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  • The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics
  • Jenny Irons
The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics By Rory McVeigh University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 258 pages. $22.50 paper.

One challenge of studying right-wing social movements – especially those of the past – is that when scholars want to answer questions about mobilization, they are faced with a serious data problem: members often keep their identities hidden and organizations often do not maintain membership lists. How, then, to answer the question of how an organization like the Ku Klux Klan recruited participants and rapidly built a movement in the early 1920s? Rory McVeigh answers this question in The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics by analyzing the KKK's nationally distributed publication, the Imperial Nighthawk. McVeigh coded the magazine's content from 1923 to 1924 to trace Klan events and frames, generating an original and unique dataset that captures how the movement varied across the nation as well as how leaders appealed to potential recruits. He builds a theory of right-wing movements, the power-devaluation theory, which he argues can help us to understand how such movements emerge, develop and decline.

McVeigh begins the book with a recounting of how Col. William Joseph Simmons was able to build an organization from floundering to booming within a few years. From the beginning, Simmons insisted that the Klan was out to recruit "leading citizens," not haters of Jews, Catholics and "Negroes."(23) Although Simmons was eventually ousted from the organization by new leadership, this message remained the same: the Klan was an organization that promoted patriotism, community and commitment to a moral order. McVeigh does not deny that the Klan engaged in violent acts and was anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, racist and xenophobic, but he insists on taking the Klan's narrative for what it was: a (usually) carefully crafted set of frames meant to build an organization of patriotic Americans. Although I would have liked to see McVeigh deal a bit more with the contradictions in the Klan's frames, I appreciated his close attention to the actual words of the Klan. By focusing on what Klan leaders produced, and not on what others said about them, McVeigh resists falling into the trap of interpreting right-wing activism as the result of psychological strain and irrational behavior. In fact, McVeigh very intentionally refutes this interpretation, arguing that past ways of understanding the Klan of the 1920s fall far short in accurately explaining why it became so powerful so quickly, and yet also failed in relatively short order.

The heart of McVeigh's book is the development of his power-devaluation theory. McVeigh's basic question is this: why, at certain times, do relatively privileged groups exploit the resources and political opportunities they already have to defend their rights and privileges? The short answer is that they feel threatened. But as McVeigh shows, this answer is complicated. Historical evidence shows that locales where the Klan was strongest often had very minimal – if any – quantifiable threats from groups identified [End Page 1059] by the Klan as enemies, especially Catholics and Eastern European immigrants. Rather, what mattered was how shifts in social relations at the national level led to a decline in demand for what middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants had to offer in economic, political and status "exchange markets." When this group faced a devaluaton in its power in more than one of these arenas, it composed a sentiment pool from which the Klan could recruit and mobilize. For example, when skilled laborers felt threatened as their jobs were lost to technological developments that coincided with a rise in deskilled positions and the concurrent influx of unskilled immigrant laborers, their economic power was devalued. Using strong appeals to populism and progressivism, the Klan built its membership base largely from disgruntled sources in the middle class: small business owners, merchants, skilled manufacturers, managers and other professionals. Importantly, Klan leaders had to carefully interpret the threat such that cultural identities (race and religion) were activated as "alternative bases of exchange."(45) "Cultural attacks" then...

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