Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse

The appearance and acts of the Ku-Klux . cannot be disposed of by the opinions that they did not exist. Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe thinks because she and a lady friend have been able to make the trip to Florida and return without being eaten up by the Ku-klux, that such clans do not exist in the South at all, and all that we read about them is bosh. Milwaukee Sentinel, June 10, 1871 ONE OF THE STRANGEST ASPECTS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION-ERA KU KLUX Klan was the inability of Americans to come to even the most basic consensus about its nature. (1) Despite the fact that both the United States government and major newspapers poured unprecedented resources into investigating it, and despite the extraordinary measures that the government took to suppress it, the most fundamental question about the Klan--whether it existed at all--never was entirely settled even in mainstream public discourse. (2) The heartiest and most consistent Klan denial came from those who had clear political motivations for it, like Democrats and, by 1872, Liberal Republicans backing Horace Greeley's presidential bid, but pre-1872 Republicans also expressed basic doubts about the information they received about the Klan. While Klansmen and their Democratic political allies deliberately spread doubt about Klan reports, they could not have succeeded as thoroughly as they did without the substantial, if intermittent, collaboration of their Republican opponents. Klan violence occurred at a time of profound transition in the mechanisms and institutions through which Americans received political information. In the decade following the war, Americans faced a substantial increase in the volume of published news. Moreover, news reached readers more quickly, with national news appearing in print generally within twenty-four hours. Editors continued to maintain partisan affiliations, but they began to make claims of neutrality in choosing which stories to publish from the vast tide available. These innovations radically changed the experience of reading the news. Individual readers had to determine how much confidence to put in newspaper editors' selection and presentation of news (was it really as neutral as some claimed? ) and how to deal with the phenomenon of stories that continued to unfold rapidly as new information arrived from one edition to the next. At the same time, Americans collectively encountered an incipient national popular culture. The exchange system had long enabled some pieces of news to circulate nationally, but national trends of interest now emerged in a much more coordinated way. As the rapidity of communication created the possibility of feedback loops in which the reception of the story shaped the unfolding of the story itself, certain particularly interesting events and ideas began to take on a life of their own. In struggling to determine the nature of Klan violence, then, Americans were simultaneously struggling to evaluate the new ways in which news was circulating. Klan violence began in late 1867 and remained at a substantial level through late 1871 or early 1872. (3) The federal government, particularly from 1870 to 1872, devoted a great deal of its resources to determining the nature of the violence and then suppressing it with a use of force utterly unprecedented in peacetime. For roughly five years, from the spring of 1868 through the election of 1872, the Klan was central to national discourse. (4) Throughout this period, surprisingly, the debate over the Klan never effectively silenced the position that the Klan did not exist at all. Despite massive and productive public and private efforts to gather, circulate, and evaluate information about the Ku Klux Klan, and even though the federal government, in pouring unprecedented resources into countering it, certainly was behaving as though it were a real threat, the national debate over the Klan failed to move beyond the simple question of the Klan's existence. …