Behind the Mask of Chivalry by Nancy MacLean (1995, Paperback)

MacLean analyzes the movement in Athens, Georgia & attempts to place the Klan’s self-proclaimed role as chivalrous protector of white women within a broader context of complex economic, political & religious forces. She posits that the rank & file Klansmen were responding to changes in the post-World War I era that they perceived as a threat to white supremacy. For MacLean, Klansmen were “middling men: neither elite employers & brokers nor, as today’s popular conceptions of the Klan would have it, ‘poor white trash.” They were often pillars in their communities & had climbed the economic ladder by adhering to a strong Protestant work ethic. During the early 1920s, many Klansmen-to-be felt vulnerable & believed their economic prospects were fast disappearing to uppity blacks & minions of monopoly- the alien chain stores. MacLean argues that reactionary populism in the form of the Second Ku Klux Klan responded to the desperate cry for a return to normalcy.

MacLean contends that the reactionary populism exhibited by the Klan in Athens, Georgia was based on classic liberalism, republican ideals & traditions, the social, economic, & political visions of the founding fathers, & Protestant evangelicalism. The Hooded Knights, MacLean argues, “put forward a populist critique of American society suited to the middling men” & thus gave voice to middle class fears. Simultaneously, however, MacLean posits that the order attracted lower classes by opposing social reconstruction from the left. Thus, the Second Klan was not a simple conservative force; its anti-statism ideologies opposed government intervention personal, social, or economic affairs; the order also advocated for certain prerequisites for citizenship such as property ownership; &, the order also justified its extralegal violence by wrapping it in the robes of Protestantism.

MacLean attempts to use her case study of a Southern klavern to generalize about the national movement. By her own admittance, readers will no doubt question such inferences. She states the most striking element of her research is the similarities “between Southern Klansmen & their counterparts elsewhere.” She has not, however, conducted any research to substantiate her conclusions.

Furthermore, MacLean’s thesis hinges on a class analysis that asks readers to believe fundamentalist ideologies are primarily a phenomenon of the middle class. She argues that the Klan in the South was chiefly comprised of middling men who were disillusioned by social & economic changes; yet, she simultaneously offers statistics to demonstrate that lower-classes espoused the same principles.

MacLean points to deep roots of racism within lower classes & their occupations. This does not, however, prove that they shared fundamentalist ideologies with the Klan. It simply states the obvious: white Southerners (& for that matter many Americans) during the 1920s espoused generally racist values & did not favor civil rights for Afro-Americans. It does nothing to enhance her already weak thesis. She also states that it is a “wonder” that more tenant farmers & mill workers did not join the Klan. Yet she never follows up on this question. MacLean also fails to describe why the entire middle class of Clarke County did not join the Second Klan. What differentiating characteristics explain why some petite bourgeois, racist, Nativist, sexist, & socially & economically paranoid white males joined the Klan & why others did not?