Thank you for your patience. Were delighted to be gathered here today. I dont want to slow is down, but i do want to make sure that all of you know a little bit about where you are today. Can i just get a sense of how many of you are at Brooklyn Historical society for the first time . Wow. Fantastic. Welcome. Welcome to all of our oldtimers as well. A few of our Board Members are in the audience, so were delighted be that as well. Those who have never been here before i want to give you a sense of this institution which has been around for a very long time, 154 years, and we are Historical Society that prides ourselves on being very, very accessible to people. We have an extraordinary Research Library that is open to one and all. We encourage you to come and explore it. We have exhibitions which you may have got an glimpse of right behind the wall, history of abolition in brooklyn, called in pursuit of freedom. Theres an exhibition i want to make sure that you pick up this brochure on your way out. It is chockfull of incredibly interesting programs, a whole series about womens suffrage coming up soon, and million my sheraton mimi sheraton will be here speaking later in the month, so take a look. Dont miss the great programs coming up, and if youre not on the eblast list, join us and youll get notice of everything happening here. So, having said that. To our main event tonight, which is a conversation between two spectacular great thinkers and scholars, linda gordon and rick pearlsteen, welcome to both of you,ber very privileged to be focusing on lindas new book tonight. Theyre going to speak for 40 minutes or so and then take questions and have kindly agreed to sign books after the talk. So, their books are available in our shop, if you havent had a chance to pick those up, i would encourage you to do so. Perlstein is an author. One book was the win are of the Los Angeles Times book award for history, and nixon lean, the rise of a president and the trafficking of america. Currently we didnt know how much fracturing was possible, did we . Non correspondent for the village voice, and stone Rolling Stone his journalist and essay have been in new newsweek , anytime anytime and other publications. Welcome, rick. And linda gordon, who is no stranger this institution, has very kindly, a few years ago, offered up her words of wisdom to a very important event that happens here annually in support of our library, when we were privileged to have her talk about dorothea lang. She is an extraordinary scholarrer, the win of two Los Angeles Times book prizes, the author of numerous books, including the wean wore going to come nows on, the Second Coming of the kkk and author of dorothea lang, the moral property of women this, history of Birth Control, politics in america, and she is coauthor of a book that i grew up understanding as a very essential text for anybody any thinking American Issue guess, which is feminism unfinished. She is the felonies kelly professor of history Florence Kelly professor of hit at new york university. She has written many other books and i gather is jetting back and forth between new york and wisconsin. Right . Is that right . Well Something Like that. Okay. So, without further adieu, welcome to you both, and thank you all for being with us tonight. [applause] thank you. Its the greatest pleasure and honor for me to be here. Im ashamefully one of those people who for whom this is his first visit to the Brooklyn Historical society. They do a spectacular job, tell already. Their exhibits, you should all return to see if you havent, and slavery and abolition in brooklyn is stupendous, i lived here for eight years but didnt find my way here. If someone told me id be hosting a conversation with linda gordon in my graduate school the university of michigan i would have fell off the chair . , some its an honor to host a distinguished scholar and voice. Lets dive in. This is a wonderful book. I highly recommend anyone interested in American History, in right wing movements and social movements in feminism. Buy it. Its for sale. One thing that makes it i think an outstanding purchase is not the words but that linda has clearly done some yeoman photo research, and the pictures are spectacular. You can see on the cover, you have you have it klans men marching arm in arm down pennsylvania avenue. That was a very big rally, thousands and thousands. You dont know because the klan exaggerated everything all the time. A lot of people. Theres a stunning image of a kind county fair ferris wheel in which everybody on the eve seat is a hooded klansman. An image of 30 or 40 klansmen at a church alter, underneath a sign that says jesus saves. Which kind of brings up how i want to introduce the subject of the book, which is the second Klu Klux Klan. She calls it the second come ago the clubs clubs. The first Klu Klux Klan was nicknamed the invisible empire. In gone with the wind they were referred to as a political organization, furtive underground they were knight riders, no one knew who they were. If you saw a clansman glue to shutter and run. Thats not this klan. Maybe we can talk about the relationship of the first explain the second klan and how they differ and how they evolved and why one was furtive and one almost fetishized visibility. Sure. Happy to do that. Before i answer, just want to say, first of all, if a been in my life of research in many historical societies and this one is by far the most lively. And thats saying a lot. I want to apologize for being late. This is way im not a new yorker and so i get lost. The second klan actually acclaimed to be continuing the first klan, but it was different in a series of major ways. First of all, it was not secret. Second of all, it was a Mass Movement having somewhere between 3 million and 5 million members. Third, it had women. Fourth, it was in the main nonviolent, and, fifth, its basic strategy was electoral ill talk about that late are