You all so much for your patience. We are delighted to be gathered here today. I dont want to slow us down, but i do want to make sure you know a little bit about where you are today. Can i just get a sense of how many of you are at the Historical Society for the first time . Welcome to the institution has been around for a long time, 154 heres comin, and we are a histl society that prides herself on being very accessible to people. We have an extraordinary Research Library that is open to one and all. Periods behind the wall of history. It is an exhibition about the prospect parprospect park and iy downstairs, so theres a lot going on and you should come back and explore and perhaps most importantly for those of you that are interested in Public Programs such as this one i want to make sure that you pick up this brochure on your way back. It is chalk full of incredibly interesting programs and a whole series about womens suffrage coming up soon. Take a look. Dont miss any of the great programs coming up. And if you are not on the list, please join us and then you will get a notice of everything that is happening. Having said that, the mai main events but as a conversation between two spectacular great thinkers and scholars welcome, to both of you. We are very privileged to be focusing on windows new book tonight. Let me introduce them. They are going to speak together for about 40 minutes or so and then take questions from all of you. They also kindly agreed to sign books after they talk, so their books are available in our shop if you have not had a chance to pick them up i would encourage you to do so. Rick perlstein is the author of the invisible bridge full of nixon and the rise of Ronald Reagan as well as Barry Goldwater and beyond making of the american consensus which was the winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times book award for history to. Currently the National Correspondent of the washington spectator and correspondent for the voice and online columnist for the new republic, the nation and rolling stone. His journalism has appeared in newsweek and many other publications. Welcome. [applause] and linda gordon who is no stranger to this institution has very kindly a few years ago offered up her words of wisdom to an event that happened in support of the library when we were privileged to have her talk about Dorothea Lange. She is an extraordinary scholar and the winner of two bancroft prizes and the Los Angeles Times book prize. She is the author of numerous books including the one that we are going to focus on for the Second Coming of the kkk and also Dorothea Lange a life beyond women and pounded, the model property of women, politics in america and she is coauthor of a book that i grew up understanding as a very essential text. The professor of new york university, shes written many other books and i gather its going back and forth between new york and wisconsin. Welcome to you both and thanks for being with us tonight. [applause] it is a pleasure for me to be here. Im one of those people for whom this is the first visit to the brooklyn Historical Society. If someone told me i would be hosting a conversation with linda gordon at the university of michigan i would have fallen off of a chair in shock. Lets dive in. This is a wonderful book and i highly recommend anyone interested in American History and rightwing movements and social movements and feminism to buy it. One of the things that makes it an outstanding purchase is linda has done some further research and the pictures are spectacul spectacular. You can see on the cover you have the klansmen marching arm in arm down pennsylvania avenue. How many people know the rally . Probably thousands and thousan thousands. Theres a stunning image of kind of a county fair spiel of which everybody is a klansmen and we will talk later about the 30 or 40 at a church altar which kind of brings up how i want to introduce the subject of the book which is the Second Coming of the ku klux klan. The first was named the invisible empire. The most famous representation in Popular Culture was of course gone with the wind in which they were referred to as a political organization. No one knew who they were. If you saw a klansmen you new to shutter and run. That isnt this clan so maybe we can talk about the relationship of the first and second clan and how they differ and default. Before i answer i just want to say first of all, i have been in my research the most lively. [inaudible] it was nonviolent and its basic strategy was electoral, i can talk about that, and finally perhaps the most important thing to do. Not to punish the individuals but intimidate the whole population. The second clan understanding you wouldnt get a lot of traction by concentrating because very few lived in the north states and they expanded their list for catholics and jews and immigrants. In the ways of immigration very few of them were protestant and when they said catholics also the included the russian and the orthodox but they didnt register that they were different. But it was an equal opportunity bias. I would add one more thing i dont know if you would characterize it this way quite organizationally, but it was you might call it a profit business. This is one of thos the reasonsu tell the story of this one guy that kind of field and brought in these agents who used the most investigative marketing techniques that included broadening the markets for who you should be hating. I have a book that was about how much of the rightwing politics devolved into a money hustle even before the internet we were getting terrifying hair on the letters saying hair on fire letters to. We know how it works for the internet that was not all that difficult for the clan. And since iin a sense it was lid scheme. If a recruiter could keep 40 of the initiation fee, the initiation fee is 10 but that was over 100 today. It was not cheap