The Civil War obliterated dreams of a Confederate state based on racial slavery. But after 1865, the war for white supremacy continued. A variety of paramilitary organizations emerged during Reconstruction to reclaim violently racial domination. The most famous of these organizations was the Ku Klux Klan, but there were many Klan-like groups—such as the Knights of the White Camelia (Louisiana), the Knights of the Rising Sun (Texas), or the Constitutional Union Guard (North Carolina)—that shared tactics, organizational forms, and the goal of reasserting white supremacy. As the founding document of the Knights of the White Camelia stated: “Knights of the White Camelia: You have been initiated into one of the most important orders […] an order, which […] is destined to regenerate our unfortunate country and to relieve the White Race from the humiliating condition to which it has lately been reduced in this Republic. […] Our main and fundamental object is the MAINTENANCE AND SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE in this Republic.”Footnote 1
Scholars will recognize such language as characteristic of interwar fascist movements, which emphasized how regenerative violence would achieve redemption from military defeat.Footnote 2 Observers have long gestured toward the comparison between the Reconstruction-era Klan and interwar fascism. As the civil rights activist Ken Lawrence put it in 1982, “Fascism was not born until the ruins of World War I darkened Europe. The Klan was around for a half-century before fascism existed in the world, and the Klan actually taught fascists a great deal in their early years.”Footnote 3 W.E.B. Du Bois cryptically suggested that Reconstruction’s failure turned “democracy back to Roman Imperialism and Fascism.”Footnote 4 Or as Robert Paxton writes about the Klan in a much-quoted passage:
It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan […]. The [first] Klan constituted an alternative civic authority, parallel to the legal state […]. By adopting a uniform […], as well as their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified in the cause of their group’s destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.Footnote 5
The idea that the United States could claim the world’s first preview of fascism is puzzling. The claim, if true, would re-orient our understanding of the Klan, as well as interwar fascism and racist politics more broadly. If the Klan was the earliest preview of fascist movements, this implies that the K.K.K. was a crucial departure from racist violence before the 1860s; the hooded night riders would be augurs of something new. History is full of precedents and harbingers. The broader ideological forces of the nineteenth century—such as exclusionary nationalism, colonialism, charismatic leadership, or modern warfare—were the “raw materials” for interwar fascism in a general sense.Footnote 6 But the idea that the Klan was functionally analogous to fascism implies a deeper affinity. They would be instances of some broader category, despite the decades between them.Footnote 7 Most studies of fascism take interwar Europe as the movement’s paradigm case. From that perspective, how fascism’s features were exemplified in an earlier social context needs to be explained. The first nominal fascist movement was born in Italy on March 23, 1919, with the Fasci Combattimento’s founding, yet something about the Reconstruction-era South made it fertile ground for a new paramilitary politics.Footnote 8 Why the affinity?
My basic argument is that the Klan and interwar fascism shared a variety of political behavior—they were paramilitary movements seeking political revolution and working-class discipline—and responded to commensurate social conditions. Like interwar Europe, Reconstruction was defined by total war and working-class rebellion. In that setting, settler ideologies and institutions, in particular eliminationist racism and vigilantism, created preconditions for a paramilitary social movement prefiguring fascism’s political behavior.Footnote 9 In short, the Klan responded to specific features of modern capitalist democracies—modern warfare, colonial politics, and labor revolt—that converged during Reconstruction and the interwar era.
This analysis yields two key insights. First, this article shows how the Klan was a break from previous traditions of nineteenth-century American racist violence and represented a more modern social movement than many accounts recognize, anticipating twentieth-century fascist movements fuelled by mass demobilization. It was not simply a manifestation of sporadic mob violence or the last gasps of an Old South. Until at least the 1970s, scholars saw the Klan as contiguous with allegedly idiosyncratic American traditions of vigilantism, growing “naturally out of the folk beliefs and practices out of the old South, compounded by the topsy-turvy conditions of Reconstruction.”Footnote 10 There is a basic truth here—the Klan did stem from the American settler context, dislocated by war—but my argument is that mass demobilization and labor revolt previewed something fundamentally new: paramilitaries, forged in the backdrop of modern warfare, who assumed the mantle of labor discipline. This is in line with current research, which tends to depict the Klan as a movement enabled by institutions such as the mass media.Footnote 11
Second, my argument implies that key aspects of fascist politics are more transportable than restrictive accounts imply. There is a diversity of views about the nature of fascism, but many scholars have used specific features of the interwar European context (such as the presence of a mass socialist movement or late imperial competition) to claim that certain authoritarian movements are radically distinct from fascism.Footnote 12 I develop a more transnational view of fascist politics. My perspective leans on the idea that fascism represented the import of colonialism into Europe, and I situate the Klan and interwar fascism within the broader arc of colonial racism. As Frantz Fanon asked: “but on the individual level, on the plane of human rights, what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country?”Footnote 13 The Klan was what I call a form of “early fascism”—both in the sense of being before the interwar period, and also never moving beyond the founding stages.Footnote 14 The conclusion reflects on our post-colonial context, and how certain American social movements—especially the Paleoconservatives—represent counterparts to European post-fascist parties.
1. Varieties of racial politics: fascism and colonialism
1.1. Fascism
Fascism is best understood as a set of behaviors (paramilitaries using the experience of war as a modus operandi for politics) and ideologies (anti-socialism and regenerative violence) that during the interwar era responded to certain social conditions. Importantly, scholars typically do not define fascism exclusively by its ideology but place more emphasis on fascism as a form of political behavior.Footnote 15 Fascist movements certainly shared ideological affinities during the interwar period and broadly similar worldviews. Yet as an ultra-nationalist creed, the basic forms of fascist ideology are more “protean” than other ideologies such as liberalism or socialism.Footnote 16 Moreover, the core feature of fascist behavior—a veneration of war—implies that specific doctrinal commitments are less central or binding; what matters more than specific policies is action and violence. As Jan-Werner Müller writes, “the disputes surrounding fascism are not just the result of academic nitpicking; they point to what appear to be characteristics of the thing itself. At least rhetorically, fascism was opposed to ‘reason;’ it glorified will, intuition, and sentiment.”Footnote 17 Therefore fascism is best understood as a set of behaviors which entail broadly similar ideologies, though the content of these ideas can vary. This follows Robert Paxton’s analysis:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.Footnote 18
For some scholars, this description of fascism is narrow, and there are more capacious definitions, such as Griffin’s view of fascism as a “palingenetic form of ultra-nationalism.”Footnote 19 The benefit of Paxton’s view, however, is that it gives us a specific set of behaviors and ideologies that contrast fascism from other racist and authoritarian creeds. In some ways, Paxton’s definition is broad: it picks out a wide variety of social movements during the interwar era (from Brazil’s Ação Integralista Brasileira movement to South Africa’s Ossewebrandwag) and after WWII (from Italy’s Ordine Nuovo to the American white power movement) that are plausibly described as fascist.Footnote 20 The Reconstruction-era Klan presaged aspects of fascist politics, though not all. To understand how the Klan could constitute a preview of fascist behavior, I focus on fascism in interwar Germany and Italy. The German and Italian cases present important affinities with the Klan, despite the distinctive social contexts. They also remain the cases where fascism was the most fully developed. Later I complicate the starting point of Germany and Italy, since no other fascist movements were able to achieve power outside wartime reconstruction.
Fascism combined a politics of war, peoplehood, and class that responded to a specific set of social structures during the interwar period. In the fin de siècle, we have the first real glimmers of fascist ideology and movements in Europe.Footnote 21 Such movements crystallized after WWI, and they were made up of soldiers who used the experience of war as a model for politics. Three proximate features of post-WWI Europe constituted preconditions for fascism as a mass movement and informed its behavior as well as ideology. These three features had counterparts during Reconstruction.
First, the most proximate precondition for fascism was WWI.Footnote 22 The war created demobilized armies that sought to translate the experience of defeat or territorial loss into a permanent war. “Fascism,” as one scholar sums up the view, is “the realisation of the principle of war in peacetime, a continuation of war by other means.”Footnote 23 In Germany, the Versailles settlement spawned the Freikorps, of which key Nazis were former members.Footnote 24 In Italy, a core constituency for fascism was the paramilitary squadristi, also known as the Blackshirts, which claimed many veterans.Footnote 25 The desire for war fed into both the ideology and behavior of fascists, and their commitment to violence reflected this core constituency. As Mussolini stated, “war alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and puts the seal of nobility upon those peoples who have the courage to face it.”Footnote 26
Second, fascists were a militant response to democratization and modern party politics. In contrast to many establishment European conservative elites who yearned for a monarchical past or restricted franchise, fascism selectively appropriated democratic ideals. They deployed race and nation to mobilize large constituencies. A mobilized civil society, as Dylan Riley argues, was also a core precondition for fascism, since fascist political parties were able to challenge the state amidst a crisis of politics.Footnote 27 Fascists created parallel institutions that competed with the state’s authority, from paramilitary organizations and police to even (in the case of the Nazi Party) a foreign policy bureau. There have been a host of anti-democratic and racist social movements, but fewer movements characterized by fascism’s appeal to popular mobilization and paramilitary forms. For example, scholars contrast fascism with authoritarianism—a more aristocratic technique of government that sought to exercise power from afar. Unlike fascism, authoritarians were typically more skeptical of popular mobilization, non-state institutions, and regenerative violence.Footnote 28
Third, fascism emerged in the shadow of mass socialist movements and was defined by its violent anti-socialism. As one scholar puts it, “the simplest and oldest theory of fascist violence treats it in origin as the manifestation of a class war of the bourgeois and propertied classes against peasants and workers. The evidence for this thesis is in fact very strong, and I do not think its fundamental truth should be questioned.”Footnote 29 In Germany, the SA often marched through working-class urban areas to provoke street battles.Footnote 30 In Italy’s Po Valley in 1921, a significant step toward fascists’ ascension to power was their role in agricultural labor discipline. Agriculturalists turned to the Blackshirts to intimidate workers and socialists, who had recently gained local power in municipal elections and organized “labor exchanges” that drove up wages. In an echo of the Klan patrol, the Squadristi typically used nightly expeditions to attack these labor exchanges and socialist organizers.Footnote 31
Fascist movements, according to Paxton’s scheme, developed through a few stages: the founding stage, the “rooting in the political system,” ascension to power, exercising power, and finally radicalization or entropy.Footnote 32 There have been many fascist movements historically, but only two ascended beyond the initial founding stage by taking power outside wartime reconstruction: Italian and German fascism. These classic cases of fascism were exceptional, at least from the perspective of their ability to take root in the political system. Both Hitler and Mussolini were invited into power by conservatives. They did not seize power, but instead were asked to form political coalitions when emergencies concentrated decision-making power within a few individuals.Footnote 33 Most fascist movements never crystallized into a stable political movement that took root within the political system. Henry Dorgeres’ Greenshirts in France or Gabriele D’Annunzio’s faction in Italy did not transcend the founding stage.Footnote 34 Though most popular images of fascism come from German and Italian fascism’s exercise of power, behavior during the founding stage was distinct. For example, racism was a defining feature of Nazism and Italian fascism throughout all stages, but the Holocaust’s bureaucratized genocide did not crystallize in Germany until the 1940s. Italian fascists pursued systematic anti-Semitic policies only after 1938.Footnote 35 The Klan was more comparable to interwar fascist paramilitaries during their initial paramilitary formations.
If we look beyond the interwar period, fascism had an extended afterlife, though at the political margins. The widespread presence of neo-Nazism in the post-WWII era suggests, as Griffin puts it, that fascism “clearly no longer requires objective conditions of developmental or socio-political crisis […] as a precondition for its existence for it appears to have established itself, at least among a numerically insignificant but highly unsilent majority, as a permanent idiom of western culture.”Footnote 36 The contemporary American white power movement—the name for a loosely affiliated collection of terrorist, neo-Nazis active since the 1970s—remains the closest analog to the Klan and fascists in the contemporary United States. The white power movement was fuelled by the Vietnam War, and key figures were veterans. Analogous to the Reconstruction-era Klan, the white power movement deploys a strategy of “leaderless resistance” based on the decentralized opposition to the federal government.Footnote 37 The more politically popular successors to fascism—often described as post-fascists in Europe—have moderated their rhetoric to integrate with electoral politics.
1.2. Colonial racism
The key to understanding the affinities between fascism and the Klan is colonial racism, which is an intimately related, though analytically separate, concept from fascism. Fascism can be considered as one particular kind of colonial racism; colonial racism is a more general and expansive category. Colonialism can be defined as a form of political domination typically based on agrarian labor, that is, an ideology that seeks to remove forcibly (or in its more liberal variants somehow “improve”) allegedly “‘backward’ people(s) from within and ‘improve’ ‘waste’ lands, overseen by colonial authorities.”Footnote 38 Colonial racism denotes the racial ideologies characteristic of colonialism, which centrally figures ideas about land (such as mythologies of a disappearing race or about “manifest destiny”) and forms of coerced labor (such as indentured labor, slavery, or sharecropping).
Modern colonialism presented early previews of genocidal racism. Orlando Patterson has argued that slavery’s high mortality rates in the British West Indies made enslavement in that context equivalent to a genocide over several centuries, while Michael Mann has pointed out that decentralized settler violence—what he calls democracy’s “dark side”—also staged examples of modern genocide.Footnote 39 There are many different kinds of colonialism, but in the Antebellum South, the most consequential kind for understanding the Klan as a preview for fascist violence was settler colonialism. Settler colonialism entails a distinct form of domination: the eradication of Indigenous peoples, or what Patrick Wolfe calls a “logic of elimination.”Footnote 40 Settler colonialism in the South centered plantation slavery—where settlers imported enslaved African labor from abroad to improve appropriated land—and was interdigitated with domestic anti-Black racial hierarchies.