finally, perhaps the most important thing, it expanded what you might call the hate list. The first klan was entirely focused on keeping africanamericans down, and used lynching to not only punish individuals but to intimidate the whole population. The second klan, understanding the the founders understanding you wouldnt get a lot of traction by concentrating only on africanamericans because in 1920, very few africanamericans lived in the northern states. They expanded their list to add catholics and jews. And immigrants, but immigrants is really the same category because in the waves of immigration that had grown larger from about 1880, very few of those immigrants were protestant. And when they said catholics, they included the russian and greek orthodox. My impression they didnt exactly register they were different but it was equal opportunity bias. Right. I would add one more thing. I dont know ifor characterize this the way organizationally, but this klan was also you might call its forprofit business. It was extremely entrepreneurial. So youtle the story of this one guy who kind of came up with the idea of correcting a second Klu Klux Klan and kind of failed and he kind of well, he brought in Public Relations agents who used the most modern, sophisticated marketing techniques, which including broadening the market for who you should be hating, and it was basically i wrote an article a few years ago called the long con, about how much of right wing politics has devolved into a money hustle. People are getting hair on fire letters saying, you know, the left wants to teach your children cannibalism and sex jed and how to have sex and sent me ten bucks so we can save the world. We know how it works with the internet. Wasnt that different for the klan which sort of functioned like a pyramid scheme. It was mr. Mid pyramid scheme. A recruiter could keep 40 of the initiation fee. The initiation fee was 10 in 1920. That is worth over 100 tuesday today. It was not cheap. And this is one this underlies one important fact, that very low income people were not in the klan. So, if i recruited you, could keep 40 but youen turn around and recruit somebody else and keep 40 , and this could keep going until theres just no one left to recruit and that is what is the problem with pyramid schemes. Ultimately well, not for some people. Come on. Ultimately, this was the undoing of the klan because there was so much money flowing, and i can give examples later if you want that the corruption became too much to ignore, and a lot of clan members became very disillusioned and a little embittered about what was going on and not just initiation fee. Let me just mention two other forms of interesting. They made a uniform in such a way as to make it very, very difficult for a woman to take old old sheets and sew it herself and they did knowingly to make people have to pay for it. Second, people in the klan started manufacturing all sortofmemorabilia. You could get a klan pocket knife and a klan brooch for your wife, and there were Just Marketing these things publicly, all these newspapers and all this money completely unaccountable was flowing in. You, too, can wear a 20 red make America Great cap. There were so entrepreneurials you have a passage, klanage native jim nativism was and ability to respond for local conditions inch oregon klan efforts were exclusively anticatholic, mentioning jews only occasionally, in san diego, some catholics even joined, members of the catholic war veterans and knightses of columbus were known to be klansmen, even though the klan believed 100 bishops in america would be 100 dictators and the nuns were kept as sex lives by the priest that didnt keep these folks in san diego from getting that membership money, and just as the klan changed to fit local conditions so did the catholic church. In Southern California many white catholics supported the klan. So, theres always this diversity but the underlying you dont characterize it as an ideology, get to in the sociology cool debates how your characterized what people think and feel and how that joins them together in movements but you say its better to describe a klan structure or feeling. What was that structure or feeling what strike federal is, mat made you a klansman, what did klansmen believe. Let me think about how to respond to this for a moment. First of all, klan peckers, a whole hundreds 0 professional lecturers lecturers who went all over the country. They earned money with doing this. These are the days before television, when a lot of people actually paid to go to lectures. Their job was in a way to rev up anger, but the anger rested on fear, and that is really important thing to register. Maybe later ill take more specifically some of the fears and i know it will be hard for you to believe that people believed in them, but the idea was that america was destined by god to be a nation of white sort of anglosaxon protestants and there were people who were trying to erode that destiny to subvert the true cause of this country. Let me give you now just one example of that creation of fear through outrageous claims. A common claim was that all of these immigrants who came from southern europe, eastern europe, et cetera, they didnt come because they were poor. They didnt come because they were persecuted. They came because the pope ordered them to. He ordered them to come to country where they function like moles and go underground remean incognito until the pope gave the sign for the coup that would take over the american government. So, i think when i call its structure of feeling, which is not my own phrase, comes from a really, really interesting british critic, but what want to say is that it emotion can be constructed just like knowledge can. And one of the thing wes see is you can get this intense anticatholicism and n places ps where there are hardly any catholics. Intense antisemitism among people who had never seen a