i don't want to slow us down, but i do want 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 full timers as well. a few of our board members are in the audience so we are delighted by that as well. for those of you who have never been here before, i want to give you a sense of this institution which has been around for very long time am a 154 years and we are a historical society that prides ourselves on being very assessable to people, we have an extraordinary research library that is open to one and all and we encourage you to come explore. we have exhibitions which you may have gotten a glimpse of ray behind this wall, history of abolition in brooklyn called in pursuit of freedom, there's an expedition about jackie robinson and baseball world series season, upstairs and an exhibition about the prospect park and its history downstairs. so, there ar is a lot going on d you should come back and explore and perhaps most importantly, for those of you who are interested in public programs such as this one, i want to make sure you pick up this brochure on your way out. it is choc chock full of incredy interesting programs, a whole series about women's suffrage coming up soon, mimi sheridan, the magnificent and brilliant chef will be here speaking later in the month so take a look, don't miss any of the great programs coming up. if you're not on our evil last list, please join us and then you will get notice of everything that's 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, welcome both of you, and we are really very privileged to be focusing on linda's new book tonight so let me introduce them. they will speak together for about 40 minutes and then take questions from all of you. they have also very kindly agreed to sign books after they 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. so, rick is the author of the invisible bridge, the fall of nixon and the rise of reagan as well as the. [inaudible] and the unmaking of the american consensus which was winner of the 2001 l.a. book award for history and nixon land, the rise of a president and the fracturing of america. we didn't know how much fracturing was possible, did we. currently national correspondent at the spectator and national correspondent for the village voice and columnist for the new republic and "rolling stone", his journalism and essays have appeared in newsweek, new york times, and many other publications. welcome rick. [applause] and linda gordon who is no stranger to this institution, she 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 lange, she is an extraordinary scholar, the winner of two bancroft prizes and the l.a. times book prize, she is the author of numerous books including the one we are going to really focus on tonight, the second coming of the kkk, also author of dorothea lange, life beyond limits, impounded, moral property of women, the history of birth control politics in america and co-author of the book i grew up understanding as a very essential text for anybody, any thinking american which is feminism unfinished. she is the professor of history at new york university, she has been, she has written many other books and i gather is jetting back and forth between new york and wisconsin. >> is that right. >> something like that. >> okay. so without further ado, welcome both and thank you for being with us tonight. [applause] >> it is the greatest pleasure and honor for me to be here. i'm shamefully one of those people for whom this is the first visit to the brooklyn historical society. they do a spectacular job, i can tell that already. their exhibits, you should all return to see if you haven't slavery and abolition in brooklyn is stupendous. i lived there for eight years but somehow i didn't find my way here, and if someone had told me that i would be hosting a conversation with linda gordon back in my two years of graduate school in michigan, i would have fell off the chair in shock. it's the deepest honest host such as distinguished author and voice. let's dive into this is a wonderful book. i highly recommend anyone interested in american history, in right wing movements and feminism to buy it. of course it's for sale. one thing that makes it an outstanding purchase is not really the words but that linda has clearly done some photo research and the pictures are spectacular. you can feel the cover you have klansmen marching arm in arm down pennsylvania avenue. >> you don't know because the clan exaggerated everything every time. >> there is a stunning image of a county fair ferris wheel in which every body, every seat is a hooded klansmen, there's an image will talk about later of about 30 or 40 klansmen at a church altar underneath the sign that says jesus saves, which kind of brings up how i want to introduce the subject of the book which is the second ku klux klan. linda calls it the second coming of the ku klux klan. the first ku klux klan was nicknamed the invisible empire. their most famous representation in popular culture was in gone with the wind in which they were referred to as a local organization, very much underground, night riders, no one knew who they were. if you saw klansmen you new to shutter and run. that's not this clan. maybe we can talk about the relationship of the first clan and the second clan and how they differ and how they evolved and why one was. [inaudible] >> sure. i'm happy to do that. but before i answer, i just want to say first of all, i've been, in my life of research in many historical societies, and this one by far is the most likely, and second, i just want to apologize for being late. i'm not a new yorker so i get lost. the second klan actually claimed to be continuing the first clan. but, it was different in the series of major ways. first of all, it was not secret. second of all, it was a mass movement having somewhere between three and 5 million members. third, it had women