Download or read book One Hundred Percent American written by Thomas R. Pegram and published by Ivan R. Dee. This book was released on 2011-10-16 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan burst into prominence as a self-styled defender of American values, a magnet for white Protestant community formation, and a would-be force in state and national politics. But the hooded bubble burst at mid-decade, and the social movement that had attracted several million members and additional millions of sympathizers collapsed into insignificance. Since the 1990s, intensive community-based historical studies have reinterpreted the 1920s Klan. Rather than the violent, racist extremists of popular lore and current observation, 1920s Klansmen appear in these works as more mainstream figures. Sharing a restrictive American identity with most native-born white Protestants after World War I, hooded knights pursued fraternal fellowship, community activism, local reforms, and paid close attention to public education, law enforcement (especially Prohibition), and moral/sexual orthodoxy. No recent general history of the 1920s Klan movement reflects these new perspectives on the Klan. One Hundred Percent American incorporates them while also highlighting the racial and religious intolerance, violent outbursts, and political ambition that aroused widespread opposition to the Invisible Empire. Balanced and comprehensive, One Hundred Percent American explains the Klan's appeal, its limitations, and the reasons for its rapid decline in a society confronting the reality of cultural and religious pluralism.
Download or read book The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas written by Kenneth C. Barnes and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2021-03-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ku Klux Klan established a significant foothold in Arkansas in the 1920s, boasting more than 150 state chapters and tens of thousands of members at its zenith. Propelled by the prominence of state leaders such as Grand Dragon James Comer and head of Women of the KKK Robbie Gill Comer, the Klan established Little Rock as a seat of power second only to Atlanta. In The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Kenneth C. Barnes traces this explosion of white nationalism and its impact on the state’s development. Barnes shows that the Klan seemed to wield power everywhere in 1920s Arkansas. Klansmen led businesses and held elected offices and prominent roles in legal, medical, and religious institutions, while the women of the Klan supported rallies and charitable activities and planned social gatherings where cross burnings were regular occurrences. Inside their organization, Klan members bonded during picnic barbeques and parades and over shared religious traditions. Outside of it, they united to direct armed threats, merciless physical brutality, and torrents of hateful rhetoric against individuals who did not conform to their exclusionary vision. By the mid-1920s, internal divisions, scandals, and an overzealous attempt to dominate local and state elections caused Arkansas’s Klan to fall apart nearly as quickly as it had risen. Yet as the organization dissolved and the formal trappings of its flamboyant presence receded, the attitudes the Klan embraced never fully disappeared. In documenting this history, Barnes shows how the Klan’s early success still casts a long shadow on the state to this day.
Download or read book Ku Klux Kulture written by Felix Harcourt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-05-09 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization. In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement. Ku Klux Kulture reveals the extent to which the KKK participated in and penetrated popular American culture, reaching far beyond its paying membership to become part of modern American society. The Klan owned radio stations, newspapers, and sports teams, and its members created popular films, pulp novels, music, and more. Harcourt shows how the Klan’s racist and nativist ideology became subsumed in sunnier popular portrayals of heroic vigilantism. In the process he challenges prevailing depictions of the 1920s, which may be best understood not as the Jazz Age or the Age of Prohibition, but as the Age of the Klan. Ku Klux Kulture gives us an unsettling glimpse into the past, arguing that the Klan did not die so much as melt into America’s prevailing culture.
Download or read book The Second Coming of the KKK The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition written by Linda Gordon and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection An urgent examination into the revived Klan of the 1920s becomes “required reading” for our time (New York Times Book Review). Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon’s disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this “second Klan” spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant “hordes” landing on American shores. “Part cautionary tale, part expose” (Washington Post), The Second Coming of the KKK “illuminates the surprising scope of the movement” (The New Yorker); the Klan attracted four-to-six-million members through secret rituals, manufactured news stories, and mass “Klonvocations” prior to its collapse in 1926—but not before its potent ideology of intolerance became part and parcel of the American tradition. A “must-read” (Salon) for anyone looking to understand the current moment, The Second Coming of the KKK offers “chilling comparisons to the present day” (New York Review of Books).
Download or read book Unmasked written by Ann Patton and published by Aplcorps Books LLC. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dark tale of the roaring '20s KKK. Irony amongst the ashes, as well as a ray of hope that offers illumination for our time.
Download or read book Klansville U S A written by David Cunningham and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Klansville, U.S.A.', David Cunningham tells the story of the astounding trajectory of the Klan during the 1960s by focusing on the pivotal and under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina. Why the KKK flourished in the Tar Heel state presents a puzzle and a window into the complex appeal of the Klan as a whole.
