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The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America
Few groups in our history are as fascinating and mysterious as the Ku Klux Klan. Its story is one of violence, political manipulation and intrigue, absurdity, and mesmerizing organizational and propaganda skills. Through shrewd political tactics and powerful leadership, the Klan has often been a potent force, as it encouraged Americans to protect themselves from those they find "unacceptable." Its actions have made it one of the most feared groups in America.
In The Fiery Cross , Wyn Craig Wade traces the Klan from its beginnings after the Civil War as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, to the present. Wade provides us with the history of the group, which has gone through a number of declines and renaissances over the last hundred years. We follow the Klan's resurgence in 1915 after D.W. Griffith's epic film The Birth of a Nation depicted Klan members as heroic saviors of the old Southern society, to the swearing in of President Warren G. Harding as a Klansman in the Green Room, and from the Klan's championing of white supremacy as a response to the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, to their present day activities, aligning themselves with a variety of neo-fascist and right-wing groups in the American West. Finally, Wade provides us with an assessment of the Klan's future.
The Fiery Cross provides an exhaustive analysis and perspective on this dark shadow of American society. It is long overdue.
In The Fiery Cross , Wyn Craig Wade traces the Klan from its beginnings after the Civil War as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, to the present. Wade provides us with the history of the group, which has gone through a number of declines and renaissances over the last hundred years. We follow the Klan's resurgence in 1915 after D.W. Griffith's epic film The Birth of a Nation depicted Klan members as heroic saviors of the old Southern society, to the swearing in of President Warren G. Harding as a Klansman in the Green Room, and from the Klan's championing of white supremacy as a response to the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, to their present day activities, aligning themselves with a variety of neo-fascist and right-wing groups in the American West. Finally, Wade provides us with an assessment of the Klan's future.
The Fiery Cross provides an exhaustive analysis and perspective on this dark shadow of American society. It is long overdue.
528 pages, Paperback
Published November 19, 1998
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August 4, 2025
This was a deep-dive through the All-Seeing Eye of the Ku Klux Klan. Wyn Craig Wayne did an outstanding job of detailing the history, rise and reigns of terror, inner turmoil, and ongoing problems exacerbated by the different reiterations and leadership throughout its history. The Klan has remained a secret fraternal organization distinguished by Klannishness (fraternal code of silence) and klandestine operations culminating in nationwide terror.
Craig did an excellent job detailing the three big eras of Kluxdom. The first was the birth of the Klan in Pulaski County, Tennessee, in 1866. The secret club started out as a social club due to post-Civil War boredom. They used the Greek for circle (Kuklos) and intentionally misspelled it kuklux and added klan afterwards as the founding members were of Scots-Irish descent (pg 33).
Between 1868-1871, it's popularity grew among it's secrecy, so did the escalation of race-motivated violence towards the newly abundance of Freedmen in the South. The government and military had to be used to squash KKK violence towards blacks, whites friendly to blacks, and carpetbaggers & scalawags. Klan activities died down until around 1915.
The influx of immigrant Jews and Catholics from Europe in the years preceding World War I, the release of D.W. Griffith's pro-Klan silent movie Birth of a Nation in 1915, and the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman in Atlanta, Georgia, wrongfully accused of murdering thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, fanned hysteria and drove the revival of the Reconstruction-era Klan's nationwide resurgence between 1915-1921. This time the KKK had become the Invisible Empire as it spread all throughout the country. Laypersons, lawyers, doctors, police, judges, political officials, even Senators and Congressmen were secret members of the KKK.
The third era was from the roughly the late 1950s & early 1960s up to the publication of the book, 1987. The author gave a lot of attention to this time frame as it was marred with violence, the Civil Rights movement & civil unrest, and FBI & law enforcement crackdowns. The Mississippi Summer incident of 1964 involving the murder and cover-up of three civil rights workers was explained (pgs 335-44). That incident was the basis of the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman and Wilhem Defoe.
There was a lot I learned in this book because it was highly readable. There were several useful appendices listing membership structuring, positions within the KKK's infrastructure (Grand Wizard, Grand Dragon, Exalted Cyclops, Grand Giants, Goblins, Kleagles, etc.), excerpts from the authority of the organization The Kloran, listing of geopolitical structures (Realms, Dominions, Provinces), and posters for rallies & cross burnings.
I would highly recommend this to anyone who knows nothing about the infamous hatred spewed from Ku Klux Klan. Thanks!
Craig did an excellent job detailing the three big eras of Kluxdom. The first was the birth of the Klan in Pulaski County, Tennessee, in 1866. The secret club started out as a social club due to post-Civil War boredom. They used the Greek for circle (Kuklos) and intentionally misspelled it kuklux and added klan afterwards as the founding members were of Scots-Irish descent (pg 33).
Between 1868-1871, it's popularity grew among it's secrecy, so did the escalation of race-motivated violence towards the newly abundance of Freedmen in the South. The government and military had to be used to squash KKK violence towards blacks, whites friendly to blacks, and carpetbaggers & scalawags. Klan activities died down until around 1915.
The influx of immigrant Jews and Catholics from Europe in the years preceding World War I, the release of D.W. Griffith's pro-Klan silent movie Birth of a Nation in 1915, and the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman in Atlanta, Georgia, wrongfully accused of murdering thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, fanned hysteria and drove the revival of the Reconstruction-era Klan's nationwide resurgence between 1915-1921. This time the KKK had become the Invisible Empire as it spread all throughout the country. Laypersons, lawyers, doctors, police, judges, political officials, even Senators and Congressmen were secret members of the KKK.
The third era was from the roughly the late 1950s & early 1960s up to the publication of the book, 1987. The author gave a lot of attention to this time frame as it was marred with violence, the Civil Rights movement & civil unrest, and FBI & law enforcement crackdowns. The Mississippi Summer incident of 1964 involving the murder and cover-up of three civil rights workers was explained (pgs 335-44). That incident was the basis of the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman and Wilhem Defoe.
There was a lot I learned in this book because it was highly readable. There were several useful appendices listing membership structuring, positions within the KKK's infrastructure (Grand Wizard, Grand Dragon, Exalted Cyclops, Grand Giants, Goblins, Kleagles, etc.), excerpts from the authority of the organization The Kloran, listing of geopolitical structures (Realms, Dominions, Provinces), and posters for rallies & cross burnings.
I would highly recommend this to anyone who knows nothing about the infamous hatred spewed from Ku Klux Klan. Thanks!
February 11, 2021
Wyn Craig Wade's The Fiery Cross is an engaging, somewhat sensationalized account of the Ku Klux Klan in its various iterations from Reconstruction through the 1980s. Wade's book is full of lurid details about Klan violence and sexual depravity which often feel too potboilerish to seem credible. He also perpetrates numerous myths (Woodrow Wilson's reaction to Birth of a Nation, Warren Harding as Klansman) that a more careful historian would have avoided. At the same time, he smashes the myth of the Klan as an initially benevolent organization gone bad, showing their activities escalating from racist mischief to violence and political corruption very quickly, their capitalizing off sociopolitical trends (resentment over Reconstruction, 1920s Nativism and evangelical activism, the Civil Rights Movement) to enhance their power and relevance; their Phoenix-like resurgence over the decades doesn't speak well of America's attitudes towards race. It's especially depressing to read now that we have a President who received David Duke's full-throated endorsement.
March 4, 2017
In honor of newly appointed US AG Jeff Sessions, I have put Shakespeare & Co. on hold in order to read The Fiery Cross: the Ku-Klux Klan in America by Wyn Craig Wade.
It’s divided into three books: 1865-1915, 1915-1930, and 1930-1987 (this last date the year of the book’s publication). I’ve just finished the first book, covering the Reconstruction period, the part of the history that is most familiar to me. President Grant summed up the Klan’s aims as
Wade summarizes the Klan’s effect during this period
Now on to 1915 and D. W. Griffith.
In book 2 of The Fiery Cross covering 1915-1930, Wyn Craig Wade makes a convincing case that the Ku Klux Klan would have remained an episode in the history of Reconstruction if it had not been for D. W. Griffith.
