The sociologist Rory McVeigh has built up a considerable reputation with his studies of the Klan. This book adds to that reputation. His aim is to point out that the recent trend for regional studies of the Klan only goes so far in explaining why “Klankraft” attracted between 4 and 10 million members in the mid-1920s, depending on whose figures you use. Through a variety of sociological theories which explain the success of right-wing movements, McVeigh concludes that the Klan's triumph was a complex mix of all the socioeconomic reasons normally ascribed, added to the manipulative, power-greedy leadership preying on a gullible membership. So far, little new.
Where McVeigh is new is in his national approach. By analyzing the Klan's national paper – the Imperial Nighthawk – he shows how the national leadership in Atlanta “stumbled upon a way of talking … that appealed to many native-born white Protestant Americans during this specific historical moment” (50). The book examines the Nighthawk's response to the decade's huge, but unevenly distributed, economic growth. The threats to existing elites presented by the shift to unskilled labour, the growing use of ethnic minorities and women, and a national agricultural depression enabled Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans to position the Klan firmly in the middle ground. They fed his “American way” that rejected capital's “mercenary motives … importing 5 and 10-cent citizenship” (64) as well as the proletariat's flirtations with communism.
In a sophisticated analysis McVeigh shows how the Klan assimilated the lessons of populism and progressivism, as well as concurrent European fascism. He shows how the Klan took machine politics out of the individual city and utilized it in a national context, justifying this as the only way to halt the devaluation of the vote to the “real American” (100). The Klan achieved the necessary cohesion via targeted enemies. These were not the foes of the Reconstruction Klan: blacks and Republicans. They were more the bogeymen of the populists and nativists: Catholics, radicals and immigrants. McVeigh's Klan was not simply based on hatred, it sought allies – the nation's majority ethnic, religious and racial groups. This Klan's rhetoric especially appealed to the newly enfranchised American women with their campaigns over the sanctity of marriage, the protection of state education and the evils of booze.
However, ultimately, as a national organization, the Klan failed, and here McVeigh disagrees with the prevailing explanations for this failure. He rejects the theories of Richard Hofstadter, David Chalmers and Kenneth Jackson in particular, who argued that the Klan withered because it was no longer relevant to much of its grassroots support. He rejects the explanations of Wyn Craig Wade (although without mentioning him in this context) that the Klan sank because it attracted a populace destined for decline. A great part of these rejections stem from his contention that the national Klan set agendas, rather than following them, and that the organization's membership was not drawn from the lower levels but was as diverse as US society itself. Of themselves these are not novel conclusions, but his statistical evidence and lucid arguments make them compelling for his picture of a national Klan. Whether you agree or not, you need to read it.