Download or read book The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland written by James H. Madison and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Who is an American?" asked the Ku Klux Klan. It is a question that echoes as loudly today as it did in the early twentieth century. But who really joined the Klan? Were they "hillbillies, the Great Unteachables" as one journalist put it? It would be comforting to think so, but how then did they become one of the most powerful political forces in our nation's history? In The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, renowned historian James H. Madison details the creation and reign of the infamous organization. Through the prism of their operations in Indiana and the Midwest, Madison explores the Klan's roots in respectable white protestant society. Convinced that America was heading in the wrong direction because of undesirable "un-American" elements, Klan members did not see themselves as bigoted racist extremists but as good Christian patriots joining proudly together in a righteous moral crusade. The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland offers a detailed history of this powerful organization and examines how, through its use of intimidation, religious belief, and the ballot box, the ideals of Klan in the 1920s have on-going implications for America today.
Download or read book The Ku Klux Klan in Canada written by Allan Bartley and published by James Lorimer & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ku Klux Klan came to Canada thanks to some energetic American promoters who saw it as a vehicle for getting rich by selling memberships to white, mostly Protestant Canadians. In Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, the Klan found fertile ground for its message of racism and discrimination targeting African Canadians, Jews and Catholics. While its organizers fought with each other to capture the funds received from enthusiastic members, the Klan was a venue for expressions of race hatred and a cover for targeted acts of harassment and violence against minorities. Historian Allan Bartley traces the role of the Klan in Canadian political life in the turbulent years of the 1920s and 1930s, after which its membership waned. But in the 1970s, as he relates, small extremist right- wing groups emerged in urban Canada, and sought to revive the Klan as a readily identifiable identity for hatred and racism. The Ku Klux Klan in Canada tells the little-known story of how Canadians adopted the image and ideology of the Klan to express the racism that has played so large a role in Canadian society for the past hundred years — right up to the present.
Download or read book The Ku Klux Klan and Freemasonry in 1920s America written by Miguel Hernandez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second Ku Klux Klan’s success in the 1920s remains one of the order’s most enduring mysteries. Emerging first as a brotherhood dedicated to paying tribute to the original Southern organization of the Reconstruction period, the Second Invisible Empire developed into a mass movement with millions of members that influenced politics and culture throughout the early 1920s. This study explores the nature of fraternities, especially the overlap between the Klan and Freemasonry. Drawing on many previously untouched archival resources, it presents a detailed and nuanced analysis of the development and later decline of the Klan and the complex nature of its relationship with the traditions of American fraternalism.
Download or read book The Second Coming of the Invisible Empire written by William Rawlings and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years after the end of the Civil War, William Joseph Simmons, a failed Methodist minister, formed a fraternal order that he called The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Organised primarily a money-making scheme, it shared little but its name with the Ku Klux Klan of the reconstruction Era. This original and meticulously researched history of America's second Ku Klux Klan presents many new and fascinating insights into this unique and important episode in American History.
Download or read book The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest written by Charles C. Alexander and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the career of the KKK and its appeal in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas in the early twentieth century. This is a study of a disturbing phenomenon in American society—the Ku Klux Klan—and that eruption of nativism, racism, and moral authoritarianism during the 1920s in the four states of the Southwest—Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas—in which the Klan became especially powerful. The hooded order is viewed here as a move by frustrated Americans, through anonymous acts of terror and violence, and later through politics), to halt a changing social order and restore familiar orthodox traditions of morality. Entering the Southwest during the post-World War I period of discontent and disillusion, the Klan spread rapidly over the region and by 1922 its tens of thousands of members had made it a potent force in politics. Charles C. Alexander finds that the Klan in the Southwest, however, functioned more as vigilantes in meting extra-legal punishment to those it deemed moral offenders than as advocates of race and religious prejudice. But the vigilante hysteria vanished almost as suddenly as it had appeared; opposition to its terrorist excesses and its secret politics led to its decline after 1924, when the Klan failed abysmally in most of its political efforts. Especially significant here are the analysis of attitudes which led to this revival of the Klan and the close examination of its internal machinations. “The Ku Klux Klan is not a single phenomenon. It is three different organizations, which sprang up three different times, for three different reasons. Charles Alexander focuses this study—and it’s a good one—on the middle Klan, the so-called Invisible Empire extending from 1915 to 1944, flourishing in the mid-twenties with a membership estimated at 5 million, at one time or another dominating to some degree politically every city in the Southwest. . . . A forthright and definitive account, to be read along with David Chalmers’s recent Hooded Americanism . . . for the complete national picture.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan written by Rory McVeigh and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Rory McVeigh provides a revealing analysis of the broad social agenda of 1920s-era KKK, showing that although the organization continued to promote white supremacy, it also addressed a surprisingly wide range of social and economic issues, targeting immigrants and, particularly, Catholics, as well as African Americans, as dangers to American society.