The Klan of the 20th century was not a revival or continuation of its 19th century namesake, but an attempt to embody a fictional creation, first outlined in the minority report of the 1870s Congressional investigation, later elaborated and dramatized by novelists such as Thomas W. Dixon and ultimately in the film The Birth of a Nation, based on Dixon’s The Clansman. One of the Klan’s signature symbols and means of intimidation which gives Wade his title, the burning cross, was not associated with the historic Klan, but was a fiction included in Griffith’s film, taken from Dixon who probably got the idea from the Scottish romances of Walter Scott. What Griffith did was essentially give racism in the US a brand symbol which would serve as an immediately recognizable signal to its adherents and a wordless but unambiguous threat to its potential victims.
In this section of his book, Wade describes a rapidly expanding national organization raking in lots of cash; such concentrations of influence and money made for inevitable leadership battles – covered here, for me, in too great detail. The Klan of the early 20th century was in its public face a fraternal organization, a Protestant fundamentalist social group, and on occasion a political machine, though hatred and fear, now expanded to include Jews, Catholics, and immigrants as well as African-Americans, still seemed the primary motivations it could offer its members. In documenting the Klan as a national organization, Wade largely neglects the individual incidents of violence and intimidation that were carried on by Klan members, though not openly sanctioned by national and state leadership. This focus gave this section of the book a rather detached and somewhat irrelevant quality for me; he fails to make the case that the manipulations and ambitions of these few men within the Klan organization had any effect on American history.
The final chapter of this section is an in-depth look at the Klan in Indiana in the early 1920s, where the organization was widespread and heavily influential in politics and law enforcement. The Indiana Klan in Wade’s account was largely a cult of personality centered around a charismatic leader. When in 1925 that leader was found guilty of the horrific abduction, rape and murder of a young woman, the organization he led fell almost completely apart. Wade attributes the decline of the national Klan in the late 20s largely to this incident, but I was not convinced that the fall of one state leader could have such a widespread effect on the relatively large membership of a national organization. I suspect that other influences may have led to a falling off in Klan membership, such as its failure to meet the social and business needs members looked for in fraternal organizations and, particularly in the North, its continued association with violent intolerance. I’d think that the increasing unpopularity of Prohibition, which the Klan supported and occasionally enforced, also caused a not insignificant number of members to leave the group.
Next, the final section of Wade’s book covers a broad range of events including the New Deal, WW II, and the civil rights era.
The third section of The Fiery Cross by Wyn Craig Wade deals with several phases of the Ku Klux Klan during the years 1930 – 1987, the book’s publication date.
The moribund Klan of the late 1920s became revitalized in the 1930s as a force in union busting. The late 30s saw some Klan groups attempt to form a united front with Nazi sympathizers in the German Bund, a movement that foundered with the outbreak of WWII and the concurrent repulsion, which has proven to be temporary, of the vast majority of Americans for Nazism.
Post-war attempts to give the Klan a less barbarous image while still retaining its bigoted appeal took the form of “white pride” groups, but this foundered both from lack of appeal to more upscale racists and increased violence against court ordered and Federal government enforced integration.
The story of the Klan in the Civil Rights era, which Wade refers to as “the Second Reconstruction”, is a distressing progression of assaults and murders committed by Klan members, abetted actively or passively by local law enforcement, and unpunished by judges and juries in those cases which managed to be brought to court. Only with the 1980s and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s formation of Klanwatch does Wade indicate that successful prosecutions of Klan violence became common. By then, however, much of the Klan’s agenda had become mainstream, with its supporters and fellow travelers seeking to enforce its racist ideology through the passage and interpretation of laws rather than the breaking of laws. A Klan Imperial Wizard said in 1980, “The Republican platform reads as if it were written by a Klansman,” a statement which has only become more true in subsequent elections.
Though I disagreed at times with some of the conclusions Wade drew from his story, his presentation of the facts of Klan history is cogent and thorough. I read this book to get some perspective on the present situation in the US. Though there has been undeniable progress in civil rights, the opposition to racial equality in this country is relentless and electoral complacency has allowed it to gain a strong foothold nationwide. Voting rights are seriously endangered at the present moment and I consider that those currently in power would, if possible, roll back civil rights to a point just short of slavery. The police shootings and beatings of unarmed and unresisting African-Americans in recent years seems in many ways a continuation of the violent assaults and murders committed by Klansmen against helpless and often random victims.
Resist.
It’s divided into three books: 1865-1915, 1915-1930, and 1930-1987 (this last date the year of the book’s publication). I’ve just finished the first book, covering the Reconstruction period, the part of the history that is most familiar to me. President Grant summed up the Klan’s aims as
by force and terror, to prevent all political action not in accord with the views of the members, to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right of a free ballot, to suppress the schools in which colored children were taught, and to reduce the colored people to a condition closely allied to that of slavery.The book introduced me to a figure that I don’t recall encountering previously, a Democratic congressman who served as the Klan’s primary apologist on the 1871 Congressional investigation into Klan violence, a racist with the unlikely and prophetic name Philadelph Van Trump. A sample question from Van Trump in trying to discredit testimony by African-American witnesses to Klan violence, “Is not the negro a vainglorious animal if entrusted with any authority?” Though the phrasing is antiquated, it accurately characterizes the sentiment that animated much of the opposition to President Obama, including that of the current president.
Wade summarizes the Klan’s effect during this period
In retrospect, the Ku-Klux Klan and its kindred organizations didn’t weaken Radical Reconstruction nearly as much as they nurtured it. So long as an organized, secret conspiracy swore oaths and used cloak-and-dagger methods in the South, Congress was willing to legislate against it – legislation that would provide vital safeguards for the cause of racial equality in the future. Not until the Klan was beaten and the former Confederacy turned to more open methods of preserving the Southern way of life did Reconstruction and its Northern support decline.I suppose that’s largely true, but I think it somewhat downplays the importance of Democratic electoral victories in the South in 1868-70, victories enabled in part by unrestricted Klan activity in suppressing Republican opposition, white and black.
Now on to 1915 and D. W. Griffith.
In book 2 of The Fiery Cross covering 1915-1930, Wyn Craig Wade makes a convincing case that the Ku Klux Klan would have remained an episode in the history of Reconstruction if it had not been for D. W. Griffith.
The Klan of the 20th century was not a revival or continuation of its 19th century namesake, but an attempt to embody a fictional creation, first outlined in the minority report of the 1870s Congressional investigation, later elaborated and dramatized by novelists such as Thomas W. Dixon and ultimately in the film The Birth of a Nation, based on Dixon’s The Clansman. One of the Klan’s signature symbols and means of intimidation which gives Wade his title, the burning cross, was not associated with the historic Klan, but was a fiction included in Griffith’s film, taken from Dixon who probably got the idea from the Scottish romances of Walter Scott. What Griffith did was essentially give racism in the US a brand symbol which would serve as an immediately recognizable signal to its adherents and a wordless but unambiguous threat to its potential victims.
In this section of his book, Wade describes a rapidly expanding national organization raking in lots of cash; such concentrations of influence and money made for inevitable leadership battles – covered here, for me, in too great detail. The Klan of the early 20th century was in its public face a fraternal organization, a Protestant fundamentalist social group, and on occasion a political machine, though hatred and fear, now expanded to include Jews, Catholics, and immigrants as well as African-Americans, still seemed the primary motivations it could offer its members. In documenting the Klan as a national organization, Wade largely neglects the individual incidents of violence and intimidation that were carried on by Klan members, though not openly sanctioned by national and state leadership. This focus gave this section of the book a rather detached and somewhat irrelevant quality for me; he fails to make the case that the manipulations and ambitions of these few men within the Klan organization had any effect on American history.
The final chapter of this section is an in-depth look at the Klan in Indiana in the early 1920s, where the organization was widespread and heavily influential in politics and law enforcement. The Indiana Klan in Wade’s account was largely a cult of personality centered around a charismatic leader. When in 1925 that leader was found guilty of the horrific abduction, rape and murder of a young woman, the organization he led fell almost completely apart. Wade attributes the decline of the national Klan in the late 20s largely to this incident, but I was not convinced that the fall of one state leader could have such a widespread effect on the relatively large membership of a national organization. I suspect that other influences may have led to a falling off in Klan membership, such as its failure to meet the social and business needs members looked for in fraternal organizations and, particularly in the North, its continued association with violent intolerance. I’d think that the increasing unpopularity of Prohibition, which the Klan supported and occasionally enforced, also caused a not insignificant number of members to leave the group.
Next, the final section of Wade’s book covers a broad range of events including the New Deal, WW II, and the civil rights era.
