Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s
Felix Harcourt
Abstract
Earlier studies of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s have largely focused on how and why the organization attracted and lost members. But to understand the Klan primarily as an organization limits our comprehension of the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire’s wider significance. This book argues that when we move beyond the fetishization of affiliation, we recognize the Klan’s broader power as a cultural movement. That movement unified nationally not around loyalty to a fractured and federalized hierarchy, but around an identity of white Protestant ethnonationalism consumed and reproduced in popular ... More
Earlier studies of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s have largely focused on how and why the organization attracted and lost members. But to understand the Klan primarily as an organization limits our comprehension of the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire’s wider significance. This book argues that when we move beyond the fetishization of affiliation, we recognize the Klan’s broader power as a cultural movement. That movement unified nationally not around loyalty to a fractured and federalized hierarchy, but around an identity of white Protestant ethnonationalism consumed and reproduced in popular culture. The audience for these entertainments reached far further than simply the organization’s paying membership to encompass a broad imagined community of cultural Klannishness. The white supremacism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism of the Klan was very much a part and a product of modern American society. Understanding that, the book argues and provides a new avenue toward understanding the wider tensions of cultural pluralism in the 1920s. Klan members both struggled against and participated in an emergent mass culture.
Keywords:
Ku Klux Klan,
popular culture,
1920s,
ethnonationalism,
white supremacism,
anti-Semitism,
anti-Catholicism,
imagined community,
cultural pluralism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226376158 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2018 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226376295.001.0001 |