Settler colonies were defined by exclusionary popular sovereignty, specific ideologies of race/labor, and non-state institutions. These features of settler politics intermixed to yield important preconditions for the Klan. Settler societies, like the American South, emphasized active self-government, and the United States was an early context of broad white enfranchisement. As a frontier society, the American South was characterized by violent vigilantism, decentralization, and powerful non-state institutions. As Edward Ayers writes about the non-slaveholder Southern Hills, “honor, Kinship, isolation, localistic republicanism, and poverty—along with hatred for blacks—fed group violence […] for generations.”Footnote 41 If interwar fascism was a political innovation bred by a new era of mass politics, we find a similar movement in a period defined by earlier exclusionary settler populism.
Settler colonies possessed specific ideologies of race/labor, and plantation slavery presented a form of anti-Black racism that saw enslaved people as simultaneously a source of wealth and a profound threat. Proslavery forces espoused an ideology emphasizing the direct control of Black labor—in addition to the expropriation of indigenous land—and allegedly paternalistic protection to justify the exploitation of Black Americans.Footnote 42 Yet white Southerners recognized the risks of racial domination. For there was a “volcanic power that rumbled just beneath the surface of Southern communities:” the slave rebellion, or what white Southerners variously called a “race war” or “servile war.”Footnote 43 The notion of race war was the specific paranoid fantasy that haunted white Southerners in general and during Reconstruction in particular. The idea behind the race war was that a genocidal apocalypse would follow emancipation, as freed people sought revenge. “The great fear of the people at that time,” proclaimed Nathan Bedford Forrest, “was that they would be dragged into a revolution something like San Domingo […] Yes; a war of races.”Footnote 44
We should tread the history of fears of a race war advisedly: African Americans never perpetrated a race war in the United States.Footnote 45 The fear served as an important pretext for white violence, as well as a general justification for keeping enslaved people in servitude. These self-serving mentions of a race war typically had an actual case of massacre in mind: the Haitian Revolution. The Haitian Revolution saw escalating mass violence. The escalation began with the French Generals’ policies of mass extermination as well as sadistic torture and ended with Haitian General Dessalines decision to execute most of the remaining French on the island in 1804.Footnote 46 The Haitian Revolution’s outcome served as a master fear for the consequences of abolition, and white Southerners repeatedly referenced Haiti’s outcome in discussions over emancipation.Footnote 47 White Americans, for their part, turned toward various remedies for this perceived existential threat. Many white Americans, particularly in the North, sought Black resettlement schemes to export freed Black Americans outside the United States.Footnote 48 Prominent Southerners, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Randolph, played a role in founding the American Colonization Society. They were in part motivated by fears of the Haitian Revolution’s replay. “If something is not done,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1797 about Haiti, “and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children. […] The revolutionary storm, now sweeping the globe, will be upon us […].”Footnote 49
In the Antebellum South, proslavery forces were less fond of Black resettlement (and emancipation in general), since Black Americans were seen as a source of labor-power. Instead, white Southerners developed extensive legal and state mechanisms for policing enslaved people. The key institution that should command our attention is the slave patrol, since Klan members and their victims often saw the K.K.K. as continuous with earlier slave patrols. Slave patrols were organizations specifically tasked with controlling enslaved labor, and they were particularly active following the perceived threat of slave rebellions. As Sally Hadden notes, “patrols were originally designed to prevent or respond to the worst scenarios slave owners could imagine: slaves free to murder their masters or to run away without impediment.”Footnote 50
Patrollers could enter the premises of a plantation at their discretion, and they freely indulged their violent proclivities. Like the later Klan, slave patrols played a role in white social cohesion. According to observers at the time, they united white Americans regardless of class around violence and racism. Harriet Jacobs recounts how after the Nat Turner Rebellion (1831) the patrols “were a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority […]. At night, they formed themselves into patrol bands and went wherever they chose among the colored people, acting out their brutal will.”Footnote 51 In the years leading up to the Civil War, as well as its first year, patrollers’ numbers and duties expanded as Southern society was wracked by internal social tensions.Footnote 52
Colonial racism in the U.S. meant that there were a host of harbingers for the Klan and fascist-style paramilitaries. However, there were no exact analogs, though it is impossible to conclusively establish that point in an article. The most important rupture between the Klan and previous vigilante social movements has to do these movements’ relationship to the colonial state. Across settler societies globally, colonial states supported—either tacitly or explicitly—non-state vigilantism to pursue policies such as labor control or violent territorial conquest. As a consequence, during the Antebellum period, the state’s de jure protection of slavery and white power precluded a definite rationale for an organization like the Ku Klux Klan. There was no clear reason for white supremacist paramilitary groups to try to seize the state and restore labor discipline, since the colonial state remained an ally. With Reconstruction, the state’s protection of proslavery goals legally terminated. Like European fascists facing defeated post-WWI governments or socialists in power, the Klan saw the state as a threat and turned against it.Footnote 53
We can also see broad hints of the exclusionary racism that defined fascist behavior in the Antebellum period, though nothing identical with the Klan or fascism. The Know Nothing Party—an anti-immigrant political party during the 1850s—espoused a racial conspiracy based on Anti-Catholic prejudice, which prompts comparisons to later fascist anti-Semitism.Footnote 54 These political parties, however, lacked the paramilitary manifestations of the Klan. Moreover, in the Antebellum South, settler vigilante Anti-Black racism (such as the slave patrol) or anti-Indigenous violence (such as settler violence) was common. Yet they lacked important aspects of Klan behavior, such as the indiscriminate anti-Black eliminationist violence characteristic of the K.K.K. In the Antebellum period, there were countervailing incentives against murdering enslaved people at scale—and especially the sorts of massacres perpetrated by the Klan—since they were valued for their labor-power, and planters viewed them as resources. These incentives were not absolute; routine violence was the norm in slavery, and enslaved people were murdered. But the widespread practice of lynching was a post-emancipation development; in slavery, the lynching of enslaved people was comparatively infrequent.Footnote 55 The Klan was a break from past racist movements, since its combination of war, popular mobilization, and racist revolution previewed an early form of fascism.
1.3. Colonial racism and fascism
Why did the settler institutions of the American South engender an early preview of fascism? To my knowledge, there is no direct connection historically between the first Klan and later fascists; I have found no evidence that European fascists directly looked to the Reconstruction-era Klan as a historical model. At the most general level, if we grant that interwar fascism represented an attempt to import colonialism into the European context, then in the nineteenth-century United States, there was no importing colonialism: it already was part of an American empire. In the post-Bellum South, settler politics of peoplehood, racism, and non-state violence, fuelled by war, presaged fascism.
