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KLÀNNISHNESS AND THE KU KLUX KLAN: THE RHETORIC AND ETHICS OF GENRE THEORY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

Brian Robert McGee, B.S., M.S.

*****

The Ohio State University 1996

Dissertation Committee: Approved by J.M. Makau, Co-Adviser

S.K. Foss, Adviser Co-Adviser

M.M. Garrett Adviser K.O. Locker Department of Communication UMI Number: 9639303

UMI Microform 9639303 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by

Brian R. McGee

1996 ABSTRACT

In this dissertation, I describe a rule-centered

approach to genre theory inspired by, if not always

faithful to, the work of Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard. This

theory distinguishes between idioms. which are composed of

the rules governing and governed by specific rhetorical

artifacts, and genres. which are collections of idioms

sharing a common rule or rules. The sharing of rules by multiple idioms— a sharing that makes identification of genres possible— I call rhetorical imbrication. In demonstrating the practical merit of this revised theory of genre, I examine several rhetorical artifacts pertinent to the rise and rhetorical maintenance of the twentieth- century Ku Klux Klan, from Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s 1905 novel.

The Clansman. to David Duke's 1991 gubernatorial campaign materials, with specific emphasis given to the "second” Ku

Klux Klan movement of 1915-1930. While the results of this study demonstrate the advantages of a reconstructed genre theory, my investigation also has an ethical and political aim, which is to develop better tools for the

11 discernment and critique of unwarranted ethnic, racial,

and religious intolerance. I work through genre theory as

propaedeutic to considering how one should respond to such

intolerance when confronted by it. Specifically, this

revised genre theory provides guidance concerning the

identification and critique of "Klannishness" in

contemporary rhetoric, where Klannishness is understood as

allegiance to enduring Klan principles (e.g., white racial

supremacy, nativism) without explicit ties to the Klan or

similar organizations.

The dissertation is organized in seven chapters.

Chapter One explains the benefits and limitations of current genre theory, outlines a revised approach to genre, and addresses questions of purpose and method in rhetorical criticism. Chapters Two through Six provide

individual case studies of rhetorical artifacts attributed to Thomas Dixon, Jr., two pro-Klan Louisiana Protestant ministers, Klan opponent W. E. B. Du Bois, 1920s Klan leader Hiram Wesley Evans, and David Duke. Chapter Seven summarizes the merits of the revised genre theory, isolates six generic principles common to Klan discourse, and shows the Klannishness of some contemporary political rhetorics that are faithful to these generic Klan principles (e.g., Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential primary campaign discourse).

Ill Dedicated to my family

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The doctoral dissertation is a genre with well-

understood rules governing decorum and appropriateness,

which the doctoral candidate is rightly hesitant to violate. Unlike many other genres, which rely on an

inchoate sense of those rules embedded in a communal history, the Graduate School has codified many of the

rules to which I am asked to conform. Among them is the suggestion that I acknowledge the "assistance and courtesy" of the individuals who helped me to complete this document. I follow this prescription with pleasure.

Contemporary authorship conventions frequently do not allow the final products of research to reflect the many sources of influence on such research. At Ohio State, I have been privileged to be a member of a talented community of scholars. My interaction with graduate students and faculty has improved this dissertation in many ways. For these contributions, I thank my colleagues and friends. For their help in finding source material, I particularly appreciate the assistance of Elizabeth Daley

(of Gustavus Adolphus College), Darrin Hicks (of the University of Denver), Janet Horne (of Salisbury State

University), Sharon Bracci, James Hikins, and Debian

Marty.

I am grateful to my committee members, Sonja K. Foss,

Mary M. Garrett, and Kitty O. Locker, for their help and

advice, both in and out of the classroom. In particular,

I wish Professor Foss well as she leaves Ohio State. A

former OSU faculty member, James Darsey, deserves special

credit, for he tolerated my fumbling initial attempts to

address this research topic in several graduate seminars.

I especially appreciate the support and assistance of my

adviser, Josina M. Makau, who generously continued to

serve in that capacity after taking a position at another university. In my judgment, this dissertation is located

at the intersection of argumentation theory and communication ethics, two areas of profound interest to me and to Professor Makau.

The 1990s have not been kind to the study of rhetoric

in communication departments, and I fear for the future of the rhetoric concentration at OSU. My department already has formally abandoned a 70-year history of public address studies at The Ohio State University, and the place of rhetoric in a redesigned unit for communication studies is less than certain. Whatever its flaws, I wish to pay tribute to the rhetoric and public address tradition at

VI Ohio State, which was founded on the pioneering efforts of

scholars like Earl Wiley, John Black, Walter B. Emery, and

H. F. Harding.

Finally, I have dedicated this dissertation to my

family. My parents, James and Carolyn McGee, and my

grandparents, William McGee, Mary McGee, and Anne

Houlihan, have encouraged and sustained this project in

ways that they probably do not realize. My greatest debt

is to my colleague and spouse, Deborah Socha McGee,

without whom none of my efforts would seem worthwhile.

information, since I have been given permission to quote

lengthy passages from these sources;

Linda Alcoff, "The Problem of Speaking for Others,"

Cultural Critique 20 (1991-92): 5-32. Reprinted by

permission of Oxford University Press.

Gender/Bodv/Knowledge. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R.

Bordo, eds., copyright ^ 1989 by Rutgers, The State

University. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University

Press.

Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The

Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford UP,

1994). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University

Press.

VI1 VITA

August 15, 1967 ...... Born - Anderson, Indiana

1989...... B.S. Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

1990...... M.S. Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

1990 - 1992 ...... Instructor of Speech Communication and Theatre, Northeast Louisiana University

1992 - 1993 ...... University Fellow, The Ohio State University

1993 - present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

McGee, B. R., & Simerly, G. (1994). Intuition, common sense, and judgment. CEDA Yearbook. 15, 86-97.

Hart, J. P., & McGee, B. R. (1992). Propositions of fact. In D. A. Thomas & J. P. Hart (Eds.), Advanced debate : Readings in theory. practice & teaching (4th ed.). pp. 391-400. Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook.

McGee, B. R., & Simerly, G. (1991). In defense of unregulated forensics transfers: A response to Bartanen. The Forensic of Pi Kappa Delta. 76(3), 6-11.

Simerly, G., & McGee, B. R. (1991). A conceptual schema for assessing the educational function of a forensics program. Speech and Theatre Association of Missouri Journal. 21. 5-14.

Vlll McGee, B. R. (1988). Assessing counter-warrants: Understanding induction in debate practice. CEDA Yearbook. 9, 63-70.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Communication

IX TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

D e d i c a t i o n ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

V i t a ...... viii

Chapters :

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

The Trouble with Genre Theory ...... 7 Definitional Approaches to Genre . • 8 Situation ...... 8 C o n t e n t ...... 10 F o r m ...... 11 R u l e s ...... 13 Advantages of Genre ...... 15 Frames of Reference ..... 16 Rhetorical Production ...... 17 Rhetorical Criticism ...... 20 Problems with Existing Genre T h e o r i e s ...... 21 Vagueness in Definition .... 22 T a u t o l o g y ...... 26 Strong Situationalism ...... 27 Strong Transcendentalism .... 30 Status Quo B i a s ...... 31 An Alternative Genre Theory ...... 3 3 Answering Initial Objections .... 42 Doing Rhetorical Criticism ...... 47 P u r p o s e ...... 49 Method and Anti-Method ...... 53 C o n c l u s i o n ...... 59

2. THOMAS DIXON'S THE CLANSMAN : THE LITERARY RE-MEMBERING OF SOUTHERN UTOPIA ...... 74

The Reconstructing of Reconstruction . . . 80 The Many Genres of The Clansman .. 88 The Rhetoric of The Clansman .... 90

X Dixon and U t o p i a ...... 94 Sentimental Politics ...... 110 Towards Rhetorical Imbrication ...... 117

3. THE MINISTERIAL VOICE OF THE KLAN: VERNACULAR RHETORICS ...... 142

The Second K l a n ...... 147 The Klan Reborn ...... 150 The Klan Comes to Louisiana ...... 160 The Klan as M i n i s t r y ...... 168 Frank Tripp and Forgetting H i s t o r y ...... 173 J. C. Barr and the Simulacrum of Americanism...... 179 H i s t o r y ...... 182 F l a g ...... 184 R e l i g i o n ...... 188 The Practice of Rhetorical Imbrication . . 196 I d i o m ...... 203 G e n r e ...... 212

4. THE OTHER TALKS BACK: W. E. B. DU BOIS RESPONDS TO THE K L A N ...... 231

Du Bois Responds to Racism ...... 236 Other(s) for Du B o i s ...... 241 Speaking and O t h e r s ...... 251 Conclusion: Situation and Genre ...... 263

5. REHABILITATING EMOTION: THE TROUBLESOME CASE OF THE KU KLUX K L A N ...... 279

The Reason/Emotion Controversy ...... 282 Reason and Emotion in Klan Discourse . . . 294 Refashioning Reason ...... 303 Assessing Innocence ...... 321 Postscript: After the 1920s 328

6. POST-KLAN ETHOS : DAVID DUKE, WITNESSING, AND EVANGELICAL RHETORIC ...... 339

David Duke in C o n t e x t ...... 343 Witnessing and Evangelical Conversion . . 347 Witnessing as Campaign Strategy ...... 352 History, Innocence, and Ethos ...... 362 On Klannishness ...... 370

XI 7. CONCLUSION ...... 382

Revising Genre Theory ...... 385 Key Concepts ...... 386 R u l e ...... 386 I d i o m ...... 389 Imbrication ...... 391 G e n r e ...... 391 Testing the Revised Theory ...... 395 Vagueness in Definition .... 395 T a u t o l o g y ...... 396 Strong Situationalism ...... 398 Strong Transcendentalism .... 398 Status Quo B i a s ...... 399 Innocence, Ethics, and Epistemology ...... 401 Reconsidering the Ku Klux K l a n ...... 410 Generic Expectations ...... 412 Anti-Klan Activism and Postmodern Klannishness ...... 426 Implications for Research and Pedagogy ...... 431

Appendices :

A. SERMON OF FRANK TRIPP, 1922 ...... 438

B. ADDRESS OF J. C. BARR, 1923 ...... 441

C. STUDYING THE OTHER?: A REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON THE KU KLUX K L A N ...... 450

List of R e f e r e n c e s ...... 490

I n d e x ...... 525

Xll . . . there are many millions who have never joined [the Klan], but who think and feel and— when called on— fight with us. This is our real strength, and no one who ignores it can hope to understand America today.

Hiram Wesley Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, 1926

There has been too much said about the Klan, and too little done about Klannishness. The organization is not as important as its spirit. As the Klan has spread through the North and entered politics it has acquired an increasing restraint without changing its inner nature. The atrocities with which the early history of the Klan was punctuated seem to have been declining while the bitter, intolerant spirit of the Klan has been spreading. To kill the organization today would mean little if its spirit persisted.

The Nation. 1924 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Even whites who hold stereotyped images of African Americans usually do not acknowledge to themselves or to others that they are racist. . . . One mechanism of sincere denial [of racism] is distancing oneself from those whites who are considered to be racist, such as Klan members or skinheads, who are viewed as uneducated or psychologically disturbed. Such distancing allows whites to deflect attention from their own role in promoting and implementing antiblack views.

Joe R. Feagin and Hernân Vera (1995)1

In his Anatomy of Criticism. literary scholar

Northrop Frye complained in 1957 that "the theory of genres . . . [is] an undeveloped subject in criticism"

(246). Whether or not this statement still holds true in literary studies, it generally remains accurate when describing the unhappy fate of genre theory as developed by rhetoricians in communication departments. Genre theory had a late start in communication studies, with little consideration given to the topic until the publication of Edwin Black's landmark monograph. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1965). While it did receive some sporadic attention in the 1970s and early

1980s, genre theory has fallen on hard times again, perhaps in part because of trenchant critiques of genre theory offered by Michael Calvin McGee ("Against") and

Thomas Conley ("Linnaean") at the second of two disciplinary conferences (held in 1976 and 1983) on the question of genre. In Quarterly Journal of Speech. the premier disciplinary journal for rhetoricians in communication departments, one is hard pressed to find an essay specifically devoted to genre theory after the mid

1980s.2

As explained below, the problems with genre theory are well known. As a concept, genre is notoriously difficult to define. Genre theory has trouble accounting for the ever-shifting character and composition of individual genres. Many generic categories overlap considerably, to the dismay of those who prefer tidy categorical schemas. New rhetorical criticisms routinely confound conventional generic categories and demand their realignment. The explanatory power of genre theory is limited by the mutability of rhetoric and the ongoing proliferation of generic categories. Skeptics find in genre theory an unfortunate tendency to oversimplified transcendence (i.e., trans-contextual knowledge claims) and an emphasis on recurring and mundane features of

similar rhetorical artifacts at the expense of the unique

and exceptional characteristics of specific texts. Genre

is a conservative force, emphasizing devotion to time-

honored categories over innovation and change.

In this dissertation, I describe a rule-centered

approach to genre theory that addresses these criticisms while still preserving the idea of genre, with its

advantages for teaching and research. Specifically, I

argue that genre theory would benefit from a revision

inspired by, if not always faithful to, the work of French postmodern theorist Jean-Franqois Lyotard. This revised, rule-governed theory would distinguish between idioms. which are composed of the rules governing and governed by specific rhetorical artifacts, and genres. which are collections of idioms sharing a common rule or rules.

From this perspective, every text belongs to a single idiom, but each idiom is potentially a member of many different genres. For example, the same speech, produced in accordance with a single idiom's rules, might be classified as an apology, a sermon, and an example of deliberative rhetoric. The sharing of rules by multiple idioms— a sharing that makes identification of genres possible— I idiosyncratically name rhetorical imbrication. In demonstrating the practical merit of this revised

theory of genre, I examine several rhetorical artifacts

pertinent to the rise and rhetorical maintenance of the

twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan, from Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s

1905 novel, The Clansman. to David Duke's 1991 Louisiana

gubernatorial campaign materials, with special emphasis

given to the "second" Ku Klux Klan movement of 1915-1930.

The existence of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century

Klan movements provides a wealth of related artifacts that

intuitively are suited to generic study as "Klan rhetoric"

or the "rhetoric of racism," since these movements

presumably would produce rhetorical artifacts organized

around similar themes.

Moreover, the choice of such an unpleasant case study

is not accidental or politically neutral. The results of

this study hopefully will demonstrate the advantages of my

reconstruction of genre theory, but my investigation also has an ethical and political aim, which is to develop

better tools (in this case, "generic" tools) for the

discernment and critigue of unwarranted ethnic, racial,

and religious intolerance. In other words, I work through genre theory as propaedeutic to considering how one should

respond to such intolerance when confronted by it. (I

assume that intolerance sometimes is warranted. For

example, almost everyone agrees that murder as a form of recreation should not be tolerated.) Specifically, I contend that a revised genre theory will provide guidance concerning the identification and critigue of

"Klannishness” in contemporary rhetoric, as Klannishness is described in the frontispiece to this dissertation.

As an Irish-American Catholic, descendant of Irish-

American Catholics, and spouse of a Polish-American

Catholic, I have no reason to love the Klan. As a white male, I am ashamed and angry that the identity politics of contemporary Klan and Klan-inspired rhetorics are premised on my solidarity with their aims. My goal for this project is a combination of theoretically relevant criticism and the development of ethical communication practices. As Feagin and Vera note in the epigraph for this chapter, racism is not a problem confined only to the tiny minority of whites who currently belong to the Klan or similar white supremacist organizations. The continued danger posed to the community by such racism leads me to take the risk of writing about the 1920s Klan, telling its story again as a warning about the discursive and material threat posed by its contemporary descendants, who denounce the Klan while embracing core features of the Klan's rhetoric and ideology. The risk of telling this story is worth taking because there is ample evidence that such descendants exist and are important players in

contemporary U.S. politics.^

My discussion of "Klan rhetoric" throughout this

dissertation requires definition. For my purposes this

rhetoric is understood broadly as including the speeches,

sermons, essays, advertisements, novels, editorials, monographs, and visual images produced by Klan leaders, rank-and-file members, Klan apologists, and those who contributed in more ephemeral ways to the Klan cause.

Where relevant, anti-Klan rhetoric also is examined.

Generally, my references to "rhetoric" signify the potential of any sign or signs, whether written or verbal, discursive or non-discursive, to influence members of particular audiences, whatever the intent of the rhetor(s) who produced the signfs).^ Occasionally, I also use

"rhetoric" in one of its other senses, where the term marks a genre (as in "rhetoric of racism").

Further, when I make reference to specific rhetors and auditors in subsequent chapters, I typically am alluding to the individual(s) implied or constructed in my reading of a given text, as opposed to the actual, historical individual(s) involved in the initial creation, distribution, and/or reception of that text. Despite the ongoing debates over the "death of the subject," I refer to individual rhetors and auditors as a matter of convenience. To address a final definitional concern, I

use both "artifact" and "text" for reference to

collections of signs understood by auditors as having some

local coherence or unity.

I have two primary aims for this introductory

chapter. First, I explain the problems with genre theory

that I seek to address in this dissertation. Second, I

address the methodological presuppositions under which I

labor in this study. (The typical dissertation review of

subject matter literature, in this case a review of

studies of the Ku Klux Klan, is found in Appendix C.)

The Trouble with Genre Theory

Traditionally, genre, a term borrowed from the

French, has referred to collections of texts with one or

more shared attributes of some social, critical, or

practical significance. Genre studies are almost as old

as the idea of rhetoric itself, given the conventional

(though not universally shared) assumption that the

epideictic, forensic, and deliberative categories

announced by Aristotle in his Rhetoric are rhetorical genres. (Students of literature have their own

Aristotelian genres of epic, drama, and lyric poetry, which are drawn from Aristotle's Poetics.1 The idea of genre has exerted considerable influence on the study of rhetoric in communication departments.

The most widely read monograph in rhetorical studies since

World War Two, Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism; A Study in Method (1965), denounced what he called "neo-

Aristotelian" criticism in favor of a genre-centered critical orientation. Genre has received sporadic attention ever since the mid 1960s, and generic criticism is universally discussed as a critical method or approach in rhetorical criticism textbooks and classes.^ However, the consensus on the significance of genre to rhetorical studies has not led to any great disciplinary agreement on how (or if) genres should be isolated or, for that matter, how "genre" should be defined. At least four distinct approaches to generic identification have been used by classical and contemporary scholars. Examples provided below indicate how these different ways of classifying rhetorical genres are relevant to the Ku Klux Klan.

Definitional Approaches to Genre

Situation. Genres frequently have been linked to recurring situations. For example, arguing before a court of law, whether in Aristotle's Athens or Judge Ito's Los

Angeles courtroom, exemplifies forensic discourse. The special circumstances under which a newly sworn-in U.S. president delivers a speech have long been labeled the

"presidential inaugural" and considered a genre of discourse (Campbell and Jamieson, "Inaugurating"). The assumption in a situational approach to genre identification is that similarly defined or similarly perceived situations will encourage similar rhetorical responses. For example, one expects a speech given at a funeral to fulfill the conventional burdens of a eulogy, praising the deceased individual's positive attributes and ignoring or minimizing her or his faults. When newspaper advertisements announce in 1926 or 1996 that a Klan- sponsored speaker will deliver an address at the local park next week, we expect that the speaker will respond to the situation by defending the activities of a controversial organization.

The situational approach to genre identification is appealing, since like situations intuitively should produce like rhetorics. This approach is made even more attractive in communication studies by the extraordinary popularity of Lloyd F. Bitzer's 1968 essay, "The

Rhetorical Situation." Bitzer defines the rhetorical situation as a

complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence. (43)

If an exigence is understood as an "imperfection marked by

urgency" (Bitzer 43), we understand that situations evoke

rhetorical responses as rhetors try to find rhetorical

solutions to perceived problems. When one takes the next

step and assumes that similar situations and exigencies

make similar rhetorical responses likely, the foundations

exist for a situational understanding of genre.

Content. Genres also have been identified when

similar content (or "substance") appears in different

artifacts, where content is the "semantic value of

discourse" (Miller, "Genre" 32). By this reasoning, the

appearance of recurrent themes in various texts marks the

existence of a discrete genre, even if the situations

producing these texts vary considerably. After Abraham

Lincoln's first inaugural address announced that the

United States was an indissoluble union of the individual states, the subsequent use of his arguments by pro-union rhetors in a variety of fora might plausibly be labeled a rhetoric of unionism. In literary studies, Susan Rubin

Suleiman describes the genre of the "ideological novel" as consisting of those works of fiction that self-consciously and deliberately expound a political position, where content is the only requirement for inclusion of a novel

in the ideological genre. Further, the discourse of

10 individuals defending the Ku Klux Klan will understandably

be labeled "Klan" or "pro-Klan" rhetoric on the basis of

content, whether produced by a national Klan leader at the

height of Klan popularity in the 1920s or by a lonely Klan

spokesperson surrounded by angry anti-Klan protesters

seven decades later.

Documents participating in conventional genres may

create content expectations for that genre, even if those

expectations are not warranted. For example, the SCUM

("Society for Cutting Up Men") Manifesto might create the

expectation that the rhetoric of feminism is inherently

anti-male or man-hating, with its declaration that males

are "walking abortion[s]" (gtd. in Morgan 577). Of

course, such an assumption makes the essentialist error of

believing in the existence of a single "rhetoric of

feminism."

Form. Genres may be labeled as such by their

association with a recurrent form. While form is a vague

construct in the genre literature (see Conley,

"Linnaean" 68-71), most scholars could agree that "form"

may refer to use of a (1) specific rhetorical device or

figure, (2) pattern of organization, or (3) method of

argument. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s use of repetition in his "I Have a Dream" speech and other addresses

illustrates the use of a rhetorical device as a form.

11 while the organizational expectations for a letter of

recommendation or interoffice memorandum demonstrate

another kind of form. Finally, Charles J. Stewart, Craig

Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton, Jr. illustrate the

argument form with their analysis of abortion rhetoric, where "pro-life" forces use a rhetoric of transcendence to argue that the right to life is more important than the right to choice or the control of one's body.

An example of a formalist bias in literary genre studies is provided by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren: "In general, our conception of genre should lean to the formalistic side, that is, incline to generize Hudibrastic octosyllabics or the sonnet rather than the political novel or the novel about factory workers ..." (233).

(This notion of "form" encompasses the first and second senses of the term described in the previous paragraph.)

Contra Susan Rubin Suleiman, Wellek and Warren would ignore content and situational concerns altogether in identifying genres. However, in analyses of rhetorical genre rhetorical scholars frequently link situation, form, and content, since the like situations to which I refer above could evoke rhetorical responses that might be similar in both form and content. Further, attempts to divide form and content frequently are criticized, since

12 some forms are more amenable to certain contents than are

other forms (and vice versa).

Rules. Genres may be marked by their allegiance to

distinct sets of rules that govern the genre by separating

good discourse from bad. Such rules may be recognized and

fully understood as such by the individuals who adhere to

them, but, more often, those rules are implicit; the

ordinary person could not articulate the rules to which

she or he adheres even in the context of following those

rules. As Tzvetan Todorov explains,

authors write in function of (which does not mean agreement with) the existing generic system, and . . . readers read in function of the generic system, with which they are familiar thanks to criticism, schools, the book distribution system, or simply by hearsay; however, they do not need to be conscious of the system. (Genres 18-19)

Such rules might regulate the form and/or content

of discourse. Speakers at Fourth of July celebrations in

the nineteenth century presumably knew, however

inchoately, that content rules dictated lavish praise of

pro-American and pro-military virtues, while form

requirements precluded an excessively long address that

prevented the audience from consuming food or pursuing the

other amusements of the holiday. Also, rhetoric artifacts

sympathetic to Klan causes may be marked by their

commitment to form and content rules, as with the pro-Klan minister whose benediction followed the conventional forms

13 for prayer and offered thanksgiving for the existence of

the Klan and its protection of Christian values.

Such rules are not absolute, of course. As Herbert

W. Simons and Aram A. Aghazarian observe, rules "are

expressions about human choice, and can thus be violated"

(46). Frederick Douglass in 1852 and Charles Sumner in

1845 knowingly violated the rules for Fourth of July

orations in order to criticism slavery and militarism,

respectively. The important point here is that adherence

to and violation of such rules is understood as such by both rhetors and auditors, so all implicitly or explicitly

recognize the advantages inherent in following or departing from such rules.

While I have described the situation, content, form, and rule-based approaches to generic identification separately, various combinations of these four approaches to identifying genres also have been defended as having merit for such efforts. Today, many scholars contend that genres are marked by some fusion of these disparate elements. For example, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen

Hall Jamieson argue that genres are "groups of discourses which share substantive, stylistic, and situational characteristics. . . . These forms, in isolation, appear in other discourses. What is distinctive about the acts

14 in a genre is the recurrence of the forms together in

constellation” ("Form" 20).

Despite the formalistic bias of scholars like Wellek

and Warren, few today would contend that form or content

explanations for genre are sufficient by themselves to

account for all generic groupings of discourse. However, both situation- and rule-centered approaches to genre

identification are able to incorporate other perspectives

in explaining the existence of genres. One version of the

situational approach depicts situations as controlling

form and content, while the rules approach suggests that rules govern the relationships between situation, form, and content. In particular, I defend the rules approach in this dissertation as providing the best explanation for the intersection of situation, content, and form in identifying rhetorical genres.

The next section explores the advantages of genre theory for teaching and research in rhetoric.

Advantages of Genre

As suggested below, many scholars are quite suspicious of genre, and some would like to abandon the concept altogether where rhetoric is concerned. However, the idea of genre has several advantages for research and teaching.

15 Frames of Reference. A fundamental principle for

genre theory is that genres are rooted in the history of

specific language communities. While the skillful critic might isolate genres of discourse at any given historical moment by pointing to form, content, or situational

similarities, genres also are understood, however

inchoately, by auditors who have prior experience with

similar rhetorics. The network television audience for

any of the current half-dozen crime dramas understands the conventions of that genre because they have learned a bit about the dramatic genre in secondary school and, more

importantly, they have witnessed hundreds of similar dramas in their prior encounters with television. Genres provide a convenient framework for analyzing and evaluating the new or unprecedented experience in terms of the old. At the risk of being grandiose, generic classification is to some extent an outgrowth of human experience itself, in which encounters with the lifeworld are used inductively to create generalized categories into which subseguent experiences are placed. As summarized by

Kathleen M. Hall Jamieson, the "human need for a frame of reference lures the mind to generic classification"

("Generic" 167).

Understanding the importance of genre in everyday life is essential to any theory of public memory or

16 sophisticated understanding of audiences as actively involved in interpretation of the texts to which they are exposed. For example, Kathleen M. Jamieson argues that situation alone is not always sufficient to account for rhetorical production. Instead, prior experience with rhetorical genres also may influence the choices made by rhetors, choices that cannot be explained only by the response to the exigence of Bitzer's rhetorical situation

(Jamieson, "Antecedent"). The historical importance of genre in structuring audience experiences of the text also explains the importance of perceptions about economic, governmental, military, or other social phenomena in shaping rhetorical expectations in certain situations, as in the appeal to precedent as an important argument form in legal reasoning. M. M. Bakhtin, in his subtle decentering of the subject, asserts that the utterance is only a "link in the chain of speech communication" (94), so that understanding contemporary rhetoric requires a diachronic assessment of rhetorical history. In Bakhtin's judgment, this historicity of the sign necessitates a theory of the speech genre.

Rhetorical Production. Genre theory also provides guidelines for the production of rhetorics. By supplying information concerning the expected rhetorical response to apparently similar situations, genres help rhetors to

17 invent discourses that will not distract, offend, or confuse auditors whose expectations are shaped by familiarity with those genres. Todorov asserts that "[i]t is because genres exist as an institution that they function as 'horizons of expectation' for readers and as

'models of writing' for authors" (Genre 18). For example, as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell ("Gender") explains, women who gave speeches to male auditors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were violating generic expectations for public discourse as a male enterprise. To produce texts that would not be rejected out of hand by audiences, women speakers had to explain why their orations were permissible in a specific context and did not do harm to their own femininity.

Alternatively, genres give rhetors information about how one might violate generic expectations to make a point. In denouncing Fourth of July celebrations in his famous oration, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of

July?", initially delivered to an audience at Rochester,

New York, Frederick Douglass turned the genre on its head.

Douglass proclaimed that "the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July" and "[tjhere is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour." Douglass's

18 speech expressed few "new" arguments; Douglass and other abolitionists had taken similar positions in the past.

Instead, Douglass's explanation of the inhumanity and injustice of slavery was exceptional because it violated generic expectations to which auditors anticipated the rhetor would adhere. Shorn of references to the Fourth of

July and delivered in June or August, the speech would be less compelling.G

The role played by genre in providing the conventional framework for audience interpretation of texts gives us a useful explanation for how specific rhetorical artifacts are understood by auditors. Rhetors may try to take advantage of these interpretive conventions by adhering to them or by violating them, but such choices are made with the understanding that auditors are familiar with these interpretive conventions. As Bakhtin explains, we "are given these speech genres in almost the same way that we are given our native language, which we master fluently long before we begin to study grammar" (78).

The guidelines for rhetorical production isolated here have several implications for the social relevance of rhetoric. In a society where change in political and aesthetic standards is discouraged, genres prescribe the available options for rhetors and reduce the risk that they will inadvertently violate the expectations of their

19 immediate audiences. In communities with more tolerance

of innovation and/or on occasions where rhetors are

willing to face the risk of public sanction, breaking

generic norms for some purpose can be advantageous. As

Jonathan Culler describes genre, the "function of genre

conventions is essentially to establish a contract between

writer and reader so as to make certain relevant

expectations operative and thus to permit both compliance

with and deviation from accepted modes of intelligibility"

(147). As a consequence, rhetoric pedagogues should make

students aware of the possibilities of genre for guiding

and enriching their own speaking and writing.

Rhetorical Criticism. The influence of genre on

rhetorical production and audience interpretation of texts necessarily makes genre considerations helpful in conducting rhetorical criticism. While the purposes of rhetorical criticism are discussed below in some detail, criticism typically is expected to teach us something new, whether about the artifact under investigation, the historical milieu that made the artifact possible, or the genre of discourse to which the artifact belongs.

Whatever the justification for a specific critical endeavor, consideration of genre has the potential to enrich critical practice by telling us about the historical and rhetorical environment that influenced the

20 choices made by rhetors and the conclusions drawn by auditors, as well as suggesting how specific rhetorical artifacts might contribute to the redefinition of conventional genres. While Campbell and Jamieson maintain only that genre is "an important concept in one kind of criticism" ("Form" 25), I suggest a stronger conclusion.

Given the critical temptation to classify, to generalize, and to judge by tracing analogues, the difficulty in rhetorical criticism is avoiding generic considerations, since generic expectations are one important factor in the auditor's choice of one reading over another.

The advantages listed here for genre theory are considerable, and such a list of advantages implies that the notion of genre should not be abandoned at the first sign of difficulty. However, several significant problems of genre theory have been identified by scholars in both rhetorical and literary studies, and any defense of genre theory requires some response to these criticisms.

Problems with Existing Genre Theories

If the history of ancient rhetoric teaches us anything, it is that the degree to which a discipline or method atrophies and declines is directly proportional to the complexity of the taxonomies it generates.

Thomas M. Conley (1979)^

21 The preceding sections indicated that genres may be

defined by situation, content, form, rules, or a

combination of these elements. Further, genre theory has

several benefits for the study of rhetoric. In this

section, I summarize several charges commonly made against

genre theory.

Vagueness in Definition. Perhaps the most obvious

problem for genre theory is the dizzying array of descriptive labels that pass for generic descriptions.

Undoubtedly, we should expect that the diversity of human experience will be matched by an equal diversity of discourse types. However, discourse types identified as genres historically have varied wildly in specificity, ranging from efforts to divide discourse into a few general categories to extremely specific names for exotic species of discourse. Forty years ago. General

Semanticists, with their faith in a single, material reality, would have talked about different "levels" of abstraction away from the "real world." In their lexicon, some well-known generic categories are far more abstract than others. Consider a few of the genres identified as such by rhetorical or literary scholars, in a list that I compiled:

forensic, epideictic, deliberative, narrative, quest story, tragedy, comedy, argumentation, exhortation, novel, sentimental style, realism, sermon, verbal tantrum, gallows speech,

22 doctrinal rhetoric, jeremiad, morality play, papal encyclical, eulogy, inaugural address, women's rights rhetoric, nominating speech, keynote address, utopian literature, state-of- the-union address, disaster rhetoric. Fourth of July oration, farce, pastoral hymns, satire, epic, apologia, wedding poem, apocalyptic, comic epitaph

Despite its length, this list is hardly all- inclusive. For example, I have not mentioned emergent genres such as the "dramedy" or "tragi-comedy" (Vande

Berg). Also, conventional subgenres such as the de casibus tragedy or black comedy are excluded from this list. But such a list demonstrates some of the problems of overlap and vagueness in generic classification. The papal encyclical is its own genre, yet it also could be classified as argumentation, deliberation, or doctrinal rhetoric. Rhetorical and literary genres do not have the classificatory neatness of genus and specie in the taxonomic work of biologists and botanists. Instead, those of us who toil in rhetorical and literary studies have a long (and ever-growing) list of shifting genres that are not mutually exclusive. If taxonomic precision is the aim of modern genre theorists, as it was for the writers of rhetorical handbooks for several centuries, then building genre theory will not be a particularly productive enterprise (see Conley, "Ancient").

In short, while I do not share the realist perspective of the General Semanticists, some genres are

23 far more broad and inclusive than others. Generic

classification does not have the precision that one might

expect after examining biological analogues. By itself,

this complaint might not be sufficient to derail genre

theory. However, this is not the only definitional

problem for genres. Scholars long have maintained that genres are marked by the common features of different

artifacts belonging to those genres. But how many common

features are required before the genre label is justified?

The four methods I listed above for identifying genres— situation, content, form, and rules— suggest that generic categories may be created on many different bases. A classificatory schema in which necessary and sufficient conditions for classification cannot be specified is not intuitively satisfying.

Most responses to this critique suggest only that the standards for classificatory rigor in genre theory should be flexible. For example, Robin Rowland argues for what I would call a functional definition of genre, where genres are identified on the basis of their recurrent usefulness as categories: "The generic analyst is not seeking a law or theory covering a class of communication acts. He or she is attempting to increase our understanding of the form, structure, strategy, and content of those acts"

(Rowland 130). From a functional perspective, pragmatic

24 utility is worth the price of definitional fuzziness, since understanding a given genre may have advantages for rhetorical production and/or criticism.

Tzvetan Todorov provides another response to this critique of definitional vagueness, maintaining that genres are separated from other categories by (1) the historical recognition of genres as genres (i.e.,

"codification") and (2) their systems of rules for governing discourse (i.e., "discursive properties").

Unfortunately, while his second demand is not problematic, his "historical recognition" requirement begs the question. At what point would one be historical enough to meet this test? A Bakhtinian response would suggest that all utterances rely on genre, that even the newest of genres come from old genres. From this point of view, all genres are historical, if not always historically recognized as genre. Further, if scholars are going to rely on the appeal to tradition as the primary guide for generic classification, the theory of genre is placed in an awkward position. After all, I need only shout loudly that "X or y is a genre" for several years, and, if a fair number of auditors accept my judgment, I will have created a genre out of thin air. A theory of genre should be able to explain how genres come into being, even if the

25 emphasis of genre theorists on functionality means that

many potential genres will never be recognized as such.

Tautology. Beyond the most basic problems with

definition, there is another problem with generic

classification. Heather Dubrow identifies tautological

reasoning as the "central problem" in defining a genre as

such, where such definitions,

like those of biological species, tend to be circular: one establishes such a definition on the basis of a few examples, and yet the choice of those examples from the multitude of possible ones implies a prior decision about the characteristics of the genre. (Dubrow 46)

By itself, the charge of circularity is not

debilitating. Interpretation of any text at some point

inevitably reguires testing an initial hypothesis against

that text, and a danger always exists that the critic will

look so hard for that evidence that she or he is bound to

find it eventually. Hermeneutical theory explicitly

acknowledges this phase in interpretation with the idea of

the "hermeneutic circle." The problem unique to genre

theory, according to Thomas M. Conley, is that rhetorical

critics and genre theorists will take extant genres to be

"fixed and immutable" forms ("Ancient" 48), forcing

specific texts into the old categories at any price.

Alternatively, the scholar who is firmly convinced that a

new generic category is warranted will look far and wide until she or he finds some evidence to sustain that

26 category. Either alternative would be a "vicious

circularity, not just a 'hermeneutic' circle" (Conley,

"Ancient" 52).

For Conley, such a presumption of generic primacy

would lead to the construction of an inferior genre theory

and, worse, to the instantiation of a dogmatic "cookie-

cutter" criticism shorn of insight about the internal

working of unique rhetorical artifacts, since a talented

critic who looks carefully for recurrent forms, for

example, is almost certain to find them. While almost

every approach to criticism not wholly dependent on the genius of the critic has been chastised for its

predilection to methodological reductionism concerning the critical act, Conley's charge has some prima facie merit.

For example, in B. L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel's essay,

"They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On the Generic

Criticism of Apologia," their investigation of apologetic rhetoric proceeds under the assumption that the artifacts they investigate belong to the relevant genre. Such an

initial assumption increases the risk that the critic will

ignore the possibility that Eugene V. Debs's "Statement to the Court" is better read as a deliberative address on

U.S. foreign policy than as an apology.®

Strong Situationalism. In addition to general problems with definition in genre theory, concerns about

27 specific approaches to definition also exist. As

discussed earlier, assessment of the requirements imposed

by the "rhetorical situation" is one of the ways to

describe a genre. If situation is taken as one component

among the many possibilities for generic classification,

few would object to this "weak situationalism," where the

perceived exigence of an immediate situation encourages

some choices and discourages others by the rhetor or rhetors.

However, if one claims that situation is the primary component or key concept in any definition of rhetorical genre, then there are some problems. This perspective, which I call "strong situationalism," was critiqued by

Richard E. Vatz, who read Lloyd L. Bitzer's "The

Rhetorical Situation" as committed to the presupposition that situation is the determining factor in rhetorical invention. For Vatz, this constituted a realist commitment on Bitzer's part that denied the importance of rhetoric as a constitutive force in the social construction of reality. Vatz complained that Bitzer's idea of situation makes rhetoric a slave to the real.

Instead, Vatz mains that "rhetoric is a cause not an effect of meaning. It is antecedent, not subsequent, to a situation's impact" (160). As Maurice Charland

("Constitutive") has argued, rhetoric has constitutive as

28 well as persuasive and other functions. At least in unusual cases, where generic expectations are not clear,

Barry Brummett sides with Vatz in defending "the role of rhetoric in creating situations" (Brummett 72).

Whether or not Vatz's reading of Bitzer is correct goes beyond the scope of this chapter (see Chapter Four).

Minimally, I suggest that, if Bitzer gives too much credence to the historical and material forces embodied in references to the rhetorical situation, Vatz underemphasizes the importance of those non-discursive forces. Even if one insists on reading the North American

Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the closing of factories in the U.S. as "texts" in the fashion of some postmodern and poststructuralist scholars, those antecedent texts have consequences for what free trade advocate Bill

Clinton would say in a debate with a protectionist like

Richard Gephardt or Pat Buchanan. Absent some radical shift in contemporary cosmology, neither Clinton nor

Gephardt could convince an informed audience that the

NAFTA agreement never existed. This is what Carolyn R.

Miller suggests when she insists that the idea of exigence

"must be located in the social world, neither in a private perception nor in material circumstance. . . . Exigence is a form of social knowledge— a mutual construing of

29 objects, events, interests and purposes ..." (Miller,

"Genre" 30).

Strong situationalism is not particularly compelling

where the definition of genres is concerned. We know of

many situations where rhetors have violated situational

expectations and benefited from doing so. Rather than

abandon altogether the insight that situation has

something to do with rhetorical invention, most genre

theorists have committed to some version of weak

situationalism. For example, Robert C. Rowland defends

his situational approach to genre by arguing that genres

function to limit the strategic options of rhetors, rather

than specifying what must be said or written by those

rhetors. Such weak versions of situationalism do not

ignore or bracket the creative potential of the rhetor in

responding to rhetorical situations in surprising ways,

but a commitment to weak situationalism does entail the

conclusion that rhetors and auditors do not work in an

ideological, historical, or material vacuum.

Strong Transcendentalism. Instead of criticizing

genre theory on the basis of definitional problems,

another objection to genre is made on the basis of

epistemology and ontology. As noted above, humans

historically have a tendency to categorize and classify when making sense of their experience. This "weak"

30 transcendent impulse is not particularly controversial.

However, Michael Calvin McGee sees in genre theory the

worst excesses of an "ideology of transcendentalism"

("Against" 139)— what I call "strong" transcendentalism—

where the idea of genre privileges transcendent, trans-

contextual knowledge claims at the expense of the

explication of specific texts. (McGee is not referring to

the Transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson, in which the

term marks a kind of pantheistic mysticism.)

At the risk of oversimplifying McGee's lengthy essay,

the strong transcendentalism of genre theory either

subordinates rhetoric to materialism (as in strong

situationalism) or makes the material an effect of

language (as in the most extreme version of Vatz's constructivist argument). In either event, McGee understands genre theory as confounding efforts to construct a suitable account of communicative praxis. If

Conley fears that genre theory does harm to critical practice, McGee is concerned that the enterprise of building rhetorical and communication theory itself will be damaged by a renewed enthusiasm for genre as the sine qua non of rhetorical scholarship.

Status Quo Bias. Yet another limitation of genre theory is its conservative bias. Historically, descriptions of rhetorical and literary genres have tended

31 to become prescriptions for discursive practice. That

business letters or eulogies have been constructed in

certain ways places some pressure on rhetors to write

letters or craft speeches consistent with those

conventions. This pressure is intensified by the rhetor's

understanding that audience members are aware of those generic conventions and that those conventions presumptively will guide the auditor's sense of decorum and appropriateness in a given situation. While I noted above that rhetors like Douglass and Sumner have been known to violate generic guidelines intentionally, they know that doing so is risky. As David Donald has documented, Sumner was both vilified and praised for his choice to ignore the conventions of the Fourth of July oration.

Stated simply, consciousness of generic conventions is more likely to encourage adherence to than abrogation of those conventions. As Simons and Aghazarian admit in their defense of a rules-oriented approach to genre studies,

. . . it must be admitted that generic criticism often serves uncritically as an implicit endorsement of existing ways of doing things. What begins as a rule-of-thumb description of what it takes to succeed rhetorically in a given role easily becomes an ironclad prescription that implicitly sanctions and further legitimizes prevailing societal norms. Little wonder that "genre-alists," formalists, structuralists, and the like are sometimes

32 accused of choosing sides in struggles between the forces of continuity and change .... Indeed, the very assumption that past practices ought to guide future actions is a conservative one. (53-54)

Taken together, these objections to or problems with

genre theory constitute a formidable obstacle to defending

genre. Predictably, as expected in the academic genre in

which I write, I will argue in this dissertation that a

revised genre theory can address these problems with the

definition, epistemology, and politics of genre. The

sketch of this revised theory, to be defended in

subsequent chapters, is provided below.

An Alternative Genre Theory

The theory of genre that I will defend is grounded in my reading of postmodern philosophy and social theory.

Specifically, my intent is to suggest a theory of genre drawn from the work of Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher whose work is cited by communication scholars with increasing frequency.^ In the following discussion,

I will make consistent use of "idiom" rather than "genre" when referring to Lyotard's notion of the rules governing a particular, local text (e.g., this dissertation). I do so in order to avoid confusion of Lyotard's sense of genre with our common, disciplinary use of the term. A tidy split between idiom and genre is difficult to find in The

33 Différend. Lyotard's most complete statement of his postmodern philosophy. Some textual evidence in The

Différend supports my own solution, which is to use

"genre" as the general term for larger categories and

"idiom" for reference to the complete and specific set of rules associated with a given rhetorical artifact or artifacts. (For convenience, I will treat code systems like English and Swahili as a backdrop to genre theory, though genres both influence and are influenced by the rules that govern such code systems.)

Whether talking about "language games" in The

Postmodern Condition or "idioms of discourse" in The

Différend. language, ethics, and argumentation are central to Lyotard's theory of postmodernity. Lyotard, a professional philosopher, dared to acknowledge in Just

Gaming the connections between his own work and classical

(sophistic) rhetorics; "This book has been written in scandalous fashion. What is scandalous about it is that it is all rhetoric; it words entirely at the level of persuasion .... It is a book that belongs more to the verbal arts than to philosophical writing, including dialectics . . ." (Just Gaming 4). In philosophical discourse, Lyotard recognized that he was violating one or more generic conventions by admitting to the rhetoricity

34 of his own writing (though most rhetoricians would say

that all writing is rhetorical).

In The Différend. Lyotard takes up a number of the

problems relevant to philosophy, argument, ethics, and

judgment when foundationalism and humanism are passe and

the autonomous subject is no longer privileged. The

central difficulty for those wishing to resolve

disagreements via argumentation is posed by

incommensurability, "in the sense of the heterogeneity of

phrase regimens [i.e., idioms] and of the impossibility of

subjecting them to a single law (except by neutralizing

them) . . . ." (The Différend 1 2 8 ) . For Lyotard, when

interlocutors adhere to different idioms of discourse

(i.e., divergent systems of rules for governing the production and reception of discourse), the absence of a common principle for resolving disputes makes such resolution impossible; heterogeneity, as signaled by the differences between idioms, becomes incommensurability, which is the lack of a common standard for judgment.

Two options in the case of incommensurability are (1) to leave the dispute unresolved for lack of a common criterion of judgment or (2) to force one or more interlocutors to abide by the judgment rendered when a criterion of judgment is imposed on the dispute by one of the interlocutors or by some other witness to the

35 conversation. Neither option is particularly palatable, since a lack of resolution sometimes may have material consequences (e.g., loss of property), while external imposition of a criterion of judgment is ethically problematic. Such external imposition might be called terror by Lyotard. Instead, as Lyotard noted in Just

Gaming. he prefers judgment "without criteria," where

"there is no stable system to guide judgments" (16).

Instead, judgment relies on something akin to Aristotle's notion of phronisis. where local norms are derived contextually from the idiom of discourse guiding a given discussion and no expectation exists that such local norms will do justice to the next conflict requiring attention.

Lyotard's theory of idioms of discourse is complicated by the instability of these idioms.

Interlocutors need not remain committed to one idiom of discourse until closure of a discussion is reached.

Instead, whether by accident or intent, one or both interlocutors may shift from one idiom to another at any time. This instability is explained by Lyotard's contention that a change in any rule governing an exchange constitutes a move to a new idiom of discourse. While this instability makes incommensurability more likely and judgment far more difficult, Lyotard's postmodernism does not require him to offer some solution to the problem of

36 judgment between idioms of discourse. In an extended

metaphor concerning an island archipelago, Lyotard even

criticizes Kant's efforts to find such a solution; "What

are we doing here other than navigating between islands

[idioms of discourse] in order paradoxically to declare

that their regimens or genres are incommensurable" (The

Différend 135)?

Lyotard tends to celebrate the imbroglio uncovered by

his analysis, rather than suggesting some means of

recovering some version of judgment across idioms that is

consistent with the postmodern condition. While Lyotard's

concern for ethics and justice is not typical of

postmodernists, his notion of ethics is centered on

exchanges within a single idiom of discourse and on

respect for difference, although he recognizes the

limitations of such an approach for ethics. Beyond

hinting at the advantages of finding a common idiom of

discourse where such an idiom is not available, Lyotard

and his judgment without criteria give the reader little help with making difficult decisions across contexts and

situations. Is the only judgment available in these

situations a "local" judgment, so that my only hope is to demonstrate that the assumptions on which Ku Klux Klan discourses rely are internally contradictory?

37 In this dissertation, I extend and revise Lyotard's

discourse theory. Insofar as rationality and

reasonableness in argument have been and continue to be

concerns of rhetoricians, I believe that this study of the

twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan will help to explain the

means by which rhetors and rhetorics shift, whether

intentionally or otherwise, from one idiom of discourse to

another. Over the course of several decades, Klan rhetors

have sought to adapt their messages to their audiences. I

argue that these Klan rhetors have done so by adhering to

rules drawn from other, more reputable idioms of discourse

(e.g., various strands of Protestant Christianity). In so doing, Klan rhetors sometimes have avoided wholesale condemnation from audiences who should be unsympathetic to their cause. Frequently, these rhetors have confused some auditors about their purposes. A better understanding of the use of such phrases will improve our ability to isolate the individual rules operative in an idiom and to assess individual rules against one other and against the rules guiding other idioms.

Beyond this use of fragments drawn from other, purportedly innocent idioms of discourse by the Klan, I also wish to highlight the ways in which contemporary rhetors operating within such innocent idioms of discourse adopt themes crucial to the popular appeal and ideological

38 position of the Klan. In offering this observation, I do

not only imply that Pat Buchanan and David Duke have

something in common— such a claim is hardly surprising—

but also that the rhetorics identified with sophisticated

left-liberal intellectuals sometimes have more in common

with the Klan than those intellectuals would like to

believe.

As a result of this investigation, I hope to develop

and to support three claims of theoretical import. First,

this study should permit me to sketch the outlines of a

theory of rhetorical imbrication in the concluding

chapter. Imbrication is a term often used by rhetorical

scholars, though the term has not yet been theorized

explicitly. I have a fondness for the metaphor

suggested by ordinary dictionary definitions of the term, which suggest that imbrication occurs when parts overlap with one another, as with roof tiles or the scales of a

fish. I will submit that new idioms of discourse are

formed in this way, with procedural norms from disparate

sources being linked together to determine what constitutes appropriate ethics and good argumentation within that discursive idiom. Not surprisingly, this theory of rhetorical imbrication will have implications both for communication ethics and argumentation theory, since adherence to one idiom rather than another will

39 determine what rules are used to evaluate the merits of any given rhetorical artifact on ethical, aesthetic, and other grounds.

Second, I claim that genres are composed of two or more idioms that share common rules. Idioms, as implied above, are the collections of rules associated with the production of specific texts. As a result, idioms are radically particular, tied to particular instantiations of the discourse with which they are allied. Changing even a single rule would mark the creation of a "new," different idiom, with all the incommensurability problems summarized above. In contrast, genres are synthetic schemas that generalize about an array of diverse idioms, where one or more important attributes are shared. In other words, the first condition for identification of a genre is the isolation of rhetorical imbrication between two or more idioms. While individual rhetorical artifacts belong to a single, controlling idiom, these artifacts (and their idioms) may belong to several genres, depending on the shared features emphasized by the definition of any given genre.

Since a new genre is recognized when the naming of such a category is useful for teaching, research, or practice— the functional approach to genre definition that

I attributed to Robin Rowland— the number of genres is

40 limited only by the imagination and inventional resources

of rhetorical scholars. While rule-governed approaches to

genre theory (and communication theory) hardly are new

(e.g., Cushman; Shimanoff), I contend that my approach

clarifies the relationship between actual talk and genre

in ways that other rules theory do not. In particular, my

revised genre theory explains how interlocutors shift from

idiom to idiom and from genre to genre.

Third, this study should allow me to question the

ordinary presumption that rhetorics issued by those holding certain subject positions are innocent, as in the

juridical notion of "innocent until proven guilty." If I am right about the ease with which presumptively innocent

idioms of discourse can be co-opted and about the extent to which presumptively innocent discourses show evidence of influence by rightfully despised influences and ideologies, then the presumption of innocence needs rethinking. The strongest formulation of my argument is that there is no such thing as an idiom of discourse innocent of questionable influences. Those assessing the ethical merits of a given rhetoric need not presume guilt. but my analysis should suggest that innocence also should not be p r e s u m e d . 12 This conclusion about presumption will have implications both for ethical assessment of rhetoric and for argumentation theory.

41 Answering Initial Objections

I can imagine two immediate objections to this

revised genre theory, which I answer now to make the

outlines of this theory seem a bit more palatable. First,

since I have proposed an expansive definition of genre, I

have not avoided the problems with definitional vagueness

summarized above. While my definition of genre

distinguishes genres from idioms, almost any other

category for discourse could be labeled a genre in my

sense of the term. As a result, my system does not

distinguish between, for example, genre and rhetorical

strategy, or genre and subgenre.

I will respond to this objection by referring to the

work of two well-regarded genre theorists. Initially, I have already explained my problems with the genre definition of Todorov. This definition, which requires historical recognition of a genre before designating a genre as such, is unappealing. While tradition, including generic traditions, is an important influence on

contemporary rhetoric— recall Bakhtin's chain in which our utterances are only individual links— Todorov's definition does not account for the shifting over time in generic categories, a shifting that he acknowledges. Also, the argument from history does not stipulate any criteria for sufficient historicity, so we are left with no clear

42 indication concerning how much historical recognition is needed to meet Todorov's definition. In short, Todorov intuits that there must be constraints on what categories can be designated as genres, but his own definition does not supply very satisfactory constraints.

A stronger version of the argument for a more limited definition of genre comes from Carolyn R. Miller, who maintains that "if the term 'genre' is to mean anything theoretically or critically useful, it cannot refer to just any category or kind of discourse" ("Genre" 23). As the title of her essay indicates. Miller wishes to theorize genre as a kind of social action, where understanding genre has pragmatic import for understanding how rhetoric does work in the world. For Miller, genres are "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" ("Genre" 31), in which form (syntactics) and content (semantics) are subordinated to action

(pragmatics). Although Miller admits that the "exact number of hierarchical levels of meaning may not be determinable with any precision" ("Genre" 36), she nevertheless proposes a hierarchy of meaning with "human nature," "culture," and "form of life" above genre on the hierarchy, while "speech act," "locution," "language," and

"experience" are subordinate to the hierarchy.

43 Miller's conclusion that genre is "meaningful action

that is rule governed" seems consistent with the theory I

hope to develop ("Genre" 34), and her demand for some

distinctions between genres and other categories certainly

is reasonable. Already, I have been treating words,

phrases, idioms, and code systems (i.e., language) as non

generic categories. Additionally, definitions of "human

nature" and "culture" involve us in a very complicated

debate concerning what should or should not be treated as

text. Treating culture, however defined, as one grand

genre probably will be too much trouble, even though

Miller's own analysis in a 1994 essay, when she concludes

that "we might characterize a culture by its genre set,"

hints at the possibility that our conventional genres are

only subsets of a larger, all-inclusive genre (Miller,

"Cultural" 70). Where teaching is concerned, instructors

frequently focus on the "homely discourse" championed by

Miller— "the letter of recommendation, the user manual,

the progress report"— that she sees as paradigmatically

generic ("Genre" 27).

I part ways with Miller when she begins to

distinguish genres from the other categories in her

hierarchy of meaning, especially the forms of life.

According to Miller, grand categories like the

Aristotelian rhetorical genres "do not describe complete

44 situation types that recur today— they are too general"

("Genre" 37). Instead, these original genres should be reclassified as forms of life within which the situation types develop that give rise to true genres.

Unfortunately, I find no dividing line here that lets us know how specific a situation type must be before it is suitably labeled a genre. The history of Western rhetorical theory suggests that rhetorical categorization of all sorts can become an end in itself, and that

"subgenres" and "subsubgenres" have sometimes been described in order to show the relationships between one genre and another. Perhaps I have not read Miller's essay carefully enough, but I do not understand why "forensic" is vacuous enough to be a form of life, while "ransom note" provides the situational detail needed to constitute a genre. Rather than accepting this analytic distinction,

I recommend that we use the generic label for any category that gives us useful trans-contextual guidance when rhetorical production and criticism are of interest.

While genre does not refer to just any old category in my system, it can refer to more than Miller would allow.

To summarize my response to this first objection concerning definitional vagueness, I believe that definitional vagueness in the identification of genres is inevitable. If a category useful in rhetorical production

45 and/or criticism is labeled a genre, however large or

small that category might be, I will not object as long as

that genre encompasses multiple idioms of discourse.

Scholars undoubtedly will continue to give preference to

traditional genres, since those genres already have such a

hold on our thinking. However, neither tradition nor neat

hierarchies provide a good basis on which to restrict the

definition of genre. Moreover, while describing a

category as a subgenre may tell us something about its

relationship to other genres, status as a subgenre will

not alter the relationship of that genre to the idioms

that adhere to it. While a subgenre might be described as

such for practical or pedagogical purposes, it will

function no differently than any other genre.

A second objection might concern slippages in the terms I use to describe a revised genre theory. In the following chapters, I use terms like "principle," norm," and "convention" as synonyms, although subtle differences between these terms have been charted with great care by

rules theorists like Susan B. Shimanoff. For example,

"convention" suggests a neutral description, while

"principle" and "norm" intimate judgment or evaluation. I recognize that distinctions can be parsed between these terms, and I request some indulgence when I elide them. I will distinguish rules, expressed as propositions, from

46 the principles, norms, and conventions encapsulated in those propositions.

Finally, the irony inherent in revising genre theory is considerable: Just as one cannot get beyond one's own humanity to study human behavior, one cannot escape generic constraints to recast genre theory. Like most dissertations, this project is written in accordance with academic conventions for form, as dictated by the Graduate

School and my committee members, and content. as in the requirement that I submit evidence for any claim that an academic reader would consider controversial. In working to recommend a new understanding of genre from "inside" genre, I have no privileged perspective on my subject matter. I only can hope that Giambattista Vico's eighteenth-century axiom regarding history, that history

"cannot be more certain than when he [or she] who creates the things also narrates them" (104), holds true for the adherent to generic conventions who also tinkers with the received understanding of those conventions.

Doing Rhetorical Criticism

Criticism consists in driving this thought out of hiding and trying to change it: showing that things are not as obvious as we might believe, doing it in such a way that what we accept as going without saying no longer goes without

47 saying. To criticize is to render the too-easy gestures difficult.

Michel Foucault (1982)^^

Criticism, broadly defined, is the predominant

humanistic approach to the explication of empirical data,

so that talk about how to do film criticism, literary

criticism, and social criticism abounds in many academic

circles. For several decades, rhetorical critics have

labored to explain how various texts, including but not

limited to what Northrop Frye called "non-literary prose,"

encourage specific responses by auditors. This

understanding of rhetorical criticism as inextricably

connected to audience (if not necessarily the immediate

audience) has not disappeared, although actual audiences

are now understood by rhetoricians and communication scholars as active participants in the making of meaning.

While conceptions of purpose and method in rhetorical criticism have changed radically over the years, audience has remained a part of the e q u a t i o n . psychological, sociological, and economic influences on public opinion, electoral behavior, and individual belief systems are perceived by rhetorical critics as insufficient to explain the formation and evolution of those phenomena; the discourse to which we are exposed also is understood as

influencing auditors.

48 Even in literary studies, students of genre long have maintained that evaluating genre requires a rhetorical consciousness. For example, Northrop Frye maintains that the "basis of generic criticism . . . is rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established between the poet and his [or her] public"

(247). Four decades after Frye, Aviva Freedman and Peter

Medway's edited collection. Genre and the New Rhetoric. reaffirms the importance of rhetoric for studies of genre by English and composition scholars. Since genre theory is fundamentally intertwined with audience perceptions of the existence of such genres, a rhetorical approach to revising genre theory seems reasonable on its face.

One generic expectation in writing a dissertation is that the doctoral candidate will explain her or his research design. The next two sections deal briefly with purpose and method in rhetorical criticism as they pertain to this study.

Purpose

Rhetorical critics have different reasons for performing rhetorical criticism. First, criticism may isolate ideas or themes in discourse that have historical importance. This variety of criticism is pursued with the intent of contributing to intellectual history.Second,

49 criticism may contribute to knowledge about rhetorical

theory. Such "theorist-critics," to borrow Roderick P.

Hart's label ("Theory-Building" 71), study their artifacts

to learn more about how rhetoric does work in the world.

Third, rhetorical criticism may contribute to knowledge of

the rhetorical artifact under investigation. Such

criticism argues for the intrinsic merit of knowing more

about a specific text or texts, leading to the

construction of what David Zarefsky calls "a theory of the

particular case" ("State" 22).

I argued above for the revision of generic theories

of rhetoric, which makes my commitment to rhetorical

theory-building rather obvious. My argument about how

genre works in rhetoric goes beyond the Klan; genre theory

has implications for many rhetorical artifacts and

critical investigations. Also, my analysis of the Ku Klux

Klan will span nine decades and a wide array of artifacts,

and the study will not exhibit the documentary

thoroughness one would expect from a rhetorical history of

the Ku Klux Klan. However, as I also indicated above, my

choice of Klan discourse, instead of the rhetorics

produced by the anti-Masonic movement, the 1996 presidential candidates, or the myriad of other artifacts

available to me, was deliberate. While this dissertation

is clearly about option two— building rhetorical theory—

50 most critics cannot avoid addressing all three of these possibilities— intellectual history, rhetorical theory, specific case— in any given critical endeavor. Criticism of the Klan has implications for genre theory in this project, but I cannot avoid making claims about the rhetoric of racism or the rhetorical history of the Ku

Klux Klan in these chapters.^®

Moreover, an ethically neutral rhetorical criticism is difficult for me to imagine. In communication studies, the "ideological criticism" debates of the early 1980s produced conclusions parallel to those reached in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (see

Campbell, "Response"; Hill; Wander); criticism cannot help but propound an ideology, whether the critic ignores her acceptance of a given set of political principles or self- ref lexively acknowledges those principles.Ideological awareness is particularly important in studies of genre, since, as discussed above, many scholars complain that genres exert a conservative influence, encouraging rhetors to rely on venerable rules for invention rather than striking out in new directions. As a practical matter, revisioning genre theory is inseparable from asking questions about the discursive resources that individual genres provide to actors in the lifeworld. Learning more about Klan rhetoric will teach us to resist the Klan's

51 social and political agenda more effectively, and revising genre theory is part of this political project.

In this dissertation, I take as my model an exemplary criticism produced by Kenneth Burke. Burke's famous essay on "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'" told us about the rhetorical strategy of scapegoating, but Burke did not apologize for his political purpose in writing this essay;20

Here is the testament of a man [i.e.. Hitler] who swung a great people into his wake. Let us watch it carefully; . . . let us try also to discover what kind of "medicine" this medicine man has concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America. . . . Hitler found a panacea, a "cure for what ails you," a "snakeoil," that made such sinister unifying possible within his own nation. And he was helpful enough to put his cards face up on the table, that we might examine his hands. Let us, then, for God's sake, examine them. (164-165)

In the same way, whatever the value of my revision genre theory or of my own theory of rhetorical imbrication, I hope to offer simultaneously an explanation of Klan rhetoric with immediate practical import. To extend Burke's medical metaphor vis-à-vis Hitler, my hope is that this dissertation assists with the formulation of a vaccine or an antidote to the virus that is the rhetoric of white racism. After all, the recent political success of former Klan leader David Duke in Louisiana suggests

52 that principles associated with the Klan have not lost their allure for some audiences.

At the fourth biennial Public Address Conference, held on the campus of Indiana University on October 14-16,

1994, Roderick P. Hart argued in a keynote address that rhetorical theorists do not know enough about the rhetoric of hate. While this study is centered on the revision of genre theory, my efforts should also contribute to a theory of the case where the Klan's rhetoric of hatred and exclusion is concerned. I see no other alternative for critical practice where the production of "socially as well as intellectually responsible" criticism of the Klan is concerned (Nilsen 178).

Method and Anti-Method.

An easy assumption to make about a dissertation subtitled "A Study of Genre . . ." is that "generic criticism" provides the methodological guidance for the project, just as my subject matter makes this dissertation susceptible to characterization as a social movement study.21 However, the typical genre studies outlined by

Sonja K. Foss (Rhetorical Criticism. Ch. 4; see also

Jackson Harrell and Wil A. Linkugel) involve description of a new or previously misunderstood genre or conclusions about specific rhetorical artifacts based on extant

53 generic categories. Since my intention is to reconceive genre theory itself, this project is a genre study only in the loosest sense of the phrase. Also, citing numerous examples, Campbell and Jamieson have argued that "a concern with form and genre does not prescribe a critical methodology. . . . In short, generic analysis is an available critical option regardless of the critical perspective that one cherishes" ("Form" 27).

As any review of criticism textbooks or readers will illustrate, there are many different ways to conceptualize rhetorical criticism. The current orthodoxy among rhetorical critics favors critical pluralism, where any methodological orientation that yields insightful results is tolerated. This situation is fortuitous, since spelling out a critical method that would satisfy traditional natural or social scientific concerns would be difficult (i.e., replicability, reliability). What would a description of method sufficient to capture the critical process look like? After all, criticism often depends on a late-night inspiration or sudden flash of insight that eludes methodological description. At best, where method is concerned, critics could aspire to reciting in detail the evolution of their thought processes in coming to a thesis, as a few legal realists have recommended for the

54 analysis of judicial decision-making. Consider the

following passage from A. E. Housman:

Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon— beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life— I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once. (qtd. in Wimsatt and Beardsley 434)

In this passage, method becomes a final, mundane accounting for the process leading up to the task of writing— in this case, the task of writing poetry. In the quest for completeness, one could imagine a poet (or critic) who takes this approach a step further, noting the brand of the beer consumed, the humidity and mean temperature experienced during the walk, and so on. Even at this descriptive extreme, we would not learn much about how to perform criticism, let alone discover how to replicate a given critical accomplishment. In the end, such a descriptive account provides us with some vulgar insights into the day-to-day experiences of an accomplished author or critic. But such an account leaves the auditor no closer to performing criticism as Matthew

Arnold, Kenneth Burke, Celeste Michelle Condit, or other critics of acknowledged skill would assess a literary or rhetorical artifact.

55 Given this problem with describing method in

rhetorical criticism, I am tempted to follow the example

of several leading critics and scarcely mention method at all

(e.g., Black, "Gettysburg"; Browne, "Encountering"). Such

silence on my part might be read as suggesting that method

questions are not as important as they once were to

rhetorical critics. Alternatively, such silence might be

read as implying that method in critical work usually

cannot be summarized neatly in a section labeled "method."

Even in the 1950s and 1960s, when the popular adulation of

science became almost a kind of worship in the United

States, critics like Edwin Black continued to maintain

that the character of the critic was different from that

of a scientist, since the critic's educative function and

proclivity to both description and judgment went beyond

the narrow aims of traditional science (Black, Rhetorical

Criticism. Ch. 1). From this point of view, the primary

criterion for external validation of criticism is

intersubiective. so that a critique is successful when its

auditors exclaim: "This not only tells me something I

hadn't observed previously in this artifact, but it also makes better sense to me than many other readings of this

artifact that might be offered."

Of course, while silence is a phrase, as Lyotard would say, silence may be read in many different ways.

56 While I would have no complaints about the interpretations suggested in the previous paragraph, other, perhaps more parsimonious readings (e.g., the doctoral candidate who wrote this dissertation is lazy and/or a sloppy scholar), also are possible when one argues from silence. For me, another, safer option is to explain in a tidy sentence that my dissertation will rely on a "close reading" of various Ku Klux Klan artifacts. But such a claim does not give us much clarity. Celeste Condit already has told us that close reading has "since the passing of neo-

Aristotelianism, formed the core of rhetorical criticism"

(Condit, "Rhetorical" 331). If Edwin Black, Sonja Foss,

Roderick Hart, Michael Leff, and Michael Calvin McGee all share a commitment to close reading, then the label does not tell us much, given the wide array of critical strategies and presuppositions employed by these rhetoricians. At most, "close reading" suggests that the critic is focusing her or his attention on the text in some way, rather than, for example, providing an author- or speaker-centered rhetorical biography.

The best description of my orientation to criticism in these pages comes from a metaphor used by Stanley Fish to describe his practice as a "reader-response critic."^2

Fish maintains that reader-response criticism (hereafter,

RRC) involves "an analysis of developing responses of the

57 reader in relation to the words as they succeed one

another in time" (Fish, Self 387-388). Fish describes the practice of RRC with a camera metaphor:

Essentially what the method does is slow down the reading experience so that "events" one does not notice in normal time, but which do occur, are brought before our analytical attentions. It is as if a slow-motion camera with an automatic stop action effect were recording our linguistic experiences and presenting them to us for viewing. (Self 389)

This passage reveals the potential value of a linear reading of a text, rather than an exclusively thematic explication of the text. Admittedly, the method and the metaphor describing it seem better suited to a single-text study than to a larger collection of rhetorical artifacts.

However, Fish never argues that his system is limited to a straightforward, start-to-finish, line-by-line-by-god exposition of an artifact, and his own criticism does not suggest that he operates under such a constraint.

Moreover, rather than performing a close reading with the intent of admiring the dexterity of a skilled rhetor or the elegance of a rhyme scheme. Fish's audience-centered critic looks for clues concerning how a text structures the reading (or hearing) experience for a u d i t o r s . ^3 RRC does not dissolve the text, but it does scrutinize the text for the purpose of learning something about the likely audience response to this text.^*

58 To summarize my critical approach to the Klan in this

dissertation, I assume that Klan and anti-Klan rhetors

have produced texts that suggest a certain preferred

reading for auditors. This preferred reading is what

Stuart Hall would once have called the "dominant-hegemonic

position," in which the decoding of messages by auditors

approximates the desired interpretation of the encoder.

Undoubtedly, different audiences are apt to do different things with these texts, including the possibility of

Hall's "negotiated" or "oppositional" decoding. I am not able to take the subject position of a rural, white

Indiana male of 1922 to determine in any final, authoritative sense how he would read a Klan pamphlet.

However, as a critic I would hope to discern, out of a limited number of plausible readings, which readings are most likely and more or less supported by the textual and contextual evidence. All critics can do is submit their work to public scrutiny. The response of their peers, students, and, in a few cases, a larger audience may be the best indicator of the success of any specific critical endeavor.25

Conclusion

As suggested previously, I have adopted a broad understanding of Ku Klux Klan rhetoric that extends beyond

59 speeches and essays attributed to Klan leaders. In

addition to these Klan-identified artifacts, I also

examine texts that predate the rise of the twentieth-

century Klan, as well as some texts that explicitly reject

Klan ideology, politics, and/or violence. The artifacts

represented in these chapters admittedly vary considerably

in terms of style. Moreover, while some literary efforts

traditionally are said to transcend their original time

and audience, these texts do not do so. While necessarily

influenced by history, they are marked as products of a particular time and place and as responses to the

exigencies of specific rhetorical situations.

Despite the decades separating these artifacts, these chapters are thematically unified in two ways. First, with the exception of Chapter Six, each artifact makes explicit reference to the Ku Klux Klan as either a historical or contemporary phenomenon. While these artifacts were not selected on the basis of representativeness (beyond my initial intuition that they would share more than mere references to the Klan), they suggest many of the ideas associated with the Ku Klux Klan over the course of the twentieth century. Second, each artifact in some way points to the intersection of talk about the Ku Klux Klan with some other genre of discourse, whether utopian, religious, or feminist. I understand

60 each chapter as adding some proposition or tenet to a

larger theory of rhetorical imbrication and a revised

understanding of genre.

The dissertation is organized into seven chapters.

Chapters Two through Six provide separate case studies,

arranged chronologically.

Chapter Two offers a critical exploration of Thomas

Dixon's popular novel The Clansman (1905), which inspired

D. W. Griffith's epic film. Birth of a Nation. Other

Dixon works, including The Leopard's Spots (1902) and some

non-fictional efforts, are used to demonstrate the utility

of a rhetorical perspective for considering The Clansman.

I argue in this chapter that The Clansman is an exemplar of utopian literature that joins literary realism and the sentimental style. The chapter describes key terms for a

Lyotardian theory of genre (e.g., phrase regimen, idiom) and concludes with a distinction that I posit between

idioms and meta-idioms of discourse in rhetoric and public address.

Chapter Three compares sermons delivered by two pro-

Klan ministers in Monroe, Louisiana in the early 1920s.

This chapter will map the points of overlap and intersection between Ku Klux Klan discourse and one version of evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity. This

61 mapping will provide the foundation for an initial

statement of a theory of rhetorical imbrication.

Chapter Four continues the discussion of Klan

Christianity. In this case, the response of W. E. B. Du

Bois to the Ku Klux Klan suggests how the "other" should

be treated in political deliberation. Also, this chapter

demonstrates the limits of "strong situationalism" in

genre theory and, conseguently, shows the merits of a

rule-based approach to genre theory and criticism.

In Chapter Five, I contrast essays written by a 1920s

Klan leader, Hiram Wesley Evans, with the efforts of some

feminist scholars who currently are retheorizing emotion as either a kind of reason or as a complement to reason.

The superficial similarity of these contemporary theoretical efforts to the Klan valorization of emotion and critique of reason suggests again how different idioms of discourse can overlap in surprising ways.

Chapter Six moves from the 1920s to the contemporary era. In this chapter, I examine the campaign rhetoric of former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who won election as a

Louisiana State Representative in 1989 and received a surprisingly large number of votes in two statewide

Louisiana elections in 1990 and 1991. Duke's adoption of evangelical, born-again Christianity aided him in the construction of a new ethos. Anti-historical tendencies

62 in late twentieth-century American life help to explain the ease with which Duke linked his one-time advocacy as a

Klan leader with Christian precepts to achieve popularity

among a sizable portion of the white Louisiana electorate.

This case study extends further the theory of rhetorical

imbrication suggested in earlier chapters by explaining the features of a "Klannish" genre.

Chapter Seven provides the peroration to my study of the twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan. Drawing on the arguments advanced in the previous chapters, this final chapter will detail the principles and propositions that together constitute a theory of rhetorical imbrication and a revised understanding of genre. The limitations of this theory also will be discussed. Finally, a summary of the

Ku Klux Klan rhetoric scrutinized in earlier chapters will provide some sense of the listening and reading experiences of Klan and anti-Klan audiences in the twentieth century, complete with my suggested responses to experiences with Klannishness in contemporary rhetoric.

The artifacts selected for critical scrutiny in this dissertation are diverse, and my choice of artifacts requires some explanation. In Chapters Two, Four, Five, and Six, I selected artifacts that received considerable attention at the time of their appearance; since they reached a significant number of auditors, they presumably

63 had the potential to exert substantial influence. Dixon's novels were very popular when first published, and, in

film form, most Klan historians consider The Clansman a major cause or catalytic event in the rise of the twentieth-century Klan. In Chapters Four and Five, what

is perhaps the best-known exchange between the 1920s Klan

leadership and Klan detractors (in the pages of the North

American Review) is examined. In Chapter Six, a David

Duke campaign film, shown repeatedly on television across the state in the days before the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial primary, is investigated because it presented Duke's "apology" for his one-time Klan activities to a large audience.

Given the concentration on the discourse of Klan leaders in other chapters. Chapter Three provides a partial corrective to this concentration, with its emphasis on the "vernacular" rhetoric of two minor Klan figures from the 1920s. Such vernacular rhetorics were crucial to the promotion of Klan ideology in various localities. Though most such rhetorics are no longer available to us, a few have been preserved in old newspapers and aging pamphlets. While I cannot know that the two texts examined here are representative of local

Klan rhetorics, they provide us with some guidance concerning how Klan ideas were passed along to ordinary

64 white citizens, especially among the Klan rank and file.

Since David Duke, the Klansman-turned-politician who I discuss in Chapter Six, has had his greatest success in

Louisiana, I chose artifacts from 1920s Louisiana to facilitate any comparisons between Chapters Three and Six that the reader might wish to make.

Throughout the twentieth century, the Ku Klux Klan has been a source of racist and sexist violence and excoriating attacks on those who do not fit the white,

Protestant, lOO-percent-American mold. The Klan has adapted and changed with the times and with local environments. Today, the Klan uses antipathy to the gay liberation movement, to affirmative action, to immigrants, and to feminism as recruiting tools. Overt racism may no longer sell quite so easily as in past decades, but Klan and Klan-inspired rhetors continue to use all "the available means of persuasion" to which they have access.

In addition to contributing to the revision of genre theory, this study should improve our ability to explain the rhetoric of hate and address our present inability to exorcise that rhetoric from civic discourse.

65 Notes

^ White Racism 161.

^ Since Robert Hariman's 1986 analysis of the status implications of generic classification, the Quarterly Journal of Speech has published only three essays with an explicit concern for genre theory (Campbell, "Gender"; Daughton; Lee and Campbell). Daughton's essay primarily considers Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural as diverging from conventional generic expectations for inaugural addresses.

^ As Michael Calvin McGee suggests, there is a risk in giving new life to the deeds of the Klan, rehearsing their deeds for another generation. As McGee explained concerning his criticism of a speech by Hitler,

This [criticism] can even have moral consequences, for I must be sensitive to what may result from keeping Hitler and his ilk "alive" by writing about them. Historians and critics can tell the dead villain's story and thereby become the witting or unwitting accomplices of evil. (McGee, "Against" 145)

Lest anyone think this concern an indicator of scholarly paranoia, one of David Duke's biographers explains that Duke's conversion to white racism occurred in the eighth grade when he conducted research for a civics term paper. His teacher allegedly assigned Duke the task of summarizing arguments against integration, which certainly was a timely topic in Louisiana in 1964 (Zatarain 76-82).

^ Defining rhetoric is an enterprise fraught with peril. No definition of rhetoric is apt to satisfy all rhetoricians; perhaps the only definitional feature on which all rhetoricians might agree is that rhetoric is not mere bombast or empty political drivel. Beyond this modest stipulation, definitions of rhetoric range from a rhetor's expressed intent to persuade to the use of signs to maintain and produce socially constructed realities. I suggest that my definition avoids the twin problems of discerning rhetor intention and assuming the existence of a coherent subject who produces texts. For example, the intent to persuade that Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin consider a mark of patriarchal rhetoric is not entailed in a definition of rhetoric that brackets the intention of the subject (though rhetors frequently claim to have such intentions).

66 My treatment of intention also allows for the possibility of reading naturally occurring phenomena as "text," a move suggested by some students of environmental rhetoric (e.g., David Gratis Williams 329-331). I concede that a critic might wish to ask questions about a rhetor's intention, if such questions will produce new insights about a rhetorical artifact. However, such post hoc exploration of intent comes without any expectation that anyone could have definitive access to the intent of actual, historical rhetors. Further, my definition makes possible the evaluation of the "rhetorical function" of texts that are purported to transcend the temporally bound audience concern of traditional rhetoric (e.g., art, literature). Such a rhetorical function does not exclude other modes of criticism, to the extent that literary or art criticism can be separated from the practice of rhetorical criticism. Throughout this dissertation, I use "rhetoric" and "discourse" as synonyms more often than I should. In no way do I wish to suggest that non-discursive rhetorics do not exist. For example, non-discursive artifacts treated by rhetorical critics in recent years include artist Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" (Foss, "Judy Chicago's") and composer John Corigliano's "Symphony No. 1" (Sellnow and Sellnow). Scholars like Foss ("Rhetorical") rightly have criticized the narrow focus of rhetorical theory on discursive rhetorics. For example, Klan violence also can be read as text, despite my tendency to separate "rhetoric" and "violence" throughout this study.

^ For example, chapters or units devoted to generic criticism appear in rhetorical criticism textbooks written by Bernard L. Brock, Robert L. Scott, and James Chesebro; Sonja Foss (Rhetorical Criticism); and Roderick P. Hart (Modern).

® These excerpts from Douglass's speech are taken from Ronald F. Reid (371-374). Kathleen M. Hall Jamieson came to similar conclusions about Charles Sumner's Fourth of July oration on "The True Grandeur of Nations" (1845), where Sumner used the occasion of the address to promote the pacifist cause (Jamieson, "Generic" 167). Different versions of Sumner's address are available (e.g., Sumner; see Donald 108-117). Examples of violation of generic expectations by rhetors who presumably intended to do so are not limited to previous centuries. Saul D. Alinsky's Rules for Radicals explain, often in colorful detail, how one can

67 transgress generic boundaries to embarrass governmental or corporate leaders.

^ Conley, "Ancient” 52-53.

® Excerpts from Debs's "Statement to the Court" are available in Andrews and Zarefsky (413-416). In a later essay, Conley charges Michael C. Leff and G. P. Mohrmann, along with Ware and Linkugel, with having performed "mechanical" generic criticisms (Conley, "Linnaean" 66). The charge is particularly startling when leveled against Leff and Mohrmann, given their public disdain for criticism not first and foremost dedicated to revealing the internal workings of specific texts. For example, see Mohrmann (270-273).

^ Lyotard's influence on communication scholarship has been growing in recent years, although treatment of his work sometimes is limited to tokenistic references to The Postmodern Condition. Both Maurice Charland ("Norms") and Kenneth R. Chase have made extensive use of Lyotard's work, but the newest version of the Matlon index lists no journal articles with a central focus on Lyotard's scholarship. Essays devoted to Lyotard are now common in literary and philosophical journals, with Diacritics and Philosophv Today devoting special issues to Lyotard's scholarship. A good introduction to Lyotard's work is found in Steven Best and Douglas Kellner's Postmodern Theorv (Ch. 5).

Richard Bernstein has catalogued the ways in which uses of the term "incommensurable" vary from scholar to scholar (see Bernstein 79-108). Lyotard's use of the word may not be consistent with its use by other scholars.

For example, Dana Cloud refers in one recent article to "the imbrication of discourse with power" (15).

Following S>^ren Kierkegaard, Shelby Steele has discussed the roles played by guilt and innocence in race relations. Steele has argued that innocence is related to power, so that those who can claim innocence are more apt to seek power over others, while those who perceive the other's claim of innocence as legitimate are more likely to assent to the other's bid for power over them. Steele appears to conceive of this innocence-power equation as a zero-sum game, with every gain in one person or group's innocence-power acquired because another person or group has lost innocence-power.

68 While I find Steele's theorizing of innocence quite useful, my own approach to innocence is somewhat different than his position. First, I am not convinced that innocence and power always can be equated; I understand this to be his position. While I am no orthodox Marxist, I do prefer an explanation of the innocence-power linkage that also can account for the effects of material conditions (e.g., unequal resource distribution) on the creation, distribution, and use of power. Second, as I hope to suggest, rejecting the presumption of innocence that some discourses currently enjoy is prefatory to embracing a rhetoric and politics of race consistent with a power-with orientation.

"Is It Really Important to Think?; An Interview" 34.

1^ Justifications for rhetorical criticism have been discussed at length in recent years. Representative essays include Black ("Note"), Darsey ("Must We"), Foss ("Criteria"), Hart ("Theory-Building," "Contemporary," "Doing"), Leff ("Interpretation"), Lucas ("Schism," "Renaissance"), and Zarefsky ("State").

1^ As opposed to the study of the history of rhetorical theory, Ernest J. Wrage enshrined this history- centered approach to rhetorical criticism and public address studies in 1947. Wrage's thesis was "that students of public address may contribute in substantial ways to the history of ideas" (453). In Wrage's view, public address scholars could assess the birth, growth, and decline of often-interrelated ideas expressed in speeches, as well as discerning the essence of those ideas as developed in texts typically intended for widespread public circulation. In other words, public address studies should center on ideas instead of rhetors. While enthusiasm for "rhetorical history" projects declined in the 1970s, some leading critics have argued for the rehabilitation of this justification for rhetorical scholarship. For example, David Zarefsky suggested in the late 1980s that "we need to revisit the idea of rhetorical biography" ("State" 26), and Martin J. Medhurst has defended his own work by explaining that "rhetorical history . . . is a project worth engaging" ("Robert" 505).

Since the 1960s, rhetorical theory-building has been the leading disciplinary justification for rhetorical criticism. Statements by scholars as diverse as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell ("Criticism"), Sonja K. Foss ("Criteria"),

69 and Roderick P, Hart ("Theory-Building," "Contemporary") affirm the central of theoretical contribution to the critical enterprise.

In defense of such studies, Stephen E. Lucas argued in 1988 that "the time has come to assert the intrinsic value of scholarship in American public address" ("Renaissance" 254). An excellent example of such a study is provided by James Darsey. In an essay on "Joe McCarthy's Fantastic Moment," Darsey takes as his primary purpose the explanation of "the mystery that is Joe McCarthy" ("McCarthy's" 66). Darsey's explanation of McCarthy's influence is grounded in McCarthy's considerable skills as a fantasist in an era amenable to fantastic visions. Darsey's bibliography indicates that he is theoretically informed vis-à-vis the fantastic, yet Darsey makes no effort to revise or extend theories of the fantastic, despite his own none-too-subtle expression of doubt about Ernest G. Hermann's work in this area. Instead, Darsey's criticism aims at producing a new and improved theory of the particular case of McCarthy.

Some scholars would argue that a contribution to theory is not required of an otherwise-worthwhile case study. James R. Andrews maintains that "atheoretical historical studies provide less tainted information with which theorists can subsequently deal" ("History" 276). Here, Andrews is advocating a case-study-centered approach to criticism, where by "atheoretical" he means that the critic does not impose a set of a priori expectations on a rhetorical artifact or artifacts. James Darsey takes a similar position in his response to Roderick P. Hart's social-scientific agenda for rhetorical criticism:

Why should we not expect great themes to be built as mosaics, out of tiny pieces of individually colored tile? The creation of the mosaic is not the responsibility of the makers of the tessera. The writer of the individual essay, like the maker of tiles, is obligated . . . to tell us something worthwhile, . . . something that increases our understanding and facilitates our functioning in the world . . . . Hart, on the other hand, seems to require that every study suggest its own generalizability, adumbrate its own mosaic. (Darsey, "Must We" 176).

Despite this complaint, the more common choice for critics is to suggest the implications of their case

70 studies for rhetorical theory. For example, Darsey's essay on Eugene V. Debs draws conclusions about prophetic ethos on the basis of his reading of Debs's life and work as a text (Darsey, "Legend").

I do not wish to suggest here that Campbell is in agreement with Wander on the subject of ideological criticism. According to Campbell, "I find the term 'ideology' a troublesome starting point for scholarly controversy because Marxian polemics have given it such intense connotations that whatever other meanings it might have had are overwhelmed by them" ("Response" 126).

Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop seem to agree with my assessment of Burke's criticism. In the opening paragraph of a lengthy essay, they note that "Burke's study [of Hitler] is compelling because it indicts Hitler's rhetoric; it challenges the voice of oppression, villainy, martyrdom, and demagoguery in Mein Kampf" (19). Whatever the virtues of Burke's theoretical contributions in his classic study of Hitler, I suggest that the reader is just as likely to remember Burke's ethical response to Hitler— in an essay written in the 1930s— as to recall his elegant explanation of the process of scapegoating.

Consider Griffin's 1952 definition of historical movements, which suits the 1920s Klan quite nicely:

Let us say that an historical movement has occurred when, at some time in the past: 1. men [sic] have become dissatisfied with some aspect of their environment; 2. they desire change— social, economic, political, religious, intellectual, or otherwise— and desiring change, they make efforts to alter their environment; 3. eventually, their efforts result in some degree of success or failure; the desired change is, or is not, effected; and we may say that the historical movement has come to its termination. ("Rhetoric" 184)

J. Justin Gustainis has argued for a combination of genre and social movement criticism, contending that "the generic approach to the rhetoric of social movements may make it easier for us to understand, and explain, how that particular kind of persuasion operates in society" (257). Gustainis takes this position because he believes that genre might provide the basis for a rhetorical definition of movements, rather than a typical sociological definition of such movements. In contrast, Simons

71 contends that studies of social movements will help in revising genre theory to account more effectively for the rhetoric of collectivities (Simons, "Genres"). Despite this possible linkage between genre and movements criticism, my efforts here not substantively influenced by social movement theory. Further, I do not see my theoretical conclusions as applying uniquely to social movement theory. This non-reliance on movement theory for rhetorical criticism of movements is not atypical among movement students, if Suzanne Volmar Riches and Malcolm 0. Sillar's conclusions still apply today. Michael Calvin McGee ("Phenomenon," "Meaning") and David Zarefsky ("Skeptical") both have questioned whether social movement rhetoric should be considered a distinct genre of discourse. According to Zarefsky, "[w]hat is true of movement studies may be true of other types as well; that we have created constructs and rhetorical categories prematurely, and on an a priori basis rather than as an outgrowth of historical research" (Zarefsky, "Skeptical" 253).

See Steven Mailloux's Interpretive Conventions for a literature review of scholars associated in one way or another with the theory and practice of reader-response criticism. Mailloux includes a discussion of the evolution of Fish's thought. My own assessment of Fish is dependent on three collections of his publications: Self- Consuming Artifacts (1972), Is There a Text in this Class? (1980), and Doing What Comes Naturally (1989). In this dissertation, I will make no pretense of providing "pure" exempla of the critical practice that Fish now endorses. I am as much influenced by Self-Consuming Artifacts as by his later works, despite the fact that Fish subsequently rejected much that he published at that time. Despite Condit's contention that audience studies have garnered the attention of rhetorical scholars, explicit treatment of Fish's work is relatively rare in communication. Stephen E. Lucas makes reference to Fish's work ("Renaissance"), as has one of Lucas's students, Amy R. Slagell. The only extended treatment of Fish's theories in a Speech Communication Association journal is Nathan Stucky, Paul Gray, and Linda Park-Fuller's examination of Fish's notion of affective stylistics.

Throughout the appendix to Self-Consuming Artifacts, Fish refers to reader-response criticism as a method, as when he claims that "[i]n its operation, my method will be radically historical" (407). However, not twenty pages later, he declares that

72 . . . strictly speaking, it [reader-response criticism] is not a method at all, because neither its results nor its skills are transferable. Its results are not transferable because there is no fixed relationship between formal features and response (reading has to be done every time); and its skills are not transferable because you can't hand it over to someone and expect him at once to be able to use it. (It is not portable.) It is, in essence, a language-sensitizing device .... (Self 425).

However controversial Fish's epistemology and ontology, his refusal to remove the skills and perceptiveness of the individual critic from the critical equation are consistent with statements on criticism made by several rhetoricians over the years.

Pamela L. Caughie reminds us that reader-response critics, including Fish, all too often advance theories of reading "based on the hypothesis of a male reader" (318). The charge that Fish's reader is presumptively male is of great concern to me. In critical practice, the critic easily can slip into the trap of assuming that she or he adequately represents all other readers, what Linda Alcoff calls the "problem of speaking for others." While I will take up the problem of otherness in Klan and anti-Klan discourse in Chapter Four, my aim as a critic is always to remember that I cannot speak for all other readers, although I will suggest that any politically engaged criticism must sometimes require advancing tentative hypotheses about the others' reading experience.

Celeste Condit provides an example of a critic's response, in this instance one of disagreement, to Michael Leff and Andrew Sach's reading of Edmund Burke's Bristol speech. According to Condit, "I do not mean to imply that Leff and Sachs are incorrect about the linkages they isolate. Instead, I suggest that their analysis is incomplete in ways that make it inaccurate as an account of the speech as a whole" (334). Her subsequent analysis of Burke's speech suggests the kind of critical dialogue that can and should take place when important conclusions about theory and/or important texts are at stake.

73 CHAPTER 2

THOMAS DIXON'S THE CLANSMAN:

THE LITERARY RE-MEMBERING OF SOUTHERN UTOPIA

What does Civilization owe to the negro? Nothing! Nothing!! Nothing!! !

Tom Watson (1905)^

In his classic monograph, The Strange Career of Jim

Crow. C. Vann Woodward documented the long period of uncertain race relations in the former Confederate states following the U.S. Civil War, when whites and blacks struggled to determine how, if at all, former slaves and their progeny would be integrated into the social and political life of the South. Even after the end of

Reconstruction, African-American participation in Southern politics continued to some degree, and social segregation of whites and African Americans was by no means universal.

Yet, by 1900, a virulent white supremacy had triumphed throughout the South, and Jim Crow laws, including those effectively disenfranchising African Americans, had been

74 enacted or soon would be. How was this retreat from the

Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments accomplished? What

could cause the former Agrarian and Populist leader Tom

Watson, quoted above, to make such a hostile claim vis-à-

vis African Americans?

In Chapter One, I asserted that events in the polis

cannot be explained entirely by retreating to

psychological, sociological, and economic causes of any

given set of effects. In addition to these concerns, the

public and private choices that we make, to the extent

that "public" and "private" can be separated, are both

constrained and enabled by the rhetorical milieu in which we operate, the discourse that surrounds us. Given my thesis in this chapter— that the success of white racism at various times in the United States has been made possible by the imbrication of seemingly incommensurable discourses in a single idiom, with attendant implications for genre theory— I wish to begin my study of the twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan ten years before the founding of the second Klan on Georgia's Stone Mountain, when the final codification of racial separation in the

South was not yet complete. The year 1905 saw the publication of a novel that that bears at least some of the blame for the misery inflicted by members of the twentieth-century Klan. This novel provides my first

75 example of rhetorical imbrication promoting white racism.

Briefly, my conclusions suggest that any fixed system of genres will not do justice to the mutability and continuing evolution of rhetorics in the lifeworld.

Whenever lists of the cinematic canon are produced by film scholars, D. W. Griffith's early masterpiece. Birth of a Nation. invariably is placed on such lists.

Griffith's first film has received no shortage of academic attention. Not only was this 1915 epic a remarkable technical accomplishment, but those studying the Ku Klux

Klan have devoted considerable time and effort to chronicling the use of the film by William Joseph Simmons as a recruiting tool for launching the twentieth-century

Ku Klux Klan (e.g., MacLean, Behind 6, 12-13; Wade 119-

1 4 8 ).2 Given the academic attention paid to Birth of a

Nation, one would expect that the novel (and the play based on it) that inspired the movie also would receive some critical scrutiny. Yet Thomas Dixon's The Clansman. despite its enormous popularity at the time of its initial publication in 1905, often is relegated to a footnote whenever a new study of Griffith's film or the Ku Klux

Klan appears.3

While Griffith's film deserves considerable infamy for inspiring the second Klan, Thomas Dixon also should bear much of the responsibility, despite his public

76 opposition to the 1920s Klan.* Throughout most of his

lifetime, Dixon was an unrepentant racist. Two of the

fortunes he lost during his life were built on novels, plays, and movies that celebrated Anglo-Saxon racial

superiority and excoriated African Americans. In a recent monograph, Kenneth W. Warren notes that he was compelled to read Dixon's novels as "document[s] in the history of

American racism" (140), while James Kinney argues that

"Thomas Dixon, the old evangelist, mounted his pulpit and became minister to an age" in his repeated and fervent efforts to warn Caucasians of the dangers of miscegenation and the perils of social equality between the races

(Kinney, "Rhetoric" 153; see Kinney, Amalgamation 164-

180). Theodore L. Gross goes even further, contending that Dixon was, in his day, the "most reactionary apologist of slavery and the [nineteenth-century] Ku Klux

Klan" (78).

Given these conclusions, the temptation to dismiss

Dixon's novels as boorish exemplars of the rhetoric of racism— and glaringly obvious examples to boot— is considerable. For example, Durant Da Ponte indicates that although Dixon's books "enjoyed tremendous sales," they were dismissed as by the literary journals of Dixon's day as "crude, melodramatic, vulgar, and artistically

77 worthless. No one reading them today would quarrel with

these judgments" (1 5 ).^

I will not dispute this interpretation: If Dixon's

The Clansman does not illustrate the rhetoric of racism,

there is no such rhetoric. Dixon's repeated use of this

rhetoric in a poorly written historical novel is, by

itself, neither intrinsically nor theoretically

interesting from a rhetorical perspective. Sterling Brown

was right six decades ago when he dismissed The Clansman

as "another hymn of hate" (Brown 94). However, I wish to

suggest a reading that supplements this first impression

of Dixon's novel, without contradicting that impression in

any way.

In addition to exemplifying the rhetoric of racism,

Thomas Dixon's The Clansman participates in what John

Rodden calls the "utopian imagination." In The Clansman.

Dixon's description of post-Civil War Reconstruction

suggests a dystopic social and political order that was

overthrown by the determined action of racially unified

Anglo-Saxons. The negation of this dystopia also

adumbrates Dixon's vision of utopia, where Aryans North

and South unite to protect their racial heritage and, more

specifically, the virtue of Caucasian women. When coupled with Dixon's stylistic choices, this emphasis on both

78 utopie and dystopic visions does much to explain the

peculiar importance of this dreary novel.

Beyond arguing, however unenthusiastically, for the

inclusion of The Clansman in bibliographies of utopian and

dystopian fiction, I believe that Dixon's fusing of

literary genres of sentimentalism and realism in pursuit

of a utopian racist imaginary suggests a means for

constructing a theory of rhetorical imbrication, where

discourse constitutes and is constituted by fragments of

other discourses. More specifically, the rules governing

the production of a rhetorical artifact may be borrowed in

part or in whole from other texts. I examine Jean-

Francois Lyotard's theory of the différend. with its

emphasis on the incommensurability of differing idioms of

discourse, as a way to understand more completely the

rhetorical imbrication of realism and romanticism in

Dixon's novel.

In this chapter, I begin by examining the historical

and cultural conditions that led to the writing of The

Clansman. Next, I concentrate on the text itself,

including the relevant similarities between The Clansman

and other rhetorical artifacts produced by Dixon. My

analysis focuses on (1) the novel's utopian and dystopian themes and (2) the fusion of literary genres in the work.

79 I conclude by discussing the implications of this investigation for rhetorical imbrication and genre theory.

The Reconstructing of Reconstruction

The history of the Reconstruction era, which began in the South soon after the Civil War and finally fell apart in 1877, has been contested throughout the twentieth century. One version of this history depicts

Reconstruction as a failure in securing the political and civil rights of African Americans, with ineluctable white

Southern opposition to the expansion of African-American civil and economic rights, African-American political inexperience, and eventual Republican and Northern indifference to the "race question" combining to explain this failure.

An example of this revisionist history is provided by Mary Francis Berry and John W. Blassingame, who argue that African-American participation in Southern politics was remarkably successful in the Reconstruction era, given the adverse conditions that they faced.^ Earlier histories of this sort, with their sympathetic portrayal of African Americans during Reconstruction, include W. E.

B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and

Marxist historian James S. Allen's Reconstruction ; The

Battle for Democracy (1937), though revisionism did not

80 prosper until after the Second World War (Eaton).? The Ku

Klux Klan, as detailed in an 1872 Congressional report and

reported by Du Bois and other revisionist historians, was

one of the most formidable obstacles to improving

conditions for the newly emancipated slaves, given the murders, beatings, and threats attributed to this secret society (see Foner 425-444; Wade).

In contrast, an alternative perspective, common in much traditional historiography before the civil rights movement of the 1960s (and essentially unchallenged until the 1930s), is more closely aligned with the position taken by Dixon in The Clansman and many of his other novels. This perspective suggests that the primary victims of Reconstruction were Southern whites, who were terrorized by unscrupulous Northern carpetbaggers.

Southern white "scalawag" collaborators, and their

African-American dupes. From this viewpoint, Radical

Republicans gave political power to unqualified former slaves while denying self-government to the white citizens most qualified to lead the impoverished Southern states.

Traditionalists like Francis A. Shoup could maintain in

1893 that "African domination" of Caucasians during

Reconstruction was overthrown because "the higher laws of nature prevailed and the white blood worked its way to the top" (103). This traditionalist portrayal has been called

81 the "old-school picture of Reconstruction" by C. Vann

Woodward (American 277).®

Whether professional historians or social commentators, adherents to this traditional position insisted that, if left to themselves. Southern whites and former slaves would get along quite nicely. Over fifty years after the end of Reconstruction, Madison Grant, a leading Northern apologist for Jim Crow, still could insist that "Southerners understand how to treat the

Negro-— with firmness and with kindness— and the Negroes are liked below the Mason and Dixon line so long as they keep to their proper relation to the Whites ..." (282-

283). The nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan is given a much gentler treatment in this version of Reconstruction history, with Klan violence defended as a necessary evil required to defend white Southern culture against misguided former slaves and their corrupters.^ From this perspective, Klan violence was overemphasized by

Reconstruction proponents. Instead, the Klan was necessary to combat the corruption and lawlessness characteristic of the Reconstruction state governments and the "Negro domination" they represented.

This traditional depiction of Reconstruction was not unique to Dixon and a few white Southern historians and public intellectuals. Southern novelists in the late

82 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a

sympathetic depiction of the white Southern cause

following the Civil War. Less than a decade after the end

of Reconstruction, N. J. Floyd's Thorns in the Flesh

(1884) claimed on the title page that Reconstruction was

"A PATH OF THORNS over which Carpetbaggers— unfitted for

such authority— led the captive South.” Floyd intended

that his novel would vindicate the South, since ”[t]he

South has been virtually silent for twenty years

respecting the slanders that have been and are heaped upon

her by every type of the radical Puritan notoriety-seeker

o . .” (6). While far less blunt about her intent to defend the South, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind portrayed the Ku Klux Klan with some sympathy, and her depiction of the Reconstruction period consistently

favored white Southerners.Given Margaret Mitchell's admiration for Thomas Dixon's novels, we should not be surprised that the South of Gone with the Wind has much in common with the South of The Clansman.

Mitchell's familiarity with Dixon's novels is not particularly surprising, since The Leopard's Spots (1902),

The Clansman (1905), and several other Dixon books were phenomenal sales successes in their day. Raymond Allen

Cook, Dixon's principal biographer, reports that Dixon's first novel. The Leopard's Spots. sold over one million

83 copies and appeared in several foreign translations, and

The Clansman was an even greater commercial triumph (see

Cook, Fire 1 1 0 -1 3 4 ) . while largely forgotten today,

Dixon's popular standing in the first two decades of the century practically guaranteed the financial success of anything he produced. His fame was further enhanced by the large crowds who paid to see his plays and, of course, by the enormous number of auditors who eventually viewed

Birth of a Nation. Praise for his efforts included the frequent assertion by favorable reviewers that one or more of Dixon's books had equaled or surpassed Harriet Beecher

Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. a standard to which every novelist aspired in Dixon's era. As late as 1957, Frances

Oakes proclaimed that "The Clansman is not without historical merit and even today is a favorite with the reader attracted by the magnolia and moonlight school of

Southern literature" (333).

Dixon also had many detractors during his lifetime, notwithstanding the positive reactions of a Secretary of

State and two Southern governors to the stage version of

The Clansman. Dixon's father once told him that "you bore down a little too hard on the Negro" after seeing a production of The Clansman (qtd. in Cook, Fire 149), although Dixon's father went on to blame "[l]ow vicious white men" for the corruption of African Americans during

84 Reconstruction (149). Beyond this family criticism, Dixon

was sensitive to the charge that his novels and plays were

historically inaccurate. He once offered to bet a

newspaper editor $1,000 that a panel of judges appointed

by the American Historical Society would find his

theatrical version of The Clansman historically accurate.

(The editor declined Dixon's offer.) Beyond questions of

historical accuracy, Dixon maintained that his novels

provided a definitive statement concerning white Southern

opinion on questions of race and the history of

Reconstruction. In defending The Leopard's Spots. Dixon

claimed that he had "given voice to the deepest soul

convictions of those eighteen millions of our [Southern]

people on the gravest problem of the twentieth century"

(Dixon, "Answer" 538).

Despite his efforts at self-defense, many reviewers

at the turn of the century accused Dixon's novels and plays of stirring up racial strife. His plays attracted

record-breaking audiences throughout the nation, even where local newspapers uniformly denounced his work.

African-American intellectuals also called attention to

Dixon's racism. Kelly Miller, a professor at Howard

University, accused Dixon at different times of

"poison[ing] the mind and pollut[ing] the imagination"

(Miller, Race 54) and "assum[ing] omniscience without

85 taking the pains to acquire intelligence" (Miller,

Everlasting 120).

Novelists took Dixon to task as well. In what Cook

calls "the most elaborate attack upon Dixon in American

Negro fiction," Sutton E. Griggs "states that Dixon's

malice toward the Negro derived from the traditional

hatred of the Southern poor white for the Negro" (Cook,

Thomas Dixon 134). Griggs devoted a chapter of The

Hindered Hand (1905) to denouncing Dixon as an "inflamed

racial egotist" (218). In the third, revised edition of

The Hindered Hand,Griggs wrote about Dixon that

[t]he misguided soul ignored all of the good in the aspiring Negro; made every vicious off-shoot that he pictured typical of the entire race; presented all mistakes independent of their environments and provocations; ignored or minimized all the evil in the more vicious elements of whites; said and did all things which he deemed necessary to leave behind him the greatest heritage of hate the world has ever known. Humanity claims him not as one of her children. (qtd. in Cook, Fire 115)

Whether positive or negative, such strong reactions to

Dixon were not uncommon, notwithstanding his retort that there "was not a bitter or malignant sentence" in works

like The Leopard's Spots (Dixon, "Author" 538).

Finally, in addition to Dixon's works of fiction, he authored occasional magazine essays and appeared on his era's lucrative lecture circuit. A neo-Aristotelian rhetorical critic would find much to discuss concerning

86 Dixon's oratorical success as a minister in Boston and New

York prior to his earning fame as a novelist. Dixon's discourse often reveals the extent to which his novels were outlets for his ideas on race, feminism, and socialism. For example, much of one speech delivered by

Dr. Richard Cameron, a Dixon protagonist in The Clansman. appears almost verbatim under Dixon's own name in a 1905

lead article in the Saturday Evening Post, and the same speech is made again by one of Dixon's doppelgangers over three decades later in his last novel, The Flaming Sword

(1 9 3 9 ).14 Overall, Dixon consistently and persistently advanced his arguments about race in a variety of fora over a span of almost forty years.

Dixon's popularity at the turn of the century seems curious, given the progressivism of the era. James Kinney asserts that Dixon's attitude towards African Americans and his politics were inconsistent with fin de siècle optimism and reformism, while Maxwell Bloomfield contends that Dixon was a progressive in his own strange way, "a muckraker in all but name, specializing in the 'black peril' rather than 'Wall Street' or 'the demon rum'"

(Bloomfield 400). Bloomfield, like C. Vann Woodward, also argues that the flirtation with imperialism by the United

States at the time encouraged a renewed commitment to

Anglo-Saxon superiority among the white citizenry; this

87 commitment presumably led to Dixon's more radical stance

vis-à-vis African Americans.Whatever the source of and motives for his position, Dixon's vision of the South and his ideology of white racial supremacy and hard work

attracted a wide audience.

In the next section, I analyze the text of Dixon's

The Clansman. Since other Dixon novels contain similar themes, I take the The Clansman to be exemplary of positions that Dixon consistently articulated throughout his career as a novelist.

The Many Genres of The Clansman

"[B ]ut for the Black curse, the South would be to-day the garden of the world!" (Dixon, The Clansman 282).

In an oft-cited essay in rhetorical studies, Edwin

Black argues that, in addition to the author implied by a text, a "second persona," or implied audience, is called into being by that text. For Black, rhetoric constructs a normative ethos for the audience; "The critic can see in the auditor implied by a discourse a model of what the rhetor would have his [or her] real auditor become"

("Persona" 113).

From the perspective of the late twentieth century,

Dixon's novels deserve our contempt for their ethical

88 poverty; even a casual reading of The Clansman reveals

Dixon's affinity for a rhetoric of racism. Dixon

announced that "[m ]y books are hard reading for a Negro,"

while daring to proclaim that "the Negroes, in denouncing

them [his books], are unwittingly denouncing one of their

best friends" ("Washington" 1). Dixon makes this

pronouncement of friendship in the same essay in which he

asserts that African-American men desire most in life to

marry white women, that those of African descent have

contributed nothing to "human progress" as Dixon (like Tom

Watson) understands the term, and that African Americans

are not "Americans" in the ordinary sense of the word.

Over twenty allusions to the bestiality or animal nature

of African Americans appear in The Clansman, a pattern

that Dixon already had established in The Leopard's Spots

and to which he would return in later novels like The Sins

of the Father.

Beyond Dixon's obvious racism, other features of The

Clansman deserve our attention. After arguing for the merit of a rhetorical examination of The Clansman. I consider Dixon's participation in the utopian imagination and his fusion of realism with romanticism in the

following two subsections.

89 The Rhetoric of The Clansman

I presume in this investigation that The Clansman,

and many other novels as well, are read profitably as works of rhetoric. This presumption requires some

explanation, since it appears to violate the conclusion of

Aristotle that rhetoric and poetic can be separated, where

poetic is judged by internal, timeless literary standards, while rhetoric is evaluated on the basis of a work's

effectiveness and utility for specific audiences. The vision of rhetoric and poetic is not without its academic defenders in the twentieth century (e.g., Howell). I can offer three justifications for reading Dixon's The

Clansman as rhetoric.

First, the sharp distinction between rhetoric and poetic has been blurred in the last century. Despite the occasional effort to rescue this division, A. W. Staub and

G. P. Mohrmann admit that "[n]o one has truly been able to establish a lasting distinction between rhetoric and poetic" (108). Distinguished scholars like Tzvetan

Todorov assert that "the situation is no different" in the inner workings of literary and non-literary genres (Genres

10). At most, scholars have suggested that the distinction between rhetoric and poetic is a matter of degree, rather than a hard-and-fast delineation (e.g.,

Ong). Donald C. Bryant, who spent much of his long career

90 examining the linkages between rhetoric and poetic, concluded that, where literature and politics were concerned, "the theory of literature-politics in discourse is rhetoric" ("Literature" 104). The contemporary interest in canon bashing, which has been inspired by much postmodern and poststructuralist problematizing of old categories, does not bode well for a return to faith in the rhetoric-poetic split as anything other than a matter of convenience.!? This distinction of convenience is what allowed Kenneth Burke to identify his only novel. Towards a Better Life, as "too 'rhetorical'" for many critics

("Party" 63).

Even if one has some hope for retaining the traditional rhetoric and poetic categories, the identity of a text as distinctly "literary" does not necessarily prevent a productive evaluation of that text on rhetorical terms. From this perspective, the student of the rhetoric surrounding chattel slavery in the 1850s certainly would examine the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but she or he should not fail to consider Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's

Cabin with equal enthusiasm.

Second, even if one generally wished to salvage the distinction between rhetoric and poetic, utopian literature fruitfully could be considered a rhetorical genre. John Rodden argues that the temporally bound focus

91 of utopian novels, which often are written by those who make no apologies for their interest in contributing to social change, violates conventional expectations of

"good" literature as espousing transcendent themes and making possible a multiplicity of often-contradictory readings. In comparison, the transparent plots and awkward stylistic choices in Edward Bellamy's Looking

Backward. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. and B. F.

Skinner's Walden Two manifest a poetic "thinness." By conventional, Eurocentric literary standards, most utopian novels compare badly to the literary "master" works of the

Western canon. For Rodden, "[t]he Utopian's passionate goal to change people's attitudes makes him or her willing to exchange artistic precision for rhetorical power" (3).

If I make a plausible case that The Clansman is a utopian novel, then this viewpoint provides a second justification for my rhetorical treatment of Dixon's work.

Third, a special case can be made for treating The

Clansman and other literary works by Dixon as rhetorical.

In a never-published autobiography, Dixon himself admitted that

I have made no effort to write literature. I have no ambition to shine as a literary gymnast. It has always seemed to me a waste of time to do such work. Every generation writes its own literature. My sole purpose in writing was to reach and influence with my argument the minds of millions. I had a message[,] and I wrote it

92 as vividly and simply as I knew how. (qtd. in Cook, Thomas Dixon 52)

Given Dixon's embrace of a specific audience at a particular moment in time, Dixon's announced intention was to produce a work of traditional rhetoric not much different than the courtroom speech or political campaign address, both paradigm cases of rhetoric in the European tradition.IB

The introductions to Dixon's books provide further evidence of his rhetorical intent. In his last novel. The

Flaming Sword. Dixon noted that, in order to provide an authoritative account of the American "Conflict of Color

. . . I have been compelled to use living men and women as important characters. If I have been unfair in treatment they have their remedy under the law of libel" (n.p,).

The specific borrowing of non-fictive characters from his own place and time— W. E. B. Du Bois among them— demonstrates Dixon's specific interest in the present.

Moreover, Dixon always insisted that his historical novels contained a message for those who read the novel (see, e.g., Dixon, "Answer"). For example, in the introduction to The Black Hood (1924), Dixon suggested to "the five million members of the new Ku Klux Klan that they read this book" (n.p.).

93 Given the possibilities for rhetorical analysis of

literature, utopian literature, and Thomas Dixon's novels,

I will consider next the utopian vision of The Clansman.

Dixon and Utopia

Utopian literature has an esteemed place in the history of American social movement. In the nineteenth century, Bellamy's Looking Backward inspired the foundation of Bellamy societies and a short-lived political party. In the twentieth century, Skinner's

Walden Two has remained in print for several decades and was consulted by some of those who experimented with communal living in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, first- and second-wave feminist utopias, including Gilman's Herland

(1915) and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time

(1976), are embraced by many academic feminists.

However, as Lewis Mumford once observed, utopias are not necessarily linked with progressive politics: "I quickly discovered that far too large a number of classic utopias were based upon conceptions of authoritarian discipline that seemed . . . far from ideal" (Mumford 4).

For example. Looking Backward is at best silent on the question of race, and Bellamy's vision of the place of women in the year 2000 would satisfy few contemporary feminists. Bellamy's future Boston may be an improvement

94 over his own nineteenth-century Boston, but the book no

longer has a critical edge. Many contemporary readers

would agree with Mumford's assertion that Looking Backward

is a "hideous cog-and-wheel utopia" (252).

Moreover, the good society envisioned in utopian

literature is radically dependent on conceptions of the

good held by author and audience. As Rodden notes,

"Bolshevism and Nazism were utopian visions to their

leaders and supporters" (11). A utopian or dystopian

novel implies an axiology, as these examples suggest. The

audience is given evidence that the utopian vision is

preferable to the status quo when some set of normative

criteria are utilized for comparing the two worlds, and,

if the audience accepts those criteria. embracing the

utopian vision is the expected audience response. For

dystopian novels, the author typically needs to reverse

this process to show the reasons for preferring the

current social order to some unappealing alternative.

While literary scholarship displays little

recognition of the possibility, several of Dixon's novels meet conventional expectations for utopian and/or

dystopian literature. For example, in Dixon's novel

entitled Comrades (1909), an attempt to establish a

socialist colony on an island off the coast of California

fails miserably because socialist precepts are

95 incompatible with human nature. The thesis Dixon offers

in Comrades is superficially similar to George Orwell's

1984 or his Animal Farm, but Dixon's work historically has

not been aligned with the dystopian tradition of these two

Orwell novels.20

Specifically, I argue that The Clansman is a novel

embracing both dystopian and utopian themes; in the

largest sense, Dixon's Piedmont, South Carolina, is a

place from nowhere. While the variety of novels

represented in Paul G. Haschak's utopian bibliography

suggests that the generic requirements for utopian novels are fairly flexible, I will use the rules for this genre

advanced by John Rodden to support my contention.

In devising an "architectonics of the utopian

imagination," Rodden identifies several generic features of utopias, which were identified by examining several classic exemplars of utopian literature, including

Bellamy's Looking Backward and Skinner's Walden Two.

First, Rodden concludes that utopias are unapologetically bound to the era that produced them, rather than aiming to articulate some transcendent truth. For Rodden, utopian novels are "written for the age, not for the ages" (1).

The Clansman has little trouble meeting this criterion. Initially, as seen in his assertion that

"every generation writes its own literature," Dixon

96 himself hoped to find an audience only during his own era,

and he wished to perform a teaching function regarding what he perceived to be a misunderstanding of the white

Southern position on past and present race relations.

Further, the lengthy speeches of Dr. Cameron and Abraham

Lincoln incorporated in The Clansman rarely speak of

African Americans in the specific context of

Reconstruction. When Cameron asserts that the race of the

African American "is not an infant; it is a degenerate— older than yours in time" (291), Dixon's protagonist is making a point as easily applied to the early twentieth century as to the mid-nineteenth. Moreover, when Dixon's

Lincoln speaks of sending all African Americans to an

African colony (45-47), Dixon is advocating a proposal that he would make in the year of The Clansman's publication (Dixon, "Washington"), almost ninety years after the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States was founded to promote

African colonization of freed African Americans (Condit and Lucaites).

Second, in a fashion reminiscent of Ernest J. Wrage's argument that rhetoric is a means for the movement of ideas in history, Rodden contends that characters in utopian literature are "vehicles of ideas" (Rodden 7).

According to Rodden, characters in utopias rarely are

97 fully developed. Instead, they are "types" who serve some

particular function that helps the reader to understand

better the form and function of the utopia or dystopia

examined throughout the work. Character development and

plot subtleties are sacrificed in utopian literature to

serve the goals of the genre.

The Clansman also meets this generic constraint. As

already suggested, African Americans in the novel

freguently are referred to as animals. At other times,

they are reduced to their body parts (e.g., the shapes of their skulls), their odor, to their supposed affinity for the jungle and cannibalism, and/or to the alleged desire of African-American men to rape white women. In almost all respects the humanity of African Americans is denied by Dixon. Few other readings are plausible for several passages. For example, in reference to African-American service in the state legislature, Dixon described "[a] new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odor ..." (155). The only African Americans described sympathetically are those who remain loyal to their former masters. Jake in The Clansman and Nelse in The Leopard's

Spots are allowed to manifest the desirable characteristics of devotion, good humor, and empathy.

African Americans can redeem themselves in Dixon's world by knowing their place and serving their superiors.

98 White men and women fare little better than African

Americans in plot development, since they also are treated as uncomplicated types or "flat" characters, rather than

as complex individuals. Throughout Dixon's Reconstruction novels, "the young [white] Southern woman was the divinity that claimed and received the chief worship of [white] man" (The Clansman 210). White women like Margaret

Cameron and Marion Lenoir display intelligence and good sense at times, but their primary obligation is to preserve the virtue inherent in their (white) Southern womanhood. Following the rape of Marion Lenoir by Gus, an

African-American soldier in the Union Army— a rape that her mother was forced to watch— Marion's declaration that suicide was the only option met with no objection from her mother.

Southern white men also are depicted as a collective, with little or no individual agency. The "Covenanter martyr blood" of white Piedmont citizens is celebrated for its contribution to the American national character (The

Clansman 187), while the race, not individual white men, responds when a threat to one of their own is identified:

"A gale of chivalrous passion and high action, contagious and intoxicating, swept the white race. The . . . assault on one of their daughters revealed the unity of the racial life of the people" (341). The only white men and women

99 not swept along by the combination of biology and Southern culture were corrupt Yankee carpetbaggers, Scalawag collaborators who suffered from some obvious character flaw, or the unwitting and misguided. Even Austin

Stoneman, the Congressional persecutor of the South, saw the light after he realized that he was the "victim" of a mulatto housekeeper, a "vicious woman" who misled him by causing him to ignore his obligations to his own race

(371).22

For African Americans, white women, and white men,

Dixon's hackneyed and stereotyped characters never suggest complexity and contradiction. Instead, they personify the good or evil associated with their individual subject positions. A white Southern male cannot help but do good unless controlled by cowardice, greed, or lust; an African

American cannot help but do evil unless obeying the commands of his or her white superiors. For Dixon, subject position is ethos. Personal improvement is possible only when one shifts to a new subject position, as when Aleck, the ignorant and abusive state representative and sheriff, regains his humor and good sense by obeying the wishes of "Marse Ben" (Clansman 347) and concluding that "I ain't nuttin' but er plain nigger"

(349). Without the potential confusion of plot intricacies and character complexity, the conception of

100 the good society advanced in The Clansman is never in

doubt.

Third, Rodden argues that "[i]n the near-perfect

world that the classic utopias project, time is stopped

and history is at an end" (7). In Rodden's judgment, one

explanation for the thin plots and poorly developed

characters in utopian fiction, beyond the advantages

explained above, is that utopian novelists have so little

strife and struggle with which to work. Plots in

traditional fiction are most easily developed when

protagonists have enemies to combat and character flaws to

overcome. The only enemies or imperfections in utopian

societies are abstract conditions and entities— war,

poverty, greed, malice, etc.— that already have been

eliminated. Since no flaw in utopia is detectable, not

even academics in the utopian society spend time trying to develop a distinctly different political, social, or

economic system. Because ideological consensus largely

exists, the end of history has arrived, at least if

history is conceptualized as revolving around some vast,

Hegelian ideological struggle. When Francis Fukuyama

announced the end of history following the collapse of the

Soviet Union, he was contending that liberal capitalist democracy provides the ideological framework for utopia.

In utopian literature, where the practical problems

101 blocking the enactment of utopian precepts largely have been solved, the price of the perfect society is boredom.

The Clansman is not without its own projected end to history. In the last 100 pages of the novel, as in the

Saturdav Evening Post article that could be a precis for the book, Dixon's characters make multiple allusions to the inability of African Americans and white Americans to live together as social equals. Dixon repeatedly makes clear his belief in the racial superiority of Caucasians.

Any attempt to force an experiment in equality on white

Southerners would not and will not be tolerated. Even

Northerner Phil Stoneman, son of a Radical Republican, declares that "if it comes to an issue of race against race, I am a white man" (The Clansman 329). Dixon, who describes Abraham Lincoln as "The Friend of the South" in his list of the novel's leading characters (n.p.), emphasizes the African colonization of the former slaves as the ultimate solution to the race problem in a conversation between Lincoln and Austin Stoneman.

According to Dixon's Lincoln, "I have urged the colonisation of the negroes, and I shall continue until it is accomplished. My emancipation proclamation was linked with this plan" (46). Lincoln's monologue continues:

We can never attain the ideal Union our fathers dreamed, with millions of an alien, inferior race among us, whose assimilation is neither possible nor desirable. The Nation cannot now

102 exist half white and half black, any more than it could exist half slave and half free. (47)

There are two possible endings to history suggested

in The Clansman. The first ending, which Dixon associates with Lincoln, would entail (forced) deportation of African

Americans to Liberia. The possibility that African

Americans would not leave the United States voluntarily after several centuries of U.S. residence was given no attention by Dixon. Kelly Miller, a leading fin de siècle

African-American intellectual, called Dixon's plan for colonizing African Americans in Liberia the "climax of absurdity" after the publication of The Leopard's Spots

(Miller, Race 52), which also recommended colonization as a final solution to U.S. racial strife.

The second possible end to history suggested by The

Clansman is a race war that would either exterminate the

African-American minority or reduce African Americans to a nonthreatening, subservient status. Dixon makes this point indirectly in the novel, when a Klan letter refers to the state of war existing between the Negro militia and white civilization in South Carolina (The Clansman 327).

The argument is advanced less subtly in Dixon's Saturday

Evening Post article: "What will he [the white man] do when put to the test? He will do exactly what his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his bread— kill him!" ("Washington" 2). While Dixon might

103 argue that he is speaking metaphorically in the context of

this passage, the adversarial tone of the passage is

consistent with the rhetoric of race war and conflict used

throughout The Clansman. Notwithstanding the lack of

African-American military and economic resources at the

century's turn, Dixon is committed to white victory in

some primeval struggle between the races.

However the subjugation of African Americans and the

separation of races is accomplished, the end of history

will arrive when whites in the North unite with their

Southern brothers and sisters in racial harmony, an end

adumbrated by the marriage of the Stoneman children to the

Cameron children. While Fukuyama predicts the end of

history when ideological struggles have been exhausted,

the end of history in Dixon's corpus will arrive when the

superior race has segregated itself from the inferior race

or has rendered the inferior race harmless. After

learning that white Southerners had won a series of

electoral victories in six states, Ben Cameron, the heroic

Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, explained the meaning of these victories to Elsie Stoneman in the novel's last

paragraph: "I am a successful revolutionist ....

Civilisation has been saved, and the South redeemed from

shame" (The Clansman 374). If Cameron's victory does not yet guarantee the onset of idyllic boredom, it does signal

104 the first step away from the disaster of Reconstruction.

While the end of history has not arrived, the end may now

be in sight if one is lucky enough to be white.

While all of these generic requirements for utopian

literature are satisfied by The Clansman, many of the

preceding paragraphs beg an important question: Where are

dystopia and utopia in this novel? To no one's surprise,

Dixon's dystopia is found in Southern Reconstruction, when

recently freed slaves were given a wide array of civil

rights for which they were not biologically or culturally

qualified. The disruption of white control over African

Americans threatened the civilization so ardently defended

by Dixon. The successful revolt against Reconstruction by

white Southerners allowed them to re-establish the rights

to which they were entitled by dint of racial heritage.

Finding the utopian vision hiding in The Clansman is

a bit more difficult. Utopias typically are built, either

in some locality or on a national or international scale,

depending on the scope of the novelist's vision. As James

Darsey notes, utopias typically come complete with "a concrete and elaborated configuration, a specific utopian program" ("Utopia" 34). Rather than taking positive steps to build a new society, Dixon's protagonists devote the vast majority of their time to tearing down a governmental structure imposed on them by their conquerors; the

105 Camerons and their allies busily deconstruct all Radical

Republican reconstructive efforts. Yet, beyond the evil of slavery, which Dixon blames on the North as well as the

South, little is wrong with the ante-bellum South at whose axiology Dixon hints in his appreciative description of white Southern virtues. Until Radical Reconstruction became a reality, the Confederate War veterans portrayed in both The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman expressed optimism in the post-war future of the South, with Dixon's characters sometimes conceding that slavery had impaired the South's economic development before the Civil War.

Only the malicious interference of the federal government derailed the proper reconstruction of the South on white.

Southern terms, which would combine Yankee dollars with

(white) Southern grit and determination.

The Civil War had settled the guestions of states' rights and the legal status of chattel slavery, at least for the time being. In Dixon's utopia, with these questions resolved, the white race would put aside sectional differences and work together in pursuit of economic prosperity, secure in the knowledge that African

Americans and the race problems they represented would be shipped to another continent. Forty years after all

African Americans were given their freedom and 300 years after the first African slaves arrived in North America,

106 Thomas Dixon would not give up the hope that every African

American might be sent to colonize Africa, a continent

that undoubtedly did not have enough inhabitants. After

all, as Dixon remarked, "who thinks of a Negro when he

says 'American?'" ("Washington" 2).

In Dixon's judgment, the utopia that America could become was blocked by the intractable problem of the

African American. In his perceptive study of Dixon's rhetoric of racism, James Kinney remarks that Dixon's work was "moving counter to the main current of his time"

("Rhetoric" 145), given the political and economic reforms that are associated with the end of the nineteenth century. As an alternative, I suggest that Dixon's proposal to remove African Americans from the country of their birth is internally consistent with his commitment to social progress, since the race problem retarded the rate of this progress and remained a source of tension between whites who should not be divided from one another.

From a contemporary vantage point, it is easy to condemn such a position, but while one might speak of a progressive mood among white Americans at the dawn of the twentieth century, proving that this mood extends to

African Americans would be difficult. Dixon not only crusaded against the black beast, as Bloomfield notes, but also embraced white unity as the best method for

107 protecting (European) civilization and American democracy

from decline, given that no other race had proven itself

able to comprehend and make appropriate use of these

privileges. As Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis

Lucaites argue, the ideas of equality and citizenship

enshrined in the United States Constitution have only

slowly and begrudgingly been extended to African Americans

by the white majority, and some whites to this day are

reluctant to incorporate the non-white other into their

understanding of what it means to be "American."

These simultaneous visions of dystopia and utopia in

The Clansman help to explain the popular appeal of the novel. Fin de siecle white Americans had been immersed in the problem of race for decades. Some wrongly believed that the sufficient cause of a disastrous Civil War had been the issue of chattel slavery. Further, the new U.S. experiment with imperialism in the years following the

Spanish-American war made coping with racial difference more immediate on a national scale. Whatever the causes, as C. Vann Woodward has documented (e.g.. Strange 74,

American 257), the century's turn was a high watermark for anti-black racism, where separation of the races was enshrined in law throughout the South, as well as in some non-Southern states. Even those previously sympathetic to the plight of African Americans frequently ignored

108 African-American concerns in the years following the

century's turn. In some cases, these once-supportive

white politicians later engaged in race-baiting for

political gain.

Given this climate, the propositions advanced by

Dixon must have been seductive for many white auditors.

First, regarding the dystopia of Reconstruction, white

readers of The Clansman are assured that a great threat to

the U.S. future was properly handled by white Southerners.

The proper order of things between whites and African

Americans had been restored following the end of

Reconstruction, and the tone of Dixon's novels was consistent with the segregationist mood of a large segment of the white audience. The reader had to do nothing to address this problem; a solution already had been found and was being implemented, with Jim Crow laws guaranteeing the safety of the white supremacy that was "essential, instead of hostile, to the nation's constitution" (Perry

31). Second, the utopian answer to the current race problem was expensive, yet simple. If African Americans left the country, there would be no more race problem.

Whatever his other limitations, Dixon could find an uncomplicated answer to a complex question.

Colonization, Dixon's final solution to the race dilemma, never did find widespread favor in the twentieth

109 century; his novel appeared decades after the popularity

of African-American colonization proposals had declined

among whites. However, after his novel became a film,

Dixon's utopian imagination contributed to the rise of the

second Ku Klux Klan and the violence and expressions of

hate that have been endemic to Klan activities ever since,

as documented in Chapter Three and elsewhere (e.g.,

Stanton ; Wade).

Sentimental Politics

By his own testimony, Thomas Dixon disliked much of what passed for realism in his own time; "There are many realities of life that are not fit for dramatic exhibition. . . . Because manure is a reality is no reason why an author or producer should be allowed to cart a load of it into the theatre ..." (qtd. in Cook, Thomas Dixon

56). Dixon's last novel. The Flaming Sword, sold poorly and was denounced by some critics for its melodramatic hysterics. One might take this evidence as an indication that Dixon was a romantic or sentimentalist, yet Dixon sometimes is classified as a realist. Explaining this apparent contradiction will help to illumine the appeal of his work to a popular audience shortly after the turn of the century.

110 Part of the resolution to this contradiction is

rather mundane. As Kenneth W. Warren indicates in a recent study, the realist compartment is large enough to

incorporate a wide range of novelists, including those with sentimental inclinations. Warren discusses the

fusion of realism and sentimentalism in several novels dealing with race, including Dixon's The Clansman. If

Harriet Beecher Stowe demonstrated that sentimentalism could be used in advocating the anti-slavery cause, then

Dixon's novel confirmed that sentimentalism also could create a sympathetic depiction of a white. Southern cause that opposed expanded civil rights for African Americans.

Never a literary purist, Dixon could move from a dense historical account of a battle scene or legislative chamber to an overwritten scene of courtship with relative ease. The subtitle of The Leonard's Spots ; A Romance of the White Man's Burden brings together Dixon's twin desires to craft a romance novel that also incorporated contemporary political themes, as his reference to

Kipling's 1899 poem suggests (notwithstanding Kipling's own romantic moments).

For our purposes, a primary concern is discerning the rhetorical advantages of a sentimental style joined with realism, since these two literary forms were prominently featured in The Clansman and presumably played some role

111 in the reception of the book by its auditors. In his

essay, "The Sentimental Style as Escapism: Or the Devil

with Dan'l Webster," Edwin Black suggests that the

advantage for Webster and others in using the sentimental

style is the style's explicit reliance on "instruct[ing]

the auditor in how he [or she] is to respond to the

speech— to regulate every shade of the auditor's feelings

as the speech unfolds" ("Style" 78). According to Black,

"it is useful to view the sentimental style as the

manifestation of a disposition to subordinate all values

to aesthetic values in order, essentially, to escape a

burden of moral responsibility" (83). While the

sentimental style seems artificial and contrived to the

contemporary ear, it was quite popular in the nineteenth century. Only at the end of his long career did Dixon's

sentimentalist tendencies reduce the popularity of his novels. In 1905, the sentimental style still had considerable market value, given its long history as a reputable literary genre frequently used to teach moral and political object lessons.

What is unique about Dixon's sentimentalism is that he sentimentalizes politics, culture, and race, rather than individuals. While contemporary critics now recognize that the sentimentalized individual makes a political statement— and Uncle Tom's Cabin demonstrated

112 the individual's political potential long ago— Dixon's refigured sentimentalism embraces even the narrowest sense of politics, including the attribution to Abraham Lincoln of the African-American colonization project that Dixon so fervently advocated.^3 Dixon, the pedagogue and utopian, used novels to teach his audience about Southern history and race theory, with long descriptions of the "reality" of Reconstruction.

Specific textual evidence shows the extent to which sentimentalism and realism are interwoven in The Clansman.

Consider the following passage, which is uttered by Phil

Stoneman and directed to Margaret Cameron:

How tender and homelike the music of your voice! The world has never seen the match of your gracious Southern womanhood! Snow-bound in the North, I dreamed, as a child, of this world of eternal sunshine. And now every memory and dream I've found in you. (The Clansman 282)

Even in this romantic moment, Dixon is not making a statement only about an individual (white) Southern woman.

He also makes a claim about (white) Southern womanhood, in which the individual woman participates. This womanhood makes the South "homelike," and the South becomes a "world of eternal sunshine" inseparable from the (white) woman/women who live there.^4 The experience structured for the reader inspires admiration for a category, rather than for an individual. In turn, this admired category

113 (Southern womanhood) cultivates respect for the climate and culture that made the category possible.

If realism intrudes on Dixon's romance, sentimentalism also pervades the realpolitik to which the novel turns periodically. Like Webster, Dixon uses the sentimental style to restrict the possible responses to his work by his largely white audience. The emotional allusions in the following sentences of Dr. Cameron direct and limit the interpretive possibilities for the reader:

For a Russian to rule a Pole, . . . a Turk to rule a Greek, or an Austrian to dominate an Italian, is hard enough, but for a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief. Our people are yet dazed by its horror. My God! when they realise its meaning, whose arm will be strong enough to hold them? (290)

No one will accuse Dixon of holding anything back here. The argument is simple enough: White Southerners will not tolerate political rule by an inferior race. But

Dixon's words also suggest the preferred response to the

African-American threat. By emphasizing physical difference, Dixon makes the African American an other who does not share in the political heritage of Europe or in the shared humanity of European ancestry. Moreover, the problem of African-American political power is not located in some far-off state capitol. Instead, the former slaves threaten the "hearth and home" of Southern whites, along

114 with the white women who traditionally were to reside in

safety in the homes provided by white men. Dixon relies

on sentimentalism to stress the imminence of this danger

and the validity of the white Southern response to the

newly emancipated African American. White males must

reassert their power over African Americans, both at the ballot box and in determining the conditions for sexual

access to white women.

This fusion of sentiment with politics also helps to

explain the appeal of Dixon's novel in the opening decades of the century. In this era, the sentimental style offered a literary and rhetorical possibility for escaping the complexities of everyday life, even while sentimentality also served as the "primary radical methodology" for advocating social change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Fisher 92).

Dixon's appropriation of sentimentalism allowed him to offer an unambiguous analysis of and solution to the racial tensions of his era. By structuring the readers' experience of racial strife in Reconstruction, the novelist could eliminate the temptation to worry about the difficult situation of the African American in the 1860s or the 1900s. If Uncle Tom's Cabin performed a great deal of the cultural work necessary to convert African

Americans from "things" or property into "persons," as

115 Philip Fisher suggests, The Clansman and other popular

Dixon novels did much to reverse this trend by systematically dehumanizing African Americans fifty years after the appearance of Stowe's classic. No intractable moral problems exist in the world of The Clansman; the uncomplicated solution to the nation's "Negro problem" is entailed in the author's analysis of that problem and, understood in the context of the anti-black sentiment of the era, helps to explain the book's popularity with white audiences. Just as Hitler made scapegoats of Jews in the

1930s, Dixon placed responsibility for Southern (and national) woes on the "black curse."

Dixon could be confident that the realist manure he shoveled could be packaged in sentimentality and sold as a remedy for (white) society's ailments, at least for those audience members already apt to accept the medicinal value of his racist hokum. Like the proverbial snake-oil salesman, Dixon promised that his product was easy to use and had no unpleasant side effects. But, unlike the snake-oil salesman, Dixon was a true believer. Not even the salesman recognized that his remedy was made from manure.

116 Towards Rhetorical Imbrication

Read today, The Clansman seems to almost everyone a particularly vicious and mean-spirited exemplar of the rhetoric of racism; I took no pleasure in conducting this analysis. The purpose of such criticism is necessarily pragmatic and political, given my concern that the discourse of Pat Buchanan, David Duke, and other actors in contemporary U.S. politics might share important rhetorical commonalities with Dixon (see Chapters Six and

Seven). One should examine works like Dixon's novels in order to understand their one-time appeal and to scrutinize the workings of the discourse that made the widespread popularity of Dixon's efforts a possibility fifty years after Uncle Tom's Cabin and thirty-five years following the end of the Civil War.

If Dixon's racism could find a national audience in

1905— even given the pro-imperialist climate of the era— critics should worry that a revised, popular version of that discourse could reappear again. The research of Joe

R. Feagin and Hernân Vera (among others) indicates the continued existence of latent and overt racist attitudes in many white Americans, and such attitudes make the popular return of a Dixonian rhetoric possible. I have argued in this chapter that Dixon's dystopian and utopian themes, as well as his use of realism and the sentimental

117 style, help to explain the relationship between The

Clansman and the enthusiastic response of the book's

audience.

So, Dixon used both realism and sentimentality, dystopia and (its antithesis) utopia, in The Clansman.

What made such a fusion of literary genres possible? As an approach to literature, realism was a reaction to and break with sentimentality, while the type with which The

Clansman has been customarily identified, the "historical novel," is not normally associated with utopian fiction.

How was Dixon able to take four distinct (if not necessarily exclusive) approaches to the writing of prose fiction and combine them into a popular 500-page racist opus?

Contemporary rhetorical and literary critics might explain Dixon's work by pointing to his selective appropriation of the popular memory of the ante-bellum

South, or to his selective colonization of several already popular archetypes for literature. After all, Dixon's novels collectively include almost every one of the twelve tropes used in the justification of colonialism, as identified by David Spurr (e.g., appropriation, debasement, affirmation), and William J. Scheick and others have explained how one might appropriate a cultural tradition or revered document to support an argument for

118 racial equality (or inequality). These tropes, inscribed within the various literary genres of fictive writing used by Dixon, are not new to rhetoricians.

What The Clansman allows is consideration of the ways

in which language can transform and be transformed to create heretofore unforeseen idioms of discourse, where speaking and writing lead to new ways of thinking about some issue, idea, or concern, without a necessary intent by a rhetor to borrow, appropriate, or colonize.

Hypothetically, a specific rhetorical artifact might call an entirely new rhetoric into being, with previously unknown rules controlling that text or announced by it.

This new category— which, after Jean-François Lyotard, I have labeled an idiom in this chapter— will operate in accordance with its own rules, some of which are not shared by other, older categories.

However, another, more common possibility for creation of a previously unknown idiom, as illustrated in

Dixon's work, is the creation of a "new" discourse from fragments of other idioms of discourse, an intertextual

Phoenix arising from the ashes of the old. This new idiom will borrow freely from its discursive cousins to announce its own set of rules for separating good from bad argument. These rules, although shared with other idioms, are unique in their particular combination in this new

119 idiom. This second possibility for the creation of an

idiom I will call rhetorical imbrication, where fragments

of multiple, established idioms of discourse are combined

to form a new idiom, as the coalescence of sentimental,

realist, historical, and utopian genres illustrates in The

Clansman. Appropriation and colonization are only a few

of the means by which a new idiom might come into being

via the combination of rules drawn from other texts.

Idioms of discourse typically are marked by their

diachronic instability, especially in oral communication.

Some idioms may last unaltered for long periods of time,

but most are ephemeral, lasting weeks, days, or even

minutes before disappearing, perhaps never to return, with

only the print or electronic record preserving them.

Moreover, such idioms are rarely available as charts or tables of guidelines. Their rules are complicit in everyday talk, and, because they are always shifting,

idioms may be created and, subsequently, disappear in the span of a single conversation. These rules can be teased out, explicated, and discussed only via careful analysis of the discourse regulated by the idiom, where the critic's persistence allows identification of such an idiom. (Not surprisingly, the critic may impose the rules of her or his own idiom on the idiom[s] studied if not

120 cautious, as artifacts are reinscribed in the conceptual

vocabulary of rhetorical or literary criticism.)

As a result, even where discussants have an intuited

grasp of the rules operating to regulate their own

discussion, the identification and explication of that

idiom is always a post hoc project, whether examining the

recording of a recent phone conversation or the brittle

pages of a 1905 novel. Further, the project of

identifying idioms will never be exhausted: The number of

idioms is limited only by the number of possible

combinations of rules that could constitute idioms, a

guantity that is potentially infinite. The existence of

generic abstractions like the "public sphere" or "legal

reasoning" (itself an "argument field") with which many

idioms might be identified has the advantage of

simplifying discussions of the functions performed by everyday talk, but such abstractions are not able to do

justice to the complexity of discourse in the lifeworld.

We should not expect any finite categorical schema to describe adequately the incredible variability of the constantly evolving systems that regulate rhetorical practice.

An important feature of such idioms is their series of rules on matters of both "procedure" and "substance."

By procedure I mean those rules that tell us how to argue.

121 as in Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst's admonition

that expressive phrases (e.g., "I despised the last

episode of Seinfeld.") are inimical to the genre they call

"critical discussion" and, consequently, should be avoided

if one desires a maximally dialectical encounter between

interlocutors. In contrast, a substantive rule tells us

what norms or precedents presumptively control a given

discussion (e.g., "the virtue of white Southern women must

be protected from predatory black males"). Courts of law

in the Anglo-American jurisprudential tradition have both

sorts of rules, with procedurals governing such matters as

the rules of evidence and substantives controlled by stare

decisis. as in the case of a United States Supreme Court

decision. Bowers v. Hardwick. determining that state laws

punishing oral and anal sexual intercourse are not

inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution. The Clansman adheres to a set of procedural and substantive rules unique to the idiom of discourse of the novel. Such rules, once identified, explain the relationship of one phrase to another within the confines of the prevailing idiom.25

Dixon's novel illustrates the process of imbrication, where rhetors, intentionally or not, create something new out of the old. Especially when the new idiom is created using precepts culled from established and well-known

122 categories, the new seems a way of exposing the limits of

the old, so the postmodern becomes a critique of the

modern, or realism exposes the limits of the sentimental

style, even when the new relies heavily on what came

before. Specifically, the plexus of rules that constitute

the idiom of discourse in The Clansman allows Dixon to

sentimentalize race and gender, while proclaiming the

historical merit of the novel, breaking the rules of

conventional literary genres to which the work has no

necessary need for allegiance. For example, one rule of

Dixon's idiom isolated above— "a white Southern male

cannot help but do good unless controlled by cowardice,

greed, or lust"— provides both a sentimentalized portrait

of white Southern manhood and a historical principle by which one might explain the existence of Reconstruction-

era scalawags and apologize for the nineteenth-century

Klan.

To explore further the possibility of rhetorical

imbrication, I wish to read Dixon against Jean-Fran^ois

Lyotard, whose many books and essays announce a theory of

shifting and unstable phrase regimes (called "language games" in his earlier work).^^ Lyotard's work accounts

for the sometimes-rapid changes in everyday talk that constitute new idioms of discourse, and my analysis above is heavily dependent on his scholarship.

123 In The Différend, his most important philosophical work, Lyotard suggests that numerous idioms of discourse exist, where rules differentiate "good" and "bad" discourse within the confines of each idiom. Lyotard's starting point for analysis is the phrase, which belongs to a regimen of like phrases. Such phrases can be descriptive, ostensive, and so on. Phrases in turn might be linked together, although the rules operating within a given idiom will determine whether a linkage is appropriate. (For example, there are few idioms in which the phrases "I'm having a great day" and "my closest friend just died" could be linked sincerely in a fashion consistent with that idiom's substantive rules.) In turn, multiple idioms sharing a common rule or set of rules together constitute a genre of discourse, as in the narrative genre. While Lyotard is less clear on this point, he posits genres of discourse as his largest unit of analysis. Each genre includes multiple idioms subservient to the rules governing that genre. According to Lyotard, changing even a single rule means that the old idiom has been abandoned, and a different idiom now exists, where the criteria for the good, the true, or the beautiful have been altered in one or more ways. This new idiom may or may not belong to the genre(s) with which it

124 previously was identified, depending on how such genres

are defined.

Again, each genre is composed of multiple idioms, while each idiom is constituted by heterogeneous phrases

linked in accordance with the rules of that idiom. A

problem exists when individuals who adhere to the discursive practices of different idioms seek to engage

one another in argument, since claims made within the

limits of one idiom are incommensurable with another

idiom's regulative principles; rules for what counts as good argument vary from one idiom to another. The product of this discursive aporia is a différend (i.e., an irresolvable disagreement). One way of escaping the différend is to impose one idiom on all interlocutors in order to allow for a common set of procedural norms, but

Lyotard worries that such an imposition is an ethically problematic variety of terrorism, where discourse is not judged in accordance with the criteria that determined its formation or function. In contrast, disputes taking place within the confines of a single idiom are litigations rather than différends, since rules exist for resolving those disputes within the confines of that idiom. For example, we already intuit that judging the quality of a painting by Monet in accordance with the principles of impressionism (i.e., a litigation) is more just than

125 applying those principles to a work by Picasso (i.e., a

différend1.

While this sketch of Lyotard's position does not do

justice to the complexity of his theoretical efforts, it

should be sufficient for my limited purposes. According

to Lyotard, one moves from one idiom of discourse to

another at the moment that a new principle is added or an

old principle of that idiom is modified or eliminated.

This move to a new idiom occurs when discourse no longer

recognizes the constraints imposed by an old idiom, but

operates in accordance with the logic of some previously

unrecognized set of rules, which cannot be articulated

until a rhetorical artifact loyal to the unti1-now-unnamed

idiom can be explicated and its principles exposed. (By

the time an idiom is identified, it is no longer new. For

example, I have called attention to the characteristics of

The Clansman's idiom over ninety years after its initial

appearance.) The sense that the linking of phrases is

proceeding without recognizable guidance, violating the

rules of already known idioms and adhering to the newly

articulated rules of its own idiom is the spirit of the

avant-garde, the pagan, the postmodern. In this sense, nothing has been modern before it has been postmodern; the

postmodern sometimes makes up rules along the way, while,

at other times, the postmodern leaves the articulation of

126 the rules to rhetorical, literary, or cultural critics

engaged in the post hoc analysis of systematizing (and

even "modernizing") the postmodern.2 ?

So, Lyotard tells us how new idioms are created.

However, Lyotard has little to say regarding the

invitation to others to share in the discourse of any

given idiom. In short, once a new idiom is created, how

are others led to join the conversation made possible by

that idiom? Or, to ask the question as Lyotard might ask

it, how do the identities to which proper names are

attached come to link phrases in accordance with the rules

of one idiom rather than another?

To answer this question, I wish to distinguish

between idioms and, for lack of a better term, meta

idioms. Not surprisingly, meta-idioms entail talk about

idioms. For my purposes, any idiom can perform the

function of meta-idiom, whether a rhetor formerly operating within an old idiom makes a move that shifts her

or him to some alternative idiom or, instead, announces her or his disinterest in the current idiom and suggests a

shift to some new idiom. In either case, the rhetor advocates an audience's adherence to the idiom preferred by the rhetor. This advocacy could use the argument from example in cases where the rhetor's discourse already operates within the nexus of the new idiom's rules, or

127 this advocacy could be immanent, in the sense that the rhetor discusses the merits of a new idiom while operating in accordance with the regulations of the old idiom.

This understanding of the problem of shifting from idiom to idiom finds support in my reading of The

Clansman. Dixon cannot assume in writing this novel that the reader will consent without question to an idiom of discourse in which African Americans are a lower kind of animal and in which a race war is inevitable unless

African Americans are deported to Liberia, although many readers doubtless will do so. Rather than positing these assumptions with the hope that most readers will share them, the novel encourages use of a particular idiom of discourse. Within the conventional frames of sentimentalism lavished on the South's "lost cause" and the realism of the so-called Negro problem, Dixon argues for a particular conception of Southern history and race, where the lines between the superior and subordinate races are clearly drawn and the Negro problem disappears because

African Americans are either deported or reduced to political and economic irrelevance. This conception is made more attractive by Dixon's utopian vision, since the end of the "black curse" will made the South into a garden, a new Eden. Only after this conception is accepted by the auditor would the auditor evaluate Dixon's

128 arguments in accordance with the rules of the idiom to

which those arguments adhere. The Clansman represents one

particular idiom of white racist discourse, but it also

incorporates arguments about what idiom ought to be

adopted by auditors; idiom and meta-idiom both are present

in The Clansman.29

To illustrate this point, consider Dixon's freguent

references to African Americans as animals, as described

above. Such repeated references serve a rhetorical

function for the reader who remains open to Dixon's message. Taken together, these references invite the

reader's adherence to Dixon's presupposition about the

subhuman status of African Americans. Such references do

not assume auditor agreement with the initial claim.

Instead, they encourage the reader to visualize African

Americans with physical attributes, behaviors, or motivations of animals, especially those animals typically perceived as unattractive or dangerous. For an era in which the critique of anthropocentrism largely was unknown, subhuman status meant that African Americans could not expect even basic human rights, let alone educational opportunities or equitable treatment by courts of law. The outcome of such references may be that auditors will persuade themselves, without explicit

129 suasive efforts in the voice of the author or by protagonists who support this claim via argument.

In a move similar to Kenneth Burke's "casuistic stretching" ("Rhetoric" 21), Dixon uses the fusion of realism, sentimentalism, dystopia, and utopia as a starting point for advocacy of his own, preferred idiom of discourse. Dixon advances not only an argument about how

African Americans ought to be treated in a specific context (e.g., black rapists of white women ought to be tortured and lynched), but he advocates a vision of the good life. African Americans are themselves signs of subhuman depravity; they should be controlled and, ultimately, eliminated altogether from the American landscape. Like some other novels, especially utopian novels, The Clansman instantiates a plexus of rules that constitute a new idiom and advocates the various rules of that idiom as guides to thought and action. Dixon's novel constitutes its own idiom as the phrase regimen of utopia.

In summary, Thomas Dixon's The Clansman offers a dystopic version of post-Civil War Reconstruction in the

South, coupled with the promise of a Southern utopia once the South and the nation are freed from the "Black curse."

This utopia is possible become of the re-membering of the ante-bellum South, since the values associated with that era are celebrated by Dixon. A South (and nation) freed

130 from slavery, but also freed from the (human) reminders of the slave era, would become a u t o p i a . ^0 Dixon used elements taken from the realist and sentimental genres to limit the range of possible responses by white readers to his utopian, racist imaginary. Like Tom Watson, Dixon characterized African Americans as without intellectual merit. If civilization owed African Americans anything, according to Dixon, it was deportation.

Given the vision of the good life advocated by Dixon, we should not be surprised that the reaction to his books, plays, and movies among whites did more than add to

Dixon's personal wealth. Just as Abraham Lincoln attributed the Civil War to Harriet Beecher Stowe and her most famous novel, W. J. Cash gave Dixon and The Clansman credit for the founding of the twentieth-century Ku Klux

Klan.In Chapter Three, I turn to the twentieth-century

Klan and the relationship of Klan discourse to the rhetoric of white, Protestant Christianity in idioms whose rules I will attempt to isolate.

131 Notes

^ Tom Watson's Magazine (June, 1905), 298; qtd. in Thomas F. Gossett (253). At one time the South's leading champion of Populism, Tom Watson became embittered by the difficulty of "the Negro question" in Southern politics and bitterly attacked African Americans, concluding that disenfranchisement was necessary to prevent African- American voters from being manipulated by the Democratic party elite (see MacLean, Behind 42-43). As T. Harry Williams explains,

Watson, who had once stood forth as a champion of Negro rights, who had demanded suffrage for the Negro as for any citizen, finally came to advocate a new strategy— the only way to eliminate the Negro issue in politics was to eliminate the Negro from politics. (Romance 56)

^ By no means do I intend to suggest that Birth of a Nation was the only impetus to the founding of the twentieth-century Klan. Nancy MacLean and others have documented the possible role played by the Leo Frank case in creating the conditions for the Klan's founding in Atlanta, where Leo Frank, a Jew, was accused of the murder of a young white woman, Mary Phagan. Frank was ultimately convicted of her murder and lynched by a mob shortly after his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Georgia's governor. The lynching of Frank occurred only a few months prior to the creation in 1915 of the second Klan. See MacLean (Behind 12; "Leo Frank").

^ While the role played by Birth of a Nation in reviving the Klan admittedly is not the primary focus of her carefully documented study, Nancy MacLean's Behind the Mask of Chivalry makes no mention of Dixon's contribution to Birth of a Nation, and Dixon does not appear in her index. In an important essay, Jeffrey B. Martin explains why Thomas Dixon's contribution to Birth of a Nation largely has been ignored. Since Birth of a Nation varies considerably from the content of Dixon's The Clansman. scholars often have assumed that Griffith used the novel only as a loose outline with which he took considerable liberties. However, after examining the script for Dixon's dramatic version of The Clansman. which is not widely available, Martin concludes that Griffith adhered more closely to one version or another of Thomas Dixon's various plot lines than previously had been assumed. Note that various characters and plot devices drawn from an

132 earlier Dixon novel. The Leonard's Spots, were used in Dixon's play entitled The Clansman. Indifference to Dixon and his corpus is not limited to Klan historians. Joel Williamson complains that "Dixon probably did more to shape the lives of modern Americans than have some Presidents. Yet, his work and Dixon himself have been all but lost to historians" (140).

^ Prior to the turn of the century, Dixon's writing reveals a more generous paternalistic attitude towards African Americans than suggested by his novels; this paternalism was typical of upper-class Southern "Bourbon" Democrats. In an essay published by The Christian Union in the late 1880s, Dixon argued that racism was inevitable in both North and South and maintained that suffrage for uneducated former slaves was not appropriate. However, he also contended that "[t ]he negro is made of the same material that the white man is made of. He has the same passions, the same heart, the same nature" ("Southern" 730). The younger Dixon's solution to the Negro problem was continuing efforts to educate African Americans, and he rejected the colonization of African Americans in Liberia at that time. In contrast, after 1902 his novels repeatedly called for such colonization, at a time when upper-class whites were no longer advocating moderation where the oppression of African Americans was concerned. Notwithstanding Dixon's awkward and turgid prose, he had the advantage of working within a Southern literary tradition that was well established by the turn of the century. Dixon's novels were only the most extreme manifestation of the pro-white, pro-Confederate fiction that had captured the U.S. literary imagination of the era. By 1888, former carpetbagger Albion Tourgee noted that "[n ]ot only is the epoch of the [Civil] war the favorite field of American fiction to-day, but the Confederate soldier is the popular hero. Our literature has become not only Southern in type, but distinctly Confederate in sympathy" (qtd. in Simms 402). II\rtha Groves Perry identifies Dixon, along with Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, as "the Southern romancers" who "unabashedly tie to future of the nation, indeed of world civilization, to the preservation of the Anglo Saxon race in the South" (Perry 3).

^ One 1905 reviewer of The Clansman concludes that the book is "crude in literary workmanship" (Whinery 153), and "though probably sincere enough, it does not promote a correct, unprejudiced understanding of the Reconstruction period ..." (160).

133 ^ Not surprisingly, many former slave owners expressed no regret for their part in maintaining chattel slavery. Leon F. Litwack quotes a one-time slave master's defense of slavery at an 1866 Chamber of Commerce meeting: "Sir, we have educated them. We took them barbarians, we returned them Christianized and civilized to those from whom we received them; we paid for them, we return them without compensation. Our consciences are clear, our hands are clean" (57). This attitude among some Southern whites concerning the perceived inferiority of African cultures undoubtedly contributed to the resistance of Southern whites to African-American participation in politics following the Civil War, and proponents of white supremacy would depict Africans as producing no important contributions to humankind, as the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter suggests. As late as 1900, the editor of the New Orleans Dailv States. a leading newspaper and the official journal of the city, insisted that African Americans were only suited to plantation labor and that the emancipation of the slaves decades earlier was "a crime" (Hair 399).

^ Du Bois's challenge to Dixon's version of Reconstruction history did not go unnoticed. In The Flaming Sword. one of Dixon's protagonists insisted that Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America "is in no sense a history, in spite of its jumble of irrelevant and worthless quotations. It is a call to race riot by a man who has become a monomaniac in his hatred of whites" (Dixon, Flaming 479).

® An example of this traditional historiography, sometimes called the "Dunning school" of Reconstruction interpretation, is Francis P. Burns's 1935 study of Reconstruction in Louisiana. Burns expounds in some detail on the African-American threat and defends the "birthright" of white supremacy (614).

® When Hodding Carter returned to his family home from Maine's Bowdoin College in 1924, he learned that the traditional history of Reconstruction still had currency among members of his own family. After he denounced the 1920s Klan, his grandmother informed him that his grandfather had ridden in the Reconstruction Klan: "Had it not been for his grandfather and a few lesser giants, he was told, no [white] man's life nor any [white] woman's virtue would have been safe during the turbulent years following the War Between the States" (Harrell 76). For this family, the memory of the earlier Klan did much to ensure their favorable attitude towards the new Klan fifty

134 years later. As Kenneth Earl Harrell suggests, "it may be convincingly argued that most Southerners in 1920 were unaware that the Klan of Reconstruction had ever dissolved" as ordered by Reconstruction Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest (Harrell 77).

As printed by Malcolm Cowley, Macmillan Company press releases trumpeting the release of Mitchell's novel describe the book as a story of

the black days of Reconstruction, the callousness of the Carpetbaggers, the scalawaggishness of the Scalawags, [and] the knightliness of the Ku Klux Klansmen, who frighten Negroes away from the polls, thus making Georgia safe for democracy and virtuous womanhood . . . . (19)

The press release does go on to concede that this "legend is false in part and silly in part and vicious in its general effect on Southern life today . . ." (19).

Dixon and Mitchell exchanged letters professing their admiration for one another following the publication of Gone with the Wind. Mitchell noted in her letter that she was "practically raised" on Dixon's novels and "love[d] them very much" (qtd. in Gerald Wood 123). While he may overstate the case, Raymond A. Cook maintains that "[t]he sentimental beauty and the tragedy of the Old South portrayed in Dixon's novels found expression in Gone with the Wind, for Miss Mitchell's work displayed the sentiment, the romance, and the Southerners' defiance that characterize Dixon's works" (Thomas Dixon 138).

Raymond Allen Cook, the only author of a Dixon biography, had a career-long fascination with Thomas Dixon. In addition to multiple articles about Dixon's career. Cook wrote two biographies devoted to Dixon: Fire from the Flint (1968) and Thomas Dixon (1974). Cook's second, shorter biography is more critical of Dixon's work and racism than was his earlier effort. Much of my discussion of Dixon's life and work relies on Cook's scholarship. Not all of Dixon's novels emphasized Reconstruction and questions of race. For example. The Flaming Sword (1939) is set in the twentieth century and is devoted in part to scathing criticism of socialism and communism, while some other books by Dixon are anti-feminist polemics.

135 In Fire from the Flint. Cook quotes the third, revised edition of Griggs's The Hindered Hand. to which I have no access. I was unable to locate this quotation in the original edition of The Hindered Hand.

Compare the following two passages. In his Saturdav Evening Post essay, Dixon asserts that ”[e]ducation is the development of that which is. The Negro has held the Continent of Africa since the dawn of history, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its light" ("Washington" 1). In The Clansman. published in that same year, Dixon's Dr. Cameron tells Austin Stoneman that

[e]ducation, sir, is the development of that which is. Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the Continent of Africa— rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his black bare feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. (The Clansman 292)

This similarity confirms that Dixon is consubstantial with at least some of his protagonists. Cameron's employment of "Dixon's" words suggests that Cameron is an alter ego for Dixon. The text of these two passages is consistent with the strategy of colonial discourse called "appropriation" by David Spurr, where the land of the native is rhetorically constructed as needing development by the colonizer, since the ignorant native cannot grasp the usefulness or value of the land she or he inhabits. For Spurr, "colonization is now a gesture of 'human solidarity' which unites the intellectual and moral qualities of Europe with the material wealth of the tropics" (29). In addition to borrowing from his own earlier work, Dixon's use of passages taken almost verbatim from Walt Whitman's Specimen Days to describe Washington, DC, during the Civil War is documented by Frances Oakes; these passages appear in the first few chapters of The Clansman. Today, we would call this "strange case of borrowing" by a different name: plagiarism.

The white. Southern brand of Progressivism was sometimes allied with unapologetic endorsements of white supremacy. For example, Georgia Progressive Hoke Smith claimed in 1905 that

136 [t]his is a white man's country .... No matter how secure we may feel at present from negro domination, if . . . there is danger to the state at large . . . from this curse, it will be folly for us to neglect any means within our power to remove the danger, (qtd. in T. H. Williams 60-61)

Another explanation of Dixon's motives for writing The Clansman and other racist novels is advanced by Joel Williamson, who argues that Dixon's books were "a sort of attenuated ink blot test" (165) in which Dixon works through his otherwise-unexpressed anger with his father for marrying his mother when she was only thirteen. While Williamson offers some plausible evidence for this explanation, his efforts also illustrate the limits of post hoc psychoanalysis, especially when undertaken by someone who is not a professional psychologist.

In The Clansman. see pages 57, 79, 94, 100, 145, 157, 163, 183, 208, 216, 249, 266, 273, 274, 290, 291, 293, 294, 295, 323, and 371. Dixon was not always content to label African Americans as cats, leopards, and apes. In a description that Dixon credits to a Yankee, Phil Stoneman, African Americans are depicted as inferior even to some animals:

He [an African-American Union soldier] had the short, heavy-set neck of the lower order of animals. His skin was coal black, his lips so thick they curled both ways up and down with crooked blood-marks across them. His nose was flat, and its enormous nostrils seemed in perpetual dilation. The sinister bead eyes, with brown splotches in their whites, were set wide apart and gleamed ape-like under his scant brows. His enormous cheek-bones and jaws seemed to protrude beyond the ears and almost hide them. (The Clansman 216)

This description continued a pattern initiated in The Leopard's Spots. where the "freed Negro" was described as "a possible Beast to be feared and guarded" (5). On the title page of The Leopard ' s Spots. this animal analogy is made explicit to suggest the inability of African Americans to change their identities or to improve their position in the natural order of things: "Can the Ethiopian Change his Skin or the Leopard his Spots?" In his last novel. The Flaming Sword. Dixon still referred to African Americans as beasts (e.g., 193).

137 Dixon's depiction of African Americans as animals or animal-like was not unique in the nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries. For example, Charles Carroll maintained in 1902 that Africans are a kind of ape created by God to serve humankind and are not included in the Christian "Plan of Salvation." Carroll made use of both scientific and Biblical evidence to support these claims in a 500-page monograph.

Wilbur Samuel Howell, the last great defender of the rhetoric-poetic distinction in rhetorical studies, believes that a "different set of commands" exist in literary as opposed to non-literary texts (74). Even if Howell is correct, his arguments suggest the need for a special category of "poetic rhetoric," rather than reification of a rhetoric-poetic distinction.

The elderly Dixon may have recognized that his work had not earned lasting fame. By the time of his death in 1946, Dixon's novels were gathering dust on library shelves. Even Dixon's greatest academic devotee, Raymond Allen Cook, concedes that "[t]he literary quality of his novels is evidently that of popular works that fade in importance as each generation acquires new tastes" ("Literary" 102). Cook asserts that Dixon's work is most important for its sociological implications. A primary interest in delivering a message in the form of a novel is not unique to Dixon in the utopian literary tradition. Edward Bellamy attributed the following to an unnamed preface author in the year 2000: "Warned by a teacher's experience that learning is accounted a weariness to the flesh, the author has sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative ..." (Looking Backward 35). For Bellamy, the tissue-paper-thin romantic subplot of his novel is only a pleasant distraction from his primary message about the ills of the Gilded Age.

As noted earlier, Dixon was no friend of the 1920s Klan. He feared the lawlessness made possible by anonymous crimes sanctioned by a powerful secret society. According to Cook, Dixon "asserted that ignorance of the original purpose of the [nineteenth-century] Klan had caused the modern, self-appointed 'judges' of society [in the 1920s] to try to place themselves under a banner that would never have accepted them as suitable members" (Thomas Dixon 64); in Dixon's own words, as quoted in 1924, "I am opposed to the present-day Ku Klux Klan because I believe it a menace to American democracy"

138 ("Dixon Condemns" 18). In making such statements, Dixon joined a sizable group of white Southerners who denounced the violence of the 1920s Klan while defending the motives of the original nineteenth-century Klan organizers. See Chapter Three for further discussion of this point.

For example, Paul G. Haschak's recent work, Utopian/Dystopian Literature; A Bibliography of Literary Criticism, makes no reference to Thomas Dixon's novels.

Of course the "woman as angel" theme scarcely is unique to Dixon's work or to fin de siecle Southern culture. See Appendix A of Kitty O. Locker's doctoral dissertation. Also, some British Victorian novels suggest that death is a desirable option for a "fallen" woman.

In a later novel. The Sins of the Father (1912), Dixon returns to this plot device, where a mulatto woman seduces an upper-class white man. Once again, the reader is told that the affair is not the white man's responsibility. As a physician patiently explains to his desperate interlocutor, "my boy, with that young animal playing at your feet in physical touch with your soul and body in the intimacies of your home, you never had a chance. But you can't make your wife see this" (Dixon, Sins 123). Throughout the novel, Dixon described mulattoes as animals whose blood is "poisoned by the inheritance of thousands of years of savage cruelty, ignorance, slavery and superstition" (Sins 402).

While Lincoln did explore the colonization option, Dixon made Lincoln a more enthusiastic proponent of colonization than historical evidence warrants. At the turn of the century, white supremacists often argued that Lincoln had been a proponent of segregation and white supremacy. A Lincoln historian, Merrill D. Peterson, has called Dixon "the most influential proponent of the white- supremacist Lincoln" (168). In contrast, Thomas F. Gossett contends that Lincoln "gradually set his policy in the direction of granting political rights to Negroes" during his presidency (255), while Condit and Lucaites maintain that Lincoln uncoupled emancipation and colonization in the latter years of his presidency. Condit and Lucaites also note that "Lincoln was the last president publicly to support colonization as a final remedy" (113), although one U.S. Senator from Mississippi would advocate "voluntary" colonization as late as the 1930s.

139 On the depiction of Anglo-Saxon women in Dixon's novels, see Martha Groves Perry's doctoral dissertation (Ch. 4).

The distinction between procedurals and substantives is both useful and imperfect. The announcement of a substantive itself relies on a procedural concerning the formation of substantive rules. Also, procedurals may have substantive implications. For example, a procedural rule that recognizes the value of pluralism gives legitimacy to political systems that embrace pluralism. Nevertheless, the procedural/substantive distinction can provide some guidance in analyzing the rules governing an idiom of discourse.

In a 1984 interview, Lyotard explains that he has abandoned the term "language game" because "it seemed to me that 'language games' implied players that made use of language like a toolbox, thus repeating the constant arrogance of Western anthropocentrism" ("Interview" 17). The phrase/idiom/genre model of Lyotard's The Différend has an analytic precision lacking in his earlier work, as well as being more consistent with Lyotard's decentering of the subject in favor of the phrase. This decentering of the subject is typical of poststructuralists like Derrida.

Criticism is invariably a modern, rationalist enterprise. I do not mean this pejoratively. In explicating their artifacts, critics endeavor to explain, to understand, to expose to the light of day, to give reasons for a work's artistry and/or effectiveness, to judge. The critic who concludes that what she or he has discovered cannot be expressed or understood has violated a rule common to the idioms guiding criticism (with the exception of religious exegesis).

In talking about "advocacy," I am not referring to a narrow sense of the term, where a rhetor intends for discourse to produce a change among auditors. Rhetoric has the ability to advocate, to suggest change, even where the rhetor had no intent to foster such change. See Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin for examples of such rhetorics.

The "rhetoric of racism," a genre, could include many idioms of discourse, given Lyotard's unstable and perpetually shifting understanding of these idioms. By itself, the term "rhetoric of racism" is not particularly

140 helpful, since it embraces such a congeries of disparate discursive possibilities that we learn relatively little of use about any single phrase when we are told without elaboration that it is racist.

Throughout this chapter, I often seem to identify the "South" with white Southerners. I am fully cognizant of this problem. Although this point is beyond the scope of my essay, I would argue that African Americans live in the South, but the (white) rhetorical construction of the "South" historically emphasizes a white Southern racial identity; for example, Condit and Lucaites discuss the symbolic importance of the "Southern people" in the constitutive rhetoric of white supremacy following Reconstruction. Those who wish to oppose white racial hegemony have both the right and the obligation to challenge this rhetorical construction.

In a meeting with Stowe, Lincoln is reputed to have called her "the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war" (qtd. in Riggio 139). Cash's discussion of Southern literature prior to the 1920s led him to the following conclusion:

But save for these exceptions the literary state of the region was to be accurately measured by Thomas Dixon, Jr., whose many rabid novels, and especially The Clansman. which was made into the moving picture The Birth of a Nation. probably contributed no little to stirring up racial feeling and to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan. (Cash 375-376)

141 CHAPTER 3

THE MINISTERIAL VOICE OF THE KLAN:

VERNACULAR RHETORICS

No brighter chapter in all her [the South's] history, no fairer page will ever be read, than that which tells of that illustrious and glorious organization called the "Ku Klux Klan."

Laura Rose (1914)1

The rise of the modern Klan is the most spectacular of all the social movements in American society since the close of the World War.

John Moffatt Mecklin (1924)2

Despite his persistent advocacy of African-American colonization in Liberia, Thomas Dixon initiated no great crusade to make his dreams come to fruition. He did not

lobby for Congressional study of the race problem or organize a new American Colonization Society. Beyond a

few lectures, his time was devoted to work on novels, theatrical productions, and films. No one was more annoyed than Dixon when a new, twentieth-century Ku Klux

Klan was founded in Atlanta in 1915, claiming as

inspiration a film based on his novel. The Clansman.

142 After all, Dixon had denounced the Klan in a 1907 novel as a potential source of "social anarchy" and "lawless power"

(Dixon, Traitor 54). While necessary in the chaotic early days of Reconstruction, Dixon maintained that Klan reliance on secrecy and disguise was politically dangerous in a twentieth-century democratic society. In the early

1920s, Dixon condemned the new Klan in speeches and interviews, arguing that the Klan was "a growing menace to law and order" ("Dixon Condemns" 18).^ Despite his uncle's alleged membership in the Reconstruction-era Klan,

Dixon emphatically insisted that he never endorsed or encouraged the formation of a new Klan.

We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Dixon's anti-Klan statements. However, once Dixon's positive depiction of the nineteenth-century Klan was let loose on the world in both print and film media, the use to which his work was put in Klan organizational efforts is not surprising. As indicated in Chapter Two, D. W. Griffith's classic film. Birth of a Nation. was seen by millions throughout the nation, bringing Dixon's romantic portrayal of the first Klan to the screen. The Klan would use the film for decades as a recruiting tool and promotional gimmick, whatever the feelings of Thomas Dixon on the subject.4

143 In this chapter, I begin my examination of genre and

idiom in the twentieth-century Klan. While historical and

sociological debates on the Klan movement have by no means

been resolved or settled, students of the Klan generally

agree that the 1920s Klan differed in motivation, size,

and ideology from the 1860s and 1960s Klan movements. The

"second" Klan attracted millions of members across the

United States, taking positions on a dizzying array of

causes ranging from divorce to Prohibition to white

supremacy. Although this movement has stimulated

considerable historical and sociological investigation, no

rhetorical study of the 1920s Klan has been conducted.

This omission is odd, given the centrality of rhetorical

appeals in converting a vast number of white, native-born

citizens to the Klan cause (e.g., in the Klan recruiting

efforts of "kleagles") and the enthusiasm of rhetoricians

in recent decades for studies of social movements.

I examine Klan artifacts throughout this dissertation with the aims of understanding this rhetoric and

determining whether or not we something can be learned

about rhetoric from such an examination. Specifically, in

this chapter I consider two addresses delivered by pro-

Klan ministers to Klan-sympathetic audiences in Northern

Louisiana in the early 1920s. This investigation isolates the rules that govern the rhetorical imbrication of

144 religious appeals with Klan precepts and principles, with

implications for the revision of genre theory.

A note about artifact and document selection is

appropriate for this chapter. In the U.S., traditional

histories and public address studies have emphasized the

words and activities of leaders in explaining historical

and/or rhetorical phenomena. With the rise of interest in

social history in the 1960s, historians increasingly have

turned to studying their subject matter from "the bottom

up," emphasizing the experience of ordinary people as

vital emendations to what is known about articulate

leaders in the military, politics, and industry.^

Following neo-Aristotelianism's decline in rhetorical

criticism during the 1960s, rhetoricians also added the

explication of ordinary people's discourse to the list of

worthy projects that a communication scholar might pursue.

This focus on the talk of ordinary people has been

retrospectively labeled the "critique of vernacular

discourse" by Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop.® While such

research might focus on subaltern rhetorics of the

oppressed, as featured by Ono and Sloop, other vernacular

rhetorics include those of petty oppressors, whether the minor Nazi officials of Hitler's Germany or the subaltern administrators of New York City sweatshops.

145 No study of the Klan would be complete without considering the importance of the rhetoric of Klan leaders to Klan successes and failures. In this chapter, however,

I examine the rhetoric of two relatively unimportant Klan speakers in order to facilitate comparison of disparate

Klan discourses, whether produced by Klan leaders (as discussed in Chapters Five and Six) or by rank-and-file members. I begin this study by summarizing the history of the twentieth-century Klan between 1915 and 1930.

Following a more specific discussion of Klan efforts in

Louisiana, I analyze the rhetoric of Frank Tripp and J. C.

Barr, two 1920s pro-Klan ministers. I conclude this chapter by detailing the rules by which their discourse operates, which in turn illustrates the rhetorical imbrication of Klan, religious, nationalist, and

"nativist" discourses.

One definitional problem deserves attention in this chapter. "Nativism" and "nativist" refer below to the so- called old-stock Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans revered by the Ku Klux Klan, rather than (as one might expect) to

Native Americans. As David H. Bennett and other historians have used the term for many decades, nativist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have valorized the old stock, the alleged 100-percent

Americans, and resisted the influx of immigrants from non

146 white or non-Protestant nations: "What tied these

[nativist] movements to one tradition was the vision of

alien intruders in the promised land— people who could not

be assimilated in the national community because of their

religion or ethnicity" (Bennett 2). While contemporary

historians recognize the irony of "nativism" references,

the term is firmly entrenched in the lexicon of

professional history.

The Second Klan

The story of the 1920s Klan has been told many times,

and the interest of historians and sociologists in re telling the story has not waned. While the records of a

secret organization by definition are difficult to acquire, the discovery of old records and the

(increasingly rare) availability of first-hand witnesses to 1920s Klan activities have encouraged a new generation of scholars to study the Klan in its local, state, national, and international manifestations.? This new work combines with classic studies of earlier decades to provide a fascinating and frightening picture of Klan activity in North and South, East and West.

The nineteenth-century Klan was founded in Pulaski,

Tennessee, in the years immediately following the Civil

War. Originally organized by former Confederate officers

147 as a social club, the Klan grew quickly, with chapters of the new organization springing up in several Southern states.® With ex-Confederate General Nathan Bedford

Forrest as its leader, the Klan's original benign purpose, as described by its Pulaski founders, quickly was forgotten in the turmoil surrounding post-Civil War

Reconstruction. The Klan's secrecy and strange hooded regalia provided an ideal cover for night-riding and vigilantism, as documented by Congressional hearings conducted on the Klan in 1871 and early 1872. Many

Southern whites maintained at the time and in later decades that the original Klan was necessary to maintain order in the chaotic Reconstruction era. In contrast, the federal government and African Americans understood Klan violence directed at African Americans, white Southern

"scalawags," and Northern carpetbaggers as an attempt to end political reforms and the African American franchise on grounds that would return the South to the pre-war status quo, when wealthy white elites typically monopolized political power.^

Eventually, tales of Klan violence and state and federal anti-Klan laws combined to reduce and, ultimately, to end coherent Klan organizing. In January, 1869,

General Forrest announced the disbanding of the Klan and ordered Klan records destroyed. While scattered Klan

148 activity persisted for a few years, the end of

Reconstruction in 1876-77 gave Southern whites

institutional options for reasserting their political

control. The Klan then lay dormant for several decades,

remembered by some white Southerners with affection and by

others with disgust and antipathy. This first Klan was

the subject of Southern literature for many years

following the end of Reconstruction, and the depiction of

the Klan in this literature was almost universally

favorable; as noted in Chapter Two, Dixon's fin de siecle

novels were by no means unique in their uncritical

celebration of Klan violence.

For forty years, the Ku Klux Klan lived only as a

historical curiosity, a memory of bygone Southern days

before the final victory of Jim Crow. Following the

arrival of Birth of a Nation in Atlanta, William Joseph

Simmons would bring a new Klan into the world. More than

anyone else, Simmons, the founder of the twentieth-century

Klan, is responsible for the suffering caused by the Klan

since 1915. The high regard for the Reconstruction Klan,

as suggested by the Rose epigraph at the beginning of this

chapter, made Simmons's efforts to create another Ku Klux

Klan that much easier.

149 The Klan Reborn

The man responsible for recreating the Klan was curiously non-threatening. An unsuccessful minister and circuit-rider, an undistinguished veteran of the Spanish-

American war, and a one-time lecturer in Southern history at a failing Atlanta university, William Joseph Simmons is notable most of all for his enthusiasm for the fraternal organizations popular in his day. Simmons was a member of the Masons, the Woodmen of the World, the Knights Templar, and several other fraternities. The former Army private was known by the honorary title of "Colonel," which was bestowed on him by the Woodmen.

While recuperating in bed from an injury, Simmons claimed to have seen a vision that inspired him to form a new Ku Klux Klan, and the showing of Birth of a Nation in

Atlanta and other events in 1915 encouraged him to go through with his plans. On Thanksgiving Day, 1915,

Simmons chartered a bus and took fifteen men to Stone

Mountain for a Klan initiation ceremony. Thus was the second Klan born as the United States moved slowly toward involvement in World War One. In all, there were thirty- five charter members of Simmons's fledgling Klan, two of whom allegedly had been involved in its Reconstruction-era predecessor. Simmons devised fanciful tiles for various

150 offices in the Klan, some of which had been used by the

original nineteenth-century Klan.

