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WORK TITLE: Ku-Klux
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1970
WEBSITE: http://elainefrantzparsons.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://elainefrantzparsons.com/bio/about-me.html * http://duq.edu/x105878.xml * https://networks.h-net.org/node/16794/reviews/152431/campney-parsons-ku-klux-birth-klan-during-reconstruction * https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469625423/ku-klux/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1970.
EDUCATION:University of Virginia, graduated, 1992; Johns Hopkins University, Ph.D, 1999.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, assistant professor, 1999-2004; Allegheny College, Meadville, PA, assistant professor, 2005-2006; Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, assistant professor, 2006–.
AWARDS:Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians, 2016, for Ku-Klux.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Elaine Frantz Parsons is a “historian of manhood, race, and violence in the nineteenth-century United States,” as she describes herself on her website. Parsons was educated at the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University and is an assistant professor of history at Duquesne University. She is also a member of the Elsinore-Bennu Think Tank for Restorative Justice at State Correctional Institute-Pittsburgh and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Center at Duquesne. Parsons has contributed articles to journals, including Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, and Journal of Social History, and she is review editor for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Manhood Lost
Her first book is Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States. In this study, Parsons examines the evolution of the temperance movement and the “drunkard narrative” in the nineteenth century. In the course of laying out her argument, she uses “novels, short stories, poems, song lyrics, trial testimonies, memoirs, and other diverse texts,” as noted by a contributor to Reference & Research Book News.
David Fahey, critiquing the book in The Historian, called the study “provocative, fascinating, and elegant,” one that shows “how the debate between temperance reformers and their critics forced Americans to grapple with difficult issues, all entangled with that of gender.”
Ku-Klux
Parson next published Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction. She delves into the beginnings of the Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee—in circumstances that are “shrouded in myth and legend,” according to John P. Lloyd, writing in the Historian. He observed that the “author draws upon a rich body of interpretive approaches that have emerged” in the years since the last large-scale studies of the “the Klan’s origins and public representations.” Their violence dates to 1867 and afterward grew and spread until, as Parson put it, it became a “daunting national movement.” Lloyd called this “complex study” a “valuable addition to the scholarship on the early Klan.” In Choice, K.L. Gorman noted that Parson’s “extensive use of available primary sources” makes this a work that best suits an academic readership.
Mark Elliott, reviewing the book in the Journal of Southern History. described Ku-Klux as a “provocative reevaluation of the Ku Klux Klan that is essential reading for anyone studying the Reconstruction South.” Parsons, he stated, “asks new questions and reaches new conclusions by analyzing evidence from multiple vantage points through the lens of cultural history.” The northern media played into the growth of the Klan in sensationalizing the stories that emanated from the South, thus provoking “widespread imitation.” In this way, the “northern press inadvertently facilitated the symbolic restoration of white masculinity and solidarity.” Elliott concluded that the book is an “extremely valuable study.”
Brent Campney, critic at H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, found this to be a “complex and important monograph” about the ways in which white southerners sought to maintain control and power over newly freed blacks. Parsons, Campney pointed out, “makes her most important contribution through her shift in focus from the Klan as an organization to the Klan as an ‘idea’.” This, as Parsons put it in her study, “created a composite notion of the Klan that defined the white southern men committing the violence as organized, powerful, mysterious, bizarre, and almost undetectable, their victims as passive and helpless.” Campney concluded that “Ku-Klux is a significant contribution in large part because it turns so much of the conventional wisdom about the Klan on its head.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, July, 2016, K.L. Gorman, review of Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction, p. 1664.
Historian, spring, 2005, David M. Fahey, review of Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States, p. 129; fall, 2017, John P. Lloyd, review of Ku-Klux, p. 600.
Journal of Southern History, May, 2017, Mark Elliott, review of Ku-Klux, p. 441.
Reference & Research Book News, November, 2009, review of Manhood Lost.
ONLINE
Elaine Frantz Parsons Website, http://elainefrantzparsons.com (November 7, 2017).
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org (November 1, 2016), Brent Campney, review of Ku-Klux.
UNC Press Website, https://www.uncpress.org (November 7, 2017), description of Ku-Klux.
Ku-Klux
The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction
By Elaine Frantz Parsons
Ku-KluxVIEW INSIDE
400 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, 4 figs, notes, bibl., index
HARDCOVER ISBN: 978-1-4696-2542-3
Published: January 2016
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-4696-2543-0
Published: November 2015
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AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS
2016 Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians
The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group's rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group's emergence have long remained shadowy. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan's mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and mass media of the North.
