[This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack that occurred on American soil and was perpetrated by attackers who had lived in the US for months if not longer. Whether and how it qualifies as domestic terrorism is a topic I’ll focus on in the weekend post, after AmericanStudying a handful of other domestic terrorist histories and contexts.]
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 on this blog 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 years, 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 our own era.
Next domestic
terrorists tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?
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