Gordon’s book is a must-read for anyone wondering over the last several months how we ended up as a country — with the first African-American president not even a year out of office — facing a group of golf shirt-wearing young white men marching onto the campus of a prestigious university carrying torches and chanting 'Jews will not replace us,' a president who has demonized Mexicans and other immigrants, and unabashed white nationalist ideology from the likes of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka at work in the White House. Gordon documents not only the mechanics of how the Ku Klux Klan roared back to power, both socially and politically, in the 1920s but why. The parallels between then and now, branding differences aside, could not be more evident.
A slim volume that largely synthesizes the already substantial literature on its subject, The Second Coming of the KKK nevertheless offers readers something new: The book is written, quite self-consciously, for this moment. Unlike other historians who strive for an ever-elusive objectivity, Gordon is refreshingly blunt about who she is and why she wrote it … Despite her lack of sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan, her approach to the group is a model of historical empathy. Unlike a previous generation of liberal and leftist scholars who dismissed far-right movements like the Klan as the result of ‘irrational paranoia,’ Gordon takes her topic quite seriously, and comes away with serious lessons … The chief success of The Second Coming of the KKK is the way in which Gordon makes clear that the organization was not an outlier, but perfectly in tune with its time … They are, as the Klan insisted a century ago, ‘100% American.’
Gordon’s is a thoughtful explanation of the Klan’s appeal in the fast-urbanizing America of the 1920s, which was leaving behind an earlier nation based, in imagined memory, on self-sufficient yeoman farmers, proud blue-collar workers, and virtuous small-town businessmen, all of them going to the same white-steepled church on Sunday.
[Gordon] rejects the academic’s commitment to history for history’s sake in favor of a perspective on the past that explicitly comments on the present ... It’s hard to finish a single page in Gordon’s book without a slight tingle of fearful familiarity, of reverberations in rhetoric and public opinion — a recognition that, maybe, it has always been thus ... They say the job of an anthropologist is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, and something similar goes for the historian. I can think of few books that accomplish this task as well as Gordon’s: In her telling, the second Klan is at once utterly bizarre and undeniably American. The 2010s may not be the 1920s, but for anyone concerned with our present condition, The Second Coming of the KKK should be required reading.
Gordon, a professor at NYU and one of America’s most accomplished historians, has written The Second Coming of the KKK as an explicit political parable: Understanding the Klan of the 1920s can help us understand the rightwing populism of today … She deftly illustrates how racism seeped into a seemingly unrelated political issue, then became institutionalized. Gordon does not claim that the second Klan got rid of its racism. Rather, in the 1920s it broadened its racism to include other groups it deemed ‘un-American,’ and adapted it to the particular historical moment … The Second Coming of the KKK is mainly a story of how the Klan rebranded itself to the public.
Gordon begins her book by showcasing the terror of the Klan and then letting readers understand just how normative they were … Though Gordon implies that she will make points about the United States in the era of Donald Trump, she wisely avoids any heavy-handed comparisons and leaves readers to draw conclusions on their own. Still, her book serves as a lesson for what the alt-right could become should it attain a greater level of respectability. Gordon notes that a key feature of the Klan was its palatability in Middle America … Highly readable and well researched, this is an important book.
The Second Coming is a scholarly history with both the strengths and weaknesses of academic works. There's little in the way of storytelling, and the characters don't come alive on the page. Readers will need to look elsewhere for vivid portraits of heroes and villains in the KKK drama. But Gordon is a thorough and perceptive historian, and she's careful to keep most of her opinions to herself: 'I am less interested in condemnation than explanation.' She is willing, however, to link the KKK of the 1920s to today's American politics, especially the nationalist movement. But there's more to The Second Coming than grim déjà vu. There are lessons, too.
...Gordon tells this illuminating and timely tale with meticulous research ... Gordon catalogues the many contradictions, the hypocrisy and the shady but effective strategies that strikingly mirror the playbook of some in the conservative movement today ... Part cautionary tale, part exposé, “The Second Coming of the KKK” illustrates how a potent and unyielding undercurrent in American life was methodically aroused and unleashed. By following a thread that courses through history, Gordon reveals why a dangerous movement, disdained and underestimated by some intellectual elites, powerfully appealed to a wide swath of white America.
The work is explicitly informed by the 21st-century rise of conservative populism in America, but Gordon largely leaves direct comparisons with contemporary politics to her readers ... Gordon also provides insights into the surprising effectiveness and independence of the women’s auxiliaries to the exclusively male KKK. This clear-eyed analysis illuminates the character and historic power of America’s own 'politics of resentment.'”