The third section of The Fiery Cross by Wyn Craig Wade deals with several phases of the Ku Klux Klan during the years 1930 – 1987, the book’s publication date.
The moribund Klan of the late 1920s became revitalized in the 1930s as a force in union busting. The late 30s saw some Klan groups attempt to form a united front with Nazi sympathizers in the German Bund, a movement that foundered with the outbreak of WWII and the concurrent repulsion, which has proven to be temporary, of the vast majority of Americans for Nazism.
Post-war attempts to give the Klan a less barbarous image while still retaining its bigoted appeal took the form of “white pride” groups, but this foundered both from lack of appeal to more upscale racists and increased violence against court ordered and Federal government enforced integration.
The story of the Klan in the Civil Rights era, which Wade refers to as “the Second Reconstruction”, is a distressing progression of assaults and murders committed by Klan members, abetted actively or passively by local law enforcement, and unpunished by judges and juries in those cases which managed to be brought to court. Only with the 1980s and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s formation of Klanwatch does Wade indicate that successful prosecutions of Klan violence became common. By then, however, much of the Klan’s agenda had become mainstream, with its supporters and fellow travelers seeking to enforce its racist ideology through the passage and interpretation of laws rather than the breaking of laws. A Klan Imperial Wizard said in 1980, “The Republican platform reads as if it were written by a Klansman,” a statement which has only become more true in subsequent elections.
Though I disagreed at times with some of the conclusions Wade drew from his story, his presentation of the facts of Klan history is cogent and thorough. I read this book to get some perspective on the present situation in the US. Though there has been undeniable progress in civil rights, the opposition to racial equality in this country is relentless and electoral complacency has allowed it to gain a strong foothold nationwide. Voting rights are seriously endangered at the present moment and I consider that those currently in power would, if possible, roll back civil rights to a point just short of slavery. The police shootings and beatings of unarmed and unresisting African-Americans in recent years seems in many ways a continuation of the violent assaults and murders committed by Klansmen against helpless and often random victims.
Resist.
May 23, 2016
This book which was published almost thirty years ago still appears to be the best survey history available of the Ku Klux Klan. While it is clearly time for a new work that will draw on the recent academic monographs, this book is unlikely ever be truly superseded as it is extremely solid.
Wade divides the history of the Ku Klux Klan into three sections. In the first section, the movement was led by former Confederate officers and manned by veterans from the enlisted rank with the objective of preventing the former slaves from acquiring either political or social freedoms in the New South. During this phase the various Klan chapters lynched and employed other means of the physical intimidation to prevent Blacks from voting. Solidly supported by the general white population, the Klan essentially won its war when in 1877, Rutherford Hayes agreed to withdraw the Federal Army from the South in exchange for being awarded the presidency in a disputed election.
The Klan then went into an era of dormancy to be revived in 1915 following the release of D.W. Griffith's notorious film "The Birth of a Nation" which glorified the hooded vigilantes. The movie did not stimulate racism in America so much as it created a huge market of adult males willing to pay annual dues in order to belong to a secret society with racist values that allowed members to wear spooky costumes and participate in occult rites. During this phase, Klan organization put as much emphasis on denouncing Jews and Catholics as it did on denigrating blacks. With this formula the Klan enjoyed strong public support in both the North and the South but fell apart because of various sexual and financial scandals involving the organizational leaders who had been raking in enormous revenues through the sales of memberships.
The third phase began in the 1950's as Klan chapters began to sprout in order to fight the civil rights movement through murders and other violent acts. During this phase, the Klan was vehemently detested in the North and fervently supported in the South. The author who lived through this period struggles to maintain a moderate tone as he clearly has a deep-seated hatred of both the Klan and its collaborators. What Wade found particularly infuriating was the fact that Klan members who committed murders were never convicted in the courts no matter how strong the evidence was against them.
It is Wade's ill concealed rage that makes this book feel dated. This is not to say that Wade was in any way wrong to feel the way he did. It is just that future historians who will not have lived through the period will almost certainly employ a more neutral tone in describing the odious members of the Klan and their abominable actions.
Wade concludes his book noting that the Klan appeared had gone into another dormancy and predicting that it wall likely revive again at some point in the future.
Wade divides the history of the Ku Klux Klan into three sections. In the first section, the movement was led by former Confederate officers and manned by veterans from the enlisted rank with the objective of preventing the former slaves from acquiring either political or social freedoms in the New South. During this phase the various Klan chapters lynched and employed other means of the physical intimidation to prevent Blacks from voting. Solidly supported by the general white population, the Klan essentially won its war when in 1877, Rutherford Hayes agreed to withdraw the Federal Army from the South in exchange for being awarded the presidency in a disputed election.
The Klan then went into an era of dormancy to be revived in 1915 following the release of D.W. Griffith's notorious film "The Birth of a Nation" which glorified the hooded vigilantes. The movie did not stimulate racism in America so much as it created a huge market of adult males willing to pay annual dues in order to belong to a secret society with racist values that allowed members to wear spooky costumes and participate in occult rites. During this phase, Klan organization put as much emphasis on denouncing Jews and Catholics as it did on denigrating blacks. With this formula the Klan enjoyed strong public support in both the North and the South but fell apart because of various sexual and financial scandals involving the organizational leaders who had been raking in enormous revenues through the sales of memberships.
The third phase began in the 1950's as Klan chapters began to sprout in order to fight the civil rights movement through murders and other violent acts. During this phase, the Klan was vehemently detested in the North and fervently supported in the South. The author who lived through this period struggles to maintain a moderate tone as he clearly has a deep-seated hatred of both the Klan and its collaborators. What Wade found particularly infuriating was the fact that Klan members who committed murders were never convicted in the courts no matter how strong the evidence was against them.
It is Wade's ill concealed rage that makes this book feel dated. This is not to say that Wade was in any way wrong to feel the way he did. It is just that future historians who will not have lived through the period will almost certainly employ a more neutral tone in describing the odious members of the Klan and their abominable actions.
Wade concludes his book noting that the Klan appeared had gone into another dormancy and predicting that it wall likely revive again at some point in the future.
October 12, 2025
This book is a decent overview of the Ku Klux Klan, from its first guerilla incarnation in the Reconstruction-era South to its 1915 rebirth as a nationwide fraternal order to its later fracturing into numerous smaller groups resisting the 'Civil Rights' movement. Thomas Jefferson warned that slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears: the nation could neither hold him nor safely let him go. The Civil War freed the wolf, and naturally, hell was going to break loose. Klan resistance to Radical Reconstruction was the continuation of the Civil War by asymmetric means. Though they were ultimately suppressed by the federal government and military, there was no more reason for them to exist as they had succeeded in freeing the South from the heel of carpetbaggers and insolent freedmen. Jim Crow became the law of the land and the KKK passed into legend as heroes of the Lost Cause, romanticized by historians and authors such as Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Decades later, the revolutionary film The Birth of a Nation, based on Dixon's novel The Clansman, spurred the birth of a new Klan. This incarnation introduced the classic standardized robes and hood, as well as the cross burning. The new Kluxers were still anti-black, but they were also fervently Protestant as well as militantly anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. Unlike the original, this organization was nationwide. It had its greatest success in Indiana but disintegrated after that state's Grand Dragon was imprisoned for a horrific rape. The Klan split into dozens of smaller Klaverns, mostly in the South. When the federal government again came to enforce racial mixing at gunpoint, the people of Dixie were right back where they'd been in 1865. This book ends at the time of its writing, in the mid-1980s, so subjects like Stormfront and Charlottesville are not covered.
Wyn Craig Wade is a liberal and not at all sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. Anytime people want to preserve their way of life instead of letting it be destroyed, liberals mock and attack them. I don't agree with his perspective, but the book does present a good deal of historical information. He covers numerous colorful characters, from Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Gordon to Hiram Wesley Evans and D.C. Stephenson to Samuel Bowers and David Duke. The Klan represented the sentiments of many more Americans than the bold ones who actually put on the sheets. The Ku Kluxers, like the Know-Nothings, the America Firsters, the John Birchers, the Tea Partiers, and the current MAGA movement, are part of a proud and rich tradition of reactionary conservatism in the United States. Their story deserves to be told.
