I recently wrote a review of the book Behind The Mask of Chivalry, which is a history of the the second Ku Klux Klan (the 1920s one). But I left out the thing that struck me most about it.
Most Klan members were good, solid citizens. They were middle-class, neither working-class tenant farmers and millworkers nor wealthy planters and bankers and manufacturers. They tended to practice “old-time religion” and worried about the increasing secularism of the age. The Klan mobilized most of its support through campaigns about upholding family values and community moral standards, especially around gender and sexuality. They were chivalrous and believed in protecting women (whether or not those women in fact wanted to be protected). They praised self-control, the Protestant work ethic, and forgoing immediate gratification in favor of economic security; they were sympathetic to self-made men. They were patriotic and loved America and the flag.
Their politics were perhaps best described as “reactionary populism.” They were strongly anti-elitist: they were opposed to monopolies, high finance, creditors and the Federal Reserve. They viewed the federal government as corrupt and encroaching on people’s liberties. At the same time, they had a deep antipathy to black people, immigrants, welfare recipients, trade unionists, Bolsheviks, liberals, and leftists. Immigrants were committing violent crime, stealing their jobs and turning America into a place they didn’t recognize. Bolsheviks and trade unionists were raising wages, making goods unaffordable, and destroying America from the inside out. Welfare recipients and the unemployed were lazy and wouldn’t work, and had lost their willpower and sense of responsibility.
Klan members had a deeply conspiratorial mindset: many believed that a cabal of Jewish bankers controlled the world affairs, Catholics were stockpiling weapons to take over the US, and white people needed to ready themselves for an imminent race war with people of color.
Overall, the Klan’s reactionary populism was related to their feeling of alienation from society. They no longer had unquestioned dominance over black people, their wives, and their children, all of whom had begun to demand their rights and were far less inclined to obey white patriarchs than they had been in the past. Income inequality meant that wealthy and powerful people could do as they liked without respecting the wishes of those poorer than them. Society had transitioned from independent smallholding to businesses, so instead of working for themselves Klansmen had to be employees. In general, while they were middle-class—white-collar employees, managers, and skilled tradesmen—Klansmen often experienced economic anxiety. Many had climbed the economic ladder during World War I and, when their prospects appeared most promising, they encountered unforeseen obstacles if not disaster. Some had lost everything in the economic crisis of the early 1920s, and many others feared how easy it would be for them to fall into poverty.
In other words, they were… the 1920s version of Trump’s base?
I don’t mean this as a gotcha, “ha ha, Trump is a Nazi, orange man bad.” People really like to read essays about what fascists believe and then take any ideology they don’t like and say “this is basically the same as fascism,” and I think this is an actively unhelpful kind of analysis. I actually almost didn’t write this post because I was worried that all people would get out of it is “these people I don’t like are the same as the other people I don’t like! Time to own the cons.”
But.... as I read, I was full of this creeping sense of familiarity. The traditional conservative values, especially around sex; the reactionary populism; the resentment of the middle class against both the working class and the wealthy; the xenophobia; the Protestant work ethic. The philosophy all hangs together, and it is a philosophy I recognize. I know people who grew up hearing this ideology from their parents and pastors; when I was a kid, I myself heard it from my friends.
In some sense, it would be stranger if it wasn’t familiar. The Klan was enormously popular, with one to five million members at its peak, especially in the South. Klansmen interviewed late in life typically didn’t regret their membership in the Klan and would do it again if they had the opportunity. Klansmen had children, and Klansmen taught their children their own values, and sometimes—not always, but sometimes—the children went on to say the same ideas the Klan wrote about in their newpapers and spoke about at their meetings.
Of course, some viewpoints have changed. The Klan was strongly pro-temperance, which is not currently popular among Trump’s base (although some arguments about drugs are strikingly similar). The aversion to Catholics has changed to a structurally similar aversion to Muslims, and the aversion to Jews has mostly faded except among the alt-right and the more extreme QAnon members. Bolshevik subversion is no longer a live issue, and LGBT rights has become one.
Perhaps the most striking change is about racism more generally and antiblackness specifically. I don’t mean to say that racism and antiblackness isn’t a problem on the right (or the left, for that matter). But, outside of the furthest reaches of the alt-right, Trump’s base is quite unlikely to explicitly say that their primary goal is to cause black people to believe they are members of an inferior race. Nor do they say that different races are as different as different breeds of animals, or that race is the basis of all human actions and reactions, or that race was decreed by God and to tamper with it invites disaster, or that it is impossible to have a democracy unless a country is monoracial.
While the change in the level of racism is striking, the most important change is the decrease in violence. Trump’s base does commit political violence, most obviously the attempted coup on January 6. But (thank God) they have not organized a vigilante organization with millions of members that regularly tortures and murders innocent people, leaving people of color throughout the US in a state of constant terror.
The arc of the moral universe is long but it points towards justice, I guess.
I guess my conclusion here is that almost no one is trying to be bad. People are trying to be good. Sometimes they are the Ku Klux Klan, and have a horrifying idea of how goodness works. It’s easy to assume that historical people who did terrible things are some kind of Lawful Evil devil or Captain Planet villain, but they’re people, sometimes people whose ideologies survive in a recognizable form today. We should seek to understand—not to condone, not to excuse, but to understand—people who committed historical atrocities, because that is important for understanding why people believe the things they believe today.
Behind The Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, by Nancy K. McLean. Published 1995. 336 pages. $19.99.
The most shocking thing to me here was that there was a welfare state to complain about in the 1920s