Behind the Mask of Chivalry

Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Klan
© 1995 Nancy MacLean
336 pages

           

I'm a faithful follower of Brother John Birch,

and I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church 

 -- and I ain't even got a garage, you can call home and ask my wife!

("Uneasy Rider", Charlie Daniels*)

Nancy MacLean’ Behind the Mask of Chivalry examines the Ku Klux Klan at its most insidious: the opening of the 1920s. Using its activity in Athens, Georgia, as a case study, she probes its tactics, its composition,  its worldview, and its impact.   She demonstrates that the Klan’s lingering horror stems not from its penchant for burning homes and whipping people, but that the most respectable castes of society could hide behind its robes. Viewing the Klan essentially as a reactionary, populist socio-political movement, she offers an intriguing comparison between it and the fascist movements in Italy and Germany, which were on the rise as well. Though not a serious rival to The Fiery Cross as far as Klan history goes,   for the reader only interested in the Klan at its modern height, it should serve fairly well.  It has limits, however, in that the author uses the history to scratch an itch against male privilege. This is essentially a feminist history of the Klan that sees a war between the sexes at every turn.

Despite the Klan’s association with ‘white trash’,  more than half of the members of the Athens group were independent business owners, managers, or small freeholders. They were the very stock of citizenry, in fact, including in their ranks mayors and pastors.  While there were a few unskilled workers in the Athens organization, the majority were men of some accomplishment – if nothing else, then masters  at a trade. They were diverse and largely successful, far from being the bitter and dispossessed ex-soldiers of the 1870s who sought revenge against their imagined enemies in the form of "northerners and Negroes".   Their concerns and fears were diverse, but the Klan would unite them in one simple message:  old-fashioned America was in peril. Its menaces were both economic and social, both real and imagined.  The United States had only entered the Great War for a year, but it would be enough to radically alter the nation: the wartime agricultural boom led to failing farms after Europe began to recover, for instance. Other social consequences of the war were a renewed sense of resistance from black soldiers who discovered there was more to the world than institutional racism, and increasing control by the government of every aspect of life.  This was an age of industrial concentration, of department stores like A&P out-competing smaller firms. Fear of business conspiracies abounded;   with so much capital being controlled by so few hands, takeovers by a corporate elite were a common object of dread. The transformation of society by science, government, and capital had completely outpaced the moderating hand of tradition, leading to drastic changes in social customs.  A family's move from an agricultural homestead to wage-warning in the city, for instance, disrupted some of the ties that bound children to the care of their parents. Instead of working around the family farm, young people were paid pages that they felt a sense of individual ownership over. Emboldened by this, they explored the new world of the growing city, and all of its temptations -- like dance halls and pool clubs.
.
In answer to all this stress and fear came the Klan, assuring parents and citizens that their fears were justified,  that true Americanism was under attack and needed defenders.  This was an age of civic and fraternal organizations, far more active than they are today. The Klan had all of their attractions, plus the costumes and rituals of older societies, and it promised to do something about the problems faced by concerned traditionalists.   Racism is the Klan's home territory, but MacLean's research indicates how broadly the Klan's sheets billowed: over half of the recorded violence done by the Athens klan, for instance, had white targets, and this was from an area  bound to be more racial than most.  The Klan attacked blacks who questioned their subordination under an elite, yes,  but they also attacked men accused of not supporting their wives. They were footsoldiers of Prohibition, leading the fight against  purported moral decay even though their leaders were known to knock a few jugs back. (Hypocrisy seems to be endemic to the human condition.)   The klan functioned on many levels: first, it offered a forum for concerns to be voiced and encouraged;   it knit members together with socials and consumer-based activism, in which Klansmen only patronized the stores of other Klansmen; and, when it occasioned, offered a sanctified use of force to take down those deemed malefactors.   The klan was more than a criminal gang: it was a tribal-civic religion, combining Christianity with racial purity -- a rebirth of paganism, almost, with a binary focus on the Tribe and its god, both supported by willing warriors.

 The religious aspects of the Klan combined with its embrace of violence invites comparison to the Fascist movements in Europe, which also not only defended tradition against modernity, but combined it with an absolute worship of the Nation and its symbols. MacClean points to the Nazi's party's success during periods of economic depression, and and the Klan's own decline after America recovered from the postwar bust, to suggest that both were  born of and sustained by severe socio-economic stress.   Had the United States endured as long a downturn as Weimar Germany, she muses, the Klan might have well brought fascism to the United States, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.  Given their success in the midwest (practically taking over Indiana), that may have been a possibility, but as MacClean notes most Klansmen had a serious ideological animus against dictatorship. Their hatred for the Catholic church, for instance,  fixated on the notion of papal authority.

As useful as MacLean's work into the Klan's demographics is, indicating how popular it became by masquerading as a civically-minded fraternal organization,  MacLean's sexual hangup presents serious baggage.  Not only does she dismiss the entire concept  of honor as one of male ownership over women, but she reduces male bonding rituals to suppressed homosexuality.  Seeing sexual undertones in every relationship is one of the more tiresome aspects of the modern mind, and does not serve this history well. MacLean also seems to place blame on the subjects' concerns, rather than than their actions:  how dare parents be concerned about their children risking their health and futures in premature sexuality? Bring on the STDs and abortion, baby, it's time for liberation. She also uniquely targets white men as being the reactionaries, as if their wives (enlisted in a Women of the KKK) or black men didn't share those concerns about their children's futures.  Granted, the villains here are white men, but MacLean singles out the concern, the very act of judgement. Moderns don't like to be judged, but  evaluating events as good or ill or some balance of the two, is how humans exist.

Behind the Mask of Chivalry is serviceable if limited. Its foray into the demographics of the second klan is more extensive than The Fiery Cross, but that work held its own in that respect and offered reams more substance with less editorializing. 


* "Uneasy Rider" is a highly entertaining song about a long-haired peacenik wandering into a redneck bar and escaping from a fight by accusing one of his antagonists of being a long-haired hippie, guilty of voting for McGovern and hired by the FBI to infiltrate  the KKK.  

The Terrorist Next Door

The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right

© 2004 Daniel Levitas
544 pages

How does the grandson of Jewish immigrants become a leading voice in anti-Semitic movements? The Terrorist Next Door reviews domestic militancy in the United States,  as viewed through the life of Bill Gale, founder of the Posse Comitatus.   Taking its name from an act meant to prevent Federal troops from interfering in civil affairs, the group’s abiding faith was animosity towards a government viewed as corrupt at best, and taken over by alien forces at worst. (“Alien” in this case referring to the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jews, or agents of the One World Government. No one here fears the sneaky Reptilian menace.)  Covering essentially the same kind of reactionary violence as Harvest of Rage, but  with less grace, it doesn't avail much other than to build on biases. Unfortunately, the use of one monstrous man as a lens to view related movements casts an evil light on even the comparatively innocent.

The Posse Comitatus is a fairly vile bunch, a Klan without robes and with less concern with decency.   Gale himself took to the racist politics of the Christian Identity movement – which sees Anglo-Saxons as the true children of Israel, and contemporary Jews as Russian pretenders – fairly early on, but the popular support he built was based on a kind of localism on steroids. The basic government unit of every American state, he maintained, was the county, and its only constitutionally-sanctioned officer the Sheriff.  The sheriff could summon the men of the county as a posse to deal with serious threats to law and order.  Gale’s posse considered itself a self-organizing and constitutionally-sanctioned force in service of the same. Their enemies varied, as Gale was able to build a following beyond his initial band of white supremacists, appealing first to farmers on the road to ruin and then later the burgeoning tax resistance movement. Later still, during the Clinton administration, the comitatus would inspire dozens of self-organized militia movements, all of which viewed the federal government as its chief object of contempt, dread, and hostility. 

Gale’s posse wasn’t merely a right-wing crank group that gathered together to swap bits of foreboding news and complain about what the government was up to;   they were a force in the true sense of the word, applying violence to 'solve' problems. One man with a claim on a farm, for instance, called the group to come to his aid: they  took possession of the place, running off the owner and blockading  the only access road. They also vigorously defended themselves, shooting Federal agents who attempted to subdue them.  Civilian casualties in Federal encounters gone wrong only inflamed passions and spurred on greater activity: after the ideologically-linked Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, militia involvement grew. The same was true after President Clinton introduced the Brady Bill, viewed as  an attempt by the government to disarm the populace.   

Like Harvest of Rage,  The Terrorist Next Door is written as a warning, but whereas Harvest seeks to understand its subjects, Terrorist is content to condemn them and anyone it can connect ever so tangentially to their cause.  Under Levitas' pen, anyone who resists the government, who cries overreach -- especially if they do so from a Christian perspective -- is a racist with a lynching rope in the closet.  The problem with this is that the people covered in this book aren't part of a uniform organization, or ones even like the Comitatus.  For instance, Alabama's chief justice, Roy Moore takes heat here for installing a monument to the ten commandments within his courthouse. As problematic as that is from a constitutional perspective, to smear him as connected to the Christian Identity clan is contemptible.  Even those with actual connections to Gale's group weren't under his violent command:   they had their own motivations and ideas for taking action, like attempting to pay tax bills with fraudulent checks and filing false liens in their courthouses. Criminal, yes, but 'terrorist'?    Tarring any reaction against the growth and abuses of the state as violently racist makes as much sense as declaring at the Federal Reserve is a Zionist conspiracy to take over the world, or regarding every man on a motorcycle as a card-carrying member of the Mongols.

My interest in this book came from the hopes of gaining some insight into the militia mentality, but Levitas is more concerned with declaring that they exist, they're everywhere, and something oughta be done about `em.  Sure,  have the Federal government go after them -- that's worked so well so far. Levitas himself documents how militancy and paranoia flourished amid real or perceived persecution, spiking after Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Brady Bill. Obviously, going after armed people who already think the government is against them is a really swell idea that will lead to happy times for everyone.  At least the author of Harvest of Rage knew, as nutty as his subjects could be, at the root of their paranoia lay real despair and genuine concerns -- about their status as economic losers in a globalized world, or  the collusion of big agriculture, big banks, and big government. Their pain and fear was twisted by the Bill Gales of this world, but for Levitas anyone remotely connected to Gale is as bad as him.  This is an alarmist and dismissive account that will make those already predisposed to view grassroots reaction as ignorant, racist, and violent feel justified, but has little purpose beyond that  Its focus on the Comitatus has its uses, but as far as understanding right-wing militancy goes,  this is far inferior to Harvest of Rage.

Related:
Harvest of Rage, Joel Dyer

Why Waco?

Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America
© 1997 James Tabor
254 pages, including text of David Koresh's manifesto on the "Seven Seals"

  In February 1995, Federal forces arrived outside a large home owned by a religious sect living in expectation of the apocalypse and led by a man who claimed to be the Messiah. Alarmed by rumors of child marriage and the fact that members of the group were involved in the gun trade, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived to execute arrest warrants. An exchange of fire that killed six residents and four agents prompted them to back down and lay siege instead. After token efforts at communication, after fifty-one days tanks rolled in to batter holes in the walls and flood the massive complex with CS case, over the protests of some on the ground who were attempting to reach the group's leader.  One of those dissenting voices was James Tabor, who in Why Waco explains the religious background of the Davidians in an effort to humanize a group derided by the media as suicidal kooks.

This strangely sympathetic account of the group's downfall begins with another group in the 1840s, who, following their century's version of Harold Camping, believed earnestly that Jesus would return to Earth on October 22nd, 1844.   These Adventists survived their 'great disappointment' on the lack of the world ending; those who kept the faith eventually found other issues to coalescence around, including an insistence that Saturday, not Sunday, was the Sabbath.  Certain elements of this denomination grew progressively more estranged from the main current of Christianity, forming an intentional community on the Texas plains that survived for decades, through several successive leaders -- one of whom, a woman, would reveal that the Holy Spirit was in fact a woman, and the Catholic church was an insidious plot to subvert worship of the divine feminine by focusing it on Mary, the mother of Jesus.  The Branch David took its name from its expectation that when Revelation was fulfilled, the world would hail a new Messiah, descended from the biblical David.

