The Klan through History
RAVITCH, DIANE
The Klan Through History THE KU KLUX KLAN: A CENTURY OF INFAMY By William Pierce Randel Chilton. 300 pp. $5.95. HOODED AMERICANISM: THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE KU KLUX KLAN, 1865 TO THE...
...Now that the civil rights revolution has begun to affect the South their time has come...
...after all, they have attacked and slandered the Establishment for years without the favor of a reply...
...is the concerted and illegal use of violence to maintain (or restore) the status quo...
...He often could be found lounging about the small family grocery store in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which is where he was when I sought him out for an interview in 1958...
...There is little that is new for the scholar here, but the general reader will be fascinated by Randel's description of the way the Southern version of Reconstruction achieved acceptance throughout the country...
...Throughout both books it is implicit that the Klan has flourished when it had the approval or tolerence of local community leaders...
...Neither of these books lives up to its subtitle, both of which claim to represent the whole century of the Klan's existence...
...It was said that he was a drunk, an epileptic, and, with the ultimate term of Southern condescension, "pitiful.' No respectable citizen would deign to talk to such a common, vulgar fellow, let alone join his fraternity...
...The multiplicity of Klans dates from 1944, when the official Klan dissolved itself in order to avoid a large tax debt...
...Chalmers has a reporter's eye for relevant detail...
...Life and other publications have published fearsome and flattering portraits of Shelton dressed in his most splendid raiment...
...In this state-by-state history, moreover, what emerges as an interesting but unexplained fact is the widespread decline of the Klan around 1926...
...This interesting fact—that the Klan has always relied on the middle class as its source of power, either as participants or as acquiescent bystanders—is brought out in two new histories: The Ku Klux Klan, by William Pierce Randel, and Hooded Americanism, by David M. Chalmers...
...The President has denounced them...
...But Tuscaloosans did sneer at the Klan's local recruiter, a fat, redfaced man who sold cheap shoes from the back of his parked jalopy on the main street of Tuscaloosa...
...Randel's concentrates largely on the Reconstruction Klan, while Chalmers' is devoted almost exclusively to the Klan since 1915...
...Judged by the effectiveness of the first Klan and the mass support accorded the second, the Klan today is experiencing not a revival but a vogue...
...Reviewed by DIANE RAVITCH IN the late '50s, Robert Shelton was a nobody...
...It was his intensity, I think, that prevented his becoming an object of ridicule among the city's leadership...
...For Klansmen, as for other fanatics, the fate which is worse than death is inattention...
...Congress will investigate them...
...420 pp...
...From 1865 until about 1872, when the Klan first rode, it served as the terrorist agency through which the ante bellum Southern leadership re-established established itself...
...True, he was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of Alabama, but no one seemed to care...
...There is no other single book which brings together so wide and valuable an array of data on the subject...
...If Klansmen were brought to justice for their crimes, the Klans would very quickly lose their numbers, their influence and the notoriety which makes them worthy of national attention...
...Chalmers never satisfactorily illumines the national mood in which Klan membership soared to between three and six million in the aftermath of World War I. Yet an integral part of the Klan's rise was the postwar climate, the time of the Red Scare, of violent labor strikes, of race riots, street fighting and widespread xenophobia...
...Where Randel gives two-thirds of his book to the Reconstruction Klan, Chalmers disposes of that KJan in 14 pages...
...Though the Klan was resurrected in 1915, it did not really flourish until 1919, when middle-class Americans joined it by the millions...
...The House Un-American Activities Committee may be investigating the wrong parties...
...The research is wide-ranging and yet deep, and the writing is sharp...
...Its principal defects, however, are important ones—mainly, a certain organizational weakness and a lack of significant generalization...
...He is determined to destroy the romantic myth in which the Klan is the deliverer of the ravaged South...
...Today too the Klan's power lies not with the Robert Sheltons, but with the George Wallaces and Ross Barnetts, and all those other Southern demagogues who use the Klan to keep racial tensions high...
...He was a young man who took himself seriously and expected others to do the same...
...the national press is barking at their heels...
...Each state is treated as a separate case history...
...His method is to describe the Klan's deeds, to discredit its motives, and then to show how historians and novelists transfigured this brutal campaign into a noble crusade...
...He assumes that his readers revere the memory of the original Klan, and thus feels he must convince them that racism is bad...
...Bombings and murders do not make a movement...
...The thread of continuity that connects the Klan of Shelton and his like to the Reconstruction Klan, and the Klan of the '20s...
...Randel's interest is in the intellectual legacy of the Reconstruction Klan...
...Hooded Americanism is the best scorecard available for knowing which Klan is which...
...The frightening power of a Klan which managed to elect 11 Governors and 13 Senators and numerous other officials is vividly conveyed...
...HOODED AMERICANISM: THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE KU KLUX KLAN, 1865 TO THE PRESENT By David M. Chalmers Doubleday...
...Consequently, the book is burdened with the author's selfrighteousness and occasional condescension...
...In each instance Chalmers relates the decline to personalities and incidents within the state, but never confronts the broader historical tides...
...He was evasive and indirect, but attempted by his demeanor to create the impression that he controlled terrible, hidden forces...
...Yet, despite its faults, Hooded Americanism, succeeds brilliantly in portraying the devious course of the modern Klan...
...Shelton and his ragtag gang waited and hoped, and clung to their belief in their mission...
...Unfortunately, Randel gives one the impression that he is addressing a Southern audience...
...Klan leaders relish this kind of notoriety...
...Previous Klans had real power: the actual political control of towns, cities and states with the power to elect Governors, Senators and lesser officials...
...The Klan today is powerful only to the extent that Southern leaders tolerate its violence and allow it to go unpunished...
...Both appear to have been expanded in order to take advantage of this centennial year of the Klan's founding...
...Hooded Americanism, taken just as a history of the Klan since 1915, is a first-rate book...
...His description of Klan leaders clearly reveals a curious paradox: the recurrence of moral scandals among the Wizards and Emperors of an organization which exalts conventional morality...
...Chalmers succinctly traces the roots and branches of the dozen or more present-day Klans...
Vol. 48 • June 1965 • No. 12