fourth, it was in the main, nonviolent, and fifth, it's basic strategy was electoral, and i can talk about that later, and finally, perhaps the most important thing is it expanded what you might call the hate list, the first clan was entirely focused on keeping african-americans down and used lynching to not only punish individuals but to intimidate the whole population. the second clan understanding that 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 with category because in the waves of immigration that had grown larger from about 1880, very few of those immigrants were protestant. when they said catholics also, they included direction and greek orthodox. they didn't exactly register that they were different, but it was equal opportunity bias. >> right. >> i would add one more thing. i don't know if you would characterize as quite this way organizationally, but this clan was also, you might call a for-profit business. it was extremely entrepreneurial and this is one of the reasons you tell the story of this one guy who kind of came up with the idea of creating a second ku klux klan and he kind of failed and he brought in these public relations agency who used the most modern sophisticated marketing techniques which included broadening the market for who you should be hating, and it was basically, i wrote a book, i wrote an article called the long con and it was about how much right-wing politics have devolved into a money politics, even before the internet people were getting kind of terrifying hair on fire letters saying the left wants to teach her children cannibalism and sex add and teach them how to have and send me ten dollars so we can save the world. we now know how it works with the internet. it wasn't necessarily all that different for the clan which did sort of function like a pyramid scheme. >> it was a pyramid scheme. a recruiter could keep 40% of the initiation fee now the initiation fee was ten dollars in 1920, but that is worth over $100 today. it was not cheap. this is one important fact that mattered that very low income people were not in the clan. so, you know, if i recruited you, i can keep 40% but then you can turn around and recruit somebody else and keep 40% and this can keep going until there's no one left to recruit and that's what is the problem with pyramid schemes. ultimately. >> well it's a problem for some people. >> well, right. >> ultimately, this was the undoing of the clan because there was so much money, 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 also, it's not just initiation fee, let me just mention two other forms of income. they made a uniform in such a way as to make it very, very difficult for a woman to take old sheets and so it herself. they did this knowingly in order to make people have to pay for it, but second, people in the clan started manufacturing all sorts of memorabilia. you could get a clan pocketknife and a brooch for your wife. they were just marketing these things publicly, all these newspapers and all this money completely unaccountable. >> you too can wear out 20-dollar red make america great cap, so there was so entrepreneurial, you have a passage that it was ever flexible, they're kind of always broadening the can the people they want to attract, as well as the ability to respond to local conditions in oregon, clan efforts were almost exclusively anti- catholic mentioning jews only occasionally, some catholics even join, members of the catholic war veterans and knights of columbus were known to be klansmen, even though elsewhere we learned that the clan believed that there were a hundred bishops in america that would be 100 dictators for 100 states and that the nuns were kept as sex slave from get in that membership money, and just as the clan checked local conditions, so did the local church. many white catholics supported the clan. so there's all this diversity but obviously there's an underlying, you don't characterize it as an ideology, it just gets into it technical debate about how you kind of characterize what people think and feel and how that joins them together in movement, but you say it's better to describe the clan structure of feeling. what structured it, what major klansmen, what do they believe? >> anything about how to respond for a moment. first of all, clan speakers, there is hundreds of professional lectures who went all over the country. they earn money by 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's a really important thing to register. maybe later i'll say specifically some of the fears and i know that 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 anglo saxon protestants and there were people trying to erode that destiny to subvert the true cause of this country. let me give you now one example of that creation of fear through outrageous claims. a common claim was that all of these immigrants who had come from southern europe, eastern europe, et cetera, that income because they were poor. it income because they were persecuted. they came because the pope ordered them to. he ordered them to come to this country where they would function like moles in a spy story. they would go underground, so to speak, and remain incognito until the pope gave the sign for the coup that was going to take over the american government. so, you know, when i call it a structure of feeling which is not my own saying, it comes from a really interesting british critic, but what i want to say is a motion can be constructed just like knowledge can. one of the things that we see is that you can get this intense anti- catholicism in places where there are hardly any catholics. anti-semitism were people who have never seen a jew. it is quite obviously relevant to some stuff that we are seeing today. >> right. >> and you argue, let me back up. let's also establish the broader political cultural context of the united states coming out of