But from the start, the Klan had no stable truth or message. That mystery lent power to the group, which is often portrayed as a sui generis American phenomenon. The hat made its public debut at the Pulaski Klan’s first parade, in the summer of 1867.Īs the Klan evolved into an intensely violent terrorist movement, the occultism and alternately intimidating and mocking costumes created a fog of doubt about the group’s membership and intentions. ![]() The wearer of the Klan’s towering headpiece struck an imposing figure while projecting a kind of religious authority. Wilson in a 1905 book, the original Klan preferred a domino mask for the face and a “fantastic cardboard hat, so constructed as to increase the wearer’s apparent height a gown or robe of sufficient length to cover the entire person.” The cone hat was a co-option of the capuchon-a mocking rip-off of the medieval clergy’s miter hat worn during Mardi Gras. As described by Pulaski Klan members J.C. Technological innovations in fabrics, dyeing, and sewing made cheap costuming a popular novelty as public carnival processions became more common during the postwar period. Such a club would also need proper costumes. The Citizen advocated for rogue justice against “horse thieves, housebreakers, loafers, and whisky-heads of this community” to correct “their propensities for committing depredations upon the public and reveling in their midnight orgies.” The paper’s reporters and editors decided that an “organized theatrical club” was necessary to combat vice and reassert the classical Southern values destroyed by war. Stories published in Pulaski’s local newspaper, the Pulaski Citizen, workshopped the Klan’s image, preparing its symbology for growth and geographical reach as it outcompeted similar groups like the Knights of the White Camelia, originating in Louisiana, or the White Brotherhood and the Invisible Empire, in North Carolina. It was never a proper-noun political organization but instead functioned as a cultural meme that spread primarily through sensational newspaper reporting and the Klan’s own mythmaking. The first wave of the Klan, which advertised itself as a nonviolent minstrel group, or an apolitical drinking club, fits neatly in this trend. All of which could be used to rebuild, or enshrine nostalgia for, antebellum Southern culture, including the racial hierarchy of the plantation. Supposedly distinct categories like “entertainment” and “politics” were, as always, not neatly separated, and former Confederates saw social utility in tournaments, balls, and masquerades. In the nineteenth century political mobilization was closely tied to public amusements like parades and picnics. Using newspaper archives, Parsons illustrates that the first wave of the Klan was very much a hodgepodge movement deft at wielding media attention. Newspapers played a sensationalizing role throughout the first wave of the Klan, as historian Elaine Frantz Parsons argues in her 2015 book Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction -the first comprehensive examination of the Reconstruction Klan since the 1970s. (Changing c’s to k’s was a linguistic fad of the mid-nineteenth century.) ![]() After spitballing, the fiddlers settled on a club name with gibberish origins-the Greek word kuklos means a band or circle, which morphed into kukloi before someone yelled out “Ku-Klux.” Klan completed the alliteration. ![]() Secret men’s fraternities like Kuklos Adelphon, founded at the University of North Carolina in 1812, had proliferated in the antebellum period. The fiddle players were college-educated ex-Confederates who knew Greek and understood the mystifying powers of a fraternal club. Pulaski was never a battlefield, but long bloody conflicts like the Battles of Nashville and Shiloh took place nearby, and the town was stressed by Union troops. ![]() On an evening in May 1866, young men in Pulaski, Tennessee, met in a judge’s office, eager to start “a club of society of some description.” At first, joining the Ku Klux Klan meant signing up for a fiddle group.
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