Decades later, the revolutionary film The Birth of a Nation, based on Dixon's novel The Clansman, spurred the birth of a new Klan. This incarnation introduced the classic standardized robes and hood, as well as the cross burning. The new Kluxers were still anti-black, but they were also fervently Protestant as well as militantly anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. Unlike the original, this organization was nationwide. It had its greatest success in Indiana but disintegrated after that state's Grand Dragon was imprisoned for a horrific rape. The Klan split into dozens of smaller Klaverns, mostly in the South. When the federal government again came to enforce racial mixing at gunpoint, the people of Dixie were right back where they'd been in 1865. This book ends at the time of its writing, in the mid-1980s, so subjects like Stormfront and Charlottesville are not covered.
Wyn Craig Wade is a liberal and not at all sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. Anytime people want to preserve their way of life instead of letting it be destroyed, liberals mock and attack them. I don't agree with his perspective, but the book does present a good deal of historical information. He covers numerous colorful characters, from Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Gordon to Hiram Wesley Evans and D.C. Stephenson to Samuel Bowers and David Duke. The Klan represented the sentiments of many more Americans than the bold ones who actually put on the sheets. The Ku Kluxers, like the Know-Nothings, the America Firsters, the John Birchers, the Tea Partiers, and the current MAGA movement, are part of a proud and rich tradition of reactionary conservatism in the United States. Their story deserves to be told.
August 23, 2017
Recent events made me think of this book that I read more than a decade ago. A well written account of the KKK that strips away any pretense of a benign brotherhood. Recommended.
October 13, 2010
This was a challenging book to read on several different levels. I read it because the KKK is such an enigma to me - I wanted to see if I could understand what would motivate people to be a part of such a violent and despicable group.
My first issue with this book is that I was ashamed to be reading it despite the fact that that book is anti-KKK. I initially brought it on my commute to work but I found that on the train and subway I was completely paranoid that someone would see it and misinterpret it, especially when there were pictures of robed klansmen. I eventually restricted my reading to home which meant it took me much longer than usual to finish.
The second problem was that some parts of the book contained gruesome descriptions which I had trouble dealing with. I would feel physically ill and depressed after reading the worst of them.
So why the high rating? Well this is a relatively academic book so it wouldn’t be for everyone, but it really did open my eyes about certain periods of history. One of the things that took me by surprise was the role that the movie Birth of a Nation played for the Klan. The KKK had pretty much died out before the movie came out in 1915. When I’ve seen those brief black and white clips from the movie I’ve always assumed that the Klansmen were the bad guys in the film, but instead they are the heroes. Unbelievable.
In terms of my goal of understanding how people could believe in such horrible things, I guess I learned a little but this was mostly history rather than getting into people’s motives and minds. There were the truly violent and crazy members of course, but there were also many people who initially came to a meeting without knowing much about it and then had trouble leaving because of the Klan’s power and intimidation (to both safety and livelihood). Other factors were the anonymity provided by the robes which allowed people to do things they normally wouldn’t and the belief that they were protecting their way of life and families. Of course none of that excuses their vile actions.
Overall a disturbing but thorough history.
My first issue with this book is that I was ashamed to be reading it despite the fact that that book is anti-KKK. I initially brought it on my commute to work but I found that on the train and subway I was completely paranoid that someone would see it and misinterpret it, especially when there were pictures of robed klansmen. I eventually restricted my reading to home which meant it took me much longer than usual to finish.
The second problem was that some parts of the book contained gruesome descriptions which I had trouble dealing with. I would feel physically ill and depressed after reading the worst of them.
So why the high rating? Well this is a relatively academic book so it wouldn’t be for everyone, but it really did open my eyes about certain periods of history. One of the things that took me by surprise was the role that the movie Birth of a Nation played for the Klan. The KKK had pretty much died out before the movie came out in 1915. When I’ve seen those brief black and white clips from the movie I’ve always assumed that the Klansmen were the bad guys in the film, but instead they are the heroes. Unbelievable.
In terms of my goal of understanding how people could believe in such horrible things, I guess I learned a little but this was mostly history rather than getting into people’s motives and minds. There were the truly violent and crazy members of course, but there were also many people who initially came to a meeting without knowing much about it and then had trouble leaving because of the Klan’s power and intimidation (to both safety and livelihood). Other factors were the anonymity provided by the robes which allowed people to do things they normally wouldn’t and the belief that they were protecting their way of life and families. Of course none of that excuses their vile actions.
Overall a disturbing but thorough history.
July 17, 2016
The review below that says it feels dated is on point. I can hardly say it's a flaw with the book itself, but the fact that this was written at a time when it was apparently still necessary to critique the racist historiography of the early twentieth century gives some of the book an oddly defensive tone that seems unnecessary today.
Aside from that, I liked it: it's the best kind of popular history, engagingly written and also thoroughly researched, panoramic in scope, and fascinating. Would very much read again.
Aside from that, I liked it: it's the best kind of popular history, engagingly written and also thoroughly researched, panoramic in scope, and fascinating. Would very much read again.
March 7, 2014
This book was my first exposure to the idea that Reconstruction was actually a good thing as conceived, and not just about money-grubbing carpetbaggers or whatever the myth is. Excellent book.
November 27, 2025
Few books deal with the entire history of the Klan. This is perhaps because, although we habitually talk of ‘the’ Klan, many separate groups have used this name.
Most were small and local, and soon disbanded, but even those with some claim to a national or at least pan-Southern membership inevitably lacked central control.
Birth
If the stereotypical Klansman is an illiterate redneck, the group’s name bears a surprisingly classical etymology, deriving from the Greek ‘kuklos’, meaning circle.
This reflected the standing of its six founders, of whom two became lawyers, one a newspaper editor, another a state legislator (p32).
At first, the group was non-political. It was “purely social and for… amusement” one founder recalled—and, since, as a white Southerner, he likely approved the politics with which the Klan became associated, he had no reason to lie (p34).
Yet the practical jokes increasingly targeted blacks, the Klansmen’s white sheets originally conceived in imitation of ghosts, the wearers posing as:
Resurrection
Why then was the Klan revived, when similar groups were forgotten? Wade does not address this, but I suspect the outlandishness of the group’s name and titles contributed, as did the fact that it was the only such group active throughout the South.
Two other factors contributed to the Klan’s revival.
First, the spectacular success of the film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the original Klan.
Deplored for its message but grudgingly admired for its artistic and technical achievement, this film occupies an odd place in film history, similar to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, ‘Triumph of the Will’. (Sergei Eisenstein’s Stalinist propaganda films get a free pass.)
Even in its day, it was controversial. The NAACP even campaigned to have it banned—proving that the left’s commitment to freedom of expression was always selective (p127-8).
The second factor was two murders—of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old factory girl, and Leo Frank, her boss and alleged killer.
His lynching was carried out by a group calling themselves ‘The Knights of Mary Phagan’, many of whom would become founder members of the new Klan, and establish a famous Klan ritual, namely the ascent of Stone Mountain to burn a cross—a ritual invented by Thomas Dixon in imitation of an ostensible Scottish tradition for his novel, The Clansman, upon which ‘Birth of a Nation’ was based.
Yet Frank’s lynching was also instrumental in the genesis of another pressure group, whose power and influence far outstripped the Klan, and which, unlike the Second Klan, survives to this day—namely the ADL, who protected Jewish interests far more effectively than the Klan ever did those of whites and would play a key role fighting later Klan incarnations.
Anti-Catholicism
Yet the primary animus of the Second Klan was directed at neither Jews nor blacks, but rather Catholics.
Today, this seems odd. Anti-Catholicism of this type is now obsolete in America—and indeed the entire world outside of Northern Ireland and Ibrox football Stadium on alternate Saturdays for the duration of the Scottish football season.
Catholics were viewed as disloyal, owing ulimtate loyalty, not to America, but to Rome.
This was a cultural inheritance from the UK, where Catholics had long been viewed as seeking to overthrow the monarchy and restore the nation to Catholicism—as, in an earlier age, many indeed had.
This is perhaps analogous to how modern Islamophobes view Muslims as threatening to convert Europe to Islam.
Yet the Klan’s anti-Catholicism was soon abandoned.
Under financial pressure in the 1930s, the group was forced to sell its ‘Imperial Palace’. A Catholic cathedral was built on the site and Imperial Wizard Evans invited to its inaugural service.
He described the service as:
Today, the Second Klan’s anti-Catholicism is an embarrassment even to otherwise unreconstructed racists.
The decline of anti-Catholicism thus shows the speed with which prejudices can be overcome.
