Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan by Craig Fox (review)

132 The Michigan Historical Review for ERAmerica in the 1970s and successfully undermined the 1982 gubernatorial campaign of antifeminist, antichoice GOP candidate Richard Headlee, but she leaves undeveloped Peterson’s broader and somewhat more convoluted engagement with feminism. The author discusses Peterson’s fascinating efforts to cultivate an urban GOP among voters of color, a plan discarded in the Nixon years to her bitter chagrin, but readers are left without much sense of Peterson’s ideological positions on the other great issues of that era. An associate remembers her as “not an issues-oriented person at all,” but more of an “organizer,” which seems accurate enough but also unsatisfying in light of such fraught political fault lines as military involvement in Vietnam, school busing programs (divisive nationally but especially in Michigan), reproductive rights, gay and lesbian rights, and other critical issues that barely enter the book’s purview (p. 75). Peterson self-consciously “mothered” the ever-dwindling ranks of moderate Republican women such as Christine Todd Whitman, but Fitzgerald never defines what it meant to cling to a “moderate” identity as postwar consensus splintered into vicious partisanship and the GOP veered sharply to the right. In 2008, shortly before her death, Peterson supported Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Ultimately, Fitzgerald does capture the life of Elly Peterson in careful, attentive detail. However, the plight of the political moderate as the New Right drove her from her former home in the GOP remains a significant, but mostly untold, tale. Whitney Strub Rutgers University, Newark Craig Fox. Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011. Pp. 274. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $29.95. Craig Fox’s Everyday Klansfolk is a unique, highly significant contribution to the scholarship on the massive, nationwide Ku Klux Klan movement of the 1920s. It is the first local study involving Michigan, a key state in the Klan’s midwestern stronghold. It is also the first work to draw on a complete, countywide membership list for a predominantly rural area. Other studies have uncovered information about the characteristics and activities of rural Klan members in the Book Reviews 133 course of broader investigations, but nothing matches the depth of analysis here. Perhaps most interestingly, in terms of addressing one of the great gaps in historians’ knowledge of rank-and-file members, for the first time this book makes use of a substantial membership list for the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). The extraordinary cache of membership records for this study comes from Newaygo County in western Michigan, about 50 miles north of Grand Rapids. Fox uses these records to trace the Klan’s (relatively late) first appearance in the area in 1923, through a phase of rapid growth in 1924 and 1925, and then its subsequent sudden decline. He constructs a remarkably detailed analysis of how the Klan wove itself quickly and thoroughly into the very core of the county’s social fabric and cultural landscape. There is an excellent assessment of the marketing of the Klan, not just the memberships themselves, but the vast array of uniforms, newspapers, books, records and sheet music, dolls, toys, pocketknives, and other merchandise that flowed from all directions, including from local merchants who advertised heavily in the county’s newspapers in hopes of tapping directly into the hot Klan market. In one of the book’s striking accomplishments, Fox uncovers an incredibly dense network of overlapping personal, family, social, economic, and communal relationships within the Klan’s membership, showing that both male and female members were ushered into the organization through the various forces that had always shaped their lives. Fox finds that the Klan was strongly represented in every significant social group and institution in the county, from local business leaders, to merchants, clerks, workers, and farmers, as well as within churches, schools, government, and leading social and service organizations. Men joined at twice the rate of women, but women were particularly likely to join along with fellow family members and to be among the most civically and socially active women in their communities. Fox finds no pattern of violence, only a seamless...