[October 8th
marks the 50th
anniversary of the Weather
Underground’s Days of Rage protests
in Chicago. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Weathermen and other
domestic terrorists—a fraught but important term, I know—leading up to a
weekend post on 21st century events.]
On two
under-remembered stages to the early histories of our oldest domestic terrorist
organization.
I could probably focus the first paragraph
of every post here on the books, articles, and work of other scholars that have
informed my own thinking about that particular subject. I generally try at
least to highlight them through hyperlinks, but sometimes I know the scholars in
question themselves as well as their work, and know that they are equally
awesome. In that case, and especially when they are women (whose work, as has
been illustrated
too often in recent months, is often particularly
under-cited), I will try to dedicate some blog space to sharing those scholarly
texts. So: if you want to learn about the Ku Klux Klan’s Reconstruction
origins, check out Elaine Frantz Parsons’s Ku-Klux:
The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (2015); and if you want to
follow the Klan’s evolution into the early 20th century, check out
Kelly J. Baker’s Gospel
According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (2011).
Both those books expand greatly and in more far depth and analytical nuance on
the histories and ideas about which I’ll write briefly in this post; for those
in my last paragraph in particular, I also greatly look forward to Cynthia
Lynn Lyerly’s forthcoming Thomas
Dixon, Jr.: Apostle of Hate.
One of the histories that Parsons’s
book helps us remember is just how contested and controversial the Klan was in
its early years. As Parsons traced in this 2014 We’re History post (which was a
partial excerpt from and certainly foreshadowed her book), in the late 1860s
and early 1870s the Grant Administration and federal government conducted a
series of investigations into the Klan, leading to famous Congressional
hearings among many other political
and legal responses. I can’t agree (and I don’t think Parsons would either,
per the end of that We’re History piece)
with Grant
biographer Ron Chernow, however, when he writes that Grant and these
federal inquiries helped destroy the Reconstruction-era Klan; as Parson notes,
even those Klan members convicted of crimes as a result of these new laws were
generally pardoned
by Grant after the 1872 election. So better remembering these
Reconstruction debates not only helps us recognize the conflicts over the Klan,
but also offers a frustrating glimpse into how that domestic terrorist
organization and its violent activities were normalized, even (perhaps
especially) in precisely the same moments when it was being treated as the criminal
enterprise it always was (and remains
to this day).
As I argued in my own We’re History piece on the subject, and as Baker’s book details
and (I’m quite sure) Lyerly’s book will as well, popular culture comprised one
central vehicle through which that normalization of the Klan took place. One of
the first such cultural normalizations was created as a direct response to the
Congressional hearings themselves: Mississippi lawyer and white supremacist James
D. Lynch’s epic poem Redpath,
or, the Ku Klux Tribunal (1877), which depicts a fictional Northern
political aide who journeys to the South to investigate the Klan and ends up
converting to its cause based on what he finds there. Texts like Lynch’s poem
helped create the conditions in which Thomas Dixon’s Klan trilogy
could become bestselling “historical” novels, in which the film adaptation of
those novels The
Birth of a Nation could become one of the most influential American
movies of all time, and in which Gone
with the Wind (written by a woman, Margaret Mitchell, who would respond
to Dixon’s praise of the novel by telling him that she was “practically raised
on” his books) remains one of the most successful American novels. All those
texts, most released during the
years (1872-1915) when the KKK was officially not active, remind us that
even a domestic terrorist mainstay like the Klan is not a given, that its arc and
influence were constructed over time, and can, crucially, be engaged,
challenged, and destroyed in own our era.
Next domestic
terrorists tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?
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