>> thank you for your patience. we're delighted to be gathered here today. i don't want to slow is down, but i do want to make sure that all of you know a little bit about where you are today. can i just get a sense of how many of you are at brooklyn historical society for the first time? wow. fantastic. welcome. welcome to all of our old-timers as well. a few of our board members are in the audience, so we're delighted be that as well. those who have never been here before i want to give you a sense of this institution which has been around for a very long time, 154 years, and we are historical society that prides ourselves on being very, very accessible to people. we have an extraordinary research library that is open to one and all. we encourage you to come and explore it. we have exhibitions which you may have got an glimpse of right behind the wall, history of abolition in brooklyn, called in pursuit of freedom. there's an exhibition -- i want to make sure that you pick up this brochure on your way out. it is chock-full of incredibly interesting programs, a whole series about women's suffrage coming up soon, and million my sheraton -- mimi sheraton will be here speaking later in the month, so take a look. don't miss the great programs coming up, and if you're not on the eblast list, join us and you'll get notice of everything happening here. so, having said that. to our main event tonight, which is a conversation between two spectacular great thinkers and scholars, linda gordon and rick pearlsteen, welcome to both of you,ber very privileged to be focusing on linda's new book tonight. they're going to speak for 40 minutes or so and then take questions and have kindly agreed to sign books after the talk. so, their books are available in our shop, if you haven't had a chance to pick those up, i would encourage you to do so. >> perlstein is an author. one book was the win are of "the los angeles times" book award for history, and nixon lean, the rise of a president and the trafficking of america. currently we didn't know how much fracturing was possible, did we? >> non correspondent for the village voice, and stone "rolling stone" his journalist and essay have been in new "newsweek" ," anytime anytime and other publications. welcome, rick. >> and linda gordon, who is no stranger this institution, has very kindly, a few years ago, offered up her words of wisdom to a very important event that happens here annually in support of our library, when we were privileged to have her talk about dorothea lang. she is an extraordinary scholarrer, the win of two "los angeles times" book prizes, the author of numerous books, including the wean wore going to come nows on, "the second coming of the kkk" and author of "dorothea lang," the moral property of women this, history of birth control, politics in america, and she is co-author of a book that i grew up understanding as a very essential text for anybody -- any thinking american issue guess, which is feminism unfinished. she is the felonies kelly professor of history florence kelly professor of hit at new york university. she has written many other books and i gather is jetting back and forth between new york and wisconsin. right? is that right? >> well something like that. >> okay. so, without further adieu, welcome to you both, and thank you all for being with us tonight. [applause] >> thank you. it's the greatest pleasure and honor for me to be here. i'm ashamefully one of those people who for whom this is his first visit to the brooklyn historical society. they do a spectacular job, tell already. their exhibits, you should all return to see if you haven't, and slavery and abolition in brooklyn is stupendous, i lived here for eight years but didn't find my way here. if someone told me i'd be hosting a conversation with linda gordon in my graduate school the university of michigan i would have fell off the chair? , some it's an honor to host a distinguished scholar and voice. let's dive in. this is a wonderful book. i highly recommend anyone interested in american history, in right wing movements and social movements in feminism. buy it. it's for sale. one thing that makes it i think an outstanding purchase is not the words but that linda has clearly done some yeoman photo research, and the pictures are spectacular. you can see on the cover, you have -- you have it -- klans men marching arm in arm down pennsylvania avenue. that was a very big rally, thousands and thousands. >> you don't know because the klan exaggerated everything all the time. >> a lot of people. there's a stunning image of a kind county fair ferris wheel in which everybody on the -- eve seat is a hooded klansman. an image of 30 or 40 klansmen at a church alter, underneath a sign that says jesus saves. which kind of brings up how i want to introduce the subject of the book, which is the second klu klux klan. she calls it the second come ago the clubs clubs. the first klu klux klan was nicknamed the invisible empire. in "gone with the wind" they were referred to as a political organization, furtive underground they were knight riders, no one knew who they were. if you saw a clansman glue to shutter and run. that's not this klan. maybe we can talk about the relationship of the first explain the second klan and how they differ and how they evolved and why one was furtive and one almost fetishized visibility. >> sure. happy to do that. before i answer, just want to say, first of all, if a been in my life of research in many historical societies and this one is by far the most lively. and -- >> that's saying a lot. >> i want to apologize for being late. this is way -- i'm not a new yorker and so i get lost. the second klan actually acclaimed to be continuing the first klan, but it was different in a series of major ways. first of all, it was not secret. second of all, it was a mass movement having somewhere between 3 million and 5 million members. third, it had women. fourth, it was in the main nonviolent, and, fifth, its basic strategy was electoral -- i'll talk about that late are -- finally, perhaps the most important thing, it expanded what you might call the hate list. the first klan was entirely focused on keeping african-americans down, and used lynching to not only punish individuals but to intimidate the whole population. the second klan, understanding the -- the founders understanding you wouldn't get a lot of traction by concentrating only on african-americans because in 1920, very few african-americans lived in the northern states. they expanded their list to add catholics and jews. and immigrants, but immigrants is really the same category because in the waves of immigration that had grown larger from about 