Spaces of Hate

Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A.

Colin Flint

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415935876
• eBook ISBN: 9781135346553
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

While much has been written about hate groups and extreme right political movements, this book will be the first that addresses the crucial role that place and context play in generating and shaping them. Ranging across geographical scales the essays start with the home, and then move from the local to the regional, to the national to-finally-the global. In this collection, much of the focus is on the U.S., as the contributors consider a variety of hate activity and hate groups across the country, including; rural white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements; anti-black sentiment directed towards cities; anti-gay activity in cities and rural areas and the resurgent Southern nationalist movement. Closing with pieces from those who combat hate activity, the intention of Spaces of Hate is to recognize specific geographic settings likely to foster hate activity.

1

One Social Milieu,
Paradoxical Responses

A Geographical Reexamination of the Ku Klux Klan
and the Daughters of the American Revolution
in the Early Twentieth Century

CAROL MEDLICOTT

The earliest decades of the twentieth century were the setting for dramatic and interrelated currents of social and cultural change in the American landscape, and this climate of change provided the impetus for two well-known American organizations, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Ku Klux Klan. While existing literature on the two groups tends to associate them both with the “superpatriotic” sentiment that dominated conservative politics in the 1920s,¹ it has done little more than acknowledge that membership overlapped at times between Klan women and the DAR. Understanding of today's hate groups is best predicated upon an appreciation of those groups' geohistorical origins in the ultrapatriotic and nativist movement of the ’teens and 1920s, a movement in which the DAR and the Klan appeared, at times, to share the limelight. Moreover, considering the geohistorical settings of nativism and superpatriotism that gave rise to hate groups highlights the extent to which geographic scale dictated groups' strategies, effectiveness, and duration.

In this chapter, I hope to go beyond exploring what was at times a striking rhetorical similarity to the more challenging task of using the Klan's relatively uncomplicated nativism to reveal the comparative complexities of the DAR and the key differences between the two groups—differences of ideology, public approach, and, most significantly, of geographic scale. A more nuanced appreciation of the differences between these two infamous groups should direct us to an understanding of how and why one of them has remained a mainstream and relatively positive influence among conservative Americans while the other has become radicalized and marginalized. It was, primarily, the difference in geographic scales to which the two organizations were oriented that is responsible for the groups' different social legacies, and I want to develop this argument particularly by focusing upon the paradoxical approach taken by the two groups to one pressing social issue of the early twentieth century: immigration. Although both groups staunchly favored the federal leglislative curbs upon immigration in 1921 and 1924, the two groups' respective responses to the challenge posed to American national identity by immigration could not have been more different.

The Daughters: Mission, Structure, and Scale

Generally acknowledged as the first of what became a popular phenomenon of lineage-based social clubs for women, the DAR was founded in October 1890 by a group of some dozen Washington, D.C., women, all of whom were already active in popular “feminist” causes, such as suffrage, championing women in the workplace, and promoting legal protection for women in abusive home environments.² While these first Daughters saw patriotism as the duty of all Americans, they believed that women lineally descended from individuals who had contributed materially to the Revolutionary cause bore a particular responsibility to perpetuate the idea of patriotic living.³ Most of the founding members were motivated by the rather modest goal of locating and marking the graves of Revolutionary soldiers. The women observed that Revolutionary dead received practically no attention by the end of the nineteenth century, in contrast to Civil War veterans and dead, who were the focus of several existing groups in both the northern and southern states. But one of the founding members later mentioned that another purpose had been to find common ideological ground between women who hailed from the old Confederacy and those whose families had been Yankees, as factional divisiveness strongly persisted even by 1890 in creating animosity among women otherwise drawn together in the same social circles. One member declared,“Another spirit, another creed was needed.”⁴ In contrast to a recent claim that women formed lineage-based groups primarily out of fear of social change,⁵ another early Daughter asserted that, alongside its mission of historic preservation, the DAR also, in fact, embraced change: “Women, who best conserve the old, might best promote the new.”⁶

Organized at the national scale and immediately associated with national political elites through its founding mandate to submit an annual report to the U.S. Congress and its early practice of automatically initiating First Ladies as members, the DAR's threefold aim was to promote patriotism, education, and historic preservation. Casting the DAR's overarching goals as its “geopolitical vision,” after Dijkink, provides one theoretical link to politics of scale, and Dijkink's definition of geopolitical vision as requiring “a Them-and-Us distinction and emotional attachment to a place” accords well with the present discussion of the DAR.⁷ While I am not suggesting that the DAR was wholly echoing the geopolitical vision that Dijkink attributes to the U.S. political mainstream, the term is nonetheless a convenient one to apply to the DAR's expansive aspiration, formed in the group's earliest decades, that American political, social, and moral development continue along Anglo-dominated lines. The DAR's geopolitical vision was that “New World” American conservative political and social values should be promoted to the “Old World” through immigrant education as well as the outward-aimed processes of commercial and quasi-imperial expansion. The goal was to bring full circle the earlier importing into North America of the raw ingredients of Old World political and social thought that produced those values in the first place. This geopolitical vision involved recasting the Revolutionary period as a “Golden Age”⁸ in which essentially Anglo-Saxon political and moral values were uniquely adapted to the rough conditions of the North American frontier landscape, responding to the twin challenges of old world monarchical oppression and new world environmental tyranny, and producing a new nationality in the process. And it also involved presenting all Old World immigrants as willing conformists to this new Anglo-based framework of political and moral values, not simply because Anglo-Saxon racial stock outnumbered other immigrants, but because the Anglo-based value system was clearly the best. This assertion ensured that later waves of immigrants to America would not only be expected to assimilate, but also presumed to better themselves as a consequence of assimilation.

Having established a structure of national officers and committees to oversee its activities, the early DAR began to replicate this structure at the state scale with state “Societies” and, within states, at the local scale, with an expressed aspiration of establishing a chapter in every community in America.⁹ Various national missions were communicated to the local scale through the state Societies and enacted through state and local committees that mirrored those at the national level. The number and variety of these committees expanded, as the DAR's mission broadened from its original threefold core, and it began to undertake a greater variety of community projects. Typically, new committees were added as the result of lobbying from the local and state scale. A good example of this was the Old Trails Road Committee, added as a national committee in 1912 following the efforts of a group of Missouri Daughters to widen their local chapter's project of reconstructing pioneer trails as modern automobile roads into a national-scale DAR venture.¹⁰ In communicating the relevance of such local projects within the organization's geopolitical vision in the broadest sense, the wide distribution of monthly DAR national magazine was indispensable, as was the protocol of annual national and state conferences where committees' work was recounted and new projects proposed. This national-to-local scalar structure of the DAR is an ideal reminder of how geographic scales are not isolated one from another, but are, as suggested by Swyngedouw in his work on “glocalization,” mutually constituted.¹¹

By the 1920s, nearly twenty national committees existed, and each of these would typically be demarcated with its own local “chairman,” even within small local chapters which themselves may have comprised only a couple of dozen members. The broadening of the DAR's original threefold mission was soon reflected in its national committee structure, with the interrelated aims of patriotism and education soon dispersed into committees for National Defense, Legislation, Correct Use of the Flag, Conservation and Thrift, Americanism, Better Films (a committee that evaluated the moral content of films in the fledgling movie industry), Girl Homemakers, Radio (a committee that bought radio time for DAR broadcasts), Approved Schools (a committee that organized support for existing schools and also sought to launch new schools), and Ellis Island.¹²

The Klan, American Memory, and Geographical Scale

Like the DAR, the twentieth-century Klan was also initially oriented to memory of past glory. The second Klan claims as its “revival” an event held on Thanksgiving eve in 1915, east of Atlanta, Georgia, atop Stone Mountain, an immense exposed granite dome that had first been suggested as a memorial site for the Confederate “cause” in a popular 1869 poem. The idea of the rock formation becoming a large-scale memorial to the Confederacy was perhaps also linked to the growing number of Confederate war memorials that were constructed of “Stone Mountain granite,” the popular building material quarried on part of the site, privately owned and managed by the Venable family of Atlanta. The first serious steps to convert Stone Mountain into a site of Confederate memory were taken about a year prior to the Klan's use of the site, and were instigated, interestingly, by the octogenarian Helen Plane, a confederate war widow and founder of the Georgia society of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.¹³ With the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War confronting an American South in which memories of the “cause” were anything but dim, the second Klan explicitly tried to link itself to the first Klan of Reconstruction, in part by including the grandson of the original Klan founder in the November 1915 mountaintop initiation ceremony. Working together, the widow Plane of the UDC and mountain owner Sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A.
• 1. One Social Milieu, Paradoxical Responses: A Geographical Reexamination of the Ku Klux Klan and the Daughters of the American Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century
• 2. The Geography of Racial Activism: Defining Whiteness at Multiple Scales
• 3. House Bound:Women's Agency in White Separatist Movements
• 4. Contesting Place: Antigay and -Lesbian Hate Crime in Columbus, Ohio
• 5. Blame It on the Casa Nova?: “Good Scenery and Sodomy” in Rural Southwestern Pennsylvania
• 6. If First You Don't Secede, Try, Try Again: Secession,Hate, and the League of the South
• 7. United States Hegemony and the Construction of Racial Hatreds: The Agency of Hate Groups and the Changing World Political Map
• 8. Mainstreaming the Militia
• 9. When Extreme Political Ideas Move into the Mainstream
• 10. Producing and Enforcing the Geography of Hate: Race,Housing Segregation, and Housing-Related Hate Crimes in the United States
• Afterword: Finding and Fighting Hate Where It Lives: Reflections of a Pennsylvania Practitioner
• Contributors
• Index