Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan by Nancy K. MacLean (PDF)

Description

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 the New South 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, author 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, anxieties about women’s changing roles, and worries over waning parental authority. Neither elites nor “poor white trash,” 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, 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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book looks at the activities of the Clarke County,Georgia Klan in the 1920’s. The reason this Klan organization is chosen is due to the many public records and archives that are available and ,according to the author, this chapter was typical of small town Klan chapters in the South. The author argues that the Klan represented a movement of ” reactionary populism” among middle class whites during this time as they tried to deal with pressures from larger businesses that were putting competitive pressure on the middling farmer and businessman as well as the threat of labor unrest from the lower classes as various union movements tried to get established. There was also a reaction against the change of the family structure and the role of women. While the Klan was without a doubt a racist terrorist organization, the author also explores other aspects of their ideology such as the enforcements of gender roles and the hostility of organized labor and Catholicism. By looking at the other aspects of the Klan’s ideology the author firmly places within the realm of extreme right wing American politics. What I found especially interesting was how the author place the Klan in the context of other far right movements in the 1920’s especially the Fascist movements in Italy and Germany during this period. While there are definitely some parallels between them there is also the biggest difference in that the Klan did not take off but began to decline after 1926. Why was this? The author asserts that the changing economic forces in the United States ( and the Klan leaderships blatant corruption) did not allow it to continue to be a mass movement like its German and Italian cousins. This is something all Americans should be very grateful for.This is a very good book that looks at the day to day activities of the Klan on a local level as well as what its appeal was and what type of people it attracted. As the title implies, the author does a good job of going beyond the image of the hooded night rider to the conditions in society that would allow this terrorist organization to flourish in the first place.

⭐As I read through the book, it became increasingly evident that this book isn’t as much on the KKK as it is a general work on reactionary populism in the period. MacLean deconstructs the reactionary populist movement in the early 1900’s, identifying it as a result of the moral, social, economic situation of the times, even comparing it to the other reactionary populist movements in the world, from Nazis to the Italian Fascists.

⭐Every Southerner should have this book sitting beside their Bible. Nancy MacLean has written a most excellent book about the KKK, and this should be a text book in colleges and universities in the Sociology Department. Every minister and all church people will benefit from this book.

⭐An interesting and detailed account of the second rise of the Klan, but the Chivalry hypothesis is not well-developed.

⭐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.

⭐Much as I can love the story of a sick culture. It is well written and easy to understand.

⭐Made me aware of the KKK history and purpose.

⭐I got this for a school paper and it was very informative.

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