It also points to an ironic byproduct of the move towards greater tolerance and inclusivity in American society—namely, even groups opposed to this process have been affected by it.
In short, now accepting of Catholics, even the Klan has become more tolerant, inclusive and diverse!
Decline
The Klan’s decline began even before its abandonment of anti-Catholicism.
Terror
The First Klan was formed as a lark; the Second as a money-making venture—but both descended into terror.
Wade claims, more than violence, which sometimes attracted members, it was the hypocrisy of the Klan that weakened it.
While it claimed to champion prohibition and the protection of white womanhood, DC ‘Steve’ Stephenson, a hugely successful Indiana Klan leader, was convicted of the rape, kidnap and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a white protestant woman, during a drunken binge.
This was the scandal that finally sunk the Klan. Thus, from the murder of Mary Phagan to that of Madge Oberholtzer:
The final end came in 1944 when the IRS demanded unpaid taxes on the profits earned during the Klan’s ephemeral 1920s heyday, driving the group to bankruptcy (p275).
Ultimately the government destroyed the Klan as they had Al Capone—unpaid taxes!
Afterlife
The so-called Third Klan was not one Klan, but many.
From here on, it is no longer proper to talk of ‘the’ Klan, since there were many different groups using this name.
Each competed to fill the vacuum left by the earlier Klan, but none were to match its impact.
With respectable opposition to desegregation coalescing in the Citizens’ Councils, the Klan was left with “nothing but the violence prone dregs of southern society” (p302).
The electoral campaigns of governor George Wallace had a similar effect (p364).
Yet Wade concludes:
“The David Duke Show”
The Klan did manage one last hurrah in the 1970s through the singular talents of David Duke.
Duke’s schtick was to use the imagery of Klandom to attract media attention, but then come across as much more eloquent than anyone expected a Klansman to be—which, in truth, isn’t difficult!
It was the same trick Rockwell had used a generation before, but with Nazi imagery (e.g. swastikas) replaced with that of the Klan (e.g. hoods, burning crosses).
The result was a media circus dismissed by rivals as “The David Duke Show” (p373).
Yet Duke alienated supporters almost as fast as he attracted them. Many formed rival groups.
The best known is perhaps Tom Metzger. But, for Wade, the most important defector was Bill Wilkinson, as he formed a rival Klan, poaching members from Duke.
Lacking Duke’s eloquence, Wilkinson resorted to another strategy to attract media attention—namely, “taking a public stance of unbridled violence” (p375)
Despite this, he mostly stayed out of jail, which led to the rumor that he was a state agent, an allegation reinforced by the revelation that he is now a multi-millionaire in multiracial Belize.
He also “perfected a technique that other Klan leaders belittled as ‘ambulance chasing’” (p384).
Duke himself came to see the Klan baggage as a liability. One by one he jettisoned such elements, styling himself National Director rather than Imperial Wizard, wearing a suit rather than sheets and eventually giving up the Klan name itself.
Yet, on abandoning Klan imagery, he found media interest dissipated—and, on reentering politics, found his name ever prefixed with the title “former Klansman/Grand Wizard”.
Un-American Americanism
Klansmen once claimed to stand for ‘100% Americanism’.
Now, were not the very word ‘un-American’ so tainted by McCarthyism as to sound almost un-American in itself, the Klan could almost be described as quintessentially un-American.
Indeed, there was pressure on the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate the Klan from the beginning:
Yet he fails to mention that the main ‘liberal’ who urged the creation of the HUAC to attack ‘fascists’ was Congressman Sam Dickstein, now known to have been a Soviet spy—hence proving that Soviet infiltration was no McCarthyist myth.
Yet the Klan ultimately fell victim of the same illegal FBI harassment (‘cointelpro’) as more fashionable victims on the left.
Today
Today, four decades after Wade’s book was published, Klan groups still exist—but they have long ceased to play any role in American political or cultural life save as as bogeyman and folk-devil.
In the 1920s, the Klan helped defeat Al Smith’s presidential bids, and Wade even claims, dubiously, that President Harding was a member (p165).
In the 1980 presidential race, the Klan again became an issue, with each candidate trying to smear the other by insinuating Klan links. This led Wilkinson to declare:
The Klan’s role, then, was similar to that played by Willie Horton in the 1988 presidential campaign; or indeed by communists during the Red Scare.
Thus, today, we have gone full circle.
Where once Klansmen had a seeming ‘license to kill’ when tried before ‘all-white juries’ in the South, today, if a suspect in a racist murder were outed as a Klansman, this would prejudice a jury of any ethnic composition anywhere in the country against him.
Today, the problem is not with ‘all-white juries’ acquitting Klansmen, but majority-black juries refusing to convict blacks (e.g. the OJ case).
Perhaps the last case of Klansmen getting away with murder was the Greensboro Massacre in 1979 (p378-83). But, there, if the jury was prejudiced, it was not because the victims were blacks (most weren’t)—but because they were ‘reds’ (i.e. Maoists).
Today, lynching is out of fashion. Yet if it were ever to reemerge as a popular American pastime, then one suspects that among the first to be hoisted from a tree, alongside pedophiles, would be white racists.
Today, if Klansmen march, a police presence is required, not to protect blacks or Catholics from rampaging Klansmen, but to protect the Klansmen themselves from angry assailants of all ethnicities, but mostly white.
Indeed, the latter, styling themselves ‘Antifa’, despite their positively fascist opposition to freedom of speech and assembly, have even taken, like Klansmen of old, to wearing masks to disguise their identity.
Perhaps anti-masking laws, first enacted during Reconstruction to defeat the First Klan, and later applied against later Klan incarnations, need to be ressurected once again and applied without discrimination against the totalitarian terror of the contemporary left.
Full (i.e. vastly overlong) review available here.
Most were small and local, and soon disbanded, but even those with some claim to a national or at least pan-Southern membership inevitably lacked central control.
“After the Klan had spread outwards from Tennessee, there wasn’t the slightest chance of central control over it—a problem that would characterize the Klan throughout its long career” (p58)It is therefore difficult to write a general history of the Klan, but Wade succeeds, weaving the story of different Klan groups into a single narrative.
Birth
If the stereotypical Klansman is an illiterate redneck, the group’s name bears a surprisingly classical etymology, deriving from the Greek ‘kuklos’, meaning circle.
This reflected the standing of its six founders, of whom two became lawyers, one a newspaper editor, another a state legislator (p32).
At first, the group was non-political. It was “purely social and for… amusement” one founder recalled—and, since, as a white Southerner, he likely approved the politics with which the Klan became associated, he had no reason to lie (p34).
“It has been said that, if Pulaski had had an Elks Club, the Klan would never have been born” (p33).This explains why Klan titles (e.g. Grand Goblin) are more what one might expect in a college fraternity than a terror group.
Yet the practical jokes increasingly targeted blacks, the Klansmen’s white sheets originally conceived in imitation of ghosts, the wearers posing as:
“Ghosts of the Confederate dead, who had risen from their graves to wreak vengeance on [blacks]” (p35)Sheets were also a disguise—but, with no standardization, not a yet uniform, let alone a ceremonial regalia.
“A black female victim of the Klan was able to recognise one of her assailants because he wore a dress she herself had sewed for his wife” (p60).The Klan came to stand for the reestablishment of white supremacy and disenfranchisement of blacks. In the short-term, this was achieved. But Wade denies the Klan a part in the victory:
“The Ku-Klux Klan… didn’t weaken Radical Reconstruction nearly as much as they nurtured it. So long as an organized secret conspiracy swore oaths and used cloak and dagger methods in the South, Congress was willing to legislate against it… Not until the Klan was beaten and the former confederacy turned to more open methods of preserving the Southern way of life did reconstruction… decline” (p109-110).Thus, the First Klan was a failure. In this, it set the model for later Klans which would fight a losing rearguard action against Catholic immigration and desegregation.
Resurrection
Why then was the Klan revived, when similar groups were forgotten? Wade does not address this, but I suspect the outlandishness of the group’s name and titles contributed, as did the fact that it was the only such group active throughout the South.
Two other factors contributed to the Klan’s revival.
First, the spectacular success of the film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the original Klan.
Deplored for its message but grudgingly admired for its artistic and technical achievement, this film occupies an odd place in film history, similar to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, ‘Triumph of the Will’. (Sergei Eisenstein’s Stalinist propaganda films get a free pass.)
