The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics

by Rory McVeigh

Overview

Rediscovering the Ku Klux Klan as a national movement in the 1920s

In 1915, forty years after the original Ku Klux Klan disbanded, a former farmer, circuit preacher, and university lecturer named Colonel William Joseph Simmons revived the secret society. By the early 1920s the KKK had been transformed into a national movement with millions of dues-paying members and chapters in all of the nation’s forty-eight states. And unlike the Reconstruction-era society, the Klan in the 1920s exerted its influence far beyond the South.

In The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Rory McVeigh provides a revealing analysis of the broad social agenda of 1920s-era KKK, showing that although the organization continued to promote white supremacy, it also addressed a surprisingly wide range of social and economic issues, targeting immigrants and, particularly, Catholics, as well as African Americans, as dangers to American society. In sharp contrast to earlier studies of the KKK, which focus on the local or regional level, McVeigh treats the Klan as it saw itself—as a national organization concerned with national issues. Drawing on extensive research into the Klan’s national publication, the Imperial Night-Hawk, he traces the ways in which Klan leaders interpreted national issues and how they attempted—and finally failed—to influence national politics.

More broadly, in detailing the Klan’s expansion in the early 1920s and its collapse by the end of the decade, McVeigh ultimately sheds light on the dynamics that fuel contemporary right-wing social movements that similarly blur the line between race, religion, and values.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816656202
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	05/06/2009
Series:	Social Movements, Protest and Contention , #32
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rory McVeigh is associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

Table of Contents

1 The Klan as a National Movement 1

2 The Rebirth of a Klan Nation, 1915-1924 19

3 Power Devaluation 32

4 Responding to Economic Change: Redefining Markets along Cultural Lines 49

5 National Politics and Mobilizing "100 Percent American" Voters 86

6 Fights over Schools and Booze 112

7 How to Recruit a Klansman 139

8 Klan Activism across the Country 167

9 The Klan's Last Gasp: Campaigning to Keep a Catholic out of the White House, 1925-1928 180

Conclusion: Right-Wing Movements, Yesterday and Today 196

Acknowledgments 203

Notes 205

Works Cited 221

Index 231