The first five years for the new Klan were not marked

by impressive membership gains. Only Georgia and

neighboring Alabama had significant Klan enrollment, and

Simmons struggled to support himself as the head (or

"Imperial Wizard") of the Ku Klux Klan. Two key events

combined to change the fortunes of the Klan in the early

1920s. First, Simmons entered into a business

relationship with Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler,

partners in the Southern Publicity Association. In

exchange for directing Klan recruitment efforts, Clarke

(and Tyler) would personally receive $2.50 of every

"klectoken," or $10.00 Klan initiation fee. With the title of "Imperial Kleagle," Clarke and his aggressive

sales force of "kleagles" (recruiting agents) would expand the Klan membership from under 100,000 (mostly in the

South) in 1921 to over one million Klansmen in every

region of the country by 1925.10 The success of this sales effort typically is attributed to the flexibility of the sales force, since individual kleagles made whatever

local issue was most apt to generate interest the centerpiece of recruiting speeches for the area.11 The rapid increase in Klan membership made Clarke and Tyler very wealthy, and, as Henry P. Fry explains, many rank-

151 and-file Klan members mulled the possibility that making

money was more important to Klan leaders than the supposed

fraternal and political goals of the organization.

Second, a series of anti-Klan exposes by the New York

World in late 1921 gave the Klan enormous national

exposure as Klan recruiting success accelerated.^^ While

scathingly critical of the Klan, this series of articles,

which was reprinted in newspapers across the United

States, introduced the Klan to some individuals who

sympathized with the Klan message. While his claims are

difficult to confirm, Clarke asserted that many new Klan

members were initiated thanks to the World's reproduction

of a Klan membership form. These forms were allegedly

clipped from newspapers and mailed to the Klan

headquarters in Atlanta. Moreover, when Simmons was

called to testify before Congress after the World articles

attracted attention in Washington, Simmons solemnly swore

to the Klan's non-violent, benevolent, and patriotic

character, insisting that no one operating under Klan

auspices was committing violent crimes. Under pressure

from Klan supporters in Congress, federal investigation of

the Klan ended for a time after Simmons testified.

While Simmons's vision was responsible for the

founding of the twentieth-century Klan, his leadership and administrative skills were not exemplary. Whether or not

152 Simmons was sincere in his commitment to non-violence,

numerous, well-publicized instances of Klan atrocities

hurt the national reputation of the Klan, and accusations

of corruption in the Klan's Atlanta headquarters troubled

many of the Klan faithful. At a Klan convention, or

"Klonvokation,” in late 1922, a group of Klan faithful

used duplicitous tactics to persuade Simmons to accept the

impressive-sounding but powerless post of Emperor and step

down as Imperial Wizard, a position soon thereafter

secured by Texas dentist Hiram Wesley Evans. When Simmons

realized that he had lost all control of the Klan to

Evans, a public war of words divided the Klan into Simmons

and Evans factions. Legal wrangling between Simmons and

Evans over the next several months alienated many once-

dedicated Klansmen, and the 1925 Indiana murder trial of

Hoosier Klan leader D. C. Stephenson did a great deal of damage to the Klan in its strongest state realm,

notwithstanding Stephenson's removal from Klan office

prior to his kidnapping and rape of Madge Oberholtzer

By the time Evans settled his dispute with Simmons by

out Simmons's interest in the Klan, the damage done to the Klan's image was considerable. While Klan membership grew for a time under Evans's leadership, frequent denunciations of the Klan, a succession of Klan scandals, and improved economic conditions were among the many

153 factors leading to the Klan's decline in membership and influence after 1925. Klan fortunes would not improve again until Jim Crow was threatened by the Supreme Court's

1954 Brown decision, although some individual klaverns were responsible for sporadic local violence during the

1930s and 1940s.For example, Klan members in Tampa,

Florida, with police cooperation, tortured union organizer

Joseph Shoemaker with a hot iron poker and boiling tar in late 1935. Shoemaker later died from his injuries (Wade

260-262).

Historical and sociological accounts of the Klan's success during the 1920s have emphasized many different phenomena in order to explain Klan recruiting success from

1920-1925, including the migration of African Americans from the South to Northern cities, the economic downturn of the early 1920s, and the nervousness of post-World War

One Americans about the U.S. role in world affairs.I will provide three examples below that illustrate the still-lively debate over the causes for the growth and decline of the second Klan. (For a review of research on the Ku Klux Klan that is relevant to these examples, see

Appendix C.)

First, students of the Klan have quarreled over whether the organization was primarily rural or urban.

Early Klan students like John Mofatt Mecklin contended

154 that Klan growth was the product of small town boredom and

hostility toward the rapid growth of ethnically and

racially diverse cities, and other Klan observers

essentially accepted this thesis for four decades (e.g.,

Harrell). No less distinguished a historian than Richard

Hofstadter maintained that the Klan was one symbol among many of an "older, rural and small-town America" making a

determined stand against "cosmopolitanism, Romanism, and

the skepticism and moral experimentalism of the

intelligentsia" during the 1920s (Anti 123), and William

E. Leuchtenburg reached a similar conclusion in his highly regarded The Perils of Prosperitv 1914-32. As J. Wayne

Flynt explained, many Americans worried at the time about the material and intellectual poverty of rural Americans in the decades following the century's turn. Students of the Klan quite reasonably inferred that this rural crisis was partly responsible for the growth of the Klan.

Among Klan scholars, Kenneth T. Jackson was the first to reject the rural thesis, arguing instead that the Klan had considerable influence and membership in most of the nation's largest urban centers. While incomplete membership records make questions about the rural or urban character of the 1920s Klan ultimately impossible to resolve on empirical grounds, studies of state Klans in recent years suggest that the Klan was both urban and

155 rural (e.g., Goldberg; Moore, Citizen'). although city dwellers may have had different reasons for joining the

Klan than their rural counterparts. While Klan scholars routinely have attributed rural Klan success to boredom with the sterility of small-town life, the urban Klan often is depicted as a response to rapid technological, cultural, and demographic changes in the nation's largest cities.

Second, studies of the Klan often differ based on assumptions about the Klan as a national or a local movement. Early commentators on the Klan focused almost exclusively on the discourse and activities of Klan leaders to inform their analyses, using examples from local klaverns only to provide further support for their general conclusions. The assumption of such a leader- driven model for Klan studies was first explicitly questioned by Norman Frederic Weaver in his landmark doctoral dissertation. Weaver concluded that the local klavern was by far the most important unit for typical rank-and-file Klan members: "The Klan of Madison,

Wisconsin, Evansville, Indiana, or Marion, Ohio, was the

'Klan' that was the important unit" (Weaver 301). Weaver maintained that these local klaverns varied considerably from one another and were very nearly autonomous where day-to-day operations were concerned. This emphasis on

156 the local klavern makes Weaver's dissertation an early

study in the "new" social history, with Weaver emphasizing

the role played by the Klan in the ordinary lives of Klan

members, in the fashion of a later generation of Klan

scholars like Kathleen Blee, Nancy MacLean (Behind), and

Shawn Lay (Hooded, War).

Variations on the national/local theme in Klan

studies include questions about the regional character of

the Klan and the socioeconomic class of typical Klan

members. While the 1860s and 1960s Klan movements were

predominantly located in the states of the former

Confederacy, the 1920s Klan had a significant presence in

almost every state in the nation; the two states with the

largest 1920s Klan membership, Indiana and Ohio, were

located in the Old Northwest, which contributed

approximately one-third of the Klan's national membership

total in this era. Also, while early commentators

depicted Klan members as lower-class, rustic, anti

intellectual reactionaries not capable of critical

thought, more sophisticated recent studies have found that many local politicians, professionals (e.g., physicians,

teachers), civic leaders, and white-collar workers also

joined the Klan, although the motives of this class for taking the Klan oath may differ from those of their unskilled brethren.^®

157 Third, one of the liveliest debates over the 1920s

Klan revolves around the use of violence in pursuit of

Klan goals. Was the 1920s Klan essentially violent or fundamentally peaceful? While no serious student of the

1920s Klan denies that violence was used at times by Klan members during this era, serious disagreement exists over the extent and regularity of such violence. This disagreement is at the core of the distinction between the

"traditional" interpretation of the Klan as a terrorist organization and the "revisionist" depiction of the 1920s

Klan as more typically peaceful than the 1860s and 1960s

Klan movements. Traditionalists are apt to emphasize violent Klan episodes that contradict the Klan's insistence that the movement was fundamentally peaceful and benevolent, while revisionists maintain that Klan violence was sporadic and infrequent, especially outside the South. Revisionists maintain that race-related violence in the South and throughout the nation was increasing prior to the beginning of rapid Klan expansion in the early 1920s and would have occurred with or without

Klan involvement. While some Klan members undoubtedly joined with the expectation that the vigilante tradition of the first Klan would not be ignored by the second Klan, there were many local klaverns to which violence was very rarely attributed.

158 Nancy MacLean undoubtedly is correct to indicate that these three debates are overblown, as are other concerns sometimes discussed by Klan scholars (e.g., nativism versus populism). The Klan was national and local, rural and urban, violent and peaceful. Despite the sweeping powers granted to the Imperial Wizard by the Klan constitution (the "Kloran"), the individual klaverns made the vast majority of the day-to-day operating decisions that determined how the Klan was perceived in local communities. For example, some klaverns concerned themselves primarily with black-white relations, while others practically ignored African Americans to concentrate on other bits of Klan dogma (e.g., anti-

Catholicism, preserving law and order), especially in non-

Southern localities with very small African-American populations. While usually consistent with the positions taken by the national Klan leadership, the discourse of local Klan rhetors is quite heterogeneous, making attempts to generalize about "Klan rhetoric" surprisingly difficult. The problems inherent in such generalization may explain in part why the best histories of the Klan have been studies of individual states or klaverns (e.g..

Lay, Hooded ; MacLean, Behind).

In the next section, I briefly discuss the growth of the 1920s Louisiana Klan. This discussion provides some

159 necessary background material for my efforts later in this

chapter. Also, considering the role played by the Klan

in Louisiana helps one to understand the (necessary) malleability of Klan rhetorics and the extent to which

Klan ideology was sublated in those rhetorics.

The Klan Comes to Louisiana

Any student of Southern history knows that Louisiana

is a former Confederate and slave state, which has its own tradition of race-baiting, white-supremacist discourse, anti-black violence, and Jim Crow laws. However,

Louisiana differs in many respects from the Southern culture of Georgia and Alabama. A one-time territory of

Spain and France, Louisiana is home to a unique Cajun and

Creole heritage. The descendants of settlers who allegedly were forced to leave the French colony of

Acadiana in eastern Canada, the Acadians (or Cajuns) brought a Francophone, Catholic heritage to the already polyglot culture of southern Louisiana.^0 Klan organizers in the early 1920s found a state that combined the usual

Old South affection for white supremacist arguments with considerable tolerance for religious and ethnic diversity.21

Despite considerable nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Protestant immigration to the state, Louisiana

160 remained almost sixty percent Catholic in 1920 (Harrell).

Not surprisingly, recruiting efforts by an anti-Catholic organization in Louisiana carried with them a certain danger not faced in states like Indiana, where the

Catholic population was very small. However, a significant minority Protestant presence was the target of recruiting efforts in south Louisiana, and New Orleans had a klavern of over 500 members— "Old Hickory Klan Number

One"— by mid-1921, only eight months after Imperial Wizard

Simmons first visited New Orleans. Moreover, while New

Orleans was the initial base for Klan expansion into the state, primarily Protestant north Louisiana soon became the center of Klan activities in the Bayou State, with kleagles capitalizing on the resentment and ill will felt by many north Louisianans toward their wealthier and more numerous Catholic neighbors to the south.^2 Kenneth Earl

Harrell estimates that the Klan had approximately 25,000 members in Louisiana by late 1922,23 and a small women's auxiliary chapter was established at that time in

Shreveport— the "Ladies of the Invisible Empire" (LOTIE)— albeit without formal approval by the Klan's national headquarters.24

Historical accounts and the public memory of the

1920s Louisiana Klan are dominated by the sensational media attention given to Klan violence in Morehouse Parish

161 (a parish is the Louisiana equivalent of a county), located north of Monroe near the Arkansas border. Two white men from the parish town of Mer Rouge were kidnapped by members of the local Morehouse klavern in August, 1922, and they subsequently disappeared. After a local, Klan- dominated grand jury in the parish seat of Bastrop refused to indict anyone for this kidnapping and possible murder, anti-Klan Governor John M. Parker sent units of the

Louisiana National Guard to Morehouse Parish. When the bodies of the two men were discovered in December, 1922, reporters from the nation's major newspapers converged on the small towns of Bastrop and Mer Rouge to expose the

Klan's direct involvement in the murders.

Despite a public hearing conducted by the state that provided ample evidence concerning those responsible for these crimes, a second local grand jury refused to issue indictments. While no Klan members were ever prosecuted for these murders, the state and national publicity did enormous damage to the Louisiana Klan and probably hurt

Klan recruitment efforts nationwide. By late 1924, internal divisions within the Louisiana Klan and local

Klan complicity in the passage of state anti-masking laws hastened the decline in Louisiana Klan membership. Only about 3,000 Klan members were left in the state by 1926

(Harrell).

162 At the time, newspaper accounts of the Morehouse

murders gave an exaggerated sense of Klan violence and

influence in the state. True, the analogues drawn between

the first and second Klans by the Klan leadership

encouraged local klaverns to act as vigilantes from time

to time, and many Klansmen participated in violence

against those who allegedly violated the moral code of the

local community. More frequently, Klan members threatened violence or left messages suggesting that some wayward

sinner reform or leave town immediately. The occasional

Klan parade or social event provided ample evidence to the community that many Klansmen were available to enforce whatever edicts were issued in the name of the organization.

The Louisiana Klan was by no means a peaceful fraternal organization, as the available evidence demonstrates. However, many local klaverns were quite nonviolent. For example, Harrell maintains that, concerning the important New Orleans klavern, "there is no evidence linking it with the night riding activities which characterized many other state units of the Invisible

Empire" (120). The intimidation of prospective lawbreakers and those with "loose morals" was an important component of Klan ideology in Louisiana and elsewhere, which explains much of the Klan's white-on-white violence

163 in Morehouse Parish and elsewhere. (Klan members did not need such an excuse for white-on-black violence.) The frequent involvement of law enforcement officers and judges in the Klan made the arrest and conviction of Klan lawbreakers notoriously difficult in the 1920s, even when white citizens were the victims of Klan assaults.

Despite all this, many Klan members were interested only in working within the local or state political system for change, using pro-Klan tracts and newspapers (e.g., in

Louisiana, the Winnfield News-American) to espouse their v i e w s . 25 The decision of the klavern in Lafayette,

Louisiana, to disband after the negative publicity surrounding the Morehouse murders demonstrates the aversion of many 1920s Klan members to violence (at least against members of their own racial group) ("Lafayette

Klan Disbanded" 1).26 While Klan secrecy provided an ideal cover for those who wanted an organizational imprimatur to legitimate their violent tendencies, a great many Klansmen in Louisiana and other states preferred suasion and leading by example to physical violence.

Academic and journalistic accounts of the Morehouse incident typically have extolled the virtues of Klan opponents in the state. However, Klan foes often had much in common with Klan members. For example, Harrell praised the anti-Klan efforts of Governor Parker and and claimed

164 that Parker was "the kind of governor too few states have and many need" (157). That Parker was the son and grandson of Reconstruction-era Klansmen is well known, and

Parker frequently praised the first Klan while denouncing the 1920s version. Also, Parker was an unapologetic white supremacist— elected officials in the Old South of the

1920s rarely were anything else— and shared the Klan's commitment to immigration restrictions and law and order.

John V. Baiamonte, Jr. indicates that "[a ]s a member of

Louisiana's planter society, Parker considered the Klan a threat to the state's class structure. Throughout his life he disliked and distrusted all secret organizations, especially those among the lower class" (153). For

Parker, opposition to the Klan was a matter of keeping political and social power concentrated in the hands of a wealthy elite, rather than promoting racial or economic egalitarianism.27 Similarly, the editors of the Monroe

News-Star, like Thomas Dixon, saw no inconsistency in opposing the Klan while trumpeting the benefits of white supremacy and criticizing the "hyphenate" immigrant

("Hyphenates," "Race Question," "Race Riots").

Klan historians have chronicled the numerous parades, public initiation ceremonies, and other Klan-sponsored celebrations designed for Klan members, their families, and interested community members. While Louisiana never

165 had an official "Klan Day" at its state fair (as did

Texas), local newspapers from north Louisiana show that area klaverns sponsored numerous social activities. For example, the aftereffects of the Morehouse incident did not prevent Monroe Klan Number Four from sponsoring in

1923 what it promised would be "the biggest 4th of July celebration that North Louisiana has ever witnessed" ("Ku

Klux Klan Celebration" 3). Subsequent newspaper reports indicate that trains from around the state would bring

Klan members to the celebration, and 10,000 pounds of meat were to be barbecued for the free dinner offered by the

Klan at this patriotic extravaganza ("Klan Naturalization"

3). The Klan frequently placed advertisements in the local newspapers to announce their activities, often on the front page. As in other states, observers worried that the Klan would influence state politics, though the

Louisiana Klan was generally not successful in doing so

("Ku Klux Klan To Be Issue" 4).

In short, reports of generally peaceful Klan social events and political activism were at least as common as accounts of Klan vigilantism, even in anti-Klan newspapers. Such events presumably counteracted (or, at least, muddled the reception of) negative press reports concerning the Klan. Students of the Klan in Louisiana and elsewhere need to consider this range of nonviolent

166 activities when assessing the 1920s Klan, because such

activities appealed to white citizens who had no desire to

participate in Klan-sponsored violence.

As documented by several revisionist historians of

the Klan, appeals made at the local level varied from

state to state, region to region, and locality to

locality. Grand attempts to explain the attractiveness of

Klan discourse provide tidy explanation, but they also

risk oversimplification. Certainly many themes are

recurrent in Klan discourse, but those themes are packaged

in a myriad of ways, with nuances of meaning and degrees

of emphasis dependent on the Klan rhetor's performative

adroitness, assessment of the local rhetorical situation,

and personal philosophy. While understanding the Klan

surely demands a grasp of national and regional trends in

Klan rhetorical appeals, assessing Klan discourse and confirming or disconfirming extant scholarly impressions

requires a commitment to mapping the local rhetorical and

ideological terrain, a commitment to examining both text

and context.

In the next section, I examine two speeches given by pro-Klan ministers in Monroe, Louisiana. According to

Harrell, Monroe Klan Number Four, located in northeast

Louisiana, was the largest klavern in north central

Louisiana in the early 1920s, and Monroe newspaper stories

167 and advertisements attest to the activity of the Klan in the area, despite Monroe's anti-Klan newspaper and Jewish mayor. My purpose in performing this criticism is twofold. First, I wish to divine the rules that govern these texts and ask how these rules function together in the idiom or idioms of discourse to which these texts belong. Second, I hope to determine whether or not these rules would appeal to the immediate audience for whom such texts were crafted. In other words, to the extent that auditors intuit the implicit existence of such rules, I suspect that the rules to which these texts conform provide ethical legitimation for such texts. However, before scrutinizing these texts, I consider the role played by religion and religious appeals in the Ku Klux

Klan.

The Klan as Ministry

Jesus Christ is the Klansman's criterion of character and to him we look for light, love and life.

anonymous Klansman (1923)28

The relationship of the Ku Klux Klan to Protestant churches is, at best, difficult to explain. The second

Klan pronounced itself a Protestant Christian order, and

Klan rhetors almost invariably made reference to

168 Christianity and Biblical principles when explaining the

purposes of the Klan. Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans

credited divine intervention with the Klan growth in the

1920s ("Fight" 35-36), and the allusions to Christianity

at Klan gatherings were l e g i o n . 29 The Klan's hymn was

"The Old Rugged Cross," and the Klan frequently marched to

"Onward Christian Soldiers."

To affirm publicly the Klan's commitment to promoting

Christianity, Klansmen clad in the requisite hoods and robes frequently visited Protestant churches in mid service on Sunday mornings to make small donations

(usually between $25 and $100). Often this visit was arranged in advance with the minister, who gratefully accepted the gift and praised the good work done by the order. For example, Monroe Klan Number Four allegedly gave $500— a considerable sum of money at the time— to local Protestant churches in Ouachita Parish during

December, 1922 ("Ku Klux Klan Church" 3). At least one

Klan donation was made to an African-American church in

Colorado during this era, to the astonishment of its congregation (Goldberg). Newspapers usually were informed of these generous Klan donations to churches or, less frequently, to other charitable groups (e.g., the Red

Cross in Morehouse Parish) ("Red Cross" 1).

169 Less self-serving were the Klan honor guards provided at the funerals of Klan members, in the fashion of other fraternal organizations (e.g., the Knights of Columbus).

Women of the Ku Klux Klan funerals in Indiana "featured

Klanswomen in full regalia serving as pallbearers, eulogists, and bodyguards for their departed Klan sister"

(Blee 164), and robed Klansmen in Monroe appeared at the funeral services of their fallen brethren ("Klansmen

Place" 1).30

The Klan also sought more direct ties with local

Protestant churches. Kleagles entering a new sales territory frequently went to local ministers to seek assistance in reaching prospective Klan members.

Ministers sometimes were offered free Klan membership in support for their aid, and they were assured that the Klan would help bring the unchurched or lackadaisical back to the Christian fold. On a less altruistic note, poorly paid ministers sometimes became Klan lecturers and even kleagles in some cases, with concomitant opportunities to increase their incomes. Finally, each klavern's officers included a chaplain, for which ordained ministers were preferred, and many klaverns were led in a de facto or de jure sense by one or more local ministers.Among

Klanswomen, one of the most famous, Daisy Douglas Barr,

170 was an ordained minister in the Friends church (Blee 103-

ill).

We should not overstate Protestant church involvement

with the Klan. Contra reports of heavy Protestant church

involvement in the 1920s Klan, Robert Moats Miller reports

that 1920s church publications demonstrate little or no

recognition of Klan activities. Indeed, Miller indicates

that most church press accounts of the Klan in that era

were negative, emphasizing the lawlessness of the Klan and

calling attention to the Klan's un-Christian spirit. Even

the evangelical denominations that were assumed by many to

be sympathetic to the Klan message did not endorse the Klan. While Miller's depiction of 1920s church publications is probably accurate, and numerous Protestant ministers were involved in anti-Klan activities, recall that klavern organization was fundamentally a local phenomenon; ministers were not always in accord with their denominational leaders.While definitive data regarding

support for or opposition to the Klan among rank-and-file ministers in the various denominations is not available, ample evidence exists that ministers of many different

Protestant denominations had some Klan involvement.^^ As

Goldberg concludes concerning the Ku Klux Klan in

Colorado;

The Invisible Empire rose to power with the aid of ministers from all denominations who turned

171 their churches into Klan sanctuaries and recruiting camps. These ministers served the realm at all leadership levels and willingly bestowed their benedictions upon the fiery cross. They welcomed delegations of Klansmen and eagerly accepted their donations. The activities of clergymen in urban and rural parishes thus assumed far greater weight than the belated and ineffective resolutions of the state conventions. On the local level in Colorado, the silent observer became the silent partner. (188)

Given this understanding of the church-Klan relationship, I consider below the efforts of two pro-Klan ministers speaking on separate occasions in the early

1920s. Neither speaker achieved any particular notoriety in the national or state Klan movement. Instead, these addresses were selected because they illustrate some of the features of the vernacular discourse of the 1920s

Klan. In an era before television and the Internet, when even radio ownership was rare, the voices of speakers like

Tripp and Barr were the Klan for the ordinary citizen and prospective Klan member in northeast Louisiana. While local Klaverns frequently advertised in local newspapers, these two speeches were published as news stories, rather than as paid advertisements. The printing of sermons or public lectures was a common practice for many local newspapers of the era. The typical approach was to publish such speeches if the rhetor provided the text of the address shortly after it was delivered.^4

172 Frank Tripp and Forgetting History

As pastor of the First Baptist church, Frank Tripp

led one of the largest congregations in Monroe, which in

turn was one of the state's larger cities. His sermon of

February 26, 1922, as reproduced in Appendix A, concerned

a Klan parade held in Monroe a few days earlier, in which

hundreds of area Klansmen allegedly participated ("Monroe

Ku Klux" 2). Such Klan parades were common during this

era; they allowed the Klan to demonstrate peacefully its

strength in a region and commitment to community values.

The August, 1925, Klan march on Washington, D.C., was a

national application of a proven local principle: If you

want to attract attention to the Klan, hold a parade.

Banners at these events typically conveyed Klan sentiments

to onlookers.

While no document unequivocally indicates that Tripp was a member of the Klan, this speech and other newspaper

accounts suggest that Tripp minimally was a Klan

sympathizer and possibly was a charter member of Monroe

Klan Number Four ("Endorses" 1). Several months after

delivering this sermon, Tripp was among those defending the character of Dr. B. M. McKoin, a former Morehouse

Parish Klan leader, during the Morehouse murder investigation, assuring his First Baptist congregation that "my faith and confidence in him [McKoin] as a

173 Christian gentleman has never faltered" ("Baptist Pastor"

6). The sermon examined here was delivered after the existence of a Louisiana Klan was well known throughout the state but several months before the Morehouse murders.

The author of the Morehouse Enterprise story in which

Tripp's sermon appeared indicated that some 800 persons heard him speak, and this congregation gave the address an enthusiastic reception: "The crowd at one point in the sermon broke into cheers that shook the building" ("Monroe

Baptist" 1).

Tripp left no room for ambiguity concerning his own \ position vis-a-vis the Klan: "I want to say unhesitatingly and unqualifiedly that I am 100 per cent for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan." Given the Klan's public advocacy of

100 percent Americanism, Tripp's 100 percent support is consistent with the Klan commitment to so-called moral and patriotic absolutes. Tripp announced further that "I join them [the Klan] hand and heart with all other moral forces of Monroe to make our city a better place in which to live." Two entailments of this claim have implications for ethos. First, Tripp's assumption that the Klan was one of several "moral forces" invites auditors to make the same assumption at a time when the ethics of a secret, masked society were under fire in the national press and Monroe's local newspaper. Second, Tripp indicated that he was a

174 force for moral leadership and, by implication, suggested that others should follow his lead by embracing the Klan.

Tripp's next few sentences preached to his audience the lessons taught by the parade. Initially, Tripp reminded his audience that the Klan clearly did exist in the region: "The appearance of these hooded gentlemen on the streets leaves no doubt in the minds of our citizens that we have such an organization on our hands . . . ."

In the fashion of many patriarchal rhetorics, the size of the parade was presented as evidence of the organization's goodness and strength. Where a secret order is concerned, proving that the society has attracted a large number of adherents is notoriously difficult, and the people of

Monroe may have questioned the strength of an organization to which so much press attention was given. (My own review of the thirty-month period between January, 1921, and June, 1923, found over 170 stories or editorials devoted to the Klan in the Monroe News-Star.1

Also, Tripp insisted that, if the sentiments

"expressed on written banners borne by the Klansmen are true," the Klan was composed of "law-abiding citizens" who

"want to co-operate with our officers in their program of law enforcement . . . ." Since the Klan was not composed of "promoters of mob violence," Tripp maintained that "I am sure that the people of our city and parish will have a

175 different attitude toward the organization than they have maintained in the past." The past is recalled here only to tell us about the rupture between past and present.

Because Klan banners proclaimed the true aims of the order and the Klan was made up of "gentlemen" and "select men of the community," Tripp believed in their peaceful intentions. (How Tripp could know the identities of hooded demonstrators I leave the reader to guess.)

By early 1922, many tales of Klan misdeeds had been printed by the national media. However, the parade provided all the evidence that Tripp required of the

Klan's good intentions, so attention need not be paid to past Klan misadventures. Once that evidence was made available, the national and local histories of the Klan became irrelevant; all was forgotten. Tripp even made the parade. rather than the Klan, the instrument of reform in

Monroe: "I am of the opinion that this parade will do more toward bettering the moral conditions of Monroe than anything, aside from the efforts of our churches, that has happened in many years." While the community has a past, the Klan in Monroe does not. For this rhetor, all we need know about this Klan has been given to us by the parade.

The argument from history had been quashed by the agency of the parade, which acted to (re-)establish the Klan's good name.

176 In a closing passage of this sermon, Tripp shifts his

focus from Klansman to criminal, even while reaffirming

again the agency of the parade:

As I watched the parade pass by . . . I had a vision. In this, I imagined if all the criminals could be corraled [sic] on DeSiard street [in Monroe] that we would yet, as a great Christian people, have to perform the supreme duty, which would be to give them "another chance." I am for the rigid and conscientious enforcement of all criminall [sic] laws which I believe is the only remedy for the unpleasant conditions that exist, but after the criminal has been run down and punishment provided by the law has been inflicted, then it is my business, and the business of every other Christian man and woman to see that he or she has the privilege of coming back and making good. The spirit of "giving a man another chance" was tried out in the life and ministry of the Man of Nazareth. He is our example and if we would reform the City of Monroe and the Parish of Ouachita, with a reformation that will last, we must apply the principles of the Christian religion in all of our efforts.

A hasty reading of this passage suggests only that

Tripp has shifted from one effect of the parade to

another, leaving behind the immediate question of the Klan

and the defense he gives it in preceding paragraphs to

emphasize a dogmatic commitment to Christian forgiveness.

Certainly maximum punishment for criminals and application

of Christian principles in all domains of life were

consistent with alleged Klan tenets, and a recurrent

feature of Klan discourse in Louisiana and elsewhere was the claim that lawlessness had become increasingly common after the World War.

177 However, these final sentences also convey a message

to auditors who suspected that some Klansmen were

criminals, despite Tripp's assurances to the contrary.

After all, Klan members already were corralled on DeSiard

street where the parade took place, as Tripp had reminded

the audience previously. Punishment of criminals/Klansmen

should be left to the law, while good Christians will give

criminals/Klansmen another chance. If dubious auditors will not forget the Klan's past, as did Tripp, they are

admonished to forgive the Klan and let them go about the business of "making good," providing moral leadership as a kind of atonement for past sins. While Tripp happily would vouch for the good character of these Christian

Klansmen, he also insisted that those Christians who would condemn the Klan's excesses were required by their own religion to give the Klan another chance. If those who doubt the Klan will not forget history, they are at least asked to forgive past transgressions. Tripp could not know that events in neighboring Morehouse Parish a few months later would confirm historically-derived fears about the Klan's modus operandi.

The newspaper account of Tripp's sermon indicates that his message was well received by the congregation at

Monroe's First Baptist Church. The perennial problem of the preacher is her or his penchant for providing the

178 message of salvation to the already saved. Tripp could not abandon the normal sermonic mode of seeking the conversion of the previously converted.

J. C. Barr and Simulacrum of Americanism

The leaders of the Klan know well that when other issues than the Pope and the dominance of the Jew and the fear of the Negro enter into the election, their own issue pales and dies.

William Allen White (1925)^®

Of the two speeches examined here, J. C. Barr's is much longer and more rhetorically complex. Like Tripp,

Barr is a minister, albeit a Presbyterian. Unlike Tripp,

Barr is a visitor to Monroe from New Orleans. Also, while

Tripp's ties to the Klan are difficult to discern from the public record, Barr was explicitly brought to Monroe under the sponsorship of Monroe Klan Number Four. Barr may have been a member of the national Klan's Propagation Bureau, which was made up almost entirely of Protestant Ministers

(Weaver), or he may have lectured only in the Klan's

Louisiana Realm.

While Barr's speech may lack the elegance of

Lincoln's second inaugural or John Jay Chapman's

Coatesville address, Barr did not suffer from Chapman's want of immediate audience.The Monroe News-Star reports that Barr's speech was given to a standing-room-

179 only crowd at the Ouachita Roof Garden, with 1,000 or more

persons in attendance ("Klan Tenets” 1). The large

gathering to hear Barr can be attributed to the

controversy of the Klan cause and the sizable Klan

presence in Monroe. As reproduced in Appendix B, Barr's

address was delivered on February 12, 1923, almost exactly

one year after Tripp's sermon and not two months after

the discovery of the mutilated bodies in the Morehouse

murder case. Barr was introduced to the crowd by R. W.

Germany, who was described by the News-Star as a Klan

spokesman and is identified by Harrell as the Klan's

"Great Titan" (congressional district coordinator) for

north Louisiana (Harrell 126). In his introductory

remarks, Germany insisted that, despite the errors made by

some Klansmen, Barr would not apologize for the activities

of the Klan in his address.

In their brilliant monograph. Crafting Equality.

Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites explain how key terms in public discourse like "the people,"

"American," and "citizen" were constructed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in ways that included

Anglo Americans and excluded those not of European extraction, with special preference given to those whites who were Anglo Saxon and Protestant. By the 1920s, immigration from southern Europe, eastern Europe, and

180 Ireland was challenging the old conception of American identity, and the Klan talk of "100 percent Americanism" was a conventional defense of the older sense of the term, which historians traditionally would describe as nativist.

Barr's address provided this typical nativist defense, if with more rhetorical sensitivity than many other Klan rhetors. For Barr, the descendants of Anglo Americans have the historical and traditional right to dictate what is and is not "American" to newcomers and upstarts, a position he took great pains to develop.

As Barr noted in his introductory remarks, the occasion of his speech came between the birthdays of

Washington and Lincoln, "two mighty characters" who

"tower" in both American history and "the annals of the race." Using a mountain metaphor, Barr contended that these "two greatest Americans" are "typical" of the spirit of the American people; Washington and Lincoln are but two of the highest peaks in a vast mountain range. While one normally might expect that the two greatest Americans must be exceptional in some way in comparison with their fellow citizens, Barr intimates that this difference is one of degree rather than kind. Ipso facto. any true American should be confident that she or he is the heir of

Washington and Lincoln and the Anglo heritage they embody.

181 The definition of that heritage on terms favorable to the

Klan is Barr's focus in this address.

Valorizing America and Americanism is the erstwhile

purpose of Barr, who does not mention the Klan until the

peroration of his speech. In the three-part

organizational structure common to twentieth-century

public speaking texts, Barr informed his audience about

three "outstanding possessions of Americanism. Let us

remeber [sic] that (1) America has a history; (2) America

has a flag, and (3) America has a religion." While Barr purported to separate these themes, each theme depends on the other in a strange sort of circularity, much like the

Sunday School teacher arguing from the authority of the

Christian Bible to the existence of God and back again.

History. Barr takes the long view of American history, going back to "Holland, England, Scotland and

Northern Ireland to get the sources out of which the streams have run to make America." After offering the expected homage to the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrim

journey on the Mayflower. Barr summarized his version of

U.S. history in a single sentence: "Keep these matters in mind, for no man can understand America until he knows her sources, and they have been essentially Christian, and essentially Protestant from the beginning." Comparing the

"traditional Americanism" of this history to "modern

182 Americanism," Barr came down on the side of tradition, since "ideal and real Americanism has the advantage that always belongs to the original owner. Let the real

Americans make the most of this advantage." Here, history is constituted as a valuable resource to be used by those who are the intellectual and/or biological heirs of this great, Protestant tradition. Without denying the citizenship of non-Protestants, Barr insisted that real

(Protestant) Americans like himself are first among eguals in the fashion of George Orwell's Animal Farm, deserving the final say on manners of importance. If Barr's

Americans are "real," then others may possess only the simulacrum of Americanism.

African Americans are significant in their absence from this speech in general and this passage in particular; race is an "absent presence" in this passage.

Since real Americans are the progeny of northern Europe, immigrants from other European countries and their descendants are excluded from the "real" and "ideal."

Those of non-white races do not even deserve a sentence.

By dint of race as well as religion, non-WASPs are excluded by Barr from the American ideal.

Barr subsequently concentrated on three particular events in American history as emblematic of the nation's uniqueness. The success of the Pilgrims and of the

183 American Revolution, Barr asserted, was the responsibility

of divine intervention. That God would intercede to

protect and preserve a nascent Protestant republic surely

indicates the rightness of the Protestant cause (if one

ignores the Catholic population of Maryland at the time of

the Revolution), notwithstanding the Protestantism of the

British monarchy. In his comments on the Civil War, the

third great event in U.S. history, Barr proclaimed that

humanity "will ever rejoice that those years of

internecine warfare when a nation was about to be torn to

pieces, resulted, instead of epochal destruction, in the

birth of a nation." In a sentence reminiscent of Thomas

Dixon's proclamation at Birth of a Nation's 1915 premier,

Barr de-emphasized the cause of the conflict to valorize the effect of the Civil War, which constituted and preserved a single nation. Again, race is ignored in this celebration of Americanism. African-American and Irish

Catholic service in the cause of the union had no part in

Barr's portrayal of nationalist midwifery, in which a

Protestant republic was born (again). The sectionalism of the post-civil War era drops out of this version of U.S. history.

Flag. As he moved from "history" to "flag" in this celebration of things American, Barr made the venerable choice to disclose to his audience the principles

184 signified by the flag. As a condensation symbol, the U.S.

flag is made by Barr to "stand for" six ideas, including the "sovereignty of the individual;" "the divine right of the people, who are the source of all authority;" "free speech;" and "free press." The irony of celebrating free speech and press a few years after the passage of the wartime Sedition Act, which severely limited free speech and sent Eugene V. Debs to prison, apparently was lost on

Barr.

More interesting in Barr's litany of the flag was his insistence that the flag stands for "separation of church and state." On its face, this separation is inconsistent with Barr's efforts to bind together Protestant

Christianity and American history. However, Barr uses the phrase only in its minimalist sense of prohibiting an established national church. Moreover, according to Barr,

"[e]ach [i.e., church and state] is the good friend of the other. Each recognizes the use and place of the other.

That in itself justifies the flying of Old Glory." Again, the symbiotic relationship between a religious tradition and the nation-state constitutes Barr's conception of

America. Separation does not prevent a close, friendly relationship; separation of church and state only prevents a catholic (let alone a Catholic) church-state merger.

The flag itself is justified only because it "stands for"

185 the interpenetration of secular and sacred in a divinely

inspired nation-state.

The flag also represents the "free public school" in

Barr's address. Not only is the school essential to the

creation of citizenship, but it also is a battleground in

the fight against American "enemies within and without."

In this school, "American ideals will be taught, . . .

truth will be taught, . . . letting the chips fall where they may." Barr's audience almost certainly knew that this passage constitutes a critique of the Catholic parochial schools, long accused by Klan members and other nativists of harboring anti-American precepts; thus, we have Barr extolling the quintessential Americanism of the public school. Not surprisingly, Barr does not face the possibility entailed in his commitment to letting the chips fall; What if "American ideals" aren't the "truth?"

This contingency is not a potential outcome in Barr's worldview, and the vagueness of "ideal" and "truth" allowed auditors to insert their own ideals and truths into this formulation. Four decades later, when African

Americans could no longer be barred from going to public schools with white children, Barr's Klan successors in

Louisiana and other states would harbor a different opinion of public education and send their children to private schools.

186 At the conclusion of this litany, Barr shifts from one sense of "stands" to another. (This move from one meaning of a word to another is an example of antanaclasis, an obscure but time-honored rhetorical device). Instead of the "stands" of identity (i.e., "the flag = X"), Barr uses "stands" to introduce a conclusion that allegedly follows from the introduction of earlier evidence (i.e., "from X we may conclude Y"):

Now it stands to reason that a flag that represents such principles . . . has its enemies, and its bitterest enemies . . . are the enemies from within. It is those who have come in to enjoy our hospitality and occasionally think they can take possession of the house. . . . It becomes wearisome, friends, to listen to some of these hyphenated Americans. They tell us we cannot enforce the prohibition laws; that we cannot enforce the principles of our constitution, and they make us very angry— just how angry they may soon find out.

Once the ideas represented by the flag are defined,

Barr need only take a short step to define the flag's enemies. Again, the flag's enemies— and the nation's enemies, and Protestantism's enemies— are the latecomers.

Barr goes even further than in his discussion of religion, comparing "hyphenated Americans" (e.g., German Americans,

Irish Americans) to house guests who have no rightful say in governing the affairs of the household.^8 The analogy does not even preserve second-class citizenship status for latecomers and immigrants. Instead, the original owners, or, more appropriately, their descendants, have inherited

187 the right to interpret the Constitution or pass laws as

they see fit, an oligarchy ruling by dint of birth.

Barr's last sentence in this section carries the threat of

action against those hyphenates who do not withdraw from

the public sphere. The struggle over Prohibition is only

the clearest indicator of the existence of an enemy within

and the battle waged between real Americanism and its

simulacra.

Religion. In this third section, Barr completed his

efforts to bind America's historic and symbolic resources

to Protestant Christianity, telling his audience

repeatedly that "America has a religion. America is religious." According to Barr, America "not only stands by great political principles, but she stands for faith in

Almighty God." Prior to this turn in the speech, Barr already had barred non-Anglo-Saxons, non-Protestants, and immigrants from a leading role in the American polis.

Now, following yet another tale of God's direct intervention on behalf of the United States, this time during World War One, Barr excluded still another category of U.S. resident from a claim to Americanism: "God has led us, righted us, and used us, and every true American wants

Him still to be our King." Even the agnostic and unchurched cannot claim the rightful title of "true

American."

188 This is Barr's final move in the creation of criteria

separating the true American from the simulacrum of

Americanism. The true or real American must be

Protestant, descended from northern Europeans, white, and

God-fearing. Conveniently, Barr has systematically

excluded all those not qualified for Klan membership from

any strong claim to Americanism. History, flag, and

religion were combined to prescribe the conditions under

which one might claim to be the original, traditional, and

best kind of American, with regnant Protestantism

dictating the (proper) reading of history, history

demonstrating the merits of religion, and the flag

representing those principles entailed by or entailing

this Klannish union of religion and history. The flag is

no better or worse than the country for which it stands.

Barr's transition from talk of religion to the defense of the Klan is abrupt, signaling the beginning of

a predictably Klan-focused peroration. If this speech was

about the ineluctable juxtaposition of religion and

nation-state in U.S. history, then Barr's final task was to position the Klan squarely in the intersection of the concepts that constitute Americanism:

We are not content simply to say that there is a God. We believe we have a connection with Him. That His truth is our portion, that His power can be depended upon. And if any man were to ask me what is going to happen should the Ku Kulx [sic] Klan decide to take off its mask, I

189 will tell him what I told a prominent editor of a religious paper recently. I said, "Do you know what is going to be seen when the Ku Klux Klan takes off its mask?" "Oh, no, what will we see?" You will see the American flag, the Holy Bible, and the fiery cross. And that's why our organization goes on. That's why each chapter grows by leaps and bounds. That's why each chapter that is added to its persecution increases its enthusiasm and its numbers.

No composition instructor would approve Barr's work

in this passage, with its mid-paragraph shift in focus from the special connection between God and America— hardly a new theme in American Public Address— to the unmasking of the Klan. A public speaking pedagogue also would disavow this transition-less shift as a poor demonstration of the art of the rhetor. But this discourse makes a demand of the reader or listener, inviting a particular construction of Barr's argument in which each claim builds upon prior conclusions. If Barr's admonition about the Klan follows from preceding claims, as the absence of a transition suggests in this passage, then we know that (a) America is religious, (b) true

Americans are religious, (c) America is blessed by God, and (d) the Klan is religious. In this series of claims what is good about America and Americans becomes what is good about the Klan. Moreover, if America is blessed by

God, then quintessentially American organizations like the

Klan must be free from doctrinal error, whether secular or sacred.

190 In his 1963 essay, "The Cross and the Flag:

Evangelists of the Far Right," Barnet Baskerville remarked

on the tendency among right-wing evangelists of the

twentieth century to identify their own brand of

Christianity with patriotism writ large, concentrating on

a campaign against the forces of evil (e.g., the devil,

alcohol, communism, liberals) rather than an affirmative

program to reform or alter public policy. Donald E.

Williams made the same observation about the fundamentally

negative message of the 1960 Klan. Barr's linkage of the

Klan to religious and nationalist causes fits squarely in

this evangelical tradition. Some Louisiana public officials had proposed legislation to unmask the Klan in

its parades, meetings, and social activities. Barr met this challenge by telling his audience what they would

find under that mask, namely the cross and the flag to which Baskerville alluded. The Klan always has maintained that the burning cross was a religious symbol, and Barr added the Holy Bible to the mix to assure the association of the Klan with suitably respectable religious artifacts.

In reaction to anti-Klan sentiment, Barr emphasized the

Christian character of Klan ethos.

Beyond eliding the Klan with patriotism and

Protestant Christianity, Barr also followed the path described by Baskerville several decades later, denouncing

191 the Klan's (and America's) enemies with far more specificity than was provided in his explanation of a proactive Klan praxis. Barr's announcement of an affirmative program of action for the Klan is less than impressive. According to Barr, Americans must "seek out the sources of our nation, . . . view again her flag, and

. . . worship in sincerity her God. We need to be educated and trained." This education and training apparently is nothing more than a fulsome commitment to absorbing the message of Barr's own speech. Moreover, in the space between the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln,

Barr called for a commitment to unity, a commitment made possible by the existence of an "American" fraternal order, the Klan, "in which Americans shall meet one another, get to know each other, and be welded into one."

Beyond vague allusions to education, training, and unity,

Barr's only specific policy proposal, putting the

Christian Bible back in the schools, was shared with the fundamentalist clergy and laity of his era; this idea hardly was original.

More noticeable in Barr's conclusion was his explanation of what he (and the Klan) opposed, in the spirit of Eric Hoffer's contention that all mass movements must have a "devil," a specific enemy, in order to succeed. The enemy, Barr averred, was "some of those who

192 have latterly come within our gates." The body of the

speech already had marginalized the contributions that

immigrants and other lesser Americans could make to public

deliberation. At the end of his speech, Barr finally was

willing to single out Jews and Catholics specifically as

anti-American. After assuring Jews that they faced no

persecution in America, Barr told Jews to leave America as

they found her: "We ask him [i.e., the Jew] to look in all

thoughtfulness at these institutions of ours and ask him

again whether he can find it in his heart to raise his

voice, or to raise his hand against these sacred

institutions that have made America what she is." One

could expect no other request from Barr; if Jews are only

house guests in America, one should not be surprised when

the owners ask the guests not to break the crockery or

empty the pantry.

Roman Catholics also were singled out by Barr for

criticism: "I want to say just a word to our Catholic

friends. We ask them to be our friends. We want them to be Americans. Some of them are." If some Catholics are

American, then one understands as well that some are not.

Barr's anti-Catholicism was rooted in the conventional

assumption of many Protestants that Roman Catholics swear their allegiance first and foremost to the Pope, who seeks the corruption of any political or religious institution

193 that does not recognize his ultimate authority.Despite

(and perhaps because of) the importance of religious values in American history, Barr would ask Roman Catholics to check their religious heritage at the door before participating in politics.

In a tradition stretching back to Thomas Dixon, Barr could not resist appropriating the words of Lincoln for

Klan-inspired purposes: "Was it Abraham Lincoln who said

'America cannot exist half slave and half free?' Is it too late to intimate that it is impossible for us to be

Americans in the absolute sense of the word, and to be anything else politically." At least where the public sphere is concerned, Barr would only allow appeals to the

Protestant Christian tradition in political deliberation; any discourse associated with the hyphenate was excluded.

No other tradition, Judeo-Christian or not, was sufficiently wrapped up in the principles of Americanism, and Barr did not want counterfeit Americans corrupting these vital principles. In a fashion akin to the 1956 film classic. Invasion of the Bodv Snatchers. newcomers were replacing the real with the simulacrum of

Americanism.

For Barr, America and Americanism are not the hearty stew of people and principles to which Condit and Lucaites refer, but a fixed set of static ideas that should not and

194 cannot be altered by the contributions of those whose

ancestors weren't running the show in 1789. Again, race

is an absent presence in these concluding paragraphs,

since decades of Jim Crow and centuries of slavery had

done the work of disqualifying blacks from any claim to

the title of "American,” at least where this white

audience of 1923 was concerned. Barr had no need to

engage in the conventional race-baiting of the era or to raise the specter of social equality. Jews and Catholics were a better sort of enemy for the Louisiana Klan, generating more controversy and demanding more oratorical finesse in their denouncement. The millions of African

Americans cut off from the ballot and rightly fearing the lynch mob posed no substantial threat to white supremacy in the Deep South of the 1920s. Little wonder that the most infamous act of Klan violence in Louisiana was directed at two troublesome white men from Mer Rouge, a subject Barr deemed too unimportant to mention in his defense of the Klan.

In summary, Barr's address is sermon, encomium to

America, deliberation on the appropriate role of the immigrant in politics, and forensic defense of the Klan.

Religion explains history, and history supports the interpenetration of Protestant Christianity, patriotism, and politics in Reverend Barr's vision of true and real

195 Americanism. Barr closed his address by plagiarizing

Lincoln again, this time without credit: "We know where we

are going, and in prayer to God, with charity to all, and

malice toward none, we will make that goal." Rarely have

so many citizens been rhetorically disenfranchised and

disavowed with such a gentle and loving banishment to the margins of the polis.

The Practice of Rhetorical Imbrication

What do we learn from these texts? While Barr's address in particular is competently organized by conventional standards of speech evaluation, neither

Tripp's nor Barr's efforts will ever be listed in the

American Public Address quasi-canon, which is periodically suggested by the publication of new speech collections

(e.g., Andrews and Zarefsky). Nor do these two speeches rank with Hitler's Mein Kampf as works studied because of the evil done in the world by their alleged influence on a large number of auditors. However, we can learn something from Tripp and Barr about the pedestrian Klan history of a specific locality, with some expectation that the vernacular discourse found in Monroe had its counterparts in other Klan strongholds across the United States. Real people were active in the Klan not only because they had sociological, psychological and historical reasons for

196 doing so. They also had rhetorical incentives to do so,

and we can reasonably intuit that the discursive choices

made by Klan and anti-Klan rhetors had the potential to

invoke different sorts of audience responses.^0

Using conventional genre theory to provide a

framework for rhetorical analysis of these two speeches,

one might begin with the assumption that two texts

produced by similar rhetors in similar circumstances within a year of one another would belong to the same

genre. Concerning situation. both speakers were from

Louisiana, both were ministers, both were publicly

identified as pro-Klan, both were addressing relatively

large audiences that could be characterized as moderately or strongly pro-Klan, and both were speaking in the same city during the same historical era. While proving the point is impossible over sixty years later, both speakers probably shared many of the same audience members. One would expect these situational similarities to suggest some constraints on the rhetorical options available to these rhetors, as explained by Lloyd Bitzer in his essay on "The Rhetorical Situation."

The form of these speeches also shares many similarities. For example, if a critic used B. L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel's subcategories for apologia to examine the efforts of Tripp and Barr, she or he

197 undoubtedly could find Ware and Linkugel's denial,

bolstering, differentiation, and transcendence strategies,

providing all the evidence one needs to make a prima facie

case that these speeches might be explained as apologia

for the Klan in the face of growing anti-Klan sentiment,

despite R. W. Germany's denial of an apologetic purpose in

Barr's case. For example. Ware and Linkugel describe

bolstering as the attempt by a rhetor to identify her or

his cause with "something viewed favorably by the

audience" (125). By this definition, Barr's attempt to

identify the Klan with flag, Bible, and cross is

indicative of bolstering in apologetic discourse.

Regarding content. a case also can be made for generic standing. While the rationales for favoring the

Klan differed for Tripp and Barr, their conclusions did not. For both, the Klan was composed of worthy Christian gentleman, deserving of audience respect and admiration.

This content, if nothing else, might mark the speeches as members of a genre of Klan rhetoric, which is composed of artifacts that unequivocally endorse the Klan or well- known Klan principles.

Finally, from a rule-aoverned perspective, one might treat these speeches as exemplars of a genre. For example, these speeches might be "rhetorical hybrids" in the fashion of Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs

198 Campbell, who could note the ways in which these

particular texts seem to blend or "fuse" the elements of

two or more well-established rhetorical genres to create

the Klan stump speech. Unlike mere apologia, this stump

speech includes a recruiting plea, while denying that it

apologizes and falling short of telling auditors to "Join

the Klan Immediately."

In Chapter One, I suggested that a rules-based

approach to genre theory has the advantage of accounting

for all the other means of defining genre, while simultaneously avoiding the twin problems of a strong situationalism and a strong transcendentalism. However, my embrace of a rules-based approach does not mean that all versions of this approach are satisfactory. For example, the hybrid theory sketched above by Jamieson and

Campbell has its problems. First, Jamieson and Campbell beg important questions about the origins of the traditional genres. The "hybrid" metaphor, with its biological and genetic overtones, works because it presupposes the existence of older, established genres that can be cross-bred or intermingled to produce a new and exotic strain of discourse, which probably will be short-lived.

However, what makes the "older" genres more stable and enduring, other than their discovery in some era

199 preceding the present? Such genres may be stable and enduring, but they might also be a product of historical accident, discovered (or, more properly, "invented") sooner rather than later. Nothing logically prevents the new hybrid from outlasting its better-established generic cousin. The relationship between the ephemeral and the enduring is not fully explored in their essay, despite

Jamieson and Campbell's claim that their notion of the hybrid allows the generic critic to explain both unique and recurrent features of rhetoric more satisfactorily.

Second, and more fundamentally, Jamieson and Campbell fail to consider the possibility that established genres have no better claim on critical practice than the newest

"hybrid." When trying to explain the work done in the world by a given text or texts, one danger for genre critics, as explained in Chapter One, is that they will force the data to fit the categories, rather than adjusting the categories to fit the data. Jamieson and

Campbell offer their notion of "hybrid" to address this problem, and their position undoubtedly is more flexible than that of a critic who cannot imagine a text inadequately described by some hoary Aristotelian or medieval category and is dedicated to protecting the

"purity of genre" as described in classical genre theory.

Unfortunately, their analysis does not take the next step.

200 which is to allow for the contingency that no established

genre will make a compelling claim to explain a given

text, even when fused with other established genres. To

believe in Jamieson and Campbell's hybrids is to put faith

in the existence of some finite number of genres that,

singly or in hybrid form, account for the dizzying

variability of possible rhetorics. No evidence has been

presented that warrants this conclusion, and the 2,000-

year history of rhetoric in the Western tradition, let

alone in other traditions, does not encourage me to put

great stock in some limited number of master genres. The

enumeration of genres, subgenres, and subsubgenres is

constrained more by the imagination of critics and the

tyranny of literary and rhetorical history than by a

theory of genres as logical t y p e s .

In keeping with the theory of rhetorical imbrication

put forward in the last chapter, I wish to suggest an alternative rules-based approach to understanding genre.

This approach requires looking backwards, working with

each text to disclose the rules that seem to govern that

text. These rules may be related to text content or text

form, and they may or may not be linked to the rhetorical

situation. My assumption here is that each text belongs to an idiom (in Lyotard's sense) in which there may be one or more members. Further, each idiom might belong to any

201 number of genres demarcated by a rule or set of rules

shared among multiple idioms. The isolation of the rules

controlling the idiom to which each speech belongs is my

task here. Any case where rules are shared between these

idioms constitutes rhetorical imbrication, as described in

Chapter Two, and makes possible the description of generic

categories.

My analysis above suggests that extant genre theory

could be used to describe the Tripp and Barr texts as Klan

ministerial endorsements (situational), apologetic

discourse (form), Klan rhetoric (content), or as Klan

stump speeches (rule-governed hybrids). These four

approaches to generic classification work as advertised;

they provide a way to place different texts in common

categories. However, with the exception of the rule-

governed approach, none of them can explain the

simultaneous influence of situation, form, and content in

the production of rhetorics with strong resemblances to

one another. Explaining such influences is necessary if

one is to defend genre theory against its critics and to

make ethical assessment of discursive categories (e.g.,

Klan rhetoric) a possibility. Since I have already

explained the limitations of Jamieson and Campbell's hybrid approach, I will now defend an alternative

202 perspective on the role of rules in constraining rhetorical invention.

Chapters One and Two already have indicated that genre and idiom are used idiosyncratically in this dissertation, with "idiom" taking the place of "genre" or

"sub-genre" in conventional genre theories, depending on how those terms are used. Below, I will first identify rules pertinent to the idiom of each speech. Second, I will discuss whether and why those two speech should or should not be considered members of a larger genre.

Idiom

As explained in Chapter One, rhetorical criticism allows the identification of rules pertinent to the production of discourse. An assumption under which I operate is that the reception of rhetoric necessarily is constrained by rules that separate good and appropriate discourse from its antitheses. Also, "new" texts frequently influence the rules announced by older texts, whether by modifying those rules, adding new rules, or deleting rules that have governed similar texts in the past. While there is not always intersubjective agreement on the applicability, validity, truth content, or utility of those rules, typical language users are aware that others will react to their language use based on the

203 users' conformity to rules conventionally understood as regulating that use, unless new ideas or circumstances trump those old rules.

Certainly language users may sometimes violate rules without good reason because they want to do so, but language users typically do work with the expectation that such rules do exist and must be violated with great caution. (If rhetors do not understand the rules believed by auditors to regulate their discourse, an explanation of that misunderstanding or ignorance is usually sufficient to satisfy tolerant audience members.) The typical price for routine violation of those rules is social ostracism or, at the extreme, confinement to mental institutions.

Taken together, the total system of rules governing the production of a given text and announced by that text is the idiom to which the text belongs.

In considering the addresses given by Tripp and Barr,

I find three kinds of rules— presupposition, immanent, and consequential— emerging from my analysis. First, some rules encapsulate presuppositions about the production of good and appropriate discourse. These presupposition rules typically are shared by rhetor and audience; if a rhetor must violate one of these rules, she or he has the burden to justify that violation. For example, public or presentational speaking courses in U.S. universities do

204 much to systematize and explicate presuppositional rules

about what constitutes good speech before an audience. If

a speaker begins her speech with the words "in

conclusion," her audience should be forgiven for

expressing some confusion about her organizational logic

unless that logic is satisfactorily explained to them.

These rules, whether pertaining to situation, form,

or content, often function like Aristotelian commonplaces

shared by audience and rhetor. However, a rule may be

understood and adhered to by a rhetor even if the audience

does not share the rhetor's commitment to that rule.

Conversely, audience members may hold the rhetor

responsible for violating a rule with which the rhetor was

not familiar or which the rhetor intended to violate, as

indicated above. Presupposition rules are necessarily the

product of rhetorical situations, rhetorical history, and

the form and content expectations frequently entailed by

situation and history. Presupposition rules may be

descriptive or normative, and they may have implications

for form and/or content in a given rhetorical artifact.

Second, claims made in the body of a text may also be

constituted as rules by the careful reader or listener.

These immanent rules, whether descriptive or normative,

encapsulate or summarize a claim that constitutes part or

all of the argument understood by the auditor after

205 examination of that text. For example, when an automobile

manufacturer's television commercial shows a vehicle

successfully avoiding obstacles or maneuvering in tight

quarters, the viewer "knows" that the preferred reading

(in Stuart Hall's sense) of the commercial concerns the

vehicle's exceptional handling, rather than the driver's

exceptional skill. The rule that emerges is something

like "automobile brand X responds well in difficult or

hazardous driving situations." Such immanent rules have

implications for how a given text will be classified

according to idiomatic conventions for form and content.

Also, immanent rules may request modification of, addition to, or elimination of presupposition rules assumed to control the text in which these immanent rules are announced.

Third, claims that are entailed by acceptance of the

immanent rules for a given text constitute a third kind of rule that may be isolated in that text. These consequential rules are not expressly stated in the text, but they are the consequences of accepting the reading of the text as understood by auditors. For example, automobile commercials rarely are explicit in telling the viewer to go buy the advertised vehicle immediately, but such a claim is understood as the result of claims that are made concerning the vehicle's low cost, exceptional

206 value, and limited availability. Like immanent rules,

consequential rules will assist in the determination of how a text will be classified in accordance with its form

and/or content. The automobile television commercial described here is understood as paid commercial

advertising, rather than a "public service announcement"

(PSA), because the consequential claim about purchasing the automobile is consistent with the rules governing commercials and incommensurable with the requirements for non-partisan PSAs. Also, like immanent rules, consequential rules may require reconsideration of previously unexamined presupposition rules.

All three kinds of rules— presupposition, immanent, and consequential— are manifest in my analysis of the speeches given by Barr and Tripp. Based on that analysis,

I have prepared two lists of rules that separately govern these two texts. These lists are not exhaustive; they are products only of the critical efforts of a single auditor, as described above in this c h a p t e r . *2 Further, these rules are deduced from the speech texts themselves, rather than from guesses about the historical author's intention.

As explained in Chapter One, while a critic might make reasonable guesses about the intention of a rhetor based on that rhetor's discourse, there are no guarantees that the author implied by a text is coterminous with the

207 historical author, the individual who uttered or wrote the

words that make up the text under consideration.

Especially since the historical author may not be able to

articulate the rules governing the production of her or

his work or the rules announced by that work, reliance on

pronouncements about intention is less important than

analysis grounded in textual e v i d e n c e . *3

In isolating these rules, I attempted to reduce to

the form of "rule" the individual presuppositions and claims described in my analysis of these speeches.44 i make such lists not because this sort of analysis is always edifying, but because such an effort demonstrates the distinction between genre and idiom.

For Tripp,

1. History is not a necessary guide to right action and judgment.

2. The Klan should be given a second chance despite its past (mis)deeds.

3. A public display of Klan activity promotes law and order.

4. Organizations doing God's work will presumptively have credibility.

5. Answering specific anti-Klan arguments is not reguired before a pro-Klan audience.

6 . Klan advocates need not conceal their identities.

7. The Klan is one of several moral forces in Monroe.

208 8. Appeals to Christian principles will exert a positive influence on Christian audiences.

9. Citizens who espouse respect for law and order presumptively obey those same laws.

10. Christian gentlemen should feel free to join the Klan.

Among these ten rules for Tripp's sermon, numbers

four, five, six, and eight are presupposition rules; numbers one, three, seven, and nine are immanent rules; and numbers two and ten are consequential rules. For example, rule five is classified as presuppositional because Tripp adhered to the form specified by this rule, but he never justified or otherwise mentioned that form in his speech. In contrast, number two is listed as consequential because it is entailed in the acceptance of

Tripp's implied comparison of criminals with Klansmen and his argument that criminals deserve a second chance.

Now, for Barr's address:

1. Properly interpreted, U.S. history is a proper and necessary guide to right judgment and action.

2. Klan members exemplify important American virtues, as any unmasking of the Klan will demonstrate.

3. The claims of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizens presumptively have more merit than those made by hyphenated Americans and/or non-whites.

4. Organizations doing God's work will presumptively have credibility.

209 5. Answering specific anti-Klan arguments is not required before a pro-Klan audience.

6 . Klan advocates need not conceal their identities.

7. African Americans are not included among those considered real and ideal Americans.

8. Associating the audience with positively valued ideas, religious precepts, and historical figures that are in turn associated with your own cause will favorably dispose the audience to your cause.

9. Demonstrating the merit of a social movement requires the identification of an important adversary that the movement opposes.

10. Protestant, white, Anglo-Saxon men should feel free to join the Klan.

11. The U.S. flag stands for worthy principles.

Regarding these eleven rules for Barr's address,

numbers four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine

are presupposition rules; numbers one, two, three, and

eleven are immanent rules; and number ten is a

consequential rule. For example, number eleven is an

immanent rule because Barr expends much time and energy in

his address arguing that the flag's "real beauty" is its

representation of principles having a positive moral valence.

Taken together, the rules explicated for each text make up that text's idiom, the rules governing or governed by this discourse. When these two lists are compared, there are obvious similarities. Rules four, five, and six

210 are identical for the Tripp and Barr addresses, while rules eight and ten on each list resemble one another.

These overlapping rules illustrate rhetorical imbrication between idioms, where rules are shared; these shared rules make possible the isolation of genres composed of related idioms. However, these speeches do not belong to the same idiom, because all the rules germane to one speech are not applicable to the other. Strictly speaking, each speech is incommensurable with the other.

An example may clarify this last point. No one would argue that these speeches do not have some common features. The openness of Tripp and Barr concerning their own approval of the Klan cause indicates their belief in number eight on both lists; "Klan advocates need not conceal their identities." However, a rule for one speech

(but not for both speeches) is not particularly illuminating when applied to the other. Number one for

Barr's address, which explains the importance of U.S. history in decision making (hereafter, Bl), arguably contradicts number one for Tripp, which dismisses the guidance provided by historical experience (hereafter,

Tl).

Bl: Properly interpreted, U.S. history is a proper and necessary guide to right judgment and action.

Tl: History is not a necessary guide to right action and judgment.

211 If I said that Bl is an immanent rule in Tripp's sermon, I would be wrong. Not a shred of evidence supports such a claim. If I said that Bl should be an immanent rule in

Tripp's sermon, I would be judging Tripp's efforts by

standards alien to the milieu that produced the text.

Such judgment would be terrorism in Lyotard's system.

At worst, Bl and Tl are inconsistent in their respective treatments of history. At best, one could imagine Tripp's sermon reconstructed in accordance with

Bl, where Tl and Bl are not inconsistent. (Social movement history and U.S. history need not necessarily remain faithful to the same governing principles.) In either event, condemning a text belonging to one idiom because it was not faithful to the rules of another idiom is an act of terror, a différend in Lyotard's sense, which hardly constitutes illuminating ethical criticism.

Successful ethical assessment of a text will involve simultaneous understanding and scrutiny of the text and its idiom, rather than efforts to separate the two.

Genre

A text may belong to only one idiom, on which the text is, by definition, dependent. However, a text may belong to any number of genres. Every text has its own idiom, but genres are not a necessary consequence of the

212 isolation of such idioms. While genres are groupings of

idioms based on the imbrication of the same rules in those

idioms, genres are categories of convenience, rather than

categories of necessity. Genres exist because the rules

shared by multiple idioms are sufficiently important to

justify putting those idioms under a single label, despite

the differences between them. Anyone who would name a

genre must explain why the substantial differences, say,

between Edward Kennedy's Chappaquiddick address and Edmund

Burke's "Speech to the Electors at Bristol" should not

prevent us from calling both "apologia." If there is no

advantage to such a collection of disparate texts, then

one would dispense with the generic category without

dismissing the texts and idioms initially thought

pertinent to the now-rejected genre. A reshuffling of

genres would not consign the artifacts organized under the old generic categories to oblivion.

If the grouping of idioms under them makes sense, genres have considerable advantages for teaching and research, since references to "epic" or "inaugural" provide an important verbal shorthand for discussing dozens, hundreds, or thousands of purportedly similar texts. Idioms frequently are represented by only a single text, since any divergence between the rules of an idiom and a text indicates that the text belongs to some other

213 idiom (e.g., the differences in rules between the Tripp and Barr speeches). In contrast, the same idiom may belong to many genres, depending on how the different rules describing that idiom are grouped with rules from other idioms. For example, I suggested above that Barr's address could be understood as encomium, apology, or other sorts of speeches, each of which comes complete with its own conventional set of generic expectations.

Tripp's sermon illustrates the several ways in which one might construct a genre. Since Tripp and Barr share rules four, five, and six (and possibly rules eight and ten), a case could be made that these two texts are members of an emergent genre, which one might label the

Klan stump speech or the Klan ministerial endorsement.

From this juncture, the critic would argue that such a category explains an array of pro-Klan rhetorics and the influence exerted by those rhetorics. For example, if the artifacts attributed to Tripp and Barr are any indication, the attractiveness of the Klan to Protestants might be understood as an effect of rules four and eight and their frequent appearance in the speeches of Klan orators.

However, Tripp's speech is not limited only to this genre. Mundanely, his speech belongs to the genre of

"sermon," since, by definition, he was delivering this type of speech to his audience at Monroe's First Baptist

214 Church. Also, his speech was "pro-Klan," since he announced his enthusiastic support for the organization.

If describing any speech that expresses admiration or support for the Klan as a member of the pro-Klan genre is appropriate, then Tripp's speech clearly fits the bill.

Further, I could put still another spin on the idiom of

Tripp's address. Rules one, four, eight, and nine have nothing to do with the Klan, yet they mark a way of combining secular and sacred appeals to the benefit of a

Christian rhetor:

1. History is not a necessary guide to right action and judgment.

4. Organizations doing God's work will presumptively have credibility.

8. Appeals to Christian principles will exert a positive influence on Christian audiences.

9. Citizens who espouse respect for law and order presumptively obey those same laws.

One could imagine the speeches of pro- and anti-Klan ministers, as well as the discourse of those preaching the social gospel, prohibition, anti-imperialism, and a myriad of other causes, all adhering to the rules of the "anti- historicist religious polemic." Isolating such a genre might have no theoretical utility whatsoever, but it illustrates the potential of the creative critic to find genres where none had previously been identified, combining disparate idioms in order to emphasize some

215 previously unexamined or underexamined commonality.

Rather than emphasizing the "purity of genre" as classical genre theorists once did, the rule-governed approach to genre theory specifies what is (and is not) shared by the disparate texts all said to belong to a specific genre.

Such specificity helps the critic to understand both the power and limits of her or his organizational schema.

Texts belong to only one idiom, but they may be members of multiple genres. Rather than belonging to one specie and one genus in some Darwinian classificatory fashion, rhetorical artifacts and their idioms may be simultaneous members of many genres, from the hoary Aristotelian categories of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic to the most specific of contemporary genres (e.g., the feminist utopian novel).

Finally, this revised genre theory requires ethical reflection. Is there a genre of Klan rhetoric?

Certainly, if one adopts the minimalist definition described above. My analysis of the speeches of Tripp and

Barr suggest what situational, form, and content concerns interact in such discourse. These speeches also indicate how a more specific genre of Klan ministerial discourse might operate. However, many of the rules in the idioms of these speeches are not Klan-specific, and one might find these rules operating in a variety of discourses with

216 no obvious Klan connection. The potential for rhetorical

imbrication teaches us not only about how genres might be

formed, but how idioms might share rules that rightly

should concern rhetorical critics (e.g., "U.S. immigration policy should reflect the ideological commitment of most white citizens to white racial supremacy"). The acceptance of presupposition rules by auditors— or their conviction that immanent and consequential rules are logically entailed in presupposition rules— will

legitimize the rhetor and her or his cause. The ethical implications of such rule acceptance are among the concerns that a rhetorical critic might wish to address, identifying a genre in order to demonstrate the ways in which the genre is itself ethically problematic.

The speeches of Tripp and Barr tell us not only how

Klan rhetoric operates, but how specific Klan concerns, shorn of the Klan label, might remain in circulation long after the 1920s Klan of Simmons and Evans ceased to be a significant force in U.S. politics. Merely classifying troublesome rhetoric in association with the specific rhetor or organization that produced it occludes examination of that genre of rhetoric when it reappears elsewhere with a different organizational imprimatur.

Recognizing rhetorical imbrication provides the critic with new resources for generic analysis and socially

217 relevant scholarship. Religious, nationalist, and

nativist sentiments were all components of the two

speeches analyzed here, and they continue to play a role

in the U.S. public sphere decades after the decline of the

second Klan movement.

In Chapter Two, I discussed the complicated

rhetorical imbrication of different idioms in ways that

confound the explanatory power of conventional genre

theories. In this chapter, I sought to demonstrate the operation of a rule-governed approach to genre and idiom

in Klan discourse. In Chapter Four, I turn to the debate over the "rhetorical situation" in an effort to problematize further the conventional understanding of genre.

218 Notes

^ The Ku Klux Klan. or Invisible Empire (New Orleans, 1914), 75. This passage also is quoted (with two minor typographical errors) by Kenneth T. Jackson (25). Jackson labels Rose a "daughter of the Confederacy" who provides the traditional Southern account of Reconstruction as a disastrous attempt by Radical Republicans to make Southern whites subservient to African Americans. On the traditional and revisionist accounts of Reconstruction in historiography, see Chapter Two.

^ The Ku Klux Klan; A Study of the American Mind (1924), 3. Mecklin's monograph was the first academic study of the 1920s Klan. Many scholars since Mecklin have treated the Klan as a movement (e.g., Jessup; Weaver). Despite doubts raised by scholars in communication studies concerning the definition of social movement (e.g., M. C. McGee, "Phenomenon," "Social"), the Klan easily meets the requirements of most movement definitions as an uninstitutionalized grass-roots collectivity advocating social change (see Chapter One, n. 21).

^ Dixon maintained in the 1920s that he had rejected membership in the new Klan: "When organized a few years ago, this modern Klan sent me an invitation to join .... I promptly declined, and in my letter warned . . . [that] the end [of a new Klan] was sure— riot, anarchy, bloodshed and martial law" ("Klan Is" 23). Like Dixon, many white Americans opposed the twentieth-century Klan while embracing white supremacy.

^ Eighty years after its first showing. Birth of a Nation is still considered a potential source of racial friction. Following the O. J. Simpson trial and verdict, executives at Turner Classic Movies decided to delay the airing of the film, which was initially scheduled for October 29, 1995. TCM's original plan was to include a discussion of Birth of a Nation's racism prior to showing the film ("Controversial Film"). With little fanfare, TCM eventually broadcast the film in late April, 1996.

^ On social history, see the essays in a volume edited by James B. Gardner and George Rollie Adams, and journals such as Comparative Studies in Societv and History. The best recent historical scholarship on the Klan has been social in character, with Klan historians studying membership records, police reports, census data, obituaries, and newspaper accounts of local events to

219 learn more about the 1920s Klan (e.g., MacLean, Behind; Moore, Citizen).

® Much of the impetus to examine vernacular in communication studies (and other disciplines) has come from research in feminist and women's rhetoric. For example, Karen A. Foss and Sonja K. Foss provide a wide array of non-traditional rhetorical artifacts in their Women Speak; The Eloquence of Women's Lives. including recipes and sewing patterns.

^ Membership records for the Klan in Hamilton County, Indiana, for the years 1923 through 1926 were discovered in an old barn in 1995 ("Ku Klux Klan Records").

® John C. Lester (an original member of the Pulaski Klan) and Daniel L. Wilson claimed in 1884 that the name of the Ku Klux Klan was derived from the Greek kuklos. meaning circle. Some post hoc observers have argued that a less exotic name would have made the spread of the Klan less likely; "Pulaski Men's Social Club" seems unlikely to spark widespread enthusiasm for widespread violence. However, the Klan was only the best known of several vigilante organizations active during the Reconstruction era, including the White Brotherhood and the Knights of the White Camélia. In all likelihood, the Klan served as a convenient reference point for Reconstruction violence that would have occurred with or without the existence of a national Klan organization.

® The only Reconstruction Klan history written by a self-confessed Klansman (and a knowledgeable co-author) is Lester and Wilson's Ku Klux Klan. originally published in 1884. Several sources provide excellent discussions of the first Klan. Eric Foner's comprehensive history of Reconstruction includes a thorough treatment of Reconstruction Klan violence (425-444), as does Wyn Craig Wade's exhaustive Klan history (31-111). David M. Chalmers supplies a more modest discussion of the Reconstruction Klan in his Hooded Americanism (8-21), and Kathleen M. Blee briefly summarizes the first Klan's construction of "woman" and "womanhood" in her Women of the Klan (12-16). The only treatment of the first Klan by a rhetorician is Gregory Robert Miller's unpublished 1991 doctoral dissertation. For a discussion of the plexus of race, class, and political concerns that explained nineteenth-century Klan activity, see Paul D. Escott's chapter on Klan activities in the North Carolina Piedmont region.

220 The rebirth of the Klan in the twentieth century encouraged some 1920s Klan investigators to re-examine Reconstruction-era Klan violence. In a short 1923 monograph, J. A. Rogers concluded his review of Klan history by observing that the "klan of today is running true to form" (35) and complaining that a "great deal of the blame for the revival of the Klan must be laid on the popular writers, who gave the old Klan a clean bill" (36).

Estimates of Klan membership in the 1920s vary considerably. The problems inherent in determining Klan membership include the secrecy surrounding Klan records, the sloppy record-keeping for which the Atlanta Klan headquarters was infamous, and the frequency with which disillusioned Klansmen would become inactive or renounce their membership, even while new Klan members were initiated in record numbers. Kenneth T. Jackson argued that the "commonly accepted figure of about four million," an estimate attributed to alleged Klan sympathizer Stanley Frost's 1924 monograph, is far too high (235). Jackson's best guess at the number of men and women initiated into the Klan or Klan auxiliaries between 1915-1944 barely exceeds two million. Clarke and Tyler would become the cause of much internal strife in the Klan. Following New York World accounts of drunken (and possibly licentious) carousing by Tyler and Clarke (who was married), some Klan members wanted to see Clarke and Tyler removed from the Klan's inner circle. A few years later, in March, 1923, Clarke suffered another public embarrassment when he was charged under the Mann Act with "transporting a young woman from Houston to New Orleans for immoral purposes" ("Former Wizard" 1).

The use of a professional sales force in fraternal organizing was not unique to the Klan. On fraternal orders as "entrepreneurial organizations," see Mary Ann Clawson's Constructing Brotherhood: Class. Gender. and Fraternalism (17, Ch. 7).

On the New York World series, which won the paper a Pulitzer prize, see Chalmers, Fry, and Wade. Fry, a former kleagle (Klan recruiting agent), repudiated the Klan and turned anti-Klan informant for the World after growing dissatisfied with the Klan's rabid anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. Like Thomas Dixon, Fry denounced Klan secrecy as politically dangerous and anti-democratic, even while reaffirming his commitment to Klan goals like white supremacy. In this respect. Fry's discourse recalls the late nineteenth-century struggle between the elite white

221 "Bourbon" democrats and the Southern populists who appealed to lower-class whites with vituperative attacks on African Americans:

By all the instincts and traditions of my race, I believe that the United States having been created by white men will be ruled by white men. . . . Experience has shown the two races get along better when they are segregated. . . . The activities of the Ku Klux Klan along the lines of race prejudice are the activities of the 'professional Southerner,' the political demagogue, and the sentiment of the 'poor white' of the South. They are typical of the political spirit that has kept the South in bondage for thirty years, a spirit that has sent mediocre politicians to Congress and to other high offices, while abler men were shoved into the background. (Fry 94-95)

For accounts of recruitment efforts by kleagles, see David M. Chalmers (Hooded 33-35), Fry, and Emerson Hunsberger Loucks (25-34). While kleagles like Fry initially approached leading citizens of any new territory about Klan membership, the financial pressure to swear in new members made kleagles notoriously unselective about the character of potential Klan recruits.

Simmons testified before Congress in October, 1921. At the end of his testimony, Simmons fainted immediately after the dramatic conclusion of his defense of the Klan. Whether staged or not, this fainting spell indicated to some the depth and sincerity of Simmons's commitment to the Klan. For an account of this testimony, see Wade (162-166)

On D.C. Stephenson, his role in the Indiana Klan, and his power in Indiana politics, see Kathleen M. Blee, Edgar Allen Booth, M. William Lutholtz, Leonard J. Moore (Citizen) and Wade (215-247). Booth's anti-Stephenson polemic is particularly interesting, given Booth's Klan membership and emphatic pro-Klan sentiment. The Klan essentially controlled Indiana's state government for a time in the early 1920s, although this control did not often translate into substantive legislative success. By some recent estimates, over twenty percent of Indiana's native-born white male citizens were members of the Klan at the height of Hoosier Klan success (e.g., Moore). Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) chapters were commonplace throughout the state (Blee).

222 After Stephenson's conviction, he made his personal records available to the public, since he was determined to take revenge on state politicians who failed to pardon him or commute his sentence. These files provided further evidence to the public of political corruption for which the Klan was responsible.

On Klan activities following the Brown decision, see Reed Sarratt's The Ordeal of Segregation; The First Decade and Wade (297-367).

On African American migration to Northern cities, see Kenneth T. Jackson. The most famous psychological explanation of the Klan's success is provided by W.E.B. DuBois in his 1926 essay, "The Shape of Fear." The DuBois essay is discussed in more detail in Chapter Four. For other psychological explanations of Klan progress in recruitment, see Norman Frederic Weaver (299-301) and John Moffatt Mecklin.

In turn. Weaver's emphasis on the local klaverns was adumbrated thirty years earlier by Mecklin, who maintained that the "real Klan is the local organization, which, owing primarily to its secrecy, is a law unto itself" (30).

Weaver contends that six different groups were attracted to the 1920s Klan: (1) those sincerely worried about African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and/or modernism; (2) psychologically unstable reactionaries; (3) those under pressure to join in order to retain their jobs or to advance their careers; (4) fraternal enthusiasts of the sort common in the 1920s; (5) "political opportunists" who wanted to make contacts and improve their prospects; and (6) those interested in joining the Klan sales force (i.e., the kleagles) (Weaver 20). While the bulk of Klan members probably belonged to the first category, the best educated and most wealthy Klan adherents were more likely to be placed in categories (3) and (5) than their counterparts. While John Moffatt Mecklin, an incorrigible elitist, maintained in 1924 that the Klan was composed of the least intelligent members of the middle class, the latest generation of Klan scholars has been more generous in its assessment, in part because the latest generation has better evidence on which to base conclusions. For example, Nancy MacLean's detailed study of the 1920s Athens, Georgia, Klan found that "Klan membership rosters at mid-decade [indicate] that the vast majority of men in the Athens Klan stood between capital and unskilled labor.

223 In their occupations, as in their assets, local Klansmen hovered at the midpoint of the spectrum" (Behind 54). While the economic and intellectual elite of any given community were unlikely to join the Klan, those aspiring to elite status often became Klan members.

The best explanation of the traditional and revisionist theses is provided by Leonard J. Moore ("Historical," Citizen). However, we should note that Moore's ardent commitment to the revisionist thesis does seem to impair his ability to treat the traditionalist camp equitably. The traditional thesis emerged from the the anti-Klan social commentary of the 1920s, with the New York World and John Moffatt Mecklin's 1924 monograph emphasizing Klan violence and its penchant for vigilante activities. The earliest proponent of the revisionist thesis, Norman Frederic Weaver, insisted in his unpublished 1954 doctoral dissertation that Klan violence was infrequent and largely confined to the South. Given its influence. Weaver's dissertation is surely one of the most widely quoted and cited unpublished documents in twentieth-century academe. In a recent monograph, Nancy MacLean criticizes the tendency to revisionism, arguing that the revisionists understate the 1920s Klan propensity for violence:

Just as many reporters assumed that David Duke's stylish suits and born-again Christianity somehow nullified his neo-Nazi convictions, so many scholars of the second Klan seem to assume that church-going, civic-minded, middle-class men would never have espoused the views or conducted the deeds the Klan is commonly associated with. (MacLean, Behind xiii)

Despite their implicit (and occasionally explicit) public criticism of one another's scholarship, MacLean and Moore do not hold entirely incompatible positions. MacLean is undoubtedly right to point out the ways in which the last two decades of revisionist social history have understated Klan violence. To this extent, her work serves a valuable, corrective function. In contrast, the work of revisionists like Weaver, Goldberg, and Moore fCitizen1, which is based on Midwestern and Western case studies, is less likely to find frequent instances of racial violence than MacLean's scrutiny of a Georgia klavern, given the peculiarities of the post-World War One South. Local klaverns were peaceful at some times and violent at others, as tragedies in places like Mer Rouge, Louisiana, so aptly demonstrate. For further discussion

224 of the traditional-revisionist distinction, see Appendix C. While he did not generalize beyond the state boundaries of Louisiana, Kenneth Earl Harrell claimed that the likelihood of Klan violence was linked to the population of the town in which a local klavern was based; "Large metropolitan centers simply did not lend themselves to kidnappings, whippings, or posted warnings for which the Klan was notorious. City residents either did not know who was drinking or wenching, or did not care" (120). Harrell concludes that Klan violence was more likely in small towns where residents kept track of the habits of their neighbors.

Any competent Louisiana history will discuss the unusual ethnic and cultural mix of the state. Interestingly, Joe Gray Taylor's Louisiana: A Bicentennial History (1976), published under the auspices of the American Association for State and Local History, devotes a single paragraph to the Louisiana Klan and ignores the Mer Rouge murders altogether, despite the central role the Morehouse incident played in shaping public opinion of the state during the early 1920s.

The most comprehensive source of information on the Louisiana Klan is Kenneth Earl Harrell's 1966 unpublished doctoral dissertation. Other discussions of the Louisiana Klan can be found in Charles C. Alexander's The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest and David C. Chalmer's Hooded Americanism. Passing references to Louisiana Klan activities are available in several Louisiana histories of the era (e.g., Baiamonte). Not surprisingly, most brief discussions of the Louisiana Klan concentrate almost exclusively on the Mer Rouge murders that attracted nationwide media attention early in the decade. For a discussion of Louisiana state politics into the 1940s, see V.O. Key, Jr.'s Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949, Ch. 8). On the role played by the Klan in the 1924 Louisiana gubernatorial election, see Harrell, T. Harry Williams (Huey 201-222) and Charles C. Alexander (177-184).

The religious and cultural split between north and south Louisiana is still evident today; it has played an important role in state history. Huey Long's base of electoral support was in north Louisiana (Williams, Huey). and David Duke's strongest showing in the 1990 and 1991 statewide elections was in north Louisiana. In northeast Louisiana, Monroe and surrounding communities had a significant Klan presence in the 1960s.

225 For purposes of comparison, note that Indiana and Ohio, the two largest Klan membership states in the 1920s, had over 250,000 members apiece, even if one uses fairly conservative estimates (Weaver). Charles C. Alexander gives a more generous guess of 54,000 Louisiana Klansmen at the organization's peak in the Bayou State.

Blee provides the best available history of involvement by women in various Klan auxiliary organizations. On LOTIE chapters nationwide, see Blee (25-26, 28, 63-64). Newspapers of the era observed that LOTIE chapter formation was "positive evidence that the Ku Klan is planning to take a hand in" state politics ("Ku Klux Favors" 3).

Harrell interviewed one former Louisiana Klansman who quit the New Orleans klavern in the 1920s because he found the klavern's focus on political discussion rather dull.

The Lafayette Klan made no reference to the events in Morehouse Parish in their resolution to disband, which was published in April, 1923. The Lafayette Klan's stated reason for disbanding and returning their charter was the community's belief that the Klan was anti-Catholic, a sentiment with which Lafayette Klan members did not wish to be associated. The Monroe News Star. an anti-Klan newspaper, printed an editorial calling for more Klan chapters to follow the Lafayette example: "This spirit manifested by the Lafayette Klan cannot be too highly commended and it offers encouragement to other communities similarly afflicted by dissension and strife brought about by Klan activities" ("Lafayette Klan Dissolved" 4).

Governor Parker apparently was less willing to denounce local klaverns for whose work he had some sympathy. Despite evidence that the Tangipahoa Parish klavern controlled law enforcement and the judiciary, Baiamonte reports that Parker "never attempted to expose the hooded order in Tangipahoa" (120-121). Parker's failure to act in this case may be explained by the ongoing murder trial in the parish, where six Italian immigrants were the defendants (Rini et al.). Parker surely knew that Klan domination of the Tangipahoa judiciary made a guilty verdict far more likely.

Papers Read (130). The essay from which this quotation comes is attributed to an "Exalted Cyclops of the Order."

226 For example, consider this 1923 depiction of the Klan by the unnamed "Grand Dragon of Mississippi";

In this reconstruction period following the world conflict, with humanity torn from its moorings, and chaos threatening to engulf civilization, suddenly a light glows in the east, and its form is that of a Fiery Cross! Then, as the people watch, the rays grow brighter, and illumine the figures of men in spotless raiment typical of the cause they serve. And, breathless, the watchers ask:— "Who are these who are arrayed in white robes, and whence come they?" And the voices of those who have waited for the dawn make answer:— "These are they who came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." And, lo! Hope is born again in the hearts of God's people; sorrow gives place to gladness; and hymns of thanksgiving ascend to Him Whose seal is set upon these. His instruments of salvation. (Papers Read 52)

This charitable work was not without its ironies. The same newspaper page on which the story of a Klan funeral honor guard appeared also reported the findings of pathologists in the Mer Rouge case. The pathological evidence suggested that Daniel and Richards, the Klan murder victims in Morehouse Parish, had been run over by a tractor prior to death. Not surprisingly, this method of execution was described as torture ("Tractor" 1).

One Klan lecturer estimated in 1923 that some 40,000 Protestant ministers were members of the Invisible Empire (Charles C. Alexander 87). Charles C. Alexander lists six clergy who left their pulpits to become full time Klan lecturers, and Robert Moats Miller cites evidence that twenty-six of the Klan's thirty-nine "national" lecturers were Protestant ministers. Much of the Klan organizing in New York in 1922 and 1923 was the responsibility of pro-Klan ministers (Lay, Hooded), and similar reports are made for other states. For example, two ministers from the local First Christian Church were officers in the Athens, Georgia, klavern investigated by Nancy MacLean (Behind 107-108). Ten clergy ultimately joined the Athens klavern.

Contemporary examples suggest the difficulty of ensuring ideological consistency among all the rank-and-

227 file members of the ministry or priesthood of a particular Christian denomination. Anecdotal evidence abounds of Catholic priests and religious taking issue with Rome's stance on contraception, ordination of women, or abortion. A Baptist church near Columbus, Ohio, was expelled from the Columbus Baptist Association in 1995 because of its ministry to gays and lesbians ("Gays Issue").

In his study of the 1920s Indiana Klan, Moore found that lay members representing almost all the Protestant denominations in Indiana at that time were involved in the Klan (Moore, Citizen 70-75). Anecdotal evidence and newspaper accounts suggest that ministers representing almost every Protestant denomination were involved in the Klan, as suggested above.

Frank Tripp's sermon appeared in the March 3, 1922, Morehouse Enterprise, a pro-Klan newspaper published in nearby Bastrop ("Monroe Baptist" 1). The Enterprise published another pro-Klan sermon by Tripp in June of the same year ("Endorses" 1). J. C. Barr's address was printed in the February 14, 1923, Monroe News-Star ("Klan Tenets" 1, 5). The anti-Klan News-Star took the unusual step of publishing a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Methodist sermon that vilified the Klan two months after Barr's appearance in Monroe ("Methodist" 1). Another speech in defense of the Klan— this time delivered by a New Orleans Scottish Rite lecturer— was sponsored by the Monroe Klan during May, 1923 ("Klan Lecturer" 4).

The New York World series on the Klan had been reprinted in the New Orleans Times-Picavune. and newspapers around the state sought out information on Klan activities in their own communities (Harrell). Weaver contends that newspapers nationwide gave considerable coverage to the Klan because the order provided exciting copy in an otherwise-dull era: "In those years of the mid-twenties editors breathed many a prayer of thanks for the Klan; they had sought for a long time to find something of news value, of interest to nearly everyone to take the place the World War had held" (Weaver 92).

"Annihilate the Klan!" The Nation (7 Jan. 1925): 7.

Coatesville's speech, delivered to an audience of three in 1912, was made famous in rhetorical studies by Edwin Black's analysis of the speech in his Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (78-90).

228 On the significant role played by so-called hyphenates in twentieth-century U.S. politics, see Louis L. Gerson.

Protestant antipathy to the Catholic, Jewish, and agnostic religious beliefs during the 1920s was not limited to the Klan. As W. E. B. Du Bois explained concerning his own state in 1924,

Of religion as it exists in present-day Georgia one may well despair. Georgia is already religious to overflowing. Everyone belongs— must belong— to some church, and really to belong one should be Presbyterian or Baptist or Methodist. Episcopalians are unusual, Unitarians gravely suspect. Catholics and Jews feared and hated. . . . Georgia's religion is orthodox, "fundamental." ("Georgia" 337)

Academic rhetoricians are not the only individuals who share this intuition. Staff members for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy may have examined the speeches made by the only other Roman Catholic presidential candidate in U.S. history, Alfred Smith, in search of a rhetorical explanation for Smith's failed presidential bid. Kennedy's campaign hoped to learn from Smith's mistakes (Voth).

Mine is not the only critique of Jamieson and Campbell's theory of rhetorical hybrids. Thomas Conley discusses their approach in his trenchant analysis of genre theory and criticism.

I have deliberately excluded the presupposition rules common to the most expansive of genres from this list (e.g., argumentation, public address). For example, Tripp and Barr generally conform to expectations concerning the argumentative genre in Anglo-American cultures, where each claim is supported by some reason or reasons. The rules for such genres are not listed below because they are not central to my point; I am not contending that these speeches do not belong to the category of "speech," "argumentation," or, at least in Tripp's case, "sermon" as these genres are conventionally understood.

This conclusion about intention is not meant to signal wholehearted acceptance of the prohibition on the "intentional fallacy." Rhetoric does not take place in a situational or cultural vacuum, and judgments about intent

229 may have important uses. However, such judgments frequently are problematic where assessment of the rhetor's own awareness of her or his idiom of discourse is concerned. Presumably, a rhetor could believe that she or he is adhering to one set of rules, while the critic might contend that the text produced by the rhetor did not follow the rules to which the rhetor thought she or he was adhering. While we may wish to judge the ethical intent of the rhetor, such judgments are not always consistent with conclusions about the ethics of the text produced by that rhetor.

For example, rule three for Tripp's sermon— "a public display of Klan activity promotes law and order"— was adduced from statements in the sermon about Klan cooperation in law enforcement and improving the moral conditions in the community.

230 CHAPTER 4

THE OTHER TALKS BACK:

W. E. B. DU BOIS RESPONDS TO THE KLAN

. . . degrading of men by men is as old as mankind [sic] and the invention of no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1920)1

Cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and academic feminism are haunted by the problem of "speaking for the other," especially for those others described as members of subaltern groups. As the epigraph for this chapter suggests, the rhetorical construction of the other as different (and inferior) is a common move for the congueror, and left-liberal intellectuals rightly perceive such rhetorical constructions as antithetical to their own political aims. For scholars with anti-foundationalist and emancipatory commitments, the notion of analyzing, summarizing, or representing the other suggests the very critical practices they wish to avoid. Whether in Rey

231 Chow's concern for where all the natives have "gone" or in

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's examination of subaltern

heterogeneities, the problem of intellectuals speaking

about, for, with, or to others has been depicted as

significant to the reconstruction of social theory.

In communication studies, this concern with speaking

and otherness led feminist rhetorical theorist Sally

Miller Gearhart to conclude that persuasion itself is an

act of patriarchal violence (see Foss and Griffin), while

Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek invite communication theorists to insert critical reflexivity

about race— and especially about whiteness— into communication research. Linda Alcoff explains that numerous poststructuralist, anticolonial, and feminist scholars agree on the non-neutrality of the theorizer:

"Who is speaking to whom turns out to be as important for meaning and truth as what is said; in fact what is said turns out to change according to who is speaking and who is listening" (12). In short, constructions of self and other have been irreversibly problematized in recent decades.

Moreover, the problem of otherness also raises important political questions. Some scholars argue that engaging narratives of nativity and rhetorics of colonialism requires the explication of socially

232 constructed subject positions beyond those with which any

one scholar is apt to identify. From this perspective,

opposition to oppressive cultural practices demands action

from those who do not share the subject position of those

who are the victims of oppression. Hence, we face a

conundrum in theory building and political practice.

Speaking of the other risks the Lyotardian terror of a

privileged imposition of both discursive idiom and

constructed subject position, especially when referring to

those in a subaltern subject position. For example,

performance studies scholar Jill Taft-Kaufman complains

that white academic elites, even when performing the

other, "tend to ignore the voices of our academic and

artistic peers from marginalized groups. The concepts of

a margin and a center still hold for such voices" (228).

But remaining silent about the plight of the other risks disabling the politically relevant projects of

academicians and "specific intellectuals," to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault (Power/Knowledge 1.

Yet another problem exists in considering the other in academic discourse. Who is the other?

Poststructuralist theory, in particular Derrida's notion of traces of absent terms found in those terms that are present, problematizes the notions of autonomous subjects

(selves) easily separable from others, and some postmodern

233 theories displace the subject to the point of dissolving subjectivity altogether. In a world in which I simultaneously can be white, heterosexual, male, middle class, and Roman Catholic, from what subject positions do

I speak? Which group memberships— Generation X, scholar.

Democrat, husband— have the controlling interest?

Answering questions about otherness also will require critical scrutiny of constructs of self.

Finally, thinking about self and other has implications for theorizing about genre and rhetorical situation. In previous chapters, I advocated a rule- centered theory of genres, where situation and other generic components constitute a complex of relations that can be articulated as rules governing and governed by a rhetorical artifact. The relationship between self and other necessarily will influence theorizing about audience in the "rhetorical situation" as described by Lloyd F.

Bitzer ("Rhetorical," "Functional"). Also, the intersection of self and other will have import for how rhetors perceive genre as constraining their inventional efforts; paying attention to the other often is a generic requirement. For example, the presidential inaugural address typically attends to the outgoing president, the unsuccessful major-party presidential candidate, the

Congress, the "people," and various international

234 audiences as others who must be referred to or mentioned by the rhetor.

To consider possible means for escaping the various conundrums of self and other in social and rhetorical theory, I examine these terms in the context of Klan and

Christian discursive contributions to the (re)construction and maintenance of white racism in the United States.

Specifically, I review the response of W. E. B. Du Bois, a leading African American intellectual of the twentieth century, to the Ku Klux Klan and to white Christianity in the U.S. Adumbrated in Du Bois's 1926 essay is a sophisticated theory of otherness, as otherness relates to political advocacy. After explicating this theory, I conclude that, contra Alooff, whatever the problems inherent in speaking for others— where speaking for implicitly denies the ability of others to articulate their own interests— the alternative to speaking about others frequently would be a politically disabling silence. My analysis suggests that otherness should be understood as a disjunctive, reversible subjectivity, where the other, at least the human, adult other, is able to "talk back." In terms of ethical praxis. the other may be interrogated and criticized by an interlocutor, but the other's subjectivity (i.e., in Burkean terms, her or his

235 perception of self as both agent and agency) ought not be denied during this critical interrogation.

In the next few pages, I begin by historicizing and contextualizing the discursive artifacts considered in this study. After investigating these texts, I consider the implications of this study for theorizing otherness.

Based on this analysis, I conclude the chapter by suggesting some revisions to theories of rhetorical situation and genre.

Du Bois Responds to Racism

Few organizational entities in the United States are affiliated more closely with white racism than the Ku Klux

Klan. As explained in Chapters Two and Three, Klan organizations have existed sporadically in the U.S. ever since the post-Civil War Klan was founded in 1865, and self-described Klansmen still hold demonstrations and rallies in cities across the nation. Like Chapter Three, this chapter is focused on the 1920s Klan, when the largest and most successful Klan in U.S. history waxed and waned over the course of a single decade, targeting immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and African Americans as

"anti-American" influences requiring Klan opposition in its myriad forms.

236 At the end of 1922, Hiram Wesley Evans, a Texas

dentist, was installed as the new Imperial Wizard of the

Ku Klux Klan in what would later be billed as an effort to

"reform" the organization. Despite the succession crisis

ignited by Evans's rise to power— former Imperial Wizard

William Joseph Simmons sued Evans in an unsuccessful bid

to regain control of the Klan— Evans would guide the Klan

to its greatest period of recruiting success and political

influence in 1923 and 1924. Even after Klan membership

started to decline in 1925, Evans provided strong (if not

always effective) leadership, railing in public against

Catholicism, Communism, organized labor, and the New Deal until he voluntarily stepped down from his position as

Imperial Wizard in 1939. While the Klan had no shortage of apologists in the 1920s (e.g.. Frost, Mast), Evans was the Klan's most freguent advocate and ardent defender in the popular magazines of the day. He also regularly wrote articles for Klan publications like the Kourier (e.g.,

Evans, "1776").

My discussion of otherness is facilitated by examining W. E. B. Du Bois's 1926 essay on the Ku Klux

Klan, published in the North American Review. This essay presented a response to the pro-Klan message of Evans, who had written an article in praise of the Klan for the previous issue of that journal. Rather than encouraging

237 Klan opponents to respond directly to Evans's essay, the editors of the North American Review simply published a series of anti-Klan articles in a subsequent issue to provide alternatives to Evans's arguments. In a move responsive to the identity politics of the Klan, the

Review's invited response essays came from members of the

Jewish (Silverman) and Roman-Catholic (Scott) clergy, as well as from Du Bois and a Princeton University professor

(Myers).

The Evans essay that preceded Du Bois's article was

juxtaposed provided a fairly typical summary of Klan arguments. In the quest to preserve and promote "one hundred percent Americanism," the 1920s Klan pursued a dual quest to subjugate non-Protestant (primarily Jewish and Roman Catholic) and non-white (principally African

American) influences on U.S. culture. The Klan's aims were explained in their slogan: "Native, white, Protestant supremacy" (Evans, "Fight" 52). (As noted in Chapter

Three, the "natives" in both Klan discourse and traditional historical scholarship are Protestants of

European descent.) Evans argued that the new Klan, now ten years old, had won the "leadership in the movement for

Americanism . . . . It is an idea, a faith, a purpose, an organized crusade" (34). Claiming divine inspiration for the Klan, Evans asserted the superiority of the northern.

238 Nordic races and elided those northern races with the

"old-stock" Americans he routinely valorized. References

by Evans to African Americans are virtually non-existent,

beyond a few, vague warnings concerning the

"mongrelization" of the races. This silence about African

Americans is not without irony, since the majority of Klan violence in the 1920s was directed at the group to which

Evans gave the least attention in his essay.

After one gets past Evans's self-congratulations

about the success of the Ku Klux Klan, its recent internal reforms, and its association with a superior breed of humans, the remainder of his essay concentrates on denouncing Jews and Roman Catholics. According to Evans,

Jews and Roman Catholics alike refused to adopt superior

American ways of doing things; they were aliens through and through. For example, explained Evans, "the Roman

Church is . . . in its leadership, in politics, in thought, and largely in membership, actually and actively alien, un-American and usually anti-American" (45), and

Catholics who adhered to the teachings of their church probably were un-American as well. African Americans,

Jews, and Roman Catholics all lack the superior attributes of the Nordic race, and these enemies of the Klan were all constructed by Evans and his ilk as subaltern others inhabiting an un-American political and cultural space.

239 while simultaneously taking jobs away from the old-stock

Americans.

That the 1920s Klan wished to inhibit immigration to

the United States is hardly surprising, since immigration

was perceived by Klan members as further diluting the

racial, political, and economic strength of Protestantism

by letting Roman Catholics from Ireland, Italy, and

Eastern Europe come into the country. Like Hitler in

Germany a decade later, Evans supplied scapegoats for U.S.

problems (see Kenneth Burke, Philosophy). Two years prior to the publication of Evans's essay, the Klan (and several other groups) successfully lobbied Congress for passage of the highly restrictive Johnson Immigration Act.

In response to harsh criticism from the Klan, Roman

Catholics, Jews, and African Americans could defend themselves by denouncing Klan racism, questioning Klan motives, impugning the credibility (ethos) of Klan rhetors, and/or defending their own Americanism. Members of one group had the option of responding to Klan criticisms of other groups, or they could limit their discussion to Klan arguments pertinent to their own subject position. The choice to remain silent about other, denigrated individuals may have seemed the least difficult, and this choice sometimes is recommended by contemporary social theorists who are uneasy about the

240 idea of speaking for others. But Du Bois took a different

stance, as I explain below. Du Bois, the first African

American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a

founder of the National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People, and an early critic of European and U.S.

colonialism, responded to the Klan by speaking about

European culture and Judeo-Christian imperatives without

assuming the subject position of Jew or Roman Catholic.^

Other(s) for Du Bois

Literary and rhetorical theorists have shown much

interest in naming their diverse approaches to criticism.

Whatever the individual methodological choices made by critics, criticism commensurable with the aims of cultural studies, for example, should enable the production of a discourse that would assist efforts at social, political, and economic change. This emphasis on discourse production in bringing about change (or in preventing it) has been a central feature of rhetoric for over two millennia, and the linkage of rhetorical theory and pedagogy with praxis is the reason I consider my work in this and other papers to be rhetorical criticism, where rhetoric encompasses the study of social influence via symbolic action.^

241 From the point of view privileged by most rhetorical

critics, distinctions between literature and non

literature are less interesting than are practical

questions of how text(s) work. Those interested in

"critical rhetoric" go a step further, asking what can be

done in the future to maximize the utility of other,

emancipatory discourses.* o f course, an announced

interest in rhetoric does not prevent the critic from

interdisciplinary borrowing of terms and ideas from social

or literary theory. In what follows, I explore one text

produced by W. E. B. Du Bois, along with textual fragments

from other speeches and writings generated by Du Bois. My

critical efforts are intended to illumine Du Bois's

implied theory of otherness.^

Du Bois began his 1926 essay by explaining that the

Ku Klux Klan no longer could be ignored or dismissed with

laughter. The Klan had attained too much power in too many parts of the nation to be disregarded. As a historian, Du Bois asserted that this "new" Klan bore

little resemblance to the Reconstruction-era Klan from which it borrowed its name.^ Du Bois argued that the new

Klan's growth was attributable to the aftermath of World

War One, a conflict of previously unimaginable global scope. The cultural remnant of this conflict, over for some seven years by the time Du Bois penned this essay.

242 was a fear shared by nation-states, religions, and races

of the horrors that difference could inspire:

The Shape of Fear looms over them. Germany fears the Jew, England fears the Indian; America fears the Negro, the Christian fears the Moslem, Europe fears Asia, Protestant fears Catholic .... The world has at present a severe case of nerves. (Du Bois, "Shape” 293)

Du Bois was enough of a socialist by 1926 to

privilege an economic explanation of this case of nerves,

since he argued that "above all. Wealth fears Democracy"

(293). Yet Du Bois's analysis accounts for the polysemy

of tensions between the groups mentioned above. Race,

class, nationality, and religion all had a place in his account of the conditions that foster intra- and

international tensions. Beyond his prescient commentary on the conditions of fear extant between Germans and Jews

in the mid 1920s, Du Bois's argument was that the local manifestation in the U.S. of these global tensions was the

Ku Klux Klan.7 Fear of the other drove the Klan, as

Evans's own North American Review essay attested. Du

Bois's repetition of the verb fear in the passage quoted above called attention to the multiplicity of othernesses that troubled the national and international scenes. The

Klan used secrecy to make these fears easier to express in physical violence. For Du Bois, the Klan "uses Fear to cast out Fear; it dares things at which open methods hesitate .... It harnesses the mob" ("Shape" 294).

243 Du Bois's answer to the "War and Ignorance" championed by the Klan (and many other citizens of the era) was to place faith in Enlightenment ideas of reason.

Du Bois worried that widespread appeals to religion by a- religious intellectuals would destroy "the ability of the

Man [sic] of the Street to think straight and reason logically" (296). Specifically, Du Bois hoped that reason and understanding would lead to a socialist reconstruction of the economy, so that the response to the economic ills of the time would be "the spread of wider and deeper understanding among the masses of men [sic] of the modern industrial process" (297). The alternative to reason, Du

Bois worried, was the secrecy and irrationality of the Ku

Klux Klan, with its organizational penchant for mayhem and murder: "We need not fear its [the Klan's] logic. It has no logic" (303).

The anti-logic of the Klan, Du Bois concluded, had influence because of the pervasiveness of fear inspired by the recent World War and by the intuition that U.S. success in economic growth and international affairs could not be attributed solely to those whose ancestors were

Protestant, Western Europeans. These Caucasians feared

"the Jew, the immigrant, [and] the Negro" because, by any measure, members of each group contributed far more to

U.S. success than scions of a self-styled superior race

244 cared to admit ("Shape" 302). The choice posited by Du

Bois for the U.S. of 1926 was between fear and reason.

All of the Klan's announced enemies shared in common their

threat to white, Protestant identity in their alien

otherness, whether by religion or by race.®

In pursuing his program of spreading reason and

understanding, Du Bois responded to the Klan's complaints

about Jews, Roman Catholics, and African Americans. After

quoting from the Ku Klux Klan application form, Du Bois

noted that the questions from that form demonstrate the

Klan's commitment to criticism of various marginalized

groups. (For example, one question on the Klan membership

form asked, "Do you believe in White Supremacy?") But Du

Bois was not able or willing to speak concerning these

multiple groups with the same voice, whatever the

similarities that might exist between Jews, Roman

Catholics, and African Americans where the Klan was concerned;

I am not the one to defend Catholic or Jew. The Catholic Church and modern European civilization are largely synonymous and to attack the one is to accuse the other. For the alleged followers of Jesus Christ and worshipers of the Old Testament to revile Hebrew culture is too impudent for words. But in this crazy combination of hates fathered by the Ku Klux Klan (and so illogical that in any intelligent country it would be laughed out of court), is the American Negro. ("Shape" 301)

245 Du Bois did not hesitate to defend the "American

Negro." He denounced allegations of African American

racial inferiority as scientifically unsound propaganda, a

recurring theme in his scholarship since the 1890s (see

Turley 1 4 2 - 1 5 0 ).^ Further, Du Bois asserted that the real

fear of the old-stock (white) Americans valorized by Evans

was that the repressive machinery of a racist government

would not be able to prevent African Americans from

achieving equality. However, as neither Catholic nor Jew,

Du Bois did not grant himself license to speak for

Catholics or Jews. By announcing that he was "not the one

to defend" these religious traditions, Du Bois refused the

temptation to speak for them, even while recognizing that

the Klan attack on Catholics and Jews deserved a response.

But Du Bois's refusal to speak for Catholics and Jews did not preclude his speaking about the Klan's anti-

Catholicism and anti-Semitism. As a critic, evaluating the rules and procedures of Klan discourse from the outside, he pointed to two performative contradictions in

Klan statements about Judaism and Catholicism. First, Du

Bois's equation of the Catholic Church with "modern

European civilization" put Klan celebrants of the Nordic races in an awkward position, since the European cultural heritage of old-stock Americans so often was valorized by

246 the Klan. Second, the Christian tradition to which Klan discourse frequently appealed was linked by Du Bois to the

Judaism out of which that tradition had emerged. As foes of anti-Semitism often have reminded Christian racists,

Christ was by birth, practice, and gene pool a Jew.

Reviling the religion on which Klan-embraced Christianity depended for its sacred texts and discourse traditions made little sense.

In his 1926 essay, Du Bois responded to the anti logic of the Klan on multiple fronts without pretending to speak for groups with whom he was not affiliated by birth or inclination. Read a-contextually, Du Bois's response to the Klan regarding Catholics and Jews could be viewed as an easy means for Klan repudiation, a casual aside meant to demonstrate obvious flaws in the Klan's logic.

But Du Bois's frequent criticism of white-dominated

Christian denominations, including the U.S. Roman Catholic

Church, was well known. Almost a decade earlier, in 1917,

Du Bois denounced the "moral bankruptcy" of "white

Christianity" for its tolerance of and contributions to racism (Du Bois, Reader 215). In a 1929 debate with white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, Du Bois declared that his white auditors were "followers of the Golden Rule ....

Yet you do not try to follow out your own religion because you know when your religion comes up against the race

247 problem that religion has nothing absolutely to do with your attitude toward Negroes" (Du Bois, Speaks 53). Also

in 1929, Du Bois would cite Biblical evidence in support of his criticism of white Christianity:

When the church meets the Negro problem, it writes itself down as a deliberate hypocrite and systematic liar. It does not say "Come unto me all ye that labor"; it does not "love its neighbor as itself"; it does not welcome "Jew and Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free"; and yet it openly professes all this. (Du Bois, Reader 217)

Roman Catholicism was not spared special attention by

Du Bois, given the tolerance of racism by the U.S.

Catholic church. For example, in 1944 Du Bois claimed that "the organized Christian church is unfavorable toward race equality. . . . The Catholic Church never champions the political or economic rights of subject peoples"

(Speaks 133). But more startling evidence of Du Bois's dissatisfaction with the Roman Catholic Church appeared in personal correspondence sent by Du Bois to Joseph Glenn, a

Catholic priest, dated March 18, 1925. Only a year before his North American Review essay appeared, Du Bois complained in this letter of "the great and glaring failure of the Catholic Church among American Negroes" and noted that "in over 400 years the Catholic Church has ordained less than a half dozen black Catholic priests either because they have sent us poor teachers or because

248 American Catholics do not want to work beside black

priests and sisters" (Du Bois, Correspondence 309).

In response to Du Bois's letter of March 18, Glenn's

letter, dated March 20, acknowledged the past failings of

the Catholic Church on race relations, though he argued

that the Church was increasing its efforts with regard to

African Americans. Glenn concluded his own letter by

asking from Du Bois "a more kindly attitude to the

Catholic efforts. It is generally accepted as a fact that

you are hostile to Catholics. . . . It is a pity that you

have left such an impression of hostility; personally, I

am sure that it does not exist" (Correspondence 310).

In his answer to Glenn's second letter, Du Bois's

letter of March 24, 1925, did not retract his earlier

critique. Because of the Catholic Church's rigid policy

of racial separation in parochial schools. Catholic universities, and seminaries, Du Bois argued that "the

Catholic Church in America stands for color separation and discrimination to a degree equalled [sic] by no other

church in America, and that is saying a very great deal"

(Correspondence 311). While Du Bois complimented the

"mighty history" of Catholicism, he lamented the great

shame that "'nigger' haters clothed in its episcopal robes

should do to black Americans in exclusion, segregation and

249 exclusion from opportunity all that the Ku Klux Klan ever

asked” (311; emphasis added).

Given these conclusions, Du Bois's 1926 essay easily

could have lumped white Catholics and Klan members

together as racists having an intra-group spat. In his

response to the Klan, Du Bois also might have chosen to

remain silent about Catholics after the fashion of

Catholic priest Martin J. Scott, a North American Review respondent to the Klan who said virtually nothing about

African Americans beyond an incidental reference in a quote from Abraham Lincoln.^ Instead, Du Bois chose (a) to recognize explicitly the Klan critique of Jews and

Catholics, (b) to note his inability to speak for those with whom he had no affiliation, and (c) to speak about the incoherence of the anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic arguments of the Ku Klux Klan. This choice on Du Bois's part was made in spite of his own condemnation of racism in the Roman Catholic Church.

What, then, might one learn from Du Bois's 1926 treatment of the Catholic Church, an organization he accused of doing the Klan's work only a year earlier? Du

Bois's choice leads me to formulate the following principle; When confronted with oppressive cultural practices, the specific intellectual is not relieved of the duty to speak about others (unless silence itself is

250 the response, the best choice among the available options). Whether those others stifle emancipatory projects or suffer from inexpiable brutality, speaking about those others sometimes is necessary if one wishes to challenge oppressive practices, as opposed to remaining silent or speaking for others. Du Bois denied his ability to speak for Jews and Catholics then attacked by the Klan.

This refusal to defend those in another subject position by taking up their cause, however, did not preclude his critique of performative contradictions in Klan discourse pertaining to Jewish and Catholic concerns. Du Bois was perfectly capable of speaking about the cultural practices and intellectual histories of Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and the Ku Klux Klan. But Du Bois did so without denying the ability of the other to speak for herself or himself and without presuming that he could represent the fundamental concerns of discursive communities to which he did not belong.

The next section explores the implications of these conclusions for theorizing otherness.

Speaking and Others

Although Du Bois's valorization of reason and truth in his 1926 essay would be problematic in many contemporary circles, his rhetoric adumbrates the

251 alternative theory of otherness I suggested at the

beginning of this paper. I believe this nascent theory

both supplements and corrects contemporary

conceptualizations of otherness, as the problem of the

other relates to postcolonialism, poststructuralism,

feminism, cultural studies, and other normative and

emancipatory projects of reconstructing social and

rhetorical theory.

In her essay, "The Problem of Speaking for Others,"

Linda Alcoff makes an admirable effort to integrate

respect for otherness with concern for the pragmatics of political action. Her recommendations— that we always should resist the easy assumption that speech in defense of the other is needed, that speaking carries with it an obligation to be responsible for the effects of what is said, and that speakers must analyze the potential effects of speaking before making the decision to speak— are thoughtful and commensurate with her theoretical explication of otherness. Also, her summary of the aporia of the subject in poststructuralism captures nicely the problem of dividing self from other. After all, selves are constructed from discursive idioms and from cultural histories that are shared with a host of "others." While

Michael Calvin McGee ("Search" 242) asserts that "the only human reality is that of the individual; groups . . . are

252 infused with an artificial identity," the reality of which

McGee speaks is itself constructed in ways that make the

autonomous, acting self seem possible. In contrast,

Alcoff speaks of selves as "constituted by multiple

intersecting discourses," where speaking for oneself requires participation "in the creation and reproduction of discourses through which my own and other selves are constituted" (Alcoff 21).

Though self and other still might be separated by reference to race, history, discursive community, or a host of other phenomena, Alcoff's analysis supports the claim that the self needs an other to separate that which is self from that which is other. At the level of artificial group identity, self is sometimes expanded to encompass the group, while other also might include collective entities (e.g., "foreigners" or "Negroes" in

Klan discourse). In one case, Zygmunt Bauman argues that friend and enemv coexist in a binary relationship with one another, with stranger constituting an ambiguous and undecidable term in relation to that binary. However, both enemy and stranger define what a friend is not.

Bauman's example suggests that the group identities by which we define our selves, in turn, are bounded and circumscribed by the existence of others who do not share in group features or characteristics.

253 Alcoff provides valuable insights into otherness and

makes a mighty effort to synthesize respect for others

with a prescription for political action. However, her

summary of the relationship between speaking and otherness

is less satisfactory. Alcoff collapses the analytic split

between speaking for others and speaking about others;

following Spivak, Alcoff wishes to emphasize instead

speaking with and to others: "We should strive to create

wherever possible the conditions for dialogue and the

practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for

others" (Alcoff 23). The dangers of speaking for others,

Alcoff notes, include misrepresentation of the others' own position and unwarranted expansion of the (usually

privileged) speaker's authority.

Engaging the other in dialogue, as valorized by

Alcoff, does not seem problematic in her discussion of speaking with and to others, but my explication of Du

Bois's own response to otherness leads me to disagree with portions of Alcoff's analysis.While speaking for others remains problematic, her choice to lump speaking about into the same troublesome category fosters the political disengagement that so worries Alcoff. As Alcoff explains,

There is an ambiguity in the two phrases: when one is speaking for others one may be describing their situation and thus also speaking about them. In fact, it may be impossible to speak

254 for others without simultaneously conferring information about them. Similarly, when one is speaking about others, or simply trying to describe their situation or some aspect of it, one may also be speaking in place of them, that is, speaking for them. One may be speaking about others as an advocate or a messenger if the persons cannot speak for themselves. Thus I would maintain that if the practice of speaking for others is problematic, so too must be the practice of speaking about others, since it is difficult to distinguish speaking about from speaking for in all cases. (9)

Here, Alcoff makes a common move, which John Searle

has attributed to logical positivism: "There is the

assumption [among literary critics] that unless a

distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn't

really a distinction at all" (Searle 182). By quoting

Searle, I do not wish to signal agreement with his

critique of deconstruction. However, I maintain that one could discern some conceptual fuzziness between speaking

for and speaking about, yet still defend the distinction.