and it matters the very low income people were not in the clan. You could then turn around and recruit someone else into this could keep going until theres no one left to recruit and that is the problem with pyramid schemes. Ultimately this was the undoing of the clan because there was so much money flowing and i can give examples if you want. The corruption became too much to ignore any one of them became disillusioned and also it is not just the initiation fee let me mention two other forms of income. I made it difficult for a woman to take the sheets and so it herself and normally people would have to pay for it, the second, people started manufacturing all sorts of things. You could get a clan pocketknife and there were just these marketing things completely unaccountable. You can wear a red make America Great again tap. You have a passage if it was ever flexible theres got broadening the ability to respond to local conditions in oregon the clan efforts were almost exclusively some catholics even joined and members of the klansmen even though elsewhere we learned that they believed there were 100 bishops in america that were going to be 100 dictators in the states that didnt keep them from getting that membership money and just a drizzle this diversity but it doesnt underline you dont characterize it as an ideology that how you kind of character guys what people see and think that its better to describe so what was the structured feeling and what do they believe . What we think about how to respond to this for a moment. First of all, these are the days before people paid to go to lectures. Their job in a way was to wrap up the anger but it rested on fear and that is an important thing to register to. I know that it will be hard for you to believe, but the idea was that america was destined by god to be a nation of protestants and there were people that were trying to invoke that to the true cause to the country. Let me give one example of that. Theyve come from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe they didnt come because they were poor persecuted. They came because the pope ordered them to. They would function like moles and a spy story and remain incognito until the pope gave a sign that they were going to take over the government. , you know, i think when i call it a structure of feeling which is not my own phrase that comes frobut itcomes from an interestg british critic. A motion can be constructed just like knowledge. You can get this intense anticatholicism in places where there are not any catholics. Its probably quite obviously relevant to the stuff we are seeing today. Lets establish the product political context of the United States coming out of world war i its not like the clan for the only racist bigots out there. It was the mainstream kind of elite. I think it is quite possible that the majority agreed with the clans basic ideology. They may not have accepted the stories about what the pope was doing but these are the days they had quote us and i can tell you. If you are interested later you also have professors in the schema for his work for the scholarly tomes about eugenics. What it was about was a letter in which older people in the world are placed on several sevl rungs of the superior ones to the most inferior ones. I want to be clear that they were very common and then another thing that happened right after world war i was a fear about communists in this started well before the Russian Revolution and they had become known as several hundred were deported were charged with sedition so that wasnt particularly racialized but you had a feeling being promoted that there were these people in the United States who wish people things for the United States and it was important to take strong action against them. If you read even across the political spectrum the Supreme Courts stuff which was the famous case in which Oliver Wendell holmes was a famous progressive and wrote the opinion of if its okay for the states to protect the nation for which they would die its okay for the state or actually it is a blessing if it is necessary for the states to protect the nation by preventing them from reading and of course if you study the fact of the case, the woman was sterilized, her little daughter was actually quite intelligent and its quite a fascinating case but it shows that it wasnt like the clan over here and mainstream america over here to view argue that it was not necessarily this organization. There is lots in the book strikingly a lot of it is in the south. To talk about how politically successful the clan was in electoral politics and how that worked and what they accomplished. It is important that they were not 100 nonviolent. In fact, the leaders walked very delicate slippery line about this because the big public statements were absolutely lawabiding. They knew that they could attract people with a promise of being able to participate in vigilantism, so in fact at some point they are dishonest about this but they are right to follow this strategy because they won so much. There were 11 governors, 45 members of congress, thousands of state, county and municipal officers and i want you to understand these are not covert klansmen, these are publicly clans people. However, there were massive victories at the national level. The first one happened right here in new york in 1924 at the Democratic Convention which was held in Madison Square garden. The candidate going into the convention was the governor of new york, al smith. This is the longest Political Convention on record at 2 to 103 ballots that became known as the klansmen because the supporters of the clan basically vetoed the nomination of alan smith. And then the Democratic Party lost the election. There were quite a lot of strengths and during the convention they claimed that it was 50 feet high. It could be seen if you want from Madison Square garden to the river. Incidentally they are burning crosses but they started to use my folks. A far more important thing that happened is the act of 1924. Some of you may not be familiar, but it set up folders for different groups of people that were allowed to come. They were very small quote us and another words this law enacted the hierarchies of the races, and i want to point out Something Else thats important to keep in mind. It was the wall of immigration until 1965. 