The 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.
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Become an affiliateThe Second Coming of the KKK reminds us that we Americans bid good riddance to serial aberrations in the civic and social life of our republic repeatedly, only to learn that these phenomena are as American as apple pie. Gordon's timely, crisply written, indispensable primer helps explain why another aberration is now upon us.--David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography
Set aside your preconceptions about the Klan, from the era of Reconstruction. As the distinguished historian Linda Gordon demonstrates in this chilling account, the KKK of the 1920s was urban, northern, and modern. Its wizards and dragons used the latest tools of mass advertising to spread their message of 'true Americanism' racial purity, religious intolerance, and opposition to immigration. Its members, one in six of whom were women, favored women's suffrage. Its campaign of terror ended not long after it began, but it left on American politics its dark mark.--Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman
An excellent historical treatment of an almost forgotten yet very dangerous period of hate in America. What a history lesson for today's electorate.--Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center
As the author amply shows, [the Klan's] fearful, angry spirit lives on. A revealing, well-researched--and, unfortunately, contemporarily relevant--investigation of the KKK's wide support in the 1920s.
A must-read for anyone wondering over the last several months how we ended up as a country--with the first African-American president not even a year out of office--facing a group of golf shirt-wearing young white men marching onto the campus of a prestigious university carrying torches and chanting 'Jews will not replace us" . . . . Gordon documents not only the mechanics of how the Ku Klux Klan roared back to power, both socially and politically, in the 1920s but why. The parallels between then and now, branding differences aside, could not be more evident. To say it one more time for those who wish it weren't so, the past isn't dead and it's not even past; and those who don't learn from it are doomed to repeat it. . . . Histories like Gordon's should help Americans understand the roots of these toxic ideologies, as well as the circumstances that help them flourish, in order to better spot them when they sprout.--Erin Keane
Sharply argued. . . . [Gordon] encourages readers to draw bold lines between the political milieu of the Second Klan and our current predicament.--Todd Moye
The Klan of the 1920s, less violent but far more wide¬spread, is a different story, and offers some chilling comparisons to the present day. . . A thoughtful explanation of the Klan's appeal in the fast-urbanizing America of the 1920s, which was leaving behind an earlier nation based, in imagined memory, on self-sufficient yeoman farmers, proud blue-collar workers, and virtuous small-town businessmen, all of them going to the same white-steepled church on Sunday.--Adam Hoschschild