Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.

By Nancy MacLean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xvii plus 292pp. $30.00).

Behind the Mask of Chivalry is a well-written, yet flawed, analysis of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. The author, Nancy MacLean, probes Klan texts, including newspapers and readers' speeches, for their racial, class and gender implications; her goal is to understand why the Klan was able to attract millions of men to join a movement that she compares to the Nazis under Hitler For MacLean the key factor was class and the apparent loss of economic status of her sample of Klan members from an Athens, Georgia, klavern. She portrays them as a petite bourgeoisie caught between wealthy beneficiaries of the new industrial order and the dispossessed and marginalized. Although many Athens Klan members, according to tax records, had benefited economically during the war years, the depression of the post-WWI era caused a decline in their economic fortune and produced a reactionary, populist crusade to regulate business and yet keep blacks, women, immigrants and labor in their subordinate positions.

Given the recent end of the Cold War and a growing debate over the limitations of a strict Marxist interpretation of history, it is surprising that MacLean would return to an interpretive framework that is monocausal and too readily dismissive of the influence of religious and cultural beliefs on human activity. The failure of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, although in power for anywhere from forty to seventy years, to wipe out or at least to ameliorate ethnic and religious tensions ought to raise doubts about the basic tenet of Marxism that economic redistribution of goods will foster universal brotherhood and sisterhood.

MacLean's economic interpretation stumbles in other ways. Her attempt to argue that an improving economy fostered Klan decline after 1925 overlooks the overwhelming evidence, offered by numerous Klan historians, of financial and moral abuses of Klan leaders as the most important single factor. The conviction of D. C. Stephenson in 1925 for the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer parallels the recent case of Jim Bakker. It was a more timely event than recovery of the national economy, which took place by 1923, for explaining the precipitous decline of Klan membership in 1925 and thereafter. There is considerable irony then in the fact that the depletion of the financial reserves of Athens' Klan members extended through 1927.

When applied to the 1930's, MacLean's thesis of economic decline as the principal motivator behind Klan activity should have predicted an even larger Klan movement. She responds, however, that the New Deal and its programs to cushion the petite bourgeoisie's economic fall enfeebled the Klan and similar organizations, such as the Bund. She disregards the fact, however, that potential Klan members' economic status must have declined far more rapidly during the depression than during the post-WWI era and that New Deal programs did not restore the previous income of most Americans. Conversely, one can wonder, as an extension of her analysis, why Germany's passage of social welfare legislation much earlier than the US did not cushion the economic misfortunes of the petite bourgeoisie during the depression, and reduce the appeal of Naziism.

Another part of MacLean's interpretative problems flows from her efforts to stretch material gathered from one local study into a fabric that covers the Klan nationally, and, to a certain, extent, right wing movements on an international scale. There are an increasing number of such monographs, on a variety of subjects, with supposedly national implications posited because of the demand of editors that studies accepted for publication provide a broad ranging level of analysis. There is nothing wrong with that emphasis, but it does place an unrealistic burden on those just finishing their dissertations.

There is something wrong, then, when the dust jacket can describe Beyond the Mask of Chivalry as "impeccably researched," for the level of intensive research has not extended much beyond one Southern state. In short, MacLean's depiction of Klan uniformity nationally does not move beyond assertion to substantial proof based on examining more than one Klan in detail. In the case of Ohio she quotes "an acute contemporary" from the Atlanta Independent, who predicted Klan-sponsored violence and the overthrow of constitutional rights once it was strong enough in that state, as proof that the Ohio Klan was of the same cloth as the Klan of Athens, Georgia. In numerous cities throughout Ohio, however, the Klan elected the mayor, city council and school board in the fall of 1923. Where is the evidence of post-election violence and trampling of constitutional guarantees that proves the validity of this prediction?

Another example of the problems generated by such faulty methodology is MacLean's contention that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was everywhere a violent, vigilante-style organization, constrained from such activity in certain areas only by its lack of power. Despite local studies that argue to the contrary, MacLean suggests that Klan-sponsored violence did occur and that newspapers were too much in the Klan camp, or too fearful of retaliation, to report it. There were many examples, however, of newspapers which reported extensively and objectively on Klan activities, some of which won Pulitzer prizes. In Youngstown, Ohio, the Vindicator combatted the Klan at every opportunity; it would have welcomed any violent or vigilante-type activities on the part of the Klan and the possibility of exposing the seamier side of its work.

Underlying MacLean's discourse is a fear that Naziism could happen here, given the right conditions, and that recent scholarship on the Klan is an unwitting handmaiden to the lessening of vigilance. What is at issue here is how one interprets those studies which have observed that the Klan attempted to attract mainstream membership by muting its prejudices and reducing or eliminating violent activities. Such studies suggest that Klan leaders, attracted by money and power, learned quickly that the extreme right wing did not attract that many followers, and so tailored their message. The recent experience of David Duke is very instructive in this regard. After years of operating on the fringe, he also tried to enter the mainstream by severing his Klan ties. Duke had realized that there was not much acceptance of a Klan that disregarded a political discourse emphasizing democracy and protection of constitutional rights. There is no doubt that the activities, as well as coded rhetoric, of Duke should raise concerns and encourage the vigilance of tolerant citizenry, but the fact that he found it necessary to distance himself from the Klan helps us to understand why Naziism succeeded in Germany and not in the United States. In short, MacLean is functioning more as a promoter of anti-Klan rhetorical discourse within American culture than as a historian interested in explaining why the Klan did not experience the success of the Nazis.

In conclusion, I believe that Nancy MacLean has undertaken a much-needed and important task, the examination of race, class and gender as categories of analysis of the Klan of the 20s. She has provocatively widened the frame of analysis, although Kathleen Thee, the first to undertake a comprehensive gender analyis of the Klan, has offered a much richer and more complex portrait of the Klan and its reaction to gender changes in American society. Unfortunately, MacLean has relied too much on ideological statements as determinative of action. I am reminded here of the striking dissimilarity between MacLean's ideologically-oriented interpretation and the left's attack on politicians and historians who cited Marxist texts as reason for a hard-nosed attitude toward the Soviet Union and increased military expenditures. Instead the left heroized George Kennan, who based his interpretations of Soviet behavior more on its history, culture and tradition. Another parallel may be observed in feminist scholars' view that prescriptive literature of the mid-nineteenth century was something that women may have read, but not followed. If all people are to merit treatment as agents in history, we have to examine more than the ideological statements of their, leaders.