The recent book Remembering Reconstruction has an essay titled “The Cultural Work of the Ku-Klux Klan in US History Textbooks, 1883–2015” by Elaine Parsons. The essay examines school textbooks from different eras to see how the story of the Klan was taught to young Americans ever since the Reconstruction Era.
Surprisingly, the Klan was rarely mentioned in textbooks published closest to the time of its founding in 1866:
Of the forty textbooks among those surveyed that were published between 1872 and 1893, only five mentioned the Klan. Textbooks in those years covered several events in the early Reconstruction era: Johnson’s impeachment, Grant’s election and reelection, several Indian conflicts including the Modoc War, and the militant Fenianism of 1866–1870, but made no mention of the Ku-Klux Klan. From [Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America’s Most Turbulent Era (Kindle Locations 4841-4843). LSU Press. Kindle Edition.]
Interestingly, Thomas Wentwort Higginson’s 1875 textbook did not mention the KKK at all. Higginson was a Radical anti-slavery man and a former Union officer who had commanded Black troops during the Civil War. Alex Stephens’s text from 1872 mentioned the Ku Klux Klan Acts but did not mention the Klan itself. In an 1883 edition Stephens condemns the Ku Klux Klan Acts writing that the acts were passed by “bitter partisans, attributing the homicides [of black men in South Carolina] to the Ku-Klux Klan.” Id. (Kindle Location 4851)
Parsons writes that discussion of the Klan itself had to wait until after Reconstruction had ended in most locales. She writes:
The first mention of the Ku-Klux in the textbooks in this survey is in Arthur Gilman’s 1883 A History of the American People. While Gilman, a banker, was a gentleman historian from an earlier era, he was near the heart of the professionalization of the social sciences: he lived in Cambridge and was involved in founding the women’s institution that became Radcliffe College. His close proximity to professional history is suggested, above all, by his early adoption of “notes, which are placed for convenient reference at the bottom of the pages to which they refer.” Gilman writes: “In 1867 the Governor of Tennessee, William G. Brownlow, called upon the United States military to suppress violent demonstrations in that State that had been traced to an organization known as the “Ku-klux Klan [sic]…It appears that at the close of the war a number of secret political societies were formed in the Southern States, the objects of which were to offset, as was claimed by the people of the section, the acts of certain other societies formed through the agency of intriguers from the North, who were exciting the Negro population to acts of violence, and endangering their homes and social relations. It has been reported that five hundred thousand members united the Ku-Klux Klan, of whom forty thousand were in Tennessee. Congress ordered an investigation in April 1871, and the result was published in twelve volumes. The organization died out afterwards, partly because the relation relation of the North and South were becoming more harmonious, and the passions engendered by war were growing weaker.”
Parsons says that the second book to mention the Klan was published in 1885, 19 years after the Klan was founded. Parsons writes:
Alexander Johnston made a second mention of the Klan in his 1885 A History of the United States for Schools. A professor of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton University, his monograph in Herbert Baxter Adams’s Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science placed him at the red-hot center of early professional history. He described the Klan as:
“a secret society of whites, extending all through the Southern States. It was originally formed as a sort of police, to keep the freedmen in subjection. It then attacked the white Republicans, the “carpet-baggers” or “scalawags.” Finally it seems to have gone into the work of committing murders for pay or spite, so that the better class of whites were compelled to aid in putting it down. Before this took place, Congress passed a number of severe laws, intended to put an end to the society and its practices of riding by night in masks and disguises to terrify, whip, or murder freedmen and white Republicans.” Id. (Kindle Locations 4897-4904).
Parsons says that Johnson is the first textbook writer to make the claim that the Klan was originally a “police” organization which later became violent and behaved like outlaws. This would be a claim repeated many times in other textbooks later in an effort to paint the Klan as good in its origins, even if it later became irregularly violent.
Parsons reports that in textbooks published between 1894 and 1913, two-thirds mention the Klan. These books tended to stress the sensational aspects of the Klansmen, emphasizing their costumes and derring do. The claim that the Klan was established to “protect” white women from black men was raised in many of the texts.
The violent attacks on Black people were minimized in these textbooks. Waddy Thompson’ 1904 History of the United States, said simply that “Organizations were. . . formed among the whites for self-protection.”
