JSTOR Daily: The History of the KKK in American Politics

White supremacism is on the rise again. The Ku Klux Klan supported Donald Trump for president. Former Klansman David Duke made a bid for the Louisiana Senate, hate incidents followed the election, and Trump named as White House senior counselor Steve Bannon, former head of Breitbart.com, a website popular with white supremacists. This isn’t the first time that so-called white nationalists have been involved with American politics. In the 1920s, during what historians call the Ku Klux Klan’s “second wave,” Klan members served in all levels of government.

The Klan didn’t start as a political force, but as a lark. Shortly after the Civil War ended, some Confederate veterans got together and played around with hoods and robes, wearing them while riding  horses through town in Pulaski, Tennessee. They formed a secret group with outlandish names for its officials, like “Grand Cyclops” for the leader. When they saw how their costumed rides scared blacks, the group turned to vigilantism. [...]

The Klan was a big issue in the 1872 presidential election, but the group was in its death throes. It rose again after the 1915 release of D. W. Griffith’s pro-Klan movie, The Birth of a Nation, when the country was reacting to many societal changes brought on by the temperance movement and World War I. This second-wave Klan emerged as a morality police to fight immigration, minorities, and the loose morals of speakeasies, bootlegging, and political corruption. While the first Klan focused on blacks, this wave also fought Catholics, Jews, intellectuals, and anybody else it felt was hurting America. At heart, it was a nativist movement that drew sympathy from those who still saw blacks as unequal to whites.

Heavy marketing drove membership in the second Klan to between 3 and 7 million; that added up to a lot of commissions for recruiters, who got a percentage of member fees. The majority of this KKK were mainstream, mostly Protestant, citizens. A portion of the second-wave Klansmen murdered or beat those they considered un-American, but a majority saw the group as a social or even charitable club. Klaverns gave money to churches and helped other community groups such as baseball teams. Members celebrated holidays together and attended one another’s funerals.

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Vox: The abortion rate is at an all-time low — and better birth control is largely to thank

US women are having abortions at the lowest rate on record since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, according to a new report. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, the abortion rate has been steadily declining for decades.

The new report comes from a massive census of US abortion providers taken every three years by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization that supports legal abortion. It’s surprisingly difficult to get accurate data on abortion in the US (more on that later), but Guttmacher’s census is the most comprehensive available on the subject. [...]

The abortion ratio — the proportion of abortions to live births — is also down to historic lows. In 1995, the abortion ratio was about 26 abortions for every 100 live births; in 2014, it was 18.8.

The abortion rate and the abortion ratio tell us different things. The abortion rate is a bigger-picture snapshot of how common abortion is among women every year, while the abortion ratio gives us a sense of how many women who get pregnant decide to stay pregnant. [...]

Abortion rates have been falling for three decades in the developed world, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff has explained. But in developing African, Asian, and Latin American countries, rates have either held steady or increased since the 1990s. That’s because women in developed countries, such as in Europe and North America, have much better access to higher-quality methods of birth control, and live in a culture that treats contraception as less of a taboo.

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Quartz: This Holocaust remembrance project is tweeting the names of refugees who died because the US turned them away

The United States’ approach to immigration is changing dramatically under president Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order targeting illegal immigrants, and is soon expected to sign another that could indefinitely block certain refugees.

A new Twitter account is highlighting another example of the US denying entry to refugees. Using data from the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum (USHMM), a Holocaust Remembrance Day project is tweeting out the names and stories of passengers from the St. Louis Manifest, a German transatlantic liner carrying 937 passengers, the vast majority of whom were Jews fleeing the Third Reich. The ship was forced to return to Europe after Cuba and the United States denied its passengers entry.

The Manifest was originally headed for Cuba, where most of its passengers planned to stay until the US approved their visas. But by the time they arrived, the Cuban president had issued a decree invalidating passengers’ recently issued landing certificates, forcing the ship to turn around with most of them still on board. Although the liner sailed close to the United States, and some passengers had contacted president Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask for refuge, the US did not take measures to permit the refugees to enter the country.

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Politico: Theresa May Is a Religious Nationalist (DECEMBER 6, 2016)

As a Conservative politician, May’s appeal depends largely on her apparently apolitical common sense. Her manner and rhetoric always suggest that things are pretty much all right as they are, that reasonable people don’t want to rock the boat, and that there is something wrong with the people who want large change. She expresses distrust of ideologues and chancers — the two labels that most naturally attach to her political rivals at the moment. [...]

The link with May should be obvious. The lack of explicit theological distinctiveness in her church coheres with an almost complete lack of ideology in her politics. She seems to have no large vision of how society should be organized or the economy run: She sees problems in her nation and fixes them, without worrying too much about how everything might fit into a grand scheme. If she had a slogan, it might be “common sense without stupidity.” The Brexit vote would seem to contradict both halves of the slogan. But we still have no clear idea how she intends to deal with it — except that she does not intend to let anyone outside the government know anything until the last possible moment. The attempt to negotiate what is supposed to be a return to parliamentary sovereignty without a vote in Parliament is one example. Another is her repetition of the phrase “Brexit means Brexit” until its lack of meaning became embarrassingly obvious. [...]

Generally, however, May’s political career is given coherence by her supposition that her Christian duty is to the people of England rather than to humanity in general or even to other Christians. This is another thing that distinguishes state churches, on the European model, from congregational ones, on the American model. The state church is not something you join, or leave, any more than the nation is. It is run as a kind of public utility: a national spiritual health service, if you like. In Germany and Scandinavia, the churches are paid for out of taxation collected by the state, as the English church once was, even if the church taxes in Europe are now voluntary. Because there is no special membership status, no one is excluded either, and there is an obligation to serve everyone. May’s father was legally obliged to marry or bury any resident of the parish who demanded this service — the assumption being that they were members of the church.

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CityLab: Finding the Poetry in 'Paterson'

All of those “Patersons” may seem like an indie film affectation, but they’re an homage. Paterson, who writes poetry when he’s not ferrying passengers, has a favorite poet: William Carlos Williams, who worked in the nearby town of Rutherford during the first half of the 20th century. Williams is probably best known for his simple, elegant poem, “This is Just to Say.” But he also wrote an epic, five-part poem called, yes, “Paterson.” In a 1943 letter to the author and poet Robert McAlmon, Williams declared that “Paterson” the poem would be “a psychological-social panorama of a city treated as if it were a man, the man Paterson.” [...]

Paterson has been accused (not unaffectionately) of depicting an unrealistic utopia, particularly in terms of racial harmony. Indeed, Paterson the man is friendly with everyone, and aside from a young white girl with whom he converses briefly, he is the only white character in the movie. (His wife, Laura, is Iranian, his friends at the bar are black, his colleague at the bus depot is Indian.) Jarmusch’s city is also a utopia of post-industrial working class life. The mills are long gone, and they’re not coming back; still, Paterson’s life is a good one. [...]

Paterson leaves one with a feeling of appreciation, if not hope. Not just for America, for the working class, and for race relations—but for walkable, dense, public-transport-loving, inclusive cities. If CityLab gave out movie awards, it might very well get Best Picture.

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