Sean Rost has reviewed The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State by Kenneth C. Barnes in the current issue of Missouri Historical Review.
“Recent scholarship,” Rost writes, “on the Second Ku Klux Klan (1915–1940) features the oft-told narrative of family members discovering records in ancestors’ attics and closets related to their secret involvement in the KKK. Kenneth Barnes’s new book follows a similar trajectory. However, it serves as somewhat of a personal reckoning, as he acknowledges that the project not only intends to examine the rise and fall of the second KKK in his family’s home state of Arkansas, but also to understand why his grandfather was one of the millions of Americans who joined the hooded order in the 1920s. In his book, Barnes masterfully builds upon two significant works on the Klan in Arkansas history, Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960, which Barnes published in 2016, and Charles Alexander’s The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest (1965). Barnes extends these prior texts by providing a deeper analysis of the Arkansas Klan at the local level—particularly through a close examination of membership records of Monticello Klan No. 108 and Bentonville Klan No. 69—in an effort to better understand the individuals who joined the Klan and the activities, both fraternal and vigilante, undertaken by various chapters.”
Rost concludes that Barnes new book is “a welcome addition to what has become a revival of scholarly interest regarding the Second Ku Klux Klan at the centennial of the organization’s spread across the United States. Localized and statewide studies, as Barnes’s publication demonstrates, are crucial pieces in understanding not only the complexities of groups like the KKK, but also how deeply intertwined its key tenets were to mainstream American society.”
The Missouri Historical Review, an award-winning scholarly quarterly, has served as the cornerstone of the State Historical Society of Missouri’s publication program since 1906. This richly illustrated journal features current scholarship on all facets of the state’s history. The Missouri Historical Review also contains reviews of and notes on recently published books about the history of the state and local areas and the lives of Missourians.