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

By Nancy MacLean

Book Overview

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 a newly modern America 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, 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, and anxieties about women's changing roles and waning parental authority. Neither elites nor "poor whites," 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 appropriate 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, Behind 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. In this thirtieth anniversary edition, MacLean reflects on this history amidst the resurgence of right-wing populism, white Christian nationalism, and political violence and intimidation in the twenty-first century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195098366
• ISBN13: 9780195098365
• Release Date: July 1995
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Shocking

This book will alter your view of who the Klan was and how its presence in the United States dramatically impacted the 1920's and 1930's. Most interesting is MacLean's analysis and comparison of the Klan in the U.S. with fascists in Italy and Germany. Seeing the Klan as part of an international/transatlantic phenomenon is particularly intriguing. I live about thirty miles from Athens, Ga., and as a local history, BTMoS impressed me greatly.

Reactionarism and the Ku Klux Klan

Utilizing the mind frame of Paul Fussell and his contemporaries that the Great War catalyzed the transformation of European and the western world from traditional to modernity. Nancy McLean advances the paradigm that a countermovement to resist the new values and norms such feminism, corporatism, unionism, and globalization. This movement developed under the auspices of the Ku Klux Klan, which contained motifs of populism, emphasis of race, gender, and age (biological) antagonisms over class and national sovereignty. The fervor populism sponsored by the conservative forces in Athens, Georgia was similar in context to the fascist organizations that occurred in Italy and Germany in an attempt to turn back the clock on ethic morals. Yet unlike its German or Italian counterparts failed to firmly take root in politics due to the brevity of the depression and boom. These characteristics manifested themselves into morality crusades to reinforce traditional norms over modern ones, but moreover the patriarchal, social, hierarchy. These inspired the reinforcement of the prohibition of liquor consumption; reconstitute the obedience to one's parents. It caused a heightened proliferation of spying and becoming turncoats on one's neighbors. Along with other fascist organizations held contradictory beliefs suggesting the development of chain stores and national/international companies were exclaimed as instruments of Catholics and Jews to dominate the U.S. economy, and yet were Bolsheviks. To exterminate this external threat from abroad, citizens joined together to boycott these conglomerates and support locally owned shops. The Klan projected powerful images of Black men raping white women in an attempt to outrage their targeted constituents to gain members and consolidate man's power over their subordinates namely women. The other catalyst regarding this movement regarded the economic depression that occurred in 1924 thus sparked a growing animosity towards people's perceived class enemies-Catholics, Jews, and Eastern European immigrants. Which had largely been absent during one of the largest immigration period in 1880. The primary purpose was to insure the independence and propriety of the middle class. Thus attempted to prevent any further declining down the socio-economic status ladder from the upper class and utilize force when necessary when workers movements occurred in threatening their livelihood