edly led to enforced conformity and an "affinity for the 'crude ejaculations'
of Mr. [William Jennings] Bryan and the Fundamentalists." ³

A host of noted historians produced works that essentially adhered to
Mecklin's thesis. Frank Tannenbaum emphasized the rural and small-town
aspects of the second Klan in his 1924 classic, Darker Phases of the South.
Robert and Helen Lynd explored the model of urban-rural conflict in Mid-
dletown, their seminal study of Muncie, Indiana. Henry Peck Fry's work was
also part of the first wave of traditional scholarship. Stanley Frost can be
grouped with its exponents, although he identified an excess of patriotism
accompanying World War I as contributing to the emergence of the modern
Klan. ⁴

A second wave of the traditional school described the KKK as flourish-
ing in a benighted, southern, rural, violent, and economically marginal cul-
ture. The passing years conferred a respectability on this view, so that schol-
ars with the stature of Richard Hofstadter, William Leuchtenburg, and
John D. Hicks could be found toeing the traditional line on the issue. In his
classic 1955 work, The Age of Reform, Hofstadter mused on the "shabbiness
of the evangelical mind" as an attribute intrinsic to the 1920s Klan. Later,
in an equally famous essay, he argued that the second Klan reflected a long-
standing "paranoid style" in American politics that encompassed move-
ments such as Know-Nothingism, Antimasonry, and, in more recent years,
McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. The paranoid politician, Hof-
stadter argued, was a "true believer" of the type described by Eric Hoffer,
a person who secularized a "religiously derived view of the world to deal
with political issues in Christian imagery" and saw it as his patriotic duty
to intercept an intricate conspiracy that imperiled millions of unknowing
citizens. ⁵

Other influential works took the same tack. David Brion Davis's work
offered parallels in examining right-wing movements in antebellum Amer-
ica. According to Davis, the absence of institutional controls in Jacksonian
America had created a cultural vacuum that prompted a rootless people to
unite in targeting allegedly antidemocratic churches and secret societies
such as the Mormons, the Masons, and the Catholics. W. J. Cash's noted study
The Mind of the South also substantially followed Mecklin's thesis. ⁶

Some recent works have relied on the traditional thesis as well. During
the turbulent 1960s, studies by William Randel and Arnold Rice gener-
ally followed the conventional mode of thinking. In The Politics of Unreason
( 1970), Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, like David B. Davis, located
the roots of Ku Kluxism and McCarthylsm in intolerant antebellum move-
ments such as Antimasonry. Following Hofstadter's lead, these scholars noted

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