Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan - Hardcover

MacLean, Nancy K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195072340 ISBN 13: 9780195072341

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1994

Synopsis

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 appropriaite 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.

About this title

About the Author

About the Author: Nancy K. MacLean is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University.

Reviews

MacLean, who teaches history at Northwestern University, offers a deft, close study of the Klan, which became in the 1920s "the most powerful movement of the far right that America has produced." In this post-WW I era, white male Christian supremacy was challenged by black labor resistance, the budding of feminism and economic uncertainty. Analyzing a typical local Klan in Clarke County, Ga., MacLean describes its members as economically fragile and insecure middle-class men who responded to the group's "reactionary populism:" a mix of Protestant fundamentalism, anti-statist individualism, anti-Communism and anti-Wall Street capitalism. She describes Klan efforts to enforce morality regarding alcohol, gambling and prostitution, and how Klansmen used racial hatred--against blacks, Jews and immigrants--to displace their fears of change. MacLean suggests, counter to the claims of others, that the Klan was indeed violent. The group waned by the end of the decade; unlike in Europe, where fascism flourished, an improved economy as well as receding efforts by labor and blacks assuaged the fears of would-be Klan participants. Then, in the 1930s, MacLean notes, a "strong and inclusive working-class movement" precluded Klan resurgence. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A well-researched and convincing analysis of the most powerful reactionary movement in American history: the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dormant since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the Ku Klux Klan broke out with an even more virulent strain of terrorism in 1915. Yet, as MacLean (History/Northwestern) demonstrates, it did not really hit its stride until after WW I, amid social disruptions ``that appeared to eviscerate discipline, stability, and predictability.'' MacLean is less interested in the organization's use of terror (though the few incidents she recounts are horrifying enough) than in the frightened worldview of its members. She takes issue with the common depiction of its rank and file as ``poor white trash,'' instead identifying the typical Klansman as a solid family man who found the settled certitudes of his life under a multipronged assault from changing relations between the sexes, Prohibition violations, strikes, and civil rights agitation. Such men, threatened by concentrated wealth above and labor insurgency below, felt as unmanned in the workplace as they did in the home. With between one and five million members at its height, the Klan was so powerful that no president in the 1920s dared to denounce its violence against African-Americans, Roman Catholics, Jews, and union activists. MacLean focuses on Clarke County, Georgia, where the Klan's Athens chapter left a cache of records surprisingly rich for an organization so famed for secrecy. At the same time, she carefully anchors this local study in a larger international perspective that takes in the post-World War I reactionary movements that produced fascism and Nazism. Masterly scholarship that unravels the murderous racial, gender, and class resentments underpinning a terrorist organization as American as apple pie. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195072340
• ISBN 13: 9780195072341
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336