We tend to see fascism and colonial racism as conjoined, since fascist racial ideology and tactics represented, often quite literally, a form of colonialism turned inward against domestic enemies. Fascists exploited some of the precise mechanisms—segregation, forced population transfers, or eventually genocide—staged in the colonies. As Alberto Toscano sums up the view: “German Nazism and their European kin were presaged and prepared by the dispossession and exploitation of ‘lesser breeds without the Law’ wrought by settler-colonialism, chattel slavery, and intra-European racial capitalism (or internal colonialism).”Footnote 56 We find these arguments in the writings of scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, George Padmore, and Aimé Césaire.Footnote 57 More recently, a large literature shows how European fascism was part of an international learning process between racial states, where techniques of racial control were practiced in one context and adopted in others.Footnote 58
After WWI, nationalist Germans and Italians felt that they had failed to gain empires comparable to the Americans, French, or British, and that their losses in WWI were partly to blame for that deficit. Fascist states searched for Lebensraum or Spazio Vitale, and they turned inward to Europe, the Mediterranean, and Northern Africa for territory.Footnote 59 The United States’ racial order loomed large as a model in the case of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler famously compared the German search for Lebensraum with the American West. He stated that the Volga would be the Nazis’ Mississippi—comparing the Jacksonian-era Indigenous genocide to Operation Barbarossa—and claimed that “here in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.”Footnote 60 Or as he elsewhere put it:
There is only one possible kind of revolution, and it is not economic or political or social, but racial […] All revolutions—and I have studied them all—have been racial. Your ideas of foreign policy are false because you have no racial knowledge. Didn’t you declare openly for the Indian independence movement when it was obviously a rebellion of the inferior Hindu race against the superior Anglo-Nordic? The Nordic race has the right to dominate the world, and that right will be the guiding principle of our foreign policy.Footnote 61
White Southerners had their own vision for racial revolution, though forged in the social relations of chattel slavery: the race war. Reconstruction and emancipation, in their mind, raised the specter of race war at home. “The true ground of defence [for slavery],” wrote Edward Pollard in 1868, the journalist who coined the term “Lost Cause,” “was as a barrier against a contention and war of races. The greatest value of Slavery was as such a barrier.”Footnote 62 These fears of an imminent race war hinted at the changes in planter ideology wrought by emancipation. Formal self-ownership attenuated the minimal countervailing force against indiscriminate murder, since Black Americans no longer represented a resource but a threat, at least in the white mind.Footnote 63
Emancipation dislodged white Southerners from state control and unmoored slaveholder ideology from the limited incentives against indiscriminate killing. As Carl Schurz put it at the time, “the pecuniary value which the individual negro formerly represented having disappeared, the maiming and killing of colored men seems to be looked upon by many as one of those venial offenses which must be forgiven to the outraged feelings of a wronged and robbed people.”Footnote 64 In response to the perceived humiliation of loss and fears of insurrection, a faction of white Southerners indulged these more murderous aspects of Antebellum racism; they sought their own racial revolution. “For us,” wrote one white Southerner, “the war was not ended. We had met the enemy in the field and lost our fight, but now we were threatened with a servile war, a war in which the negro savage backed by the U.S. and the intelligent white scoundrel as his leader was our enemy.”Footnote 65 With white Southerners no longer in unquestioned control of state power, paramilitary organizations such as the K.K.K. fought their own pre-emptive race war for white supremacy.
2. The Ku Klux Klan
2.1. The founding of the Klan
We have good evidence that an organization called “the Ku Klux Klan” was started by a group of six former Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee sometime in 1866.Footnote 66 According to the group’s members, the organization was started for fun by desultory veterans searching for amusement. All six were middle-class professionals, ranging from their late to early thirties, and three were lawyers. The Klan began as a response to the governorship of William Brownlow, who enfranchised Black men in 1867 and disenfranchised Confederate veterans. “We shall try,” stated the Pulaski Citizen, an early Klan booster, in 1867, “to stir our young men up to organize a dramatic club, such as one we were proud of when the war cut short our amusements.”Footnote 67 Eventually, Ku Kluxes spread into every former Confederate state and Kentucky, and Klan-like groups unleashed a wave of violence—including political assassinations, torture, labor discipline, rape, and mass killing—aimed at unseating the Republican Party and attacking Black autonomy.Footnote 68
Historically, observers tended to think of the Reconstruction-era Klan as a cohesive political movement started in Pulaski and later led by the former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Little evidence directly vindicates this picture. Klans were organized into “dens,” but there was no single Klan organization or central authority. The mechanism behind the Klan’s spread was the media: locals read accounts of the Klan, initiated local dens, and copied tactics.Footnote 69 A few of the Klan’s founders were involved with the Pulaski Citizen, a local newspaper, which popularized the organization in its fledgling stage. Forrest was credited as the head of the Klan and presented himself to the press, albeit indirectly, as the Klan’s leader, but there is no conclusive evidence that he was.Footnote 70 Observers used the term “Klan” to describe other paramilitary groups that mirrored Klan-style activity. Contemporaries sometimes broadly described any white violence or paramilitary activity as the product of the Klan—even though any such correlation might not have existed—inflating the group’s cohesiveness.
This makes it difficult to identify what counts as “the Klan,” but I use the term to describe what observers typically described as the Klan—paramilitaries during the 1866–1872 period. There was also a larger ecosystem of “Southern paramilitaries”—the term I use to describe the broader umbrella of Klan-like paramilitaries during Reconstruction—sharing a range of tactics and objectives. The distinction between the two is less one of substance than style. Between 1866 and 1872, Klan-style tactics (such as costumes or night riding) had the most use during the federal military occupation, when there were strong incentives to remain covert during the organization’s insurgency phase.Footnote 71 This was also when there were historical documents produced by Klan members and self-identified Klan groups. The 1870s saw a successor generation of Southern paramilitaries—such as the Red Shirts in the Carolinas and the White League in Louisiana—who engaged in even larger street battles and were less concerned with hiding their identities after the federal government’s retreat.Footnote 72 Moreover, during the 1890s, another generation of Southern paramilitaries emerged in response to populist movements and threats of civil rights enforcement from the federal government.Footnote 73 Self-described Klan groups and their specific tactics faded by the early 1870s, but Southern paramilitary violence was a force until at least the 1890s.
2.2. Total war and labor revolt
What made the affinity between the Klan and fascism deeper than just the presence of extreme racism was that the Reconstruction period saw social conditions comparable to interwar Europe. First, the experience of total war has a counterpart in the Reconstruction-era South, where nearly the overwhelming majority of able-bodied adult males served in the Confederate Army. Like interwar fascist parties, veterans also started the Klan, and the organization’s violence replicated military culture.