Shedding new light on the ideas that motivated the Klan, Parsons explores Klansmen's appropriation of images and language from northern urban forms such as minstrelsy, burlesque, and business culture. While the Klan sought to retain the prewar racial order, the figure of the Ku-Klux became a joint creation of northern popular cultural entrepreneurs and southern whites seeking, perversely and violently, to modernize the South. Innovative and packed with fresh insight, Parsons' book offers the definitive account of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
About the Author
Elaine Frantz Parsons is associate professor of history at Duquesne University.
For more information about Elaine Frantz Parsons, visit the Author Page.
Biography
Elaine Frantz Parsons is a historian of manhood, race, and violence in the nineteenth-century United States. Her latest book, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan in the Reconstruction-Era United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), argues that the post-war Klan was produced by northern and southern interests and media alike, and that its victims struggled not only against the Klan itself but against widespread skepticism of reports of Klan violence, and widespread white sympathy for its goals.
Parsons’ current book project is a history of “thugs” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This will be both a labor history and a cultural history of men whose profession was to commit or threaten violence on behalf of others. She is beginning this project with a series of articles focusing on Pinkertons and other strikebreakers.
Parsons’ first book, Manhood Lost: Drunken Men and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), claims that temperance discourse, by questioning men’s autonomy and agency, created a space for women’s relative empowerment both in the home and the public sphere.
Parsons’ articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, and the Journal of Social History, among others.
Parsons is a proud member of the Elsinore-Bennu Think Tank for Restorative Justice at State Correctional Institute-Pittsburgh. She is editing a book written by the group about identity and incarceration, with the working title “How to Maintain.” Parsons and other members of Elsinore Bennu also work with Public History students to plan annual exhibitions related to incarceration.
Parsons is the Review Editor for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Center at Duquesne.
Elaine Parsons
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Duquesne University
Assistant Professor
Company NameDuquesne University
Dates EmployedSep 2006 – Present Employment Duration11 yrs 3 mos
Allegheny College
Assistant Professor
Company NameAllegheny College
Dates Employed2005 – 2006 Employment Duration1 yr
university of wisconsin at oshkosh
assistant professor
Company Nameuniversity of wisconsin at oshkosh
Dates Employed1999 – 2004 Employment Duration5 yrs
Education
The Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University
Degree NamePhD Field Of StudyHistory
Dates attended or expected graduation 1992 – 1999
University of Virginia
University of Virginia
Dates attended or expected graduation 1988 – 1992
Bowers Elementary School
Bowers Elementary School
McKinnley High School
McKinnley High School
Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During
Reconstruction
John P. Lloyd
The Historian.
79.3 (Fall 2017): p600.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Full Text:
Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction. By Elaine Frantz Parsons. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 388. $34.95.) This book on the origins of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction is
the first major study to emerge on the topic since the 1970s. The author draws upon a rich body of interpretive
approaches that have emerged in the intervening decades to read the Klan's origins and public representations anew and
to fill gaps in our understanding.
Elaine Frantz Parsons begins her study with a careful archaeology of the roots of the Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee. The
Klan's origins have long been shrouded in myth and legend, and the author pieces together the most complete
understanding of its origins yet, finding that its earliest incarnation was inchoate and local. She traces its origins to a
small group of professional men in Pulaski during the aftermath of the war who initially took inspiration for the form of
their organization from Northern cultural sources. A record of violence by this Pulaski group does not appear until late
1867, and from then on it spread, became increasingly violent, and took the form "of a daunting national movement"
(72). What made the Klan new, Parsons argues, was not the infliction of pain and violence upon black bodies but the
"networks of dark cultural meaning" with which the Klan surrounded their violence. Parsons demonstrates how the
Klan's early participants appropriated Northern cultural forms such as minstrelsy and burlesque, using them first to
deflect the overt political nature of their violence then later, through the Northern press, to amplify their violence
beyond the local.
The interplay between North and South, local and translocal, forms a central theme of Parsons's study. The Klan
intended accounts of their deeds to be "circulated through a national newspaper exchange and wire system" in which
Northern newspaper accounts amplified Klan violence and shaped a national narrative of race and citizenship (9). The
Klan's "performative" violence found a ready audience and amplification in the Northern press and, ironically, among
Northern political leaders who took testimony and framed a narrative that tended to portray blacks as "failed citizens"
and whites as "the people" (109). African Americans sometimes were able to resist this narrative, but Northern elites
had the ability to shape the narrative in ways that reflected their political interests.
