Linda Gordon's concise history of the rise and fall of the second Ku Klux Klan is a masterful study of American political culture and the psychology of white supremacy as a persistent force in the struggle to control the identity of the nation. The first KKK rose in the aftermath of the American Civil War and was a direct and violent response to Reconstruction, in which there was a brief effort to elevate the formerly enslaved people of the South to the status of citizens, and even office holders, and to secure their rights to education, property holding and self-employment.

The original Klan was a Southern white supremacist terrorist organization whose members were mostly Confederate veterans. They also attacked "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags", white Republican allies of the freedmen. With the end of Reconstruction and the abandonment of Southern blacks by the national Republican Party, the need for Klan vigilantism ceased and the KKK became inactive.

The second KKK was founded in 1915, largely inspired by D.W. Griffiths' cinematic epic "The Birth of a Nation" which glorified the Confederacy and the first Klan and portrayed blacks and their white allies in Reconstruction as corrupt, depraved and incompetent. The second Klan, like the first, was founded on white supremacy, but it was also fixated on religious and ethnic bigotry, fostering a hatred of Jews, Catholics, and immigrants from all "non-Nordic" lands. Unlike the original Klan, the second KKK was a national organization and some of its strongest "klaverns" or regional chapters, were in places like Oregon and Indiana.

Gordon demonstrates how respectable and mainstream the Klan of the 1920s appeared to a wide swath of the American people. It claimed it was defending "Americanism", (Protestant) Christianity, and family values and its membership overlapped with that of the Masons, the Chamber of Commerce, the Protestant churches and the American Legion. The Klan wielded enormous political power, electing dozens of governors and U.S. senators and hundreds of state legislators and local officials. The Democratic National Convention in 1924 was almost destroyed by a battle over a resolution to condemn the Klan. The measure failed by a fraction of a vote.

Eventually, the second KKK was discredited by the scandalous and criminal behavior of several of its leaders. But Gordon notes that the ideas of the Klan continued to influence American politics, reappearing in the form of Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and McCarthyism in the 1950s, and in the white backlash to the African American civil rights movement. She also likens the Klan to European fascism and the many foreign forms of ultra right-wing identity politics. In summary, Gordon's work is a first-rate argument that the Klan of the 1920s was not a collection of freaks, they were dominant in their sphere for a time, and their mentality is clearly still with us. ( )

I had mixed views on this book. The author, early on, makes no bones that she has a point of view, and given her biographical blurb on the back cover, a reader is forewarned. There's a very strenuous effort to try to tie the KKK to the "Tea Party" and the current right, which is both distasteful and not, in my view, convincing. However, it must be said that that is confined to only a few areas of the book. The analysis of the workings of the 1920s Klan is done in a straightforward fashion; not a great deal of new ground is broken in terms of looking at Klan corruption (Korruption?), and there's some demographic analysis that purports to confound expectations, though I believe I've seen similar analyses that go back many decades (such as when American Heritage magazine looked at the issue). One point that is soft-pedaled, but that still shows up, is how tightly the Democratic Party was tied to the KKK, in spite of the status in GOP-dominated Indiana and sharply divided Oregon. To the author's credit, she does not pussy-foot around that problem, even if it is soft-pedaled. The analysis of the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish nature of the Klan (and anti-Orthodox Christian, which hasn't really gotten much ink before) is fairly well done, and worth noting. Still somewhat mixed views on the book, but it is interesting. ( )

Gordon offers an explicitly presentist account of the KKK in the 1920s through the 50s. She emphasizes how mainstream the KKK was in certain areas, especially the midwest, and how it adapted in different regions, emphasizing the danger of black political and social participation in the South and the danger of Asians in the Pacific Northwest, while targeting Catholics in northern cities where they were more numerous than (the groups we now call) nonwhites. Its opportunism was both strength and weakness—when it raged against the corruption of elites (sound familiar?) and then engaged in self-dealing, self-enrichment, and other shenanigans itself, its credibility was diminished. Still, many white people were able to avoid endorsing the KKK and its ever-looming threat of mob violence because so many of its preferred social policies were enacted anyway, such as non-Western European immigration restrictions and exclusionary laws in the Pacific Northwest. I liked Gordon’s point that the really un-American idea is the idea that there is consensus on much of anything in America. The KKK is American (as apple pie) and so is antiracism—the question is which one will be relegated to the dustheap of history. ( )