Along with a penchant for violence, Klansmen symbolized war by presenting themselves as the ghosts of the Confederate dead. As an anonymous letter to the editor in Tuscaloosa’s Independent Monitor—edited by Ryland Randolph, a violent den leader, veteran, and prominent Klan publicist—wrote:
We have a regularly organized body of confederate ghosts here, whose bodies were deposited in shallow graves on the battlefields around Richmond and elsewhere. These hobgoblins appear in our midst very mysteriously, and vamose [sic] equally so. Their object seems to be revenge, and a riddance from earth to all those white and black human impurities which, have, since the surrender, been annoying their brethren at the South.Footnote 74
By donning robes and roaming the night, Klansmen courted the comparison to the returning ghosts of soldiers. They also developed “a small repertoire of practical jokes” to intimidate African Americans, some of which harped on this theme.Footnote 75 According to one common trick, before his victim, a Klansman would say he had not drunk since his death at Antietam. He would then drink an enormous amount of water which flowed into a bag in his chest.Footnote 76 Similar to fascists in interwar Europe, some Klan members sought to assume the symbolism of death and war.
This theme of regeneration through martial violence is something that recurs in Klan documents, and this highlights a further parallel between the ideology of fascist movements and the Klan. Fascists’ interest in martial virtues also fit with a sometimes-nihilistic bent that did not seek redemption by restoring a lost past, but salvation through accelerating social, political, and technological change. Filippo Marinetti, a pioneer of both futurism and fascism, declared how “the splendor of the world has been enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed,” and went on to claim futurism’s desire to destroy museums, libraries, moralism, and feminism.Footnote 77 The Klan was similarly founded by a group of soldiers searching for meaningful pursuits in the aftermath of defeat. They initially saw the Klan as a social club that could provide for diversion through violence.
We have few sources about the Klan’s founding, but the most extensive source for the Klan’s beginnings is an 1884 book The Ku Klux Klan: Its Founding, Origin, and Development. John C. Lester, one of the Klan’s founders, wrote the book with D.L. Wilson (reportedly not a Klan member but familiar with them).Footnote 78 Published more than two decades after the Klan’s decline, the book is highly dubious as a factual source, but it offers insight into the Klan founders’ ideology. What is striking about the book is its amoral, even sybaritic, tone. The narrative also stands out for a total lack of nostalgia. The book does not mention the terms slavery, Confederacy, or the plantation. Instead, in Lester’s retrospective account, the Klan was the product of restlessness:
When the war ended, the young men of Pulaski, who had escaped death on the battlefield, returned home and passed through a period of enforced inactivity. In some respects it was more trying than the ordeal of war which lay behind them. The reaction which followed the excitement of army scenes and service was intense. There was nothing to relieve it. They could not engage at once in business or professional pursuits. […] There was a total lack of amusements and social diversions which prevail wherever society is in a normal condition.Footnote 79
As Elaine Frantz Parsons points out, the “description of the nature of Ku Klux founders’ motivations is jarring in that it is distinctively modern.”Footnote 80 There is no attempt to recover a lost past but a sense of disorientation and anxiety. The suggestion that the founders could not engage in “professional pursuits” is “not the language of the plantation-house parlor” or one that “evoked plantation culture.”Footnote 81 For Lester and Wilson, “the object of all this was amusement—‘only this, and nothing more.’ A few young men debarred for the time by circumstances or professional pursuits, and deprived of the ordinary diversions of social life, were seeking in this way to amuse and employ themselves.”Footnote 82 Violence was the cure for post-demobilization ennui.
Second, Reconstruction and the interwar period share a context defined by democratization and working-class politicization. Reconstruction did not possess a large socialist movement, but it did see a labor revolt and attempts at economic redistribution. As is well known, enslaved workers fled from plantations during the Civil War, which ultimately facilitated changing the course of Lincoln’s policy in Washington and took plantation slavery off the table. As Du Bois argued, this represented a general strike against the plantation system.Footnote 83 What is more, Congressional Reconstruction saw Black Americans ascend to elected office in local, state, and federal institutions. Interwar socialist parties presented a politicized working class, and enslaved people’s self-assertion presented a comparable threat to the established order—a vision of a class hierarchy turned upside down.
Many northern abolitionists and freed people also sought economic redistribution. Enslaved people, for their part, typically sought a form of independent proprietorship, which was itself a residue of slavery’s “natural economy.”Footnote 84 White Southern capitalists feared the impacts of Black economic autonomy on their family wealth, and they were concerned that access to non-market means of life would remove the compulsion to work for white agriculturalists.Footnote 85 More broadly, the federal government, long friendly to the basic aims of slaveholders during the Antebellum period, also presented new threats of redistribution, since many radical abolitionists tried to use the Freedman’s Bureau to provide economic and civil rights to Black Americans.Footnote 86 These more radical policies never came to fruition—in part because of the Klan’s efforts—but the attempt suggested that state power could no longer be taken for granted as an ally of white supremacy.
2.3. Behaviors: political revolution and working-class intimidation
With new forms of African American political power—or at least the threat of it—Southern paramilitaries continued the war for white supremacy. Fascist movements and the Klan shared political behaviors: they intimidated the working class and the political expressions of its power. If interwar European fascists sought to crush worker and socialist organizations, the Klan sought to intimidate Black workers—people who were, because of their racial status, seen as proletarian laborers.
The typical Klan tactic was the patrol. Klansmen patrolled at night, often on horseback, and visited the cabins of freed people and white republicans. Groups could range from a handful of riders to fifty. Armed with clubs, revolvers, knives, lashes, and rifles, Klansmen engaged in a variety of violent tactics that often involved whipping Black Americans, rape, theatrical violence, and execution.Footnote 87 “Under ordinary circumstances such devices are unjustifiable,” opined Lester and Wilson. “But in the peculiar state of things then existing they served a good purpose. It was not only better to deter the negroes from theft and utter lawlessness in this way […] but it was the only way, at this time, by which they could be controlled.”Footnote 88 There was a particular pre-Civil War vigilante institution that the Klan replaced: the slave patrol. As Booker T. Washington wrote:
[The Klan] corresponded somewhat to the “patrollers” of whom I used to hear a great deal during the days of slavery, when I was a small boy. The “patrollers” were bands of white men—usually young men—who were organized largely for the purpose of regulating the conduct of the slaves at night in such matters as preventing the slaves from going from one plantation to another without passes, and for preventing them from holding any kind of meetings without permission and without the presence at these meetings of at least one white man. Like the “patrollers” the “Ku Klux” operated almost wholly at night.Footnote 89
Like patrollers, the Klan rode horses, often at night, and drew members from all social classes. The Klan was distinct from the slave patrol, since it was a non-state mechanism of discipline designed to operate when white supremacy was impugned at the federal and local levels. The Reconstruction amendments assailed slavery’s de jure status and ushered in new voting rights, which hindered property owners’ ability to use state governments to control freed people. Black Americans, now enfranchised, could elect sympathetic local officials who would uphold their rights.Footnote 90 Thus, the Klan operated at the local and state levels to restore Black subordination in two important ways.