world war i. it is not like the clan was the only racist bigots out there. it was a profoundly, especially profoundly racist time in the 1920s. maybe we should establish some of the mainstream elites, the structured things. >> you know, i think it's quite possible that the majority of american white protestants agreed with the clan's basic ideology. they may not all have accepted these wild stories about what the pope is doing. you have to remember these are the days in which, for example, the great universities had quotas for juice. i can tell you 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. you also had professors in these great universities who were writing scholarly tones about eugenics and eugenics which is technically the science of human greeting, but what it was about was a whole hierarchical ladder in which all the people of the world are placed on several wrongs from the superior ones to the most inferior ones. now this, i'm not sure, i want to be clear that these views were not unchallenged but they were very, very common. then, another thing that happened right after the world war was a kind of hysterical fear about communist. : : was not particularly racialized, but there was this feeling that there were these people in the united states who wished evil things for the united states and it was important to take strong action against them. >> to get the sense of how pervasive it was even across the political spectrum if you read the supreme court case in which oliver wendell holmes was famous and wrote imbeciles are enough, it was about if it's okay for the state to protect the nation by the scripting people in combat would die, it's okay for amore blessing for the state to protect the nation by preventing imbeciles from breathing. the facts of the case it turns out woma the woman who was sterd wasn't a quote on quote in the falimbecile. her daughter was quite intelligent but it just shows it wasn't like the clan over here and mainstream america over here. but you argue that it was not necessarily a violent organization. there's lots of violence in the book and a lot of it is in the south and goes back and has its own roots but you almost end up arguing that it just has to be because it got what it wanted through the political process and talks about how politically successful it was in the politics and how that worked and what they accomplished. >> it is important that they were not 100% nonviolent. in fact, the leaders walked a delicate slippery line about this because the public statements were this is a law-abiding organization. [inaudible] 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. so, there's, in fact, at one point they are directly dishonest about this. but they were absolutely right to follow this electoral strategy, because they wanted so much. just a few figures they elected 11 governors, 45 members of congress, thousands of state, county and immiscible officers, and i want you to understand that these are not covert klansmen. these are publicly claimed people. however, there were two massive victories at the national level. the first one actually happened right here in new york in 1924 at the democratic convention that was held in madison square garden. the leading candidate going into the convention was the governor of new york, al smith. al smith is a catholic. this longest political convention on record went for 103 ballots but it became known as the clan make because they need vetoed the nomination of al smith and bend the democratic party lost the election and i'm not saying that he could have one but there is one little thing about the convention. they had quite a lot of strengtf strength in new jersey and giving the convention on several nights, they put up a cross claiming that it was 40 feet high and on the new jersey side it could be seen if you walked from madison square garden to the river. incidentally, theoretically they started to mainly use light bulbs. they didn't really use technology, that i think far more important what happened is that immigration restriction act of 1924. some of you may not be familiar with it, but it set to 'for the different groups of people who could be allowed to come. big quote us for white and very small )-close-paren -- in other words, this wall enacted exactly the clan's hierarchy of the races. and i want to point out something else that is important to keep in mind. it was a wall of immigration until 1965. 40 years of that -- >> mr. emmanuelle o >> mr. emmanuelle of brooklyn kind of defined his career from that window. he fought against it in 1924. so, then we have a state like indiana where the head of the clan said i am the law. it was an enormous political machine and in the home state of oregon where it was the seabed of the whole chapter which was a stupendously racial state and interesting campaign against something that we usually think of now is something that the right likes which is private school. what was their beef with private school and how did that play out? and >> the one piece of legislation at the state level that they introduced everywhere they could was to it then private school that will lea they really meants to ban catholic schools. but this is interesting. it twists things around because they wanted to get rid of these schools they did become supporters of more tax money going to education and they even proposed that there should be a federal department of education although on the other hand they were very staunch about teaching the bible in the schools so the claim to want to separate church and state were completely phony. oregon is the only state that passed this ban on public schools and passed it as an amendment to the state constitution. this is a place where i don't remember the figures but i know that the member numbers of both catholics and jews was under 1%, talking about a fraction of 1%. this was always