jew. Its quite obviously relevant to stuff were seeing today. Right. Right. And you argue welllet me become up. So, lets establish the broader political cultural context of the United States coming out at world war1. Its not like the klan where the only racist bigots out there. It was profoundly especially profoundly racist time in the 1920s. So maybe we should establish the mainstream elite bigotry that structured things. I think its quite possible that the majority of american white protestants agreed with the klans basic ideology. May not all accepted the wild stories about the pope. You have to remember these are the days in which, for example, the great universities had quotas for jews. I can tell you that my college, as late as the 1960s, had such a quota, and if youre interested later i can tell you how i slipped in. But you also had professors in these great universities who were propounding and writing scholarly articles eugenics, the science of human breeding. Was a kind of hysterical fear about communists and actually this started well before the russian revolution, but you had what became known as you may several hundred, i think those are 2000 people were deported because they were charged with sedition, so that you certainly had this feeling that there were these people in the United States who wished evil things for the United States and that it was important to take strong action against them. Writes and if you read ticket a sense of how pervasive it was even across the political spectrum, i mean, if you read the Supreme Court bell case which is the famous case in which Oliver Wendell holmes wrote the opinion up three generations of imbeciles are enough, it was about well, if its okay for the states for the state to protect the nation by prescriptive people into combat its okay for the state or actually a blessing, a necessary for the states to protect the nation by preventing imbeciles from breeding and it turns out that the woman who was sterilized was not a quote the imbecile. Her little daughter was actually quite intelligent and its a fascinating case, but it shows that it was not like the clan over here and mainstream america over there. But, you argue that this clan was not necessarily a violent organization, i mean, theres lots of the balance in the book and strikingly a lot of it is in the south so it goes back and has its own roots, but you almost kind of end up arguing that it did not have to be because he got what it wanted through the political process. Talk about how politically successful the ku klux klan was in electoral politics, how that worked and what they accomplished. Its important that they were not 100 nonviolence. In fact the leaders walked a very delicate slippery line about this because theyre big public statements were this is a lawabiding nonviolent organization. Well, i will let you lecture but they also knew that they could attract people, particularly young men with the promise of being able to participate in vigilante ism and so at some point they were directly dishonest about this, but they were absolutely right to follow this strategy because they want so much, just a few figures. They elected 11 governors, 45 members of congress, thousands of state, county and municipal officers and i want you to understand these are not covert clan centered these are public clans people. However, there were two really massive victories at the national level. The first one actually happened here in new york in 1924 as the Democratic Convention which was held in Madison Square garden. The leading candidate going into the convention was the governor of new york, alex smith. Powell smith is a catholic. This is the longest Political Convention on record that went through 103 ballots, but it became known as the clan bake because the supporters of the clan basically vetoed the nomination of alex smith and within the Democratic Party lost the election. Im not saying al smith could have one, but certainly relationship. But only and theres one good thing about that convention went to tell you. The clan had a lot of strength in new jersey and during the convention on several nights they put up a cross and they claimed it was 50 feet high. On the shores of the hudson on the new jersey side so it could be seen if you walk from Madison Square garden to the river and incidentally theoretically these are burning crosses, but after a while they started to use lightbulbs and really technology, but i think far more important thing that happened was the immigration restriction act of 1924. That act, some of you may not be familiar with, but it set quotas for different groups of people who could be allowed to come, big quotas for white, nordic small quotas in other words this law enacted exactly the clans hierarchy of the races and i want to point out Something Else that its really important to keep in mind that the law was a lot of immigration until 1965, 40 years. When a valid native sons here, mr. Emanuel cellar kind of defined his career from that window, really. He fought against in 1924 and repealed in 1965 and then we have a state like indiana where the head of the clan there said i am the law. It was enormous political machine and you told me her home state of oregon where it was theres a whole chapter on organ which was stupendously gracious state that shocked a lot of us took a very Interesting Campaign against something that we usually think of now as something that the right likes, which is private schools. What was their beef with private schools and how did that play out . Yeah, well one piece of legislation of the state level that they introduced everywhere they possibly could was to ban private schools, but what it really meant was to ban Catholic Schools, but this is kind of interesting and twist things around because they wanted to get rid of these religious schools they then become a supporters of more tax money going to education and even propose a one