The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (review)

This is a straightforward and useful study of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. McVeigh argues that this version of the Klan emerged as a white Protestant response to the rise of large-scale manufacturing and retail, which squeezed small businesses and farms, diminished the political influence of the heartland, and strengthened the power of the cities—and the ethnic communities that lived in them. The Klan's explosive growth from 1920-24 was due to the success of Klan organizers in mobilizing WASPs who feared the devaluation of their economic, political, and social power as a result of these shifts.

McVeigh convincingly argues that social movement theory has difficulty explaining right-wing movements because it overlooks how threats to social status can be used to mobilize relatively privileged groups. Most social movements, he notes, seek to win power and status for the powerless. But right-wing movements "act to preserve, restore, or expand rights and privileges of a relatively advantaged social group" (38). The Klan is an example of this. They employed a populist rhetoric that condemned industrial elites above them for manipulating labor markets and attacked the "rabble" below them (i.e. ethnic, Catholic working class communities) for flooding these markets and for being culturally alien. The top and bottom of American society, they charged, conspired to squeeze the hard-working, upright, white Protestants in the middle.

McVeigh devises a "power devaluation" theory to explain why so many of this "virtuous middle" (Judith Shklar's term in American Citizenship, Harvard University Press, 1991) were attracted to the Klan. Relatively privileged groups who fear the decline of their political, economic, and social "purchasing power" are susceptible to joining movements to defend it. White Protestants, for example, feared that their power was being devalued by the growing presence of Catholics and immigrants. The Klan mobilized anxious WASPs by presenting itself as a "one-hundred percent American" organization that promised to restore their standing. The power devaluation of these relatively privileged WASPs, combined with effective mobilization techniques by the Klan, led farmers and middle class white Protestants to join the KKK in droves.

McVeigh uses quantitative and qualitative data to examine the Klan at the national level, particularly a close content analysis of its major national newspaper, the Imperial Night-Hawk. His prose sometimes reads like stiff social science, but the book's straightforward, non-moralistic tone is a strength. McVeigh takes the KKK seriously as a social movement and does so without feeling the need to constantly remind readers how evil they were.

McVeigh argues that while the 1920s Klan was racist, its focus was not on anti-Black terrorism like the Reconstruction-era KKK. (Its racism toward African Americans was primarily paternalistic, he maintains.) Rather, the 1920s Klan was essentially an anti-immigration organization. Through McVeigh one can see that its discourse is eerily similar to that of anti-immigration groups today. The KKK argued that "true Americans" were losing ground to immigrants, that immigrants burdened public resources, and that they degraded American culture. These arguments—and many of the quotes McVeigh provides from Klan papers—could have come from the Minutemen today.

I have two criticisms of the book. First, McVeigh's use of market metaphors to explain power devaluation underplays the role of struggle in political organizing. To speak of a "supply" of social status or a "decline in demand" of its "purchasing power" makes it seem like status is a commodity to be exchanged rather than a hierarchical relation of power negotiated through social conflict. Second, I wonder how generalizeable his power devaluation theory is. It seems like a promising model with which to interpret the contemporary anti-immigration movement and the "Tea Party" phenomenon, for example. But it is less clear how participants in anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, abstinence-only education, creationism, and other evangelical Protestant movements are motivated by a perceived threat to their material interests or loss of social...