Lawton B. Evans’s The Essential Facts of American History published in 1909 gave an account of the Klan’s origins that was repeated in other books:
“To protect themselves against these idle and lawless negroes, who were often led away by evil white men, a secret order known as the ‘Ku Klux Klan’ was formed. . . . When they appeared. . . the frightened blacks scurried to their cabins.”
Some Northern authors took a disapproving approach to the Klan. According to Parsons:
Edmond S. Meany’s “United States History for Schools”…dismissed the Klan: “In other [states] forceful intimidation was resorted to, especially by a secret society called Ku-Klux Klan. By ghostly threats and by actual violence, Negroes were kept from voting or holding office. Not a few murders are charged to this movement before it was finally stamped out.”
Several textbook writers from the North during this period wrote brief descriptions of the Klan focusing on violence against blacks. Ohioan Henry William Elson in his “School History of the United States” (1912) wrote: “The more vicious class formed the ‘Ku Klux Klan,’ with the object of intimidating the black vote.”
Edmond S. Meany’s United States History for Schools said of the Klan: “In other [states] forceful intimidation was resorted to, especially by a secret society called Ku-Klux Klan. By ghostly threats and by actual violence, Negroes were kept from voting or holding office. Not a few murders are charged to this movement before it was finally stamped out.” University of Chicago’s Harry Pratt Judson’s “The Growth of the American Nation” (1895) sounded the argument that while the Klan was to be deplored, its advent was a natural racial occurrence. He wrote: “Men of the Anglo-Saxon race cannot be expected to submit forever to the dominance of ignorance and corruption.”
Here is another instance in which the rise of the Klan is depicted as “natural.” Johns Hopkins PhDs Albert Woodburn and Thomas Francis Moran wrote in their textbook “American History and Government” (1906), “The idle darkies were waiting around, each one looking for his ‘forty acres and a mule’ and wondering ’when de land was goin’ gur to be devided.’ Former faithful slaves were becoming good-for-nothing loafers.” The blacks were given the right to vote while capable white people, the natural leaders of the South, were left out. This was more than human nature could bear.”
The 1907 textbook by University of Pennsylvania history professor John Bach McMaster, “A Brief History of the United States,” followed the same line, “most of the Southern whites were determined to stop the misgovernment; [they] banded together in secret societies, called by such names as Knights of the White Camellia, and the Ku-Klux-Klan.” The fact that the Ku Klux Klan was formed nearly two years before most Southern Black men could vote was usually ignored by these textbook authors.
The release of the film Birth of a Nation in 1915 spurred more discussion of the Klan in textbooks. One motive for the magnified focus was increasing popular interest in scientific racism, another was more prosaic: the Klan allowed authors to spin adventure stories involving the Klansmen that would interest high school boys. They became the cowboys of the South. Horses, chivalric ritual, mystery, gunfights, and cosplay were a guaranteed formula for awakening the student bored by discussions of the Wilmont Proviso. Seeing the Klan on the silver screen and reading about it in history class was an early version of the modern marketing tie-in.
In addition, the film helped relaunch the Klan itself. The Second Klan began to actively encourage textbook authors to include the story of the Reconstruction Klan in their books. No longer just a “Southern thing,” the second Klan was national in scope with millions of members among the country’s white Protestant majority. Many school children had father and uncles in the Klan and some, both boys and girls, participated in Klan clubs for those too young to burn their own cross. The appreciated the positive depiction of the terrorist organization that they found in their books at school.
The 1897 centralization of textbook adoption by Texas also contributed to the favorable depiction of the Klan. With massive buying power, Texas could push publishers to produce works that adopted the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction and that depicted Klansmen whose souls were as white as their hoods.
Parsons writes of the Birth of a Nation period and the inter-war years:
…of 86 textbooks from 1914 through 1941, 78 named the Klan. And sections on the Klan were longer than those that had come before, often as much as five hundred words.