1880, very few of those immigrants were protestant. and when they said catholics, they included the russian and greek orthodox. my impression they didn't exactly register they were different but it was equal opportunity bias. >> right. i would add one more thing. i don't know ifor characterize this the way organizationally, but this klan was also you might call it's for-profit business. it was extremely entrepreneurial. so youtle the story of this one guy who kind of came up with the idea of correcting a second klu klux klan and kind of failed and he kind of -- well, he brought in public relations agents who used the most modern, sophisticated marketing techniques, which including broadening the market for who you should be hating, and it was basically -- i wrote an article a few years ago called "the long con," about how much of right wing politics has devolved into a money hustle. people are getting hair on fire letters saying, you know, the left wants to teach your children cannibalism and sex jed and how to have sex and sent me ten bucks so we can save the world. we know how it works with the internet. wasn't that different for the klan which sort of functioned like a pyramid scheme. >> it was mr. mid -- pyramid scheme. a recruiter could keep 40% of the initiation fee. the initiation fee was $10 in 1920. that is worth over 100 tuesday today. it was not cheap. and this is one -- this underlies one important fact, that very low income people were not in the klan. so, if i recruited you, could keep 40% but youen turn around and recruit somebody else and keep 40%, and this could keep going until there's just no one left to recruit and that is what is the problem with pyramid schemes. ultimately -- >> well, not for some people. come on. >> ultimately, this was the undoing of the klan because there was so much money flowing, and i can give examples later if you want -- that the corruption became too much to ignore, and a lot of clan members became very disillusioned and a little embittered about what was going on and not just initiation fee. let me just mention two other forms of interesting. they made a uniform in such a way as to make it very, very difficult for a woman to take old old sheets and sew it herself and they did knowingly to make people have to pay for it. second, people in the klan started manufacturing all sort-of-memorabilia. you could get a klan pocket knife and a klan brooch for your wife, and there were just marketing these things publicly, all these newspapers and all this money completely unaccountable was flowing in. >> you, too, can wear a $20 red make america great cap. there were so entrepreneurials you have a passage, klanage native jim -- nativism was -- and ability to respond for local conditions inch oregon klan efforts were exclusively anti-catholic, mentioning jews only occasionally, in san diego, some catholics even joined, members of the catholic war veterans and knightses of columbus were known to be klansmen, even though the klan believed 100 bishops in america would be 100 dictators and the nuns were kept as sex lives by the priest that didn't keep these folks in san diego from getting that membership money, and just as the klan changed to fit local conditions so did the catholic church. in southern california many white catholics supported the klan. so, there's always this diversity but the underlying -- you don't characterize it as an ideology, get to in the sociology cool debates how your characterized what people think and feel and how that joins them together in movements but you say it's better to describe a klan structure or feeling. what was that structure or feeling -- what strike federal is, mat made you a klansman, what did klansmen believe. >> let me think about how to respond to this for a moment. first of all, klan peckers, a whole hundreds 0 professional lecturers lecturers who went all over the country. they earned money with doing this. these are the days before television, when a lot of people actually paid to go to lectures. their job was in a way to rev up anger, but the anger rested on fear, and that is really important thing to register. maybe later i'll take more specifically some of the fears and i know it will be hard for you to believe that people believed in them, but the idea was that america was destined by god to be a nation of white sort of anglosaxon protestants and there were people who were trying to erode that destiny to subvert the true cause of this country. let me give you now just one example of that creation of fear through outrageous claims. a common claim was that all of these immigrants who came from southern europe, eastern europe, et cetera, they didn't come because they were poor. they didn't come because they were persecuted. they came because the pope ordered them to. he ordered them to come to country where they function like moles and go underground remean incognito until the pope gave the sign for the coup that would take over the american government. so, i think when i call it's structure of feeling, which is not my own phrase, comes from a really, really interesting british critic, but what want to say is that it emotion can be constructed just like knowledge can. and one of the thing wes see is you can get this intense anti-catholicism and n places ps where there are hardly any catholics. intense anti-semitism among people who had never seen a jew. it's quite obviously relevant to stuff we're seeing today. >> right. right. and you argue -- well-let me become up. so, let's establish the broader political cultural context of the united states coming out at world war1. it's not like the klan where the only racist bigots out there. it was profoundly -- especially profoundly racist time in the 1920s. so maybe we should establish the mainstream elite bigotry that structured things. >> i think it's quite possible that the majority of american white protestants agreed with the klan's basic ideology. may not all accepted the wild stories about the pope. you have to remember these are the days in which, for example, the great universities had quotas for jews. i can tell you that my college, as late as the 1960s, had such a quota, and if you're interested later i can tell you how i slipped in. but you also had professors in these great universities who were propounding and writing scholarly articles eugenics, the science of human breeding. was a kind of hysterical fear about communists and actually this started well before the russian revolution, but you had what became known as-- you may several hundred, i think those are 2000 people were deported because they were charged with sedition, so that-- you certainly had this feeling that there were these people