by Linda Gordon
Not all populisms challenge the dominant economic form of organization. Those on the democratic end, like the 1890s Populists, have frequently called for regulating the ability of the wealthy to “rig” the system, while those on the conservative end have not usually challenged the ruling power structure. In its economic values, the Klan was wholly conservative. Klanspeople respected the rich. The middle-class identity promoted by the Klan honored the profit motive (which insulated its profiteering leaders from criticism for a time). These values then confirmed the belief that America offered economic opportunity to everyone. That ideology might seem to contradict its assertions that “aliens” were stealing jobs from “right” Americans, but that accusation was largely rhetorical, as there were few areas of Klan strength in which immigrants were competing with the native-born for jobs. One might call this claim about unfair competition from “aliens” a grievance to be taken seriously but not literally, to use a twenty-first-century phrase.
What economic complaints the Klan articulated always took the form of racial and religious prejudices. Klan anti-Semitism closely resembled the Nazi version. Jews were not only swindlers but, due to their tribal conspiracies, blocked honest competition. Klan anti-Semitism differed from mainstream anti-Semitism only in intensity; condemning Jews for their commercial success by branding them cheaters and money-grubbers was a popular slur of the time, to the extent that “Jewing” referred to ruthless haggling over prices. The pecuniary stereotype of Jews served both to veil the pecuniary dishonesty and profiteering of non-Jews, notably Klan officials themselves, and to deflect criticism from the inequities imbedded in the economy. Klan discourse, unlike that of the Nazis, did not often blame Jews for Communism, an argument that would become a regular feature of Father Coughlin’s fascism in the 1930s. Anti-Communism appeared occasionally in Klan propaganda but was never a major theme in the North. If it had been, it would have yielded the contradiction so common in Europe, accusing Jews both of Communism and predatory capitalism.
By contrast, Klan anti-Catholicism was, in the main, uniquely American. As in its anti-Semitism, the Klan charged Catholics with unfair competition, alleging that the pope’s emissaries helped them take over police forces, newspapers, and big-city governments. These allegations then bled into the Klan’s anger at the entire “political class,” despite its own ambition to become that political class.
Condemning Jews and Catholics while honoring “right” Americans for the same practices speaks to the Klan’s demand that supporters accept its allegations on faith. Because the Klan was a religious as well as a nationalist organization, the beliefs required of its members were all the more obligatory. Challenging its truths constituted treason or heresy or both. The emphasis on faith as opposed to evidence-driven inquiry both reflected and fed suspicion of science, especially evolutionary theory. That suspicion strengthened its hostility to intellectuals in general. Klan doctrine was impregnable to disproof. Its discursive mode—anecdotal, testimonial—resisted challenge. In this respect the KKK was authoritarian, even as it denounced Catholics for their subservience to papal authority. Klan anti-intellectualism protected it from skeptics. In this respect it differed from European fascisms, which, partly because they were less religiously narrow, did not typically display hostility to science. What Umberto Eco wrote of fascist ideology—“There can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all”—actually fits the Klan better than it describes European fascism.23
Some scholars have labeled fascist and populist movements irrational, as in the analyses of historian Richard Hofstadter and sociologists Joseph Gusfield, William Kornhauser, and Neil Smelser in the 1960s. The Klan did not engage in the characteristic fascist romanticization of violence. Moreover, the status-anxiety diagnoses that dominated social-movement scholarship in the 1960s characterize social movements as products of psychological strain or tension and therefore not rational pursuits of concrete goals. These conclusions mirrored those of 1920s critics of the Klan. Behind the “irrationality” accusation lies an assumption equating emotion, especially fear and anger, with irrationality. Anger and especially indignation, “the morally grounded form of anger” in sociologist James Jasper’s definition, can be not only rational but also justified.24 But mass emotion can be rational even if it rests on false beliefs. The Klan’s drive to maintain the supremacy of white Protestants was a perfectly rational expression of what many of its members conceived as their interest. So were its strategies for achieving that goal. Even the Klan’s appeal to fear was a rational means to build mass support. So it becomes important to distinguish emotionality from irrationality.