40 years. The kind of defined his career from that window. So then we have a state like indiana where they said i am the wall and it was an enormous political machine which told me the home state in oregon was a state of shock a lot of us and a very Interesting Campaign against something that we usually think of it now has something to the right kind of likesbikes, which is private sc. What was their beef with private school and how did that play out . The one piece of legislation at the state level but they introduced everywhere they possibly could was to ban private schools, but what they really meant was to ban Catholic Schools. This is interesting. It kind of twists things around because they did become supporters of more tax money going to education and they even proposed that there should be a federal department of education although on the other hand, they were very staunch of teaching the bible in the schools that it was the protestant bible, so the claims were completely phony. Oregon is the only state the past the bill as an amendment to the state constitution. And this is a place i dont remember the figures but both catholics and jews were under 1 . We are talking about a fraction of 1 . It was overturned by the court that it is a sign of the strength. In fact, its probably one because there were not enough catholics which there would have been if they introduced it into a new jersey or mean or other places. This is the case where the role of the democrats democratics institutions are so important in rolling over the rightwing demagoguery and the Supreme Court said no way this is unconstitutional, so they tried to get around it in various ways, but the impetus was there. The ban on Catholic Schools didnt rule that way on any grounds of religious freedom. Those of you that are the lawyers they understand that it was on the grounds that it was a taking of property that therefore it was unconstitutional to take the property away from them. You talk about how they are each embedded in history and you cite racism, temperance, populism but im saving the best for last and biggest christian evangelism. At the book is the Second Coming so it almost is like a christian reference to the title, very clever. Do you want to do a little reading for me . They went first to the masons but then the ministers next promising to help them increase church attendance. An estimated 40,000 ministers joined. I might add they didnt have to pay an initiation fee or jews. The congregation served as. As the model klan city so much that people began to call it klanaheim. And then to become vulnerable to retaliation officials sometimes would ask Friendly Police to investigate allegations that you should investigate the sister because she married a reformed jew who was associated to work at a negro school. And with those negro association. Candid is very interesting and we will talk about those later but with those liberal cosmopolitan are baffled by the attraction of evangelicals for donald trump right now but with that even angeles of in america if it shows that the moral questions follow the teachings of christ with the radical sectarian and troublous movement but there is a lot of that and also a history of that ethnic imperialism. And basically to fuse with betty norman size of the klan was made possible because of the evangelical revival. Talking about white evangelicals. Than those fundamentalist were a little more standoffish to believe in the literal word of christ and never made much headway like the episcopalians but all klan meetings began with a prayer and to there were a lot of ministers to published work about the klan thought. And i can get into this later but those evangelicals have those services that they participate think there may have been a connection between that because of those chapter meetings are like the script going on for pages and pages like the crazy words the allstar with the letter k they get to dress up cent you get to dress up and be part of the clubs one of the successes clearly it is a great thing to do in a small town. Also the klan managed to benefit from lack of secrecy but also secrecy because the republicans members but the oath to swear to become a clients person that you would not reveal any of this arcane abracadabra stuff it was terrifying if you were, revealing the secrets. And added to that notion. Like elijah and the reason that was part of the culture then but then there was a chapter called kkk feminist. Explain what you mean by that. Actually this is the chapter that i may get the most criticism because i know many people that believe you cannot call yourself a feminist of your also a racist and all of the other bad things ben the fact is that there were people and groups within the womens clan that advocated a serious womens rights reforms and to take seriously Domestic Violence of wife beating to go along with that to equalize those standards that was just about every state. That adultery on a woman was grounds for a divorce and an equal inheritance. So there were very concrete things. That not all feminism is wonderful. But there is a remarkable story that the klan group chose the joan of arc. [laughter] the fact they identify with the woman who obviously is not a whole body clear rate clearly as how they want to be perceived. In when you were writing about a second way feminism of. Ended that would be a profound contemporary residents . But in some ways i feel like an impostor beca