This is a revised and updated repost of an older post about US support for Nazis during the 1930s. Now it’s a closely related post about the rise of the 1920s KKK. This post needs some rewriting, and more detail.
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KKK in the 1920s by Dan Sinker
The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s by David Pietrusza
The Ku Klux Klan and Racial Tensions Before WWII by the UC Irvine Library
The KKK was Always an Anti-Nonwhite-Immigrant Terrorist Movement, even in the 1870s
The articles above are great, but they miss the origin of American immigration laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese, who had already had their rights proscribed by the courts, because they weren’t white.
Moreover, during the 1870s, and Anti-Chinese Movement formed in California, and led by huckster Denis Kearny, the California Workingmans Party and it’s white (immigrant) workers scapegoated Chinese workers for all the white workers’ problems. The Movement took its cues from a slightly older anti-Chinese movement that was mainly elite whites, who opposed Chinese immigration for cultural, racial, and religious reasons.
Parallel to this movement, the KKK formed in the West and in California, to chase down and murder Chinese people. See The Shameful History of the KKK We Never Knew by Kevin Waite
The Anti-Mexican KKK in the Southwest in the 1920s
According to Wikipedia, in the 1920s, Mexican Americans were scapegoated and attacked by the KKK, which had taken a lot of city power in cities in the Southwest, like Anaheim, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Terrorist cops seemed to have immunity.
Original post, below, from Oct 20, 2018
More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think. Here’s Why One Expert Thinks That History Isn’t Better Known
Lily Rothman explains some of the forgotten history of Nazi support in the United States. It’s some interesting information, and has a strong anti-populist bent to it, but it’s well worth reading and considering.
“We want to remember ourselves as always having been on the right side in this war”
Now for the criticism.
The article presents the US Naziism as isolationism, and the establishment as anti-isolationist, or interventionist.
This completely overlooks the other aspect of American fascism: racism. The rise of US fascism was connected with the 1920s rise of the KKK. A major “isolationist” political trend in the US was xenophobia, which was expressed as a long-lived anti-immigrant movement that targeted Asians, Mexicans, Jews, and Southern and Eastern Europeans.
Even today, there are so many memes that compare the rise of Trump with the rise of Nazis in Germany in the 1930s, but completely ignore the fact that fascism had also taken hold in America.
America had ghettos. America had roundups of workers. America had a Red Scare. America had concentration camps.
The meme makers, who I assume are liberals, don’t want to remember that.
The fascists, however, do remember all that, and I think they want to bring it all back.
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