What I’m Reading: The Second Coming of the KKK – 22 in a series – “Instead it blamed the country’s woes on two overlapping categories of unpatriotic Americans…”

“The Klan’s enemies were not economic exploiters, unlike those of the Populist Party. While spouting a small-business ethic—honoring individual entrepreneurship as the basis for American greatness—it did not challenge economic policies that served big capital. Instead it blamed the country’s woes on two overlapping categories of unpatriotic Americans: African American, Catholic, and Jewish minorities, but also big-city liberals, “a cosmopolitan intelligentsia devoted to foreign creeds and ethnic identities,” whose culture was “without moral standards,” that is, secular. When the Klan railed against big money, as it did very occasionally, it did so because it saw big money as Jewish.”

The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition by Linda Gordon

What I'm Reading: The Second Coming of the KKK - 1 in a series

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