Among the Klan’s emotional appeals, gendered messages to men had particular power. Like European fascism, the Klan supplied a way for members to confirm manliness at a time when its content was shifting. As more men became white-collar workers, as more small businesses lost out to chains, as the political supremacy of Anglo-Saxons became contested, as more women reached for economic and political rights, alternative ways for men to enact manliness became especially magnetic, even stimulating vigilante violence. Fascism is distinguished not only by its ideologies, which are often incoherent, but also through its visual symbolism and its aggressive mobilizations. The Klan similarly organized performances of masculinity and male bonding through uniforms, parades, rituals, secrecy, and hierarchical military ranks and titles. A study of today’s Minutemen, a group that patrols the southern US border to keep Latin Americans out, described their motives in phrases that fit the Klan: they long for “male spaces, spaces where they can carry guns and be soldiers at war.”25 Klanspeople trafficked in warlike discourse; manliness was strength, womanliness weakness. This binary was hardly exclusive to the Klan; it pervaded the United States. As with its racism, the Ku Klux Klan merely offered an intensified version. Its excitatory rhetoric both reflected and elicited a yearning for action. To be manly was to fight; not to fight was to be weak. All this was fundamental to fascism, and the Nazis used it in violent, even sadistic attacks on and humiliations of its “aliens.” The northern Ku Klux Klan rarely did that. Klan leaders realized that they could gain more from electoral than from martial action. True, there was vigilantism, but its scale was tiny compared to the Nazis’ violence. The northern Klan stopped far, far short of Storm Trooper behavior.
In the South, by contrast, precisely the area that 1920s Klan leaders sought to decenter, vigilantism remained the Klan’s core function. It constituted a strategic terrorism directed at African Americans. Once legal segregation was challenged, the 1950s and 1960s White Citizens Councils (the organizations that opposed school desegregation) responded by establishing ostensibly private—and therefore legal—segregated schools. In their inflammatory rhetoric, ratcheting up fears about the losses of white privilege, the councils could be seen as revivals of 1920s Klaverns.
In the north, however, part of the Klan’s genius lay in enabling men to imagine themselves warriors even as they behaved peaceably. For most Klansmen the hierarchy, the rituals, and the uniformed parades were metaphorically, not literally, militaristic. But the metaphor was essential. Like most other right-wing populisms, the Klan could not survive a peace treaty or even an armistice with its enemies. It needed a sense of danger to thrive. Klanspeople had to visualize themselves as soldiers defending against threats, and in doing so created belief in those threats. Right-wing populisms often produce this doubled effect.
Women were also aroused by the Klan’s warlike rhetoric. To presume that women were not avid participants in the Klan’s militaristic performances is to replicate Victorian assumptions about women’s moral superiority. They did not need to be vigilantes to like vigilantism. But women’s energy for promoting the Klan produced tension. Klansmen and Klanswomen both honored a family ideal that confined women to their homes, but in practice Klanswomen rejected it. As the sisters organized Klan groups, the brothers had to accept them as co-soldiers, if of subordinate rank. Despite the
ideology that men’s roles included protecting women, most Klansmen, like most other men, must have known perfectly well that womanly delicacy and passivity were myths. Klansmen exploited and depended on millions of hours of labor by Klanswomen and the even more numerous Klan wives. These women not only made the mass Klonvocations possible but also socialized children into Klan values, performed charitable work in the Klan’s name, cast votes for Klan candidates, and promoted boycotts against “alien” merchants. Klansmen liked to imagine Klanswomen’s roles as merely supportive, an illusion that Klanswomen frequently punctured. They often insisted on autonomy, influence, and a wider range of activity. This contradiction—that women’s activism often defied the domesticity they appeared to endorse—appears in many conservative movements. Second to no men in their bigotry, Klanswomen seem often to have militated for equality within the organization (although the scarcity of research limits the available evidence). Kathleen Blee’s study of Klanswomen illustrates this contradiction, as do historical studies of other conservative and fascist women.26
The Ku Klux Klan’s bigotry and rabble-rousing were typical of fascism, but its official political values were not: the Klan ostensibly favored democracy. In Klan propaganda it was the Catholic enemy who sought to impose authoritarian rule. By excluding “aliens” through the allegation that they could not be loyal citizens, the Klan could support majority rule, because white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were still a majority in the United States. For example, the Klan supported the many state constitutional amendments allowing voters to initiate referendums. This kind of democracy—a herrenvolk democracy, democracy of the privileged—would effectively disenfranchise the rest of the population, leaving them without protection from discrimination. The journalist Dorothy Thompson, who spent years covering Nazi Germany, and lived through the 1920s heyday of the Klan, pointed out that “no people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. . . . When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”27
The Klan’s vision of majoritarian or plebiscitary democracy was not entirely the opposite of authoritarianism. Democracy seemed a safe bet for Klanspeople because, in the 1920s, they could hardly imagine a United States in which “right” Americans would not be a majority. In this respect the Klan differed sharply from today’s right-wing populisms, when such a loss of majority threatens.
The Klan’s electoral work illustrates, perhaps, its greatest divergence from fascism: it sought ideological hegemony but planned to achieve it without fundamental changes to the political rules of American democracy. The KKK was a political machine and a social movement, not an insurrectionary vanguard. It is quite possible that in the 1920s a majority of American citizens shared Klan values. This context illuminates also the Klan’s contrast with today’s right-wing populist movements, which are often distinctly oppositional, because they face an America in which liberal values have to some degree taken root in the majority of the population. For the majority, segregation and discrimination are wrong, freedom of speech is widely endorsed, racism is a pejorative term, and tens of millions of those the Klan considered “aliens” are respected citizens. True, these values are neither universal nor entirely secure, and many who enunciate them in principle violate them in practice. But today’s right-wing populists, even as they can win elections, face majorities who reject their values.
