ku klux klan - book - 1992 - The Invisible Empire in the West: Towards a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

The Invisible Empire in the West: Towards a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

Shawn Lay (ed.)

University of Illinois Press

1992, 2004

248 pages

The Invisible Empire in the West is a collection of essays on the presence and activities of the Ku Klux Klan in a number of then small cities in the Western United States. There are a total of seven essays and six are focused on specific urban centres: Denver, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Anaheim, Eugene, and La Grande. Each of these essays focuses on the specific details of each localized Klan unit, and the challenges that the social composition of each of these cities presented to the Klan in those regions.  

This volume is edited by Shawn Lay, a professor of history and current chair of the Department of History, Philosophy and Religion at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina. Lay has written a number of books on Klan history and it appears as though this may be the domain of his expertise.  Many of the contributors to his collection also appear to be Klan historians, and this book may represent the efforts of a particular generation of KKK experts (Lay, in his conclusion to The Invisible Empire, uses the phrase “klan studies”) to impose a radical new historical vision of the once national, ultra-conservative organization.  In the introduction and the conclusion, Lay discusses how recent research into the Klan during the early 1920s (when the Klan was modeled after fraternal groups such as the Lions Club) has revealed the organization to be, at that time, primarily urban and middle class in its cultural situation and composition, and that it was not necessarily focused on preserving privilege for white Americans.  

Lay insists that the view this book presents of the KKK is radically different from the representation produced by earlier Klan historians such as David Mark Chalmers (in his book Hooded Americanism) or Wyn Craig Wade (via his book The Fiery Cross). Lay’s arguments rest on the fact that these earlier historians constructed the Klan as a phenomenon that arose out of rural backwardness.  The historical representation of the Klan as constructed by Lay and company is certainly radically different from that of earlier histories, however I prefer when a historian is also willing to account for the previous, in his or her eyes inadequate or inaccurate, interpretation of a historical phenomena.  Lay simply points out that Wade, Chalmers, and a selection of other Klan historians, simply failed to properly apprehend the KKK of the early 1920s.  

While many of the essays are quite interesting in their investigations of the Klan in various regional contexts (including, for example, an essay about the tensions of a predominantly and militantly protestant KKK recruiting in the almost entirely Mormon Salt Lake City, Utah), Lay’s own assertions about this new vision of the Klan is not really supported by his fellow “Klan Studies” academics.  In his conclusion, Lay argues that this book has shown the Klan of the 1920s to not have been overtly bigoted or violent.  Certainly, the Klan held many prejudices, not just their world famous disdain for blacks, and Lay’s book shows that they were also opposed to Catholics and Jews. The essays in The Invisible Empire in the West, recant numerous instances of local Klaverns (the KKK name for a regional chapter of the organization) expressing their not-so-positive opinions on these other, non-black, socio-cultural groups. Perhaps the specific regional contexts spotlighted by the authors of these essays gave more opportunity to the Klaverns that formed there to target Catholics with their bigotry than they did for other groups. Furthermore, while physical violence may have been rare, the essays include a fair number of accounts of the Klan using intimidating and threatening language against their targets in their crusade to maintain a social order that privileged white protestant Americans.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2008 - Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Bandidos, Hells Angels, and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Bandidos, Hells Angels, and Other Criminal Brotherhoods
Alex Caine
Random House
2008
304 pages

Alex Caine is a Canadian veteran of the Vietnam War who lived his life as a martial arts instructor and more importantly, as a confidential informant who infiltrated criminal subcultures for the benefit of police. Caine grew up in Canada’s national capital region on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, also known as Hull (now called Gatineau).  By Caine’s own account, he grew up around, and participated in, street crime in his youth, which made him a convincing informant later in life.

Befriend and Betray is Caine’s memoirs of his experiences as a police informant.  He has worked as a contract informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI in the US, and other law enforcement organizations, infiltrating organized crime syndicates but also the Ku Klux Klan, and most importantly, outlaw motorcycle clubs. Befriend and Betray includes stories of infiltrating the Hells Angels, and the book includes a photo of the author standing with Sonny Barger, however the most important part of the book are the stories of the author riding with the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. At one point in the book, Caine recalls telling a law enforcement officer that pretending to be an outlaw biker was his specialty.

The Bandidos are a Texas born club that has grown into one of the big-four outlaw motorcycle organizations. Caine appears to have spent much of his time working with them, and finding acceptance among them (attaining a full patch) and ultimately providing evidence at trial against the club. Caine’s expertise in the Bandidos is, apparently, such that he wrote another book titled The Fat Mexican about the 2004 Bandidos Massacre that occurred in southern Ontario where seven Toronto Bandidos were murdered on the farm of biker Wayne Kellestein.  In Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his own life with the club, riding with them on runs and visiting a street in a Texas town that was virtually owned by the Bandidos.

The most interesting aspect of Caine’s book are the points where it is revealed how many of the Bandidos appeared to actually believe in the brotherhood aspect of their club.  He discusses how the vice president of the Bandidos chapter he infiltrated, a karate expert known as Karate Bob, wouldn’t enter into a martial arts business with Caine because he felt that that would corrupt the sanctity of karate. Caine then compared to this same biker’s unwillingness to allow the club to engage in group-wide criminal activity because that would corrupt the club’s sense of camaraderie.  This frustrated Caine’s ability to collect evidence against his friends, and demonstrates that there are bikers, in leadership positions, who genuinely believe in the general ideals of their subculture.  Of course, when it was apparent that Caine was not a true Bandido, there was not much hesitation in sending club members to his apartment to snuff him out.

Caine’s book is unique because it comes from someone positioned between the worlds of law enforcement and the underground. Caine has the experiences of a street criminal to make him appear authentic to the groups he approaches, but he’s opposed to crime, and he’s not police either, and he often voices his frustration with the actions of his law enforcement handlers. Among the kinds of subcultures where its members are routinely sent to prison, the rat is the lowest form of life. Caine appears, in his own writing (the truthfulness of which has been questioned by others), excited to be a part of these subcultures and to take down their criminal members at the same time, and while everyone might harbor some sense of admiration for the freedom exercised by bikers, who is out there who admires those among them who commit violent crimes?

radical right - book - 1995 - The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Milita Movement

The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement
David H. Bennett
Vintage Books
1995 (revised from original 1988 edition)
585 pages

Salutations, readers!  I picked up my copy of The Party of Fear: The American Far Right Movement from Nativism to the Militia Movement from Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.

The Party of Fear is a historical survey of the far right political scene in the United States.  American nativism, the social ideology which persecutes peoples coded as outsiders to the ideal American society, in the various forms it has taken since late 18th century, serves as the axle around which Bennett’s history of right-wing extremism revolves.  Nativist movements are composed of individuals who have constructed identities of what it means to be a true American by establishing who aren’t true Americans and then victimizing them in a variety of ways.  This usually takes the form of anti-immigrant or ethnocentric sentiments.  An illustrative example of nativist is the Party of Native Americans led by Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York.  Bill the Butcher leads his gang, the Party of Native Americans against recent immigrants from Ireland and the gangs they formed in response to such assaults.  And by the way, in Party of Fear Bennett actually discusses the historical Native American Party, and Bill “the butcher” Poole, that was represented in Scorsese’s film.



A More recent example are these recent political ads that identify immigration from Mexico as a major threat to the American way of life:





David H. Bennett is a professor of history at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.  One of his major research interests is political extremism in the United States, and this book appears to be the culmination of his work on this topic (although he has also published the book, Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-36, in 1969, which I’ll  get around to reading eventually).  This work is a survey of virtually every manifestation of right-wing radicalism in the United States going right back to the revolutionary period.  Nativism was and is a core concept of the extreme right wing, and almost all of the movements featured in Bennett's text are underscored by nativist fears.  Bennett finds a wax and wane to the history of nativism, which he weaves through his overarching history of the American radical-right.   Nativist sentiments may, at one point, be a flag carried primarily by fringe groups to only explode into the mainstream later in an event as celebrated as the McCarthy hearings to root out communists, or the incredibly popular Anti-Catholic ‘Know-Nothing’ party of the 19th century.

At other times, Nativism is represented by fringe movements at the very tip of the political spectrum.  The Ku Klux Klan (discussed at length by Bennett) and its violent paramilitary enforcement of the notion of the true American as white and protestant serves as a recurring example.  Furthermore, my copy of the book, the updated 1995 revision, ends with discussions about the unorganized militia movements that emerged in the United States through the 1980s and 1990s which found national attention after Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building.  Bennett’s book is not just about the pervasive existence of nativist sentiments but about nativist action taken against the perceived intrusion of America’s eternal outsiders, it’s about forming specific social units that identify themselves as American by taking action against that which they identify as non-American, whether its via the judicial and political apparatus ala Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, or via night raids and other forms of terror a-la the Ku klux Klan.  Bennett discusses all of these movements, as well as the more mainstream forms, including those presidents whose administration were defined by promoting nativist sentiments, such as Calvin Coolidge.  This book is excellent as a historical survey of these social movements, and although it never studies any of these movements in depth, it has a large bibliography that points to books about each individual movement.

This edition was revised to include discussion of the militia movements that emerged in the 1990s.  I hope that Bennett publishes another update soon to include many of the new forms of right-wing extremism that orbit around the nativist ideals since Barack Obama’s 2008 election.  The profound rise of Islamophobia, manifested in the Dove World Outreach Center and its leader (who recieved global attention for his heavily publicized wish to ritualistically burn the Koran), but also discussed at length in this report.  The post-911 prominence of conspiracist Alex Jones, who, for example, issued paranoid proclamations that the film Machete was a call to Mexicans to attack white American’s in a race-war, and the renewed explosion in far-right racist groups as studied by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, and the anti-Obama ‘Birther’ movement that claims that the current president is, in fact, an alien.