This entry is a critique of the article in the American Historical Journal by Elaine Franz Parsons, entitled Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan.

It would be tempting to take this article's first sentence, and say the thesis of this piece is that: 'The reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan movement was intimately intertwined with, and completely dependent on, contemporary popular cultural forms and institutions'. This fairly aptly sums it up. Unfortunately, that would be too easy. The piece goes into a lot more detail, so I'll begin by summarising, then I'll come back to the thesis, or the overall point.

Fairly obviously, the article starts at the beginning. It details how the first chapter of the Ku Klux Klan came into being. Before they read this, who thought that the KKK’s origin was serenading minstrel group? The author, Elaine Frantz Parsons, writes that ‘while origins as an entertainment troupe may seem incidental to, or even inconsistent with, the violent group the Klan soon became, the Reconstruction-era Klan movement remained closely intertwined with popular cultural forms throughout its existence.’ This theme is important to keep in mind, as it helps explain how and why Klansmen behaved and dressed the way they did, and how the movement spread so rapidly.

Beginnings – the costume’s purpose and evolution

Parsons discredits historians who had not questioned why the Ku Klux Klansmen from different areas wore some kind of disguise or costume, taking on face value the common claims that it was to protect their identities, to scare their victims, or for their own amusement. She explains in great detail the fallacies with this line of reasoning – the elaborate nature of the costumes, the performative elements of their actions, and the fact that not even the Klansmen could have realistically expected to fool their victims. Men dressed as confederate ghosts were obviously not as scary as men with guns in their hands and violence on their minds. The idea that black people were fooled and scared by costumes perpetuated the myth of superstitious uncivilised people, and absolved whites of blame. It's not their fault if the superstitious blacks were scared by a costume, it was all in good fun!

Defining and Identifying Klansmen

The image of the Ku Klux Klan is generally a 20th century one, the white robes and funny pointed hat, the ceremony and the symbols. The KKK as it is known now is an organised group, but in the Reconstruction-era south, the Klan was as much about defying northern control as it was intimidating the freed slaves. Therefore the normal lines of communication were unavailable. The groups could not be organised in any official sense, so there was no centralised group, no recognised leader, aim, philosophy or intent.

Parsons wrote: ‘Given the lack of centralisation, it is not surprising that those who chose to call themselves Klansmen and were popularly accepted as Klansmen did not even share common motivations. Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, bored young men, sadists, rapists, white workers fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labour discipline, common thieves, neighbours with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen¹ and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.’

While the more political elements of what was called the Ku Klux Klan tried to distant itself from the criminal element, in public consciousness, the different people in the different groups all represented, and were represented by, the Klan as a collective. Parsons also comments that those who committed violent acts against black people, even without a disguise, were considered Klansmen. This suggests that the idea that the only thing that identified Klansmen was that they called themselves, or were called Klansmen, is not entirely accurate – violence, or at least hatred and threatened violence, against freedmen and the whites who supported them, also defined the Klan. This may seem an obvious point, but without making it, the reader gets the impression that the costumes defined the movement, while the essential element of racism and violence is sidelined.

The idea that acts of violence committed against black people automatically identified the culprit as a member of the KKK is troubling. Racially motivated violence occurred independent of the political ideals of the Ku Klux Klan. A group of white people attacking a black person or group of people in a northern city is not considered affiliated with the KKK because of geography and the political climate. As Parsons mentions further on, the KKK was motivated by the military loss and the loss of political power, and the threat on their way of life after emancipation. The attacks on black people in costume was a manifestation of the Klan’s political aims, a way to regain power and control, and a rebellion against the north.

The 'Invisibility' of the Klan

The Klan’s use of costumes and pageantry served to keep its existence in doubt. The mimicry of minstrelsies, circuses, plays and Mardi Gras celebrations, and the subsequent incorporation of the Klan within these entertainments allowed southerners to claim that the idea of the Ku Klux Klan was only a cultural representation, disavowing the use of violence by claiming it didn’t exist. The use of costumes and disguises furthered this purpose. Klansmen were mistaken for performers, even during their attacks. The author says that the ‘Klan members’ decisions to wear costumes and the costumes they chose ensured that Klan attacks would be read as in part theatrical and understood in terms of popular entertainment’. She also makes the point that ‘in the Reconstruction-era South, where freed people were increasingly asserting their own agency, the very form of the Klan attack relegated them to passive spectatorship’. She comes back to this later, when describing a parade in which the KKK staged a lynching for public entertainment, while ‘freed people were accommodating enough to turn out in great numbers’ to watch.

Costumes

Hiding behind pageantry did more than protect the Klansmen’s identities, it allowed them to adopt different behaviours and take revenge on those who personified their loss in the Civil War. The author uses the phrase ‘racial and gender redefinition’. While the most popular disguise was the ghosts of the Confederate dead, animals and Indians were often mimicked, as well as black people and women.

