Preface
Chapter 1: The Klan in 1920s Society
Chapter 2: Building a White, Protestant Community
Chapter 3: Defining Americanism: White Supremacy and
Anti-Catholicism
Chapter 4: Learning Americanism: The Klan and Public Schools
Chapter 5: Dry Americanism: Prohibition, Law, and Culture
Chapter 6: The Problem of Hooded Violence
Chapter 7: The Search for Political Influence and the Collapse of
the Klan Movement
Chapter 8: Echoes
Afterword: Historians and the Klan
Thomas R. Pegram is professor of history at Loyola University Maryland. Born in Hammond, Indiana, he grew up in the Midwest and California, then studied at Santa Clara University and Brandeis University, where he received a Ph.D. in American history. He has also taught at the Ohio State University. He is also the author of Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933, and Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870–1922. He lives with his family in Baltimore County, Maryland.
Pegram (Loyola Univ.-Maryland) provides a comprehensive examination
of the 1920s Klan and places it in its proper historical context.
He successfully challenges the idea that the Klan fit comfortably
into the US mainstream in that confusing time: "The book situates
the Klan within mainstream developments in American postwar life
but also explains why the Klan failed to achieve mainstream status
in the 1920s." Pegram relies on both the words and publications of
Klansmen and their surrounding communities to illustrate how the
excesses of the organized Klan made it impossible for it to truly
fit in the mainstream. While not downplaying the Klan's violence,
he also discusses the organization's other activities (politics,
volunteering, boycotts) to show how even if it shared mainstream
values (racism, anti-Semitism, etc.), it could not gain the support
of the majority of Americans, nor could it retain its own
popularity long after the 1920s ended. Well written, well
organized, and worth the read. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All
levels/libraries.
*CHOICE*
Pegram, a professor at Loyola University Maryland, presents a
diligently researched and nuanced view of the Ku Klux Klan,
yielding a picture of an organization that is far more complex than
previously thought. In the post–Civil War South, the Klan
successfully blunted the efforts of Reconstruction, then faltered
until its 1915 revival. Pegram shows how effective 'modern
marketing and mass mobilization techniques' pushed it to national
prominence during the 1920s, a decade when Klansmen amassed
political power in Indiana, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Texas. . . .
Pegram has made a useful contribution in the study of this highly
fragmented movement.
*Publishers Weekly*
In One Hundred Percent American, Thomas R. Pegram, a professor of
history at Loyola University Maryland, traces the Invisible
Empire’s meteoric rise and equally precipitous fall. . . . Pegram
is at his best exploring the problems that bedeviled the Klan. . .
. He’s got an eye for the telling detail.
*The New York Times*
This reexamination of an organization that was a precursor to
today’s extreme populist Right is highly recommended.
*Voice of Reason*
In this invaluable book, Thomas Pegram provides the first thorough
synthesis, overview, and analysis of this newer Klan scholarship.
He does a superb job of providing examples of Klan activities
across the country, and utilizes a wide array of secondary and
primary sources to produce a well-written work that will interest
general readers and academics alike. ... Individual chapters
include fascinating discussions of the methods the Klan employed to
attract members, the Klan’s views on education, its role in
prohibition enforcement, the place of violence and vigilantismin
the movement, and the quest for political power that ultimately
contributed to the organization’s precipitous collapse in Indiana
and nationwide....One Hundred Percent American stands out as a
sophisticated, nuanced, and essential examination of a subject
which, as Pegram notes, constitutes 'a particularly difficult
puzzle for historians'.
*Indiana Magazine of History*
In One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku
Klux Klan in the 1920s, Thomas R. Pegram, a professor of history at
Loyola University Maryland, documents its rise and fall with
thoroughness and expertise. ... Pegram, in this valuable work, puts
the Klan into historical perspective.
*Sheldon Kirshner Journal*
The Ku Klux Klan was reborn because Thomas Dixon romanticized the
organization in his novel The Clansman which was later turned into
the movie The Birth of a Nation. This movie would inspire another
racist who was a preacher into launching the rebirth of the Ku Klux
Klan. This was in the early 1920’s and a lot of the black veterans
of World War 1 were demanding to be treated better. They fought for
America and they felt that they earned better treatment. As in all
organizations that attempt to take away the freedoms of another
minority the violence got out of hand over a period of years and
over 1,000 Negroes would ultimately be lynched by the mob rule of
the Ku Klux Klan. It was through these acts of violence that Klan
membership fell by the thousands. It was still the Jim Crow era,
but the violence was re-pungent to the vast majority of people in
the 1920’s. One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline
of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s has earned an 'EXCELLENT!'
Rating.
*The Lone Star Book Review*
One Hundred Percent American will appeal to undergraduates and
graduate students studying for exams.
*The Historian*
In One Hundred Percent American the Loyola University Maryland
professor Thomas R. Pegram draws upon his primary research as well
as the plethora of books, articles, and dissertations that have
been written on local and state organizations in the past few
decades to provide a nicely readable account of the Klan’s rise and
fall in the 1920s.
*Journal of American History*
Informed by exhaustive research in primary and secondary sources,
One Hundred Percent American is without doubt the most advanced and
valuable general history of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s to date.
Scholars, students, and general readers alike will find this
elegantly written and astutely argued work to be of great
interest.
*Shawn Lay, Coker College*
A much needed, splendid synthesis of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan.
*David J. Goldberg, author of Discontented America: The United
States in the 1920s*
One Hundred Percent American is an excellent synthesis of the
scholarship about the New Era Klan and the best general history of
the topic that exists . . . [It’s] an engaging read, filled with
colorful examples and personalities. With debates over American
national identity continuing still today, it is a book that
deserves a wide audience.
*Journal of American Ethnic History*
What makes One Hundred Percent American so valuable is the full
range of evidence that the author deploys to buttress this
argument. He summons a ‘rich inventory of theses, dissertations,
articles, and focused studies of local or state Klans’ that have
been written in recent decades (xi); and, because so much of this
scholarship has been unpublished, his book rightly bids to take its
place as the standard scholarly account of its subject. There are
excellent, informative chapters on the violence of the Klan and on
the special anxiety that the Catholic Church stirred, and on the
ambivalent response of these hooded—but often
hard-drinking—believers in law and order to the enforcement of the
Eighteenth Amendment.
*Patterns Of Prejudice*
Pegram's page-turning work deserves to be considered one of the
best studies of the Invisible Empire in particular and 1920s
culture in general. As an added bonus for students and scholars,
Pegram includes an afterword in which he explains the difficulties
of studying a 'secret' yet public organization and chronicles
ninety years of scholarship on the 1920s Klan.
*Journal of Southern History*
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