overturned by the courts. but it just is a sign of the strength. in fact, it probably won in oregoone inoregon because theret enough catholics to maryland in organized opposition which there would have been when they organized in new jersey or maine or other places. >> and this was a case where the role of democrats and small institutions are so important in rolling over the separation of the right-wing demagoguery and the supreme court said no way. so they tried to get around in t in various ways but the impetus was there. >> the courts that ruled against the ban on catholic schools did not rule that way on any grounds of religious freedom. those of you with our lawyers may understand the overturned on the grounds that it was a taking of property that the catholic schools were owned and therefore it was unconstitutional simply to take their property away from them. >> so, you talk about historically within the kind of american history the second clan has the six ancestors each of them embedded in american history insight racism, nativism, temperance, paternalism, populism. i might add entrepreneurialism but i'm saving the best for last, and that's christian evangelism. the book is the second coming so it almost has a christian reference in the title, very clever. do you want to do a little reading for me? >> when recruiters came into the new region they went first to the masons and the ministers next promising to help them increase church attendance and estimated 40,000 ministers joined and i might add here i didn't say they didn't have to pay an initiation fee or jews. the congregation served as a sanctuary and recruiting camps. ministers frequently out of themselves as klansmen during the services it was so much thae began to call it -- >> the home of disneyland. >> they sometimes asked police to investigate allegations and these are quotes from some correspondence. you should investigate the sister because she married a reformed jew who was associated in work at a negro school or that another was the head of an interracial committee which is a branch of negro association in new york. >> i think that historiographical davis is very interesting and has come temporary residences we will talk about later. a lot of liberals and cosmopolitan intellectuals in the secular folks are kind of baffled by the attraction of evangelicals and fundamentalists christians for donald trump right now but the more i studied the history of the fundamentals and evangelism in america, we kind of assumed christians follow the teachings of christ what to do with this kind of violent sort of radical secretary in tribalist movement. but there's a lot of that in the history of american fundamentalism. it's also kind of a history of ethnic imperialism in a lot of ways. >> one of the smartest things they did is refuse racial and ethnic bigotry with religious bigotry. to some degree i would argue it was made possible because it was an evangelical revival. now i am talking about white evangelicals and also there's a slight differencthere is aslighe evangelicals and fundamentalists. fundamentalists were a little more standoffish, but a fundamentalist is someone that believes in the literal word of christ and so on. they had some reservations and the clan never made much headway in the protestant churches that were called to mainline like the episcopalians, the lutherans and so on. all of the clan meetings began with a prayer. there were a lot of ministers who published work about the clan or about the thoughts as a part of this revival. but also i can get into this later, the evangelicals also tend to have services at which people move and shot and participate. there might have been a connection to that because these chapter meetings were extraordinarily dramatized by the scripts that go after pages and pages almost like you have a whole glossary you get to dress up and go to parties all the time. you get to be part of this club. one of the successes of the social movement clearly is the great thing to do in a small town on a saturday night. >> also they benefited from the lack of secrecy and also secrecy because the republic as members but the oath they had to swear is you were not going to feel any of this stuff and it was a terrible oath about what happened and i think that added to the notion is. >> it's part of the cultural then, too. why don't you explain what you mean by this? >> this is a chapter i think i might get the most criticism because i know many people and some of them are my friends who feel you can't call yourself a feminist if you are also a racist and all the other things the clan wants but the fact is there were people and groups within the clan that advocated women's rights reforms. they advocated for harsh punishments into the domestic violence to go along with that. they advocated equalizing the standards for getting a divorce which were just about every state complete crippled standard between men and women. they advocated for the equal inheritance runs so there's a number of these very concrete things. there is even a remarkable sto story. says something about how they want to perceive. as a pioneer feminist scholar i am sure you have an interesting career in activism that is a surmise on my part. did you ever imagine when you were writing about the history of birth control or feminism in the 60s and early 70s that you would be writing a book about the 1920s to fo ku klux klan? >> absolutely not. in some ways i feel like an imposter because i am not an expert on the right. i've never previously written about anything to do with conservatism. i am not any better informed than any other reader of "the new york times" about the contemporary clan stuff. this came to me by an accident and i'm still writing a larger book about social movements in the 20th century u.s. and i had it as a chapter and i did that for two reasons. first, it