While it is true that at least a few Klansmen denounced European fascism (mostly due to its ‘foreignness’, among other petty distinctions), other Klansmen noted striking similarities between their antisocialist clique and the Italian Fascists:
Klansmen themselves were certainly struck by the family resemblance. In the same year as Owsley’s proclamation to the American Legion, Nancy MacLean observed that the Klan periodical Searchlight declared that Mussolini was a ‘sign of political health in Italy and a guarantee against the crazy and experimental forms of government with which Russia is afflicted’.
Hardly known to harbour sympathy for Catholics, the Klan could nonetheless find a mirror of itself in Italian Fascism. As the Klansman minister Charles Jefferson of New York state put it, post‐war Italy was a political mess, with established politicians failing to meet the challenges it faced. The discontent was finally addressed, he continued, by the ‘strong man’ Mussolini.
‘The Ku Klux Klan’, he concluded, ‘is the Mussolini of America’ which would address the ‘vast volume of discontent in this country with things as they are’. Another Klan publication, the Imperial Night‐Hawk, drew admiring parallels between the Black Shirts and themselves, claiming that
the Fascisti of Italy came into existence in a cloak of liberty, like a rainbow of promise, and was hailed by even the enlightened element of the world as a ‘voice in the wilderness’ of human freedom and religious tolerance.
Another article in the same publication applauded what the Klan perceived to be Fascist anti‐Ultramontanism: ‘Mussolini’s battle in his home country to subdue communism and anarchy and halt Papal aggression was an entirely worthy cause.’
Recently the sociologist Rory McVeigh has pointed to some intriguing similarities, albeit very passingly, between fascism and the Klan: both used a combination of mass politics, violence and intimidation to whip up nationalist fury and bridge class divides. Both were extremely anti‐communist, but also blamed big business for the impoverishment of family‐run small businesses.
He is also keen to address the societal underpinnings of success for both fascism and the Klan, pointing, for instance, to the fall in agricultural prices in the 1920s that made rural communities particularly susceptible.
[Class analysis & commentary]
Unlike histories of individuals, it is with the history of an organization like the Klan that we can broach the question of class composition and social make‐up, and compare it to social analysis of historical fascist constituencies. According to MacLean, one of the few to attempt a lengthier examination of this kind, Klansmen were classic ‘men of the middle’.
Looking at the occupational distribution of Klan membership in Athens, Georgia, MacLean concludes that thirty per cent were ‘low white‐collar’; twenty‐six per cent were ‘petty‐proprietor and managerial’; nineteen per cent in ‘skilled trades’; eight per cent ‘mill workers’; seven per cent ‘professional and semi‐professional’; six per cent ‘semi‐skilled’; three per cent ‘major proprietors’; and one per cent ‘unskilled, non‐mill’.
In other words, while there was representation from every class, the bulk of local KKK membership came from the old and new lower‐middle classes. Similar studies of the Nazi voter in Germany come to remarkably similar conclusions: while the [so‐called] National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) electorate was nominally cross‐class, the old lower‐middle class of skilled artisans and shopkeepers (Mittelstand) and new lower‐middle class of white collar employment, civil service and management were over‐represented.
Only labourers who did not belong to a union, worked in a family‐run business, were more inclined to be religious, or who otherwise viewed their class status as temporary, could be found among the [Fascist] electorate.
Any monographic treatment would have to explore more deeply the social bases of American fascism taken as a whole; but the ‘family resemblance’ unveiled in this brief comparison is already suggestive of the social and economic spaces that fascist movements sought to occupy.
Yet most of those who have looked at the Klan’s social base, like McVeigh, exclude the question of whether the Klan was part of a larger, transnational — let alone national — phenomenon.
Might those who gravitated toward Pelley and Winrod, Owsley and Coughlin have come from the same social strata as Klan members? Could the limits of the Klan’s organizational reach reflect not the impermeability of part of the country to its message, but rather the occupation of its ideological and electoral battlements by other groups?
On a slightly unrelated note, I would like to comment that I was at first tempted to focus on this anecdote from the same paper:
Owsley followed this statement with something perhaps less anticipated: ‘Should the day ever come when they menace the freedom of our representative government, the Legion would not hesitate to take things into its own hands — to fight the “reds” as the Fascisti of Italy fought them.’
Here the head of the American Legion, the defender of American democracy, seemed to be suggesting that the anti‐democratic squadristi of Italian Fascism offered solutions to the potential of worker unrest in America. Could Owsley simply have been speaking in hyperbole? Was it possible he was unaware of Fascism’s true political meaning?
[…]
At the 1931 convention, national commander Ralph O’Neill presented the Italian ambassador de Martino with a resolution of the National Executive of the Legion expressing support for Mussolini. In 1935, Colonel William Esterwood, national vice‐commander of the Legion, made Mussolini an honorary member of the American Legion and visited him to present him with a medal.
I decided that the discussion on the KKK would be a more interesting point of focus, but you are of course welcome to disagree.
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