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IN MANY RESPECTS THE KLAN MIGHT APPEAR ANTI-MODERNIST, as in its romance about “old-time religion” and its campaign to “restore” “true Americanism.” Yet in its organizing, it was not only modern but innovative. What made the Ku Klux Klan so wildly successful in the early 1920s was an aggressive, state-of-the-art sales approach to recruitment.

From its start, the second Klan used what might be called the social media of its time. These methods—a professional PR firm, financial incentives to recruit, advertisements in the mass media, and high-tech spectacular pageants—produced phenomenal growth for several years. This was distinctly not a project of uneducated rubes.

What made the Ku Klux Klan so wildly successful in the early 1920s was an aggressive, state-of-the-art sales approach to recruitment. One study labeled the Klan “a hybrid of a social club and a multi-level marketing firm.” 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.

Women’s roles in this maternalist imagination were multiple: they mothered their families, served the movement, and exerted influence on their men. This “republican motherhood,” a modern translation of a discourse from the American revolutionary era, gave women political voice indirectly, through the male heads of families who represented them.

Klanswomen expressed their purity through their maternalist orientation, but in this the Klan differed hardly at all from hegemonic American beliefs. Motherhood was a woman’s primary and highest calling, but she could also assert a social motherhood that took her into the public sphere.

These people looked and cooked differently, socialized with their own kind, spoke in foreign tongues. Such a hodgepodge led to chaos in the Klannish mind. Order required uniformity.

Fear of heterogeneity underlay also its extreme nationalism and isolationism; Klanspeople saw little to admire in any foreign culture. Many Americans shared (and still share) this anxiety; nativists abhorred the “Babel of voices” that arose from the immigrant enclaves in big cities and industrial or mining towns.

Purity meant homogeneity as well. Diversity seemed to Klanspeople a form of pollution, uncleanliness. Antagonism to diversity saturates Klan discourse, conveying a structure of feeling hostile to the very essence of big-city life and cosmopolitanism. The wish for societal endogamy, for conformity, was the aspect of the Klan value system that most expressed its romance with small-town life.

"Europe plotted to dump its criminals in the United States. Immigrants plotted to enter the country in order to “plunder, pillage, rape and murder” and thereby take over."

Conspiracy theories are the backbones of RSS ideology as well.

The Klan tended to blame conspiracies for everything it disliked, even if it had to posit conspiracies including millions of people. Examples abound. A “class of cultured Negroes have organized societies to promote mixing of white and colored blood. The members of these societies are oath-bound to marry none but white women.”

"The Klan was never thoroughly anti-modernist. It fit what Jeffrey Herf, writing about Germany, called reactionary modernism: enthusiasm for modern technology combined with rejection of Enlightenment and liberal values. Despite suspicion of science and what liberals call critical thinking, Klans people adored and exploited the technological products of science."

Similar to RSS followers!

"It is impossible to resist the suspicion that in attributing such violence to Catholics, Klans people’s own suppressed impulses leaked out."

Interestingly same arguments can be found in the fear mongering literature of Hindutva crowd.

A counterfeit Knights of Columbus initiation pledge circulated by the Klan required a promise to “wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants, and Masons . . . burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip open the stomachs and wombs of their women and crash their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.”

Suspicion of science reflected a larger anti-intellectualism. That stance combined distrust of urban cosmopolitanism with reverence for faith. “We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership,” Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans declared proudly.

Klan officers frequently insisted that the Klan did not preach hate but sought the “best interest” of black people—which meant keeping them in a servile place with few political and civil rights.

The Klan had absorbed and remixed earlier influences, but its novelty never took it out of the American mainstream. In its prejudices it was, just as it claimed, “100% American.” Never an aberration, the KKK may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed. But the Klannish spin whirled these ideas into greater intensity. The Klan argued that the nation itself was threatened.

"Passionate oratory, of course, marks many political campaigns, of all ideological persuasions. But the Klan used it exclusively to banish nonconformists and people of the “wrong” race and religion from Americanism."

The Ku Klux Klan, used demagoguery as its exclusive approach—to recruitment, to persuading voters, to coercing elected representatives. Its leaders built fear through outrageous conspiracy allegations, fake news, and scapegoating. They whipped up intense rage.

Interesting parallels with how RSS operate in India. They even have derogatory names for liberals and seculars (sickular, libtard, andolanjeevi). Tragedy lies in the fact that KKK never got a chance to directly rule the USA, but RSS did.

Instead it blamed the country’s woes on 2 overlapping categories of unpatriotic Americans: African American, Catholic, &Jewish minorities, but also big-city liberals,“a cosmopolitan intelligentsia devoted to foreign creeds &ethnic identities,” whose culture was “without moral standards,” that is, secular. When the Klan railed against big money, as it did very occasionally, it did so because it saw big money as Jewish

The Klan’s enemies were not economic exploiters, unlike those of the Populist Party. While spouting a small-business ethic—honoring individual entrepreneurship as the basis for American greatness—it did not challenge economic policies that served big capital.

"Within the sacred nation, the KKK fumed, powerful but stealthy forces were injuring the majority and its values"
Same argument as RSS!

"The Klan formulated &imposed a singular set of beliefs. Even its perspective on immorality boiled down to a racialized Protestant intolerance of cultural difference. It is this conception that makes right-leaning populists so often hypernationalists,hostile to internationalism& cosmopolitanism."
parallels:
Immorality: Indian culture is under attack by western morality!
Hypernationalism
Hostility to internationalism

Interestingly the RSS's call for homogeneity (One nation, one language rhetoric) and mystification of the nation (golden age of Hinduism before Muslims invaded- narrative) sounds similar to Klan's ideology. Fascism works in the similar fashion everywhere it seems.

These attitudes make some populists illiberal, uncomfortable with diverse opinions, and disinclined to protect dissenters. Among the many dangers of imagining the existence of one genuine nation is a call for the people to be undivided in their will. The second Klan trafficked in precisely that mystification of the nation. Its call for homogeneity provided the underlying ostinato in the Klan’s song of patriotism.

"Opposing immigration might seem a tricky posture in a country where none of the whites (or blacks) were indigenous."
In the same note, branding Muslims as 'Others' or invaders by RSS will seem a tricky posture in a country like India where the only true natives are the Adivasis, even that is to some extent.

These latter-day Klansmen practiced various secret rituals and paraded in masks but often proudly proclaimed their membership; the Klan ran candidates in elections, advertised openly, and sponsored popular events open to all. While the second Klan did little lynching, it did at times employ nonlethal and occasionally lethal terrorism, in which police forces were active participants.

For the second Klan, by contrast, northern society, economy, and law created more constraints. Liberal tenets of the rule of law were stronger, so without maintaining a law-abiding legitimacy the Ku Klux Klan could not have spread so widely. Legitimacy did not make the 1920s Klan less reactionary or bigoted but did underlie its success.2

Klan used a veneer of secrecy to maintain the fiction that the perpetrators of racist violence were unknown. In fact, they were well known: their lynchings rested on widespread white consent and the open collusion of law-and-order officials. Klan secrecy served not to protect its members, who needed no protection, but to intensify its fear-inducing aura.