This is a fine historical study of an amazingly broad-based but (thankfully) shallow, corrupt, and short-lived effort to make Arkansas great again in the 1920s. The conclusions largely align with much of the scholarship on the 1920s Klan in various states. The author curiously tries to suggest that the Klan has been effectively normalized in other books, made into a “respectable, civic-minded organization” (5). Save for a couple of works, I do not think that is a fair assessment of the scholarship, and the author does not really either, as on the next page he refers to Nancy MacLean's classic Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford University Press, 1994), which (as he correctly states) “portrayed the Klan agenda as a set of ideological propositions that logically progressed into violent actions toward targeted groups” (6).

Most 1920s Klan books make some version of that argument, even while capturing the degree to which the 1920s Klan was also a broad-based civic group—a sort of Lion's Club—that for a brief time attracted a huge body of white Protestants and offered them a world of social activities, women's auxiliary organizations, opportunities for charitable work, and support for religious institutions, public education, and Prohibition. Its toxicness came dressed in the guise of a rather boring normality (see “banality of evil”). The author here pursues basically the same points and paints a similarly fascinatingly grim picture of the lived religion of the Klan in all its insipid vapidity.

Thus, this book presents a largely familiar picture of the Klan, one we know from other books. Its real strength lies not in its novelty of argument but in its depth of research and richness of detail, making the book a fascinating reading throughout. The author exploits local sources, especially newspapers, wonderfully well. Barnes really recreates the world of the Arkansas Klan of the 1920s in its full complexity, and some of the stories are just astounding.

Ironies abound, and one does not know whether to laugh or to cry. The Klan was a supposedly secret organization that publicized its activities at every turn. Klansmen loved to march into churches, fully robed, and commend preachers for upholding Protestant morality (and preachers could join the Klan without paying dues), but of course everyone knew who these men were. It portrayed itself as law-and-order but also encouraged vigilante violence. It was all about white nationalism, but it had little to say about African Americans, who had been violently suppressed in the terrible massacre in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, and thereby effectively put in their place. Mostly, save for one horrific lynching in 1927, the Klan ignored them. The Klan's ideology was anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, but in much of Arkansas there were hardly any Catholics or Jews to harass.

There are further ironies specific to the Arkansas Klan. Its primary leader, James A. Comer, had been a Bull Moose and Black-and-Tan Republican but somehow emerged as a political leader of the Klan in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. The Klan portrayed itself as a great cultural movement that would (as the title says) “rule a state,” but in fact it was a faction-ridden clique that mostly failed in its larger objectives (immigration restriction being one major exception). The Arkansas Klan never “came to rule a state”; despite the title, the author—a careful and judicious historian—does not actually argue that. He concludes, rather, with a paragraph breathing a sigh of relief that they did not come to rule the state, but very well could have given a more competent and less self-serving leadership.

The Klan was all about white Christian morality in theory; in practice, at least at the leadership level, it was about money and sex. At the national level, and in Arkansas as well, the Klan organization functioned as a pyramid scheme, enriching those at the top; and at the national level, Klan leader David Stephenson was a sexual predator and rapist. The husband-and-wife overlords of the Arkansas Klan, James and Robbie Comer, skimmed money from Klan dues, merchandised Klan swag, and lived high on the “hog” (pun intended). Robbie Comer, the wife, was quite the character; once James, her husband, died, she essentially abandoned his special needs children and continued living off money from dues from the Women's KKK. She retained the term “Imperial Commander” long after there was nothing left to command. She never bothered to put a tombstone on the grave of husband James. She is to this story what Ivanka Trump is to the victims of MAGA land's exploitative monetary bloodsucking (via preselected auto-renewal of contribution boxes) of its loyal email base. (By this analogy, the husband may be compared with Roger Stone, a lifelong political trickster with essentially no values to promote other than self-aggrandizement and screwing his enemies.)

At the end, the author pursues the analogy of the Klan as kind of failed Nazis: “Prejudice is at the beginning of a continuum that can end in genocide” (189). To me, that is not really the issue, and in any case Nazi analogies are disallowed by Godwin's law (Reductio ad Hitlerum). Rather, the real analogy lies in understanding the Klan's role in the long history of twentieth- and twentieth-first-century white Christian nationalism. In that sense, the teleology goes not to the Nazis, but to America First, the John Birch Society, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Buchanan, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the Trumpian part of the contemporary Christian and fascist right. The final step on that continuum is not Nazi horror but rather the power of contemporary white Christian nationalism to move the country politically in ways that the comically inept and corrupt 1920s Klan never really accomplished. Yes, it can happen here; it has, and it may very well again. Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland.