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.
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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.  

They Thought They Were Free

They Thought they Were Free: the Germans, 1933-1945
346 pages
© 1955 Milton Mayer

How could ordinary, decent people abide the Nazis for the span of twelve years -- to allow a baby born at the NSDAP's seizure of power to practically come of age under their banner? Shortly after World War II, Milton Meyer traveled to Germany and attempted to answer that question for himself. Omitting his Jewish heritage, he cultivated friendships with ten German citizens and approached them with questions about their life during the war.  His mission was to understand their experience.Though primarily writing for the western world of the 1950s, urging the powers not to turn the Germans into the anti-Soviet front line, virtually none of the import achieved here has faded with the decades. He searched for insight about the German soul under the Nazi state, but discovered man.

Today Hitler and the Nazis are a byword for evil, but for Meyer's Germans, this was not so. The totality of the Nazi evil was not revealed until after the Allies had swept across Germany and discovered the camps, those ghastly factories of obscenity where families were slaughtered with hellish efficiency. For the Germans interviewed, Hitler was a bolt from the blue, a strike of leadership in a time of self-indulgent parliamentary quibbling. He was a leader who believed in Germany, who could inspire the kind of discipline needed to rebuild and recover from the Great War and depression. He  advanced a siege mentality, but stirred up the fortitude requited to endure a struggle.  Judging from his friends, Meyer believes that most Germans knew little about the atrocities that would be committed under that threatened mindset; for them,  Hitler was the man who had cured unemployment,  who had restored national pride; such was his stature in their imaginations that even when it became obvious that the NSDAP was leading Germany into ruin,  he was beyond reproach. Disconnected from the party, he was the Kaiser, the head of state, the man above politics; when things went awry, it was his advisers who were held liable, his administrators deemed malevolent. “If only Hitler know what was happening,” some thought.   The belief that the king can do no wrong seems to have deep roots in the human psyche,  appearing seemingly everywhere.

Even if Hitler was not known then as the source of evil,  no one could deny that something was amiss in Germany. Here Meyer examines how the Jews could be subjected to such desolation. . The Nazi cultivation of antisemitism worked not only to marginalize Jews, to keep the mind from lingering too long on where they kept disappearing to, but simultaneously gave baser instincts a target to fixate and build on. Urges for casual petty violence, normally inhibited by the law, were given legal sanction against Germany’s Jewish population; but violence, once unleashed,  is rather difficult to rein back in. That violence was not only physical, but psychological, eroding the civil soul;  Meyer's interviewees report how they were steadily compromised.  Merely conflicted when the Nazi campaigns were set in motion, torn by a sense that something was not right but unsure as to whether attacking the triumphant Party was worth it. That inaction only reinforced itself as Germans were slowly prised apart from conscience, either out of fear or moral sloth. Some values, like free speech directed against the government, were so new and existing only on the  periphery that when they disappeared their absence was as dimly noticed as that of the marginalized Jews. 

Though elements of the book are specific to Germany, the study of man compromised by rule is more generally applicable. Meyer believes the veneration of Hitler was tied to the German veneration of the Kaiser, but what society has been spared a leader who acts as if he is above  the law?  Even England, which prizes the Magna Carta and its supposition that the king is subject to laws greater than he, has had its Henry VIII;  in the modern age the power and influence of rulers is even more strongly expressed. Of general interest, too, is the conflict of moralities at play when the state is doing things that are obviously wrong. People want to do the 'right' thing,but so utterly basic is tribal preservation instinct that we hesitate; how can we attack 'ourselves'? We must separate the players in our minds, must create a new 'us' and relegate the government to the status of 'them', but that doesn't alter the fact that those enabling the evil are still our countrymen. The tide of fear and uncertainty has an awful strength, sweeping away all but the most strident stands.  It is a struggle not finished, and one which will never be finished;  we are never relieved from the possibility our instincts may lead us in the wrong direction. 

They Thought They Were Free strikes me a must-read for beginning to grasp the German mind and the human soul in its darkest hour. Historically it alters a bounty of insight into what Germans were enduring now, but can be applied to human travails through the centuries. 

The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America
© 2004 Philip Roth
400 pages

Mister Charlie Lindbergh, he flew to old Berlin,
Got 'im a big Iron Cross, and he flew right back again
To Washington, Washington. 


Misses Charlie Lindbergh, she come dressed in red,
Said: "I'd like to sleep in that pretty White House bed
In Washington, Washington."
("Lindbergh", Woody Guthrie)

The normal proceedings of the 1940 Republican Presidential Convention were interrupted when Charles Lindbergh, the heroic aviator adored by millions for his pioneer solo flight across the Atlantic, arrived at the last moment and swept the convention, winning the Republican candidacy for president. As Britain continued to struggle to hold its own against Hitler's Luftwaffe, Lindbergh denounced President Roosevelt as a warmonger influenced by Jews,  and won a staggering victory; the course of history changed. The Plot Against America is an alternate history novel about the Jewish experience during the Nazi-friendly Lindbergh administration. While grimly fascinating at first,  the novel goes off the rails of plausibility 4/5ths of the way in and doesn't so much as conclude as simply comes to a stop.

Roth makes the usual move of writing himself and his family into the plot: a young Phillip Roth is the viewpoint character, and the novel is presented as a memoir of his coming of age in a dark time for his family. Roth's alternate tale concerns social and cultural change, chiefly; the war in Europe plays only a background role, and judging by the novel's ending, comes to the same end as it did in reality. Where Roth succeeds is in believably portraying the slow growth of fascism in an American context. Lindbergh doesn't swap his suit and tie for a colonel's uniform and turn the United States into a slightly different version of an Evil Empire; he works instead on a more insidious level -- concealing fascism perfectly behind the flag and cross. While Jews in the United States are understandably alarmed by his election, there seems to be a genius behind Lindbergh's machinations. Rather than making overt moves against them,  he waits for their sustained agitation to cause them to lose sympathy among the Christian majority..and then ever so-subtly fans the flames.  It reminds me of the tactics of anti-labor politicians in the Gilded Age, who would manipulate strikers into taking forceful action and then send in the troops to brutally put down the uprest. The middle class then blamed the strikers for being violent against the state. More fascinating than this is the psychological tole the subtle war takes on the Jewish community. This is very much the heart of The Plot Against America. Not only are members of the Roth family turned against one another, but they begin to doubt themselves, and their love of country is slowly battered by the increasing climate of fear in which they must live.

Unfortunately, the novel's end doesn't do it justice. As the horror  seems as if it can't get any worse, Roth writes that "just like that, it was over" -- and then quickly tells what happened in brief. Here he teases readers with a revelation that puts Lindbergh's entire political career into a more understandable context, but the revelation rather beggars belief. This would seem an appropriate time for a conclusion, but the faux memoir continues for almost another hundred pages, with seemingly no little point other than to tuck in a minor thread. The effort is appreciated, but seems out of proportion.

Probably worth your while if the alternate social history catches your attention: that story is definitely moving, but the ending is problematic.

Related:
"Lindbergh"/"America First" by Woody Guthrie, in which Guthrie decries isolationist Lindbergh's America First organization.
In the Presence of Mine Enemies, Harry Turtledove. (Here the US also doesn't enter WW2.)

SPOILER:
The ultimate premise of the plot against America is that Hitler kidnapped Lindbergh's baby in 1932 and raised him in Germany as a hostage; in exchange for his continued safety, the Lindberghs had to enter public office. Hitler  thus engineers his entire political career and turns Lindbergh into a puppet for his own ambitions.