First, Klan activity attempted to restore labor discipline. Eric Foner writes that “in a sense, the Klan sought to take the place of both the departed personal authority of the master and the labor control function the Reconstruction state had abandoned.”Footnote 91 Landowners reportedly invited Klansmen to lash Black workers, and the Klan’s conventional target—the sharecropper’s cabin—highlights the central role of labor regulation. As one sharecropper testified to the Congressional Committee, “They came along and called me up when I was in bed asleep. I got up and went out of the door. But the time I went out of the door, they presented pistols in my face and told me I was not attending to my crop good. I told them I was. They said I was not. They asked me if I voted. […] He told me he was obliged to give me a few, and he hit me fifteen pretty keen, pretty hard.”Footnote 92
Second, a central aim of Klan violence was political: the destruction of the Republican Party in state elections. They sought to restore white supremacist power within the state, and Klan violence surged before state and local elections. “By the time another election rolls around,” stated Randolph in 1869, “the negro element of Tuscaloosa will not vote, even.”Footnote 93 By pursuing voter intimidation, assassination, and attacking institutions of Black autonomy, the Klan violence often went beyond sporadic killing. We do not have accurate records of the Klan’s total casualty rate (estimates range from the hundreds to tens of thousands) or even the casualties from particular instances of mass violence.Footnote 94 But some events displayed the paramilitaries’ capacity for mass killing, such as the Colfax, Louisiana Massacre (1873), and the Hamburg, South Carolina Massacre (1876). Perhaps the most notorious example of Reconstruction violence was the Opelousas Massacre (1868), where the Knights of the White Camelia hunted down Republicans over a few days, with the Democratic Press estimating around a hundred casualties.Footnote 95
To carry out this insurgency, both the Klan and fascist movements attempted to create a non-state authority parallel to existing political institutions, what Klansmen often called an “Invisible Empire.” These designs are contained in what is called “the Prescript,” which is a document detailing a sort of constitution for the Klan. The Prescript is core to Klan mythology, but the sources attesting to its progeny are inconclusive.Footnote 96 The authors of the document, however, expressed one possible self-understanding behind the Klan; they sought more than community self-defense, but an alternative authority to the state with an immense bureaucracy. As Parsons writes, “the Ku-Klux who produced the Prescript were looking to transform their local group into an expansive modern bureaucracy.”Footnote 97 The Klan, according to the document, was headed by a Grand Dragon and had descending levels of authority. The Prescript partitioned the Invisible Empire into “departments,” “realms,” and “dens,” and it prescribed rules and duties: officers would “communicate and receive reports” or receive “other such information [the officer] may deem expedient to impart.”Footnote 98 The Klan never had such coherence, but these aspirations are illustrative. Analogous to later fascists, the K.K.K. sought a non-state authority that could serve as an agent for revolution.
3. Early fascism
The K.K.K.’s similarities to fascist behavior underscore an important insight about colonial racism and fascism. Colonial racism not only harbored the antecedents to fascism in a general sense, that is, in the sense of providing models of racial control or genocide. Colonial racism under conditions of war and labor revolt furnished a social movement defined by a mode of political behavior very proximate to fascism. This raises the basic question of how the Klan’s politics should be characterized, given its surprising affinities with fascism. I would propose to describe the Klan as “early fascism,” since it was early in two senses: it was early in the sense of being both before the rise of interwar fascism, and also the Klan was early in the sense of never moving beyond the founding stage. The Klan was similar to later fascist movements, though not identical with them, because of its location within an antecedent type of colonial racism. Hence the term “early fascism,” for it captures the anachronistic character of the Klan’s fascist qualities.
The notion of early fascism contextualizes many of the apparent, though not substantive, discrepancies between the Klan and interwar fascism. For example, scholars might object that certain ideological differences between the Klan and fascism—such as the lack of any corporatist economic program—imply that the Klan is fundamentally a different sort of social movement. The notion of early fascism suggests why this line of reasoning is ultimately misleading. As already indicated, we tend to think about fascism less as a strict set of ideological commitments but as a political behavior. And since the Klan was an outgrowth of a much earlier kind of colonial racism, the organization’s ideology and goals were simply distinct. There was no specifically anti-socialist element to the Klan, no detailed Klan pamphlets about corporatist theories of class harmony, and no equivalent to the sort of “reactionary modernism” that existed, at least, during the Weimar Republic.Footnote 99 Importantly, even though German and Italian fascists pursued genocide after assuming power, the violence perpetrated by the Klan and interwar fascists during their founding stages was comparable. The more extreme rhetoric of some Klan boosters—as well as the large death toll of massacres such as Opelousas (1868), numbering into the hundreds—indicated hints of eliminationist racism.Footnote 100
Furthermore, the Klan was also early in the specific sense of having never moved beyond the founding stage. There have been a host of fascist movements historically, yet few ascended to any level of consolidated political power. “To write of fascism in Scandinavia, Britain, the Low Countries, or even France,” as Paxton writes, “is necessarily to write of movements that never developed beyond founding a newspaper, staging some demonstrations, speaking on street corners.”Footnote 101 While the Klan was politically far more consequential than a movement that staged some demonstrations, Ku-Kluxes remained decentralized and did not go further than seeking control of state governments.
The most significant contrast between the Klan and interwar fascism, which is not simply a function of historical distance, is the fact that Southern paramilitaries and the Klan were less pre-occupied with unseating traditional white Southern elites.Footnote 102 There was not a “Ku Klux Klan” party in the sense of a party that ran for elections, and Southern paramilitaries did not search for solutions outside partisan lines. This is a contrast with fascists in Italy and Germany, who sought to install separate political parties and replace conservative elites, despite collaborating with them at crucial junctures. Such a tactical contrast is important, since it sheds light on the Klan’s relationship to fascism as a more general phenomenon. As becomes clear, the K.K.K. is more aligned with the abortive history of fascist movements in general, though it contrasts with some prominent fascist movements.