in the united states who wished evil things for the united states and that it was important to take strong action against them. >> writes and if you read-- ticket a sense of how pervasive it was even across the political spectrum, i mean, if you read the supreme court bell case which is the famous case in which oliver wendell holmes wrote the opinion up three generations of imbeciles are enough, it was about well, if it's okay for the states-- for the state to protect the nation by prescriptive people into combat it's okay for the state or actually a blessing, a necessary for the states to protect the nation by preventing imbeciles from breeding and it turns out that the woman who was sterilized was not a quote" the imbecile. her little daughter was actually quite intelligent and it's a fascinating case, but it shows that it was not like the clan over here and mainstream america over there. but, you argue that this clan was not necessarily a violent organization, i mean, there's lots of the balance in the book and strikingly a lot of it is in the south so it goes back and has its own roots, but you almost kind of end up arguing that it did not have to be because he got what it wanted through the political process. talk about how politically successful the ku klux klan was in electoral politics, how that worked and what they accomplished. >> it's important that they were not 100% nonviolence. in fact the leaders walked a very delicate slippery line about this because they're big public statements were this is a law-abiding nonviolent organization. >> well, i will let you lecture -- >> but they also knew that they could attract people, particularly young men with the promise of being able to participate in vigilante -ism and so at some point they were directly dishonest about this, but they were absolutely right to follow this strategy because they want so much, just a few figures. they elected 11 governors, 45 members of congress, thousands of state, county and municipal officers and i want you to understand these are not covert clan centered these are public clans people. however, there were two really massive victories at the national level. the first one actually happened here in new york in 1924 as the democratic convention which was held in madison square garden. the leading candidate going into the convention was the governor of new york, alex smith. powell smith is a catholic. this is the longest political convention on record that went through 103 ballots, but it became known as the clan bake because the supporters of the clan basically vetoed the nomination of alex smith and within the democratic party lost the election. i'm not saying al smith could have one, but certainly relationship. but only and there's one good thing about that convention went to tell you. the clan had a lot of strength in new jersey and during the convention on several nights they put up a cross and they claimed it was 50 feet high. on the shores of the hudson on the new jersey side so it could be seen if you walk from madison square garden to the river and incidentally theoretically these are burning crosses, but after a while they started to use lightbulbs and really technology, but i think far more important thing that happened was the immigration restriction act of 1924. that act, some of you may not be familiar with, but it set quotas for different groups of people who could be allowed to come, big quotas for white, nordic-- small quotas in other words this law enacted exactly the clan's hierarchy of the races and i want to point out something else that it's really important to keep in mind that the law was a lot of immigration until 1965, 40 years. >> when a valid native sons here, mr. emanuel cellar kind of defined his career from that window, really. he fought against in 1924 and repealed in 1965 and then we have a state like indiana where the head of the clan there said i am the law. it was enormous political machine and you told me her home state of oregon where it was-- there's a whole chapter on organ which was stupendously gracious state that shocked a lot of us took a very interesting campaign against something that we usually think of now as something that the right likes, which is private schools. what was their beef with private schools and how did that play out? >> yeah, well one piece of legislation of the state level that they introduced everywhere they possibly could was to ban private schools, but what it really meant was to ban catholic schools, but this is kind of interesting and twist things around because they wanted to get rid of these religious schools they then become a supporters of more tax money going to education and even propose a one point that there should be a federal department of education. although, on the other hand they were very staunch about teaching the bible in these schools, but of course it was the protestant bible so their claims to be wanting separate church and state were completely phony. oregon is the only state that passed this ban on public schools and it passed it as an amendment to the state constitution. this is a place where i don't remember the figures, though, they are in the book. i know the number of both catholics and jews were under 1%. we are talking about a fraction of 1%. this law was overturned by the courts, but it just is a sign of the strength. in fact, it probably one in oregon because there were not enough catholics to mount a really organized opposition, which there would have been when they introduced to say in new jersey or maine or other places. >> this is a case where the role of democrats-- democratic small public institutions are so important and rolling over the depredations of right wing demagoguery and the supreme court said no way this is unconstitutional, so they try to get around in various ways, but the impetus was there. >> the courts that rules against the ban on catholic schools did not rule that way on any grounds of religious freedom are to those of you who are lawyers may understand this. they overturned it on the grounds that it was the taking of property that the catholic schools were owned and therefore it was unconstitutional simply to take their property away from them. >> that is a very right-wing doctrine, actually. you talk historically within the long terrain of american history is the-- as the clan has ancestors in each long embedded in american history and music racism, racism, temperance, populism and i might add on serial is, but i'm saving of us realized and that's christian evangelism. you call it the look is the second coming and almost has like a christian reference or to very clever, professor peered do you want to do some reading for