The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon

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). However, it must be said that that is confined to only a few areas of the book. 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. 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. The Klan's brilliant melding of Christian values with racial bigotry and its lightning-like accretion of political power now becomes a sobering parable for the twenty-first century. Condemning 'urban' vices like liquor, prostitution, movies, and jazz as Catholic and Jewish 'plots' to subvert American values, the rejuvenated Klan became entirely mainstream, attracting middle-class men and women through its elaborate secret rituals and mass 'Klonvocations' before collapsing amid revelations of sordid sexual scandals, financial embezzlement, and Ponzi-like schemes.

Responding to the 'emergency' posed by the flood of immigrant 'hordes'-Pope-worshipping Irish and Italians, 'self-centered Hebrews,' and 'sly Orientals'-this 'second Klan,' as award-winning historian Linda Gordon vividly chronicles, spread principally above the Mason-Dixon Line in states like Indiana, Michigan, and Oregon.

By legitimizing bigotry and redefining so-called American values, a revived Klan in the 1920s left a toxic legacy that demands reexamination today.īoasting 4 to 6 million members, the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s dramatically challenged our preconceptions of hooded Klansmen, who through violence and lynching had established a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South.

The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon