Pegram (Loyola Univ.-Maryland) provides a comprehensive examination of the 1920s Klan and places it in its proper historical context. He successfully challenges the idea that the Klan fit comfortably into the US mainstream in that confusing time: "The book situates the Klan within mainstream developments in American postwar life but also explains why the Klan failed to achieve mainstream status ... Read morein the 1920s." Pegram relies on both the words and publications of Klansmen and their surrounding communities to illustrate how the excesses of the organized Klan made it impossible for it to truly fit in the mainstream. While not downplaying the Klan's violence, he also discusses the organization's other activities (politics, volunteering, boycotts) to show how even if it shared mainstream values (racism, anti-Semitism, etc.), it could not gain the support of the majority of Americans, nor could it retain its own popularity long after the 1920s ended. Well written, well organized, and worth the read. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.
CHOICE
Pegram, a professor at Loyola University Maryland, presents a diligently researched and nuanced view of the Ku Klux Klan, yielding a picture of an organization that is far more complex than previously thought. In the post–Civil War South, the Klan successfully blunted the efforts of Reconstruction, then faltered until its 1915 revival. Pegram shows how effective 'modern marketing and mass mobilization techniques' pushed it to national prominence during the 1920s, a decade when Klansmen amassed political power in Indiana, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Texas. . . . Pegram has made a useful contribution in the study of this highly fragmented movement.
Publishers Weekly
In One Hundred Percent American, Thomas R. Pegram, a professor of history at Loyola University Maryland, traces the Invisible Empire’s meteoric rise and equally precipitous fall. . . . Pegram is at his best exploring the problems that bedeviled the Klan. . . . He’s got an eye for the telling detail.
The New York Times
This reexamination of an organization that was a precursor to today’s extreme populist Right is highly recommended.
Voice of Reason
In this invaluable book, Thomas Pegram provides the first thorough synthesis, overview, and analysis of this newer Klan scholarship. He does a superb job of providing examples of Klan activities across the country, and utilizes a wide array of secondary and primary sources to produce a well-written work that will interest general readers and academics alike. ... Individual chapters include fascinating discussions of the methods the Klan employed to attract members, the Klan’s views on education, its role in prohibition enforcement, the place of violence and vigilantismin the movement, and the quest for political power that ultimately contributed to the organization’s precipitous collapse in Indiana and nationwide....One Hundred Percent American stands out as a sophisticated, nuanced, and essential examination of a subject which, as Pegram notes, constitutes 'a particularly difficult puzzle for historians'.
Indiana Magazine of History
In One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, Thomas R. Pegram, a professor of history at Loyola University Maryland, documents its rise and fall with thoroughness and expertise. ... Pegram, in this valuable work, puts the Klan into historical perspective.
Sheldon Kirshner Journal
The Ku Klux Klan was reborn because Thomas Dixon romanticized the organization in his novel The Clansman which was later turned into the movie The Birth of a Nation. This movie would inspire another racist who was a preacher into launching the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. This was in the early 1920’s and a lot of the black veterans of World War 1 were demanding to be treated better. They fought for America and they felt that they earned better treatment. As in all organizations that attempt to take away the freedoms of another minority the violence got out of hand over a period of years and over 1,000 Negroes would ultimately be lynched by the mob rule of the Ku Klux Klan. It was through these acts of violence that Klan membership fell by the thousands. It was still the Jim Crow era, but the violence was re-pungent to the vast majority of people in the 1920’s. One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s has earned an 'EXCELLENT!' Rating.
The Lone Star Book Review
One Hundred Percent American will appeal to undergraduates and graduate students studying for exams.
The Historian
In One Hundred Percent American the Loyola University Maryland professor Thomas R. Pegram draws upon his primary research as well as the plethora of books, articles, and dissertations that have been written on local and state organizations in the past few decades to provide a nicely readable account of the Klan’s rise and fall in the 1920s.
Journal of American History
Informed by exhaustive research in primary and secondary sources, One Hundred Percent American is without doubt the most advanced and valuable general history of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s to date. Scholars, students, and general readers alike will find this elegantly written and astutely argued work to be of great interest.
Shawn Lay, Coker College A much needed, splendid synthesis of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan.
David J. Goldberg, author of Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s One Hundred Percent American is an excellent synthesis of the scholarship about the New Era Klan and the best general history of the topic that exists . . . [It’s] an engaging read, filled with colorful examples and personalities. With debates over American national identity continuing still today, it is a book that deserves a wide audience.
Journal of American Ethnic History
What makes One Hundred Percent American so valuable is the full range of evidence that the author deploys to buttress this argument. He summons a ‘rich inventory of theses, dissertations, articles, and focused studies of local or state Klans’ that have been written in recent decades (xi); and, because so much of this scholarship has been unpublished, his book rightly bids to take its place as the standard scholarly account of its subject. There are excellent, informative chapters on the violence of the Klan and on the special anxiety that the Catholic Church stirred, and on the ambivalent response of these hooded—but often hard-drinking—believers in law and order to the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Patterns Of Prejudice
Pegram's page-turning work deserves to be considered one of the best studies of the Invisible Empire in particular and 1920s culture in general. As an added bonus for students and scholars, Pegram includes an afterword in which he explains the difficulties of studying a 'secret' yet public organization and chronicles ninety years of scholarship on the 1920s Klan.
Journal of Southern History
Show Less