By Nancy K. MacLean
On Thanksgiving evening, 1915, a small band of hooded males amassed atop Stone Mountain, a majestic granite butte simply open air Atlanta. With a flag fluttering within the wind beside them, a Bible open to the 12th bankruptcy of Romans, and a flaming move to gentle the evening sky above, William Joseph Simmons and his disciples proclaimed themselves the recent Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, named for the notorious mystery order within which lots of their fathers had served after the Civil conflict. not sure in their footing within the New South and eager for the provincial, patriarchal global of the earlier, the boys of the second one Klan observed themselves as a military in education for a battle among the races. They boasted they had bonded into ''an invisible phalanx...to stand as impregnable as a tower opposed to each encroachment upon the white man's liberty...in the white man's kingdom, lower than the white man's flag.''
Behind the masks of Chivalry brings the ''invisible phalanx'' into huge sunlight, culling from background the names, the existence tales, and the using passions of the nameless Klansmen underneath the white hoods and gowns. utilizing an strange and wealthy cache of inner Klan files from Athens, Georgia to anchor her observations, writer Nancy MacLean combines a fine-grained portrait of a neighborhood Klan global with a penetrating research of the second one Klan's principles and politics national. No different right-wing circulate has ever completed as a lot energy because the Ku Klux Klan of the Twenties, and this e-book exhibits how and why it did. MacLean unearths that the circulate mobilized its thousands of yank fans principally via campaigns waged over matters that at the present time will be referred to as ''family values'': Prohibition violation, premarital intercourse, lewd videos, anxieties approximately women's altering roles, and concerns over waning parental authority. Neither elites nor ''poor white trash,'' lots of the Klan rank and dossier have been married, middle-aged, and center category. neighborhood conferences, or klonklaves, featured readings of the mins, plans for recruitment campaigns and Klan barbecues, and distribution of academic materials--Christ and different Klansmen was once one renowned tome. still, as mundane as court cases usually have been on the neighborhood point, crusades over ''morals'' continually operated within the carrier of the Klan's better schedule of virulent racial hatred and middle-class revanchism. the boys who deplored intercourse between kids and sought to revive the ability of husbands and fathers have been additionally sworn to reclaim the ''white man's country,'' striving to take the vote from blacks and bar immigrants. evaluating the Klan to the ecu fascist activities that grew out of the crucible of the 1st global battle, MacLean continues that the impressive scope and frenzy of the circulate mirrored much less on contributors' strength inside of their groups than at the demanding situations to that energy posed via African american citizens, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and white girls and adolescence who didn't obey the Klan's canon of appropriaite behavior. In vigilante terror, the Klan's evening riders acted out their movement's brutal selection to keep up inherited hierarchies of race, classification, and gender.
Compellingly readable and impeccably researched, The masks of Chivalry is an unforgettable research of a very important period in American heritage, and the social stipulations, cultural currents, and usual males that outfitted this archetypal American reactionary stream.
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Additional resources for Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
Example text
43 Similar patterns prevailed elsewhere. In 1923, for example, at 18 Context and Motive least seventy-five congressional representatives were said to owe their seats to the Klan; at the annual conference of state governors the year before, only one was willing to discuss, let alone condemn, the Klan. The reason was not hard to find. 44 The ability to dispose of opponents so handily where it had the requisite numbers gives an indication of why Klan leaders put such a high premium on electoral politics.
The newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation became so worried that in 1920 it initiated investigations throughout the South into the extent of gun purchasing by blacks. 21 The unrest among blacks was serious enough to prompt a small group of liberal whites to action. Several met in January of 1919 in Atlanta to form what would come to be known as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC). " The CIC identi- 30 Context and Motive fied three different groups among Southern blacks: the "openly rebellious, defiant and contemptuous" leaders to whom "one talks ...
The topic was just too ticklish to touch. Coverage of the Klan's activities, after all, might deter outside investors, agitate blacks, and stimulate discord among whites—to say nothing of losing subscriptions. Yet, uneasiness about the Klan's methods remained. The Athens press thus gave editorial support to two area judges who came out against the Klan in 1926 for its "lawlessness," its efforts "to intimidate men and . . "49 The Klan's internal structure and methods of operation were well suited to such activities.