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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3155 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 20, 2025

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Minor Heterodox take: The KKK mostly did nothing. They're just a particularly famous kind of Elks At their peak there were fewer than 200 lynchings annually in the USA, at its peak the Klan had eight million members.

Most Klan members never lynched anyone, or probably ever attended a lynching. They never saw, as it were, combat.

Can you name any other organizations that get close to 200 murders a year?

By your standard, most organizations mostly do nothing. They prefer legally and socially defensible activities like fundraising and complaining on Twitter. The big exceptions are outright criminal gangs where violence is instrumental.

The big exceptions are outright criminal gangs where violence is instrumental.

Which would be the normal framing of the Klan in history and pop culture! As an outright criminal gang, dedicated primarily to violence against black people. If you asked MoPs for historical peer organizations for the KKK, you'd probably get a lot of the Mafia, the IRA, Crips and Bloods, MS13, maybe Al Qaeda or ISIS. You typically wouldn't get a lot of comparisons to the Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, Optimists Club, BSA Order of the Arrow, Knights of Columbus, the Campfire Girls. ((FWIW, the best comparison is probably the Black Panthers))

The former, on a murders-by-membership basis, typically run pretty close to even, if you say you're in La Cosa Nostra or a Cartel or in Al Qaeda I expect you to have been involved directly in acts of violence over the course of your career. The same could not be said of the typical KKK member: taking 200 as our upper bound (assuming KKK involvement in every lynching) and even taking a crazy number like 100 Klansmen involved in every lynching, that's only 20,000 Klansmen if they all only participate in one lynching. Over a ten year period, that's only 200,000 Klansmen who were actually involved in a lynching, as against 8,000,000 Klansmen nationally. Your modal Klansmen never lynched anyone. They may have participated in other, smaller scale violence, but that's a lot harder to track. By comparison, the Cartel membership estimates vs body count runs close to 1% a year; if the Klan ran that high at its peak we would have been seeing 70,000 lynchings a year.

Of course, the Masons aren't an entirely apt comparison on this basis, I would expect that most years the Masons have zero associated murders. But the experience of the average Klansman was probably closer to that of the average Mason than to that of the average Mafiosi.

I agree that cartels and international terrorists are bad comparisons. I’m trying to say that the Elks are also a terrible comparison.

The gap between “zero” and “200” is huge! There is a categorical difference between a club that refuses minorities and one that occasionally goes out and kills them pour encourageur les autres. Not incidental protests turned violent, not even organized patrols spoiling for a fight, but actual, premeditated murder. Putting them in the same category as some xenophobic philanthropists is doing the latter a disservice.

Hezbollah, the Muslim brotherhood, and the longshoreman’s union do extralegal violence. All of them have lots of members dedicated to the organizations other functions and not involved in personally doing terrorism.

I'm focused on the experience of joining and participating in the Klan for the average Klansman. Who never murdered anyone, though he probably approved of it pour encourager les autres.

The second wave of the klan(the one everyone actually remembers) actually did a lot of things, but there’s lots of actions short of lynching to engage in- from intimidation campaigns to beatings and vandalism.

The Invisible Empire did a lot more bake sales than beatings, and a lot more local parades than lynchings, and a lit a lot more grills than they did crosses. They were much closer on any given day to the Elks than to Al Qaeda, their existence and traditions and activities basically resemble that of any other fraternity, with the occasional addition of violence.

Their existence nevertheless suggested the existence of a vast body of white men willing to engage in racialized violence, but they didn't actually engage in it all that often.

A lot of their violence wasn't racialized. The klan believed it was a guardian of historic American protestant morality(in the process of shifting due to the first sexual revolution) and did a lot of busybodying.

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

I would say the second Klan was more anti-Catholic than anti-Black. By the time the second Klan was founded in 1915 the racial issue had basically been won by the racists, Jim Crow was firmly in place, and there was no need for an extralegal anti-Black organisation similar to the first Klan. The strongest second Klan state organisation was in Indiana, where there were no Blacks to oppress.

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

We're already seeing a much more nuanced Klan than we get in the average portrayal.

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