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  • Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons
  • Andrew F. Lang (bio)
Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. By Elaine Frantz Parsons. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 400. Cloth, $34.95.)

Elaine Frantz Parsons’s Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction appears at an auspicious cultural moment. As the nation continues to grapple with the tragic 2015 massacre in Charleston, South [End Page 150] Carolina, moviegoers witness in Free State of Jones (2016) a snapshot of the Civil War that confronts diluted Lost Cause narratives. In this fraught time, Parsons’s book challenges academic audiences to reconsider the origins, meaning, and dark history of the Ku Klux Klan. Just as we cannot escape the historical connections to Charleston while engaging the ugly power of racial violence on the silver screen, Parsons exposes readers to the troubling realization that the Klan was not a local or regional institution. Rather, it was an American idea, drawn from national culture and sustained by national custom. The events of the past two years, both real and in the theaters, have lent weight to this reality, which Parsons depicts with blunt revelation.

Parsons’s account of the Klan is as much a cultural history as it is an institutional history, a refreshing departure from a vast literature that has long cataloged the political, social, and economic implications of Reconstruction violence. While Parsons is certainly interested in these various dimensions, she is more concerned with how the Klan acted, from where it derived its peculiar customs, how it performed its ritualistic violence, and, most troublingly, how it functioned as an American institution. Although she underscores that the Klan emerged as a response to Confederate defeat and the disquieting conditions of a postemancipation order, Parsons’s cultural approach portrays the Klan not only as a group that conducted sporadic, local night-riding attacks, but also as a ubiquitous, insidious manifestation of the American imagination. The Klan may not have spread its terror to every corner of the South, but its discursive spirit was felt across the postwar landscape, its existence validated in both discourse and image.

Ku-Klux thus revises several historiographical premises about the Reconstruction era, carrying immense promise for future scholarship. First, while the Klan may have lacked a coherent organizational scheme, Parsons suggests that this omission misses the point about the Klan’s power as an idea. The forms of collective violence scattered throughout pockets of the South became well publicized in the press, shaping how future victims might react to political conditions. In fact, the Klan relied on media coverage as a weapon just as powerful as torches or guns. The specter of violence—not only the tangible act itself—“limited how all black southerners and their white allies used public space and resources, participated in political life, and defended their interests” (7).

Second, Parsons argues forcefully and convincingly that the Klan was not the product of a backward and dying South. Instead, its original founders and members hailed from urban centers, practiced professional livelihoods, and retained an ambivalence about the region’s plantation culture. [End Page 151] Indeed, the Klan promised a hopeful future to a class of vengeful white southerners who worried that radical political and social changes threatened to disrupt a stable white society. Integrating their costumes, language, and practices within the era’s popular culture—all of which they attached to systemic violence—gave the Klan a national, modernizing legitimacy.

Northerners also could see in the Klan an image of themselves, they could read the language of the Klan as an American discourse, and they could relate to the Klan’s carnival dress, minstrel obsession, and burlesque tradition. And herein lay one of the many tragic ironies that the Klan inspired. Northerners did not create the Klan, and they rarely participated in its physical practices. But in a twisted process of sectional reconciliation, “the Klan simultaneously took the form of white southern resistance to northern authority while serving as white southerners’ contribution to a unified culture” (12). Parsons makes a powerful, devastating case that the Klan could not have thrived without northern...

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