The use of blackface – burnt cork or soot on the face to imitate a black person – had several purposes. Some of the worst atrocities were blamed on the blacks themselves, doubling the insult, but that was only one purpose. The contradictory image of a Ku Klux Klansman dressing as a black man offered the same ‘benefits’ as dressing as an animal or an Indian. All were seen as primitive, less than human, uncivilised and barbaric. Therefore, performing the role of a black, an Indian or an animal allowed the Klansmen to behave barbarically while disavowing the violence as a white, civilised man. In a way, by committing violence while in blackface, white men could ‘blame’ the black people for their own behaviour. Parsons writes ‘blackfaced Klansmen appropriated the lawless violence they attributed to those outside civilisation even as their decision to commit their atrocities in easily shed costumes distanced them from their violent deeds’. Performing as black people enabled the emasculated whites to reclaim the violence and strength considered to be an uncivilised trait within the confines of ‘theatre’, while also contrasting the violence against white civilisation. ‘The deliberate and apparent ludicrousness of their inversions underlined their real manhood and whiteness in the classic manner of the carnivalesque’ (828). She furthered this point later in the article: ‘They wanted to believe that the civilised could contain and perform brutality, savagery, or blackness without becoming brutish, savage, or black’, and ‘through their theatrics, Klansmen consumed and enacted savagery, while reassuring themselves and others that it would function as a tool of order and civilisation’.

Okay, one of the overriding themes I noticed was of contrasts, or ambiguities. Dressing in blackface was one of them, designed in part to contrast blackness with whiteness, emphasising the men’s whiteness. Another was to self-parody their manliness by wearing women’s clothing. ‘By assuming the guise of women while exercising physical coercion, defeated white men simultaneously owned and transcended their humiliation’. What were seen as womanly virtues contrasted with the womanly ‘vices’: high ideals and morality emphasised the Klan’s virtuous nature, while the ‘woman’s’ sexual power and uncontrollable desires offered them an excuse for their base behaviour. They also discarded ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour while in costume. Honour didn’t work against the cowardly northerners, and presumably, the blacks were too uncivilised.

Parsons drew parallels between the Klan’s performances and Mardi Gras celebrations. Carnival itself was an Afro-European hybridisation – the Klan’s appropriation offered them a different kind of power. ‘Elites channelled the chaos of carnival into particular times and spaces and controlled (indeed, comprised) the membership of its key institutions’ (834). As the performative nature of Klan attacks offered them real power, the idea of the Klan was reincorporated into performance, especially minstrel and circus shows and Mardi Gras, therefore completing myth.

The Ku Klux Klan declined when the whites of the south regained political power, and more conventional methods of racism and hatred became more acceptable. It was possible then for southerners to claim that the KKK never existed, it was merely a cultural construction, and even though it was still depicted, graphically and horrifyingly, within performance, it was laughed off as a bit of harmless fun.

The Thesis

So, the thesis. I’m still tempted to take the first sentence as the thesis, but I think it goes a bit further than merely linking the Klan’s performance with cultural forms and institutions. After all, almost anything can be said to be irrevocably intertwined in contemporary culture. While it’s definitely true that the Klan was very very influenced by minstrelsy and carnival, and carnival was in turn affected by the Klan’s appropriation of its style, the article makes a further point about the use of costumes and performance by the Ku Klux Klan. They abandoned the ideal of the honourable southern gentleman, because it hadn’t worked during the war, and they were no longer masters of their land. They feared the end of racial segregation, and dressed in racially ambiguous costumes to ‘police’ the racial boundary. They dressed as women in order to emphasise their threatened manliness. The Klan’s performances were a mix of contrast and ambiguity. Parsons mentions several cases of mistaken identity, where witnesses weren’t sure if they were seeing blacks or whites, men or women, Klansmembers or performers. But I think the major contrast was between the Klan’s purpose and their methods. Their victims were raped, tortured and killed, while Klansmen held parades, improvised plays and sang to audiences. I think that the article’s thesis is that …. ‘the appropriation of costume and performance enabled Reconstruction-era white southerners to reassess and reassign cultural expectations through self-parody and ambiguous cultural boundaries, and regain political control through the use of popular entertainment and public opinion’.

Sources

Parsons used a number of primary and secondary sources, a couple of pictures, all in all a good selection, I think, though I’d have expected more for the amount of ground she covered, and a larger proportion of primary sources. She also quoted a number of people – and from different backgrounds, which I thought was interesting, especially as a few of the people whose opinions she included were different from her own. I thought that she should have included more of a discussion about their views, however. For example, on pages 831 and 832 she mentions W. T. Lhamon’s views on the enactment of miscegenation by the Klan and within minstrel and carnival performances, but she doesn’t expand on his analogy much, and I think it would have benefitted from more of a critique. Most of the primary sources she included were direct quotes which illustrated her points, while I’d have expected to see more that actually justified her points. She included very few black voices and seemed to marginalise the affect Klan attacks had on the black community.

Achievements and Limitations

The article was engaging, very interesting, and offered some interesting interpretations, however, the structure left a lot to be desired, jumping around all over the place, and like I said, the referencing wasn’t great. She also often seemed to include things that didn’t add a lot to the thesis, and she repeated herself a few times, making the same point in a number of different ways. Overall, though, I think she made what could have been a difficult concept to grasp understandable and interesting.