商品簡介
Boasting 4 to 6 million members, the reassembled KuKlux Klan of the 1920s dramatically challenged ourpreconceptions of hooded Klansmen, who through violenceand lynching had established a Jim Crow racial hierarchyin the 1870s South. Responding to the “emergency” posedby the flood of immigrant “hordes”—Pope-worshipping Irishand Italians, “self-centered Hebrews,” and “sly Orientals”—this “second Klan,” as award-winning historian Linda Gordonvividly chronicles, spread principally above the Mason-DixonLine in states like Indiana, Michigan, and Oregon. Condemning“urban” vices like liquor, prostitution, movies, and jazzas Catholic and Jewish “plots” to subvert American values,the rejuvenated Klan became entirely mainstream, attractingmiddle-class men and women through its elaborate secret ritualsand mass “Klonvocations” before collapsing amid revelations ofsordid sexual scandals, financial embezzlement, and Ponzi-likeschemes. The Klan’s brilliant melding of Christian values withracial bigotry and its lightning-like accretion of political powernow becomes a sobering parable for the twenty-first century.