Into this group came young Vernon Howell, later known as David Koresh. He came searching, to pit their claims against his studious knowledge of the Bible and its prophecies. Consumed by a desire to understand the secret truths of Isaiah and Revelation, he flourished and eventually inherited leadership of the community.  He was especially charismatic after a trip to Israel,  where he claimed an encounter with the Divine.  Koresh also became increasing messianic, changing his name to conform to a role he felt called to:   the sinful Messiah.  Although modern Christians regard messiah as Jesus' title alone, the word is used several times throughout the Bible, and at one time in connection with Cyrus of Persia, whose name is rendered Koresh.  Cyrus was used by God as messiah, called to wage war against the satanic power of Babylon and restore the Temple and the Jewish people to their rightful place. Vernon Howell, becoming David Koresh, believed he was the new messiah:  He wasn't Jesus, but he was called by God  to gather around him a chosen few and reveal the Final Revelation to the world.  When the Final Revelation came,  Koresh would be at one with the Word of God, comprehending the entire Bible as a mystical whole, and guide the world into a new era.  This greatness would not come without price; the powers of the world would rise against the chosen few, and even kill them just as they did Jesus, but God would prevail.

Against this figure, whose vocabulary was saturated with references to arcane prophecies, whose days were spent in intense discussions about theology, propagating increasingly esoteric doctrines and practices, rose the ATF.  While agents on the ground attempted to talk to Koresh and convince him to surrender, all they heard in response was "bible babble",not comprehending that just as they were trying to squeeze him into the criminal profile boxes that they understood, so to was he understanding them in the light of his own narrative. Their initial attack on the center, followed by their encirclement of it that cut all electricity and communication with the outside world, seemed to him the fulfillment of the "Fifth Seal", in which the forces of darkness rise against the righteous. They were playing the perfect villains, convincing him that he was right and that the end was night.  So they held out and perished in fire, almost eighty souls.

Tabor's goal in this is to humanize the Davidians, and it works for the most part. They obviously weren't too strange at first or on the whole, given how good their relations were with their neighbors: when the raid happened, the Davidians were expecting it, having received numerous tips.  Although the ATF and FBI referred to the siege as a prolonged "hostage situation", Davidians plainly were not under coercive force. They came and left the group as they pleased, drawn mainly by desire to  see what Koresh was teaching, attracted by his energy. The fly in the ointment is that by the time the center was attacked, Koresh was in a pecuilar spot, psychologically. He was the chief fixation of attention for scores of people, whose awe at his abilities at arguing scripture convinced him that he was the chosen one.   Unrestrained by the fear of social reprisal, his body followed its desires, carefully justified by seemingly rational arguments: bit by bit, he convinced himself that it was just and proper for him to be married to several women, including teenage girls, and father children by them. They were to be the new royal priesthood of the next epoch of human history.  The Davidians could have been quirky but harmless even living on a compound by themselves and earning money by selling guns, but once polygamous child-marriage enters the picture even the most sympathetic soul has to say, "...that boy's off his rocker."

However, Tabor's principle object may not be the Waco group themselves, but cults in general.  Tabor objects to their being demonized: what modern religion, he asks, does not match the attempts at quantifying what exactly a cult is?  He rightly criticizes the agents on the ground for not seriously attempting to understanding who they were dealing with, beyond wacky gun-cultists,  but even if the group had been able to send regular messages to the world through the siege,  but who is to say they could?  The group's entire bent was occultic, fixated on its elite status.  Tabor does a good job at comparing Waco to Jonestown, which was more domineering where its members were. David Koresh may have told his followers that that were called to be celibate (unless David felt a call to know another man's wife in the biblical sense), but if they insisted on remaining married to one another, they could leave.  Koresh's group was definitely weird, increasingly dominated by the man's sexual fetish, but from this account they seem more likely just to be a danger to themselves, and especially to their children.  Of  course, the government's brutal attempt to force the group to surrender only led to the deaths of most of the children at risk, so the entire episode is an utter tragedy.

Why Waco? has a jarring sympathy for its bizarre subjects, one that struggles to be professional and errs on the side of indulgence. It does make comprehensible the group's apocalyptic teachings, and can't help but entertain...but the author's lack of judgment, even when horror would be appropriate, is unsettling

Harvest of Rage

Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is Only the Beginning
© 1997 Joel Dyer
307 pages

In the spring of 1996, the peace of Oklahoma City was shattered when a truck bomb ignited outside a federal office.  Nearly two hundred people were killed, and nigh a thousand injured, in one man's act of rage against the government.  But in Harvest of Rage, Joel Dyer writes that McVeigh was far from alone: he was part of a movement of thousands, spread across the country but concentrated in its withering agricultural heartland.  The farm crisis -- the growing poverty and destruction of rural life in the wake of globalization -- has created legion of homegrown terrorists, whose despair has been crafted into insurrection against the government. Dyer spent seven years interviewing and visiting anti-government types attempting to get to the bottom of rural militancy, and offers sections on the movement's ideological bases as well as his economic argument.  Although portions of this are badly dated, especially given that Dyer sees Endtimes-paranoia about the coming of the Millennium as a factor,  the central issues are alive and well twenty years later.