Even in its day, it was controversial. The NAACP even campaigned to have it banned—proving that the left’s commitment to freedom of expression was always selective (p127-8).
The second factor was two murders—of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old factory girl, and Leo Frank, her boss and alleged killer.
His lynching was carried out by a group calling themselves ‘The Knights of Mary Phagan’, many of whom would become founder members of the new Klan, and establish a famous Klan ritual, namely the ascent of Stone Mountain to burn a cross—a ritual invented by Thomas Dixon in imitation of an ostensible Scottish tradition for his novel, The Clansman, upon which ‘Birth of a Nation’ was based.
Yet Frank’s lynching was also instrumental in the genesis of another pressure group, whose power and influence far outstripped the Klan, and which, unlike the Second Klan, survives to this day—namely the ADL, who protected Jewish interests far more effectively than the Klan ever did those of whites and would play a key role fighting later Klan incarnations.
Anti-Catholicism
Yet the primary animus of the Second Klan was directed at neither Jews nor blacks, but rather Catholics.
Today, this seems odd. Anti-Catholicism of this type is now obsolete in America—and indeed the entire world outside of Northern Ireland and Ibrox football Stadium on alternate Saturdays for the duration of the Scottish football season.
Catholics were viewed as disloyal, owing ulimtate loyalty, not to America, but to Rome.
This was a cultural inheritance from the UK, where Catholics had long been viewed as seeking to overthrow the monarchy and restore the nation to Catholicism—as, in an earlier age, many indeed had.
This is perhaps analogous to how modern Islamophobes view Muslims as threatening to convert Europe to Islam.
Yet the Klan’s anti-Catholicism was soon abandoned.
Under financial pressure in the 1930s, the group was forced to sell its ‘Imperial Palace’. A Catholic cathedral was built on the site and Imperial Wizard Evans invited to its inaugural service.
He described the service as:
“The most ornate ceremony and… most beautiful service I ever saw” (p265)More beautiful even than a cross-burning!
Today, the Second Klan’s anti-Catholicism is an embarrassment even to otherwise unreconstructed racists.
The decline of anti-Catholicism thus shows the speed with which prejudices can be overcome.
It also points to an ironic byproduct of the move towards greater tolerance and inclusivity in American society—namely, even groups opposed to this process have been affected by it.
In short, now accepting of Catholics, even the Klan has become more tolerant, inclusive and diverse!
Decline
The Klan’s decline began even before its abandonment of anti-Catholicism.
“In 1924 the Ku Klux Klan… boasted more than four million members. By 1930, that number had withered to about forty-five thousand… No other American movement has ever risen so high and fallen so low in such a short period” (p253).Even its famous 1925 march on Washington “proved… its most spectacular last gasp”, attracting “only half of the sixty thousand expected” (p249)
“The National gathering of thirty thousand was less than what [DC Stephenson] could have mustered in Indiana alone during the Klan’s heyday” (p250).The Klan also retreated geographically:
“Over the next half-century the Klan would gradually lose its Northern members, regressing more and more loosely towards its Reconstruction ancestor” (p254)The membership profile also changed:
“Klan defections began with the prominent, the educated and the well-to-do, and proceeded down through the middle-class” (p252)Thus, though initially mostly middle-class, the stereotypical image of Klansmen as rednecks gradually set in.
Terror
The First Klan was formed as a lark; the Second as a money-making venture—but both descended into terror.
Wade claims, more than violence, which sometimes attracted members, it was the hypocrisy of the Klan that weakened it.
While it claimed to champion prohibition and the protection of white womanhood, DC ‘Steve’ Stephenson, a hugely successful Indiana Klan leader, was convicted of the rape, kidnap and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a white protestant woman, during a drunken binge.
This was the scandal that finally sunk the Klan. Thus, from the murder of Mary Phagan to that of Madge Oberholtzer:
“The [Second] Klan began and ended with the death of an innocent girl” (p247).Death & Taxes
The final end came in 1944 when the IRS demanded unpaid taxes on the profits earned during the Klan’s ephemeral 1920s heyday, driving the group to bankruptcy (p275).
Ultimately the government destroyed the Klan as they had Al Capone—unpaid taxes!
Afterlife
The so-called Third Klan was not one Klan, but many.
From here on, it is no longer proper to talk of ‘the’ Klan, since there were many different groups using this name.
Each competed to fill the vacuum left by the earlier Klan, but none were to match its impact.
With respectable opposition to desegregation coalescing in the Citizens’ Councils, the Klan was left with “nothing but the violence prone dregs of southern society” (p302).
The electoral campaigns of governor George Wallace had a similar effect (p364).
Yet Wade concludes:
“No one used and manipulated… Klansmen more than Wallace. He gave them very few rewards for their efforts on his behalf” (p322).Much the same could be said of President Trump’s relationship to the ‘alt-right’ during his first term.
“The David Duke Show”
The Klan did manage one last hurrah in the 1970s through the singular talents of David Duke.
Duke’s schtick was to use the imagery of Klandom to attract media attention, but then come across as much more eloquent than anyone expected a Klansman to be—which, in truth, isn’t difficult!
It was the same trick Rockwell had used a generation before, but with Nazi imagery (e.g. swastikas) replaced with that of the Klan (e.g. hoods, burning crosses).
The result was a media circus dismissed by rivals as “The David Duke Show” (p373).
Yet Duke alienated supporters almost as fast as he attracted them. Many formed rival groups.
The best known is perhaps Tom Metzger. But, for Wade, the most important defector was Bill Wilkinson, as he formed a rival Klan, poaching members from Duke.
Lacking Duke’s eloquence, Wilkinson resorted to another strategy to attract media attention—namely, “taking a public stance of unbridled violence” (p375)
Despite this, he mostly stayed out of jail, which led to the rumor that he was a state agent, an allegation reinforced by the revelation that he is now a multi-millionaire in multiracial Belize.
He also “perfected a technique that other Klan leaders belittled as ‘ambulance chasing’” (p384).
“Wilkinson… traversed the nation seeking racial ‘hot spots’… where he can come into a community, collect a large amount of initiation fees, sell a few robes, sell some guns… collect his money and be on his way to another ‘hot spot’” (p384).This is, of course, the same tactic employed by later black race baiters like Al Sharpton and BLM.
Duke himself came to see the Klan baggage as a liability. One by one he jettisoned such elements, styling himself National Director rather than Imperial Wizard, wearing a suit rather than sheets and eventually giving up the Klan name itself.
Yet, on abandoning Klan imagery, he found media interest dissipated—and, on reentering politics, found his name ever prefixed with the title “former Klansman/Grand Wizard”.
Un-American Americanism
Klansmen once claimed to stand for ‘100% Americanism’.
Now, were not the very word ‘un-American’ so tainted by McCarthyism as to sound almost un-American in itself, the Klan could almost be described as quintessentially un-American.
Indeed, there was pressure on the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate the Klan from the beginning:
“The Creation of the… Committee had been urged and supported by liberals and Nazi haters who wanted it used as a congressional forum against fascism. But in the hands of chairman Martin Dies of Texas, an arch-segregationist…. the committee instead had become an anachronistic pack of witch hunters who harassed labor leaders… and discovered ‘communists’ in every imaginable shape and place” (p272).Wade’s objection, then, seems to be, not that the HUAC became “witch hunters”, but that they chose to hunt the wrong coven of witches! Instead of going after commies, they should have targeted Klansmen.
Yet he fails to mention that the main ‘liberal’ who urged the creation of the HUAC to attack ‘fascists’ was Congressman Sam Dickstein, now known to have been a Soviet spy—hence proving that Soviet infiltration was no McCarthyist myth.
Yet the Klan ultimately fell victim of the same illegal FBI harassment (‘cointelpro’) as more fashionable victims on the left.
Today
Today, four decades after Wade’s book was published, Klan groups still exist—but they have long ceased to play any role in American political or cultural life save as as bogeyman and folk-devil.
In the 1920s, the Klan helped defeat Al Smith’s presidential bids, and Wade even claims, dubiously, that President Harding was a member (p165).
In the 1980 presidential race, the Klan again became an issue, with each candidate trying to smear the other by insinuating Klan links. This led Wilkinson to declare:
“We’re not an issue in this Presidential race because we’re insignificant” (p388).But what Wilkinson failed to grasp was that now the Klan’s role was now wholly negative. Neither candidate actually courted Klan votes. That would have been electoral suicide.
