If we approach the Klan as movement rather than organization, we better appreciate the cultural politics and aesthetic ideology of Klannishness. The Klan organization was, at its heart, a deeply local structure. The national Klan was a fractured and federalized affair. Yet, across media, the forging of shared self unified a far-reaching national movement. The Klan appropriated the melodies of popular songs, adopted the format of adventure novels and tabloid newspapers, anticipated the power of film and radio, and was absorbed by the world of sports. The Klan movement was more than capable of both enjoying contemporary mass popular culture and turning it to its own ends. Hoosiers concerned by an impending invasion of papists, Georgians who feared an international rising ride of color, or Illinoisans who reviled a perceived breakdown in public morality--all could unite behind the image of the idealized Klan member that appeared around the country and across media. In the creation of a consumable cultural identity, citizens of he Invisible Empire bound themselves to an imagined cultural community.Id. at 9. From the book jacket: "In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization, . . Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement."
Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017):
[M]y goal in this interpretation is to understand, not to conduct an argument or mount an attack. . . As a student of social movements I am less interested in condemnation than in explanation. Explaining requires that the historian avoid cheap shots and try to understand why perfectly reasonable people supported the Klan. Because the Klan was the biggest social movement of the early twentieth century, and because its ideas echo again today, examining it in order to grasp its attractions seems worthwhile. In what follows, I consider the Ku Klux Klan's methods of recruitment, the satisfactions it brought to its members, and the deep structures of its ideology. Its allures were manifold: they included the rewards of being an insider, of belonging to a community, of expressing and acting on resentments, of participating in drama, of feeling religiously and morally righteous, of turning a profit.Id. at 7-8.