Dyer is not sympathetic to most of the ideas that he encounters during his seven-year investigation (he refers to the free enterprise system as one "in which the government does nothing to help people"), but he does empathize with the plight of his subjects, sharing some of their concerns if not their response. The central issue, as Dyer sees it, is economic:  as globalization allows for American firms to  manufacture goods and purchase food more cheaply overseas,  America's own primary industries are being gutted. Family farms are being eaten alive by monstrously large international entities like Cargill, and as they fail they take with them rural towns. Further , Dyer writes, a farm is different from  other small businesses; a farmer is more likely to have inherited the estate from his father, who inherited from his own. The farm is home,  and can contain within it an family's entire history. To be responsible for losing that heritage can be emotionally crippling: little wonder when this ruin looms,  some farmers clutch at whatever desperate straws they can find.

Having established the nature of the farm crisis as one not causing a shortage of food, but one obliterating the livelihoods of families and local economies of families throughout the west, Dyer then argues that their legitimate grievances are being twisted into sometimes violent conspiracy theories.   Farmers are not simply competing with multinationals;  in fact, they depend on them for storage, equipment, and some supplies.  Some chicken farmers are functional sharecroppers, doomed to contracts with  giants like Tyson which constantly demand equipment upgrades that keep them in debt.  The law is no recourse; not only are the oversight agencies tasked with keeping monopolies in check staffed by former members of the very companies they are policing, but the government bears responsibility in promoting “get big or get out” policies. Many of the families interviewed within were crippled by the farm policies of the 1970s and the monkeying-around with of interest rates.    On realizing how many of their woes came from monopolies, and their sinister connection with the government which was supposed to be fair referee,  the door was pried open for conspiracy.  Government policy was not simply inappropriate, or corrupt: it became viewed as evil. Here was a plot to destroy individual freeholders and replace them by massive conglomerates controlled by a few,  in one measure strengthening the cabal and undermining economic resistance. It was a sign of the times, the advent of a New World Order.   The architect of this scheme was not a pocket-lining bureaucrat, but Satan himself.  Obviously,  it was the duty of every true Christian to resist – little wonder the government was so interested in  taking the weapons of  Americans! From there follows militia movements, composed of individuals willing to shoulder arms in defense of their rights – against the tyranny of the state, if need be.

 All of this is tremendously interesting, although the central argument tends to wander away from its roots. Dyer’s goal is to link the farm crisis with rising antigovernment rhetoric and violence, but after some sections on farmers attempting to defraud lenders through legalese, he examines various parts of the antigovernment as a whole, not all of them with any rural dependence.   Religious obsession with the rise of the New World Order and doomsday, for instance, was common in the sect of Christianity I was raised in, but we haven’t been farmers for three generations.  The same is true of the book’s sections on strict Constitutionalism and monetary policy: one need not be a distressed farmer to hold the government in contempt for granting itself war powers in peacetime, or for entrusting the nation’s financial security to an entity that has control over the money supply, but no accountability whatsoever.   Dyer has a tendency to make sweeping statements – at one time, he urges the reader to go into any small rural town and take note of the abundance of people with Constitutions in their front pockets.  99.9999% of the time, he says, these people are involved to some degree in the antigovernment movement. Well, who isn’t involved in antigovernment activity to some degree?   He also assumes that all of the pipe bombs discovered in the United States in a given year were deployed by agents of the vast rural agenda.  Dyer is genuine, though, both in his concern about how the heartland is being devestation, and in his fear of what is to come.  No war of disaffected farmers ever broke out, however, despite the coming of  the Millennium, and I for one think Dyer’s extensive time embedded in some fairly radical groups gave him his own acute sense of  paranoia.   

Harvest’s argument is stretched too thin sometimes to be credible, but the facts and stories Dyer turns up are worth the read alone.  The issues at hand are still relevant: many of the grievances aired here drive the contemporary Tea Party movement, for instance.  Even with its tares, Harvest of Rage is a commendable look inside  American populism and how it can turn tragically violent.