The Klan’s role, then, was similar to that played by Willie Horton in the 1988 presidential campaign; or indeed by communists during the Red Scare.
Thus, today, we have gone full circle.
Where once Klansmen had a seeming ‘license to kill’ when tried before ‘all-white juries’ in the South, today, if a suspect in a racist murder were outed as a Klansman, this would prejudice a jury of any ethnic composition anywhere in the country against him.
Today, the problem is not with ‘all-white juries’ acquitting Klansmen, but majority-black juries refusing to convict blacks (e.g. the OJ case).
Perhaps the last case of Klansmen getting away with murder was the Greensboro Massacre in 1979 (p378-83). But, there, if the jury was prejudiced, it was not because the victims were blacks (most weren’t)—but because they were ‘reds’ (i.e. Maoists).
Today, lynching is out of fashion. Yet if it were ever to reemerge as a popular American pastime, then one suspects that among the first to be hoisted from a tree, alongside pedophiles, would be white racists.
Today, if Klansmen march, a police presence is required, not to protect blacks or Catholics from rampaging Klansmen, but to protect the Klansmen themselves from angry assailants of all ethnicities, but mostly white.
Indeed, the latter, styling themselves ‘Antifa’, despite their positively fascist opposition to freedom of speech and assembly, have even taken, like Klansmen of old, to wearing masks to disguise their identity.
Perhaps anti-masking laws, first enacted during Reconstruction to defeat the First Klan, and later applied against later Klan incarnations, need to be ressurected once again and applied without discrimination against the totalitarian terror of the contemporary left.
Full (i.e. vastly overlong) review available here.
July 16, 2016
Living in the country as I did, the bus ride to school always lasted over an hour, and in elementary school I remember being utterly petrified by older students telling we younger horror stories. They spoke of monsters in white sheets, demons from hell, who could rise from the ground, or who lived in the woods, and would come out at dusk or emerge from a fog and snatch little children up, returning to their lairs to eat them. This was my earliest exposure to the Ku Klux Klan. After having read The Fiery Cross, I wonder if those stories have some basis in 19th century folk history, of parents warning their young against the obscene danger that continued to erupt in the hundred years that followed the Civil War. The Fiery Cross is a history of America's own hydra, of a hooded beast that has risen and been slain numerous times, yet always comes back -- the Invisible Empire, an organization where sheets hide a confusing jumble of motives, fears, and hatreds.
Although Lincoln's armies prevailed against those of the south, the Confederate cause was not totally lost until Andrew Johnson faced off against a Republican congress and was defeated. A southerner himself, Johnson's plan for quickly grafting South back into the Union left Congress with a bitter taste in its mouth. What had been the point of the war, of those hundreds of thousands of men and boys dying, of all of the money spent, if the South was simply to be welcomed back with open arms? Not settling for anything less than a total remolding of the south, Congress introduced its own re-admittance programs, incorporating various amendments and federal administrations like the Freedman's Bureau. Southern resistance manifested itself almost immediately, bristling at outside meddling and the humiliation of having been made second-class subjects of the law in their own land. The most forceful opposition came from shattered remnants of the Confederate army, either refusing to give up the fight or seeing resistance easier than submission, and the ranks of the old slave patrols. Both bands of men moved about and acted autonomously, taking the law into their own hands when they saw fit. Their violence against the new invasion of not only Union troops, but northern lawyers, government agents, and teachers, found a means of easy expression in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
Curiously, the Klan proper did not begin as a political organization; according to the author, six young men formed a secret society complete withe elaborate titles and costumes for the pure purpose of gallivanting around the countryside at night, raising hell and having fun. When they started playing pranks on freedmen, however, pretending to be the ghosts of Confederate dead, things grew far nastier. As the Klan grew in number, it took a life of its own, one demanding purpose -- and that purpose came to protect the supremacy of white southerners, both against the Yankee invader and against the usurping blacks. The civil war continued again, this time under cover of night, and fought more with terror than muskets. Although the Klan would be reorganized as a strict hierarchy, anyone with a bedsheet and the desire for vengeance could cause trouble. Hooded hooliganism so swept the south that the "Grand Wizard" of the Klan ordered the organization's self-destruction, and President Grant was forced to declare martial law to quell the anarchy.The Klan collapsed when the North washed its hands of the South, ending reconstruction and allowing the old planters to redeem their nation. Soon attempts at subduing blacks through fear and criminal means would find success in binding them by the law.
The Klan would revive in the early 20th century, but not as simple reaction against one government program. Credit for reviving the group is generally given to The Birth of a Nation, a highly innovative piece of film-making that depicted the Klan as righteous saviors of civilization against moral bankruptcy. In truth, public response to Birth of a Nation was managed carefully by a evangelical preacher who thought the old clan admirable. Reusing old charters and titles, but adding a bit more organization, he effected a comeback that was more potent and less obvious. The new Klan still maintained its racial message and support of segregation, but it was heavily influenced by the Fundamentalist movement, and drew support from the rising fear of social and moral anarchy. The early decades were a frightening world for many Americans: organized crime was on the rise, immigration from Europe continued apace and brought with it all kinds of new, strange, and sometimes dangerous ideas. Although from the 21st century it is easy to sit in judgment of our predecessors a century go for panicking about flappers and jazz, this was an age of labor riots and anarchist assassinations, in which increasingly very little could be taken for granted. America was changing -- the country emptying out, the cities swelling. Farmers were in debt and industrial workers utterly at the mercy of their employers. Against this chaos, the Klan pitched itself as a rear guard of civilization. If political machines and bribe-taking cops wouldn't keep bedlam in check, the 'caped crusaders' would -- leaving ominous messages outside the doors of evil-doers like men failing to support their wives, or blacks attempting to move into a white neighborhood. They held high the cross and flag, offering a social club that gave aid to its ailing members and offered them a chance to 'fight back', either as a political organization or through old-fashioned thuggery. They were a cult, a gang, an invisible empire justified unto themselves and utterly sinister. Between World War 2 and the revelation that a Klan chieftan had kidnapped a young girl and tried to eat her, however, the second Klan fell apart. Later iterations have never achieved much more than being vague threats; they have certainly lost whatever reputation they cultivated as guardians of civic order (cannibalism will do that) and settled for being lunatics on the fringe, content merely to stir up trouble.
The Fiery Cross is an exceptionally well-done history of a dismal subject, relying heavily on letters and charters for the 1870s clan, and interviews for the modern iteration. Despite having grown up in the South, I knew next to nothing about the thing that is the clan, and I say thing because there's never been just the one organization. It is instead an idea, a symbol -- rather like the V for Vendetta masks, not to slander those activists -- that creates association without unification. One hopes that the Klan's day is now past, despite its occasional resurfacing. Given that they have descended to becoming recurring characters on The Jerry Springer Show, there is is room for optimism. The most fascinating section for me was that on the second Klan, given that its perverse masquerade as a civic organization manages to launch it to national success, flouring not only in the South, but in the northeast and especially the midwest.
Related:
Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love, Joseph Pearce
Although Lincoln's armies prevailed against those of the south, the Confederate cause was not totally lost until Andrew Johnson faced off against a Republican congress and was defeated. A southerner himself, Johnson's plan for quickly grafting South back into the Union left Congress with a bitter taste in its mouth. What had been the point of the war, of those hundreds of thousands of men and boys dying, of all of the money spent, if the South was simply to be welcomed back with open arms? Not settling for anything less than a total remolding of the south, Congress introduced its own re-admittance programs, incorporating various amendments and federal administrations like the Freedman's Bureau. Southern resistance manifested itself almost immediately, bristling at outside meddling and the humiliation of having been made second-class subjects of the law in their own land. The most forceful opposition came from shattered remnants of the Confederate army, either refusing to give up the fight or seeing resistance easier than submission, and the ranks of the old slave patrols. Both bands of men moved about and acted autonomously, taking the law into their own hands when they saw fit. Their violence against the new invasion of not only Union troops, but northern lawyers, government agents, and teachers, found a means of easy expression in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
Curiously, the Klan proper did not begin as a political organization; according to the author, six young men formed a secret society complete withe elaborate titles and costumes for the pure purpose of gallivanting around the countryside at night, raising hell and having fun. When they started playing pranks on freedmen, however, pretending to be the ghosts of Confederate dead, things grew far nastier. As the Klan grew in number, it took a life of its own, one demanding purpose -- and that purpose came to protect the supremacy of white southerners, both against the Yankee invader and against the usurping blacks. The civil war continued again, this time under cover of night, and fought more with terror than muskets. Although the Klan would be reorganized as a strict hierarchy, anyone with a bedsheet and the desire for vengeance could cause trouble. Hooded hooliganism so swept the south that the "Grand Wizard" of the Klan ordered the organization's self-destruction, and President Grant was forced to declare martial law to quell the anarchy.The Klan collapsed when the North washed its hands of the South, ending reconstruction and allowing the old planters to redeem their nation. Soon attempts at subduing blacks through fear and criminal means would find success in binding them by the law.