Many fascists, to borrow Griffin’s phraseology, could not allow themselves “to linger on a bed of contentment,” since their nemesis was “the normality of human society in equilibrium.”Footnote 103 This characterization most accurately applies to Italian and German interwar fascists, since they sought to substitute existing political elites with their own revolutionary personnel. While they collaborated with conservative elites, the collaboration was less symbiotic, and Italian and German fascists claimed to “transcend” existing party factions.Footnote 104 As Robert Paxton writes, “to search for new political solutions along antisocialist and nonliberal lines placed one squarely within the ‘magnetic field’ of fascism at its most successful moment.”Footnote 105 Similar characterizations apply to the Klan’s most proximate analog in the current U.S. context, the modern white power movement. It is organized around the fantasies of The Turner Diaries, which depicts an organization called “the Order” overthrowing the federal government, killing the globe’s non-white population and Jews with nuclear weapons, and creating a new white utopia.Footnote 106
It suffices to say that the Klan’s modus operandi was distinct, since we do not see grander ambitions beyond state-level partisan control and Black economic, social, and cultural dependency.Footnote 107 Ultimately, Klan boosters saw the K.K.K. as a temporary instrument for restoring order, racial hierarchy, and the Democratic Party’s power.Footnote 108 “By degrees they will cease to be,” as Ryland Randolph wrote about the Klan in 1871, “from the fact that the necessity which created them no longer exists. […] Democratic victory has dissipated that recklessness that long continued Radical oppression and ignited and kept burning in the hearts of the Southern people […] Radical defeat has so cowed the negroes and their white skinned leaders, that they have been comparatively quiet since their misfortune.”Footnote 109 By 1870, the Democratic Party had achieved control of the state legislature and the governor’s house in Alabama, Randolph’s home state.Footnote 110 More broadly, the Klan’s heyday was over by mid-1871 and concluded by 1872.Footnote 111 Klan boosters seemed contented with the equilibrium of Democratic Party control, and “the Ku-Klux,” as an article published in Randolph’s Monitor put it, “vanished as mysteriously and noiselessly as it appeared.”Footnote 112
To be sure, one factor behind the Klan’s retreat was external to the organization, since in 1871 the K.K.K. faced the Klan Acts and suppression by the federal government.Footnote 113 More recent scholarship argues that it is easy to exaggerate the Klan Acts’ role in eliminating the K.K.K. and suggests that Southern paramilitarism changed in style, though not substance, after 1872.Footnote 114 In states that were not under Democratic control by 1872—notably South Carolina and Louisiana—paramilitary activity often continued, and contemporaries recognized that Southern paramilitaries adopted new tactics. “These Ku Klux Klans,” as one South Carolina observer put it in 1876, “have reorganized themselves under the names of rifle clubs and have entered upon and intend to pursue the purposes and general plans of 1871 and 1872 of the old organizations.”Footnote 115 Louisiana and South Carolina saw open street battles by a new generation of emboldened paramilitaries during the elections leading up to the Compromise of 1877. Louisiana’s “White Leagues” fought in the Battle for Liberty Place (1874), while Wade Hampton’s Red Shirts perpetrated a reign of terror during his 1876 gubernatorial campaign in South Carolina.Footnote 116
Ultimately, the Klan’s more finite and partisan self-conception, aimed at control of state governments, aligns with one possible path for fascist behavior. Paxton notes that movements within the orbit of fascism have chosen between policies of normalizing their goals with mainstream party politics or some form of escalation, which could include continuing the insurgency against the state or (after assuming power) ramping up domestic repression and war. Italy and Germany were distinctive in pursuing ongoing insurgency, territorial expansion, and accelerating repression, yet not all fascist parties went down that path. General Francisco Franco in Spain was at certain points plausibly described as fascist, especially given his role in the Spanish Civil War’s violence. Yet he eventually absorbed and neutralized Spain’s fascist party, the Falange, and later relied more on traditional elites and an authoritarian mode of government.Footnote 117
The Klan’s policy of retreat therefore fits with the evolution of fascist behavior, perhaps the typical one. The fact that the Klan did not even aim to transcend the founding stages, failing to pursue goals identical to fascism in Italy, Germany, or The Turner Diaries, makes the Klan more approximate to fascism’s normal case. Though Italian fascism and German Nazism constitute the paradigm cases for studies of fascism, in broader perspective they are aberrations. For fascism, as Griffin puts it, is typically “abortive,” and the fate of fascist movements is normally some form of spontaneous dissolution “out of despair for lack of headway,” merger with another organization, suppression by the state, or co-optation and neutralization by an authoritarian regime.Footnote 118 Fascism in Italy and Germany not only maintained organizational momentum, but were the only fascists who ascended to power outside of wartime reconstruction. The typical course for fascism is that it is abortive, whether due to self-dissolution or external repression.
However, this all raises a key question. Why did the Klan pursue policies of normalization or retreat, often melting away after the Democratic Party had assumed control of state governments? Any attempt to draw out the cause of the differences between interwar fascism and Southern paramilitary violence will be inconclusive, simply due to the variety of factors in play. Yet one contrast with the Post-Bellum South versus interwar Europe is the stability of party politics, and the lack of a political vacuum. From different perspectives, historians of interwar fascism have converged on roughly the same insight—that is, the popularity of paramilitary politics was a function of the “political space” available.Footnote 119 Fascist parties thrived during the perceived collapse of establishment conservative politics and a crisis of state authority in general. In Italy and Germany, fascism as a meaningful political force nearly vanished until it was able to replace existing conservative political parties in rural areas, notably the Po Valley in 1921 and Schleswig-Holstein after 1929.Footnote 120 Later, the crises and political deadlocks wrought by WWI’s aftermath (in Italy) or the Great Depression (in Germany) made possible fascism’s invitation to power by conservative elites. By contrast, a marked feature of post-Bellum politics was the Democratic Party’s durability. It was remarkably capable of making itself synonymous with the cause of white supremacy.
There was not a collapse of the Democratic Party’s legitimacy after the Civil War, and federal party politics stabilized around a consensus that eliminated the threat of Reconstruction’s egalitarian ambitions. As Du Bois argued, the shifting basis of party politics consolidated behind “the counterrevolution of property:” Northern finance capital and white planters could readily agree on opening the South to market expansion, resurrecting the agricultural economy, and keeping Black workers in economic dependency to facilitate capital accumulation.Footnote 121 The thing that made the Klan “necessary” in the first place—labor revolt—was no longer on the table, and after 1877 the Democratic Party stood as the guardian of the South’s consolidating Herrenvolk democracy.Footnote 122
In terms of the broader arc of paramilitary violence, what contributed to the ultimate decline of Southern paramilitaries, as John W. Cell speculates, was their co-optation by Jim Crow during the 1890s. The pioneers of the New South enshrined constitutional disenfranchisement and de jure segregation to bring law and order; they were the vanguards of what they saw as an orderly vision of white supremacy and attempted to pre-empt paramilitary violence.Footnote 123 Jim Crow made the systematically extra-legal ways of enforcing the Democratic Party’s control—whether through lynching or paramilitarism—less rational (though lynching continued throughout Jim Crow). An empirical study vindicates that as Jim Crow ascended during the 1890s, incidents of lynching declined, since constitutional disenfranchisement replaced informal means of voter suppression—means that are inherently costly and not guaranteed to be effective.Footnote 124 This was even evident to Southern paramilitaries at the time. As Alfred Moore Waddell stated, a former leader in the Wilmington Massacre (1898) and later Mayor:
I am here not to philosophize, or to discuss abstractions, but to tell what I know from observation and experience about unrestricted Negro suffrage, and I unhesitatingly say that it is disastrous to good government and to the peace and welfare of society […]. How shall [suffrage] be restricted? Fraud and shot guns have no place in this argument. Legal method only, and such as will be just because they will best serve the commonwealth, are to be considered.Footnote 125
Waddell is implying that the paramilitary violence, which he supported earlier, was excessive (“fraud and shotguns…”).Footnote 126 He instead sought regularized disenfranchisement. North Carolina’s 1900 constitutional amendment legally enshrined that ambition, since it passed literacy tests and poll taxes tailored to disenfranchise African Americans. Waddell’s statement reflects the broader insights of historians: Jim Crow brought order to Southern politics, since legal mechanisms achieved what shotguns had attempted earlier.
