justice enforced them aggressively, which forced the Klan to disband by the end of the 1870s. But just before the United States entered World War I, the group rose again and flourished throughout most of the 1920s. This is the period explored by historian Linda Gordon in her sharply argued new book, The Second Coming of the KKK. Gordon makes no pretense of neutrality, and she encourages readers to draw bold lines between the political milieu of the Second Klan and our current predicament.
At its height, the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan had more than a million dues-paying members. It dominated politics throughout the United States — it was even stronger in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest than the South — and millions of Americans shared the Second Klan’s ideas about the supremacy of the white race.
The Second Klan used violence to maintain racial segregation and assert white supremacy, but on a much smaller scale compared to the first. Members of the Second Klan feared and hated African Americans, but they distinguished themselves further from the original KKK by making enemies of Jewish merchants, Greek bakers, South Asian laborers, Italian immigrants, Mormons, Catholics, bootleggers, jazz fans and flappers, among others. Gordon finds that the Second Klan drew as much from the American traditions of nativism, temperance, fraternalism, hucksterism, Christian evangelicalism and right-wing populism as it did from racism, and it used modern public relations techniques to great effect.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/in-the-second-coming-of-the-kkk-a-timely-lesson-in-the-history-of-american-hate/