me? i love the one in 1989. i hope that's a favorite of yours. >> when recruiters came to a new region they went first to masons , but ministers next promising to help them increase church attendance with an estimated 40000 ministers joining. i might add here and didn't say it, ministers did not have to pay initiation fee or dues. their confirmation-- congregation served as clan recruiting camps and ministers read frequently as clan during the services. of the clans 39: cards they add a whole rigmarole of recitals of traveling lecturers and 261 ministers. the seven california clan-- southern california clan was organized by a reprimand leon myers and he arrived in 1922 to take over the largest church in town and organize a men's bible class, which became the clapboard, which is a clan name for a chapter of anaheim. the clan touted anaheim as a model clan the city so much that people began to call it clan of time. >> home of disneyland, for you east coasters. >> ministers who rested deposing of clan could become bowl numeral two retaliation. clan officials sometimes asked from the police to quote investigate allegations and these are quotes from clan a correspondence. you should investigate reverent axes sister because she married a reformed jew who was associated in work at a negro school or that another x was headed a quotes interracial committee, which is a branch out negro association in new york. >> i think this is the store graphically very interesting and also has contemporary residences and we will talk about those later, but i think a lot of liberals, cosmopolitan intellectuals, secular folks are kind of baffled by the attraction of evangelicals and fundamental christians for donald trump right now, but the more i study undulate-- evangelism in america we just kind of assume christians follow the teaching of christ and what would they had to do with this kind of violence sort of radically sectarian and tribalist movement, but there's a lot of that in the history of american fundamentalism. it's also kind of a history of kind of ethnic almost imperialism in a lot of ways, i mean, that's a true line in american history. >> in some ways one of the smartest things that klan did was to use a good tree with religious bigotry. to some degree, i would argue that the enormous size of the klan was made possible because it was in a sense of evangelical revival. now i'm talking about white evangelicals, of course. also, there's a slight difference between the evangelicals and fundamentalists. the fundamentalist or bit more standoffish. a fundamentalist is someone who believes in the literal word of christ and so on. they had some reservations in the clan-- klan ever made what-- much headway in the protestant churches called the mainline or the real churches like the episcopalians, lutherans and so on. all klan meetings began with a prayer. they were a lot of ministers who published work about the klan or about klan thoughts as a part of this revival, but also, i think, i can get into this later, but i think that evangelicals also tended to have services of which people move and shouts and participate. i think there might have been a connection between that and what went on in the chapter meetings because these chapter meetings were like extraordinarily dramatizes choreographed. >> like these scripts that go on for pages and pages of most like you had this whole glossary of the crazy words. you have these-- you get to dress up and go to parties all the time, you know. you get to be part of the club, i mean, one of the successes of this movement clear areas that it's a great thing to do in a small town on a saturday night's unit and also the klan managed to benefit both from lack of secrecy, but also from secrecy. >> of that stuff on this gimmick they as members, but the oath you had to swear to become a klan person that you are not going to reveal any of this kind of arcane abracadabra stuff is a really terrify notice about what would happen to you if you were caught revealing secrets and that added-- you had this kind of cachet to be a member of the clan-- klan. >> the masons and that was part of the culture then, to pick also you have a chapter called kkk feminism and. why don't you explain what you mean by that. >> sure. action, this is the chapter in which i think i might get the most criticism. i know many people and some of their are my friends who believe you cannot call yourself a feminist if you are also a racists and all of the other bad things the clan-- klan was, but the fact is that there were people and groups within the women's klan that actually advocated serious women's rights reforms. the advocated for harsher punishment for really taking it seriously was then called wifebeating, which we called domestic violence. to go along with that, they advocated equalizing the standards for getting a divorce, which were just about every state completely a double standard between men and women, i mean, the most obvious is that adultery on the part of a woman was grounds for divorce, but not on the part of men. the advocated for equal inheritance rights, which was not mandated so there's a number of these very very concrete things that i look at that and i say well, you have to call that feminism. it's just that not all feminism is wonderful. there is even remarkable story that happened in oregon of this women's klan group chose as their kind of mascot or symbol joan of arc. now joan of arc-- >> she was catholic. >> the fact that they identify with this woman who led an army, who was obviously not a home body is a something clearly about how they wanted to be perceived it. >> i think of you as a pioneer feminist scholar and i'm sure you have a very interesting career in activism, also. that's just a surmise on my part here did you ever imagine when you were writing about say your history of birth control or were involved in second way that feminism in the 60s and early 70s that you would be writing a book about the 1920s clew clucks clay and and once more that it would be a profound contemporary residence mean this is not how the story was supposed to end the. >> absolutely not. in some ways i feel like an imposter because i am not an expert on the rights and have never previously written about anything to do with conservativism. i'm not any better informed than any other reader of the "new york times" about contemporary clannish stuff. this came to me really by an accident that i was writing and i'm still writing a larger book about social movements in the 20th century us, and i had the klan is a chapter and i did that for two reasons. first, it was obviously the largest social movement in the 1920s. secondly, i did not want people to think of movements are wonderful. i had already drafted this chapter and in my editor, agent and friends of said you need to put this out, so i did. >> we are all reading this book, i mean, there's lots of residences are pointing i wrote a big "new york times" magazine piece i came out a few months ago in which i was like the story i was telling basically starts with national review and barry goldwater, but you really can't understand what donald trump shows us is he can't really understand the right america without going back to some of these 1920s movements that actually hitler found a lot of inspiration. he considered southern segregation is him as kind of a model for what he wanted to accomplish in germany and we have very fascinating residences involving basically the performance of demagoguery. i think you mentioned was it david stephenson who flew down from the sky with the plane with his name on the sky that he had the imperial wizard who says i've got the biggest brain. [laughter] so, how do you approach the subject of how this 1920s history, much as we understand the 1950s and 60s history of national review and barry goldwater and ronald reagan obviously forming newt gingrich and paul ryan, how do you see this history informing our contemporary movements? >> i think to answer that i want to start by sort of disaggregating something because there was a marked difference between that klan and catholicism and its anti-semitism. catholics could converts. if they did that they were fine. jews, no. in fact, when you look closely at it, what you see is that anti-semitism for them was closer to racism against people of color and it was to the anti- catholicism. now, it's also true that the anti- catholicism disappeared and disappeared quickly because for example, many clans people in the 1930s, some of you have probably heard of this radio personality called father coughlin was an overt supporter of hitler and that third right. well, he's a catholic and the klansmen went eagerly into supporting him, so there is something fungible here. where i think the anti-semitism and i think that more because i see so much of it today is somehow more fundamental. it's interesting that in the 1920s of the things the clan had against the jews was something that actually came true. and they claim that the jews were in cahoots with african-americans. now, the reason they did that is because in their view once they saw that there were actually a civil rights organization developing, well, that had to have been outsiders who were organizing and putting the plaques at that because on the one hand plaques are really happy with where they are in klan speak and on the other hand there just not capable of this. what's interesting about this is that starting in the late 1950s jews were disproportionately represented in the civil rights movement. obviously, i see that as a positive thing and something i'm a proud of, but it suggests is something about the way these things carried through. >> and when you tie that with the association of jews with communism, you know, then you have a direct thread between that and what the society was saying and also the governors of southern estate saying about civil rights movement was cocked up in moscow is a plan to break united states. >> the thing about jews and communism is double-sided because the accusations are completely contradictory. on one hand you a communist and on the other hand there's these predatory capitalist. >> robert welch had a way of explaining that, but we won't get into that. that only came about in the 70s and we don't need to go into the weeds, but i think it's important that if there is one thing i've learned in focusing on the left, i mean, studying the right going on 20 years now is that an american reactionary thought and practice that fears are profamily fungible. the name change, but the structures the same. the way that-- maybe we have a delay coming on. the way henry ford talked about the jews was the way that mccarthyite's talked about communists. the way that mccarthyite's talked about communists when in the south when people started organizing the people's rights amendment in the houston women's conference, a big national conference in 1977, which turned out to be kind of the feminist inspired but turned out to be enormous organizing opportunity for the new rights that led to reagan and in the journalists that are the civil rights movement in mississippi and wrote an article about the meeting-- estate meeting in which the forces of the new right and feminist clashed about the delegates that would go to the conference in houston or did these are the same people we would see at the white citizens council meeting. there like wow, now they call them liberals and sentiments and the bogeyman now that it's become arabs infiltrating the muslim brotherhood. we've seen it infiltrating the obama white house and sort of like the devil in the shape of a woman, you know. the story, the narrative structure is the same. the name they give it and this longing to construct oneself and one's community and one's integrity as a subject against this thing you exclude and that means in a lot of ways it's universal, but certainly with an american history it takes on these different crux. >> i agree with part of that, but the issue with. the part i agree with that of what you just said. my sense of klan people feeling was that they had a tremendous discomfort with any diversity. they wanted people to all be alike. in the book i actually call it a lusting for purity because there are number of ways in which this claim about purity was expressed in in that sense it's true that this kind of hostility to different groups is fungible, but i want to say that there's really something different about the racism against people of color and anti-semitism because they communists could change and give up his communism and become -- people do that all the time. a jew can never do that. the major imperial wizard said and i think i have this almost exactly right, a jew could never be a good american precisely because he is a good jew. in fact, a just a little bit of levity here. i have this as one story that i enjoy. you probably all know the story of jonah and the whale. jonah was swallowed, but he came out whole. when of the clan ministers had a different version of this. the reason it jonah came paul-- hold is that jews are indigestible. [laughter] what they literally meant is that as a metaphor for the fact that jews can never be assimilated into patriotic americanism and i see that as more characteristic of the attitudes towards people of color. that there is-- >> do you not think that within that particular fraction of the trumpet movement that's not how muslims are thought of? >> that's interesting. i had not thought about that. it certainly is something i've noticed. i don't know. we have to look at that. what would happen to the islamic fold if a muslim converts. is that person then okay? >> i could get into that. luckily we can choose that one over drinks, but you guys get to chew things over with us or lend i say. it's time for us to distribute the microphone so once-- >> quick note before we get to questions. first occupant mind the books are available for sale and we will do a book signing afterwards and secondly we are doing audio capture so when you are selected for a question please wait for the microphone to get to you. i'm sure you can project a loudly, but we want to make sure our equipment can pick it up. >> the tv feed, also. i will let bo handel who to call on. >> thank you for a good talk. just two things. when is that you were saying about violence and nonviolence. well, everyone doesn't have to be violence if you live in a small community and everyone knows two of your cousins are crazy and they will be afraid of you anyway. the other thing recently i like to hear your opinion, in the media the general public and a lot of the more severe race riots of the 20s, east new york, east st. louis i mean and other places downplayed the number of the african-americans killed because they said the african-americans the message, but they could put on a good pr that there wasn't that many, but on the other hand they also downplayed the number whites killed because they did not want to give the impression that african-americans could fight back. i would like to hear your opinion. >> that was more like a comment which i appreciate, but maybe we could take a few questions. hand way back there. >> did world war ii affect the kkk? >> yes, definitely. as the real story about the genocide became clear to the us and perhaps for some people even earlier because the nazis were master eugenicists who were as you probably know they were killing off disabled people as a way of purifying and advancing the race, so this got stigmatized. you know i think there's a core of stuff that doesn't go away. it just goes underground and we have seen that throughout as you had these periods of a burst of earlier it was called nativism and than racism and whatever you want to call it and then it can subside and that relates to what i said before about the participation of elites, political elites, intellectual elites and so on and various levels of this kind of racism. is the difference between the quiet and the loud. in fact, one writer they dispraise the same, let's quiet in the center is loud at the margins. i think that is partly what i meant. [inaudible] my own interpretation of this is yes precisely the sponge ability that we all need and think of a shadowy string who we need to kind of blame for all of our problems there can a lot of that became a legitimate's to blame jews for that because of the sheer awfulness of the holocaust another thing is there was a lot of right-wing vigilantism that was actually quite ugly and violent in this city and in boston. a lot of it was catholic inspired by father conlon and i think was called the christian legion. there was all kinds of vigilante violence that was supported by a lot of ways the catholic hierarchy. a lot of the history is being flushed out for the first time because it hasn't really-- historians have it gleaned on the idea that america was a liberal nation for a long time. anyway, another question? we have to like i say though is the master of the microphone. >> i have read a fair pitch about fdr's new deal to get the new deal done he had to kind of deal with the devil in the sense of the southern democrats, but i'm wondering whether the clan in any organized way also kind of led to some of those programs not being equally shared. >> that's a call for kitty question they were extremely hostile to roosevelt's and they used to call him like rosenberg or rosenthal and claim he was a jew at heart. but, you know their ideology was not anti- statists. they were not against government programs such as public health programs, such as public schools >> awsat a pamphlet for national healthcare once because the ideas they believed in the germ theory of disease and we needed to protect ourselves. >> liquid know more about this and you can correct me. i seem to think of it as antistate libertarianism as coming from a more elite group then that klan. >> historians want to say it's complicated, but there was a group that claimed in the 30s to be a klan enforcement and that's the black legion which i became fascinated of and discovered it reading old files in the "new york times" on proquest. humphrey bogart made a movie about them in 1937. the black legion's sued and they were a lot more violence than the klan as linda depicts it and they were actually basically hunting down a union leaders and you-- new dealers and they were very powerful in detroit's. of the police chief in pontiac, interesting group that we need more research on that clearly saw the new deal as this basilisk that was bringing in that infection. [inaudible] >> there's a lot of hands over here. >> in the trend for-- klan sales pitch was very claim a promised land are great destination on the hate and exclusion? >> i don't know if you would call a millenarian, but their notion was close to them because their notion was that america is really special and that they are in fact-- in both america has this destiny, but they have been called up into see that america can fulfill the destiny and they position themselves often as the rescuers of the downtrodden, but the downtrodden, you know this is another thing common among conservatives and they took up the position that they are the victims, that is the white protestant who is the victim and it's these other people trying to take away from them-- for example, they even used the same thing we hear today about immigrants taking it jobs in places where there were no immigrants. again-- but, it's close to that. i don't think it would call it literally. >> i think the klan kind of emerges-- kind of merges with international fascism, which is that it sees its transcendence in a return to this millenarian past in which everything was eugenic before the bad guys come >> first of all, thanks. i want to thank both of you for superb conversation. i am learning so much. i have two questions that i think are connected questions in terms of the history of ideas. i come from an anthropology background. i'm wondering first if you would comment on the extent to which you can see a connection between the