Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s

A study of the Ku Klux Klan’s efforts to interact with American culture in the 1920s.In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization.

In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement.Ku Klux Kulture reveals the extent to which the KKK participated in and penetrated popular American culture, reaching far beyond its paying membership to become part of modern American society.

The Klan owned radio stations, newspapers, and sports teams, and its members created popular films, pulp novels, music, and more.

Harcourt shows how the Klan’s racist and nativist ideology became subsumed in sunnier popular portrayals of heroic vigilantism.