Every such movement arises also from specific local and national contexts, and all are different. But they share characteristics, as a particular but recognizable type of conservatism. Illiberal in their suspicion of dissent and the rights of minority groups, clinging to fictive images of their nations as homogeneous and destined to be so, resentful of cultural elites yet accepting the dominance of economic elites, they direct anger at big-city cosmopolitans and at groups outside their imagined homogeneity. In the United States these movements and their populist, racist, demagogic, and incitatory orientation are a continuing part of our history, if sometimes dormant. The Klannish spirit—fearful, angry, gullible to sensationalist falsehoods, in thrall to demagogic leaders and abusive language, hostile to science and intellectuals, committed to the dream that everyone can be a success in business if they only try—lives on.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. Salt Lake City showing of Birth of a Nation.
(Utah Historical Society, Shipler Commercial Photographers Collection)
Figure 2. William J. Simmons, initiator of the second Ku Klux Klan.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-USZ62-104018])
Figure 3. H. W. Evans, Imperial Wizard, at the mass Klan march in Washington, DC, 1924.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-USZ62-61303])
Figure 4. Klan cartoon from Jeremiah J. Crowley’s The Pope: Chief of White Slavers, High Priest of Intrigue. The accompanying text reads, in part, “Romanism is a Monster . . . the arm of subversion crushing the American flag, crushing the credulous dupe . . . greed grasping public moneys . . . tyranny destroying freedom of conscience.”
Figure 5. Klan cartoon defending Prohibition.
Figure 6. Klan mass “naturalization,” 1922.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-F82-7717])
Figure 7. Klan mass “naturalization,” Los Angeles, 1925.
(AP Photo)
Figure 8. Klan “naturalization,” Moorhead, Minnesota.
(Clay County Historical & Cultural Society)
Figure 9. Klan “naturalization,”Anderson, Indiana.
(Ball State University Archives & Special Collections)
Figure 10. Cars on their way to a Klan mass picnic.
(Courtesy of Western Heritage Center,Billings, Montana)
Figure 11. Klan choreography.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-USZ62-28024])
Figure 12. Klan choreography.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-USZ62-77228])
Figure 13. Klan leaders with their airplane, 1922.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-F82-7420])
Figure 14. Klan parade, Madison, Wisconsin, 1924.
(Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-1902)
Figure 15. Klan paraders, Muncie, Indiana, 1922.
(Ball State University Archives & Special Collections)
Figure 16. Formal Klan portrait, Racine, Wisconsin, 1924.
(Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-38517)
Figure 17. Klan vigilantes.
(Ball State University Archives & Special Collections)
Figure 18. 1923 tobacco label for Klansman Tobacco, All-American Cigar Co., Dallas, Texas.
(Everett Historical / Shutterstock)
Figure 19. Recording from Klan Music Company, Indianapolis.
(Courtesy Jeff Porter of AtlantaRelics)
Figure 20. Alma Bridwell White,Pillar of Fire bishop.
Figure 21. Klan christening.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-USZ62-23996])
Figure 22. Women’s KKK “naturalization,” Long Island, New York, 1924.
(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-USZ62-36658])
APPENDIX 1: A GLOSSARY OF SOME KLAN TITLES
Alien—nonmember of the Klan and/or someone not a white native-born Protestant
Exalted Cyclops—head of a Klavern
Grand Goblin or Grand Dragon—head of one of the nine domains for purposes of recruitment
Imperial Kleagle—supervisor of Grand Goblins
Imperial Klonsel—national lawyer for the Klan
Imperial Wizard—national head of the Klan
Invisible Empire—the whole K
lan
King Kleagle—head of recruitment for a region, under a Grand Goblin
Klabee—treasurer
Kladd—conductor, in charge of initiating new members
Klaliff—Vice Cyclops
Klarogo—guard of a Klavern’s “inner room”
Klavern—local chapter
Kleagle—recruiter, under a King Kleagle
Klecktoken—initial joining fee
Klexter—outer guard at a Klavern meeting
Kligrapp—administrative officer of a Klavern
Klokan—head of a committee to investigate potential members
Klokard—traveling lecturer or representative of national Klan
Klonklave—weekly meeting of a Klavern
Klonverse—weekly meeting of a province
Klonversation—event at which new members were “naturalized”
Klonvocation—national or regional public event
Kloran—Klan bible, setting out rules and procedures
Klorero—large Klan gathering