eugenicist ideas that the klan and people like henry ford were promoting in the 1920s and someone like arthur jensen who in the late 60s or early 1970s and this is appalling to me was able to publish a work of pseudoscience in the harvard educational review with the title of how much can we boost iq and academic achievement and secondly the mainstream reception for child's murray's book, which in my opinion is also a work of vulgar racist crackpot pseudoscience, but it got onto the front of time and newsweek where they treated it as if it was like a legitimate and also in terms of the history of ideas going back again the extent to which other anthropologists in the 20s and 30s were pushing back against this and it's frustrating to me that is coming through again. >> yeah, i think it's like a bad penny that keeps coming back and i think that yeah, i mean, you make an eloquent statement. we shall overcome. don't look at me. look at the one with the microphone. >> you have not said much of anything about the klan in the south and the campaigns of intimidation using night writing" and all of of that stuff against african-american people and specifically i'm aware that there was a big effort on the part, for example, of the naacp and the teens and 20s and into the 30s to get a federal law against lynching and it never succeeded and i'm wondering if the klan lobbied against its. >> absolutely, yes. franklin roosevelt would never throw his support behind an anti- lynching bill. obviously, as someone said earlier he believed that he absolutely needed the votes of those southern democrats. plus, he also had the luxury of being able to use eleanor roosevelt's to somehow appease the people who were more antiracist. >> yeah, so violence in the south and i think this passage outlook gets it how him brocaded, how kind of big a part of the structure of society the clan could become. one of the interesting details of northern oklahoma, they had a rule in the klan that if you are called to a jury you automatically canceled your membership, so when they asked you during the jury selection if you are a klansman you could say no, so it's important to have klansman on a jury and you're right about how the anti- prohibition governor, which we can talk about the role of prohibition in all of this, of louisiana discovered in 1922 klansman were not only intercepted his mail monitoring his phone call, the killed two of his allies an examination of the corpses sure they had been tortured, but klan supporting juries refused to convict the accused. hoover said fbi agents to investigate. klansman warned they would take care of the federal agents. press by the governor, hoover charged 18 clan operatives with conspiracy, but very very familiar story of southern history once again the jury refused to convict. >> it just reminds me and i want to make clear that during this period in the south the klan was continuing its absolutely direct violence in the lynching's continued, so when i say it was relatively nonviolent i'm talking only about the north. >> there have been a number of articles about fred trump, donald's father being arrested wearing a hood and the whole affair at a ku klux klan rally and when i'm kind of wondering is a matter of interpretation. you have this whole kind of amalgamation of masonic lodges and so on that are very very respectable and here's a respectable young businessman getting into the property business and all of that. would this have been kind of bora of not honor because-- is it that bad of a thing, i mean, is there a specific organization you are part of it you are in the queens-- [inaudible] >> first of all, fraternal organizations and some several organizations were right spread with large large memberships. this was still a continuation of this 19th century pattern. furthermore, the klan did some of the same things other fraternal stood and also that political parties did which is that they organized all kinds of leisure activity for their members. you could spend your life in a klan community. there were clubs, baseball team. >> a memorial day parade, i think, where they had that altercation with police. >> constant. the other part of this and i'm not trying to let trump's father off the hook in any way, but a very good sociologist that i highly recommend if anyone wants to dig deeper, her name is kathleen bully, she did some work number of decades ago in which they were people still alive from the 20s klan who she could interview. any many of these people told her it was just another club. it was just another fraternal thing. now, grant you a lot of that is kind of self excusing oneself decades later, but i have to believe that there was some of that and i think the really crucial thing to remember is it was at that time that it was respectable to be a member of the klan and there would be very few locations in which their membership in the klan would make you ostracized. >> when working in the roll call of some of the famous members of the klan in the 1920s, some of which surprised me. >> hugo black, the supreme court justice. harry truman was a member of the klan. harding was a member and most of these people resigned when they went into national politics or as into-- >> it with a big issue in his confirmation. everyone was like forget about it he's the klan. it's interesting, i mean, one of the stories in this book is that it faded pretty quickly a heavier interpretation of why what happened, but i think also it's possible that some people with memory holds within their own kind of mayor chisholm kind of a shameful-- of course, in the case of fred trump we don't need to verify whether he was actually an active klansman or what kind of klansman to know he was a racist. we know he put a little fees next to zero up the little quote unquote colored applicants of his building and the justice department nailed the case and they settled. but, i looked through i think it was "buzzfeed" and kind of like a burial-- very thorough examination of every scrap of paper they could find on that and it was a clan parade and there were lots of people arrested. they got in an altercation with police and everyone who was arrested was wearing a klan robe, so must the brooklyn eagle is not a particularly reliable reporters than i would say there's a pretty good chance we can establish not to a legal certainty, but with confidence that yes, fred trump was a member of the ku klux klan and was arrested during an altercation with the police in queens. >> hello. i was thinking about-- i believe it was from the 1915 based on a book of the klansman and i'm curious what those two works-- what effects they had been legitimizing the second coming of the