was obviously the largest social movement and secondly, i wanted people to know that they were wonderful so i had already drafted this chapter and then my editor and agent and bunch of friends said you needed to put this out, so i did. >> we are all reading this book. there's lots of references. a "new york times" magazine piece came out and i though fele story that i thought i was telling about in america basically starts with national review and barry goldwater but you can't really understand what donald trump shows us is you can't understand the right in america without going back to some of this. he considered henry ford a role model and the southern segregationist him as kind of a model for what he wanted to accomplish and we have some very fascinating residences involving basically the performance of demagoguery. you mentioned david stephenson would swoop down in the sky with a name on the plane and then you have the imperial wizard who says i've got the biggest brains. [laughter] how do you approach the subject of how this 1920s history as much as we understand the 1950s and 60s history of national review and barry goldwater and ronald reagan is informing newt gingrich and paul ryan how do you see this history as informing our contemporary movement clacks >> i think to answer that i want to start by sort of disaggregating something because there was a lot of difference between the anti-catholicism and its anti-semitism. catholics could convert. if they did that, they were fine. shoes, no. in fact when we look closely what we see is that anti-semitism for them was closer to the racism of people of color then it was to the anti-catholicism. now, it's also true that the anti-catholicism disappeared and it disappeared quickly because for example many clans people in the 1930s some of you have probably heard of this radio personality cult father coughlin who was an overt supporter of hitler. well, he's a catholic and the klansmen went eagerly into supporting him because there's something kind of fungible here. where i think the anti-semitism, and i think this more because i see so much of it today is somehow that is more fundament fundamental. it's interesting that in the 1920s one of the things they had against the jews is something that came true. they claimed that they were in cahoots with african-americans. the reason they did that is because in their view once they saw that there were actually a civil rights organization developing, but hav that had toe been outsiders that were organizing it because on the one hand they are really happy with where they are and on the other hand they are just not capable of this. that's what's interesting about that is starting in the late 1950s, they were impacted disproportionately represented in the civil rights movement. obviously, i see has a very positive thing and something i am proud of, but it just says something about the way that these things carry through. >> host: and when you carry it through, you have a direct threat between that and with thithislady was saying about ale governors in moscow as they plan to the united states. >> the thing about jews and communism as double-sided as the accusations were contradictory. on one hand they are communists and on the other hand friends are catholic [inaudible] >> robert welch had a way of explaining it. the illuminati was fine and all and that came about in the 70s, so we don't need to go into the weeds on that one. but it is important one thing i kind of learned in focusing on the left in the stud tends to be right going on 20 years now is in the american reactionary thought we are taught to peer the others. the names change but the structure is the same. the way that henry ford talked about the jews was the way that the mccarthyites talked about communists. the way they talked about communists win in the south people started organizing the equal rights amendment and remember that women's conference manuscript i'm working on now. it was a national conference and 77 which turned out to be kind of feminist inspired but it was an enormous organizing opportunity for the new right that led to ronald reagan and a journalist who covered the civil rights movement in mississippi and wrote an article about the state meeting in which the forces of the new right and feminist clash about who would be the delegates in the conference and are these the same people. and now they call them liberals and feminist and now it's become infiltrating the muslim brotherhood and infiltrating the obama white house sort of like the devil in the shape of a woman. it stories, the narrative structure is the same and this longing to construct one's self and community and one integrity as a subject against this thing that you exclude. in a lot of ways it is universal but in american history it takes on these different things. >> i agree with part of that. part comes out of what you just said. my sense of the clans people's feelings if they had a tremendous discomfort with any diversity. they wanted people to all the unlike. in the book i call it a lusting for purity because there's a number of ways without which this claim was expressed and in that sense it is true that this kind of hostility to different groups is fungible and can switch, but i want to say there is something different about the race and people of color and anti-semitism because a communist could change and give up his communism and become -- people do that all the time. there's one story that you enjoy the story of jonah and the whale. jonah was swallowed came out whole. one of the clan members have a slightly different version of this. the reason is that they are indigestible. [laughter] what they meant this as a metaphor that they can never be in that patriotic and i see that as more characteristic of the attitude of the people of color. >> is it something in that particular fraction? there's something that we've noticed at the same time but i don't know, we have to look at that and what would happen if if a muslim converts is that person then okay? >> leslie will be able to choose that over over drinks, but you get to shoot things over with us or linda i should say. it is time to distribute the microphone that bo has in his hand. so a quick note before we get to questions, first off keep in mind that the books are available for sale and people between a book signing afterward and we are doing audio capture so when you are selected, please wait for the microphone to get to you and i'm sure you can project very loudly that we want to make sure that it can pick it up. >> the tv feed also. >> i would have handled to call on. >> thank you for the talk. here are two things. one is about the violence and nonviolence. if you live in a full community and everybody knows two of your cousins are crazy you don't have to be violent. the other thing more recently i would like to hear your opinion. in the media, the general public and a lot of the more severe race riots in the 20s and in east st. louis and other places they downplay the number of the african-americans killed because they say they got domestic but they can put on a good pr it wasn't that many. on the other hand, they also downplay the number of bytes that were killed because they don't want to give the impression that they could fight back and would fight back. would like to hear your opinion. >> it was more like a comment which i appreciate but maybe we can take a few. as the real story about the genocide became a critic of the u.s. and for some people even earlier because they were master eugenicists as you probably know they were killing off disabled people as a way of purifying so if this got stigmatized by think there's stuff that doesn't go away, it just goes underground and we have seen that throughout that you have these periods of a burst of nativism and then it's called racism, whatever you want to call it and then it can subside. that relates to what i said before about the participation of the political elites and intelligible and so on in various levels of this kind of racism. it's the difference between the quiet and allowed. one writer said what is quiet in the center is allowed at the margin, and i think that is partly what i meant. >> my own interpretation of this is yes with the fungibility that we all need a shadow string for that we need to blame for all of our problems. a lot of that became illegitimate to blame jews for that because of the awfulness of the holocaust. another thing if there was a lot of right wing vigilante as i'm that was quite ugly and violent in this city and also in boston a lot of it was catholic and inspired by the christian legion i wrote about that in my times article that was supported in a lot of ways by the catholic hierarchy. a lot of the history is being flushed out for the first time because historians have kind of leaned on the idea that america was a liberal nation. but anyway, another question. >> [inaudible] about fdr's new deal and to get the deal done, she had to kind of deal with the devil in the sense that 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 is a computed question. they were extremely hostile to roosevelt and they used to call him those involved were rosenberg. they wanted to claim he was a jew at heart. their ideology wasn't anti-status. they were not against government programs such as public health programs such as public schools. >> there is a pamphlet for national healthcare. the idea is they believe in the theory of disease and we need to protect ourselves. >> rick would know more about this and correct me if i'm wrong but i think of it as antistate libertarianism coming from a more elite group. >> it's complicated, but there was a group that did claim to be a play on the enforcement you mentioned in a couple times in the book which i became very fascinated and discovered basically in the files of "the new york times" they made a movie about them in 1937 but they sued and also were a lot more violent than the clan inflicted to fix it and they were basically hunting down union leaders and they were very powerful in detroit. the police chief and pontiac and things we need more research on that filed the new deal. in the sales pitch, were there any elements of a promised land or great destination not beyond the exclusion fa? >> i don't know if i would call it that, but the notion was close to that because the notioe notion was that america is really special and in fact both america has a destiny but they have been called up to see that. they've positioned themselves often as the rescuers of the downtrodden but this is another thing that is common. they take up the position that they are the victims. that's the white protestants are the victims and it's these other people that are trying to take away from them and for example they even use the sam used the g here today about immigrants taking jobs in places where there were no immigrants, so again it close to that. i don't think i would call it literally -- >> i think the clan kind of merges with the international fascism which is the transcendence and return to its past in which everything was before the bad guy took over. >> first of all, i want to thank both of you for a superb conversation. i am learning so much. [applause] i have two questions that i think are connected in terms of the history of ideas. i come from an anthropology background and i'm wondering first if you would comment on the extent to which you may see a connection between the eugenicists ideas that the clan was promoting in the 1920s and those who in the 1960s or 70s and this is appalling to me was able to publish a work in the harvard educational review with the title of how much can we boost our academic achievement and second, the mainstream reception for