This is especially the case when the practical

implications of Alcoff's distinction are considered.

Lest my concerns be thought mere quibbling about prepositions, reflect on the following: Speaking to an other requires the immediate or mediated presence of that other to the message. In the case of speaking to, the message is not directed primarily to an alternative audience. Such alternative audiences might be composed of undecided individuals who are not the other at whom your

255 message is directed, but are instead those who potentially might support your cause (or the cause of the other) and have not made an irreversible decision concerning their position on the subject. Further, speaking with the other might imply a direct, dialectical interchange between interlocutors. Alternatively, speaking with might imply addressing an audience together with the other. In both cases— speaking to and speaking with— the possibility of addressing an undecided auditor or auditors (the second other) while still in disagreement with an interlocutor

(the first other) is excluded. Although speaking about and speaking for may sometimes overlap, speaking with or to the second other in many cases requires speaking about the first other. Without speaking about the first other, speaking with or to the second other may be impossible or, at least, exceedingly difficult.

This potential exclusion of the second other in a discursive universe without the option of speaking about is important for political advocacy. Political rhetoric rarely has the form of Platonic dialectic, where advocates interrogate one another until an irresolvable contradiction is reached and a winner is declared.

Instead, political rhetors, who disagree with a first other on one or more points, will appeal to a second other

(another audience) because that second other has the

256 power/knowledge required to make a judgment between competing policy alternatives or because that second other controls resources that are important to competing

interests in the dispute. In these cases, speaking about the other may be critically important, since the first other may not be able or willing to engage potential interlocutors in dialogue.

The North American Review exchange discussed in detail above illustrates the need to speak about others.

Neither Klan appeals nor anti-Klan arguments are likely to influence the supposed interlocutors in this exchange.

Hiram Wesley Evans and W. E. B. Du Bois did not share a frame of reference sufficient to make change likely for either disputant (see Brockriede, "Where"); no both/and logic or compromise could resolve their differences. The messages of Du Bois and Evans were directed to the larger readership of the journal, an audience that presumably included many who had not firmly aligned themselves with

Klan or anti-Klan forces. These second others were members of a "court of public opinion" that could praise the Klan or blame it in accordance with their own conclusions about Klan members, messages, and practices.

The votes cast by this audience, the money contributed by this audience, and the pressure this audience could exert on elected representatives were profoundly important to

257 both Du Bois and Evans. Asking Du Bois to ignore the

second other out of deference to the first, Klan other

(Evans) would be political folly.

Du Bois's choice regarding Jews and Roman Catholics

also illustrates the importance of speaking about the

other. In a fashion now approved by Alcoff and numerous

other contemporary scholars, Du Bois did not speak for

Jews or Roman Catholics. But he did write about their

relationship to Klan arguments in the context of calling

those Klan arguments into question. In so doing, did Du

Bois assert his authority on the histories of Catholicism

and Judaism by discussing those religious traditions?

Undoubtedly he did, but this minimal assumption of

authority did not preclude further defense of Catholic and

Jewish interests by those who inhabited the appropriate

subject positions, and Du Bois's respectful speaking about

is infinitely preferable to the speaking about of the

Klan. In other words, Du Bois did nothing to prevent

Catholics and Jews from talking back to him, to the Klan,

or to the second other. Du Bois could have chosen to

speak for Catholics and Jews in a show of anti-Klan

solidarity, in the fashion of Jewish rabbi Joseph

Silverman, but he did not do so.^^ In contrast, Imperial

Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, with his theories of racial

superiority and celebration of old-stock Americans,

258 explicitly denied the value and voice of the others who

served as scapegoats in Klan discourse.

Further, in choosing to speak about rather than for

Catholicism and Judaism, Du Bois avoided the difficulty of

having to speak for the interests of a Catholic Church

that he had described previously and would describe in the

future as racist. Recall that Du Bois was speaking about

Klan and Catholic "first others" to an audience of "second

others." Du Bois could have spoken about Catholic racism,

but, for reasons about which we can only conjecture,

decided not to do so. Perhaps he decided that equating

Catholicism with the Klan would only confuse the issues or would elide racisms that were different in degree and

kind. By choosing not to speak for the other, Du Bois was

spared the difficulty of defending a Church he had labeled as racist, while also avoiding the political problem of separating out the elements of Catholicism he would praise

from those he would blame. Speaking about the other in this case allowed Du Bois to be selective in his discussion of Catholicism without shouldering the ethical burdens of advocacy required in speaking for an other

(especially an other from whom one sometimes demurs).

Some might argue that advocacy does not require speaking about the other. For example, an alternative to speaking about others is silence. As Lyotard would say.

259 silence is a phrase. Silence may testify, may argue, as

Edwin Black ("Gettysburg") suggests in his analysis of

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In response to the Ku Klux

Klan, Du Bois could have pointed out white-black racial inequities in economics and politics, made a plea for racial justice, and closed his essay without any reference to Catholics, Jews, or Klan; he could have adopted indifference as a response to all cases of intolerance in which he had no vested interest.

Such an approach is fraught with dangers, however.

Silence in Anglo-American jurisprudence commonly has been taken to signify assent to current conditions. The silence attributed to Christ in the New Testament allegedly made his crucifixion less difficult. The internal dynamics and regulations of a social system are supposed to keep that system intact unless a conscious effort is made to change that system. Limiting oneself to speaking with others, to speaking to others, or to silence deprives the political rhetor of an important resource.

Exhortations to an emancipatory praxis often will need speaking about, as my analysis of Du Bois's 1926 essay suggests. While responding to a given rhetoric always poses the risk of legitimizing the rhetors and causes associated with that rhetoric, the risk of response is tolerable when the objectionable rhetoric is being given

260 substantial consideration by auditors who might be

receptive to the preferred reading of that text.

Undoubtedly, there will be times when speaking about

others closely resembles speaking for others. At these

times, Alcoff's own analysis suggests a partial remedy.

The speaker must consider the potential consequences of

speaking about both the spoken about and the spoken to

before going on to discourse production. Ironically, the

critic herself or himself always should ask such

questions: About whom am I speaking? For what purpose?

Do I speak for Du Bois, now dead for over thirty years?

For this chapter, my answers to these questions are

something like "I speak only for myself and only from my own subject position," "my purpose is to prevent a paralyzing inability to advocate social change among those who wish to show respect for otherness," and "I speak about Du Bois's response to Klan and Catholicism, but I do not foreclose other interpretations of this text or pretend to know his intention." As a critic, I only can interrogate the texts that are available to me and make the arguments that I perceive to be warranted on the basis of this evidence.

Finally, speaking about the other does not necessarily deny the other's agency, nor should that speaking about preclude the other's own choice to speak

261 for herself or himself. Speaking about the other can

respect the other's subjectivity and recognize difference

and disjuncture without denying the other's ability to

"talk back" to me, to my audience, or to members of the

other's own group.In the worst case, the Ku Klux Klan

and similar organizations speak about others by telling

their auditors (second others) what the (first) other is

like, without entertaining the possibility of alternative

readings. The Klan denies the right of the (first) other

to explain that she or he exists in the world in ways

incommensurable with the Klan's stated position. A

sensitive and self-reflexive effort to speak about the

other, as demonstrated by W. E. B. Du Bois almost seventy

years ago, poses a minimal risk of replicating the

subjectivity-denying stratagems of the Klan. Speaking

about the other, when coupled to a constantly self

questioning ethic in rhetorical (social, literary)

criticism and political advocacy, should not pose the

grave threat that many perceive to exist in the act of

speaking for others or in the hostility and closure of the

Klan speaking about the other.

The subjectivity of the other is discontinuous with one's sense of self as subject, but, as long as the other's existence is not denied, subjectivity is reversible in the sense that the other has the potential

262 to speak about and for herself or himself. The existence

of that potential for discourse production is no guarantee

that the potential will be utilized. Effects of power or

past messages that speaking is inappropriate may have a

chilling effect on speech. Further, as Spivak notes,

insufficient command of colonial code systems (such as

French and English) or academic discursive idioms may make

the material possibility of subaltern speech effectively unattainable in the short term. Acting individually, privileged academics may not be able to address these concerns, although addressing them is the aim of many

intellectuals. But the contextual sensitivity to others suggested by Alcoff should help rhetors avoid speaking about others in ways that would discourage those others from using their own voices to challenge the categories that have been constructed for them.

Conclusion: Situation and Genre

Since its publication in 1968, Lloyd Bitzer's article, "The Rhetorical Situation," has generated a great deal of interest in communication studies; it remains one of the discipline's most frequently cited essays. As I noted in Chapter One, most rhetoricians are familiar with

Bitzer's definition of the rhetorical situation as

a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential

263 exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence. (Bitzer, "Rhetorical" 43)

Bitzer defines "exigence" as "an imperfection marked by

urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done" (43). Following Carolyn R. Miller ("Genre"), I understand exigences as existing in the space between subjective thought and individual perceptions of an objective world; exigences are defined intersubjectively

in the social action by which communities define urgent

imperfections.

A complete review of criticism of Bitzer's thesis is beyond the scope of this chapter. While many scholars have assumed that Bitzer's original essay advocated

"strong" situationalism, where situation would determine the specific form and content of the text produced by a rhetor (e.g., Consigny, Vatz), Bitzer's subsequent clarification of his position ("Functional") and an essay by Alan Brinton satisfactorily explain that Bitzer sees the situation as imposing only a set of constraints on the rhetor, within which she or he has freedom to make c h o i c e s . on this reading, Bitzer's position conforms to what I called "weak" situationalism in Chapter One. As examples from Bitzer's 1980 essay indicate, many situations are recurring (e.g., political campaign

264 speeches, natural disasters) and lead to the establishment

of generic audience expectations about responses to such

situations ("Functional").

I see my analysis above as suggesting three

implications for the idea of rhetorical situation as it

relates to genre theory. First, since many different

responses are possible for similar or recurring rhetorical

situations, neither situation nor genre overdetermines

rhetorical invention. Du Bois, Silverman, and Scott were

in similar, marginalized positions when they responded to

the Klan in 1926, yet each chose a different path. Scott

essentially ignored the non-Catholics denigrated by the

Klan; Silverman decided to speak for all those he perceived as persecuted by the Klan; Du Bois spoke about other groups slighted by the Klan while denying his ability to speak for those groups. The similarities in the situations to which these rhetors responded were not sufficient to dictate the specific form or content of those responses, beyond their uniform denouncement of the

Klan's ideology and violence.

Against those who wrongly perceive Bitzer's theory of the rhetorical situation as determining what the rhetor must say to respond appropriately to the situation, I consider these responses by Du Bois et al. as exemplary of a situation where "alternative fitting responses" are

265 acceptable (Bitzer, "Functional" 37). Three very similar

(though not identical) exigencies evoked three different rhetorical responses, none of which was clearly

inappropriate. (Of course, one may concede that a response was appropriate while arguing that a more appropriate response was available; Du Bois's rhetorical choices were available to Scott and Silverman.) While each essay adhered to a genre we might call the "anti-Klan response," membership in a genre does not make each text identical in every key respect or similarly admirable by some set of ethical standards for discourse assessment.

Second, David M. Hunsaker and Craig R. Smith, Mary

Garrett and Xiaosui Xiao, and Barbara A. Biesecker have argued in separate essays that Bitzer's treatment of the audience in rhetorical situations is inadequate. For

Hunsaker and Smith, there are three audiences in the rhetorical situation, including a situational audience

(which recognizes the existence of an exigence), a rhetorical audience (consisting of those capable of acting to modify the exigency), and an actual audience (which is exposed to the rhetor's message). Garrett and Xiao see the (actual) audience "as the active center of the rhetorical situation" (39), since the attitudes, presuppositions, and discourse tradition(s) of the audience will determine whether or not a rhetorical

266 situation exists. If audience members cannot or will not

accept that an exigence confronts them, then the "fact" of

the exigence's existence is irrelevant as a practical

matter. Finally, Biesecker's poststructuralist

reconstruction of the rhetorical situation would emphasize

the role of rhetoric in refashioning the identities of

rhetors and auditors.

The roles played by constructions of self and other

suggest another possibility for rethinking audience as a

central component of the rhetorical situation. The

construction of identities by rhetors and auditors will

determine who is or is not perceived as an appropriate

party to discussion in a specific rhetorical situation.

For example, the idiomatic rules to which Evans adhered

imply that only old-stock Americans are worth addressing; the leader of an exclusive organization talks to the outsider, the other, only to say that the organization poses no immediate threat to the other or that the other

should not interfere with the organization. In contrast,

Du Bois's essay announced its central concern with the

Klan's anti-black racism without constructing Catholics or

Jews as "exterior and remote" others (Todorov, Conquest

3), acknowledging them as having different interests without marginalizing them or labeling them as evil or inferior. Even Klan members are treated with relative

267 respect by Du Bois, notwithstanding a few frustrated

references to the Klan's absence of logic.

Hunsaker and Smith concede that the actual audience

may not always be the rhetorical audience, since auditors

may wrongly address their discourse to auditors not able

to deal with the exigence productively. However, Hunsaker

and Smith (and some other theorists of the rhetorical

situation) do not explicitly consider the possibility that multiple audiences and multiple exigencies may be

addressed by a single t e x t . IB As suggested above, Du

Bois's 1926 essay was not written for Evans or other Klan

interlocutors who would concede none of Du Bois's presuppositions. However, Du Bois probably understood that his essay would be read by Jews, Catholics, white

Protestant intellectuals, and African Americans. His discourse addressed the concerns of these various groups, providing an explanatory narrative for Klan recruiting success that was germane to his own and to other subject positions. The multivocality of a "single" text confirms the complexity of the idiomatic rules that govern the production of many rhetorical artifacts. That same complexity, where numerous presupposition, immanent, and consequential rules are identifiable, increases the probability that the text (and the idiom to which it

268 belongs) will be associated with multiple genres of discourse (see Chapter Three).

Third, concerns for self and other suggest the ways in which the rhetorical situation cannot be understood synchronically. Garrett and Xiao and Biesecker already have argued that the history of a discursive community must be evaluated in order to understand the rhetorical situation; diachronic assessment of the rhetorical situation must supplement synchronic concerns (e.g., identification of the immediate audience). The rhetor's decision about which other to address and how to construct those others in discourse will be influenced by the audience's sense of community history where self and other are concerned. Understanding the rhetorical situations of

Du Bois and Evans reguires a sense of which audience(s) they address, but understanding also demands diachronic assessment of the historical marginalization of African

Americans, the symbolic construction of whiteness, the material interests of the various relevant groups, and so on.

Historicizing the rhetorical situation is essential to understanding the rhetorical possibilities that will be attractive to individual rhetors. However, such a move also makes the idea of the rhetorical situation itself increasingly problematic where criticism is concerned.

269 dissolving the immediacy of the rhetorical situation into

the potentially infinite regression of historical

investigations concerning rhetorical context. For

example, if understanding the rhetorical situation of Du

Bois's 1926 essay demands a solid grasp of the preceding

300 years of African-American history and the political economy of chattel slavery, then we have come full circle to an old problem in the study of public address. Before

Edwin Black's trenchant critique of neo-Aristotelian criticism in his Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method

(1965), critics were expected to become practicing historians (and sociologists, and political scientists) in order to demonstrate their adequate grasp of context when studying a particular rhetorical artifact. In that era, one should not be surprised that most rhetorical critics never had time to develop particularly sophisticated critical skills and frequently produced fairly superficial readings of specific rhetorical artifacts.

Without denying the importance of history, a rule- driven theory of genre has the advantage of providing a synchronic starting point for the analysis of individual texts that avoids the infinite regression problem of situational analysis. The theory of genre I propose encourages critics to start with the text itself in isolating the rules unique to its idiom, rather than

270 demanding analysis of context— with its attendant risk of

infinite regression— as an essential prerequisite for

engaging the text. Assuming that rhetorical imbrication

is identified following the initial analysis of the text,

the critic's sense of the genre(s) to which a text belongs

provides one or more historical frameworks from which the

critic might begin diachronic investigation, since genres

frequently have a history with which a critic might be

familiar. An obvious example might illustrate this point:

The critic who considers Lincoln's first inaugural surely

will want to have some grasp of the history of the U.S.

abolitionist movement, Lincoln's biography, and the

debates over federalism in the eighty years prior to

Lincoln's election, but a particularly useful (and

familiar) starting point for engaging the historical

milieu surrounding Lincoln's inaugural is the rhetorical

tradition of presidential inaugurals from George

Washington to James Buchanan.

While a sense of historical situation and context

will undoubtedly enrich critical efforts, the critic

engaging in generic analysis should be comforted by her or

his knowledge that the rhetorical and literary history of genres with which she or he is likely to be familiar

should provide a primary critical framework for diachronic

assessment of individual rhetorical artifacts. In

271 contrast, after the work of scholars like Garrett and

Xiao, any investigation of a rhetorical situation could

now be labeled inadequate unless the context that produced

the rhetorical artifact was investigated thoroughly, and

we know that someone always will find something wrong or

incomplete in such efforts to contextualize. At least

genre theory has the advantage of letting the critic begin

research from a position of disciplinary expertise,

suggesting where one should start in seeking to understand

the rhetorical environment that influenced the production

and the reception of a given rhetorical artifact. While

the infinite regression problem is also a risk in this

formulation, the genre approach minimally suggests that

some approaches to diachronic evaluation have a higher priority than others, which should encourage critics to

adopt something other than a random approach to historicizing the synchronic elements of a rhetorical

situation.

In summary, respect for difference matters, as does maintaining the conditions for political advocacy and

social change. The most workable position for those who

feel trapped between respect for otherness and political advocacy is to distinguish between speaking for the other and speaking about the other. There is no immutable link between speaking about the other and speaking for the

272 other, just as there is no inherent connection between speaking about the other and denying the other's ability to talk back to the rhetor. Only in denying the other's ability to talk back or in denigrating the value of the other's discourse is the other's value and subjectivity

(as actor and agency) denied. Du Bois points the way to a respect for otherness commensurable with speaking the name of the other, where the conditions for social change are not ineluctably constrained by one's ability to speak only about one's own race, gender, ethnicity, region and/or religion.

273 Notes

^ Writings 931-932. This quotation is drawn from Du Bois's Darkwater; Voices from within the Veil.

2 An examination of W. E. B. Du Bois's long and active life as scholar and public intellectual is beyond the scope of this chapter. Manning Marable's VL. B_:_ Du Bois; Black Radical Democrat provides a good starting point for those interested in Du Bois's life and work. Also, see Du Bois's last autobiography (he wrote three in his lifetime). Paul Gilroy's excellent chapter on Du Bois traces African, Asian, and European influences on his work, while David Turley outlines Du Bois's intellectual evolution from social scientist to activist in the twentieth-century public sphere. For Du Bois's most detailed discussion of colonialism, see his Color and Democracy.

^ This line of argument is explored in far more detail by Terry Eagleton. My own understanding of rhetoric is far broader than that of Paul de Man and his disciples (e.g., Spurr), who concentrate on the internal logics of tropes and figures when talking about rhetoric. For me, rhetoric also encompasses larger questions of how rhetors influence texts and texts influence auditors. A study like Edward Said's Orientalism, with its scrutiny of fictional and non-fictional texts (to the extent that one can defend the coherence of the category called "fiction”) and its concern about the production and maintenance of the discursive formation for which the book is named, seems to me an outstanding example of rhetorical criticism. Also, see my definition of rhetoric in Chapter One.

^ An example of a rhetoric consistent with emancipatory aims is provided by Raymie McKerrow. McKerrow reverses the usual arrangement of the phrase rhetorical criticism to announce a critical rhetoric in which discourse production in the service of social change is valorized. McKerrow's Foucault- and Mouffe-inspired project orients the critic to continual critique of both domination and freedom in everyday life. As Ronald Walter Greene notes in his explication of McKerrow's project, "the point of a progressive critical practice is to investigate the possibilities for constructing radical democratic social practices" (Greene, "Social" 125). On the problems with the traditional rhetoric-poetic distinction, see Chapter Two.

274 ^ Some would label this an "eclectic" approach to criticism, to borrow Brock, Scott, and Chesebro's term. Rosenfield, for example, explains that the critic necessarily is an "expert-spectator" never wholly bounded by method. Of course, this alleged tendency of criticism to exceed the confines of method does not excuse critical projects from intellectual scrutiny and counter argument. Despite the hodgepodge of critical methods announced over the last several decades by various critics, all but a tiny minority reject the idea of replicability that is associated with "method" in the physical and biological sciences. As discussed in Chapter One, the separation of justified from idiosyncratic conclusions is determinable only by evaluating the critic's arguments and by examining the textual evidence the critic provides in support of those arguments. I remain aware that the intellectual practice called criticism is not immune to the problems of speaking for and about the other. I address otherness as it relates to criticism in a subsequent section of this chapter.

^ For a brief discussion by Du Bois of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, see his Black Reconstruction in America. In his last autobiography, Du Bois also made a passing reference to the resurgence of the 1930s Ku Klux Klan as a consequence of economic problems during the Great Depression.

^ While Du Bois's contemporaries in the 1920s frequently noticed similarities between Mussolini's fascism. Hitler's nazism, and Klan ideology, contemporary Klan students rarely have taken an international perspective in analyzing the Klan. For further discussion, see MacLean (Behind, Ch. 8).

® This emphasis on the alien in Klan discourse is reminiscent of Spivak's discussion of the "heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other" ("Can" 280-281).

® An intellectual history of "racial science" is provided in I. A. Newby's Jim Crow's Defense. Said and Spurr also provide examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific arguments for racial inequality.

Compare Du Bois on this point to Martin J. Scott's essay in the same issue of the North American Review. Scott is a Roman Catholic priest who defends his church from Klan charges of anti-Americanism while essentially

275 remaining silent about African Americans and Jews as targets of Klan hostility.

In his North American Review essay, Joseph Silverman, a Jewish rabbi, was far more explicit than was Scott in criticizing the Klan for its intolerance of African Americans: "The Ku Kluxer by unjust, bigoted . . . opposition to our colored citizens, proves himself to belong to an inferior class of the Homo Sapiens; [sic] [and] convicts himself of being unworthy of the great privileges and rights of American Citizenship" (Silverman 285).

As Alcoff notes, the problem of the other is bound up with the well-known critique of representation in poststructuralist theory. For the moment, I will stipulate that representation of another or of a situation is impossible on ontological grounds. But the impossibility of representation should not detract from our ability to make local and contextualized knowledge claims, to argue for counterfactual worlds in which the material and political conditions of subaltern groups would be improved, and so on. In other words, the problem of the other cannot be solved in the fashion of a subject index by saying to the reader "see representation, critique of."

Note that Alcoff does not explain what she means by dialogue in her essay. I take dialogue to refer to something like the following: "Where attempts to minimize inequalities of power are made, dialogue is engagement between interlocutors such that each participant recognizes the possibility that opposing interlocutors could convince one another based on the merits of the better argument." Related notions of dialogue might depend on the Buber-esque notion of authentic encounters between individuals whose humanity and existential uniqueness are mutually recognized (see Buber, I and Thou).

Consider Joseph Silverman's adoption of an African-American voice:

It behooves the American to be tolerant of that race which some of his own forefathers [sic] . . . enslaved for several hundred years. Let the American be tolerant . . . and . . . let him [sic] be kind to a people that only asks to be permitted to work out its own salvation in peace

276 under the protection of the Stars and Stripes. (285)

My references to agency and subjectivity are not meant to signal a naive faith in the stable, univocal subject who has an essence prior to discourse. Who would make such a claim after Derrida and Lyotard? However, the place of discourse in creating identity does not entail the radical alteration of individual notions of self (and other) following exposure to any given text and/or experience. While self-identity never reaches a final, unalterable stage, neither is it apt to shift radically in a period of a few seconds, minutes, or hours, as twentieth-century communication research has demonstrated. The always provisional and incomplete self is constituted by the sum of experience with a vast collection of texts experienced diachronically, so that individual responses to rhetorical artifacts sometimes are unpredictable. Talking about self and subject remains possible because individuals perceive themselves as such and act as if these constructs are relatively stable. A particular concern where the other is concerned involves children, animals, and other "voiceless" beings. My analysis of speaking, otherness, and talking back does not account for these special cases. The one guarantee in these cases is that silence is even less likely to be a viable political option, since such beings often are unable to defend their legitimate interests in ways that we can comprehend.

One of the first scholars to appropriate Bitzer's idea of the rhetorical situation, Arthur B. Miller, advanced a similar reading of Bitzer's original essay: "Although an exigence essentially specifies limits, the rhetor has creative latitude to interpret the significance of the exigence within those limits .... Why do rhetors speak differently to the same rhetorical exigence" (Miller "Rhetorical" 111)?

Kathleen M. Hall Jamieson ("Antecedent," "Generic") has written about the importance of genre in dictating the appropriate rhetorical response to a situation: "What I do wish to suggest is that perception of the proper response to an unprecedented rhetorical situation grows not merely from the situation but also from antecedent rhetorical forms" (Jamieson, "Generic" 163).

I am not suggesting here that texts are whole, complete, and finished, nor am I denying the possibility

277 of intertextuality. What I take to be a single text may be taken as a textual fragment by others (see M. C. McGee, "Text"). However, speeches and essays usually are perceived as individual texts by auditors who have been trained to do so. Thus, references to individual texts have some practical utility.

Bruce E. Gronbeck once wrote rather disparagingly of traditional history-centered public address studies as "rhetorical history" rather than "rhetorical criticism." While rhetorical history and rhetorical biography have their defenders (e.g., Medhurst, "Public," "Robert"; Zarefsky, "State"), participants at the four public address conferences held between 1988 and 1994 have spoken of conducting studies that emphasize both text and context, rather than pitting one against the other. Unfortunately, the admonition to account for text and context provides no critical guidance beyond the vague insistence that the critic do everything well. Although neo-Aristotelian critics occasionally produced exceptional readings of specific rhetorical artifacts, such as Marie Hochmuth Nichols's critique of Lincoln's First Inaugural, more often their attempts to consider context marginalized the texts they allegedly were investigating. The neo- Aristotelian primary focus on audience and outcomes in judging rhetorical artifacts sometimes is attributed to the conventional reading of Herbert A. Wichelns's "The Literary Criticism of Oratory" (1925), in which Wichelns maintained that rhetorical criticism "is not concerned with permanence, nor yet with beauty. It is concerned with effect" (209). Craig R. Smith's recent defense of neo-Aristotelianism and blistering attack on Edwin Black's Rhetorical Criticism demonstrate that Wichelnsian assessments of effect still have some devotees in communication studies.

278 CHAPTER 5

REHABILITATING EMOTION;

THE TROUBLESOME CASE OF THE KU KLUX KLAN

The impulse that leads us to reject instruments . . . that can be turned to any and every purpose is that we know that we are the good guys and the Nazis are the bad guys. We should like to find some way of making this knowledge as clear to everyone as it is to us . . . . The trouble is, of course, that this same sort of knowledge-claim is made, in all sincerity, by the bad guys, and that we shall never have any resources available that will not be equally available to them.

Richard Rorty (1990)1

Intellectual historians may observe at some future time that the closing decades of the twentieth century were not kind to logos. or r e a s o n . ^ After centuries of reason reigning supreme in Western metaphysics, many scholars in the humanities and social sciences now look suspiciously on appeals to reason or rationality as providing the single, preferred procedure for knowledge validation. Those who call themselves poststructuralist or postmodern frequently have criticized reason as a central facet of a dysfunctional and untenable

279 Enlightenment project. Jacques Derrida's critique of

loaocentrism provides only one example of the

poststructuralist orientation. Joining Derrida and

Lyotard in opposition to master narratives of reason are

those feminist scholars who depict the domination of logos

as instrumental to the maintenance of patriarchy. For

example, given modernity's many problems, including the

valorization of reason over emotion, Sandra Harding (1986)

notes with approval the "often beneficial ways in which

the modernist world is falling apart" f Science Question

164).3

Responses to this critique of logos in recent years have been manifold, and no single satisfactory alternative to the modern vision of rationality is certain (or even

likely) to emerge. The conceptualization of alternatives to Enlightenment reason has begun, but no end to this theorizing is imminent. Minimally, many scholars now conceive of rationality as a contested and contestable notion, given that multiple rationalities are said to exist. Some academics have even rejected reason altogether as a dangerous and confining idea, although

Mary E. Hawkesworth and others complain in response that such thinking wrongly elides reason with Enlightenment reason. Instead, scholars like Hawkesworth conclude that

"a critical feminist epistemology must avoid both the

280 foundationalist tendency to reduce the multiplicity of

reasons to a monolithic 'Reason' and the postmodernist

tendency to reject all reasons tout court" (Hawkesworth

556).

Against this backdrop of efforts to fashion more

satisfactory accounts of reason, I wish to warn that one

increasingly popular move in remaking moral philosophy and

rhetorical and argumentation theory, the choice to ally

reason with emotion, is not without peril.^ A monolithic

"Emotion"— or even a commitment to some specific emotion—

is not a simple corrective for a metaphysical faith in reason, and those scholars who make the admirable attempt to deconstruct the reason/emotion binary in Western metaphysics must be aware that reconstructive efforts in this area have their own pitfalls.

By calling attention to these pitfalls, I do not mean to discourage this reconstructive effort. Instead, I suggest that scholars should be aware of the potential problems that confront them in undertaking such a project.

While more promising than the uncritical valorization of reason by their Enlightenment predecessors, contemporary theories that link emotion to reason or fuse reason with emotion are not guaranteed to produce an improvement over the Enlightenment marginalization of emotion.

281 In what follows, I make my case by examining that most troublesome of sources, the rhetoric of the Ku Klux

K l a n . 5 In the discourse of one Klan leader, I find

adumbrated a theory of rationality that links a concern with giving reasons to an insistence on the importance of

racial instinct and emotion. As suggested below, this

Klan theory has significant shortcomings from the typical

feminist and other revisionist perspectives on emotion.

However, as I hope to demonstrate by examining Klan rhetoric, attempts to retheorize emotion and reason face significant problems. First, I will provide a sketch of the linkages that have been posited between reason and emotion, a subject rarely considered by contemporary rhetoricians. G Second, I will scrutinize the place of emotion and reason in the discourse of Hiram Wesley Evans, a one-time Imperial Wizard and Emperor of the Ku Klux

Klan. Third, given this analysis of 1920s Klan rhetoric,

I will suggest some implications for theorizing the connections between reason and emotion. I conclude with some tentative thoughts on the ethical assessment of rhetorical genres and idioms.

The Reason/Emotion Controversy

How might people make good decisions? Historically, the answer for Western philosophers typically has involved

282 avoiding or bracketing reliance on emotion in favor of

dependence on reason. Among the philosophers of Hellenic

Greece, Aristotle encouraged the division between reason

and emotion in Book Two of the Rhetoric. to which scholars

in philosophy and psychology sometimes turn in their

search for a systematic Attic discussion of the emotions.

While Aristotle did suggest that reason (logos) required the assistance of credibility (ethos) and emotion (pathos) to make rhetorical success possible, he did not posit any necessary relationship between logos and pathos (see

1377b-1378a), though, according to Martha C. Nussbaum,

Aristotle, contra Plato, restored emotions to a role of prominence in practical reasoning and morality.?

Rhetoricians after Aristotle included sections on emotion in their treatises, but generally they did not suggest that emotion was a vital concern in making good decisions. Emotion and audience psychology were discussed because auditors usually were imperfect logicians at best and dullards at worst. Alternatively, emotion was considered because the passions were needed to give spirit and energy to ideas for purposes of persuading an audience to action (e.g., George Campbell, Philosophv 77). From these traditional perspectives, one would not discuss the emotions in rhetoric if audiences were composed of educated and intelligent interlocutors who would not be

283 swayed by appeals to the emotions.® One of the first

complaints about the "artificial" distinction between

reason and the emotions in rhetorical and argumentation

instruction was made by Mary Yost in the 1917 Quarterly

Journal of Public Speaking. Nevertheless, some

scholars of rhetoric and argumentation still maintain that

emotions are "not directly relevant" to argumentation

studies (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Snoeck Henkemans et

al. 2).

Following the near-universal abandonment in the twentieth century of the James-Lange theory of the emotions, which posits that emotion is a response to

(rather than a cause of) physiological changes, scholars have suggested a range of possible relationships between reason and emotion. Some of these theories sharply divide emotion from reason, as with the traditional perspectives outlined above, while other theories suggest that an intimate intertwining of reason and emotion is necessary.

Two theories illustrate the clear separation between reason and emotion in twentieth-century scholarship.

First, Jean-Paul Sartre's short monograph. Sketch for a

Theory of the Emotions, suggested that emotion is "a transformation of the world" (63), where emotion

"magically" alters the relation of the self to the world;

"Emotion arises when the world of the utilizable vanishes

284 abruptly and the world of magic appears in its place" (90-

91). This magical state of affairs, which exists when

emotion is aroused, is inconsistent with rational activity

as such, since "the magical . . . is . . . an irrational

synthesis of spontaneity and passivity" (85). While

Sartre's theory of the emotions has been criticized on

several fronts, the division of reason from the emotions

in his theory exemplifies a common trend in Western

philosophy.9

In contrast to Sartre, positivism provides a theory

of reason, rather than a theory of emotion per se.

However, positivism, as described by A. J. Ayer and his

cohorts, adumbrates a theory of emotion by insisting on a

science that is free of values and all else not verifiable

via empirical observation. Since a positivist does not

expect that emotion could be explained by or function as

argument, she or he will seek to eliminate the influence of emotion in scientific research. An emotional scientist might lose her or his ability to evaluate dispassionately the object of her or his research. Anything that might

interfere with the scholar's objectivity by injecting some confounding variable into the investigative process is rejected as either interfering with the rational production of knowledge or as extra- or ir-rational itself.

285 Thus, positivism suggests that producing knowledge

necessarily requires the separation of reason and emotion.

Like Sartre, positivists declare that emotion and reason

cannot successfully coexist. Unlike Sartre, positivists

make clear their preference for reason over emotion.

Following Spelman, Alison M. Jaggar summarizes this

positivist "Dumb View" of the emotions as not "being about

anything: instead, they [emotions] were contrasted with

and seen as potential disruptions of other phenomena that

are about some thing, . . . such as rational judgments,

thoughts, and observations" ("Love" 148-149). Thus,

adherents to positivism continued what had become the

Enlightenment tradition of separating reason from emotion

and preferring reason to emotion.

In comparison with these theories that bifurcate reason and emotion, other, typically feminist scholars in recent decades have provided various reconstructions of the relationship between reason and emotion. At the risk of oversimplification, I suggest that alternative conceptions of this relationship take three forms.

1. One might valorize emotion over reason. Some strong versions of the critique of Enlightenment reason suggest that reason is responsible for a host of social and environmental ills. While Hawkesworth complains that such strong critiques confuse "reason" with "Enlightenment

286 reason," as noted above, the effect of such critique often is to suggest that alternative modes of judgment, including pathos and ethos, are more reliable than logos.

An example of this position comes from Francis Dunlop's

(thoroughly non-feminist) call for the development of

"emotional autonomy" in children, where one relies on connectedness with inner feelings to guide decision making. Dunlop is suspicious of reason, since reason abandons faith in God. Instead, Dunlop prefers to put faith in feelings as "the creation of . . . something more obviously worth trusting" (118).

Typically, even the harshest contemporary critics of reason are unwilling to defend the strong conclusion that emotion is better than reason, which would substitute a new hierarchy for the old. Rather than reverse the binary to privilege emotion and put reason in a subaltern position, these critics more often embrace one of the following two conceptions of the reason/emotion relationship, where the hierarchical character of the binary is deconstructed altogether.

2. One might depict emotion as a needed supplement to reason. From this perspective, reason is given direction and emphasis by emotional considerations, especially in making difficult ethical decisions. Reason may be necessary, but it is not sufficient to the achievement of

287 a satisfactory means or a satisfactory end when coping with difficult moral questions. Here, reason and emotion exist in a symbiotic relation. While both retain their distinct identity, neither is seen as functioning well without the other. As Hilary Rose explains, the

faculties, which have been constructed as separate and arranged in hierarchical dualities, need bringing together in a way which is both non-hierarchical and anti-foundationalist. All the faculties need developing, for knowing requires them all. (Love 50)

An early illustration of this second option comes from V. J. McGill. Citing Dewey as an early proponent of problematizing the reason/emotion distinction, McGill warns that "when reason is separated from the emotions, the former is unmotivated and the latter, blind" (111).

While noting that many of the motives for human action are emotional and, strictly speaking, non-rational, McGill claims that underlying reasons for emotions exist and ought to be discoverable. When this linkage between reason and emotion is explicated further, education of the emotions should be considered an important aim for teachers, given the connection between reason and emotion.While still subordinating emotion to reason in one sense, McGill seeks for emotion a legitimate role in moral reasoning.

Another, recent example of this second option is found in Alison M. Jaggar's work. Pursuing themes

288 adumbrated in her well-known Feminist Politics and Human

Nature. Jaggar concludes that a non-positivist account of

systematic knowledge requires emotion. For Jaggar, this

theory of knowledge relies on the interdependence of

faculties that have been wrongly abstracted and separated

in Western metaphysics, including the faculties of reason

and emotion. Her "nonhierarchical and

antifoundationalist" account insists that "emotions are

neither more basic than observation, reason, or action in

building theory, nor are they secondary to them" (Jaggar,

"Love" 165).

3. One might reconstruct reason such that emotion is

not analyticallv severable from reason. Unlike the first

two responses to the separation of emotion from reason,

which do not problematize narrow, traditional definitions

of reason, this approach suggests a broadening of reason

to embrace various kinds of non-propositional knowledge,

so that an emotion or feeling could "count" as a good

reason for accepting a given conclusion or taking a

suggested course of action. For example, Kathleen Wallace

calls for a "notion of judgment that is not exclusively

identified with a narrow view of reason, that can account

for how emotions and feelings function as judgments and can establish genuine parity for emotion in judicative

processes" (67-68). Wallace's call for parity is founded

289 on her explicit rejection of the emotion-as-supplement approach and on her request for a re-evaluation of both reason and emotion in revising theories of judgment.

While Wallace avoids a systematic rethinking of reason definitions in her synthetic attempt to theorize judgment, her conclusion indicates that failure to consider emotion in many decision-making situations would be "irrational.”

In these cases, emotion becomes an intrinsic feature of rationality, rather than a supplement to rationality.

Another specimen of this third option comes from

Patricia Hill Collins. Hill Collins suggests that an ethic of care is consistent with an Afrocentric, feminist epistemology, since this ethic is common to experiences of

African-American women. The ethic of care for Hill

Collins includes the assumption that emotion is appropriate in dialogue, since "emotion indicates that a speaker believes in the validity of an argument" in the tradition of African-American women (Hill Collins 215).

By quoting with approval Ntozake Shange's goal of rendering reason and emotion indistinguishable as separate categories. Hill Collins suggests the need to recast emotion and reason as a single, indivisible human faculty.

Whether arguing for emotion as a supplement to reason or for emotion as a kind of reason, many scholars have suggested that the effort to rescue emotion from

290 intellectual obscurity in the Western tradition has

important political implications. For example, developing

a specifically feminist epistemology and/or feminist

science sometimes is said to require some theory of

emotion. One essay by Hilary Rose, which has received

widespread attention among students of feminist

epistemology, calls for the "integration of hand, brain,

and heart," where "bringing caring labor and the knowledge

that stems from participation in it to the analysis

becomes critical for a transformative program equally

within science and within society" ("Hand" 9 0 ).

Further, some widely read feminist ethicists (e.g., Seyla

Benhabib, Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings) recently have

embraced various versions of an "ethic of care," where

concern with specific circumstances, individual problems,

and, of course, emotion displaces more abstract, trans-

contextual ethics, such as the ethic that Rawls's veil of

ignorance illustrates.^^ As Sandra Harding (Whose) points

out in summarizing work done by Genevieve Lloyd, Sara

Ruddick, and Evelyn Fox Keller, the devaluing of

contextual modes of analysis has been linked to the marginalization of emotion in Western rationality.

Regarding the second and third options for

retheorizing the reason/emotion relationship, these

projects concerning emotion have yielded important

291 insights concerning the legitimation of knowledge and the

workings of power in an array of contexts. However, I

worry that the foundation on which these projects are

built may be less stable than it seems. Left-leaning

academics and activists— among whom I number myself— have

no exclusive claim to emotion as a political and

epistemological resource. Avoiding the trap of a

debilitating relativism requires that such groups be able

to explain why their theory and practice, whether

involving emotion, reason, or their combination, are better in some sense than those theories and practices

commensurate with regressive policies. Before we conclude that refiguring the relationship between reason and emotion is necessarily advantageous from an epistemological or political point of view, I suggest that we consider a particularly "hard case," where a leader of one despised social movement announced a dependence on emotion similar in several respects to some of those mentioned above. This case is drawn from the writing of

Hiram Wesley Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.

I take it as a given that the Klan has a monstrous history of racism and violence from the 1860s to the present. But one should not simply condemn the Klan as irrational and call it a day. No less distinguished a

292 figure than W. E. B. Du Bois made this error when he

asserts that "we need not fear its [the Klan's] logic. It

has no logic" ("Shape" 303; see Chapter Four). Du Bois

relied on Enlightenment reason in his explanation of Klan

popularity, arguing that the Klan's success of the 1920s

was caused by a fear of difference and the unknown in the

aftermath of World War One.

Whatever the plausibility of Du Bois's explanation

for the reemergence of the Klan, I argue that Evans,

rather than being irrational, had his own brand of

rationality, in which reason is allied with emotion. As I

suggest below, adherents to this Klan rationality had

embedded in their discourse a critique of Enlightenment

reason. Just as Celeste Michelle Condit concludes that

millions of otherwise "morally sane and responsible"

individuals could defend slavery (Condit, "Crafting" 88),

seemingly rational individuals could defend their Klan membership— sixty years after the U.S. Civil War— with

what they thought was an optimal combination of reason and

emotion. If Klansman Evans advocated a theory of emotion

distinct from theories devised in recent years, then my

efforts should assist us in distinguishing productive from unproductive conceptions of emotion. However, if Evans

shares some common understanding of emotion with Rose,

Noddings, or Hill Collins, then one should ask whether or

293 not that common understanding poses any threat to the

utility of the theories of emotion devised in the last

several years. In the next section, I use the tools of

rhetorical criticism to seek an answer to these questions.

Reason and Emotion in Klan Discourse

Perhaps no organizational entity in the United States

is affiliated more closely with white racism than the Ku

Klux K l a n . 14 Klan organizations have existed sporadically

in the U.S. ever since the post-Civil War Klan was founded

in 1865, but the highly successful Klan movement of the

1920s provided an unusually extensive documentary record where a "secret" organization is concerned; scholars

regularly have turned to this record over the last seventy years in their efforts to explain the Klan's ideology.

This record includes the apologetic discourse of the Klan, where Klan rhetors sought to defend the organization against charges of fomenting ethnic, racial, and religious strife. Not surprisingly, the leading Klan apologist of the mid and late 1920s was Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley

Evans, whose background was discussed in Chapter Four.^^

In two essays published by Evans during the 1920s, his discussion of reason and rationality initially seems paradoxical. In response to repeated attacks on the Ku

Klux Klan by respected U.S. intellectuals of the 1920s,

294 Hiram Wesley Evans responded with his own brand of anti-

intellectualism in a 1925 Forum article and a 1926 North

American Review essay. (This is the same North American

Review essay discussed in Chapter Four.) Long before the

1988 U.S. presidential campaign, "liberals" (a term

frequently enclosed by Evans within quotation marks) were accused of betraying American values in defense of aliens and alien ideas.For Evans,

the . . . cause of the break with Liberalism was that it had provided no defense against the alien invasion, but instead had excused it— even defended it against Americanism. Liberalism is today charged in the mind of most Americans with nothing less than national, racial and spiritual treason. ("Fight" 42)

The charge of treason made a claim about liberal ethos ; one presumably should not take the words of traitors seriously. The Klan association of whiteness with

Americanism made charges of white race betrayal consubstantial with anti-Americanism.The liberal, charged Evans, was both "alien and alien-minded" ("Fight"

34).

However, Evans's critique of his liberal opponents is not limited to denigrating their motives. Beyond Evans's questioning of liberal patriotism, his antipathy towards these liberals and their arguments led Evans to a critique of liberal reason itself, with Evans charging that the liberal reliance on reason should be dismissed as

295 specious. Early in his 1926 essay, Evans warned that

liberals were "intellectually mongrelized," an odd epithet

that hints at both sexual misconduct and racial and

intellectual inferiority. Liberals' use of their

intellectual capacities, Evans suggests, is responsible

for the "mass of old-stock Americans" rejecting the

excesses of Liberalism ("Fight" 38). Rather than relying

on reason for its legitimation, "Americanism, to the

Klansman, is a thing of the spirit, a purpose and a point of view, that can only come through instinctive racial understanding" ("Fight" 53). The intolerance of the Klan,

Evans concluded, was "based on the sound instincts which have saved us many times from the follies of the intellectuals" ("Fight" 59). Much of Evans's 1925 Forum article is devoted to the defense of Klan intolerance.

Thus far, Klan complaints about intellectualism plausibly could be read as an outright rejection of reason in favor of guidance derived from some essential racial instinct. Yet, despite their critique of liberal reason,

Evans and other Klan rhetors made frequent appeals to logic and reason in their own discourse. In particular,

Evans did so by deriding Klan opponents about their failure to conform to standards for good argument. For example, Evans accused Klan critics of seeking to "confuse the issue" regarding the relationship between religious

296 freedom and Roman Catholicism ("Fight" 44). Further, in

spite of the insults heaped on Klan opponents throughout

his essays, Evans complained that Klan opponents prefer

the araumentum ad hominem to reason giving: "We of the

Klan pay no attention to those who argue with epithets

only. They thereby admit their weakness. And we are

still waiting for some one to try to answer us with facts

and reasons" ("Fight" 58). Finally, Evans characterized

Klan discussion of race conflicts as an attempt to find a

"sane solution" to those conflicts ("Fight" 61).

(Presumably, those opposed to the Klan were only

advocating insane alternatives.)

No less than his liberal opponents, Evans

appropriated the discourse of "sane" logic and reason to

support his own arguments and to denounce those who oppose the Klan. Rather than reason itself being rejected by

Evans, these passages from his 1926 essay suggested that the better arguments favor the Klan's advocacy, while

liberal intellectuals relied on inferior argumentation to buttress their position. In a combined assault on liberal character and intellection, Evans concluded that "when the plain people begin to win with one of their movements, such as the Klan, the very intellectuals who have scoffed and fought most bitterly presently begin to dig up sound— at least well-sounding!— logic in support of the success"

297 ("Fight" 50). À year later, in an article calling for

restrictions on the requirements for Roman Catholic

marriages, Evans repeated this theme: "There is no form of

un-Americanism . . . for the defense of which selfish

casuistry will not invoke the very principles which it

violates" (Evans, "For New" 732). For Evans, the liberal

was a dissembler willing to employ any available argument

to justify whatever precept had gained popularity. The

Klan's appeals to standards for argument demonstrated

their intellectual superiority to the villainous liberals, though Evans never pointed to any specific logical errors made by a liberal or liberals in his lengthy essays.

In support of his contention that the better arguments supported the Klan position, Evans invoked the authority of both science and his own cadre of expert witnesses. First, regarding science, Evans suggested that

Klan members "are pleased that modern research is finding scientific backing for these [racial] convictions" (Evans,

"Fight" 52). As I. A. Newby points out in his excellent intellectual history of white racism, biological and social scientists frequently were quoted by Klan members and their ilk in support of white racism. Evans's allusion to those scientific arguments for white supremacy was not unusual in 1926, with Evans intimating that scientific evidence supported his own advocacy. Second,

298 Evans approvingly quoted from the work of racial

separatists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who both

had standing in some white circles as credible

intellectual apologists for Jim Crow policies. Lothrop

Stoddard, for example, made use of all the usual tools of

academic argument— including the assertion that a critic

of his position did not understand his analysis and argued

from irrelevancies— in defending his own version of

"biracialism" in a 1927 essay (Stoddard, "Impasse").^®

To this point, Evans's position on reason could seem

contradictory. The Klan relied, said Evans, on racial

instinct rather than intellectual work. But Evans also

claimed that anti-Klan arguments were markedly weaker than

those arguments supportive of Klan positions. One is

tempted here to ask what the Klan's position on the utility of reason might be. How is this apparent contradiction between Klan denouncement of intellectual reason and Klan appeals to reason resolvable?

We might conclude that these Klan leaders were

inconsistent. After all, we are not tempted to extend to them the same argumentative charity that we assume when examining the discourse of Edmund Burke, Frederick

Douglass, Angelina Grimke, or W. E. B. Du Bois. However,

I suggest that these Klan texts adumbrate a theory of rationality that ties reason to emotion and racial

299 instinct. No inconsistency exists here when one

recognizes that liberal logos lacked the integration with and reliance on pathos reguired by Evans's epistemology.

Evans explained that the reason of liberal intellectuals was different from the reason used by Klan supporters. According to Evans, the liberal intellectuals he derided relied on an abstract reason that was not grounded in the lifeworld of everyday experience:

This [intellectual] aberration would have been impossible, of course, if American Liberalism had kept its feet on the ground. Instead it became wholly academic, lost all touch with the plain people, disowned its instincts and common sense, and lived in a world of pure, high, groundless logic. (Evans, "Fight" 42)

The failings of liberalism were attached not to its association with unpopular organizations like the ACLU (as in 1988), but to the liberal adoption of the wrong kind of reason. The distinction between "groundless" liberal reason and Klan reason provides a context in which Evans's seemingly contradictory claims make sense.

The "plain people" in Evans's world did not suffer from the surfeit of abstract reasoning found among liberal intellectuals. Instead, for Evans, the "Nordic Americans" with whom he identified had come to "understand that the differences in racial background, in breeding, instinct, character and emotional point of view are more important than logic" in assessing the dangers of non-Nordic

300 American principles ("Fight" 41). Evans did not suggest that reason was unimportant; if he did so, his own appeals to reason would seem bizarre. Instead, he suggested that emotion could trump reason when reason and emotion appeared to be in conflict. The gut instinct of the

Nordic American or the emotional response of a Klan member should take priority over the argument of the liberal, since those liberal intellectuals who criticize the Klan

"have lost contact with their deeper emotions and instincts" (Evans, "Defender" 802).

In one passage, Evans expounded at length on the importance of emotion in Klan epistemology and politics:

The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain. They are the many-times distilled product of experience; they still operate much more surely and promptly than reason can. For centuries those who obeyed them have lived and carried on the race; those in whom they were weak, or who failed to obey, have died. They are the foundations of our American civilization, even more than our great historic documents; they can be trusted where the fine haired reasoning of the denatured intellectuals cannot. (Evans, "Fight" 51)

Here we have a thorough explanation of the place of emotion in Klan dogma. First, emotion comes from instinct, which itself has been "bred into" the white races of Northern Europe. Second, given the extended

301 period of time during which these emotional responses were

developed and refined, emotion surely is more reliable

than reason. Third, ignoring for the moment Evans's

apparent dependence on some version of Darwinism, we have

Evans's assurance that the cold, abstract reasoning of

liberal intellectuals was the result of their

denaturalization, since they had cut themselves off from

their inherited, biological instincts. The somber warning

about historical consequences of such "denaturing"

suggested what would happen to white, Protestant America

if Evans's audience did not heed the warnings of Evans and

his Klan followers. Fourth, the emotion/ratiocination

binary puts liberals in the same position as Klan members,

since liberal attempts at ratiocination— the search for

reasons supporting a pre-determined conclusion— makes

liberals just as biased as Klan members. This bias marginalizes the importance of reason as a kind of proof.

In short, although Evans seemed to speak of reason in two contradictory ways throughout his 1926 essay, that

contradiction is resolved when one recognizes his

separation of abstract, intellectual reason from a reason consistent with emotion. As a consequence of this distinction, Evans could make reference to the irrelevance of liberal, intellectual reason, while valorizing the reasoning used to support Klan positions. Thus, emotion.

302 aided by reason when appropriate, produces satisfactory results when reason, by itself, fails. Emotion is more reliable than reason, but reason serves a useful purpose when not divorced from emotion. Thus, Evans combined the first and second options for theorizing emotion that were discussed in the previous section, allowing reason to supplement emotion when the two are not in conflict.

Refashioning Reason

In the following section, I proceed under the assumption that Evans produced a coherent and internally consistent theory for utilizing both emotion and reason to invalidate anti-Klan arguments. Sandra Harding reports that

the definition of logical and rational thinking is itself a cultural artifact. . . . Judgments of logicality and rationality are 'theory- dependent': what counts as a logical statement depends upon other views a society holds about self, community, nature, and their relationships. (Science Question 182)

Judged by Evans's own standards. this Klan rhetoric was rational, rather than dictated only by Du Bois's description of an illogical "shape of fear" in Klan discourse. Given this assumption of a coherent, if unpleasant, Klan logic, I trace the implications of this

Klan theory of rationality for current work on the reconceptualization of reason and emotion.

303 Like some contemporary feminist scholars, Evans

rejected the traditional. Enlightenment preference for

reason over emotion. And, like these scholars, Evans

insisted that a cold, abstract, unconnected reason provides

an inadequate basis for making important decisions about

truth and the good. Nevertheless, despite these

similarities, Evans's discussion of reason and emotion

differs in some important respects from contemporary

attempts to retheorize the reason/emotion relationship. I draw three conclusions from my analysis of Evans's 1925 and 1926 essays.

First, Klan reasoning is as cold and abstract as the

liberal arguments denounced by Evans. Evans claimed that the liberal intellectuals who oppose the Klan had lost contact with nature and were cut off from their emotions by their relentless pursuit of abstract logic. However,

Evans's emotion-centered alternative was likewise divorced from the world of embodied contact with other, concrete human beings. Rather than a relational theory of emotion,

Evans proposed an inner-directed theory, where individual efforts to get back in touch with inherited instincts and essential human emotions were emphasized. Implicit in this theory is the assumption that such instincts exist and provide the intuited equivalent of "first truths" from which one might derive conclusions about what to believe

304 and how to act. Evans's emotions were grounded in biology, rather than in the experience of the social.

As I understand this theory of emotion, one gets in touch with emotion by freeing oneself from the straitjacket of logic; identifying the unadulterated essence of one's instinctive, emotional response to a given situation; and allowing that response to guide one's actions in that situation. Finally, one considers the resources provided by rationality to determine what arguments will count as good reasons in this emotional milieu. With apologies to Husserl, this introspective version of emotion-seeking seems similar to the phenomenological principle of "bracketing" presuppositions in the quest for (emotional) essences. Only after one has learned to identify and trust one's emotions would reason be allowed to contribute to individual deliberations.

If I read this Klan theory of the emotions correctly, then contemporary versions of the reason/emotion linkage differ in important ways from the position advanced by

Evans. Earlier, I suggested that discussions of emotion and reason might (1) valorize emotion over reason, (2) depict emotion as a supplement to reason, (3) reconstruct reason so that emotion is not analytically severable from reason, or (4) maintain the traditional. Enlightenment privileging of reason over emotion. Evans shares with

305 contemporary theorists the rejection of the fourth option.

However, while present-day scholars generally avoid the

temptation posed by the first option, Evans embraced it

wholeheartedly. While not rejecting reason completely, he

made it clear that emotion was more reliable than reason.

Further, he intimated that a response commensurate with

emotion should be preferred if reason and emotion ever

conflict, as might be the case when arguments are advanced by liberal intellectuals. In short, Evans reversed the traditional reason/emotion binary without problematizing the either-or reasoning of that binary.

Given this understanding of Evans's theory of emotion and reason, Evans did not reject abstraction as a component of moral reasoning and decision making.

Instead, he replaced one sort of abstract, universal regulative principle ("Always trust reason and be suspicious of emotion") with another ("Always trust emotion and be suspicious of reason"). There was no

"concrete other" or situated knowing in Evans's world.

Instead, there was only a white-identified self who always must distinguish white, Protestant Americans from those who fall outside this category. Race, religion, and sex constitute the essentialized tests by which generalized others were divided, judged, and sentenced to a particular kind of being-in-the-world. There was no veil of

306 ignorance in Evans's system, but neither was there an

interest in individual circumstances or in caring.

Emotion for Evans was experienced on a personal and

introspective basis, while emotion for Benhabib, Hill

Collins, and other contemporary scholars described in this

essay is experienced on an intersubjective and relational

basis.

Second, Evans's essentialist theory of emotion

differs radicallv from contemporary discussions of

emotion. As suggested above, Evans's understanding of

emotion depended on essentialist assumptions about the

existence of fixed racial instincts, which may or may not

differ from one race to another. However, the contemporary theories of emotion discussed above typically

avoid essentialized notions of emotional capacities (e.g.,

"women innately are better connected to their emotions than men"). More specifically, the feminist theorists mentioned above generally reject the assumption that emotion is governed by biology.For instance, Jaggar

includes in her description of emotion the claim that

"mature human emotions can be seen as neither instinctive nor biologically determined. Instead, they are socially constructed on several levels" ("Love" 150). Contra

Evans, interest in understanding emotions as socially

307 constructed has grown considerably in recent years, as the

contents of a volume edited by Rom Harre suggest.

Despite the early affinity of some radical feminisms

for biological essentialism (e.g., Shulamith Firestone),

an important and now common (though not universal) theme

in feminist theory is the critique of essentialism and

identity politics, particularly in relation to claims

about biology and the definition of "women." Essentialism

frequently is depicted as a patriarchal and politically disabling principle, whether in rhetoric (see Batson;

Looser) or in other disciplines, since essentializing about "women" renders such concerns as race and class invisible. Even if these objections to essentialism could be met, other scholars have succeeded in problematizing the possibility of an epistemologically coherent essentialism, as in Judith Butler's discussion of gender.

In contrast, others argue that a minimal, cautious essentialism is politically advantageous (see Nussbaum,

"Human"; Wood). The choice to essentialize without a second thought separates Evans from the contemporary scholars who typically attempt to connect reason with emotion.

My first two conclusions should encourage those who seek alternatives to Enlightenment reason in theories of emotion. Such theoretical endeavors do not lead

308 ineluctably to the politically frightening implications of

Evans's project. However, my third conclusion is meant as a warning to this same group of scholars.

Third, even non-essentialist attempts to ally reason with emotion are not presumptively improvements on abstract. Enlightenment reason. The feminist analyses on which I have relied in this essay have avoided so far the best known problems with essentialism in theorizing the connections between reason and emotion. Further, the work of Jaggar, Noddings, and others on reason and emotion typically is thoughtful, closely reasoned, and thorough.

The efforts of these scholars have done much to create a coherent post-positivist, post-Enlightenment, and (more often than not) postmodern alternative to earlier, uniperspectival accounts of reason and rationality.

Despite my admiration for the accomplishments of the epistemologists named above, I urge scholars like Noddings and Jaggar to consider more carefully the potential costs of accepting emotion as the pain-killing remedy for an

Enlightenment hangover. Whatever the problems with

Western standards for reason that have been identified over the centuries— and many such problems do exist— there is in the idea of reason (as opposed to a single, monolithic "Reason") a commitment to procedural standards to which all parties in a discussion might appeal in order

309 to distinguish better from worse arguments, whether those parties have institutional authority or occupy a subordinate position. Of course, inequities in the possession of power frequently have precluded the serious consideration of arguments articulated by subaltern groups throughout the world, and procedural standards to which those controlling institutional resources adhere will, not surprisingly, favor those who created the rules. Yet, despite these grave limitations, even Enlightenment reason provides a few tools that those without institutional power might use to their own advantage. A detestable Klan rhetoric illustrates the advantages a self-described protest movement can derive from appeals to reason, advantages that more progressive social movements should not fail to claim while simultaneously striving to construct more satisfactory conceptions of judgment.