In later chapters, Parsons provides a close analysis of Klan violence in Union County, South Carolina, and its local and
national repercussions. Parsons makes use of an algorithm that depicts the strength of relationships between individuals
who appeared in indictments in Union County criminal records and the strength of the relationships between propertied
men in that area (225, 229). She is able to use this analysis to deepen our understanding of the local particularities of
Klan violence as well as its relationship to Federal enforcement of the Ku Klux Klan Act. This complex study is a
valuable addition to the scholarship on the early Klan and will be of much interest to scholars of the period.
John P. Lloyd
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Lloyd, John P. "Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction." The Historian, vol. 79, no. 3, 2017, p. 600+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA508103897&it=r&asid=011fbf92f2d0c71c24c8d3fda956fee8.
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Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During
Reconstruction
Mark Elliott
Journal of Southern History.
83.2 (May 2017): p441.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction. By Elaine Frantz Parsons. (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 388. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2542-3.)
Elaine Frantz Parsons has written a provocative reevaluation of the Ku Klux Klan that is essential reading for anyone
studying the Reconstruction South. Not since Allen W. Trelease published White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy
and Southern Reconstruction (New York, 1971) has a scholar offered such an important overall assessment of the first
Klan and its significance. While acknowledging the "brilliant, exhaustive, and painstakingly careful" research of
Trelease's classic study. Parsons asks new questions and reaches new conclusions by analyzing evidence from multiple
vantage points through the lens of cultural history (p. 16). The result is a new perspective on the Klan phenomenon of
1866-1872 that promises to transform the way historians understand the meaning of this infamous chapter in American
history.
Parsons wisely distinguishes between the imagined Klan that was largely constructed through public discourse in
newspaper accounts and editorials, and the actual acts of violence, intimidation, and political theater attributed to a
single organization known as the "Ku-Klux" (p. 7). Plainly skeptical of claims to extensive organizational formation.
Parsons focuses the majority of her study on interpreting the power of the public discourse about the Klan. In her
estimation, the violence of the Klan, and Klan-like groups, ought to be viewed as just one temporary manifestation of
extralegal mob violence that was commonly employed for the purposes of community and racial control in the South.
"Klan" activity in many places was little more than a single night of raiding, with purposes that were often driven by
long-standing local conflicts. Evidence of broad coordination is scant and highly dubious, but Parsons shows that the
"real" Klan and the imagined one were interdependent. As sensationalized accounts about the Klan proliferated in early
1868, so did acts that adopted the well-publicized trappings of the Klan, which fed into the public narrative of a vast
conspiracy and widely coordinated campaign. Because the Ulysses S. Grant administration set out to substantiate
evidence of a vast organization, subsequent historical accounts, including Trelease's, naturally place the search for
organization and coordination at the center of inquiry. Parsons reframes the story as one about a compelling media
sensation that inspired widespread imitation, that reshaped northern perceptions about southern white communities, and
that ultimately served to portray freedpeople as helpless and dependent on government support.
Parsons believes the Klan served as a "modernizing" force for white southerners, bringing the rural South into a secular
national culture (p. 12). The fascination of the northern press inadvertently facilitated the symbolic restoration of white
masculinity and solidarity. Moreover, she shows that northern commentary on the Klan began to shift after the
Enforcement Acts of 1870-1871, becoming more sympathetic to those prosecuted under the laws' strict prescriptions as
being denied a fair trial. At the same time, the graphic descriptions of Klan violence that dominated the early
newspaper coverage declined. In a bold departure from the rest of her study. Parsons undertakes in her final two
chapters a case study of Union County, South Carolina, demonstrating the relationship between the idealized Klan of
the national discourse and the local realities on the ground. Employing a sophisticated network analysis, Parsons
impressively reconstructs the social world of Union County with software-generated data and visual mapping. Charting
relationships and degrees of association, she paints a convincing picture of the likely participants in the local Klan raids
that highlights their local concerns and the continuum of Klan violence within long-standing local conflicts.
One caveat of this extremely valuable study is that it does not attempt to retell a full narrative of the Klan's role within
the political context of Reconstruction, and it generally addresses itself to scholars and specialists, which limits its use
in the undergraduate classroom.
Mark Elliott
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University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Elliott, Mark
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Elliott, Mark. "Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 2,
2017, p. 441+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495476243&it=r&asid=c38ee9772073f2cf95dd02c4fcc96edb.