charles murray's book which in my opinion is also a work of racist crackpot pseudoscience but got on "newsweek" where they treated it as though it were a legitimate debate 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. it's so frustrating to me that this is coming through again. >> yeah. i think it's like a bad penny it keeps coming back and i think that you make an eloquent statement. we shall overcome. don't forget me, look at the mail with the microphone. >> you haven't said much of anything about the clan in the south and the campaigns of intimidation using nice writing and hoods and all that stuff again african-american people, and specifically i am aware that there was a big effort on the part for example a the naacp in the teens and 20s and into the 30s to get to the wall of a lynching and if it ever succeeded and i wonder if they opposed it and lobbied against it sex >> absolutely. franklin roosevelt would never throw his support behind an anti-lynching bill obviously as someone said earlier, he believed he needed the votes of those southern democrats who plus he also had the luxury of being able to use eleanor roosevelt to somehow appease the people who were more antiracist. >> the violence in the south and biscuits at how big a part of the structure could become. one of the interesting details was in oklahoma they had the rule if he were called to the jury, they automatically cancel your membership so when they ask you during the jury selection whether you were a klansman, you could say no. it was important to have klansman of a journey. you write about how they are governor and we can talk about the role of prohibition and all of the south louisiana discovered in 1922 that the klansman were not only intercepting as male and a muttering from phone calls but killed two of the allies. examination of the corpses showed that they had been tortured that the jury refused to convict the accused and they send fbi agents to investigate. but they wanted to take care of the federal agents. oppressed by the governor, he charged 18 clan operatives with conspiracy but of course some are familiar with the story and the 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 clan was continuing its absolutely direct violence and the lynching continued so when i say that it was relatively nonviolent i'm talking only about the north. >> there've been a number of articles and i've wondered is kind of a matter of interpretation you have this whole and automation that was very respectful. would this have been kind of an aura [inaudible] if you were just another civic organization you are a part of god as a resident input on the outfit and go to meetings. >> i'm glad you asked that. first of all, fraternal organizations were widespread and had large memberships. this was still a continuation of this pattern. furthermore, they did some of the same things others did just they organize all kind of leisure activity for their members. you could spend your life in a clan community. there were clubs, there were baseball teams, there was a memorial day parade or they have that obfuscation with the police. >> it is just constant. but the other part of this, and i'm not trying to let his father off the hook in any way but 80s i did because sociologist if anyone wants to dig deeper into this, she did some work in number of decades ago in which there were people still alive from the clan whom she could interview. many of these people told her it was just another club, it was just another fraternal thing. now i grant you a lot of that is self excusing oneself decades later but i have to believe that there was some of that and i think the crucial thing to remember is at that time it was respectable to be a member of the clan and there would be very few locations in which the membership but thank you ostracized. >> some of the members of the clan in the 1920s some of which surprised me. >> hugo black the suprem supremt ojustice, harry truman was a member of the clan, harding was a member of the clan. most people resigned when they went into national or into the kind of national legal community. >> it was a legal issue it wasn't like forget about that he was in the clan. i mean, one of the surprising stories in the book and geared of the clan is that it faded pretty quickly. you have your interpretation of what had happened but i think also it is quite possible some people hold it within their own narrative. of course in this case we don't need to verify whether he was an active klansman. we know that he put little cds next to all of the color of applicants and the justice department nailed the case so they settled. but i look through i think it was those feet and a thorough examination of every scrap of paper that gets signed ont on to that and it was a clan's parade. there were people arrested, they got into an altercation with the police and everyone arrested for swearing a clan robe, so unless a brooklyn eagle is not a particularly reliable reporter then i would say there is a pretty good chance we can establish not to a legal certainty but competently but yes he was a member of the ku klux klan and was arrested during an altercation with the police. the. i was thinking about words of the nation and the kind of book on the klansman and i'm just curious what effect they had in legitimizing the second coming of the clan and also embedding the 19th century clan as sort of the foundational midst of the united states. >> i think i missed the first part of what you're asking him if what group have an impact? >> if the film birth of a nation and of the klansman >> no, it was the kind used it constantly. it appeared in 1915 before this happened, but they organized showings in all kinds of cities and actually made a lot of money from using that film. a >> it was shown for a long time, reagan was born after 1911. he said my father wouldn't let me see birth