The Klan would revive in the early 20th century, but not as simple reaction against one government program. Credit for reviving the group is generally given to The Birth of a Nation, a highly innovative piece of film-making that depicted the Klan as righteous saviors of civilization against moral bankruptcy. In truth, public response to Birth of a Nation was managed carefully by a evangelical preacher who thought the old clan admirable. Reusing old charters and titles, but adding a bit more organization, he effected a comeback that was more potent and less obvious. The new Klan still maintained its racial message and support of segregation, but it was heavily influenced by the Fundamentalist movement, and drew support from the rising fear of social and moral anarchy. The early decades were a frightening world for many Americans: organized crime was on the rise, immigration from Europe continued apace and brought with it all kinds of new, strange, and sometimes dangerous ideas. Although from the 21st century it is easy to sit in judgment of our predecessors a century go for panicking about flappers and jazz, this was an age of labor riots and anarchist assassinations, in which increasingly very little could be taken for granted. America was changing -- the country emptying out, the cities swelling. Farmers were in debt and industrial workers utterly at the mercy of their employers. Against this chaos, the Klan pitched itself as a rear guard of civilization. If political machines and bribe-taking cops wouldn't keep bedlam in check, the 'caped crusaders' would -- leaving ominous messages outside the doors of evil-doers like men failing to support their wives, or blacks attempting to move into a white neighborhood. They held high the cross and flag, offering a social club that gave aid to its ailing members and offered them a chance to 'fight back', either as a political organization or through old-fashioned thuggery. They were a cult, a gang, an invisible empire justified unto themselves and utterly sinister. Between World War 2 and the revelation that a Klan chieftan had kidnapped a young girl and tried to eat her, however, the second Klan fell apart. Later iterations have never achieved much more than being vague threats; they have certainly lost whatever reputation they cultivated as guardians of civic order (cannibalism will do that) and settled for being lunatics on the fringe, content merely to stir up trouble.
The Fiery Cross is an exceptionally well-done history of a dismal subject, relying heavily on letters and charters for the 1870s clan, and interviews for the modern iteration. Despite having grown up in the South, I knew next to nothing about the thing that is the clan, and I say thing because there's never been just the one organization. It is instead an idea, a symbol -- rather like the V for Vendetta masks, not to slander those activists -- that creates association without unification. One hopes that the Klan's day is now past, despite its occasional resurfacing. Given that they have descended to becoming recurring characters on The Jerry Springer Show, there is is room for optimism. The most fascinating section for me was that on the second Klan, given that its perverse masquerade as a civic organization manages to launch it to national success, flouring not only in the South, but in the northeast and especially the midwest.
Related:
Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love, Joseph Pearce
September 24, 2019
In this book Wyn Wade has given us a very good overview but not an extremely detailed look at the Ku Klux Klan. That is not to say that he has not done his research for he has found lots of material. The simple fact is that a book of this length cannot possibly cover the subject in any great depth. That would require a book at least twice this long, and probably three times as long. This book was obviously not intended to be a Shelby Foote type narrative of the Klan, but the basic survey that it is.
Wade has done a good job with the post reconstruction Klan, but he tends to take revisionist history a bit too far. One thing that puzzles me is that he refers to Tennessee as the, "the only border state" that left the Union. Many historians refer to the Volunteer State as a border state even though it was surrounded by slave states on all sides, so I can let that part of the statement slide. I have never however heard of Tennessee referred to as a border state without at least Virginia and Arkansas also receiving that label. It's not a big thing I realize, but it did bug me.
After reconstruction, Wade takes the reader to the history of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", the movie that made the rebirth and rise of the post World War I Klan possible. Then he traces the new Klan through its phenomenal growth to its demise. Wade then moves on to the Cold War anti-Communist Klan, the Civil Rights era Klan, the David Duke Klan, and today's Aryan crowd. He does a fine job of bringing out the personalities of various Klan leaders and giving the lowdown on various politicians who, while not Klansmen themselves, were more than happy to court Klan support. He also does an outstanding job of telling the story of Klan violence, with special attention to the victims.
Wade has done a good job with the post reconstruction Klan, but he tends to take revisionist history a bit too far. One thing that puzzles me is that he refers to Tennessee as the, "the only border state" that left the Union. Many historians refer to the Volunteer State as a border state even though it was surrounded by slave states on all sides, so I can let that part of the statement slide. I have never however heard of Tennessee referred to as a border state without at least Virginia and Arkansas also receiving that label. It's not a big thing I realize, but it did bug me.
After reconstruction, Wade takes the reader to the history of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", the movie that made the rebirth and rise of the post World War I Klan possible. Then he traces the new Klan through its phenomenal growth to its demise. Wade then moves on to the Cold War anti-Communist Klan, the Civil Rights era Klan, the David Duke Klan, and today's Aryan crowd. He does a fine job of bringing out the personalities of various Klan leaders and giving the lowdown on various politicians who, while not Klansmen themselves, were more than happy to court Klan support. He also does an outstanding job of telling the story of Klan violence, with special attention to the victims.
July 29, 2021
Shows the power ruthless men, and how long it takes to refute them. It also shows how America was infiltrated with derogatory racist ideas from the people to the president of the US.
Shows how they gained, lost and re-gained power.
Also shows all their in-fighting as well.
Also shows the power of a Congressional report.
Shows how they gained, lost and re-gained power.
Also shows all their in-fighting as well.
Also shows the power of a Congressional report.
July 30, 2015
It took me a while to get through this, but not for lack of interest. This book chronicles the creation and rise of the KKK, its rifts, declines and resurgences, and its internal and external power struggles. It contains a thorough history, and is well detailed with (often sickening) anecdotes. I especially appreciated Wade's inclusion of some of the official paperwork of the Klan in the appendices (charters, credo, directives, etc.). I would term the documents "laughably" ill-conceived and hypocritical (citing ideals like "character", "peace", "love" and "morality"--as if they could be compatible with the Klan), had they not been used to mobilize Americans in acts of barbarity that could have no humor injected. I wish I had an updated version of Wade's work to include the 2000s, but that would be the largest of my complaints.
August 7, 2009
in depth history and workings of the klu klux klan. i had no idea how pervasive the klan was since reconstruction, and how much it appealed to ordinary people's arrogant (and yet secret, always secret) superiority. the book highlights the charismatic and brilliant leaders of the kkk in its many forms, as well as the intellectual and idealistic people who fought against it, and were at times victims of the heartless brutality of the klan. anonymous mob vigilante daring at its worst, the klan appealed to so many, including presidents and senators and governors. truly disturbing insight into an "american institution."
November 11, 2011
I only read the first part of this book, the one talking about the Klan of the Reconstruction period, for I'm doing a research on them. For now, I won't read the rest, but maybe I will read it eventually. Wade's book will help me a lot; there is a lot of information, description and interesting quotes. This kind of book can be boring, but Wade's is anything but boring
March 20, 2012
A little dry at times, but the most thorough account and history of the KKK that I think one could ever come across...I've seen this guy interviewed on TV for History channel documentaries, and this book was my #1 source for information for my 20-page thesis paper about the Klan as a senior in high school.
April 19, 2016
Informative and terrifying. I wish I could compel my family and friends to read this because white people need to understand that the Klan isn't dead, it just goes through boom-and-bust cycles of death and revival based on the social, cultural, and economic circumstances of the present moment. The extent to which this book demonstrates this narrative is its most valuable asset, in my opinion.
August 9, 2011
Still considered the bedrock text of Klan history, it feels a bit dated 25 years in.
February 17, 2016
Such an interesting history...and scary...
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