These progressively zoomed-in maps identify places in the US that had an active chapter of a particular private organization comprised of ordinary citizens between 1915 and 1940. Look at the maps and make your guess as to what that organization was...answer in next tweet. 
It's the KKK. labs.library.vcu.edu/klan/
This post was inspired by reading this stunning article that appeared recently in the Journal of American History. The long, transnational history of the American Right is something it would behoove us to notice more and more these days. processhistory.org/fronczak-fasci…
One of the details that emerges in this article is that the locality with the largest proportion of KKK members in the interwar period was not Atlanta or Birmingham, AL, but Altoona, Pa. My grandmother was from Altoona and I grew up 20 minutes from there.
One of my grandmother's early memories was of waking up one morning (probably in 1924 when she was 7) and finding the letters KKK painted on their trash cans. Her father was a Jewish merchant who owned a jewelry store.
My grandfather told me a story of watching the Klan march down the streets of his (and my) hometown, Ebensburg, Pa in 1924, one year after his father (a Jewish haberdasher) opened up his clothing store in town. The men in KKK robes were the fathers of my grandpa's classmates.
One of the far right figures from the 1930s who Fronczak talks about in that article is Gerald LK Smith, someone who few Americans know about but whose political activism carries some troubling resonances today.
In 1936 Smith, a galvanizing orator, proudly announced to an eager crowd, Bible in hand, that "The lunatic fringe is about to take over the government!" He meant that to refer to himself and his deplorable supporters who were so looked down upon by their contemporaries.
That same year Smith's compatriot, Father Coughlin, gave a speech denouncing the Roosevelt administration as "a slimy group of men culled from the pink campuses of America with a friendly gaze fixed on Russia." One of the invitees to the event was Rep. Martin Dies, of HUAC fame.
Those last two stories come from this excellent, and also recently published, book. amazon.com/Hitlers-Americ…
Here's a great, brief history of the "2nd KKK" that rose in the late 1910s and reached its peak in the mid 1920s. It was motivated by anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, and anti-unionism as well as the anti-black racism that fired the first KKK of the 19th C. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
Fronczak used the term "participatory antidemocracy" to refer to what the far right of the 1920s and 1930s was up to. It's a brilliant phrase that captures how far right politics fires up ordinary people to engage in movements that seek to deny the rights and humanity of others.
Looking back, most historians would refer to these homegrown groups of white, largely middle class Americans as fascists. They engaged in multiple acts of vigilante violence intended to intimidate leftists, with the tacit (if not active) support of local economic elites.
None of these rank and file far right goons called themselves "fascists." They called themselves "patriots" or "defenders of religion and the American heritage." Some of them joined groups that had regalia and did the Nazi salute.
But most of them just kept a baseball bat in the closet in case a group of "pinko labor organizers" or some "America hating left wing professor" came to town and needed to be intimidated into silence.
This piece by @AdamSerwer helps explain how America's role in WWII led too many of us to think of fascism as something that never happened here, and which can never happen here. The true history of the American right suggests otherwise. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
@AdamSerwer Returning to post this chilling document I just found in an electronic archive someone pointed me to. It's the list of people in my hometown who paid for Klan robes in September of 1924, and who were probably in the parade my grandfather watched from his father's clothing store.
@AdamSerwer For the Pennsylvanians out there...here's the archive I used. It took me less than 5 minutes to find this September 1924 list of Klan robe purchasers from my hometown. powerlibrary.org/category/psa-d…
@AdamSerwer Judging by that document, there were some 250 Klan robes that had been purchased in Ebensburg, Pa. by September of 1924. The town's population was 2150 in 1920. Assuming members were mostly male, that means roughly 40% of the adult males in town had a Klan robe. Damn.
Update: Here’s a document from the next county over, from 1994. I’d bet a good chunk of money that not a single person who attended this event in this very red county in 1994 voted for Clinton in 2016.