Parsons says that during this:
era of the Klan’s reemergence that textbooks within and beyond the South alike most consistently presented the Klan in the most unambiguously positive light. Most notably, writers in this period highlighted the mysterious and sensational nature of the Klan. As New Yorker Marguerite Stockman Dickson gushed in her 1927 “American History for Grammar Schools,” “Punishment of these daring men was almost impossible, so complete was the mystery in which they concealed themselves.” Harvard history PhD Emerson David Fite’s 1916 “History of the United States” described in detail two of the Klan’s mechanisms for terrorizing their victims, victims, which he sensationally referred to as “grotesque devices.” Toledo, Ohio, school superintendent William Backus Guitteau’s 1919 text also focused sensationally on the logistics of terror. Western Reserve history professors Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton’s A History of the United States (1919) expanded upon the Klan’s disguises: “Some of the disguises which the members of these societies wore were terrifying. Their faces were masked, and they were shrouded in white. Even their horses were covered with long white gowns.” One textbook, intended for a southern audience, went so far as to illustrate its section on Reconstruction with stills from Birth of a Nation.
The Southern Publishing Company’s 1920 A History of the United States for the Grammar Grades explained KKK intimidation thusly: “To accomplish [this], it was necessary that the negro should lose his interest in politics. . . . Often a thorough fright would result in submission, but in the case of serious offenses the Ku-Klux sometimes took the law into their hands and punished the negroes severely.”
The rise of the Nazis and Fascists and the Second World War soured Americans on violent paramilitary organizations like the Klan. After the war, nearly all depictions of the KKK were either negative or mixed. The collapse of the Second Klan in the late 1920s also meant that active and open Klansmen were no longer on textbook acceptance committees. While the treatment of the Klan would be more negative in the years that followed, it also was not entirely accurate. Books tended to blame all white-on-black violence on the Klan. Most racist violence was ad hoc, rather than planned by the Klan. The books also tended to identify the end of racial violence with the demise of the First Klan in the early 1870s, as though the violence had not continued up to the time the authors were doing their writing.
The books also wrote-out Black anti-Klan activism during Reconstruction. William Hamm’s textbook The American People de-emphasized the role of blacks in countering the Klan and overemphasized the role of the Federal government, saying the Feds:
“finally put an end to its activities…drastically punish[ing] those who attempted in any way to deprive the Negro of his civil rights.”
Books in the 1940s and 1950s also tended to group Klan leaders and the Federal government as common enemies of Klan lawlessness. In other words, Klan leaders realized that the group’s members had gotten out of hand, and they disbanded it.
For example, in “The Story of Our Country” (1954) Ruth West wrote that when Klan violence escalated; “Finally, the leaders themselves wished to put an end to the organization. Congress passed laws against the Klan and gave the army authority to stamp it out. Fear of the Klansmen, however, was stronger with the Negroes than their faith in Uncle Sam’s army, and most of them stopped using their right to vote.”
By the 1960s and 1970s there were major changes in the way the Klan was portrayed in textbooks. The Civil Rights Movement changed minds about the position of African Americans in American history. As importantly, African Americans were increasingly involved in the writing of textbooks and on the boards that adopted them. The Klan was increasingly viewed as a terrorist organization both in its modern manifestation and in its First and Second versions.
By the 1970s expanded academic research on the Reconstruction Era also began to influence textbook authors. Parsons offers an example of this change in a
1971 textbook, We the People: A History of the United States of America, captioned an image: “The Ku Klux Klan stood for fear and violence.”
Parsons discusses the modern approach:
Textbooks in the last decades of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries have continued this basic change of tone and have addressed many of the racist implications of conventional Klan framing. The Klan, however, still takes substantial real estate in the story of the period. So, for instance, Davidson et al.’s section on the Klan is larger than that on the election of 1868 or on the Fifteenth Amendment. All texts in the past few decades assign a negative value to Klansmen and a positive value to their victims: texts regularly label the Klan as a terrorist group which, always a negative designation, became became even more powerfully so in the 1980s and, especially, after 9/11. Joyce Appleby et al.’s teachers’ edition encourages teachers to introduce the Klan, and other similar contemporary groups, as “terrorist groups.” Lapsansky-Werner et al. refer to the Klan’s “terror tactics.”
Parsons says that while the modern texts are more accurate than those of earlier years, they still have problems:
The texts are better than earlier texts at indicating that racial oppression persisted after the Klan’s end, yet they still are remarkably unsuccessful in presenting the Klan as part of a long and continuous history of white-on-black violence.
