I dont have time for a long post at the moment, but I thought I’d contribute a single blow to the forces tearing down the walls of the Cathedral, specifically the ‘progressive history’ wall:
Committed to protecting the “purity of White Womanhood,” the Klan physically punished those who engaged in immoral behavior, public indecency and drunkenness, wife beating, gambling, adultery, and the failure to support one’s family. Interestingly, the Klan supported women’s suffrage since women could help restore and preserve morality and traditional values by voting for Klan agendas and political candidates.
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Well, that suffrage thing was a bust! The Klan didn’t understand the basis of chivalry and how woman are led astray by emotion. Ultimately quite shortsighted.
I’m not so sure that’s how it went down. I am coming more and more to the view that the Klan in the Second Era was a very different animal from the Klan in the First Era, and in fact was a progressive organisation.
Compare the Second Era to the First:
In the First Era the Klan was Southern-only, with no real activities outside the former Confederate States.
In the Second Era the Klan operated all over the country, and in fact was strongest in the Midwest.
In the First Era the Klan was mostly Confederate veterans and other unreconstructed Southrons.
In the Second Era the Klan embraced American Nationalism enthusiastically, often quoted Lincoln, and rarely flew the Confederate Flag.
It’s also worthy of note that the Second-Era Klan strongly supported Prohibition, a left-wing Yankee Puritan idea if ever I heard of one. And Woodrow Wilson showed the film Birth of a Nation, instrumental in the formation of the Second-Era Klan, in the White House. I haven’t seen the film, but I’m given to believe it tries to paint the Klan as pan-white, which is more in line with the Second Era. In the First Era, white Republican carpetbaggers were at least as much the target as blacks.
My theory is that the anonymity and mystique of the Klan made it easy to reinvent with a different political agenda, back when the Left was still racialist.
My family has strong and on going ties with the Klan. You’re mostly right. As I understand family history, during the second era, there where pretty much two Klans. The yankee Klan as you described and the Southern Klan which was less (or not at all) hostile to White enthics and Southron Catholics, since neither had much of a presence in The South at that time.
Not the best source, I know, but it’s how it was passed down to me.
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