Word: klan
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...House Un-American Activities Committee, five Southerners joined the other four members in unanimously approving a full-scale investigation of the Ku Klux Klan. According to Chairman Edwin E. Willis, a Louisiana Democrat, a preliminary study showed that "shocking crimes are carried out by highly secret action groups within the Klans." And despite the committee's disrepute in some quarters for its blunt and into-every-corner antiCommunism, there were signs that it might prove the sharpest ax on Capitol Hill for cutting the Klan down to size. "Klanism is incompatible with Americanism," said Chairman Willis. "The South...
...their time, got together to form a club. Like college kids, they gave the club all the trappings of a fraternity-mysterious rites, initiations, secret words. For a name, they hit on the Greek word for circle, kyklos, gave it a few twists and came up with Ku Klux Klan. For kicks, they made robes and hoods out of bedsheets and pillowcases, and took to riding sheet-draped horses solemnly through the town at night. Soon they discovered that their frolics frightened superstitious Negroes, and that was reason enough for scores of others to join...
...most part, the Klan's outrages were applauded by Southerners who felt that the K.K.K. was the last best hope for the South's lily-white cause. But in 1869, Nathan Forrest himself ordered the Klan to disband. As University of Florida Professor David Chalmers writes in his book, Hooded Americanism, "A secret masked society, composed of autonomous units, dedicated to the use of force, operating in unsettled times, proved impossible to control. The better citizens were dropping out and the quality of membership in many of the states was declining...
...Practical Fraternity." The Klan mentality, however, never died; it merely lay quiescent, while apologists fed it intravenously with myths. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s 1905 book, The Clansman, idealized the K.K.K. as a righteous crusade led by noble men, and D. W. Griffith immortalized the book in 1914 with his film, The Birth of a Nation...
...shattered that peace by murdering a white woman from Detroit. This act of moronic savagery once again outraged the national conscience, provoked the President of the U.S. into a nationwide television outburst, in which he announced the arrest of four Ku Klux Klansmen and demanded that Congress curb the Klan...