Threat to Democracy: The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: A Warning from History - Hardcover

`Threat to Democracy reminds us that Americans bid good riddance to serial aberrations in the civic and social life of our republic repeatedly, only to learn that these phenomena are as American as apple pie. Gordon's timely, crisply written, indispensable primer helps explain why another aberration is now upon us.' -- David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography `A first-rate historian can show us the past in a way that clarifies the present. That's what Linda Gordon does here ... Threat to Democracy reminds us that the sentiments that powered the reprise of the Klan have never been entirely absent from American life, and cannot be understood as an aberrant strain that might be entirely eliminated from the national character.' -- Nicholas Lemann, author of Redemption `An excellent historical treatment of an almost forgotten yet very dangerous period of hate in America. What a history lesson for today's electorate.' -- Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center `At once thoughtful, fair, and deeply troubling, Threat to Democracy exhibits the analytical wisdom of a master historian who sharply reminds us that popular mass mobilizations can be instruments of depredation.' -- Ira Katznelson, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Fear Itself

Boasting four to six million members, the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s dramatically challenged preconceptions of hooded Klansmen, who through violence and lynching had established a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South. Responding to the `emergency' posed by the flood of immigrants - Irish and Italians, `self-centred Hebrews', and `sly Orientals' - this `second Klan', as award-winning historian Linda Gordon vividly chronicles, spread across America. Condemning liberal, `urban' vices like liquor, prostitution, movies and jazz as Catholic and Jewish plots to subvert American values, the rejuvenated Klan became entirely mainstream, attracting middle-class men and women. It grew to include elaborate secret rituals and mass `Klonvocations' before collapsing amid revelations of sordid sexual scandals, financial embezzlement, and Ponzi-like schemes. The Klan's effective melding of Christian values with racial bigotry and its lightning-like accretion of political power now becomes a sobering parable for the twenty-first century, helping to explain the dangerous appeal of today's welter of intolerance and explaining its ancestry.