The Kluxers
Owens, Patrick J .
BOOKS The Kluxers The Ku Kxux Klan: a century of infamy, by William Peirce Randel. Chilton Books. 230 pp. $5.95. Hooded Americanism: The First century of the ku klux klan, 1865-1965, by David M....
...His book is a discursive treatment of a shady side of the American character...
...Resistance intensified and, in the end, triumphed...
...Like the first two Klans, the agglomeration of Kluxer operations that con-stitues the third dramatizes the question of Federal responsibility for the physical safety of American citizens...
...It had heavy support from the fundamentalist clergy and recruited many of its hired hands from the underpaid ranks of the traditionalist denominations...
...But a Federal judge ordered the prisoners released, and—the crucial point in the sequence—Governor Hold-en's appeals to President Ulysses S. Grant brought no supporting action...
...More a money-making scheme than anything else, the second Klan became a gold mine by the early Twenties, with a grand total of $75 million paid in by members...
...In Hooded Americanism, David M. Chalmers' interest is the second Klan, not the South...
...The modern Klan is not more abashed at the odds against it than the old, and no less determined to win...
...Its aims were never perfectly clear, but the South found what it understood of them unendurable...
...Double-day...
...What was crucial—and what remains crucial—is not the bed sheets but the willingness to whip, maim, and kill to preserve white supremacy...
...Another legislator decamped for Indiana one jump ahead of the Kluxers...
...It was reborn two years later but is no longer one big lodge...
...Southerners are great joiners, and if the Klan had not been invented something like it probably would have been...
...Professor Randel understands all this well enough, and his book deals with Reconstruction in these terms...
...In the South, the second Klan would never be mistaken for Daddy, but it was unmistakably Daddy's boy...
...Near Bastrop, Louisiana, two Negroes who had talked against the Klan were flogged, crushed under a road grader while still alive, then mutilated, dismembered, and thrown into a lake...
...Federal efforts to guarantee a place above the mudsill for the Southern Negro proved less than whole-hearted and all too transient...
...Then, as now, the question never-fully resolved was the extent to which Federal force should be used to enforce the Federal mandate...
...The tendency to schism, always there, became epidemic...
...Governor William Woods Holden ordered the militia into the two counties and arrests were made...
...What the Klan offered were a fraternal connection to Americans hungry for status and fellowship and the promise of action against the Negro, the Jew, the Catholic, the foreigner, and the recent immigrant...
...It had enough political power to elect governors and U.S...
...Four decades later, in 1915, a novel glorifying the Klan was converted into The Birth of a Nation, the first American film epic...
...There is a continuity in all this that bears stressing...
...The second Klan was virtually finished well before the end of the Twenties, but it survived to cuddle up with Bund-types in the Thirties and did not officially fold until 1944...
...Consider North Carolina, which by the middle of 1870 had logged twenty known whippings and thirteen known murders...
...The burden of his book is that the original Klan and groups like it were what wrecked the Federal effort to overturn the old slavocracy after the Civil War and that terror is still the racist's most effective weapon: "The old Klan won its fight...
...In two abutting counties, the death toll included a legislator who had authored anti-Klan legislation, the Negro head of a county Union League, and a halfwit who was found in a millpond with a rock around his neck after he babbled of seeing the Union Leaguer hanged...
...resistance in graphic detail, and thus provides the key to a visceral understanding of what went wrong in the South after Appomattox...
...Hooded Americanism: The First century of the ku klux klan, 1865-1965, by David M. Chalmers...
...The value of Randel's book is that he tells the story of the...
...In the late 1860s, as now, the South clung stubbornly to its past...
...In Randel's telling, it is an unrelieved horror story, full of murders, mutilations, and gentler discouragements to Negroes and to white Recon-structionists...
...Elections followed almost immediately, and the Democrats won...
...The second Klan was terribly concerned about other people's morals, and probably did more whipping, bushwhacking, and branding for familial nonsupport, boozing, adultery, and other contraventions of fundamentalist Protestant behavioral standards than it ever did for Romanism, Jewishness, or Negro assertiveness...
...The problem now is the same problem that was ducked in Reconstruction—how to extend effective criminal sanctions into areas where a majority of residents endorse or accept vigilante terrorism...
...William Peirce Randel, in his re-strainedly indignant history, The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy, contends that the road has had few turnings...
...But it is doubtful that Southern history would be much different if no such organization had ever come into existence...
...Reviewed by Patrick J. Owens Tt is a long old road from Pulaski, A Tennessee, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded within nine months of Appomattox, to Lowndes County, Alabama, where a Detroit housewife and civil rights worker was bushwhacked by the Southern chivalry recently...
...In another two years, the legislature was to vote a blanket amnesty and pardon for crimes committed on behalf of any secret organization—Negro organizations, of course, excepted...
...Even during Reconstruction, it is doubtful that the Klan claimed anywhere near so many Negroes as were executed by unaffiliated vigilantes...
...Who can say with confidence that it will not...
...As an enterprise in social engineering, Reconstruction was a disaster...
...Surely, by now, some confidence is justified...
...Senators and to wreck the Democratic National Convention of 1924...
...That year, the Klan was reborn...
...The Klan had done an excellent job of intimidating the Negroes," Randel comments...
...The Klan has been an organized and thus uniquely visible manifestation of a continuing Southern technique of social control...
...The Kluxers have never done well anywhere they have been resisted by the police and dealt with justly by judges and juries...
...But these histories of the Klan by Randel and David M. Chalmers (Hooded Americanism) are of more than academic interest because Kluxism is today, as it was then, the traditionalist South's most effective weapon...
...The second Klan was big and broad-based, with up to three million members in Klaverns from Alaska to the Canal Zone...
...In the long years between Reconstruction and Black Monday 1954, the Klan had little if anything to do with the most spectacular Southern racial violence (such as the Elaine, Arkansas, race war of 1919, in which several whites and scores of Negroes were killed...
...420 pp...
...Within a few months, the new legislature had impeached Governor Hold-en—having guaranteed itself the votes to do so by refusing to seat some Republicans...
...Among other things, this has made the Klan a more elusive target of governmental wrath...
...But it would have been a better book if he had done so more explicitly...
Vol. 29 • June 1965 • No. 6
