Book Review - THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK by Linda Gordon

The cover of Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the KKK” shows a procession of men marching in full Klan regalia up Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol dome looming behind them. 

It would be a disturbing image in any era, but in 2017 — after the attack on an African-American church in Charleston, S.C., after the neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., after the alt-right poured into Washington for President Trump’s inauguration — it is terrifying.

The photograph was taken in 1925, during the decade when membership in the so-called Second Ku Klux Klan — the first was put down during Reconstruction — swept the country. 

In all, 30,000 men participated in that parade. What the photo leaves out are the throngs lining the avenue: The Klan didn’t just march in the nation’s capital; it received a warm welcome. 

Unlike the first and third Klans (the third appeared during the civil rights era), the 1920s Klan was well integrated into American life. “The K.K.K. may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed,” Gordon writes.

One of Gordon’s tasks is to show that the 1920s we think we know — a Gatsbyan bacchanal of speakeasies, flappers and mob hits — was just an urban, coastal bubble. 

For most Americans, it would appear, the decade was more like something out of “Babbitt” or “Elmer Gantry”: a country turned inward against the world, small-minded and cruel. 

A country in which the Klan and its values — so-called Americanism, xenophobia, white nationalism and patriarchy — were the norm. An America, Gordon all but says, not unlike today.

The second Klan was national in scope, with a surprisingly small footprint in the South — its highest per-capita state memberships were in Indiana and Oregon. In New Jersey, Klansmen burned a cross in the black section of Metuchen, today a liberal commuter suburb of New York. 

The Klan was so powerful in Southern California that it nicknamed Anaheim “Klanaheim.” Its main focus was, as always, on spreading hatred against blacks, Jews and Catholics, but its agenda always fit the local context: In the Southwest, it turned its ire on Hispanics and Latino immigrants; in the Pacific Northwest, it took aim at Japanese.

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Original review on: www.nytimes.com