KKK Seed Bed

...No two cities were exactly alike, and the Klan story differs greatly from Atlanta to Portland, Detroit to Denver, Indianapolis to Dallas...

...Nor should men of good will ever forget this...

...The Klan "could neither restore the Bible to primacy in the public schools, nor restrict the activities of the Catholic Church, nor return the Negro to rural docility, nor stop neighborhood transition...

...The CBS show was written and produced by David Lowe and narrated by Charles Kuralt...

...In city after city, able organizers built large Klaverns and successfully sought to influence elections...

...David Lowe would have approved...

...But his revised estimate for Klan strength in cities is 530,000, leaving three times that many for some other scholar to study in a putative "Rural Life in America Series...

...The majority of urban Klansmen were non-union, blue-collar employes of firms and factories, seldom with any exposure to a high school education...

...it is to be regretted that he died just four days after his documentary was first shown, and never knew that it would win a posthumous Emmy, a Peabody award, and first prize in the sociology category at a Festival del Populi in Florence...

...No amount of analysis, no court decisions, nor restrictive legislation will wholly suppress the Klan, and the "white supremacist" thinking it reflects, as long as the Reconstruction is treated as it now is in most history texts used in the South (and elsewhere, too, except where "revisionism" has forced a change...

...He wrote "American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900-1918" and is now writing a political study of American labor to be published by Praeger...

...Moreover, it was Protestant opposition, more than non-Protestant, that eventually destroyed the Klan...

...Revisionism is well established on the college level, but Klansmen are not the kind of men with more than a grade school education, and they have no means of knowing that the history in their outdated books has been discredited...

...Jackson agrees, in a way, at the end of his epilogue: "Although the Ku Klux Klan is no longer an effective and viable force in American life, the Klan mentality remains...

...What Jackson does not develop adequately, although in each chapter he presents evidence enough, is the part played by the financial irregularities of local Klan leaders in disillusioning rank and file members, without whose dues the Klan became impotent...

...In the city the Invisible Empire found its greatest challenge, and in the city it met its ultimate defeat...

...But now, instead of merely glimpsing a Klan leader for a few seconds, we can study his portrait, fit it to excerpts from his statements, and muse about his motives and the whole complex question of why the body politic must suffer from such extremist groups as the Ku Klux Klan...

...Jackson may be guilty, inadvertently, of skewing his conclusions, but he presents a convincing case for his thesis that the Klan, in the fifteen years after its rebirth in 1915, was most significant in the cities...

...And that was the history that was taught me when I was in school...

...The minority of Klansmen in the cities seem to have been struggling independent businessmen, advertising dentists, lawyers, and chiropractors, and poorly paid clerks—men for whom the Horatio Alger myth (or the Protestant ethic) of hard work crowned by success had somehow failed...

...The Klan growth in the early 1920's is interpreted largely as a predictable response to the great changes in American society that few people, whether Klansmen or not, recognized at the time, or understood...

...Jackson's book, one of the "Urban Life in America Series," necessarily limits itself to the urban phase of the Klan...

...If there was one common factor, it was a preoccupation with politics...

...WILLIAM RANDEL, a professor of English at the University of Maine, wrote "The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy...

...Few men of wealth, education, and professional position joined the Klan in the period Jackson has studied—quite possibly because the myth of success had not failed for them...

...there were simply too many Protestants opposed to Klan methods...

...PHILIP G. ALTBACH is an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin...

...In those days before revisionism, what the latter learned in grade school—that ours was strictly a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant civilization— could only confirm their fear that their own kind of people would become an impotent minority unless the other kinds—Jews, Catholics, recent immigrants, and such non-whites as Negroes and Orientals—were kept in check...

...Kenneth T. Jackson, in his admirably thorough study of the Klan's fifteen years of greatest success, 1915-1930, devotes his final chapter to the question of who joined the Klan and why...

...Jackson's thesis, which he supports most ably, is stated in his concluding chapter: "The Ku Klux Klan provided a focus for the fears of alienated native Americans whose world was being disrupted...

...One useful service of his book is to adjust downward the probable Klan strength at its peak, about 1924, from the generally accepted figure of five million to barely more than two million...

...Jackson suggests that the major reason for the rapid decline of the Klan in the late 1920's was that the Grand Dragons and Kleagles could not deliver on their promises...

...in Northern cities, at least, there was far less of the violence used by either the Reconstruction Klan or the current Klan, both concentrated in the South and both primarily directed against the Negro...

...But nowhere was the success maintained...

...One of the most revealing Klan quotations in the Lowe volume, attributed to Matt Murphy, now dead but once the chief legal counsel of the United Klans, suggests why the Klan continues its campaign: "I read in my history books that the Negro man, the Negro race was an inferior race...

...A text challenging the white supremacy notions of Negro inferiority and carpetbag maladministration has slight chance of approval by textbook selection committees in most of the South...

...THE REVIEWERS JAMES B. ADLER is a book publisher and editor...

...even if it is repeated, it is a single production—nothing that the viewer can go over, at his own time and pace, as he can a book or a recording...

...WILLIAM McCANN reports regularly on quality paperbacks...

...JOSEPH E. ILLICK is an associate professor of history at San Francisco State College and the book editor of The American West...

...Reviewed by William Randel All viewers of the 1965 television documentary on the Ku Klux Klan should be glad to know that the text, and many of the pictures, are now available in a printed volume...

...Haynes Johnson of The Washington Star, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1966 series on the Selma troubles, has written an introduction to the Lowe book which briefly summarizes the Klan's first century, and, in an epilogue, Johnson reports some of the latest Klan activities...

...Would this were so—if it were, we would not need such a CBS documentary as David Lowe's, and could ignore the continued violence that other Klan students deem a valid forecast...

...7.50...

...MARC KARSON, a professor of political science at North Central College, was formerly national education director for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers...

...One trouble with television is that once a program has been put on the air, it is no longer available...