Though America has had a number of populist political movements, there are aspects of the Tea Party that remind me of the peak of Klan popularity in the 1920s.
http://www.africanaonline.com/orga_ku_klux_klan_knights.htmThe Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was active in many states, notably Colorado, Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Although the defense of white supremacy remained a core issue for the Ku Klux Klan, it focused its attack on what it considered to be alien outsiders, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, which it believed was threatening traditional American ways and values. All non-Protestants, aliens, liberals, trade unionists, and striking workers were denounced as subversives.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/hist409/klan.htmlThe Ku Klux Klan is, as one historian has put it, "America's recurring nightmare"--a repeated challenge to American ideals of tolerance that has had extraordinary influence in three different periods in our history. The first came immediately after the end of the Civil War; this first Klan mobilized white Southerners who instigated a reign of terror against black Americans (and white Republicans) in an ultimately successful effort to re-establish white supremacy in the South. In the 1950s and 1960s, the "invisible empire," as the Klan called itself, returned to the South in a desperate--and now ultimately unsuccessful--effort to block the Civil Rights movement from finally winning formal equality for black Americans.
Although these two racist and Southern Klans shape our popular images of the KKK, the era in which the Klan attracted its largest membership was the 1920s. And, interestingly, the 1920s Klan was not centered in the South, nor was its ideology as single-mindedly focused on race. Nevertheless, the initial impetus was both Southern and racist. It was revived in the aftermath of D. W. Griffith's wildly popular 1915 silent film, Birth of the Nation, which presented the late nineteenth-century Klan in a heroic light, and the man who got it started was William Simmons, a former Methodist minister from Georgia. But when the real growth came in the 1920s, the Klan spread well beyond the South. More than three million Americans joined; many of them were urban residents and it won political power in such non-Southern states as Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. In this period, its public statements were more likely to attack Jews, Catholics, and immigrants than African Americans.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the great size and influence of the 1920s Klan, historians have not been able to agree on its central values and its larger significance. The traditional interpretation, as historian Leonard J. Moore writes, sees the 1920s Klan as "the story of a backward segment of American society, one trapped by economic insecurity, dying small-town ways, and an inability to adjust psychologically to the 'modern age' which seemed to emerge so clearly in the decade before the Great Depression." In different ways, this interpretation of the 1920s Klan as backward looking, irrational, and a reflection of "status anxiety"is echoed in the work of many prominent historians of the 1950s, including Richard Hofstadter, John Higham, William Leuchtenberg, and John D. Hicks.
Moore himself, who is the author of a study of the Klan in Indiana, favors a different interpretation, which depicts the 1920s Klan in "populist" terms. He and some other recent historians (including Robert Alan Goldberg and Shawn Lay) have argued that "the Klan served different purposes in different communities, but that in general, it represented mainstream social and political concerns, not those of a disaffected fringe group. Prohibition enforcement, crime, and a variety of other community issues seemed most responsible for the Klan's great popularity in these states and communities." Without excusing the racism and nativism of 1920s Klansmen, historians like Moore want to downplay the centrality of ethnic and racial bias to Klan activities and to present the men and women of the Klan as more ordinary representatives of their time. "The Klan," Moore concludes, "appears to have acted as a kind of interest group for the average white Protestant who believed that his values should be dominant in American society. . . . The Klan became a means through which average citizens could resist elite political domination and attempt to make local and even state governments more responsive to popular interests."
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