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Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Ku-Klux: the birth of the
Klan during Reconstruction
K.L. Gorman
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.11 (July 2016): p1664.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Ku-Klux: the birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. North Carolina, 2016. 388p bibl index
afp ISBN 9781469625423 cloth, $34.95; ISBN 9781469625430 ebook, $33.99
53-4939
HS2330
2015-26763 CIP
Parsons (Duquesne Univ.) presents the first comprehensive cultural history of the Reconstruction Klan. Using a variety
of analytical techniques from different disciplines, she demonstrates that this first Klan was more complex than it has
been portrayed. Starting with a detailed examination of the founding of the group, Parsons questions almost all existing
assumptions about it. She believes the Klan did not spread as rapidly or was as well organized as previously thought,
and that it was used by both North and South to advance their visions of the nation. Parsons also notes that the Klan
was just one part of the racial violence of Reconstruction, often not a major part. One of the book's most interesting
parts examines how the group was described by the Northern press through analyzing how many times the group was
mentioned by different papers at different times. Parsons concludes with two chapters on Union County, South
Carolina, to place the racial violence in that area into her larger narrative. The extensive use of available primary
sources and a number of advanced analytical techniques recommends this work only for advanced academic audiences.
Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate students/faculty.--K. L. Gorman, Minnesota State University--Mankato
Gorman, K.L.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gorman, K.L. "Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Ku-Klux: the birth of the Klan during Reconstruction." CHOICE: Current
Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2016, p. 1664. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457393519&it=r&asid=77f992cf39ebda62cebd5f8315364b4e.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
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Manhood lost; fallen drunkards and redeeming
women in the nineteenth-century United States.
(reprint, 2003)
Reference & Research Book News.
24.4 (Nov. 2009):
COPYRIGHT 2009 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780801892561
Manhood lost; fallen drunkards and redeeming women in the nineteenth-century United States. (reprint, 2003)
Parsons, Elaine Frantz.
Johns Hopkins U. Press
2009
241 pages
$25.00
Paperback
New studies in American intellectual and cultural history
HV5292
Drawing from novels, short stories, poems, song lyrics, trial testimonies, memoirs, and other diverse texts, Parsons
(American history, Duquesne U.) traces the persistence and evolution of the "drunkard narrative" in US society over the
course of the 19th century and its relationship to how middle- and working-class people involved in the debates over
drink and temperance thought about gender roles and the relationship of individuals to their environment. She describes
a fairly static narrative of the drunkard's fall in the first half of the book and focuses on two significant changes that
arose in the last 30 years of the century: the shift from describing the drunkard's fall as a seduction to describing it as an
invasion of the drunkard's body and will and the development of a counternarrative of female invasion. She also is
particularly concerned about the gender politics of the condemnation of men for abusing their patriarchal family roles
with drink found within the drunkard narratives of the temperance movement.
([c]2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Manhood lost; fallen drunkards and redeeming women in the nineteenth-century United States. (reprint, 2003)."
Reference & Research Book News, Nov. 2009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA211163281&it=r&asid=ca094024292dab50d7a2245c4a8791b6.
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Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming
Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States
David M. Fahey
The Historian.
67.1 (Spring 2005): p129.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Full Text:
Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Elaine Frantz
Parsons. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 241. $42.95.)
Based on a careful reading of the drunkard narrative, "the central pillar of the temperance movement," Manhood Lost is
a provocative, fascinating, and elegant book (4). It shows how the debate between temperance reformers and their
critics forced Americans to grapple with difficult issues, all entangled with that of gender. Elaine Frantz Parsons
examines many published versions of the drunkard narrative, including fiction, but relies most heavily on court records
for civil damages (which allow her to give voice to immigrants and rural workers). Each chapter begins with the story
of obscure participants in the drink debate known only from court testimony and ends with a relatively well-known
figure such as Louisa May Alcott.
Here is a brief summary of a complex book. By the 1830s, temperance reformers began to emphasize hereditary and
environmental limits on an individual's ability to make moral choices. Critics resisted this new attitude, which fit badly
with the assumptions behind American democracy and nineteenth-century Protestantism. Like volition, manhood
presented problems for both temperance reformers and their enemies, especially after the Civil War when the
homosocial saloon replaced the mixed-gender tavern. Although the saloon provided male camaraderie, alcohol
undermined the ability of a man to "mind his own business," the defining criterion of being a man. A heavy drinker
risked his manhood in both of its meanings: his gender character (such as supporting his family) and his very humanity.
