Levering Lewis Review of the Second Coming of the Kkk
Nonfiction
The Ku Klux Klan's Surprising History
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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 comprehend of Linda Gordon'due south "The Second Coming of the KKK" shows a procession of men marching in total Klan regalia up Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol dome looming behind them. It would be a disturbing paradigm in any era, merely in 2017 — subsequently the attack on an African-American church in Charleston, Due south.C., later the neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., after the alt-correct poured into Washington for President Trump'due south inauguration — it is terrifying.
The photograph was taken in 1925, during the decade when membership in the so-called 2d Ku Klux Klan — the first was put downwards during Reconstruction — swept the land. In all, xxx,000 men participated in that parade. What the photo leaves out are the throngs lining the artery: The Klan didn't just march in the nation'southward capital letter; it received a warm welcome. Different the kickoff and third Klans (the third appeared during the ceremonious rights era), the 1920s Klan was well integrated into American life. "The M.K.K. may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed," Gordon writes.
1 of Gordon'due south tasks is to show that the 1920s we think we know — a Gatsbyan bacchanal of speakeasies, flappers and mob hits — was just an urban, littoral bubble. For most Americans, it would appear, the decade was more than like something out of "Babbitt" or "Elmer Gantry": a country turned inwards against the world, small-minded and cruel. A country in which the Klan and its values — and then-chosen Americanism, xenophobia, white nationalism and patriarchy — were the norm. An America, Gordon all only says, non 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 blackness 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, information technology took aim at Japanese.
Like the alt-right today, the Klan was never a political party, merely information technology wielded sizable influence in politics. Klan members or Klan-endorsed politicians held the governor'due south function in Oregon, Texas and Colorado; it controlled mayor'southward offices from Portland, Me., to Portland, Ore. And lest we criticize the current president for existence uniquely unable to condemn the alt-right, bear in mind that no president in the mail service-World War I era from Woodrow Wilson to Herbert Hoover would condemn the Klan either, for fear of losing public support.
Merely the Klan's real power lay not in politics but in its attain into the everyday. Gordon paints a picture like something out of a Vonnegut novel, an America seen in a fun-business firm 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 hit photograph of Klansmen in total hooded regalia riding on a Ferris wheel in Colorado), higher fraternities and beauty pageants, in which young women competed for the title of "Miss 100 Percent America."
A historian at New York Academy, Gordon has written books on a broad range of topics, from 16th-century Ukraine to nascence command, and she is one of merely a few historians to twice win the Bancroft Prize, the profession's highest honor. But in this book, she rejects the academic'due south commitment to history for history'due south 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 information technology'due south important to parse what that era does and doesn't say about our electric current state of affairs. Today's alt-right — and I use this term broadly, ranging from Richard Spencer and those even farther to his right, to "mainstream" politicians, like the Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama and Representative Steve Rex of Iowa, who espouse a slightly laundered version of Spencer'due south nationalist, traditionalist xenophobia — is nowhere nearly equally 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 lawmaking words to its machine-like control over Metropolis Councils and state legislatures. In many modest towns, belonging to the Klan was a ways of career advancement for political strivers — among them Hugo Black and, evidently, Harry Truman. Information technology's difficult to imagine anyone, anywhere, proverb the aforementioned of the alt-correct today.
But underneath those differences are similarities that signal to a recurrent trend in American history. It'due south difficult to finish a single page in Gordon'due south book without a slight tingle of fearful familiarity, of reverberations in rhetoric and public stance — a recognition that, maybe, information technology has always been thus. "Precisely considering the 2d Klan was so mainstream," she writes, "examining it also reveals standing currents in American history, currents at times rising to the surface, at other times remaining subterranean."
Like today'southward alt-right, the second Klan envisioned an American past cut from mythical textile: an America without immigrants, an America ruled past 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 aristocracy, merely information technology tried to make mutual cause with moneyed interests. It played on white people's sense of "fearfulness, humiliation and victimization." And it spread misinformation about its enemies, planting false news stories about conspiratorial Jews and greedy Cosmic priests. These echoes are not coincidental.
The 2nd Klan roughshod as fast as it rose; with several 1000000 members at its height in the mid-1920s, it had collapsed subsequently in the decade to 350,000, brought low by internal corruption scandals. Something like could, peradventure, happen today. Should a scandal turn Steve Bannon and Breitbart toxic, is there any dubiety that their movement would endure a body accident?
In that location are two means to recollect about this. Ane could say, great — we've met the enemy earlier, and defeated him. Nosotros'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 e'er present, "that it tin lie dormant for years and years in article of furniture and linen-chests," as Camus wrote, set to re-sally, 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 remember of few books that attain this task as well equally Gordon'southward: In her telling, the second Klan is at in one case utterly bizarre and undeniably American. The 2010s may not be the 1920s, just for anyone concerned with our present status, "The Second Coming of the KKK" should be required reading.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/books/review/linda-gordon-the-second-coming-of-the-kkk.html
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