I love revisionist history
First off.... The klan is and always was a Conservative organization. Liberals are not welcome
Secondly.... the second generation klan that emerged in the early 1900 s was comprised of both Democrats in the south and Republicans in the Midwest.
Thirdly..... TODAYS klan is staunchly Republican and Conservative
.
Then you need to correct
History, who states that it was CONFEDERATES who created the group:
"
Founding of the Ku Klux Klan
A group including many former Confederate veterans founded the first branch of the Ku Klux Klan as a social club in Pulaski,
Tennessee, in 1866. The first two words of the organization’s name supposedly derived from the Greek word “kyklos,” meaning circle. In the summer of 1867, local branches of the Klan met in a general organizing convention and established what they called an “Invisible Empire of the South.” Leading Confederate general
Nathan Bedford Forrest was chosen as the first leader, or “grand wizard,” of the Klan; he presided over a hierarchy of grand dragons, grand titans and grand cyclopses."
It was REPUBLICAN President Grant and other Republicans who tried to shut down the KKK:
Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was passed by Republicans.
"This expansion of federal authority–which
Ulysses S. Grant promptly used in 1871 to crush Klan activity in South Carolina and other areas of the South–outraged Democrats and even alarmed many Republicans. From the early 1870s onward, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South as support for Reconstruction waned; by the end of 1876, the entire South was under Democratic control once again."
More or less accurate although the year was 1865 (Christmas) and the group of "many" was specifically six in number, twentysomething vets whose names are all known. They modeled what was basically conceived as a college fraternity after a popular fraternity of the time called Kuklos Adelphon and the silly rituals, alliterative terms and costumes were soon taken over by regional vigilante "night riders" who formed at least two dozen such groups around the occupied former Confederacy. Forrest, who was not present in the beginning stages, was drafted in absentia in 1867 and his first and only General Order No. 1 ordered the organization disbanded and its regalia destroyed, though that order was largely ignored as Forrest had been a figurehead. By the early 1870s it was toast and took its place in the anals of history.
That's in effect a different Klan from the one pictured in the OP, which was far larger, far more widespread and lasted much longer than the original, which modeled
itself after the movie stylings of
Birth of a Nation (e.g. the cross burnings which were a D.W. Griffith invention) and was founded in 1915 by an opportunist looking to make money from selling memberships by making the Klan of the movie into a real thing. Racism spurred by the Cult of the Lost Cause, which also produced
Birth of a Nation (1915) as well as the novel "The Clansman" that it was based on (1905), was rampant at the time, as was xenophobia, antisemitism and antiCatholicism, all of which became Klan targets along with alcohol, adultery, "loose women" and people who didn't go to church. Neither the six 1865 founders nor Simmons the 1915 founder had any known political affiliations, though SImmons had been a Methodist minister.
Both of those Klans operated independent of political party affiliation since their impetus was social structure rather than political power for its own sake. Once Simmons lost control of his Klan, a victim of his own success in proliferating it, the KKK started working, especially through the 1920s, to support sympathetic politicians and oppose unsympathetic ones, be they Republicans, Democrats or unaffiliated. That meant Democrats in the South, Republicans in the midwest and the west.
Maine for example was as solidly Republican as the South was Democratic, so being nominated by the Republican Party in Maine was tantamount to election just as being nominated as the Democratic candidate in Georgia. Ergo both the pro- and anti- Klan forces were affiliated with the same political party in each state. In Georgia, Talmadge (Democrat) supported the Klan while Arnall (Democrat) opposed it (and shut it down). In Maine Brewster (Republican) supported the KKK while Baxter (Republican) opposed it. So all this amateur jockeying to put political party uniforms on the Klan as if some kind of elemental causation deliberately ignores the history and context they lived in.
The Klan in the OP is, obviously, the 1915-founded one, in the peak year of its reach, which was coast-to-coast and numbered in the millions. Though the errant Wisconsin trolley tracks photo has nothing to do with any political convention, it did seek to influence both political parties' conventions that year, to little effective result in either case. It's become "fashionable" to conflate a Klan picnic sixty miles away with the Democratic convention and claim it was called "Klanbake" but all the evidence indicates that's yet another 21st century internet historical revision. The OP and his careless conflation of a December day on Wisconsin trolley tracks with a political convention five months earlier and a thousand miles away, indicates just how recklessly partisan hacks will present their hackery expecting the gullible to line up to buy it. Just as "Colonel Joe" Simmons in 1915 expected gullibles to line up to buy his new Klan.
What's ultimately interesting in all of this in the sense of rhetorical analysis is how these same revisionists want to take this clearly
Christian terrorist organization and ignore its religious foundations, painting them over with contrived political party ones, while at the same time taking clearly
political terrorist organizations e.g. al Qaeda, ignore their political foundations and paint them over with contrived
religious ones. As I like to say after the old MasterCard commercial --- "Having it both ways: Priceless".
The Klan has never required a political party. What it did require was that you be white, Chrisitan, specifically Protestant Christian, native-born and believe in the superiority of the white race. Nothing about politics. KKK preached "100% Americanism" but it didn't care how you got there politically.