The limitations of Enlightenment reason to which I refer above make the project of constructing new theories of emotion and reason both necessary and urgent. To paraphrase and extend poet Audre Lorde's famous metaphor in Sister Outsider. one might tear down the master's house with the master's tools, but using those tools to build another house will not yield a result much different from the master's earlier efforts. Defenders of patriarchal authority historically have been willing to use emotion

310 and reason in defense of an explicitly racist and sexist

agenda. The discourse of emotion might be appropriated by

defenders of the status quo at the very moment that

feminist scholars succeed in thoroughly rehabilitating

emotion as an intellectual resource. Although 70 years

old, Evans's essays attest to this possibility.

A few passages from an essay by Jaggar, when read

against Evans's theory of emotion, illustrate my concerns.

Jaggar, a careful scholar, admits forthrightly that her

account of the importance of emotion for knowledge

construction is a "preliminary sketch" and leaves "many

questions unanswered" (Jaggar, "Love" 147). I wish to

hint at some of these unanswered questions.

Near the end of her 1989 essay, Jaggar makes some

observations regarding the importance of emotion for

feminist theory. Initially, she states that certain

"outlaw emotions" may encourage observers of the status

quo to interrogate heretofore unscrutinized features of

the prevailing social order; "Only when we reflect on our

initially puzzling irritability, revulsion, anger, or fear may we bring to consciousness our 'gut-level' awareness

that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty,

injustice, or danger" (Jaggar, "Love" 161). These outlaw

emotions could then lead to analysis and action that

challenge and undermine the status quo.

311 To the extent that such outlaw emotions do encourage

the sorts of scholarship and political activity suggested

by Jaggar, a theory that links together reason and emotion

seems promising for feminism. Unfortunately, "we” (as

identified in the last Jaggar quotation) have no guarantee

that the "lawful" emotions of those in control of

political and economic resources will not inspire them to

act in ways that reaffirm their authority. Additionally,

Evans's racist and sexist successors have their own outlaw

emotions, and those racist and sexist emotions may encourage them to justify and to pursue aggressively an agenda that is grossly incompatible with what would now be understood as a left or feminist politics.

Jaggar fully understands that all outlaw emotions do not have an emancipatory orientation, since "emotions become feminist when they incorporate feminist perceptions and values, just as emotions are sexist or racist when they incorporate sexist or racist perceptions and values"

(Jaggar, "Love" 160). As a consequence of this division between different kinds of emotion, she recognizes that her discussion of outlaw emotions requires an answer to questions about which emotions are appropriate and which are not. Her answer to this concern about emotional appropriateness comes in two parts. First, Jaggar suggests "that emotions are appropriate if they are

312 characteristic of a society in which all humans (and perhaps some nonhuman life, too) thrive, or if they are conducive to establishing such a society" ("Love" 161).

Second, Jaggar returns to an argument she made in her

Feminist Politics and Human Nature. where she concludes that an oppressed subject position provides a privileged epistemological standpoint that is "less partial and distorted and therefore more reliable" ("Love" 162). This privileged position would help the oppressed distinguish between thriving, humane societies and those societies that do not meet this criteria.

Jaggar's two criteria have their problems. First, the conditions under which all human beings might thrive are widely disputed. For example, Evans argued consistently throughout the 1920s that all members of a society would be happiest without race-mixing, a conviction he shared with many white citizens at the time.

Further, whether one considers nineteenth-century social

Darwinism or late twentieth-century attacks on "big" government, the assumption that all humans can, should, or deserve to thrive has been open to debate. In Newt

Gingrich's world, the poor may deserve their poverty.

Also, progressive intellectuals are hard pressed to support sustaining the conditions under which the Aryan

Nation and the militia movements thrive. Jaggar does not

313 try to explicate this egalitarian criterion, and surely

it could be defended, but such a defense will not be without complications.

Second, even if one concedes Jaggar's observations on the epistemic benefits of oppression, her suggestion for distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate emotions raises important questions about the definition of oppression. The contemporary, racist defender of

Evans's theory of emotion would argue that today's Klan is made up of the oppressed victims of affirmative action, busing, and other policies that privilege African

Americans and other minorities at the expense of white males.20 (David Duke, a former Klan leader, made use of a rhetoric decrying the oppression of white Louisianans in his 1991 gubernatorial campaign; see Chapter Six.)

The Klan of the 1990s is small, publicly denounced by politicians of the two major U.S. political parties, and portrayed negatively almost without exception in the mass media. At public Klan rallies, Klan speakers and sympathizers routinely are threatened with violence and death by angry opponents of their organization.

Investigative reporters attempt to infiltrate the Klan for the express purpose of exposing Klan policies to intense and hostile public scrutiny (e.g., Jerry Thompson). As a consequence of this current treatment of the Klan, its

314 members would argue that they meet Jaggar's fFeminist1

definitional requirement for oppression, which is unjust

subordination of one group by another group. Obviously,

the irony of such a claim is that the Klan's history is

one of oppressing those with whom they do not identify.

But, by itself, awareness of this irony does not help us

to separate just from unjust subordination. The problem

identified by Richard Rorty in the epigraph for this

chapter is still not resolved; we are still striving to

find a conclusive means for demonstrating that we are right and that the Klan member (or the Nazi) is wrong.

I do not suggest that the "oppression" of the Klan is similar in degree or comparable in scope to the oppression of African Americans or of women in the United States, whether in the past or the present. My immediate response to such a Klan argument would be to deny it using all the resources available to me. However, the possibility that relative levels or differences in kinds of oppression can help us distinguish between better and worse emotions requires further e x p l a n a t i o n . Despite the initial promise of Jaggar's criteria, a general reliance on emotion provides no certain answer to the problem of constructing an emendation or alternative to Enlightenment reason, since some emotions are sexist and racist. In short, separating good from bad emotions looks no easier

315 than differentiating between better and worse standards of

reason. Such separation may be even more difficult in the

case of emotion, since we lack a well-developed conceptual

language for talking about emotion as a resource for

judgment, let alone for distinguishing between better and

worse emotions, (Of course, this additional problem

should not prevent us from working to devise such a

language.)

Concentration on emotion in general may be less

constructive than focusing on specific emotions that are

consistent with emancipatory aims and projects of radical

democracy. Noddings's ethic of care seems a step in such a direction. But those who choose to privilege one sort of emotion (e.g., care, love) over another (e.g., hate, shame) must be able to explain why their dependence on some emotions is warranted, while other emotions should not be used to supplant or supplement reason.

For example, Josina M. Makau maintains that, where a

"liberatory consciousness" is concerned, shame is

"[iInherently unloving and authoritarian" and "inhibits the achievement of authentic self-awareness, growth, and nurturant connectedness" (8). I have no quarrel with

Makau's examples, which demonstrate the frequent problems caused by shame, but her analysis does not help me in dealing with Forty's Nazis or my troublesome Klan members.

316 First, if shame is one means by which communities maintain control over others, I can imagine several extreme cases in which I might want to encourage it in others. If motivated by my compassion for and connectedness to all members of the community, I might desire that the rapist, the murderer, the Nazi, and the Klan member feel shame concerning their past behavior and beliefs, since such feelings of shame might be a barrier to the reappearance of such behavior. (Assuming that Klan members become convinced that their Klan involvement is wrong, how can I expect them not to feel shame?) Shame may be a necessary step toward the "love, caring, [and] empathy" that Makau embraces (Makau 8). In these situations, shame might be contextually appropriate as a first step towards Hannah

Arendt or Seyla Benhabib's "enlarged mentality."

Second, Klan members or Nazis might accept Makau's analysis concerning shame, yet argue that love, caring, and empathy apply only to humans like themselves. In other words, the Klan member maintains that one's moral obligations to others (the "justice" ethic) or one's caring engagement with others (the "care" ethic) does not apply in dealing with Jews, non-whites, etc. Again, acceptance of the desirability or undesirability of specific emotions is no guarantee of specific outcomes, such as the renouncement of the Klan or the rejection of

317 Nazism. While Alisa L. Carse tells us not to "overlook

the crucial role emotions can play, when properly

cultivated, in alerting us to morally salient dimensions

of situations" (Carse 14), our difficulty is in

determining what counts as proper cultivation of the

emotions. Once more, we return to Rorty's problem.

Given my reading of Hiram Wesley Evans on emotion,

Jaggar, Noddings, Hill Collins, Makau, and their

successors need to devise a theory of emotion that

accounts for the difficulties inherent in distinguishing

between appropriate and inappropriate emotion and that

highlights differences between emancipatory and regressive

theories of emotion, a task that Makau comes closest to

engaging. This theorizing is complicated by the

contemporary imperative to avoid essentialist notions of

emotion. Evans's theory of emotion certainly is guilty of

fostering such notions, and Joan C. Tronto hints that

Gilligan and Noddings harbor some essentialist principles.

More recent attempts to construct the ethic of care have

tried to avoid essentialist claims about the moral voice

of women (e.g., Carse).

Again, my problem concerns the ability of the Klan members or Forty's "conversable" Nazi to appeal to

specific emotions in ways that I find repellent (Rorty

637). Klan rhetors with an adequate understanding of

318 academic conventions for argument would contend that

theirs is a "love” or "care" ethic, albeit one

appropriately limited to a specific ethnic, racial, and

religious group. For example, Klan apologist Blaine Mast

(with some evidence of sincerity) suggested in 1924 that

African Americans form their own Klan if they did not like

their exclusion from the benefits of Klan membership and

protection. Our disgust at the argument would not prevent

Klan rhetors from contending that love, rather than hate,

is their emotional impetus. Former Klansman David Duke

said as much at an anti-affirmative action rally in

February, 1996. According to Duke, "I don't hate black

people. I love white people" ("Affirmative" lA).

How do we know that it is good to respect difference

(even, within some limits, the "difference" of the Klan)

and bad to kill or otherwise do violence to other human beings without some minimal essentialist commitment to tolerance of divergent cultural practices and the value of human life? If such core values are desirable, are they best grounded in theology, history, prior intersubjective agreement, or what? Emotion provides another resource that potentially enriches and informs judgment within specific discursive communities. However, rehabilitating emotion as an essential component in making good decisions does not solve basic ethical questions if we have no basis

319 (beyond reliance on our own political commitments) on

which to say that our emotions and reasoning-giving are

better than those of past or present Imperial Wizards.

We know the dangers of both essentialism and a

radical skepticism or subjectivism, yet we still cannot

specify with confidence what constitutes the better

judgment when judgments must be made across multiple

idioms or genres. Perhaps such confidence is beyond the

grasp of mere mortals. The essentialist fears the

political paralysis of subjectivism or relativism, where

the triumph of local judgment deprives us of the ability

to tell the Klan member that she or he is wrong. In turn, the relativist fears the terror of the oppressor, who

imposes her or his standards for judgment on those who reject those standards (i.e., Lyotard's différend).

Aristotle's phronesis (practical reason) and successor theories of situated knowing only tell us how to improve our decision making within the confines of a specific

idiom (i.e., in the application of presupposition rules).

For the relativist, such theories risk a new kind of essentialism regarding judgment across idioms, substituting faith in the experience, wisdom, and contextual sensitivity of individual interlocutors for commitment to a trans-contextual rationality or touchstone.

320 Avoiding the appropriation of emotion for regressive

political purposes seemingly necessitates some theory of

emotion that both resists the slide into politically

dangerous essentialisms and allows for a distinction

between "good" and "bad" appeals to emotion.

Enlightenment reason has been rightly criticized for its

amenability to the rhetorical defense and maintenance of a

wide array of undesirable cultural practices. Defenders

of emotion must act to protect emotion from similar

appropriations, or future generations may add the

twentieth-century rehabilitation of emotion to the list of

dead-end academic projects. Instead of solving the

problem of separating good reason from bad, the

rehabilitation of emotion and situated knowledge claims

has added more variables to what was already a complex

equation. While this complexity is not inherently undesirable, it does not answer, by itself, the question

about how or where to ground epistemological and/or

ethical claims.

Assessing Innocence

Innocence is not a perfection that one should wish to regain, for as soon as one wishes for it, it is lost, and it is a new guilt to waste one's time on wishes.

S0ren Kierkegaard (1844)22

321 Whether scientific discourse or moral philosophy is at issue, those trained in Western metaphysics typically have privileged reason and marginalized emotion in discussing judgment. Even rhetoricians, who traditionally have been associated with crafting appeals that particular audiences will find compelling, often seem apologetic about their need to study pathos, as both Mary M. Garrett and Craig Waddell have pointed out. Recent efforts to study emotion more closely have created exciting new opportunities for scholars in rhetoric, philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines. For example, given recent efforts to expand what counts as argument and attempts to incorporate emotion into more satisfactory accounts of judgment, we are now inclined to reject the idea of a discrete "argumentative genre" (see Black,

Rhetorical Criticism. Ch. 6) in favor of investigations of argumentation and emotion as relevant to a plethora of genres. While rethinking the roles of reason, emotion, and judgment in rhetorical theory is nothing new, we should acknowledge the debt that future theorizing will owe to feminist epistemology and ethics for beginning the rehabilitation of emotion.

In this conclusion, I hope to concentrate on the problems inherent in the ethical assessment of rhetorical genres and idioms. I already have explained the central

322 problem confronting advocates of emotion as a component of

judgment; How do we distinguish good and bad emotions (or

arguments, or policies) from one another? While I maintain that the answer to this problem, if one exists,

lies in a kind of intersubjective testing of core

principles across argument communities with the aim of devising a common genre for argumentation (see Chapter

Seven), I am primarily concerned in this conclusion with the political implications of innocence (or its lack), given the existence of rhetorical imbrication.^3

In earlier chapters, I outlined a rule-centered theory of rhetorical genre. Central to this genre theory was the belief that the vagaries of everyday discourse are governed by the rules that constitute individual discursive idioms. When local idioms share one or more rules with various other idioms, these shared rules exemplify rhetorical imbrication. In cases where rules are shared by multiple idioms, the potential exists for identification of a genre. which is composed of those shared rules. In other words, imbrication makes a genre possible. For example, while there are substantial differences between the first inaugural addresses of

Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, one can find situational, form, and content similarities requisite to generic expectations for such addresses. Of course.

323 "generic expectations" exist because, based on our past

experience with this specific discourse tradition, we

already anticipate the appearance of such similarities.

Previously, I avoided any discussion of the ethical

assessment of genre theory beyond a summary of the

Lyotardian notion of terror in discourse evaluation, where

the rules governing one idiom are used to assess discourse

produced within another idiom. Where interlocutors

operate within the same discursive idiom, the standards

for separating good from bad judgment are common to all

discussants, in what Lyotard calls a litigation. (To the

extent that interlocutors agree to appeal only to those

rules that are shared, litigation also is possible across

idioms if one remains within the confines of a specific

genre.) Only when rules not shared by all interlocutors

are applied to resolve disputes does one move from

litigation to a différend.

Strictly speaking, no ethical component is required

in a theory of discourse. While we know as a practical matter that auditors frequently extract prescriptive

conclusions from descriptive presuppositions, no ethical

claims necessarily are entailed when one explains that "a

genre is best understood in this way." However, I am worried by the ethical lessons that might be drawn from this rule-centered genre theory. For example, if

324 presupposition rules about the relevance of emotion for

optimal judgment are shared by both Klan and feminist

rhetors, then what are we to make of this instance of

rhetorical imbrication? Are such feminist rhetors no less

ethically suspect than their Klan counterparts?

Obviously, I do not take this position. If my idiom has a few rules in common with Evans's idiom, I should be

self-reflexive enough to consider why those rules are shared. However, sharing a few rules in this situation does not make my idiom morally equivalent to a Klan idiom,

just as the imbrication that makes both Stowe's Uncle

Tom's Cabin and Dixon's The Clansman "novels" does not entail the moral equivalence of the two texts. Instead, idioms and genres may be judged only by examining the confluence of their multiple constituent parts. In a mundane sense, the sum of the individual components that make up an idiom far exceeds the importance of those individual components when examined separately.

Differences between idioms (and the texts they govern) will be more important than idiomatic similarities when judging the relative merits of those idioms, so that the

Klan's embrace of racial essentialism provides a crucial means of differentiating between Klan and feminist appropriations of emotion.

325 I can imagine no more politically disabling move than

insisting that various emancipatory rhetorics should have

nothing in common with Klan discourse. Such an absolute

standard for innocence would preclude most attempts to

enact social change. Instead of seeking the common good

of the community, the individual who pursues this standard chases a metaphysical dream of perfection, where all one's

efforts are directed at ridding discourse of the effluence of evil. After postmodernism, as Jane Flax would argue, pursuing this dream is counterproductive. Instead, scholars and activists must abandon the idea of a perfect

innocence and respect difference without ending our commitment to justice; "We need to learn ways of making claims about and acting upon injustice without transcendental guarantees or illusions of innocence" (Flax

459). While a perfect innocence is impossible, we still might distinguish between levels or gradations of innocence in the concrete, disorderly world of everyday life.

Following Martha C. Nussbaum, perhaps what we need are "thick, vague theories of the good," where a cautious, self-reflexive, minimalist essentialism helps us to separate right from wrong, without any assurances that consensus regarding such a thick, vague theory will ever be permanent or that such a theory constitutes anything

326 more than a rebuttable set of presumptions. While this

minimalist essentialism may still be a metanarrative in

Lyotard's sense, it differs from Enlightenment

metanarratives in its rejection of a metaphysical

grounding and its refusal to subordinate local concerns to

universal principles. ^4 in other words, Nussbaum would

have us agree on minimalist presuppositions about the good

(which would function as commonplaces) as a starting point

for subsequent deliberations about specific cases, without maintaining that those presuppositions will always be

easily applied to resolve those specific cases. In other words, shared presupposition rules serve as a common resource to which interlocutors might appeal. While she might shudder at the thought, I contend that Nussbaum has given us one approach for turning différends into litigations, an approach that requires agreement about the genre shared by different idioms.

In this chapter, I have argued that efforts to link reason to emotion, as well as efforts to rehabilitate emotion after modernity, should be pursued with caution.

Emotion is no more the exclusive intellectual property of progressive social and intellectual movements than was reason a few decades ago. The theory of emotion articulated by Hiram Wesley Evans, a Ku Klux Klan leader of the 1920s, has little merit and rightly has received

327 minimal attention. The consideration I give Evans is

deserved only because Evans's work provides a warning

about the problems inherent in arguing that emotion is

some measure of cure for the ills of Enlightenment reason.

Studying emotion yet may provide answers to many important questions plaguing students of rhetoric, philosophy, and psychology. However, theories of emotion are not sure to advance emancipatory political aims, given the current composition of those theories. Distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate emotions is a task that deserves more of our time and attention than it has received in recent studies of emotion.

Postscript: After the 1920s

As I explained in Chapter One, this dissertation concentrates primarily on the rhetoric of the "second" Ku

Klux Klan movement of 1915-1930. My concentration on the

1920s Klan to the exclusion of Klan discourse in succeeding decades provides little sense of Klan activities in those decades. As a modest corrective measure, this postscript provides a brief review of these decades (1930-present).^5

As already discussed in Chapter Three, the remarkable membership gains of the Klan were ending by the mid 1920s.

A litany of Klan denouncements by the nation's leading

328 newspapers and public intellectuals over a period of

several years combined with a series of scandals involving

Klan leaders to do irrevocable harm to the Klan's

reputation. After D. C. Stephenson's murder conviction

and the other misdeeds of the Klan leadership, committed

over a span of several years, even the most "anti

intellectual" of prospective Klan members were apt to be

cynical concerning the Klan's recruiting efforts. Even

Evans admitted in 1926 that the Klan was "very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained

leadership" and would "for many years . . . be seeking better leaders" ("Fight" 49). We are fortunate that the

Klan generally failed to find such leaders.

By the latter half of the 1920s, Klan membership would begin to decline as a considerable number of one time Klan members failed to pay their dues. Sometimes these membership declines were drastic. For example, by one good estimate the Klan's Ohio Realm went from almost

300,000 members in 1923 to 33,666 in 1926 and a mere 3,993 members in 1927 (Howson). Support for the Klan increased briefly during the 1928 presidential campaign, in which unsuccessful Democratic candidate A1 Smith was a "wet"

(i.e., anti-Prohibition) Catholic, but the Klan's fall from prominence continued after the election. The Klan remained active in the 1930s, stressing in particular the

329 fight against Communism and "Red" unionism. However, the

Klan no longer had significant political clout. No longer

did Klan-dominated communities found Klan banks or

hospitals, as had their predecessors a decade earlier, and

no future U.S. president would be sworn into the Klan in a

White House ceremony, as was Warren G. Harding. By 1944,

the Internal Revenue Service's demand for back taxes led

to the temporary disbanding of the organization.

After the loss of William Joseph Simmons's original

Georgia charter in the tax debacle, no one Klan clique

could legally control or restrict the use of the Klan

name. Numerous local Klan groups were organized; anyone with a white sheet and some letterhead could pronounce herself or himself the head of a klavern or realm, and

sporadic episodes of Klan violence continued under the auspices of these local groups. The first of several successor Klan organizations was founded in Georgia in

1946, and the history of the Klan ever since that time has been marked by intra- and inter-klavern squabbling about control of the various Klan groups. As a result of petty rivalries and internecine feuding, local Klan groups since the 1940s frequently have acted as they wished without any oversight from regional or national Klan leaders.

The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown school desegregation decision was a boon to Klan recruiting in the South.

330 Despite the organization of white, middle-class "Citizens'

Councils" in the Southern states to head off a Klan revival by fighting desegregation via legal and non violent means (Sarratt), Klan membership started to r e b o u n d . 26 Membership gains were especially rapid in the early 1960s as many white Southerners reacted in anger to the civil rights movement. Cataloging the violent activities of Klan-affiliated individuals during this period is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but much

(and probably most) of the racist violence in the South during the 1960s could be directly or indirectly attributed to the Klan (e.g., George and Wilcox; Wade).

Klan membership estimates for the mid 1960s vary between

10,000 and 55,000.

By the late 1960s, the Klans once again were losing their membership. While the collapse of the legal fight against desegregation and the passage of federal civil rights legislation probably contributed to the perception that legalized white supremacy was a lost cause, a major factor in the decline of the Klan was the intense federal investigation of the various Klan factions by the House

Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) and the FBI.

In particular, the FBI made the Klan a target of its

COINTELPRO program, using paid informants, anonymous

331 letters, and other strategies to create dissension in the

Klan's rank-and-file membership.

Surprisingly, the Klan started to grow again, albeit slowly, in the 1970s, when a new generation of Klan leaders moved their local organizations beyond a near exclusive focus on anti-black racism to embrace neo-Nazi, anti-immigration, anti-feminist, and anti-gay activism.

Also, some of these new leaders would eventually abandon the Klan name and its baggage to create new organizations like the Aryan Nation. One of those leaders, former Klan

Grand Wizard David Duke, is discussed in Chapter Six.2?

332 Notes

1 "Truth" 639-640.

^ Although distinguishing between reason and rationality is conceptually feasible (as in Chaim Perelman's work), the confusion of these terms in popular and academic discourse leads me to believe that little would gained by distinguishing them for my purposes. Note that different senses of reason and rationality include (1) the system of rules that governs the inner logic of some discourse tradition, as opposed to (2) the process by which one provides explanations for the veracity or appropriateness of some asserted claim (e.g., "Caroline provided a rationale to support donating money to Amnesty International"). I will use reason and rationality interchangeably in this essay to refer to one or both of these senses of the terms. Further, I take "judgment" to an inclusive term, involving both rational and extra- rational inputs, concerning how we do and/or should make decisions.

^ While my concern in this essay is with the reason/emotion binary, a separate issue for some feminist scholars is the deconstruction of the mind/body opposition. Since emotion has been associated with the (feminized) body in Western metaphysics, some of what I say below also may seem relevant to recent discussions of mind and body.

^ While recognizing the importance of acquiring some definitional grasp on what is meant by emotion. I avoid the quest for a satisfactory definition in this essay. Edited volumes by Rom Harre and Amelie O. Rorty provide a sense of the heterogeneity of both emotions themselves and the various definitions suggested for "emotion." Given these varied understandings of emotion, even some philosophers, like Greenspan (see Ch. 2), have resigned themselves to discussing emotion without relying on some classificatory essence of emotion. Hopefully my efforts here will suggest the diversity of theories of emotion that have been devised and investigated in recent years. As Rorty explains the problem of defining emotion, "it is too early to construct a unified theory [of emotion], even too early for a single interdisciplinary account of the approaches whose contributions are required to explain the range of emotional conditions" (4). Robert Solomon catalogs the problems inherent even in specifying the cause(s) of emotions.

333 ^ A more complete summary of Klan history is provided in Chapter Three. Despite the popularity of movement studies in rhetoric and communication over the past few decades, published communication scholarship on the Klan is virtually non-existent.

^ Mary M. Garrett notes the paucity of efforts by twentieth-century rhetoricians to construct theories of emotion: "Outside of a handful of studies there has been little treatment of pathos in and of itself [by rhetoricians]" (19). While Garrett evaluates methods for appealing to audience emotions in Classical Chinese rhetoric, I use rhetorical criticism to foster further theorizing of the relationship between reason and emotion. I hope that my own efforts, along with those of Waddell and Garrett, will inspire more rhetorical studies of pathos in the future.

^ My reading of the Rhetoric relies on George A. Kennedy's translation. In commenting on the Aristotelian tradition, Wayne Booth notes that this tradition, more than Aristotle himself, has depicted logos as "somehow superior" to ethos and pathos (Booth 144). In her Love's Knowledge, Martha C. Nussbaum maintains that "Aristotle does not make a sharp split between the cognitive and the emotive. Emotion can play a cognitive role, and cognition, if it is to be properly informed, must draw on the work of the emotive elements" (78).

® In the following discussion, I have deliberately sidestepped the question of whether or not emotions are context dependent or context variant. While I find the notion plausible that the experience of emotion is influenced most significantly by language, culture, and personal history, I am not able to defend this claim here. For an explanation and defense of the "social construction" of emotions, see James R. Averill, Jaggar ("Love"), and Harre.

^ For critical discussions of Sartre's treatment of the emotions, see V. J. McGill (Ch. 2) and Nel Noddings (Ch. 6).

Many scholars have summarized the limitations of positivism, with its uncritical realism and its reliance on the now-contested fact-value split. For further discussion, see Patricia Hill Collins and Alison M. Jaggar (Feminist. especially Ch. 11).

334 Note the similarity between McGill's position and Garrett's discussion of educating the emotions in Classical China. Jaggar ("Love") also refers to the education of the emotions.

The influence of Rose's 1983 Signs essay probably has been enhanced by the considerable attention given to it in Sandra Harding's The Science Question in Feminism, which is one of the most widely read monographs on feminist science and epistemology. Five years after the publication of her 1983 essay, Rose ("Beyond") would return to the subjects of feeling and caring in her own version of feminist standpoint epistemology. For Rose, such epistemologies would "still claim reason, but simultaneously give new meaning to the category of reason itself" ("Beyond" 74).

Discussions of this ethic of care can be found in Benhabib, Gilligan, and Noddings. The importance of this work for feminist ethicists is difficult to overstate. Eve Browning Cole and Susan Coultrap-McQuin suggest that the scholarship of Gilligan and Noddings in particular has been "especially important" in "setting the initial agenda in feminist ethics" (3). For a tidy summary of the call for a context-based moral philosophy of caring in Benhabib, Gilligan, and Noddings, see Margaret Urban Walker. The ethic of care has generated considerable controversy. In addition to the celebrated Gilligan-Kohlberg debate, some feminist scholars worry about the dangers of an uncritical embrace of caring. Joan C. Tronto warns that the analysis of Gilligan and Noddings may problematically elide feminine with feminist notions of caring, while Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson contend that Gilligan's work provides an essentialist account of women's moral development.

A brief history of the 1860s and 1920s Klan movements is provided in Chapter Three.

My association of Evans's statements with Klan attitudes results from my conclusion that Evans's discourse does not diverge sharply from the writing of other Klan leaders and apologists. For example, in 1923 a "Grand Titan" from Texas made an Evans-esgue complaint that "some of the professors in some colleges and universities of this nation are preaching doctrines that are detrimental to American ideals .... [They] are not really and truly loyal to their state or to their nation" (Papers Read 55).

335 An edited version of Evans's 30-page 1926 North American Review essay is available in Volume Three of Hofstadter and Hofstadter's Great Issues in American History.

Unlike the presidential campaign of 1988, liberalism in the 1920s had some defenders. In his 1925 critique of the Klan, William Robinson Pattangall, former Attorney General of Maine, warned that the "Klan's greatest threat is against American liberalism, which is and always has been the true Americanism; and the danger menaces all American liberals" (322).

Charges of race betrayal still are featured in contemporary Klan discourse. See Mab Segrest's Memoir of a Race Traitor. which describes her work as an anti-Klan activist in the 1980s.

Stoddard, who held a Ph.D. from Harvard University, is most famous for his Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacv (1920). White racist appeals to science and the language of argument did not cease in the 1920s. Thirty-five years after the publication of the Evans and Stoddard essays quoted here, Carleton Putnam, in his widely read Race and Reason (1961), would condemn as bad science the anthropological evidence cited in support of Brown v. Board of Education and repeatedly would accuse proponents of racial equality of failing to answer the strongest arguments for segregation. Former Klan leader and Louisiana gubernatorial candidate David Duke claims that Putnam's book profoundly influenced him when he read the book as a child (Zatarain).

I am not making the claim that essentialism no longer exerts influence on the practice of physical, biological, or social sciences. However, both positivism and, to a lesser degree, essentialism (with the exception of so-called "strategic essentialism") suffer from a paucity of academic defenders, at least in the humanities and social sciences. For one defense of a minimal, Aristotelian essentialism that incorporates emotion and concrete, situated knowing, see Martha C. Nussbaum ("Human").

Of course, the theory of emotion described by Evans would lead to rejection of the emotional experiences of African Americans as inconsistent with Nordic-American racial instincts.

336 Interestingly, Jaggar approvingly summarizes Harding's contention that "women's oppression is constantly changing in form and these forms cannot be ranked" (Jaggar, Feminist 386). By focusing on women's experience in justifying feminist theory, Jaggar evades the additional complications in her final chapter of accounting for the oppression of men because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Outrageous as the demand for such explanation may seem, scholars should be able to explain why a white, male Klan member in the 1990s does not suffer from oppression, albeit an oppression much different than that suffered by traditional Klan targets.

Concept of Anxiety 37.

I refer to innocence in its juridical sense, where one is not guilty of the wrongful thought or act of which one is accused or for which one is to be punished. In contrast to juridical innocence, moral innocence refers to an intellectual and/or emotional lack of understanding concerning good and evil, where innocence is a kind of naivete. On the distinction between the different senses of innocence, see Peter Johnson's Politics, Innocence. and the Limits of Goodness (Ch. 1).

Nussbaum maintains that her theory of the good "is emphatically not metaphysical; that is, it does not claim to derive from any source external to the actual self interpretations and self-evaluations of human beings in history" ("Human" 215). Some of the basic presuppositions of Nussbaum's theory of the good involve mortality, the human body, affiliation with other human beings, and the desirability of good health. I do not pretend that my account of judgment is entirely consistent with Nussbaum's position.

In outlining the Klan's escapades after 1930, I rely on the comprehensive Klan histories written by Chalmers and Wade, as well as on John George and Laird Wilcox's Nazis. Communists. Klansmen. and Others on the Fringe (1992, Ch. 37).

Local Citizens' Councils did not always succeed in keeping themselves separate from the Klan. Some critics of the Councils labeled them "the Klan in business suits," and at least one Citizens' Council president was also a Klan organizer (Sarratt 156).

337 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 1995 Speech Communication Association Convention in San Antonio, TX. I thank William J. Starosta of Howard University for his helpful comments on that version of the chapter.

338 CHAPTER 6

POST-KLAN ETHOS :

DAVID DUKE, WITNESSING, AND EVANGELICAL RHETORIC

The Klan of the twenties has disappeared. But its spirit and its goals remain, sustenance for new crusades for 100 percent Americanism and moral conformity.

Charles C. Alexander (1965)1

If one is going to devote only one dissertation chapter to the post-1920s Ku Klux Klan, why study the rhetoric of David Duke? The discourse of failed politicians rarely is considered worthy of rhetorical analysis, and, by most measures, Duke is a failed politician. While Duke is now the best known ex-Klansman and neo-Nazi in the United States, he is unlikely to win a future statewide election in L o u i s i a n a . ^ The recurrent use of his name in the national media as a synecdoche for white racism suggests that Duke has even less vote-getting potential outside the Bayou State.^

In my judgment, Duke is not worthy of study by rhetorical critics because he has enjoyed significant

339 electoral success or because of his unusual past.

Instead, he is an important figure because of the relative success he has enjoyed as a political candidate, despite his past. His "conversion" from far-right extremist to mainstream politician with a large base of support was accomplished in a remarkably short span of years, and this rapid conversion was accomplished largely via rhetorical means. After all, Duke claims that he has not significantly altered his beliefs over the years, and he continues to defend segregation and his vision of white majority rule while attacking immigration and affirmative action.4

In what follows, I examine Duke's 1991 gubernatorial campaign discourse to investigate how he addressed the problem of an ethos that should have been irreparably damaged by his one-time Klan leadership. The discourse that he has adopted in recent years may provide the best clues for scholars attempting to understand his surprising popular appeal. As Kenneth Burke remarked in his famous analysis of Hitler's Mein Kampf. "let us try to discover what kind of 'medicine' this medicine-man has concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against" (Burke, Philosophy 164). I suggest below that, in the post-Klan era, Klan organizations pose less

340 of a threat to the polls than do politicians whose discourse reveals a Klan-inspired ideology.

David Duke came to politics from the right-wing political fringe, but he was no fringe candidate from 1989 to 1991. Despite his unsavory past, Duke defied conventional wisdom in his political campaigns during those years by attracting a large number of votes. David

Duke was Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

(one of several national Klan organizations) from 1975 to

1980, founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) during the 1980s, and has been involved with a number of neo-Nazi organizations since the early 1970s.^ Yet, he won a 1989 special election to a state representative's seat as a Republican, despite an enormous effort by nationally prominent Republicans to help his opponent. He then received a respectable 44 percent of the statewide vote in a 1990 U.S. Senate race and attracted more primary votes than the incumbent governor in the October, 1991, Louisiana gubernatorial primary.

Even if Duke's relative success in earlier elections is attributed to a "protest" vote cast against his opponents in those contests, he still received over

670,000 votes (39 percent) in the November, 1991, gubernatorial run-off election ("Edwards Wins"). This

341 "weak" showing in the run-off came after voters were

bombarded for weeks with anti-Duke commercials and

unfavorable national media coverage, as well as warnings

of statewide economic disaster should an ex-Klan leader be

elected governor of a state that relies heavily on tourism

revenue. Even now, Duke may have some political influence

in Louisiana. Current Louisiana governor Mike Foster

refused to reject Duke's endorsement during the 1995

gubernatorial campaign, and Foster's position on

affirmative action is remarkably similar to Duke's stance

on the subject.G

Duke's ability to attract a substantial following in

Louisiana's statewide elections, given his background of

involvement in highly unpopular racist causes, is unprecedented in the post-civil rights movement era. No combination of rhetorical appeals, strategic moves, or visual images should have been sufficient to make him attractive to such a large portion of the Louisiana electorate, especially when the opposition of almost every influential politician and mass-media outlet to his campaigns is considered. As Donald E. Williams once concluded in a study of the 1960 Klan, Duke "faced a large-scale problem of ethos" (Williams 46). While sociologists and political scientists might evaluate the economic and sociocultural factors that made his political

342 "success" possible, the rhetorical critic's task is to map

the discursive terrain that apparently made Duke an

attractive option for those voters.

To discover how Duke attempted to create a new ethos

for himself, I examine one of his half-hour campaign

films, which was broadcast on television stations

throughout Louisiana prior to the October, 1991,

gubernatorial primary. I argue that David Duke

appropriated a rhetoric of conversion, which served the

dual purpose of constructing a new ethos and bearing witness to the need for a metaphoric "born-again"

experience in Louisiana politics. Duke's secular conversion to mainstream politics was tied integrally to his religious conversion to evangelical Christianity. The man who once condemned Jews to the "ashbin of history" claimed during his gubernatorial campaign to be the follower of Judaism's most famous religious and historical figure. I close by examining the implications that Duke's religious discourse have for ethical assessment of what remains a Klan-inspired rhetoric.

David Duke in Context

Several explanations have been advanced to account for David Duke's ability to attract political support.

Many journalists and political commentators simply label

343 Duke an aberration whose electoral viability is limited to

Louisiana. During Duke's 1990 and 1991 campaigns,

Louisiana was disparagingly described at various times as

"America's banana republic" (Riley 29), "America's Third

World" (Minzesheimer 2A), and "among the nation's leaders in illiteracy, economic stagnation and overall backwardness" (Royko 12A).? Political scholars, in contrast, warn that the appeal of politicians such as Duke is not limited to Louisiana or the South (e.g.. Rose).

Instead, the explanation for Duke's surprising popularity is found in the continued political appeal of racism in the United States— which certainly is an important source of Duke's popularity— or in the disdain for history as

"old news" that pervades postmodern society (e.g.,

Freedman). Moreover, attempts to account for Duke's status as an electoral threat routinely have emphasized his audience and the failure of those auditors to consider his (past and present) racism.

However, Duke's efforts to remake his ethos by emphasizing religious themes freguently are given little attention. In addition to his allusions to race during the 1991 gubernatorial campaign, Duke referred to

Christian principles and narratives. After all, religious concerns may be as important as questions of race in

Louisiana. Historically considered a Roman Catholic

344 State, Louisiana harbors a sizable evangelical population affiliated with Baptist, Pentecostal, and other Christian denominations (see Chapter Three). Concentrated in north

Louisiana, these evangelicals constitute a significant political force in the state. As polling data indicate, evangelicals were strong Duke supporters in his recent campaigns, with self-described white evangelical fundamentalists giving Duke a staggering 69 percent of their vote in the November, 1991, gubernatorial election

(Robertson). Those whites associated with non-evangelical

Christian sects gave Duke a much smaller percentage of their vote, though his pro-Christian message presumably appealed to many non-evangelical Christians. Even white

Catholics gave Duke a majority of their gubernatorial votes.

Religious themes were evident throughout Duke's gubernatorial campaign. Never a frequent church-goer during his adult life, Duke surprised many political analysts with the fervor of his evocation of Christian rhetoric. These messages appeared in his campaign speeches, his face-to-face interaction with prospective voters, and in his free and paid mass-media appearances.

Before the November run-off election, a pro-Duke organization calling itself "Christians for Truth" even released campaign materials indicting Duke's gubernatorial

345 opponent, Edwin Edwards, for once questioning the

resurrection of Christ and for "putting lipstick on his

palms and on his shirt to simulate the nail holes and the

cleft in Jesus' side." That Edwards did so as a media

stunt, rather than in an effort to mock Christianity, was

not mentioned in this campaign literature.® By

implication, Duke was a better Christian than Edwards.

By November 15, 1991, the day prior to the run-off

election, Duke's opponents felt obligated to respond to

his repeated use of Christian themes in his campaign

rhetoric. Newspapers across the state carried

advertisements, paid for by the anti-Duke Louisiana

Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which argued that

Duke did not attend church and was not a Christian.

Another newspaper advertisement, placed by the Louisiana

Association of Conservative Ministers, carried the words,

"DUKE DISQUALIFIED," in large type.^ They concluded their message by condemning Duke's appropriation of Christian rhetoric for campaign purposes:

There is no room in the governor's mansion for division and bigotry. There is no room in our Christian faith for those who would use us to serve their own political needs. First it was black/white. Now it's Christian/Non Christian. Duke's bigotry must be stopped. We are born again new testament believing, God fearing, saved by the grace of Jesus Christ Christians [sic]. We preach and love this gospel, but we can no longer allow it to be distorted to serve David Duke's political agenda.

346 Please join us on November 16, 1991 in electing #5 Edwin Edwards Governor.

The polling data cited above suggests that the

worries of Christian leaders in Louisiana were justified.

The gospel of conversion preached by these "saved by the grace of Jesus Christ Christians" was co-opted and used effectively by David Duke, despite their suspicion that

Duke, like the devil, quoted scripture to suit his own purposes. I suggest that Duke's rhetoric took advantage of Christian tenets concerning forgiveness, redemption, and, most importantly, witnessing to create a new ethos.

In the next section, I explain the centrality of witnessing to evangelical discussion of conversion and the

"born-again" experience.

Witnessing and Evangelical Conversion

Jesus answered and said unto him. Verily, verily, I say unto thee. Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

John 3:3

Although many claim that the First Amendment to the

U.S. Constitution separates church from state, the struggle over appropriate limits to the interpenetration of the sacred and the secular in U.S. life has never abated. From prayers defiantly offered at Texas high

347 school football games to televised images of Catholic priests arrested at anti-abortion protests, the symbols of

Christianity never disappear from public discourse. The occasional, highly publicized Christian conversion of controversial public figures like Nixon administration official Chuck Colson illustrates the difficulty of uncoupling religious and secular concerns when evaluating the character of the rhetor.As Sacvan Bercovitch concludes in The American Jeremiad. "[o]f all symbols of identity, only America has united nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive history, the country's past and paradise to be, in a single synthetic ideal" (176).

Among the most visible of U.S. Christian sects are the so-called evangelical denominations, whose adherents claim to have "received Jesus Christ as their personal savior" and, as a result, are "born again." While fundamentalist, pentecostal, and charismatic evangelicals have some significant doctrinal differences, the born- again experience is at the core of their religious practice. Being born again, for evangelicals, requires a religious conversion, in which

the inner speech of 'convicted sinners' is transformed as they are alienated from their previous voices ('the old self,' 'natural man'); cast into a limbo ('lost,' 'in need,' 'searching') . . . ; and begin to hear a new

348 voice ('an inaudible voice,' 'the Holy Spirit'). (Harding, "Convicted" 170)

The evangelical understanding of conversion emphasizes that the convert has made a dramatic and profound change, which reguires the rejection of an old belief system in

favor of a commitment to live in accordance with Biblical principles (see Heirich).

Since "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), the conversion experience is denied to no person on the basis of her or his past life; in

Christian theology, God's willingness to forgive is infinite. Burke argues that religion "is based upon the

'prosperity of poverty,' upon the use of ways for converting our sufferings and handicaps into a good"

(Philosophy 166). According to Christian lore, no accumulation of sinfulness can exceed YHWH's capacity for forgiveness. Indeed, the parable of the prodigal son reguires evangelicals to rejoice most loudly when someone who has been a great evildoer— however evil or sin is defined— wishes to be born again. As Christ explains in

Luke 15:7, "I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance." Robert

James Branham points to a similar impulse among abortion rights opponents, who proudly identify former pro-choice activists who later joined the pro-life movement.

349 The evangelical Christian does not hold the born- again convert's past against her or him, since God already has forgiven the convert. Like YHWH, evangelical

Christians are expected to forgive those who sin against them. The importance of this forgiveness is emphasized by

Christ in Luke 17:3-4; "If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day [and] turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him."

Given this emphasis on the born-again experience in evangelical religious practice, an important feature of evangelical religious services and everyday life is the practice of witnessing. While evangelical ministers regularly call for each unsaved member of their congregations to "ask God into your heart," witnessing is the more common method for evangelical proselytizing. In witnessing, born-again Christians attempt to convert the unsaved by recalling their own conversion experiences and urging the lost souls to undergo a similar transformation.

Susan F. Harding's ethnographic account of witnessing talk uncovers some important rhetorical moments in witnessing, including the definition of speaker as saved and listener as lost ("Convicted"). Further, the listener is encouraged to speak her or his way to salvation by praying

350 to God for forgiveness of sin and the gift of the born-

again experience.

All participants in the witnessing event function as

witnesses, since the unsaved listener(s) witnesses the

evangelical Christian's religious advocacy and the

already-saved speaker bears witness to the urgent need to

seek salvation. The optimal outcome of witnessing is the

reversal of witnessing roles, as lost souls bear witness

to their desire to be born-again and the already-saved

participant becomes a witness to the submission of the

sinner to God's healing power. The lyrics from the old

Christian hymn, "Amazing Grace," are sometimes taken as referring to the transformative experience of the born- again evangelical: "I once was lost but now I'm found/Was blind but now I see."

Witnessing in the evangelical Christian tradition, then, both highlights the radical rupture or break with a past life of sin for those who witness and focuses attention on the present need of auditors to desire a similar conversion. This transformative experience occurs when one is born again.One suspects that the born- again politician, who already has been forgiven by God for her or his sins, might find much rhetorical use-value in this redemption from past transgressions. The potential of political appeals addressed to Christians (and

351 especially to evangelical Christians) by the repentant

sinner is considerable.

Witnessing as Campaign Strategy

I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.

Jeremiah 23:21

In order to examine Duke's use of evangelical themes

in his Christian-inspired message, I will evaluate selected passages from one of his half-hour campaign films, which was televised throughout Louisiana before the

October, 1991, gubernatorial primary. In addition to requesting campaign contributions, Duke used this film to present his "issues" to Louisiana voters, including welfare reform, increased pay for police officers and teachers, and the elimination of affirmative action programs (i.e., "racial quotas and set asides"). My analysis concentrates, however, on Duke's efforts to present and defend (bear witness about) his conversion from virulent racist to benign conservative politician.

The Duke campaign film was an impressive and professional example of this increasingly popular genre of political advertising (see Morreale). Produced by a New

Orleans media consultant (Esolen), the film displays Duke

352 in a business suit amid leather-bound chairs and large bookcases. Introducing himself as "Representative David

Duke," he calmly tells the listener that he intends to present his "vision for Louisiana and America" during this film.

After Duke introduces his teen-age daughters (but not his ex-wife) to the television audience, a blue screen with the message, "A Fair Hearing," appearing in white letters, calls attention to the first portion of the f i l m . Duke begins by joking that the "liberal media" have ensured that there are no more skeletons in his closet, and he then attempts to address the charges that were made by his critics during the campaign. Subsequent paragraphs make specific references to his new-found and vocal religious faith as a born-again Christian.

In the campaign film, he asserts that "over the years

I've grown as all of us do. My Christian faith has deepened, and Christ has led me to see that working to preserve my heritage doesn't mean I have to disparage others."13 A common metaphor in U.S. culture, growth refers to the development of wisdom and strength as well as to physical size. By suggesting a progression to maturity and strength from the mistakes and recklessness of youth, Duke emphasizes the inappropriateness of using his past associations to judge his gubernatorial

353 candidacy. His apparent embrace of evangelical

Christianity also marked a difference between the younger,

strident David Duke and the older Duke, who has a

"deepened" Christian obligation to tolerate others, even

while retaining his commitment to preserve a "heritage"

that is white, Christian, heterosexual, and anti-

feminist.^^ In this passage, one also discovers that Duke

defines his former leadership roles in the Ku Klux Klan

and neo-Nazi organizations as the means for preserving his

heritage, rather than as a vehicle for advancing the cause of Anglo-Saxon racial purity at the expense of non-whites.

Another passage in the "fair hearing" section of his campaign film contains a lengthy exposition that

incorporates several Christian themes:

I sometimes wonder about those self-righteous people who speak about loving everyone, and then hate me. Those of you who hate me for my past, I ask you honestly: Have you ever hurt a friend or a loved one? Have you ever spoken words you'd take back if you could? Have you ever changed your opinion? If you haven't, I guess you can throw the first stone at me. I only ask that you treat me as you'd have others treat yourself. Now let me move on to the real issues in this election.

The first sentence of this passage recalls the

Christian admonition to avoid judging the behavior of others, since God alone reserves the power to sit in judgment. Just as the "self-righteous people" of the New

Testament, the Pharisees, were among those most harshly

354 condemned by Christ, those critics who doubt Duke's

conversion to Christianity also risk condemnation by God.

In Duke's bipolar world, those who do not love him are

self-righteous haters who will not inherit God's kingdom.

Those who question Duke's conversion and witness are

guilty of the ultimate "performative contradiction"; one

cannot claim the title of evangelical Christian while

denying the possibility that Duke is born again. Duke, of

course, does not admit to the possibility that a Christian

could "hate the sin," while also "loving the sinner."

In the second sentence, Duke compares his own history

of racist activity with hurting "a friend or a loved one."

This comparison calls on listeners to reflect on their own

failings and, by equating Duke's behavior with that of the audience, de-emphasizes the magnitude of Duke's past wrongdoings, which are portrayed as unexceptional.^^

Also, this sentence puts African Americans, Jews, and other groups insulted and marginalized by the "old" Duke

in the interesting subject position of Duke's "friends or

loved ones," who regrettably have been traumatized by his past comments about them. The third sentence contains the admission that the old Duke was a sinner who made mistakes. His desire to retract claims with which he is no longer in agreement supports his claim that he is born again, a new creature in God's eyes, who regrets the

355 errors made before his conversion. Duke's comparison of

hurting a friend to donning Klan robes is extended by

evoking the image of taking back (mere) "words." In

summary, the second and third sentences in this passage

allow Duke to confess his sins while claiming that those

sins are not terribly important or particularly

unforgivable.

The fourth sentence from this selection is an

indictment of all who condemn Duke for his renouncement of

racism; after all, isn't he allowed to change his position? By comparing his (suspect) renouncement of an entire racist worldview to the mundaneness of changing an opinion, he encourages the uncritical equivocation of two very different sorts of personal change. In a 1991

Donahue television appearance, Duke made the Christian foundation of his alleged change explicit: "I'm a

Christian person, and I believe that through the power of

Christ and through the power of your faith . . . that you can certainly become more moderate." Duke implies that he not only has changed, but that his embrace of born-again

Christianity gives him the right to change without receiving criticism from fellow Christians.

In the fifth sentence of this complicated passage,

Duke, after emphasizing that all humans act as he acts, refers to a passage from the Christian Bible, where Jesus

356 tells the Pharisees and teachers of the law in John 8:1-11 to stone (execute) a sinner, an adulterer, only if those teachers and Pharisees are "without sin." Duke appropriates this Christian narrative to suggest that he is no more guilty of error than any other human, and is, like the adulterer, beyond the judgment of any human. If one accepts these premises, Duke, like the adulterous woman in the eighth chapter of John, deserves forgiveness and tolerance rather than condemnation. Again, Duke explains, as Jesus declared in Matthew 7:1, that his detractors should "judge not, that ye be not judged."

Those auditors questioning his faith will be subject to the scrutiny of a stern and judgmental deity. Note Paul's warning to the early Christian community in Romans 14:10:

"But why dost thou judge they brother? or why dost thou set at nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ."

The sixth sentence also includes a Biblical reference. Duke paraphrases a quotation attributed to

Christ in Matthew 7:12, where Christ provides the so- called "golden rule" near the conclusion of his sermon on the mountain: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." Again, Duke calls into question the Christianness of his critics, who allegedly

357 fail to treat him with the respect and love demanded by the Christian tradition. This rhetorical construction puts Duke's opponents— not the long-time racist— in the position of violating the golden rule. Since Duke has chosen to embrace Christian dogma, his detractors must abandon their attempts to evaluate his present character by his past actions. Failure to heed this Christian imperative in Duke's case brings the ethos of his critics into question. In combination, the fifth and sixth sentences depict Duke as both a sinner, who should not be judged by fellow humans, and as Christ's messenger, reminding his Louisiana auditors of the golden rule. Of course, Duke does not call attention to Christ's teaching a few verses after the golden rule is announced: "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:15-16).

Finally, the seventh sentence, by contrasting Duke's plea for a "fair hearing" with the need to consider "real issues," closes this section with an air of finality. The irrelevant charges brought against Duke by his (un-Godly) opponents have been addressed. This born-again Christian already has answered for his sins by seeking and finding forgiveness from God. Duke has no need to respond to further charges from his critics, since a historically

358 derived judgment about ethos is not a "real" issue when

one is born again and embraces evangelical Christianity.

Further, Duke intimates that charges of current racism on

his part are not relevant to this campaign, since he is now ready to move on to the real issues in his campaign

film.

In summary, this excerpt from his campaign film allows Duke to bear witness regarding his religious faith and paint the behavior of his opponents as un-Christian.

In so doing, he warns his followers and prospective followers to reject the warnings of his opponents and exhorts them to keep their eyes on the task at hand, which is the consideration of ideas for transforming the state government of Louisiana (another "conversion").

Duke returns to these Christian themes in the concluding section of his campaign film, which is entitled

"Faith in Louisiana and Trust in God." Duke defends

Louisiana's "Southern drawl" and "devout Christianity" against the "towers of babble" of the "New York press," and warns that the New York press "won't be satisfied until we're like they are, and then heaven help us." He then warns that the campaign will be difficult:

I'm different and offer real change. The powers that be will oppose me with the might of a Goliath against a David. They will use their immense power of media to fill the air with accusation, innuendo, and flat out character assassination. My opponents will attempt to

359 spend me into oblivion. But if we work hard and have faith in the people of Louisiana, and trust in God, we'll win this race.

The first two sentences of this passage position

Duke's opponents, who fear the "real change" he offers, as

Philistines, un-Godly people who need to be conquered.

This David, like the Old Testament David (who, in turn, was an ancestor of Christ), must fight a larger, stronger

foe. But the Godly, the born again, know that God will aid David to defeat the "powers that be," because those powers cannot withstand the Truth that Duke speaks. Note that Duke grants himself (and the forces of Christendom) the favored subject position in the second sentence; it is the powers that be who oppose him, rather than Duke opposing those powers. The metaphoric comparison of these two Davids places Duke on the side of Godliness and makes

Goliath, the profane and inept warrior, the symbol of all who oppose Duke. Like Goliath, the secular "powers that be," however understood by Duke's audience, are the enemies of David the Louisiana racist prefers the ethos of another David, one of the most famous figures in

Judeo-Christian lore.

The third sentence from this passage uses the odd phrase "immense powers of media" to further extend the

David and Goliath metaphor. "They"— Goliath, the powers that be, etc.— control the mass media, and any negative

360 message about Duke that comes from the media is suspect.

Both medium and message are the tools of the un-Godly; they cannot be trusted. The media from this perspective are the means by which the "fiery darts [or messages] of the wicked" mentioned in Ephesians 6:16 are hurled.

The predictive tone of this and other sentences in this passage even provides a glimpse of the prophetic vision.

We are told what will happen in the future because God has already revealed that future to those he favors.

Accusation, innuendo, and character assassination are, not surprisingly, what we expect from a contemporary Goliath.

Duke's position as defender of the Christian tradition against such powerful foes points to the completeness of his conversion: Duke, the sinner of old, is now a prophet singled out for criticism by the un-Godly.

The fourth sentence details another power, the power of money, which the foes of Duke also control. Duke uses another odd phrase ("spend me into oblivion") to characterize the goal of his opponents. Oblivion, an absence or lack, functions here as a synecdochal representation of those who are cast out into the darkness because they have not won their race. The silence of oblivion is the ultimate death of witness-bearing, a not- space where born-again Christians do not belong and should never be taken. To allow Duke's enemies to spend him into

361 oblivion would be akin to a defeat for the act of witnessing itself.

The fifth sentence fulfills the requirements for those who bear witness. Duke not only demonstrates his own born-againness and the hypocrisy and evil of those who oppose him. He also tells us what must be done to "win this race" to convert the Louisiana state government. We must "work hard" (the so-called Protestant work ethic) to assure victory, have faith in the people of Louisiana (who are, after all, devout Christians), and trust in God (a

Biblical imperative). Work, trust, and faith are the trilogy inscribed in the gospel according to Duke. The born-again Christian must subscribe to this gospel in order to make possible the success of the born-again politician.

History, Innocence, and Ethos

. . . all cultural performances are not religious performances, and the line between those that are and artistic, or even political, ones is often not so easy to draw in practice, for, like social forms, symbolic forms can serve multiple purposes.

Clifford Geertz (1973)^®

The tenets of evangelical Christianity require lost souls to save themselves by experiencing a spiritual

362 rebirth, in which God forgives sin and enters into the heart of the newly-saved. Because other evangelical

Christians also have experienced this transformation, the new, born-again Christian is immediately credible when addressing this audience. Further, Christian redemption has the advantage of not requiring Duke to die on a metaphorical cross. Duke need not suffer personally to gain the advantages of a new ethos. since Christianity relies on "the possibility that one character may be redeemed through the act or agency of another" (Burke,

Religion 176).

By claiming this new-born status for himself, Duke was able to construct a new ethos and argue for the veracity of his renunciation of racism and Nazism among many evangelical audiences. In this respect, Duke's adoption of the evangelical rhetoric of conversion allows him to identify his interests (in the Burkean sense) with those of the evangelical audience he addresses. But, more important, this conversion rhetoric makes it difficult for believers to question or doubt his sincerity and his motives. Such questioning by an evangelical auditor would be the sign of an unbeliever. Duke's ability to talk the born-again talk is equated with his being born again.

Bearing witness in the evangelical tradition, complete with the admission of past guilt required by the

363 conventions of witnessing, becomes the only necessary

demonstration of his conversion. This choice for

construction of a new ethos has implications for our

discussions in previous chapters of history and innocence.

In assessing Duke's loss of the the gubernatorial

run-off election, Carl Freedman has argued that the postmodern milieu is marked by an indifference towards history. For Freedman, the ability of Duke's supporters to ignore his past is a product of "the current phase of monopoly-capitalist civilization," where "history" denotes

"that which is gone and irrelevant" (28). According to

Freedman,

Duke supporters frequently argue that Duke's past is, after all, past, and that he ought to be judged on the basis of what he is saying now. This weakened sense of historical community amounts, not exactly to social amnesia as such, but more frequently to a selective amnesia that allows one to forget what one has other reasons to overlook. (28)

Freedman's analysis has a certain appeal. Anyone who has completed a basic presentational speaking course should know that the ethos of a rhetor is derived in part from the audience's sense of history. The prior acts and utterances of persons or organizations typically are taken as evidence of their character, so that rhetors with low

"prior" ethos must take steps to improve their credibility with auditors before asking those auditors to accord their claims some presumption. Since Freedman notes that the

364 Klan, "despite its indigenous American roots, is almost

invariably represented as evil in hegemonic mass culture

today" (28), one should not be surprised that an ex-

Klansman like Duke would use the "oldest known technique

for abolishing the past: religious conversion" (Freedman

28). Duke's conversion is "postmodern," suggests

Freedman, because it has not been marked by any change in

behavior or advocacy.

However, I contend that Freedman overestimates the

uniqueness of the current social milieu, let alone the

importance of the postmodern condition. Ignoring for the

moment the difficulty of separating social and symbolic,

Freedman gives too much credence to a social form and too

little attention to a symbolic form, as Clifford Geertz might say. Material and cultural conditions in the 1990s differ substantially from those in the 1920s, and late- twentieth century anomie may have contributed to Duke's relative success in statewide Louisiana elections. Yet,

Duke's situation is hardly new. Rhetorical history provides many examples of rhetors who had to defend themselves or their organizations against charges of malfeasance, and some of them did so by encouraging their auditors to ignore historical evidence. For example, in

Chapter Three I suggested that Frank Tripp's 1923 pro-Klan sermon amounted to an admonition to forget history, since

365 the good intentions of the "Christian gentlemen" of the

Klan should be taken at face value, even though no evidence of behavioral change was offered. The rhetorical admonition to forget history hardly is new or unique to postmodernity. As the furor over Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis should have taught us, history ends rhetorically whenever history's end is announced and believed.

