It deserves a wide readership. With sharp analysis and clear writing, Harcourt has substantially increased our understanding of racism and xenophobia in the s and identified new directions for further inquiry. A handy reference work that will be much used. This is an important and original book in Klan historiography.
In a time when white supremacy was widespread and unapologetic, the Ku Klux Klan was enormously popular. Drawing on an impressive body of research, Harcourt shows us the remarkable extent to which the Klan became central to American culture of the day.
Klan newspapers proliferated nationally and gained huge circulations. Popular books catered to cultural fascination with the Klan. Major publishers nudged authors to take a pro-Klan tone, as readers cancelled subscriptions to publications critical of the Klan. Klan baseball teams and basketball teams were widespread, and sometimes sensationally competed against Catholic, Jewish, and African-American rivals.
While Harcourt shows that many found the Klan profoundly un-American, it was very much present at the creation of, and influenced the shape of modern popular culture. Supreme Court justice. African-Americans were horrified at the revival of the KKK, which had conducted a reign of terror marked by lynchings and burnings of black churches and homes in the s.
The Chicago Defender, the city's black newspaper, editorialized: "The Ku Klux Klan has reached Chicago: Full page ads in the papers, followed by the announcement that 12, of them had met at Charlie Weeghman's farm thirty miles out of town, and in the pouring rain initiated nearly 3, more, ought to jar us off our do-nothing stools.
By the Tribune's logic, the new KKK besmirched the legacy of the original one: "The first Ku Klux Klan grew out of intolerable conditions in the south and passed away when the danger of Negro domination and the plague of the carpet bagger were lifted," the Tribune wrote. Local clergy decried the arrival of the KKK, and the City Council passed a resolution saying that the group wasn't welcome in Chicago.
The resolution said: "That it is not necessary to supplement the police force of the city of Chicago with a secret organization. But the protests of aldermen and ministers hardly impeded the growth of the KKK's Chicago chapters. In , the Klan initiated 4, new members in another ceremony in a field at 91st Street and Harlem Avenue. More than 25, supporters welcomed the initiates.
For the first time, according to the Tribune, a Chicago reporter was allowed to witness the ritual: "Searching eyes inspected them the candidates to make certain at the last minute that none should enter 'not fit' for the ritual of the Klan. When the circular march was completed a torch was applied to the cotton covering of the cross, and as it burned the grand representative intoned the oath binding the new members to the Klan.
Two years later, the black community's fears appeared to be confirmed. Yet the Klan was approaching its peak and would shortly begin to decline. Reborn in , it grew to an estimated 2. Northwestern University history professor Nancy MacLean in her study "Behind the Mask of Chivalry" attributes the rise and fall of the second Klan — it would rise a third time in the s — to a common cause: a morbid fear that "Such things as the rise of divorce, feminism, black radicalism, white racial liberalism and the postwar strike wave were not isolated, random occurrences.
The decline of the KKK — by the s it was reduced to a small, insignificant fringe group — was also due to its dual nature: The reborn Klan was both a political movement and a business venture.
Its true organizers were Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, public relations consultants, called in to pump up the organization in its struggling early years. Everything was for sale: memberships, official hoods and gowns, and literature, according to a Tribune story in One of the writers who revealed this is Kenneth T. Jackson; he's most famous for Crabgrass Frontier , a landmark work on suburbanization. And it was respectable, or at least respectable enough for a considerable white-collar membership.
Out of a sample of members uncovered by the publication Tolerance —an anti-Klan publication from the American Unity League, a multicultural but largely Catholic organization—22 members were businessmen and 67 were white-collar workers, compared to 43 blue-collar workers of whom the most common profession was the comparatively elevated position of foreman. In , Chicago had the largest Klan membership of any city. For a qualitative perspective, Jackson quotes the writer Robert L. Duffus, who reported on the Valparaiso gathering: "Belonging to the less successful strata of the white-collar class, they were not 'average American citizens' and neither did they represent organized labor.
Rather, Duffus estimated Chicago Klansmen to be "small store-keepers, corporation employees, clerks, and clingers to the edges of professions, with perhaps a sprinkling of more influential personages. This is echoed by findings from Harvard's Roland Fryer and the University of Chicago's Steven Levitt, working from a much larger sample of 60, Klan members across the country.
In other cities, however, Klan members were significantly less likely to hold professional jobs despite being better educated. They had to be: being a Klan member was expensive. Only a small portion of this revenue was required to fund basic operations," they write.
In short, the Klan was a multi-level marketing scheme , like Avon for racism. And it was designed this way.
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