Download or read book Keeping Canada British written by James M. Pitsula and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ku Klux Klan had its origins in the American South. It was suppressed but rose again in the 1920s, spreading into Canada, especially Saskatchewan. This book offers a new interpretation for the appeal of the Klan in 1920s Saskatchewan. It argues that the Klan should not be portrayed merely as an irrational outburst of intolerance but as a populist aftershock of the Great War – and a slightly more extreme version of mainstream opinion that wanted to keep Canada British. Through its meticulous exploration of a controversial issue central to the history of Saskatchewan and the formation of national identity, this book shines light upon a dark corner of Canada’s past.
Download or read book Women of the Klan written by Kathleen M. Blee and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and Christian supremacy.
Download or read book Not a Catholic Nation written by Mark Paul Richard and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Arrival in New England -- Invasion of the pine tree state -- Confronting franco-americans in maine -- Expansion in the granite state -- Rebuff in the Green Mountain state -- Confronting Irish Catholic politicians in the bay state -- Counterattack by commonwealth Catholics -- Attempt to americanize the ocean state -- Infiltrating the rhode island militia and implication in the sentinelle affair -- Encountering secession in the constitution state -- Reappearance in the late twentieth century -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index
Download or read book Behind the Mask of Chivalry written by Nancy K. MacLean and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-13 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Thanksgiving night, 1915, a small band of hooded men gathered atop Stone Mountain, an imposing granite butte just outside Atlanta. With a flag fluttering in the wind beside them, a Bible open to the twelfth chapter of Romans, and a flaming cross to light the night sky above, William Joseph Simmons and his disciples proclaimed themselves the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, named for the infamous secret order in which many of their fathers had served after the Civil War. Unsure of their footing in the New South and longing for the provincial, patriarchal world of the past, the men of the second Klan saw themselves as an army in training for a war between the races. They boasted that they had bonded into "an invisible phalanx...to stand as impregnable as a tower against every encroachment upon the white man's liberty...in the white man's country, under the white man's flag." Behind the Mask of Chivalry brings the "invisible phalanx" into broad daylight, culling from history the names, the life stories, and the driving passions of the anonymous Klansmen beneath the white hoods and robes. Using an unusual and rich cache of internal Klan records from Athens, Georgia, to anchor her observations, author Nancy MacLean combines a fine-grained portrait of a local Klan world with a penetrating analysis of the second Klan's ideas and politics nationwide. No other right-wing movement has ever achieved as much power as the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and this book shows how and why it did. MacLean reveals that the movement mobilized its millions of American followers largely through campaigns waged over issues that today would be called "family values": Prohibition violation, premarital sex, lewd movies, anxieties about women's changing roles, and worries over waning parental authority. Neither elites nor "poor white trash," most of the Klan rank and file were married, middle-aged, and middle class. Local meetings, or klonklaves, featured readings of the minutes, plans for recruitment campaigns and Klan barbecues, and distribution of educational materials--Christ and Other Klansmen was one popular tome. Nonetheless, as mundane as proceedings often were at the local level, crusades over "morals" always operated in the service of the Klan's larger agenda of virulent racial hatred and middle-class revanchism. The men who deplored sex among young people and sought to restore the power of husbands and fathers were also sworn to reclaim the "white man's country," striving to take the vote from blacks and bar immigrants. Comparing the Klan to the European fascist movements that grew out of the crucible of the first World War, MacLean maintains that the remarkable scope and frenzy of the movement reflected less on members' power within their communities than on the challenges to that power posed by African Americans, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and white women and youth who did not obey the Klan's canon of appropriate conduct. In vigilante terror, the Klan's night riders acted out their movement's brutal determination to maintain inherited hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Compellingly readable and impeccably researched, The Mask of Chivalry is an unforgettable investigation of a crucial era in American history, and the social conditions, cultural currents, and ordinary men that built this archetypal American reactionary movement.
Download or read book The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota written by Elizabeth Dorsey Hatle and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minnesota might not seem like an obvious place to look for traces of Ku Klux Klan parade grounds, but this northern state was once home to fifty-one chapters of the KKK. Elizabeth Hatle tracks down the history of the Klan in Minnesota, beginning with the racially charged atmosphere that produced the tragic 1920 Duluth lynchings. She measures the influence the organization wielded at the peak of its prominence within state politics and tenaciously follows the careers of the Klansmen who continued life in the public sphere after the Hooded Order lost its foothold in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.
