Threat to Democracy

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-win...