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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780199879403
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter