The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
We discover in Nancy MacLean’s scholarly study of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after World War I that there have been terrorists operating on American soil long before September 11. In this particular case, the terrorists are homegrown and as American as apple pie. MacLean’s book traces the roots and motives of the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, which she basically felt arose from the sentiments of a group of family men who were frightened by and resented what they viewed as an attack on their certainties of life. This was particularly true with respect to changing relations between the sexes and what was viewed as an increasing threat from those with concentrated wealth. Yet it was the Klan’s middle-class makeup that enabled it to gain power and eagerly sought members. As MacLean writes: “The order’s overlap with the mainstream made it possible to win the enthusiasm of men like Chester D. Morton, a local Mason, Shriner, Boy Scout leader, and member of the Booster Club and the board of stewards of the First Methodist Church” (4).
Many of MacLean’s accounts are based on the Klan’s Athens chapter in Clarke County, Georgia. Here the Klan which is typically shrouded in secrecy left behind a large stash of records. MacLean uses them to show how the group became so powerful at one point that not one American president during the 1920s spoke against the brutal violence of the Klan against African-Americans, Jews and Italians (Roman Catholics). The author also goes from the local to the global when she discussed how the Klan’s formation was similar in kind to those that produced fascism and Nazism. Through the use of fear-mongering, propaganda, and violence, the Klan became extremely powerful and skilled at finding recruits. Eugenics was used to prove there was scientific evidence that some people and races were inferior to others. Violent, g
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