"The idealization of contentment and of the domestic space in which many Americans believed contentment to reside
was central to the drink debate" (77). Worry about class and geographical mobility dominated the debate over
contentment. "Discontented" young men turned to drink in drunkard narratives. In discussing seduction, Parsons points
out that "temperance reformers often described the pleasures of alcohol with striking enthusiasm or even longing"
(115). The larger purity movement provides the context for the new metaphor of invasion that replaced that of
seduction. Invasion reduced or eliminated the responsibility of the drunkard.
Gender is everywhere in Parsons's book. In her introduction, she argues that the drunkard narrative "constructed the
gender crisis as a problem of individual volition and the crisis of individual volition as fundamentally gendered" (13).
When women challenged male drinking in general or in civil damage suits against saloons that sold booze to their
drunkard husbands, they both rejected and accepted traditional gender roles. Women left their domestic sphere to
compel men to reclaim their patriarchal responsibilities. This was also true of the female invasion of male space (the
saloon) by Carry Nation at the century's turn, and in the women's temperance crusade of 1873-1874.
As a specialist in Anglo-American and international temperance history, this reviewer is curious how Parsons's exciting
analysis of the drunkard narrative compares with what researchers might find for other countries where there might not
have been civil damage laws and where women played a much smaller role in the agitation against alcoholic drink. It is
an old question: How different was the United States?
David M. Fahey
Miami University
Fahey, David M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Fahey, David M. "Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States."
The Historian, vol. 67, no. 1, 2005, p. 129+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
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Campney on Parsons, 'Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction'
Author:
Elaine Frantz Parsons
Reviewer:
Brent Campney
Elaine Frantz Parsons. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 400 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-2542-3.
Reviewed by Brent Campney (University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley)
Published on H-Law (November, 2016)
Commissioned by Michael J. Pfeifer
Rethinking the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan
In this complex and important monograph, historian Elaine Frantz Parsons presents the first major treatment of the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan since the publication of White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction by Allen Trelease in 1971. With the collapse of slavery and the Confederacy at the end of the war, she writes, white southerners became concerned that they no longer possessed the tools to control the freed people. Consequently, they pressed a vigorous campaign to do so through economic power (rooted in land ownership) and through the passage of legislation aimed at maintaining white dominance over blacks.
Central to their campaign was their use of racist violence, particularly mob violence. With extreme frequency, white mobs attacked random blacks in bloody race riots or targeted them for nighttime whippings, beatings, and hangings. Because they did so in clandestine ways to avoid capture or punishment by federal authorities, they undermined their ultimate objective. “All of these forms of violence, however, shared a significant shortcoming as a means of reasserting white racial dominance,” she argues. They “neutered their coordinated political force. The many thousands of individual white-on-black attacks, the several bloody riots, the hundreds of [vigilante] groups failed to add up to a coherent whole. Rather than representing the voice of a defeated-but-not-prostrate white South--an emergent southern white leadership--they conveyed a message of inchoate southern white fury” (p. 6).
“The Ku-Klux Klan would solve this problem,” she contends. It allowed white southerners not only to continue their clandestine violence and avoid detection by Union officials, but also to reimagine and present themselves in small, scattered cities, towns, and hamlets across the region “as part of a single pan-southern resistance movement.” Rather than striking only at a local level to terrorize black Republicans and successful black farmers, the Klan allowed for southern whites to present themselves plausibly as part of an invisible coalition--an Invisible Empire--standing together against the coordinated assaults against white domination by white carpetbaggers and scalawags and striving black southerners alike. Between 1866 and 1871, white guerrillas calling themselves “Ku-Klux” became what Parsons calls “the most widely proliferated and deadly domestic terrorist movement in the history of the United States,” killing, raping, dispossessing, and expelling thousands of African American men, women, and children (p. 6).