clan and also embedding the 19th century clan-- klan as part of the foundational myths of the united states. >> i think i missed the first part of what you said. you are asking if what group had a impact? >> of the film-- w griffin's film, birth of a nation. >> it was a major klan-- the klan used it constantly. it appeared in 1915 before this happened, but they organized showings in all kinds of cities and ash made a lot of money from using the film. >> it was shown for a long time. reagan was born in 1911 and he always said my family wasn't racist and we have no reason to disbelieve him and he said my father would not let me see birth of a nation. one reason his father would have hated the klan which he did was because his father was a catholic, not merely because the klan was racist. it was a very big part for a long time of american public culture. >> i think this will be our last question. >> i got the last question. i am very appreciative of it your lighter side and your humor and a want to tell you quickly something that happened here at the court street cinema. it was a tyler perry movie, the only when i remember. i do think it depends on the color of your skin whether you will wear still really afraid of the klan are not, but we were some of the few white people in that audience and it was filled. tyler went to the south for some reason as the character that he becomes an a guy was doing-- he had a knife and he was cutting something, i guess, you call it whittling or whatever and tyler got out of the car and asked the guy where he could go to the bathroom or she could go to the bathroom and the guy said over there. he went in over there and he saw that it was a group of clan members all wearing white and the audience went crazy, crazy and tyler perry ran out and was so afraid that he dove into the car and he's a heavier women in this film and he dove into the backseat and they pulled away. i think it reflected a lot of fear-- now, we all laughed. all of us. everyone was laughing, but there was a great deal of fear. that's my question, however. my question is on the women. i'm really interested in your feminist kkk group and they remind me of the women who supported trump when he was elected and i don't know if i understand that well enough. i'm curious what you think. >> well, i'm sure i'm not alone in saying that it was very difficult for me to understand how many white women voted for trump. one thing is clear that is just because people are women does that mean that issues about gender equality are going to be their highest priority. mug, i also think and you know this is now just me talking as an ordinary citizen, not a historian. a lot of that vote was really more of an expression of tremendous anger that it was any carefully thought out consistent ideological position and i was recently in a conversation with someone who didn't know quite a bit about the altar right and a lot of the mainly particularly young people who are in these white nationalist group and today the car klan is only one small part of the white nationalist movement, but anyway this person who interviewed a lot of people said, a lot of them are very confused and they don't come up with a completely clear ideological position on a number of things. this goes back to the reason i like very much this structure of feeling that they are part of a community of people who have built up a feeling, but you might know more about this than i do. >> well, i think that if you are too kind of frame the structure of feeling that might and of course there is lots of different kind of trump of voters that would impel a woman to support, one might be that the idea of restoring a stable hierarchal, trustworthy, knowable moral order and in which the nuclear family at its center with a basic conservative principle. you-- if you see conservatives and some as i do is about a movement of establishing hierarchy and order against the liberatory energies of the various kinds of classes. then it can be very comforting to have a strong man promising to protect you. i mean, that is one story you could tell about the world in which trump gets that role and you can laugh, but as scholars and analysts and journalists and whatever as writers yet to take the evidence as it comes than that's where the theory comes from. you don't start with a theory work back with the facts. i think it's all a challenge and i think history helps. i think journalism helps, but this is a movement as was in the 1920s of profound change and confusion and that's when reaction thrives and it doesn't go away. i think a lot of it is remembering that when obama was elected without that bad stuff was behind us. my most recent article, some white folks .-ellipsis stuff was behind us, thank you. the most recent article i published in the washington spectator is about how the week before donald trump gave that speech in which he stood on the escalator and talked about how mexico had rapists and people were celebrating the fact that south carolina voted to remove the confederate flag from the statehouse grounds and people were passing around a viral video of public and state senators saying i'm the-- americans i think long because there is so much wound at the heart of our national story, long for that transcendence and consensus and healing and we keep seeing that, but i think that as long as we are america we will be struggling. maybe you agree with that dialect between progress and reaction. >> let me close by saying two things around this. comes a bit from this history and a lot from observing the president. one of the things that characterizes this kind of movements, which we now see all over the world is that people have perhaps genuine grievances, but they always blame the disadvantaged rather than the advantaged and that is fundamental to what makes these movements right wing, but they don't go after the people who are-- you know have the economic and political power. the other thing i want to say that i think we can't forget and it's a little bit true of the klan, but a lot true of trump and that is the need for all of angry rhetoric and racists rhetoric and all the stuff there's another agenda in the agenda is you might just call it neoliberal because what's going on in the certain sense underneath the trump rhetoric is the deregulation of everything that provides us as citizens of any safeties, the deregulation of climate issues, the deregulation of safety issues, the deregulation of consumer protection, deregulation of wall street and my senses that some of the clan's supporters were people who benefited in the economic sense from this kind of right-wing stuff, but it's really visible today. i think ..