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199 Epilogue The 1920s Ku Klux Klan in rural Newaygo County, and in the state of Michigan more widely, certainly appears to fit in with the “new historical appraisal” of the organization as championed in more recent regional studies by writers such as Shawn Lay and Leonard J. Moore. In his introduction to a particularly notable edited volume of case studies featuring six western Klaverns (drawn from Colorado, Texas, California, Utah, and Oregon ), Lay pointed out that the organization “demonstrated a great appeal among mainstream elements across the nation,” and labeled it “simultaneously a vast social, political and folk movement.”1 Moore, meanwhile, in assessing the findings of what he called “populist” Klan studies (including his own in Indiana), concluded that “Klansmen were too much a part of America’s social mainstream to be dismissed as an extremist aberration.”2 It is statements such as these that, above anything else used to describe members of the order, seem most genuinely fitting to describe the Klansmen and Klanswomen of Michigan. In order to help either confirm or deny their interpretation of the 1920s Klan movement, and in the process build up a national picture of the organization , Lay and his associates stated the need for a wave of future Klan researchers to provide “a sufficient number of case studies from a variety of regions.”3 It is hoped that this effort, the first to concentrate entirely upon the state of Michigan, can in some way contribute to this wider national picture. Certainly its findings agree by and large with those of the “PopulistCivic ” school of thought on the Klan, revealing an organization that, at the peak of its popularity, was chiefly social and civic in nature, was essentially law-abiding, and drew members from across the white Protestant religious spectrum as opposed to simply the fundamentalist fringes. The mass of its members, here as elsewhere, came from all strata of local Protestant life and, just as Lay noted of his own Klan subjects, “whatever their social or economic standing, a commitment to civic activism united members of the order.”4 Naturally for the average upstanding white Protestant Midwesterner of the time, the word “activism” in this description could just have easily 200| Epilogue have been replaced by “moralism,” and it was the moral arena in which the Klan mounted its greatest public campaigns. At the national level this meant an obsession with prohibition enforcement and the prevention of “undesirable” immigration, while more local manifestations included worries about the supposedly corrupting effects of “Romanist” influence in local government and public schools. Either way, in its Northern, homogeneously white surroundings, the Klan’s primary concerns turned out to be far more religious than racial, and its ungodly enemies, as depicted in crowd-drawing caricatures of foreign moral depravity, far more imagined than real. Even so, engaging self-portrayals by the KKK were nothing if not accessible, making their way to the public through a prism of pop-culture distractions and deviations that included romance novels, drama, song, and—most impressively of all—the movies. Using impossibly clichéd imagery depicting a thoroughly American self and a deeply un-American adversary, the Invisible Empire succeeded almost as much, it seems, in entertaining the crowds as persuading them. That the Klan’s arrival in towns and cities across the nation during the 1920s was accompanied by a faddish Klan-themed merchandizing craze is a sure sign of its entry into popular culture. Trading on attractive notions of a prestigious, patriotic, and exclusive member’s club, commission-hungry Kleagles “sold” the Klan, or at least the idea of the Klan, to expectant communities everywhere, while sales of robes, assorted regalia, and all manner of novelty items boomed accordingly. Despite the banal outer material trappings of the Klan phenomenon, the meat of its recruitment activity took place at the very heart of the community , as the Newaygo County membership records clearly show. As well as winning recruits from every social class via informal mechanisms of family, work, and fraternity, the KKK took particular pains to make members of the influential and the reputable. Protestant ministers, local government officials, newspapermen, school boards, the civically active, the socially and financially prominent, and the “best” citizens—all provided, in their robes, a respectable, and public, example. As the Klan banner began to fly over all manner of entertainments—whether they be picnics, potlucks, parades, celebrations, 4th of July fireworks, even christenings, weddings, and funerals —the culture of the Ku Klux...

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