Elaine Frantz Parsons's brilliant new book challenges conventions about the Ku Klux Klan's origins and enriches our understandings of white supremacy after the American Civil War.

Although the South is often seen as an anomaly in U.S. race relations, recent research reveals a nationwide commitment to preserving white supremacy that both predated and outlived the Civil War. The Klan was just one manifestation of a broader anxiety about slave emancipation. And yet, the group's success in using collective violence and a slick campaign to restore the antebellum racial order, while facilitating postwar reconciliation among white Americans who feared racial equality, reflects the group's dark political genius.

What we know about the Klan, Parsons writes, comes from “three-way collaborations among attackers who created, and largely controlled the situations to be described; victims who experienced the attacks and shaped them into coherent narratives; and elites taking testimony, who encouraged certain narratives while silencing, invalidating, and manipulating others” (109–10). Unraveling these threads and tracing the production and reproduction of narratives about Ku-Klux activities, Parsons identifies two Klans—one made of real men, who tried to harness frustration with Confederate defeat by forming a social club, and another made of disparate people who drew various meanings and inspirations from the group's activities. Revealing how the two converged to foster a response to a world upended by slavery's end, Parsons rewrites the history of the Klan's ascent to national prominence.

Starting with the group's rise in Pulaski, Tennessee, Parsons illuminates the ways white Southern resentment toward the federal government and free/d African Americans marshaled aggrieved whites to action. Close attention to Ku-Klux organizers reveals they were not provincial, broke men hailing from the Deep South; they were middling Border State cosmopolitans who deployed sophisticated frameworks to respond to progressive Reconstruction. They tapped into a well-established white Southern Democratic grievance industry, portraying themselves as brave but oppressed men who needed to defend their interests against encroachments by ambitious blacks and their white Republican allies.

Parsons unpacks the ways original Ku-Klux developed their cultural tropes by pulling from a national popular culture teeming with fully formed meanings about race, manhood, and membership in the American family. Klansmen drew on older, local traditions of collective violence and organizing social amusements to channel men's restless energies into something productive. Examining the stories that organizers crafted to describe themselves and their activities, Parsons reveals Ku-Klux's need to be seen and understood as mysterious and mighty.

Although the original Klan's initial activities did not seem to include violence, white Southerners’ increasing frustration with the axes of Congressional Reconstruction saw their activities evolve. Collective violence by people claiming to be Ku-Klux emerged in places where Democrats lacked a stronghold and faced an empowered and Republican-backed black leadership corps. Parsons writes that Ku-Klux strikes were “rituals of exclusion” (126) where armed gangs used pain and tried to force their targets to perform inadequacy and “play minstrel caricatures” (101), spelling out “structures of alliance, participation, and exclusion in their postwar communities” (109).

Parsons argues that although Ku-Klux created their identity as dominant, legitimate stakeholders in the post-slavery world and cast their targets as people who accepted their subservient place, understandings and larger white Americans’ acceptance of the Klan, “would never have progressed without the cooperation of the national press” (145). Early media coverage essentially duplicated Klan produced narratives, but as Congressional Reconstruction progressed and violence increased, partisan and sectional politics informed the reporting. Democratic papers typically downplayed activities, engendering skepticism about violence while decrying the ineffectiveness and culpability of Republican-run governments. Republican papers reflected the party's divergent views about the postwar order. Some duplicated Ku-Klux scripts while others portrayed the group as a scourge requiring government intervention to advance the GOP's progressive agenda.

Through campaigns of terror and violence, Ku-Klux restored white Democratic rule across the South. Support from white Southerners and federal ineffectiveness enabled Klansmen and their allies to reap the vast rewards of their activities. In time, white Northerners appropriated Ku-Klux imagery, reflecting their own anxieties about Reconstruction and the prospects of a more racially egalitarian society, making them reluctant to punish even known Klan terrorists.

Mining newspaper accounts as well as census records, legal records, and testimonies at the congressional hearings, Parsons presents a clearer picture of the Klan's rise and expansion. Historical network analysis allowed Parsons to map the complexities of Klansmen's activities and relationships on the ground before and after violence convulsed select Southern communities. Parsons's illumination of the ways white Americans’ concerns about Reconstruction policies threatening to undermine white supremacy flowed in both directions across the Mason-Dixon line is revealing, fitting into the work of scholars looking beyond the South to understand the nationwide institutionalization of anti-black racism after the Civil War.

Engagingly written, Ku-Klux offers new insight on Americans’ attitudes toward white supremacy, violence, and government in the age of freedom. It's a book that deserves a very broad audience. Parsons's impressive intervention into the postwar historiography, sensitive writing about Klan violence, and thought-provoking methodological moves make Ku-Klux a critical text for scholars and the public.