Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
Like father, like son?
Where have I heard these concepts recently? "Restricted immigration"...."return the nation to its former glory"..."nation in peril"...
In 1915, William J. Simmons, an ex-minister and self-described joiner of fraternities, created a new Ku Klux Klan dedicated to “100 percent Americanism” and white Christianity.
He wanted to evoke the previous Reconstruction Klan (1866-1871) but refashion it as a new order—dressed in Christian virtue and patriotic pride.
Simmons’s Klan was to be the savior of a nation in peril, a means to reestablish the cultural dominance of white people.
Immigration and the enfranchisement of African Americans, according to the Klan, eroded this dominance and meant that America was no longer great.
Simmons, the first imperial wizard of the Klan, and his successor, H.W. Evans, wanted Klansmen to return the nation to its former glory.
Their messages of white supremacy, Christianity, and hypernationalism found an eager audience.
By 1924, the Klan claimed 4 million members; they wore robes, lit crosses on fire, read Klan newspapers, and participated in political campaigns on the local and national levels.
To save the nation, the Klan focused on accomplishing a series of goals.
A 1924 Klan cartoon, “Under the Fiery Cross,” illustrated those goals: restricted immigration, militant Protestantism, better government, clean politics, “back to the Constitution,” law enforcement, and “greater allegiance to the flag.”
Along with the emphases on government and nationalism, the order also mobilized under the banners of "vulnerable" white womanhood and white superiority.
Nativism, writes historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, is a crisis about the boundaries of whiteness and who exactly can be considered white.
It is a reaction to a shift in demographics, which confuses the dominant group’s understanding of race.
For the KKK, Americans were supposed to be only white and Christian.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/donald-trump-kkk/473190/
