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Notes -
Interesting, thanks. Yeah the wiki article on Reconstruction era referred to "the legal, social, and political challenges of the abolition of slavery and the reintegration of the eleven former Confederate States into the United States" and various laws & amendments being passed nationally, which sounded like what I remembered. But what stood out was looking up what marked the end, the supposed compromise of 1877, simply being when federal troops were pulled out (so it was all an 'era' characterized by gunpoint).
That's the wild part to me, which I somehow never learned or got through osmosis. I always had the connotation of 'carpetbagger' as economic opportunist, northern capitalists coming down to make a buck, a la 'shock doctrine'. Never knew that apparently northern white & black republicans literally went south and became congressmen & governors for a decade. The people who would actually pack up and move to a southern city to try to run/organize politics and government -- that's a mindset I'd also like to see portrayed from the flipside. If it was something other than a naked power grab, I could imagine it positively portrayed as a moral SJW angle, a 'doing my part' missionary flavor, or a more general entrepreneurial spirit.
I was wondering if maybe in the initial wave they were trying to imitate the crusades with the outfits and talk of wizards & knights. Then the revival in the 20s after this movie came out seems a lot more like a fanclub secret society, either larping or wanting more agency of 'you can just do stuff'. Admittedly, the movie poster artwork does look fairly badass, and makes me want to play dark souls or something.
Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed...
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The difference between how reconstruction was taught to me in school in my state-mandated Texas history class and how it was taught in my American history class is striking; while the radical republicans can certainly be portrayed sympathetically, they were undoubtedly a disaster in practice.
Maybe a little bit, but what is known is that they were fairly explicitly using the robes and titles to try to convince freemen that their white former masters had magic powers- and it actually worked. The robes were intended to look like the ghosts of confederate soldiers(and had the added benefit of concealing accoutrements for magic tricks) and the wizards were supposedly their masters who summoned them.
The south in the nineteenth century was not a very literate or scientifically minded society, and black slaves were more superstitious than most. A lot of the theater has very different effects on us than it did on illiterate, unfree subsistence farmers who unironically believe in witches- it’s plausible that although Islamist movements are a better metaphor for the second wave of the klan(and it’s underdiscussed the extent to which the 20’s era klan saw themselves as a bastion of white Protestant morality being eroded by the then-ongoing first sexual revolution, for which they blamed foreign influence), the oprikhniki is a decent analogue for the first wave.
This, along with the numerous references to confederate relatives, has left me wondering if Scooby Doo was inspired by the KKK. They were literally Scooby Doo villains, disguising themselves as ghosts to scare people away.
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