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In The New York Times Book Review, Clay Risen reviews Linda Gordon’s “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.” Risen writes:
Like the alt-right today, the Klan was never a political party, but it wielded sizable influence in politics. Klan members or Klan-endorsed politicians held the governor’s office in Oregon, Texas and Colorado; it controlled mayor’s offices from Portland, Me., to Portland, Ore. And lest we criticize the current president for being uniquely unable to condemn the alt-right, bear in mind that no president in the post-World War I era from Woodrow Wilson to Herbert Hoover would condemn the Klan either, for fear of losing public support.
But the Klan’s real power lay not in politics but in its reach into the everyday. Gordon paints a picture like something out of a Vonnegut novel, an America seen in a fun-house mirror: The Klan sponsored baseball teams (one played the Hebrew All-Stars in a 1927 game in Washington, D.C.), county fairs (she includes a striking photo of Klansmen in full hooded regalia riding on a Ferris wheel in Colorado), college fraternities and beauty pageants, in which young women competed for the title of “Miss 100 Percent America.”
On this week’s podcast, Gordon talks about “The Second Coming of the KKK”; Scott Kelly discusses “Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery”; editors from the Book Review talk about our 10 Best Books of 2017; and Gregory Cowles, Jennifer Szalai and John Williams on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books mentioned in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:
“Improvement” by Joan Silber
“These Possible Lives” by Fleur Jaeggy
“Child of God” by Cormac McCarthy
“Misogyny” by Jack Holland
“Operation Mincemeat” by Ben Macintyre
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
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Continue reading the main story