Linda Gordon is the author of the new book The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. Her other books include Dorothea Lange and Impounded. She is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University, and she lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin.
Q: You’ve noted that this book was originally a chapter in a
larger book about 20th century social movements in the United
States. How much was the 2016 election an impetus for you to write this book?
A: The impetus to expand the chapter into a book was that
[factor], but I had already written the chapter in the larger book, so it was a
little of both.
Q: What accounted for the Klan’s rise in the 1920s, and how
strong was its influence during that decade?
A; There are two factors. First is the rise in the volume of
immigration starting in the 1880s. They were not mainly Protestants—you have
all these Catholics, Jews, Greek and Russian Orthodox people, who were made to
seem like a threat.
The second happened directly after World War I—a real rise
in prosecution and persecution of dissenters with many deportations. It set a
precedent for the idea that dissent should be repressed. That is a lot of what
the Klan is about—the notion that we should all be alike. It was very
uncomfortable with diversity….
Q: How does it compare with other movements of the time?
A: The film Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915. The Klan
used that as an enormous tool in recruitment…It was oriented toward the South
and toward scurrilous stigmatizing of African Americans. One of the things I
felt from writing about this was that one kind of bigotry builds another.
Q: Did you need to do a lot more research for this book, and
did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?
A: I had to do a lot more. There is no central archive of
Klan material in this country. I was benefiting from previous articles that
were very specific about the Klan in various locations.
From the beginning, what was clear to me was that I wanted
to do a general survey, but I [did focus on particular locations; for example,]
Oregon; there’s no way someone could travel all over.
Q: What did you see in terms of regional differences or
similarities?
A: The Klan was extremely flexible and opportunistic. In the
West, they went after Mexican Americans in California and Japanese Americans in
the Upper Pacific states.
Also, they were completely unprincipled. In California, they
cooperated with the Irish Catholic Church against the Mexican Catholics,
despite the Klan’s general anti-Catholicism.
In one of the Klan manuals, directed to small chapters, one
of the first instructions is to research your region and see what issues and
grievances are in your region. These were very sophisticated people.
Q: In Clay Risen’s review of the book in The New York Times,
he says, “It’s hard to finish a single page in Gordon’s book without a slight
tingle of fearful familiarity, of reverberations in rhetoric and public
opinion—a recognition that, maybe, it has always been thus.” What do you think
of that comment?
A: I have no particular expertise on the hate groups of
today. I know what I read in the newspapers and from the Southern Poverty Law
Center.
In terms of the Klan today, there are some Klan groups but
they’re very small, a tiny part of the growth of white nationalism and the
alt-right. We can’t judge it by asking how many people are in the Klan. That
was true in the ‘20s as well. People were not members, but shared the Klan’s
values.
The Klan today and white nationalist groups have no central
leader; no Imperial Wizard gives directions to all these groups. That is both
good news and bad.
Good because they don’t have the strength a central
organization might give, and bad because there’s no control over them. My sense
is a lot of white nationalist groups are appealing to young men. That was not
true of the Klan. These young guys are just itching for a physical fight, and
that’s dangerous, that lack of any central control.
Q: Where do you see the movement going in the future?
A: I wish I could say I hope they’re going to decline, but
they have a bully pulpit from the president. In one way, the president does
what the Imperial Wizard did in the 1920s. Dogwhistling. He’s constantly
putting out messages that encourage racism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant
[sentiments].
I don’t want to have to write a book like that again. It
gets you down.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: The book engendered a lot of publicity for all the bad
reasons. I’m doing lectures, publicity, op-eds.
Q: Anything else we should know about the book?
A: One of the things that’s most controversial is about the
role of women in the Klan. I gave a talk [recently] and a young person asked,
How can you call these women feminists?
A lot of people want to assume that to be a feminist you
have to be relatively liberal or progressive. I know the way I wrote that
chapter would evoke controversy, but we need to understand that no particular
tendency owns feminism.
There are certain versions of feminism that are compatible
with this kind of bigotry. When I was doing the research, I found not the
slightest indication that any of the women were critical of what the male Klan
[members were] doing.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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