Content area
Full Text
Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, by Nancy MacLean. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 292 pp. $30.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-19-507234-0.
In the past few years there has been an explosion of case studies of local and state chapters of the massive Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. In addition to its national agenda of racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and conservative moralism, this second Klan fashioned local appeals to suit the apprehensions of specific constituencies of white Protestants, highlighting, for example, anti-Mormonism in the West, anti-Catholicism in the East. Thus, most studies scrutinize the origins and practices of community or state Klans to explain the explosive growth of white supremacist activity between 1923 and 1927.
Nancy MacLean's study of the Athens, Georgia, Klan--for which she compiled data on local Klansmen from the manuscript censuses, tax records, and other sources--similarly draws upon data from a single Klan unit. And, in many respects, her findings differ little from those of other recent social...