Drawing on cultural history, Parsons makes her most important contribution through her shift in focus from the Klan as an organization to the Klan as an “idea” (p. 9). Certainly, she observes, the Ku Klux Klan was a real thing--“embodied,” as its victims learned through incessant floggings and other acts of abuse; yet, it was also a “disembodied” thing, an “abstract idea … as it was represented in public discourse,” and particularly in newspapers. “Like the embodied Klan, the disembodied Klan was produced by thousands of individuals who spoke, wrote, drew, and performed their distinct idea of the nature and meaning of collective” violence and, together, they “created a composite notion of the Klan that defined the white southern men committing the violence as organized, powerful, mysterious, bizarre, and almost undetectable, their victims as passive and helpless” (p. 10). In the national mass-media conversation between white southern vigilantes, black southerners, and white northerners, the Ku Klux Klan became a narrative, a trope, that each used for their own purposes to shape the debate over black freedom and Reconstruction policy. “The Klan was part of a modernizing process through which rural white southerners learned, appropriated, and inhabited cultural forms from the urban North,” she argues. Klansmen did, as many scholars have long assumed, draw upon a southern code of honor “but they also fiercely parodied it, becoming deliberately comic versions of noble knights, dressed in ridiculously exaggerated faux finery and attacking foes for whom they had only the deepest contempt. They frequently appropriated tropes, language, costume, and even technology from northern urban cultural forms such as the minstrel stage and even from the brand new burlesque performance style” (p. 12). Parsons also addresses how black victims used--or were used in--the Ku-Klux discourse during their testimony before Congress over the racist violence sweeping across the South, and how their white interlocutors locked them into roles as passive victims through the questions asked and the testimony sought. She also interrogates how white northerners used Ku-Klux discourse to debate the shifting course of Reconstruction. Specifically, she argues that “the idea of the Klan also served the purpose of sectional reconciliation and the construction of a shared set of political understandings between northerners and southern Democratic whites” (p. 12).
Although appropriately respectful of the contributions made by Trelease in White Terror, Parsons sets about dismantling certain of the assumptions that guided his scholarship--and therefore that of subsequent historians. “Trelease wrote before the rise of cultural history,” she writes, a fact revealed “above all, in his stiff relationship to his often ambiguous primary sources” (p. 16). In addition to contemporary documents, for example, he introduced some sources written long after the fact--and for particularly political purposes. Consequently, he tended to credit the claims of a later generation of supporters who characterized the Klan as an “organization,” claims which, Parsons suggests, do not comport with the ground-level reality of the 1860s when the Klan existed primarily through discourse animated through acts of stylized violence that seemed to prove such claims. “My book’s approach to evaluating evidence of organization is a mirror image of Trelease’s,” she asserts (p. 18). “This book reads accounts of Klan organization and capacity through a lens of suspicion” (p. 19). She also asserts that if the Klan had been well organized, it would have left behind far more archival evidence of its existence. “The suggestion that local den chiefs or secretaries, together with individual members who had received correspondence, reliably and comprehensively destroyed them in 1871 to avoid prosecution and that almost none concealed them only to bring them out again in the Ku-Klux-loving period a few decades later suggests a pervasive internalized bureaucratic discipline that would be surprising to see anywhere, but particularly in the postwar South” (p. 19).
Ku-Klux is a significant contribution in large part because it turns so much of the conventional wisdom about the Klan on its head. Whether or not subsequent scholars support all of its contentions, the book certainly alters the discussion in the future. It also uses an impressive array of sources, including very insightful readings of contemporary local, regional, and national newspapers; testimony from the Congressional Record; material culture analysis of contemporary Ku-Klux robes and attire; and a wide variety of reverential accounts of the early Klan produced during the second phase of the organization in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Particularly fascinating for this reader are Parsons’ attention to the adoption by the Klan of northern urban entertainment tropes and her emphasis on the “carnivalesque” in analyzing their violence, including the use of almost clown-like gowns and fright-inducing masks, the organization of parades, and even the performance of terrifying stunts. “In the course of a particularly sadistic attack, Ku-Klux staged their own circus, first forcing their black victims to act like horses, then performing for them, ‘puking’ fire out of their mouths’” (p. 86). The Klansmen were selective in their appropriation of popular culture, she writes later. “In choreographing their attacks, for instance, they drew not from prize-fighting or domestic fiction but from minstrelsy, the carnivalesque, and related genres. Not coincidentally, these types of performance were deeply implicated in the work of racial and gender redefinition. Drawing from them enabled Ku-Klux to mobilize the cultural messages they had already refined over many years of performance” (p. 87). In other instances, Klansmen forced their black victims to play out minstrel roles as part of their degradation. On numerous occasions, she finds, Klansmen “demanded that victims perform a minstrelesque role. For instance, Ku-Klux attackers frequently forced victims to feign gullibility. One important argument against citizenship for freedmen was that they were too gullible, too easily manipulated” (p. 101).
In the opinion of the reviewer, the conclusion of this book provided Parsons with an opportunity to pull together the disparate threads of her expansive and complex argument and to consider their implications for the larger historiography. Instead, it is largely summative. Aside from this mild grievance, Ku-Klux should be essential reading for scholars focusing on the Civil War, Reconstruction, or racist violence in America.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=47359
Citation: Brent Campney. Review of Parsons, Elaine Frantz, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. November, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47359