The KKK and U.S. Immigration Law

 

I have been looking at the role of the KKK in supporting federal immigration legislation, including the Immigration Act of 1924 and its national origins quotas system.  Two relatively recent books lay out important history of the Klan in the 1920s, an era in which the KKK was a legitimate political player and deeply integrated into the political and social fabric of many communities, north and south.

Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (2017)

The KKK of the 1920s had millions of members outside the South. It targeted Catholics and Jews as well as Blacks, and had great success at electing governors and congressmen. It passed immigrant restrictions that remained in effect until 1965.  Historian Linda Gordon explains HERE her book The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan and the American Political Tradition. 

 

A Fever in the Heartland:  The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Eagan (paperback – June 2024)

 Here is the publisher's summary of the book:

"The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history."

 

KJ