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The Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan movement was intimately intertwined with, and completely dependent on, contemporary popular cultural forms and institutions. The degree and significance of this entanglement is most immediately obvious in the Klan's origins in Pulaski, Tennessee. According to the founding member James R. Crowe, his fellow founder Frank McCord played the violin and Calvin Jones the guitar. The group would "go serenading and amuse ourselves as best we could." In an unpublished 1911 historical novel about the Klan, Frank McCord's younger brother Lapsley (himself an early member) remembered that in its early days "there were parties of them out nearly every evening calling upon their sweethearts." Though that description does not mention musical performance, his account is consistent with serenading. It would, of course, be a mistake to accept early members' self-interested explanations of their origins at face value. Fortunately, ample additional evidence supports their accounts. The future founders of the Klan first appeared in the post-Civil War public record working together in May 1866, about a month before the Klan was most likely founded. Three of the six founders, Richard Reed, J. C. Lester, and James Crowe, appeared in the Pulaski Citizen (edited by Frank McCord's brother Luther) on a list of organizers of tableaux staged to raise funds to provide artificial limbs for maimed Confederate veterans. Crowe appeared in one scene as the emperor Aurelian, and Lester appeared in "Queen Elizabeth Discovering her Favorite's [Sir Walter Raleigh's] marriage." Most of the scenes expressed domestic sentiment or provided opportunities for the belles and beaux of Pulaski to display themselves, though Crowe's Zenobia and Aurelian tableau, for instance, had an obvious political message. McCord's newspaper reflected that in the scene showing Zenobia, the conquered warrior princess, "raising her deprecating, but manacled hands," "the fetters degraded not [her] but the haughty Roman [Aurelian] who had imposed them." Just as these future Klan founders' first public appearance was performative, so were two of the earliest Klan activities noticed by outsiders: a moonlight dance at which the Klan made a costumed appearance and a parade replete with costumes and musical entertainment.1
There is also material evidence of the Klan's theatrical roots. Frank McCord's fiddle still exists, in the custody of the Tennessee State Museum. More intriguing,...