There is a scene in Mississippi Burning, the overrated and largely factually inaccurate portrayal of the FBI’s response to the murder of three Civil Right’s workers in Mississippi that is unintentionally telling. The wife of Klansman whom the folksy, Southern FBI investigator has a crush on, is beaten by her Klan husband. After seeing that — not the rank injustice of letting Klans men off for violent attacks, not the everyday abuse of African Americans in town, not the glaring economic oppression of African Americans in town — the FBI investigator goes on a Dirty Harry style rampage than finally brings the murderers to justice. I wonder if the writers of the move knew about the history of the 1920s Klan, because that echos the story that brought that version of the Klan tumbling down.
Within the lifetime of Civil War veterans, the country witnessed the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, a collection of avower white protestant supremacists who virtually took over the government of most of the South, Indiana, Ohio, Oregon, and Colorado as well as a significant portion of Congress and achieved at least the disinterest of President of the United States in the 1920s. They completely took over the Republican Party, drove African Americans out of it, and caused divisions so deep in the Democratic Party that it took the Depression to make it a force in politics again. A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan is an excellent history of that period.
Egan interweaves the story of the woman whose assault eventually brought the Klan down with the tale of the rise of the man and who raised it to its greatest heights, the women who helped him, the violence and power they wielded, and the people from all walks of life who tried to stop them. He tells the story with a novelist’s flair. The prose is riveting and even though you largely know the outcome, you hang on every word. Certain set pieces — a woman’s desperate attempts at escape on the drive during her kidnapping; the student counter-assault on klansmen trying to burn a cross on the lawn at Notre Dame University (by the way, anyone who tries to whatabout the Fighting Irish nickname and Native American imagery in professional and college sports should be made to read this book); the mother of Malcom X standing up to a lynching squad; the editor of the Muncie newspaper calming taking abuse day after day for years and not folding. It all reads better than most thrillers and will compel you to keep reading until you have reached the final page.
The parallels between the 1920s and today are obvious and Egan does not belabor them. He does try to interrogate why so many people turned to the Klan, and the answers are prosaic and nonetheless chilling for their ordinariness. Times were hard — the farm recession started in the early 1902s and never really stopped. The Klan offered people an easy scapegoat for their unease that played on people’s sense of ego and superiority and tribalism. Given a target for their discontent and a means of making themselves feel both superior to others and part of something greater than themselves, people put on the headgear.
How the Klan was defeated also has potential lessons for today, but the picture is murkier. Much has been made about Adrent’s prescriptions for dealing with fascism, but the death of the Klan in the 1920s shows that the situation is more complex. “Institutions won’t save you”: except that it was only the intervention of the justice system that shook the Klan’s control over the minds of people. Showing the corruption and hypocrisy was not enough — it wasn’t until the leader of the Northern Klan was seen to be punished for those transgressions, that the power of the Klan suddenly broke. And of course, those crimes were focused on violence against white, protestant women and white, protestant men.
On the other hand, however, Egan is quick to point out that the Klan got much of what it wanted. Jim Corw and Sundown towns were entrenched in much of the country. The immigration doors were shut to most of the world. Perhaps, he muses, the Klan lost steam because they had largely won. The country’s democracy was saved because it largely delivered what the authoritarians wanted. It would be twenty-five years between the fall of the Klan leader and the first real official pushback on the structures of legal racism, and even longer to open up immigration laws.
But democracy did survive in a strong enough fashion to be restored, eventually. The combination of using institutional power, physical resistance where possible (such as at Norte Dame and in immigrant and African American communities in Western Pennsylvania), and a willingness to document and call out the evil being done as evil, allowed democracy to fight a strong enough rear-guard action to recuperate and be in a position to revive. It muddled through, if barely.
Fascism, as perhaps is inevitable on an economic system built on slavery, has been lurking in the United Sates since at least the Antebellum era. Egan’s book is a powerfully told story of how it can burn away much of our democracy if we aren’t careful, and how those flames can be tamped down by ordinary people. History, as the saying goes, does not repeat, but it does rhyme. The rhymes between 1925 and 2023 are obvious. There is already a growing backlash against racist inspired book bannings and the attempt to stuff our children and fellow Americans back into the closet, even in the reddest of America. Perhaps this time, if we pay attention to the rhymes of the past, we can do better than muddle through.
Leave a Reply