of a nation. i really wanted to as a kid. one reason his father would have hated the clamor cheated his because his father was a catholic. it wasn't just because it was racist. but there was a very big part for a long time in american public culture. >> these will b >> these will be the last questions. >> i'm very appreciative of your lighter side and humor. i wanted to tell you quickly something that happened here at the cork street cinema. it was a tiger. movie. the only one i remember, and i do think it depends on the color of your skin whether you were still afraid of the clan or not that we were one of the few white people in that particular audience and tiger went to the south for some reason as the character that he becomes and a guy had a nice and was cutting something i guess you could call it what a lame or whatever and tyler got out of the car and asked him where he could go to the bathroom and he said over there. he went in over there and saw that it was a group of clan members and they all were wearing white and the audience went crazy and tyler perry's character ran out and was so afraid he dove into the car as a heavier woman in thi women in te dove into the car in the back seat and they pulled away. i think that reflected a lot of fear. everybody was laughing but there was a great deal of fear. that isn't my question however, i just my question is actually owned by women. i'm interested in your feminist kkk group and they remind me of the women that supported chum when he was elected. i don't know if i understand it that well enough and i'm curious what you think. >> 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 and that is just because they are one an wot doesn't mean that issues about gender equality are going to be their highest priority. but i also think and this is me now just talking as an ordinary citizen, not as a historian. a lot of the vote was more an expression of tremendous anger van and he carefully thought out ideological position. i was recently in a conversation where someone who did know quite a bit about the albright and made me particularly young people who are in the sand today it's only one small part of the white nationalist movement but anyway, this person who interviewed a lot of people said a lot of them were very confused and don't come up with a completely clear ideological position on a number of things. this goes back to the reason i like very muchce this concept tt came from a structure of feeling that they are part of a community of people have built up a feeling that you might know more about this than i do. >> i think that if you are too kind of frame the structure of feeling and of course there's lots of different kinds of trump voters it might entail a woman to support him. one might be that the idea of restoring a stable hierarchical trustworthy noble and moral order in which the nuclear family at the center is the basic conservative principles. if you see conservatism as i view as fundamentally about a movement of establishing hierarchy and order against sort of the libertarian energies of the various kinds of classes, then it can be veryy comforting to have someone to protect them. that's one story that you can tell about the world and he plays in knoxville. you can laugh, but as scholars and analysts and journalists and writers you have to take the evidence as it comes and that is where the theory comes from. so this is all a challenge and i think history and journalism helps but this is a movement as was the 1920s for the profound change and that's when of reaction thrives and it doesn't go away. a lot of us remember in 2008 whenn obama was elected and we thought all that data stuff was behind us. my most recent article some white folks thought maybe that bad stuff was behind us and the most recent article i published was about how the week before donald trump gave the speech and talked about how they are were e rapists, a lot of people were celebrating theot fact that souh carolina voted to remove the confederate flag from the statehouse grounds that people were passing on the videos and saying i'm a descendent of jefferson davis and we have to turn our backs on this. americans i think long and because there was so much a part of the story lost that kind of transcendence and healing and we keep seeing it but i think as long as we are america we are going to be struggling with the dialectic between progress and reaction.y >> let me just close by saying two things around this that come a little bit about this history but observing the president and one is one of the things that characterizes this movement which we are now seeing all over the world is that people have perhaps genuine grievances but they always blame the disadvantage rather than the r advantaged and that is fundamental to what makes the movement right wing that they don't go after the people that have the economic and political power. the other thing isa want to say that i think we can't forget and it's a little bit true of the clan that is beneath all this angry rhetoric and racist rhetoric and all this stuff, there is another agenda and you might just call it neo- liberal because what is going on in a certain sense beyond the rhetoric is the deregulation of everything that provides us as citizens with any safety. the deregulation of climate issues, the deregulation of safety issues, the deregulation of consumer protection, the deregulation of wall street. and my sense is that some of the clan supporters were people who benefited in the economic sense from this kind of rightc wing stuff but it's really visible today i think and in my view it's the only possible explanation of why so few elected representatives in the party have been willing to step away from his agenda. >> thehe struggle continues. please think join me in thanking linda gordon. 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