In sum, Southern paramilitaries prefigured twentieth-century fascism. The fact that they failed to resemble exactly fully-fledged fascism in Italy and Germany requires no special explanation. Southern paramilitaries’ lack of interest in transcending the founding stage, whatever the precise reason, approximates more closely the history of fascist movements in general. What does require special explanation, however, are the Klan’s profound affinities with interwar Europe.
4. Conclusion: late fascism
My analysis has implications for debates over home-grown varieties of American racism, including in the present. In what was called the “fascism debate”—the debate about whether American authoritarian-populism was fascist—observers often discussed at length how much the Trump administration measured up to interwar Europe.Footnote 127 As Dylan Riley writes, “the classical fascisms that took shape in Italy and Germany would be inconceivable without the recent and interlinked experiments of inter-imperial warfare and revolutionary-socialist uprising, unfolding in a context of massive excessive productive capacity, on a world-scale.”Footnote 128 It is perhaps true that fascism’s road to power in Italy and Germany (the “classic fascisms”) was inconceivable without the Great Depression. But that asserts a tautologous truth. If fascism is defined by interwar Italy and Germany, then the concept is definitionally yoked to those cases—cases that were ultimately quite unusual.
The idea of the Klan as early fascism implies a more transnational perspective, where the Klan and fascism are tethered to a history of colonial racism. Granted, my argument hinges on broad similarities between the interwar period and Reconstruction, namely total war and labor revolt. This was what made the Klan a form of early fascism, not just another racist social movement. Yet the key takeaway is that we cannot take for granted features of interwar Europe—whether socialism or late inter-imperial competition—as fascism’s transhistorical defining markers or preconditions. We can adopt a transnational perspective on fascism, and certain racist social movements in the U.S. and post-fascist European parties today have important affinities. If colonial racism furnished an early preview of fascism, many American and European racist movements have crafted a “late fascism” adapted to a post-civil rights and post-colonial context.Footnote 129
Many observers have noted that since the 1980s, a new group of paramilitary fascists (more oriented around terrorism) and moderated heirs to fascism (such as the Movimento Social Italiano and its successors in Italy, or the Front national in France) have proliferated. For the most part, scholars describe these moderated successors to fascism as part of the “radical right” or post-fascism, since they no longer subscribe to key aspects of the fascist program and even try to distance themselves from it.Footnote 130 Post-fascism was the self-description of Gianfranco Fini, the leader of the Alleanza Nationale, who said in 1994 that “nobody can ask us to deny our past, to break a continuity that is rooted at the base of our party” but “like all Italians, we too are post-fascists.”Footnote 131 Like interwar fascism, the radical right or post-fascist right was intertwined with colonial racism. Diethelm Prowe observes that “aside from Old-anti-Semite traditions, interwar fascism had taken its racialist cues from colonial conquest and the oppressive practice of imperial rule. […] In contrast, the new radical right has absorbed its racism from the racial interactions of decolonization,” especially anti-colonial wars and immigration from former colonies.Footnote 132
The consensus view is that the more fascist political parties normalize, the greater their popularity. There are incentives to avoid the suspicion that one is resurrecting interwar fascism, since it is no secret that the movement ended in self-destruction and genocide.Footnote 133 The attempt to craft moderated post-fascist parties suggests that they recognize the liability. The United States is distinct from Europe, since the lineages are less definite: there are not major political parties directly descended from self-described interwar fascists. Yet the American white power movement is a very close analog to interwar fascism and the K.K.K. There are also social movements that approximate analogs to European post-fascism; comparable figures include David Duke or the Paleoconservatives. The Paleoconservatives were a group of anti-immigrant and anti-free trade conservatives who were cast out of establishment conservatism because of their sometimes-open white supremacy.Footnote 134 Analogous to post-fascist parties’ relationship to decolonization, the Paleoconservatives were spawned by opposition to the civil rights movement. They were a relic of an older, Southern conservatism; Paleoconservatives were often far more comfortable with outright nostalgia for Jim Crow and flatly rejecting the civil rights movement’s legacy.Footnote 135
The deeper similarity between Duke, the Paleoconservatives, and European post-fascism is the selective accommodation to party politics and norms against open expressions of white supremacy. The Paleoconservatives, maybe paradoxically, looked toward extreme neo-Nazi movements, on the one hand, and sought to repackage that extreme racism, on the other. Duke, for his part, was a former Klansman who facilitated the “Nazification” of the Klan and helped consolidate the white power movement.Footnote 136 But he later attempted to moderate his rhetoric (not always especially successfully) and ran as a mainstream Republican, becoming a Representative in Louisiana’s state legislature. The most well-known Paleoconservative was Patrick Buchanan, while Samuel Francis, a self-described “fascist,” remains the philosopher king of the American white supremacist right.Footnote 137 Like European post-fascists, the Paleoconservatives embraced multiple pasts to create a sheen of plausible deniability. They defended states’ rights, Confederate nostalgia, or railed against bussing.Footnote 138 Yet with varying degrees of explicitness, they were tempted by fascist politics; Buchanan wrote that he endorsed the “blood-and-soil idea of the nation,” which is striking given the term’s origins in Nazi Germany.Footnote 139 Buchanan and Francis extolled Duke as a model for what Francis called a new “respectable racism.”Footnote 140
The Paleoconservatives were sidelined in part because of their open anti-Semitism, which scandalized many donors and cut them off from funding.Footnote 141 Today, certain expressions of white supremacy remain “contestable,” as Daniel Hosang and Joseph Lowndes put it, and in the United States, a post-civil rights “norm of equality” militates against unvarnished, segregationist-style racism.Footnote 142 The rise of rabid anti-Semites such as Nick Fuentes indicates profound cracks in that post-civil rights norm. It is unlikely that those barriers were ever ironclad. Modern warfare, colonial racism, and anti-labor politics—the things that made fascism possible in its early and interwar iterations—show little sign, at least right now, of abating. As the Judge, the notorious sadist of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, said: “it makes no difference what men think of war,” for “war endures.”Footnote 143
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Elaine Frantz Parsons, Michael Weaver, Bruce Baum, Paul Frymer, Stephen Macedo, Jan-Werner Müller, Wayne Wapeemukwa, and the audience at U.B.C.’s Political Theory Colloquium, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for feedback and suggestions.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Funding statement
The author thanks Princeton University’s Social Sciences Prize Fellowship, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for financial support while writing the article.
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