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True, the Klan did not invent bigotry. Sometimes ebbing, sometimes flowing, white racism had appeared as soon as Europeans arrived on this continent. But the Klan spread, strengthened, and radicalized preexisting nativist and racist sentiments among the white population. In reactivating these older animosities it also relegitimated them.

In the last few decades, historians have compared Klan membership lists to census information about occupations and thereby estimated the class composition of the movement. The consensus among these scholars is that small businessmen, lower middle-class employees, and skilled workers constituted the majority of members in most locations.

The Ku Klux Klan practiced a two-sided strategy: working not only to attract members and followers but also to quiet others who might have objected to its goals.

The economic boycott thus supplemented the mass pageants, the cross-burnings, and the political campaigns in communicating the Klan’s strength and discouraging opposition. A message of this kind had the muscle to preclude resistance, particularly among those who preferred the safety of conformity.

The Klan’s economic warfare probably had mixed and limited results. But the boycott also had indirect consequences, because it sent the message that opposing the Klan was unsafe. So too threats against workers and employees who were not “right” must have created anxiety and caution.

Klanswomen were the foot soldiers of the boycott campaigns. WKKK leader Daisy Barr emphasized repeatedly that her members should shop only at “right” stores. Because this form of activism appeared to many women as housewifery and neighborliness, akin to telling a friend about a sale, many of those who boycotted did not recognize it as political activism.

unlike classic “dual power” situations, where a nonstate organization such as a labor union gains a legitimacy equivalent to that of the state, the Klan actually took over state and municipal governments. It did this entirely legally, through the ballot..

This is similar to what's happening in India nowadays. But unlike clan RSS has its own political party ruling at the center.

Stephenson boasted, “I am the law.” He planned to run for president in 1928.24 This kind of power led one legal historian to argue that the Klan constituted a “parallel government,” but this is misleading, because it worked within existing governmental lines:

A writer for the New Republic wrote in 1927 that a politician who went along was promised “sure election if he lined up and took orders.” If you wanted anything done in Indiana, “you went to Stephenson [Grand Dragon of Indiana] first, and afterward or not at all to those who had official power to grant it.”

Klan candidates ran mostly as Democrats but occasionally as Republicans.

in 1922, thirteen incumbent Republican congressmen lost their seats to Democrats, who were on average more sympathetic to the Klan.

Like Scouting, Klan youth groups emphasized sports competitions for boys and crafts for girls. Both sexes could serve as flag bearers and could play in drum and bugle corps. Girls specialized in singing and rhythmic chanting. One festival advertised “kute girls, katchy songs, and kunning costumes.”

The Klan’s obsession with konverting c words to k words is komic at best and katastrophic at worst!

(The latter perspective has been called both maternalist and essentialist, because it rests on the assumption that women are naturally nurturing and self-sacrificing, the key qualities associated with motherhood.) Both types see women as victimized by male dominance, but in different ways. Klan feminists belonged to the latter stream.

some feminisms challenge the gender order and the practice of identifying women primarily or even exclusively as mothers and wives; others, equally feminist, accept that gender order and promote women’s rights within it.

There is nothing about a generic commitment to sex equality that inevitably includes commitment to equalities across racial, ethnic, religious, or class lines. In fact, espousing sex equality and enacting female leadership have often been easier for conservative women, because their whole ideological package does not threaten those who benefit from other inequalities.

Barr and White were also women’s rights advocates, as was Tyler, implicitly, through her achievements. Their activism requires a more capacious understanding of feminism. Their combination of feminism and bigotry may be disturbing to today’s feminists, but it is important to feminism’s history.

In fact, some Klanswomen interpreted political activism as a female responsibility. Then, once active, they often came to resent men’s attempts to control them and even challenged men’s power. Thus we meet a phenomenon that many progressive feminists found and still find anomalous—the existence not only of conservative feminism but even of bigoted feminism.

The claim that women might bring “family values” back into the nation’s governance—a claim made at the time in movements of all political hues—created a contradiction within conservative movements: despite an ideological commitment to Victorian gender norms, including women’s domesticity, many conservative women enjoyed participating in politics.

Vigilantism strengthened the Klan, even though it sometimes created enemies. Vigilante attacks not only cemented Klan solidarity but also strengthened Klansmen’s pride. This pride came not only from good feelings about manliness but also from the conviction that they were performing responsibilities of democratic citizenship.

"As William Reich wrote about Nazi street violence, it (vigilantism) allowed “little men” to act “big.”"

The true attraction of countless right wing Hindutva vigilante groups.

The 1920s was not the first time that evangelical Protestantism wielded great political influence,but it may have been the first time that bigotry became a major theme among its preachers.That so many ministers& preachers endorsed the Ku Klux Klan& even declared membership in it underlines two important Klan characteristics: its assimilation to conservative Protestantism& its respectability within mainstream politics

"Baseball functioned to normalize the Klan, so that it could appear as a benign club, akin to the Elks or, again, a labor union. More, the KKK’s love of baseball became another route to community clout—even audacity."
RSS follows the same mode in India.

The first Klan and the third Klan (that which re-formed to combat the civil rights movement) typically burned crosses on or next to the homes or gathering places of African Americans. These burnings delivered messages to those who violated the economic or political racial order, or even contemplated doing so, warnings of worse to come.

"The days of the week were Dark, Deadly, Dismal, Doleful, Desolate, Dreadful, and Desperate. The months began with Bloody and ended with Appalling, in one version; in another, from Dismal to Dying. Even the hours were renamed, from one o’clock, Fearful, through Startling, Awful, Woeful, and finally Appalling and Last. What fun it must have been to coin these names."
:))

The pleasures of this ritual were, then, multiple: the participant was a member of a theatrical troupe, allowed a fantasy world alongside workaday life; he reaped the security and prestige of being an insider, enhanced by knowing that so many were excluded “aliens”

The make-believe quality of Klavern meetings made them folk theater, albeit not performed for an audience other than the participants.

Klan decentralization and finances combined to produce a somewhat feudal or tribal structure. In return for autonomous control over their fiefs, local leaders paid taxes, which we might call tribute, upward and recompensed themselves by taxing their vassals.

"as with all Klan leaders, it would be difficult to disentangle principle from profit motives, in part because they considered their profits honorably earned. They were champions of the business ethic, another respect in which the Klan was entirely mainstream."

"One study labeled the Klan “a hybrid of a social club and a multi-level marketing firm.”1 Far from rejecting commercialization and the technology it brought, such as radio, the Klan’s system was entirely up-to-date, even pioneering, in its methods of selling"
Similar to how RSS is using modern technology and social media to spread its propaganda.