Most scholars in communication studies (and perhaps in history as well) would maintain that history is rhetorically constituted. Historians typically craft narratives in which their discursive choices will divide protagonist and antagonist, highlighting some possible causes of historical effects while giving others short shrift. Beyond this commonplace concerning the rhetorical construction of history, history and anti-history also are important inventional resources for rhetors. Some specific idioms and genres even require appeals to history and/or pleas for its erasure. For example, the eulogy celebrates a fallen comrade's significance for family and community, mining history for evidence that the departed has somehow enriched the lives of others. Alternatively, some rhetorics are resolutely and necessarily anti- historical, ignoring the unpopular past associations of the rhetor or asserting the irrelevance of those past

366 associations.^® To return to our previous example, the eulogist for a controversial figure must ignore history when appropriate, gently intimating that the deceased should not be judged by her or his worst transgressions.

In particular, witnessing demonstrates the importance of history as an inventional resource. Evangelical witnesses need their histories to contrast a past life of sin with their current relationship with the Almighty.

Yet, the divine forgiveness they have experienced means that those past sins should not cause auditors to be suspicious of the witness' current advocacy; this lack of suspicion is itself an example of anti-historicism. Like other evangelical witnesses, Duke embraces the anti- historicism of Christian redemption, but he does not recognize the appeal to history also required by the inner logic of witnessing. To borrow Duke's term, evangelical conversion does not make one more "moderate"; instead, redemption narratives magnify one's former misdeeds to make the conversion experience seem even more remarkable and desirable. The perceptive Christian recognizes that

Duke's conversion could not be complete until he renounced his past with zeal, attended church regularly, and sought to atone for his past sins by doing good in the African-

American community. Duke's rhetoric of redemption has intuitive appeal for the evangelical Christian, but his

367 conversion rhetoric is selective. He borrowed only those

tenets of evangelical conversion that were consonant with

his immediate goals.

In retrospect, Duke might have been even more

successful in the 1991 election if he had attended some

church (preferably one with African-American members) in

the six months prior to the election, or if he had worked

on some public service project whose primary beneficiaries were black. A few, relatively simple acts of Christian charity and devotion by Duke would have marked for

evangelical and other Christian auditors the full depth of his sincerity and made the anti-Duke advertisements mentioned above vastly more difficult to d e f e n d . ^0

Without the evidence provided by such acts of reverence and charity, Duke left himself open to charges of false prophecy.

Further, Duke's campaign commercial and its reception— discussed so far as a case study in the malleability of ethos— might teach us something about the rhetorical construction of innocence. Central to judgments about ethos are considerations of innocence and guilt, since a rhetor guilty of prior illegal or immoral acts presumptively will be prone to recidivism. How does a rhetor recapture a lost presumption of innocence? Duke does so by inverting guilt and innocence, since he insists

368 that he has been born again (thereby recapturing the

innocence of youth) and that those who doubt his newfound innocence are worthy of censure. If one accepts Shelby

Steele's analysis, those who claim innocence are likely to use this purported innocence in their pursuit of power over others. While those who claim such innocence need not do so— surely innocence of wrongdoing does not necessarily trigger a desire for power over others—

Steele's depiction of innocence is consistent with Duke's efforts to claim innocence as a political resource and vote-getting tool.

Finally, Duke's witnessing serves another, related function. By serving as audience to his witnessing, those who listen to his testimony can later bear witness about his conversion. This conversion rhetoric, however, also encourages audience members to become converts to the policy initiatives championed by Duke. In addition to being worthy of trust, Duke testifies regarding the political conversion that the state of Louisiana needs.

The powers that be must be challenged; Goliath must be defeated. Metaphorically, a second, secular conversion is required of those who are born again. Born-again

Christians must convert to the cause of He who speaks the

Truth and offers "real change" from the Godlessness that marks the current state government. State government must

369 also be born again; a conversion is needed in Louisiana politics. After all, Duke, a fellow evangelical, knows what the "real issues" are in this gubernatorial election.

And like Christ, Duke teaches a difficult doctrine. Those who are not with Christ (Duke) are against him. One detects the devil's handiwork in the political opposition to Representative David Duke, who once was lost, but now is found doing the Lord's work in Louisiana.

On Klannishness

After 1991, David Duke faded from the political scene in Louisiana, although in late 1995 he started to position himself for a comeback attempt. His overwhelming popularity among evangelicals does not extend completely to other white Christian congregations, and the one-time fervent evangelical tone of his testimony may even limit the enthusiasm felt for his political candidacy among other Christians. Perhaps his conversion narrative, however tightly wrapped in evangelical Christianity, is too fantastic even for some evangelicals to accept. But none of these limitations on his future electoral viability detracts from the remarkable success he enjoyed at the polls from 1989 through 1991. While he may never win a major political office, we still have something to learn from Duke about the ability of a rhetor to construct

370 a new ethos untarnished (and even enhanced) by that rhetor's earlier misadventures.

In Chapter Five, I argued that some commonalities between the idioms of Klan rhetors and other idioms did not presumptively make those non-Klan idioms suspect.

However, in this conclusion I wish to suggest that Duke, despite his denial of sympathy for the Klan, nevertheless continues to use a Klan-inspired, or "Klannish" rhetoric.

In the 1920s, Klan rhetors invited their auditors to practice "Klannishness," which, according to Charles C.

Alexander, was "the practice of 'sticking together' among

Klansmen, finding expression especially in economic terms, such as trading with Klan merchants in preference to non-

Klansmen" (xv).^^ As metaphor, this quality of "sticking together" is what constitutes a Klannish genre identified largely by content, where clusters of Klan-identified principles guide the production and reception of rhetoric.

Strictly speaking, any discourse attributed to a member or advocate of the Ku Klux Klan will be identified as a "Klan rhetoric," even if that discourse announces a commitment to principles not typical of the Klan (e.g., racial tolerance). However, how should one categorize the rhetoric of an ex-Klan member and leader who renounces the

Klan while continuing to adhere to core Klan principles like white supremacy? Alternatively, how should one

371 assess the rhetoric of someone never formally affiliated with the Klan who nevertheless seems to be in accord with fundamental Klan precepts?

The ordinary response in the latter cases is to accuse such rhetors of "sounding like Klan sympathizers" or labeling them as Klan fellow travelers. Given the pariah standing of the Klan in the 1990s, such a label will cause problems for the Klan-identified individual.

However, such charges are not always easy to make. Duke has insisted on numerous occasions that he is a changed person, a convert to tolerance, and his public speeches and campaign materials now evince a more subtle racism, substituting "welfare recipient" for the infamous N-word and "drug peddler" for black criminal.^2 Those who oppose

Duke have been left with the burden of proving that he is not changed, but is one of the false prophets to whom

Jeremiah referred. The burden of proof becomes much more difficult to meet when the rhetor, unlike Duke, has never been associated with a white-supremacist group. Duke's electoral inroads in 1990 and 1991 have not gone unnoticed in Louisiana, where multiple Republican candidates without

Duke's obvious liabilities have adopted his campaign issues and public discourse without public censure by the local or state press.^3

372 I suggest that one must look to the rules that

constitute individual idioms of discourse to discern the

presence of Klan principles. A Klannish genre, composed

of many related idioms and found in discussions of

affirmative action, welfare, and myriad other topics, is

present in the public discourse of the 1990s. While Klan-

inspired texts undoubtedly share presupposition, immanent,

and/or consequential rules with a dizzying array of

idioms, as we saw in Chapter Five, multiple Klan rules

like "Caucasians are genetically and culturally superior

to other races" and "the U.S. should remain a white-

majority nation" mark the presence of a Klannish rhetoric.

In other words, the "sticking together" of multiple Klan

rules in a given idiom indicates the rhetorical

imbrication required for identification of a Klannish genre. A Klannish rhetoric is separated from a Klan rhetoric only by a missing rule concerning Klan membership: "A (white) citizen who sympathizes with the

Klan should join it." The mapping of such Klannishness in rhetoric, however arduous or tedious the task might be, gives left-leaning activists the specific evidence to support their claims about Klannishness in political campaigns, policy debates, and other rhetorical situations. Alternatively, such mapping may lead one to

373 conclude that previous suspicions of Klannishness were not

justified in a specific case.

Intuitively, the distinction between Klan and

Klannish rhetorics may seem irrelevant. If one identifies

racist advocacy, who cares whether the advocate espouses

Klan or Klannish discourse? However, such a position

ignores the practical, political difference between the

two. If nothing else, David Duke's case demonstrates the

ease with which the Klan is condemned and the difficulty with which Klannishness is denounced. He cheerfully admitted that his youthful intolerance was an error, renounced the Klan, and continued to make speeches that varied only slightly from those he made while still a

Grand Wizard. Duke could not succeed in electoral politics while he led the Klan. However, to the consternation of his many critics, among whom I counted myself as a resident of Louisiana, Duke could win election to the Louisiana House of Representatives and garner the majority of the white vote in two statewide elections by simultaneously denouncing the Klan and advocating policies inspired by a thinly disguised white racism. One could not say that this ex-Klansman was guilty of declension where the fundamentals of Klan ideology were concerned, despite the evolution and increasing sophistication of his public discourse during the 1980s and 1990s. (Generally,

374 his one-time Klan supporters in Louisiana backed his efforts to become part of the political mainstream.)

The opponents of racism in the U.S. should learn that calling someone like Duke racist or exposing a sordid personal past is no guarantee that the person in question will be rendered politically ineffective. Perhaps the foes of Klannishness need to become better textual critics, using the words and deeds of Klannish rhetors to demonstrate their allegiance to the vilest of Klan precepts. Only such a sustained commitment to engaging the discourse of ethically suspect rhetors will allow us to move beyond the presumption of innocence extended to any rhetor who professes an anti-racist or anti-Klan agenda, a topic that I explore in Chapter Seven.

Unless his political comeback efforts are successful,

Duke may become only another footnote in the bizarre political history of Louisiana. But this tale deserves retelling, for, once upon a time, the unthinkable in the

1990s, a former Grand Wizard in a governor's mansion, became thinkable. Most Klannish rhetors commit to a certain degree of subtlety in their discussions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Unfortunately, Duke's conversion rhetoric suggests the potential that even the most obvious exemplars of Klannishness have for attracting enthusiastic white support. Thirty years after the heyday of the civil

375 rights movement, "mainstream" white racism remains alive and well, requiring only a thin excuse to justify its resurgence.24

376 Notes

^ The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest 256.

^ As Gary Esolen points out, Duke's campaigns for major office have been unsuccessful, and "Duke's electoral career would be singularly unimpressive for a normal politician" (136). The entirety of his political career as an officeholder consists of a single two-year term as a Louisiana state representative from a district that was over 99 percent white at the time. Moreover, notwithstanding the fears of a few journalists (e.g., Baxter), Duke hardly seems likely to win a major election at any time in the near future. Although the heavy media pre-election coverage of the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race might suggest otherwise, polling data confirm that Duke never seriously threatened to win that election, despite the association of his opponent with political corruption. In short, while Duke's relative success in the 1990 and 1991 statewide elections should not be understated, he ultimately did lose both races. In such cases, special justifications for the study of rhetorical failure typically are required of rhetorical critics, despite James Darsey's claim that, where ultimate success and failure are concerned, rhetorical criticism "has moved beyond such a provincial and univocal conception of rhetorical worth" ("Legend" 434). Ben Voth defends his study of A1 Smith's unsuccessful 1928 Oklahoma City apologetic address concerning Catholicism by using it to explain John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech to the Houston Ministerial Alliance on the same topic. Marie Hochmuth Nichols concludes her well-known investigation of Lincoln's first inaugural with the explanation that Lincoln's failure to avoid the Civil War could not be blamed on his superbly crafted speech.

3 On a 1995 television episode of ER, an African- American cast member referred to a white counterpart as "David Duke" following the white character's derisive reference to welfare recipients. Also in 1995, the Irish American Unity Conference, a U.S. organization devoted to the withdrawal of Great Britain from Northern Ireland, likened a pro-Britain Irish Protestant leader to David Duke in a New York Times advertisement (O'Clery).

^ His most recent campaign speeches and statements to the press suggest that Duke has not retreated from valorization of whiteness as he prepares to campaign again for a U.S. Senate seat. Duke's positions on race and

377 immigration have not changed substantially since his Ku Klux Klan days, although, as we will see, he does claim to have become more moderate. Consider William T. Coleman, Jr.'s summary of Duke's remarks at a rally held in March, 1996:

Campaigning for his state's U.S. Senate seat last month, David Duke sounded like a current, rather than an ex-Ku Klux Klansman. During an anti-affirmative action rally at which supporters waved Confederate flags and sang "Dixie," Duke said welfare and immigration policies "threaten to make white Americans the minority" and announced: "I think the heartbeat of this country is the white majority . . . and I'm speaking for them." Duke also proclaimed: "I hope you make it possible for me to go to the U.S. Senate. I've come to symbolize white people who aren't going to take it anymore." (A17)

^ For discussions of Duke's background, see Tyler Bridges; Douglas D. Rose; Patsy Sims; Bill Stanton; Lucian K. Truscott, IV; and Michael Zatarain. The best book- length analysis of Duke is provided by Bridges, who is appropriately critical of earlier Duke biographical efforts. Bridges also provides the best discussion of Duke's anti-Semitism, which receives surprisingly little media attention (see Lance Hill). Duke's Jewish conspiracy theories exemplify what Richard Hofstadter once called the "paranoid style." Louisiana journalist John Maginnis provides an accessible (and frequently humorous) account of the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial campaign in his Cross to Bear: America's Most Dangerous Politics. In his master's thesis, David J. Allen provides a detailed exposition of regional voter support for Duke and other Louisiana GOP candidates in recent years. The Louisiana Klan's activities in the 1920s are reviewed in Chapter Three.

^ One of Foster's first official acts as governor was to end state-controlled affirmative action programs ("Louisiana").

^ Accusations of backwardness and political corruption where Louisiana is concerned hardly are new. For example, V. O. Key, Jr. asserted in 1949 that "[f]ew would contest the proposition that among its professional politicians of the past two decades Louisiana has had more

378 men who have been in jail, or who should have been, than any other American state" (156).

® Edwin Edwards, who frequently was accused of political corruption during his preceding terms as governor, staged this incident to lampoon his treatment by the Louisiana press.

^ These advertisements appeared in The News-Star of Monroe, Louisiana, and in other Louisiana newspapers on November 15, 1991. All advertisements and campaign materials discussed in this chapter are available from the author.

On Colson's evangelical conversion, see Charles J. G. Griffin. Few now doubt that Colson's profession of Christianity is sincere, despite his notorious involvement in the Watergate scandal.

Other rhetorics of conversion and witnessing are possible. For example, Burke suggests a similar "born again" theme in Hitler's discourse: "I trace these steps [taken by Hitler] particularly because I believe that the orator who has a strong sense of his [sic] own 'rebirth' has this to draw upon when persuading his audiences that his is offering them the way to a 'new life'" [Philosophy 170, n. 2).

Duke and his wife, Chloe, were divorced in 1986 after several years of separation. She subsequently married Don Black, another Klan leader. Patsy Sims describes how Erika, Duke's eldest daughter, was dressed in a miniature Klan robe at a 1970s Klan rally (195-196). Erika was a toddler at the time.

All quotations from Duke, unless otherwise indicated, were transcribed from audio tape by the author. While I refer to sentence and paragraph divisions throughout this chapter, those divisions are my own and should be accorded no special significance.

Duke's own campaign literature indicates his commitment to a regressive politics. For example, in a campaign handout that included the headline "Edwin Edwards Mocks Christ," Duke promises to eliminate Louisiana's "office of Women's Services if it sponsors 'feminist' workshops."

Duke claimed in a 1991 Donahue show television appearance that his racist background remains a focus of

379 continued interest only because "I've had a microphone in front of me when I've said some of these things."

In Mein Kampf. Hitler suggests that "a number of essentially different enemies must always be regarded as one in such a way that in the opinion of the mass of one's own adherents the war is being waged against one enemy alone. This strengthens the belief in one's own cause" (qtd. in Burke, Philosophv 166). By 1991, Duke apparently realized that the "international Jew," the scapegoat used so effectively by his German mentor, would not work for a Louisiana audience. Thus, his scapegoat became the amorphous "powers that be," against whom so many populists have campaigned in the past.

Duke does poorly when assessed against the ethical standard for prophetic ethos identified by Darsey:

Considered as biography, the prophetic ethos is a kind of legend, from leaende. a derivative of the Latin for stories of the Saints and martyrs. The prophetic life as presented by the prophet and his or her disciples becomes its own rhetoric, and it must be judged according to the example it presents, . . . according to its aspirations and to the sympathies it creates. ("Legend" 436).

For a study of the Old Testament roots of prophetic ethos. see Margaret D. Zulick.

The Interpretation of Cultures 113.

While David Duke's most recent rhetoric has not emphasized his evangelical conversion, his need to assert the irrelevance of his Klan and neo-Nazi past continues. Never the modest sort, Duke now claims that issues he popularized helped propel the 1994 Republican takeover of the U.S. Congress, for which he takes some credit. In turn, Duke maintains that Republican electoral success has validated his political agenda (Gill; Kellman). In 1996, Duke concludes, "I don't think my background is an issue now" (qtd. in Schultz 3B).

Edwin Edwards, Duke's gubernatorial opponent, exploited this gap between Duke's conversion tale and his actions. In the second of two televised gubernatorial debates, which was broadcast on November 6, 1991, Edwards implied that Duke had not yet compensated for his past misdeeds with acts of kindness or other forms of penance

380 necessary to signal his trustworthiness and suitability for an important elected office.

References to "Klannishness" are common in the pamphlets and other documents of the 1920s Klan. For example, a 1918 pamphlet published by the Klan was titled The Practice of Klanishness and detailed the methods by which Klan members were to "live and act as to safeguard and enhance each other's interest and welfare in all the several relationships of life and being" (1).

In one sense, Duke has only adapted to the times. The obvious examples of white racist discourse discussed by Haig Bosmajian in 1974 are no longer acceptable in civic discourse. The white politician who gets caught using a racial epithet in the 1990s does irreparable damage to her or his career, although former white segregationists still are found among the ranks of elected officials (e.g., Bennett Johnston, Strom Thurmond).

During the 1995 Louisiana gubernatorial campaign, GOP candidate Mike Foster, now governor of Louisiana, never publicly repudiated the endorsement he received from Duke (Ferris and Eddy; Kellman; "Louisiana"). Former Louisiana governor Buddy Roemer adopted many of Duke's ideas on welfare and crime (Gill). Roemer even hired a former Duke aide to bolster his unsuccessful 1995 gubernatorial campaign (Wardlaw).

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 1994 Communication Research Conference, which was held on the campus of Ohio University. I thank Professor David Descutner of Ohio University for his helpful comments on that paper.

381 CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

The Ku Klux Klan as an organization is relatively unimportant. Its methods cannot and will not succeed. As an indication of further intolerance in the treatment of colored citizens of America and a further aggravation of the already tense race relations, it is highly significant and ominous. If America wishes to avert racial clashes which may make the orgies of Chicago and Washington [race riots] pale into insignificance, it will take immediate action to stamp out, not only the farcical organization of Imperial Wizard Simmons, but the spirit which makes so un-American an organization possible.

Walter F. White (1921)1

In the final analysis, the Klan was not alien to society or un-American. If it were, the problem would have been much simpler. Rather the Klan was typically American. It prospered and grew to national power by capitalizing on forces already existent in American society .... To examine the Ku Klux Klan is to examine ourselves.

Kenneth T. Jackson (1967)2

As an organization, the Ku Klux Klan is almost dead.

I do not mean that no self-described Klan members exist, or that Klan rallies no longer are held from time to time, or that no one murders or burns African-American churches

382 in the name of Klan. However, whatever the hold that white robes and "klonvocations" once had on (white) popular culture, that hold no longer exists. To admit to

Klan membership today is tantamount to declaring one's marginality to the polis. In the public-sphere struggle over what it means to be "American," liberal values like tolerance now are perceived as more important than the association of America with a white racial identity, notwithstanding the objections of a few who still concur with Thomas Dixon's 1905 proclamation that no (white) person "thinks of a Negro when he [or she] says

'American'" (Dixon, "Washington" 2). One feels compelled to reject Dixon's diatribe and embrace Walter F. White's denouncement of the Klan's un-American character.

Yet, even from the vantage point of the 1990s, one cannot dismiss Kenneth T. Jackson's analysis out of hand.

The 1920s Klan was successful because of the near consensus among native-born white Protestants concerning the potential dangers of immigration, the subordination of women, and the merit of white supremacy. As we have seen, white Klan opponents in the 1920s frequently accepted most

Klan teachings as uncontroversial; only Klan methods for propagating the racist and nativist faith were questioned.

White, Protestant America generally was sympathetic to the

1920s Klan ideology, as when Frank Bohn denounced the Klan

383 in the 1925 American Journal of Sociology while bemoaning the "race suicide" of old-stock white Americans who were not reproducing as rapidly as immigrant Catholics,

Hispanic Americans, and African Americans (Bohn 406).

Nor has the appeal of basic Klan tenets disappeared in the 1990s, despite the moral disapprobation now directed at the Klan. In Chapter Six, I declared the core elements of the 1920s Klan ideology to be alive and well in the present era. For example, markers of that ideology are present in the discourse of David Duke and some other

(usually GOP) political candidates without Duke's history of Klan involvement. (Before the decline of the Southern

Democratic Party, such candidates frequently were

Democrats.) If the Klan had not become associated with vigilante violence in its twentieth-century reincarnation, one wonders if the Klan could have evolved into a semi respectable social fraternity and political lobbying organization of the sort that 1920s Imperial Wizard Hiram

Wesley Evans once envisioned. Benjamin Herzl Avin rather flippantly suggested as much in 1952: "Had it concentrated on the social amenities of life . . . the Klan might have become a fairly good social club, as desirable as the

Rotarians" (279).

I noted in Chapter One that this dissertation encompasses both a theoretical project concerning genre

384 and a political and ethical project concerning the Ku Klux

Klan. In this conclusion, I try to bring those two projects together. Specifically, a revised genre theory is central to the ethical assessment of rhetorics that we intuitively would associate with the Klan and to an optimal anti-Klan praxis. First, I present a summary of the revised genre theory outlined in preceding chapters.

Second, I consider how we might understand and respond to the dangers posed by the Klan and Klannishness at the end of the twentieth century.

Revising Genre Theory

While expectations for the successful defense of a new or revised theory vary, I can imagine two minimal tests that such theories must pass. First, the key terms on which a theory relies should be defined so that the separate concepts that constitute the theory can be understood both individually and in their relationship to one another. Second, the theory must be able to answer objections that might reasonably be anticipated after the theory has been explained fully and subjected to critical scrutiny. This section attempts to meet these two tests for theory construction.

385 Key Concepts

As described in previous chapters, there are four key

concepts central in this revised theory of genre. This

section briefly summarizes the claims made in those

chapters.

Rule. When rhetors link words together to form

phrases, they do so in accordance with the (usually

implicit) understanding that conventions exist for

separating good and/or appropriate phrases from their

antitheses. I have argued that such conventions can be

identified by the discerning reader or listener and

expressed as the rules governing that specific text.

These rules might constrain the form of the phrase generated, as in Roman and Medieval expectations about the grand, middle, and plain styles, or the content of the phrase, as in the expectation that a eulogist will not depict the deceased as an importunate cad. (Of course, the form-content distinction is not absolute. Certain contents are more easily expressed using one form rather than another; some forms are better suited to specific contents than others.) Moreover, the synodical relationship of form and content rules in certain situations leads auditors to expect adherence to rules for rhetorical production that historically are associated with such situations.

386 Typically, rhetors attempt to follow time-honored rules for the production of discourse (or non-verbal rhetorics),3 since audiences typically will presume that the rhetorical history of a discourse tradition should constrain the inventional options of contemporary rhetors.

However, as explained in Chapter One, sometimes the "old" rules are violated because the rhetor is not aware of those rules or because the rhetor wants or needs to violate them. Violating old rules requires adherence to some new conventions that also could be articulated as rules. When referring to new rules, I understand "new" in this context as a previously unseen or unknown collection of the rules governing discourse, rather than as new rules per se. A plexus of rules that, individually, have been observed before may still be new in terms of the relationship of rules to one another.

Striking out in previously unexplored directions, inventing a discourse as one goes along without an articulable sense of the rules governing that discourse, is one of the practices that Lyotard would characterize as postmodern. While the the modernist strives to adhere to known rules or to justify new rules before following them, the postmodernist approaches situations without the expectation that an idiom suited to each situation must be known in advance.^ in other words, rules are not

387 inviolable. Old rules will pass away; new rules routinely will be created and announced in the everyday production of discourse.

In Chapter Three, I identified three kinds of rules that emerged from my analysis. First, presupposition rules are the a priori constraints perceived by rhetors

(and frequently by auditors) as pertinent to a specific utterance. Those involved in the production and/or reception of discourse need not be explicitly aware of such rules in order to follow them. We typically think about rules only after we have the intuition that those rules are being ignored. Presupposition rules may apply to form or content, and they are understood as the consequences of situation, history, and their interaction.

Second, immanent rules encapsulate the claim or claims made in the text, as understood by auditors.

Finally, consequential rules. though not explicitly stated in the text, are the implied conclusions that auditors might draw from immanent rules, so that acceptance of an immanent rule advanced by an interlocutor (e.g., "Toni

Morrison's Beloved is the best U.S. novel of the post-

World War Two era") might lead one to accept a consequential rule never suggested by that interlocutor

(e.g., "U.S. students of literature should read Morrison's novel"). Of course, the actual audience will not always

388 read the text in the fashion preferred by the actual

rhetor or implied rhetor. One can imagine an oppositional reading by which an auditor extracts a quite unexpected consequential rule from a given text (e.g., "U.S. novels after 1945 generally have been unimpressive").

Concerning all three sorts of rules, such rules could be understood as descriptive or normative, though descriptives frequently are made into normatives by rhetors and auditors. Both immanent and consequential rules may be announced in such a fashion as to remain loyal to or consistent with relevant presupposition rules, or they may break with presupposition rules to announce new, contrary rules that are incompatible with those presuppositions. In either case, immanent and consequential rules may become presupposition rules in subsequent discourses.

Idiom. Previously, I defined an idiom as the total system of rules governing the production of a given text and announced by that text. Their intimate linkage to specific texts means that idioms typically are most relevant to a particular locality and context. For

Lyotard, changing a single rule is sufficient to signal a new idiom. Very similar idioms still must be understood as separate from one another, requiring different standards of judgment from one idiom to another. While a

389 single idiom might be associated with multiple texts,

idioms are more likely to pertain only to one text. As I

suggested in Chapter Three, two very similar texts

produced by pro-Klan Louisiana ministers still belonged to

two distinct idioms. Further, many (and probably most)

idioms are diachronically unstable, called into being to

serve the needs of the moment and abandoned thereafter.

In Chapter Two, I indicated that multiple shifts from

one idiom to another could happen within the course of a

single conversation. Such shifts could occur without the knowledge or intention of those involved in the conversation, or they could occur as the consequence of a purposeful move by one or more rhetors to switch idioms.

(This is what Lyotard once would have called the announcement of a new language game.) Such moves require the idea of the meta-idiom. where the initial discussion of or shift to a new idiom functions as meta-talk about idioms. Meta-idiomatic talk occurs when rhetors implicitly or explicitly advocate adherence to the new idiom and the abandoning of the old idiom. Such advocacy may or may not be intentional; even the rhetor who rejects intentional efforts to persuade provides a model that may encourage self-persuasion on the part of auditors where the switch to a new idiom is concerned.

390 Imbrication. In ordinary language use, imbrication refers to a sharing or overlapping, as with the laying of bricks in home construction. Such overlapping also occurs

in discourse, since multiple idioms frequently share one or more of the same rules. For my purposes, imbrication

is the linchpin of a revised theory of genre, where

identification of shared rules in different idioms is a prerequisite for establishing an idiom's participation in an established genre or the existence of a previously unnamed genre.

Genre. Critics can label and describe genres whenever they discern common rules shared by two or more idioms of discourse. That is, genres can be isolated whenever rhetorical imbrication is detected. Such genres might range from expansive categories (e.g., epideictic rhetoric) to highly specific manifestations of organizational discourse (e.g., the pro-Klan Southern

Baptist sermon of the 1920s). The wide variations in inclusiveness between different genres suggest that genres are not logical types or permanent, stable phenomena.

While every rhetorical artifact belongs to one idiom, artifacts may be classified as members of several different genres. For example, J. C. Barr's address in

Chapter Three was described as illustrating multiple genres, from deliberative rhetoric to sermonic.

391 As I intimated in Chapter One, we should not isolate

genres for their own sake. Instead, we should do so because genres provide important frames of reference and

assist us with rhetorical production and criticism. We accept that a newly discovered genre is valuable only if the discoverer demonstrates that the genre enriches our understanding of specific texts, as when Kathleen M.

Jamieson ("Antecedent") argued that papal encyclicals cannot be understood apart from the influence of Roman imperial documents on the form and content imperatives of the genre that governs such encyclicals.

A basic feature of any genre is its emphasis on sameness, on the similarities found in many different texts. As Edwin Black explained in his endorsement of genre criticism, "critics can probably do their work better by seeing and disclosing the elements common to many discourses rather than the singularities of a few"

(Rhetorical 177). However, the theory of genre described here explicitly allows for and explains the considerable variation between the various texts grouped together in a given genre. While individual idioms and the texts belonging to them have rules in common with other idioms, idioms also differ from one another. As a result, each idiom purportedly loyal to a given genre will govern specific artifacts that will diverge in important ways

392 from other, similar artifacts. For example, the presidential inaugurals of Abraham Lincoln and John F.

Kennedy have much in common, but no one pretends that

Kennedy's is (or could be) a mere rearticulation of

Lincoln's first inaugural.

Strictly speaking, the existence of a genre is ethically neutral. That a genre can be named says nothing about whether that genre is consistent with an individual's or community's understanding of the good.

However, generic classification has two implications for ethical assessment of individual rhetorics. First, the rules to which genres adhere will have varying ethical valences within different discourse traditions, and these valences will influence the ethical assessment of the texts governed by those rules. The "same" genre might be recognized in different places and times without entailing a similar response on the part of auditors to the individual texts (and their idioms) that exemplify the genre. For example, whether or not one can speak for or about an other without ethical sanction depends on the individual community or communities in which one holds membership, since the idioms to which such communities adhere will have different rules for judging the appropriateness of speaking for or about the other. If I speak on behalf of affirmative action, some will applaud

393 my progressive motives, while others will question my ability as a white male to speak on this matter.

Second, ethical prescriptions can be derived from an understanding of how genres (and idioms) do their work in the world. The centerpiece of Lyotard's postmodern philosophy is the distinction between litigation and the différend. Litigation involves disagreement between interlocutors who operate within the confines of a single idiom, appealing to the shared set of rules that compose the idiom in their effort to resolve their dispute. In contrast, a différend exists when interlocutors invoke one or more rules to which all the relevant parties do not wish to adhere. If an interlocutor (or a third party) imposes a solution or resolution on the basis of principles not shared by all participants, in the case of a différend. Lyotard would call this imposition an act of terror. While Lyotard has no quarrel with litigation, he is fearful of terror. To the degree that Lyotard would adhere to any ethical metanarrative, he would presume that forced resolution to a différend is unjust. (I take a different position than Lyotard on the ethical implications of genre theory, which is described below.)

Together, these four terms— rule, idiom, imbrication, and, not surprisingly, genre— are central to a revised

394 genre theory. I hope to demonstrate the strengths of this

theory in the next section.

Testing the Revised Theory

As explained in previous chapters, I believe that a

revision of genre theory inspired by the work of Jean-

Francois Lyotard will resolve many problems currently

associated with genre theory. In particular, five

criticisms of contemporary genre theory were identified in

Chapter One. Below, I respond to these animadversions where my own theory of genre is concerned.

Vagueness in Definition. Despite the biological or

Darwinian metaphors sometimes used in discussions of genre, I argued in Chapter One that rhetorical and literary genres do not mirror the tidy classificatory schemes of biologists and botanists. Theories of genre are notoriously vague concerning how much individual texts must share in common before those commonalities are sufficient to define a specific genre. My criticism of the genre definitions of Tzvetan Todorov and Carolyn R.

Miller in Chapter One suggests my doubts concerning efforts to delimit the categories now considered genres.

The definitional problems with genre are in some sense unavoidable. As I noted above, genres are not logical types. Instead, they are classificatory labels of

395 convenience. Their greatest contributions to rhetorical

theory and practice often are heuristic, inspiring or

guiding the beginning writer, speaker, or critic; this is

the functional approach to genre identification that I

attributed to Robin Rowland in Chapter One. Genres

help to simplify the incredible variability and complexity

of everyday discourse. Individual genres, whether gross

or extremely specific, are bound to overlap and, even, to be partially redundant. However, the theory of genre

sketched above has the advantage of explaining the conditions under which genres can be defined, providing even more specificity than earlier defenses of a rule- governed approach to genre (e.g., Simons and Aghazarian).

Imbrication, the isolation of a common rule or rules in multiple idioms, is the precondition for identifying a genre. The individual genre's relevance for rhetorical theory and pedagogy must then be defended before one would expect the genre to receive widespread recognition.

Tautology. The rhetorical or literary critic who takes well-known genres to be all-inclusive forms is likely to fit each new rhetorical artifact into one of the old categories, no matter how poor a "fit" a given category might be for that artifact. Alternatively, the critic who is convinced of the existence of a new genre is, almost by definition, going to seek out evidence of

396 that new genre until she or he finds it. Either alternative risks a circularity that is more likely to occlude than to enhance our critical assessment of specific texts.

While I cannot prevent the genre enthusiast from engaging in specious reasoning, two fundamental tenets of the revised genre theory discussed above should make such circularity more difficult. First, I already have emphasized the diachronic instability of idioms.

Similarly, genres, while necessarily transcontextual, are not guaranteed to have exemplars in every age. The documents grouped under the rubric of the Medieval ars dictaminis (i.e., the art of letter-writing) could be understood as constituting a coherent genre, yet no text has adhered to the rules of this genre for centuries. The assumption that new texts can or should be neatly catalogued in hoary genres does not hold for this approach to genre. Second, genres, from this perspective, are not mutually exclusive. A single text and its idiom may be aligned with any number of genres, provided that each alignment is consistent with the imperatives of the relevant genre. In other words, prior generic classification of a text as epideictic, for example, will not prevent a future critic from analyzing that same text as forensic (or sermonic, or as an ideological novel); no

397 necessary contradiction exists in the understanding of a

text as participating in multiple genres.

Strong Situationalism. In Chapter One, I explained

that most advocates of genre do not favor what I call

strong situationalism, where the rhetorical situation is

understood as the definitive factor in determining what a

rhetor might say in that situation. While situation might

be one factor among many in encouraging a rhetor or

rhetors to adopt a given rule or idiom, my account of

genre does not give situation such a definitive role.

Specifically, in Chapter Four, I suggest that situational

approaches to rhetorical criticism suffer from drawbacks

that do not pertain to a neo-Lyotardian generic criticism.

Strong Transcendentalism. As I described it earlier,

strong transcendentalism is the alleged tendency of genre

theory to valorize transcendent knowledge claims over the explication of specific rhetorical artifacts,

subordinating contextual to trans-contextual scholarship.

In contrast, as implied above, a revised genre theory could account for both sameness and difference, recognizing recurrent similarities in different texts and their idioms without insisting that such texts are fundamentally homogeneous. Further, the diachronic instability of idioms, as rhetors shift from idiom to idiom, implies that any transcendental knowledge claims

398 must be made with great caution. The conclusion that a

genre exists does not require that the genre always be

represented in contemporary discourse, whether public or

private (by whatever definition). Genres frequently do

not transcend the historical milieu that brought them into

being.

Status Quo Bias. À common objection to genre theory

in both rhetorical and literary studies is that the idea

of genre is inherently conservative. Since descriptions

of discursive practice are often made into prescriptions

for such practice— a move to which Lyotard would object— many scholars worry that the isolation of a genre will encourage students of rhetoric and literature to operate

in accordance with those generic conventions.

While no genre theory is wholly immune from this objection, the revised position outlined in this dissertation never implies that rhetors are obligated to revere current genres. Despite the importance of history as a material constraint on rhetoric— in M. M. Bakhtin's terms, the individual utterance is only a link in the chain of speech communication— my proposed theory does not discourage the violation of old rules. Such rules violations signal existence of a new rule or rules and, consequently, the move to another idiom. In the shift from one idiom to another, rhetors may suggestion

399 revisions in or abandon one or more genres. Immanent and

consequential rules advanced in rhetoric might demand modification of an old genre or creation of a new generic

category that recognizes a heretofore unknown variety of discourse. Understanding that discourse may belong to more than one genre means that rhetors are under no obligation to select one guiding genre over all others.

The spirit of the postmodern, as Lyotard would suggest, means that rhetors may work without the benefit of any clearly understood set of rules; they may come to understand those rules in some articulable sense only after the texts to which those rules apply have been produced. In this sense, a postmodern genre theory need not be conservative in theory or practice.

To the extent that a revised genre theory satisfactorily attends to these five concerns— vagueness in definition, tautology, strong situationalism, strong transcendentalism, and status quo bias— the theory will improve and enrich the use of genre in pedagogy, rhetorical practice, and rhetorical criticism. For example, against those who complain that genre theory encourages students of rhetoric to adhere uncritically to established generic conventions, this revised theory emphasizes the potential of rhetors to circumvent or ignore such conventions. In addition to addressing these

400 problems with the idea of genre, this revised genre theory has an ethical and political dimension, which I explore in the next section.

Innocence. Ethics. and Epistemoloav

Given the presence of deep disagreement, we feel a desperate need for some type of answer to the question of how are diverse groups to live together in a just and peaceful manner. . . . We may not be able to construct an ideal system that can rule out injustice before it happens. However, . . . we, as communication theorists and researchers, may be able to guide participants in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of evermore democratic and révisable institutional, public, and personal spaces.

Darrin Hicks (1995)^

After nearly 400 pages and six chapters, the perceptive reader understands that ethical and political concerns are central to this generic study of the Klan.

Chapters Four, Five, and Six explicitly engaged such issues in one way or another. While revising and improving genre theory is a worthy project in its own right, I have worked through genre theory in an effort to find methods for separating what is and is not inspired by or rightly associated with the Ku Klux Klan. After all, such separation is politically important, since, as I argued in Chapter Six, association with the Klan in public

401 opinion usually is the end of respectability in the public

sphere and viability in electoral politics. For example,

when evidence points to the Klannish commitments of a

political candidate, a Klan opponent cannot be blamed for

wanting to point out those commitments to the voting

public. In contrast, as Chapter Five suggests, one might

share something with the Klan and not assent to the core

rules (as isolated below) that constitute the Klan's

genre.

The intuitive response to such ethical concerns is

that separating Klan fellow travelers from those innocent of Klannish commitments is not difficult. When speaking of blatant white supremacists (e.g., the Aryan Nation, some militia members), I would agree. However, important

"borderline" cases exist that make important the ability to demonstrate a specific reliance on Klan precepts.

In Louisiana, critics of David Duke generally failed in their attempts to show Duke's continued adherence to Klan principles. References to his history as a Klan leader and Nazi sympathizer were routinely ignored by white

Louisiana voters (see Chapter Six), while accusations that

Duke used affirmative action and welfare as "code words" for derogatory references to African Americans were denied by Duke and his ardent supporters as quickly as those accusations were made. GOP presidential candidate Pat

402 Buchanan, whose discourse adheres to many of the same

rules to which Duke is faithful, rarely is accused of

Klannishness because he has never had organizational ties

to the Klan.

Better command of genre theory could help rhetorical critics to become active in the political sphere in which

Duke and Buchanan operate. The Klan label frequently is affixed to candidates like Duke without any explanation of what that label entails. Alternatively, as in Buchanan's case, the Klan label is avoided altogether because the accusation is so difficult to make, despite my strong suspicion that Buchanan and Hiram Wesley Evans would get along quite nicely. Charging someone who explicitly has repudiated the Klan with adhering to a core, Klannish spirit is a difficult and dangerous endeavor, since that person or that person's supporters will dismiss such assertions as hyperbole. Doing so requires a strong sense of what Klannishness entails and how the rhetoric, especially the recent rhetoric, of someone like Duke is consistent with the core Klan commitments I isolate below.

The critic who is historically informed about the specific features of Klan rhetoric and can compare rhetorical artifacts produced by Duke to the constitutive elements of the Klan genre will be a far more effective opponent of

Duke's future campaigns than someone who is limited to

403 repeating anti-Klan platitudes. Especially in addressing non-academic audiences, the critic who is prepared to make such comparisons could demonstrate the Klannishness of rhetors like Duke and Buchanan.

This use of genre theory for political purposes is not limited only to the Klan and its sympathizers. For example, in the the debate (if one can call it a debate) over political correctness that took place in the early

1990s, conservatives complained, with some justification, that charges of racism and sexism are leveled all too easily in discussions of public and/or university policy.

When such accusations are made cavalierly, the ability to discuss difference(s) is eroded, and such labels become more difficult to use when needed because those labels eventually are perceived as the stock-in-trade of a leftist McCarthyism. To appeal to an old idea in argumentation theory, the rhetor who describes some rhetorical artifact or other social practice as racist or sexist has the burden to prove such charges, but such a rhetor should not hesitate to make such charges when they are warranted.

An epistemological implication of this genre theory also deserves consideration. Thus far, I have assumed that Klan principles are ethically objectionable, a position to which I am passionately committed. However,

404 how do I know that Simmons, Evans, and Duke are not

correct when they tout white supremacy and extol the merits of Protestantism? I do not ask the question

facetiously. Richard Rorty has asked a similar question concerning Nazis (Rorty; see Gander); Jean-Frangois

Lyotard has asked it concerning the so-call Holocaust revisionists, who deny that the Holocaust took place

(Lyotard, Différend). Obviously, I have no problem demonstrating the evils of Nazism, Holocaust revisionism, or white racism to the satisfaction of someone who shares my political commitments. However, those who sympathize with the Nazi cause or the Klan are not likely to find my idiom appealing. How could I demonstrate to Rorty's

"conversable” Nazi— "one a bit more sane and conversable than Hitler himself" (Rorty 637)— or to a conversable Klan member that such sympathies are misplaced? In Lyotard's terms, how could I move from différend to litigation in these cases?

Rather than rehearsing the answers of Rorty and/or

Lyotard, let me provide my own response to this troubling question. Contra Lyotard, I do not maintain that argument across idioms necessarily ends (as it began) with the différend. Lyotard so emphasizes the ineluctable difference between idioms that he ignores the possibility of finding common ground, let alone the evermore

405 democratic and révisable spaces to which Hicks refers above. Whatever the differences between idioms, imbrication and the possibility of isolating a genre mean that interlocutors potentially share presupposition rules to which they might appeal. I suggest that such a search for shared rules, the forging of a common genre, is exactly what Lyotard should attempt with the Holocaust revisionist and what I should do in conversation with a

Klan member or sympathizer.

Rules that could be shared might be found in the history of a locality or nation-state, a common religious tradition, a perception of what constitutes good science, and so on. The Klan member and I can search for rules to which we both might adhere, creating the shared frame of reference that Wayne Brockriede and others suggest is necessary for argumentation. In creating this shared frame, we might begin with some basic model for ideal discussion, such as Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob

Grootendorst's pragma-dialectical model for argumentation, and adapt that model to our specific needs or limitations

(see McGee and Simerly).^

Such a frame would need to go beyond the procedural requirements for conversational turn-taking; it also should include the beginnings of some "minimal criteria of validity" a la Benhabib ("Epistemologies" 125) or a

406 "thick, vague theory of the good" a la Nussbaum ("Human"

214). Without such criteria, there will be no common reference to which interlocutors might appeal in arguments about prescriptives (see Chapter Five). Specifically, our task is to create a genre of argumentation to whose rules we can appeal in a dispute over the merits of the Klan and to whose rules we agree to limit ourselves, with the hope

(but without any guarantee) that each of us will willingly remain within the boundaries of the same idiom throughout our discussion. For example, the Klan sympathizer will not presume the racial superiority of the Aryan, while I will not try to trump her or his arguments by invoking the liberal idea of tolerance that transcends a particular local enclave or racial identity.

Granted, our conceptions of the good still will differ dramatically, and isolating a genre in which différend becomes litigation provides no guarantees about the outcome of argumentation. (I do not hope here for any semblance of Habermas's ideal speech situation.) Further, any encounter that is meaningful will require that I risk personal change in my conversation with that Klan member; after all, I must take this risk if I ask my interlocutor to take it. However, the alternative to the search for imbrication is an unending agon, in which Klan foes and

Klan proponents never engage one another, each group

407 struggling for the resources to exert power over the other

and defining itself as innocent of wrongdoing. In this

context, each group forever will perceive the other as an

agent of terror.

If this agon is unavoidable, I clearly prefer my own

political commitments to those of the Klan, and I will use

political resources available to me in responding to

preserve the status quo, in which Klan commitments are a

sign of moral shortsightedness or deficiency, as opposed

to an alternative world in which the Klan is (once again)

perceived by millions of U.S. citizens as the protector of

(white, Protestant, patriarchal) virtue. In this status

quo. I will gladly work to demonstrate David Duke's thinly

veiled white supremacy; as suggested in Chapter Four,

speaking about others is an important rhetorical resource

that can be defended. Yet, I prefer an alternative in

which litigation is attempted before we accept the

inevitability of the différend. Perhaps a shared

commitment to examining our commonalities will allow Klan

foes to share power even with their Klan and Klannish

adversaries, in contrast with the current struggle to keep

the Klan powerless.

The historically informed rhetorician undoubtedly will notice that what I have described above is not unlike

a charge to seek out and argue from Aristotelian

408 commonplaces, a point that I concede. A greater concern

is that such a sharing with the Klan will give the Klan

power and legitimacy, allowing it to rise again. In

response to this concern, I suggest that such a fear

underestimates the attractiveness of the narratives now

told by Klan opponents. Surely the risk of Klannishness

gaining power (whether in the sense of a new, Klannish

episteme or in reference to formal political influence) is

considerable, but if a Klannish rhetoric exists that is so

compelling for many white auditors, we cannot expect to

marginalize that rhetoric forever. At the risk of

sounding like a naive advocate of the marketplace of

ideas, I conclude that conversation with Klan enthusiasts

and their Klannish cousins is preferable to leaving them

alone. For such rhetors are with us still. We will not

silence them by force, unless we use methods usually (and

I think correctly) prohibited in the North Atlantic democracies. Our best alternative is to engage those rhetorics and those who articulate them, without any naive expectation that such engagement invariably will be successful or a cynical conviction that such engagement will yield nothing.

409 Reconsidering the Ku Klux Klan

Unless we are extraordinarily fortunate, the Klan will soon celebrate its controversial existence in three different American centuries. I suggested in earlier chapters that there is less continuity from time to time and place to place in Klan rhetorics than we might initially expect. Whether the cause of this rhetorical mutability is the ambition of local kleagles (Klan recruiters), the shifting political fortunes of the Klan, a changing historical milieu, or a concatenation of these influences, those who oppose the Klan sometimes must wonder for what the Klan stands. The individual rhetors of the various Klan organizations often will surprise us as they advance new appeals (or revise old appeals) in response to changing times. While contemporary Klan speakers frequently are rhetorically inept, insulting the auditors they wish to convert, they and their Klannish counterparts also can and sometimes do switch to new idioms of discourse. For example, David Duke has attempted— not always successfully— to abandon the use of racial epithets in public meetings, while one Texas klavern held a parade a few years ago in support of the current conservative enthusiasm for a thinly disguised heterosexism.

410 Given this historic mutability of Klan rhetoric, why oppose something called "the Klan" at all? Why not pursue

Foucault's idea of the specific intellectual further than

Foucault himself, decrying racism, ethnocentric nationalism, and other instances of unwarranted intolerance wherever one finds it, rather than guibbling over an organizational name? Instead, I believe that we should continue to use the Klan label as pejoratively descriptive of a kind of discursive practice. As explained above, the negative rhetorical valence associated with the Klan means that left-liberal intellectuals who publicly associate Klan history and ideology with a person, cause, or organization usually will do great harm to the public image of those who must cope with that association. Presidential candidate Ronald

Reagan knew that he had to reject one Klan organization's endorsement or suffer blistering media attacks.? Even

David Duke, the former Grand Wizard who miraculously went on to achieve some political success, has never won or come particularly close to winning a major election.

Successfully describing someone or something as similar to the Klan has political advantages.®

But what would justify branding someone with the stigma of Klan association? Obviously, use of the Klan label is justified if one can point to recurring features

411 of an individual's discourse that are consistent with the

specific features of a Klan or Klannish genre. We already

know that one content-based rule— the announcement that

the rhetor is a Klan member— would presumptively mark her

or his rhetoric as part of a Klan genre.^ However, such a

genre, identified by a single, shared rule among multiple

idioms, would not provide much guidance for someone trying

to explain what it means to be a Klan member. If

references to "Klan rhetoric" are to suggest more than the

presence of a Klan-identified rhetor, one must know what

rhetorical markers constitute signs of Klan rhetoric.

The next section identifies what I understand to be

recurring, core Klan commitments that can be found over

and over again in discourse concerning race, sex, and class.

Generic Expectations

Klan rhetors, like their counterparts in many other social movements, are cultural bricoleurs. capitalizing on situations and borrowing fragments of content and form to create texts suitable for their purposes. Klan rhetorics are marked as much by difference as by similarity, yet there is a relatively stable plexus of rules that can derived from the many Klan texts produced by national, state, and local Klan leaders over a span of decades. As

412 a collection of presupposition, immanent, or consequential

rules, this plexus constitutes a Klan genre defined by more than the Klan affiliation of an individual rhetor.

As noted in Chapter Five, the individual rules in the list below are not unique to the Klan; a few might be shared with idioms for which we have considerable respect and

admiration. However, together such rules constitute what

Walter F. White once called the Klan's "spirit."

First, Klan discourse routinely indicates love of

family, hearth, home, and country. In particular, love of country frequently takes the form of patriotism and nationalism. While Southern Klan members in particular sometimes speak fondly of the ancien regime of the

Confederacy, the vast majority of Klan adherents— whether in the 1920s or 1990s— claim to be patriots (albeit foes of a strong federal government). The celebration of country and flag in J. C. Barr's 1923 address was typical of Klan professions of patriotism (see Chapter Three;

Appendix B). This Klan patriotism often takes on nativist overtones, with Klan groups consistently opposing immigration and racial desegregation because such activities threaten the "American" way of life. While glorification of one's nation-state by itself is not necessarily problematic, the Klan's profession of nationalism and "100 percent Americanism" frequently

413 preceded the fusion of nationalism with an essentialized racial identity, where Native Americans, African

Americans, and other non-whites were relegated to the margins. Moreover, this nationalism had other unpleasant manifestations. We should not be surprised that the great literary champion of the nineteenth-century Klan, Thomas

Dixon, Jr., was also a staunch advocate of fin de siècle

U.S. imperialism.

Second, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, Klan texts typically exude reverence for old-stock Anglo-Saxon

Americans, the "100 percenters" mentioned above, whose ancestors occupied an empty land or conquered the native savages, depending on the preferred colonial narrative of the moment. As the "original owners" of the country, these Nordic Americans were presumed to be the best class of citizen. Their genetic and social worth had been proven by the deeds of their ancestors, who were responsible for the birth of the nation and whose descendants reputedly deserved the first fruits of their labors. The role played by African-American and immigrant labor during the last 400 years on the North American continent is systematically devalued or ignored in this discourse. These old-stock "American Americans," to quote one anti-Klan newspaper ("Hyphenates"), were hostile to

"hyphenated Americans" (e.g., Irish Americans, Italian

414 Americans, Polish Americans) who did not abandon their

native languages or otherwise efface their own ethnic

identity to adopt Anglo-Saxon conventions.

Third, Klan members routinely have criticized anti-

Americanism in religion. Klan leaders like Hiram Wesley

Evans always maintained that Roman Catholicism and Judaism were fundamentally opposed to Americanism, and pro-Klan

legislators invariably introduced anti-Catholic bills during the 1920s. While some Klan organizations now accept Roman Catholics, anti-Semitism remains common in

Klan discourse. The paradigmatic American in Klan texts always has been the white Protestant, and the twentieth- century Klan routinely has supported efforts to legislate or otherwise impose (typically evangelical) Protestant notions of morality on Protestants and non-Protestants alike.

Fourth, though the definition of whiteness has been revised and expanded over the years, Klan rhetors always have emphasized white racial supremacy.^ Prior to World

War Two, the paradigm case of whiteness involved descent exclusively from the "racial stock" of Northern and

Western Europe, where Protestantism predominated. (Irish

Catholics specifically were excluded from this formulation.) Whiteness has become a much more expansive term in the Klan lexicon, so that an Italian family name

415 now seems no less "white" to most Klan recruiters than do

"Smith" and "Jones." However, whiteness remains of enormous importance to Klan members and sympathizers, so that African Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Hispanic

Americans, Chinese Americans, and other groups described as non-white have been and continue to be victims of the

K l a n . 12 White supremacy was always a core principle of the 1920s Klan; it received relatively little attention in official Klan documents only because white supremacy was not a controversial topic for most white audiences at the time. In contrast, maintenance of white supremacy in the

South was central to Klan recruiting during the 1860s and

1960s.

Fifth, official Klan discourse (at least in the twentieth century) routinely defends the rule of law and the idea of law and order. The persistence of the Klan in condemning lawlessness makes little intuitive sense to the beginning student of the organization, since its role in lynchings, beatings, and other forms of physical violence is legendary. However, the Klan had and has several reasons for endorsing law and order. Initially, Klan recruiting is less difficult if the leadership remains publicly and officially opposed to law-breaking. Further, prior to the 1950s, the Klan could count on the police, the courts, and juries to enforce white supremacy. In the

416 South, such assumptions held true in many localities until

the 1970s or later. Finally, Klan leaders denounced

violence as a way of deflecting blame for specific violent

acts. Klan spokespersons frequently argued that those

seen shooting or beating someone were impersonating Klan

members and were acting without Klan authority. To avoid the appearance of sanctioning violence, those accused of

such acts sometimes have been publicly expelled from the

Klan, though they frequently have been reinstated at a

later date.^^ Since local police forces in several cases were dominated by Klan members in the 1920s and the 1960s, individual klaverns sometimes could deny wrongdoing while breaking the law with impunity.

Sixth, the Klan insists on the purity of traditional

(white) womanhood, which for Klan members requires the maintenance of patriarchal constraints on the employment, educational, and marital options of white women (see

Chapter Two). For this reason, Klan members and sympathizers routinely have justified lynching as a reasonable response to threats against white racial purity. A less charitable reading would depict this stance as guaranteeing that white women are sexually available only to white men (Blee; MacLean, Behind1. Not surprisingly, the Klan has never demonstrated a parallel concern for the purity of black womanhood. On a few

417 occasions, Klan members in the 1920s warned or beat white

husbands who allegedly were mistreating their wives (see

MacLean, Behind 121-124), and women and men of all races were told by the Klan at one time or another to stop violating the community's sexual mores or face punishment.

Isolating these six principles in Klan discourse does not mean that one should fail to scrutinize Klan behavior

as another kind of text. Especially in the 1920s, the behavior of Klan leaders and the rank-and-file membership

frequently belied the organization's public discourse. At various time, Klan members were accused of drunkenness

(Simmons), sexual misadventures (Clarke, Tyler), and violence (Stephenson). The 1920s Klan's emphasis on the benevolent character of the organization was inconsistent with this behavior. While the Klan's violent reputation has been attractive to some prospective members, the

Klan's efforts to cultivate an aura of legitimacy and to exert political influence has frequently put Klan discourse at odds with the behavior of its leadership.

The six principles isolated above, when framed as rules, are common to a great many idioms that one ordinarily would consider as exhibiting Klan or Klan- inspired tendencies. When some or all of these rules are combined with recognition of the rhetor's Klan membership, one can reasonably conclude that discourse belonging to a

418 Klan genre has been introduced. If the subject of Klan membership is ignored or if Klan membership is denied, I contend that we still could and should label that discourse as belonging to a Klannish genre, since the rules that guide that discourse "stick together" in the fashion of the Klan; some or all of the principles discussed above, when found in a text, are indicators of a

Klannish genre. This sticking together is the mark of

Klannishness (see Chapter Six). One might concede that a rhetor does not belong to the Klan, yet argue based on the text she or he produces that the rhetor is a Klannish fellow traveler. Of course, the enormous harm potentially done to a person's reputation by such an accusation means that such conclusions ought not be drawn without considerable forethought and careful examination of the evidence; the presumption against making such accusations of Klannishness ought to be heavy.

Assuming that my analysis of the core features of a

Klan genre (and its Klannish cousin) is correct, what should we make of the Klan after 130 years of sporadic

Klan activity and organizing? I offer the following general conclusions. First, as I have already suggested,

Klan rhetorics may vary considerably— both synchronically and diachronically— while not leaving core Klan allegiances behind. Second, Klan and Klannish rhetorics

419 are not original per se; none of the six principles listed above is unique to the Klan. Instead, the plexus formed by some or all of those rules gives us an unpleasant sense of deia vu when enacted in rhetorical practice, since we suspect that allegiance to those rules marks adherence to a Klan or Klannish genre of discourse. Third, we should not confuse the Klan organization with allegiance to Klan

ideology. The recent discourse of David Duke and other local, state, and national politicians suggest that one might embrace the Klan's most fundamental precepts for the production of rhetoric without ever speaking of the Klan with anything but contempt.

Examples of such Klannishness among "mainstream" politicians are not difficult to find. Two members of

Congress from Idaho are even less subtle about their

Klannishness than David Duke. In 1994, U.S. Senator Larry

Craig, while criticizing environmental legislation in a speech to an Idaho Chamber of Commerce, remarked that the

"only endangered species in New York City is probably a free white human being. . . . The only person there isn't a law protecting today is the white Anglo-Saxon human being" (qtd. in Freda 5A). Not to be outdone, Idaho GOP congressional candidate Helen Chenoweth claimed a few days after the Craig speech that "[w ]e have probably protected in our . . . [Idaho] state civil rights act everyone but

420 the white Anglo-Saxon male" (qtd. in Grove, Kamen, and

McAllister A21). Chenoweth was elected to Congress after

making this statement, and Chenoweth and Craig still are

members of Congress. While Craig later apologized for

his remarks, Chenoweth did not. Since only three-tenths

of one percent of Idaho residents are black, syndicated

columnist Jeff Greenfield concludes that the re-election

prospects of Craig (and, presumably, of Chenoweth) "are

not in serious danger" (Greenfield 6B).

These are not even "borderline" cases of

Klannishness, since the statements of both Chenoweth and

Craig combine the defense of white, Anglo-Saxon

Americanism with the assumption of white supremacy. If

laws protect other racial groups without extending the same protections to whites, then those laws are unfair

(even if they protect those other groups from white racism). That the white sense of fairness should trump the evidence of white discrimination against African

Americans and other non-whites is a bald attempt to assert white privilege; Chenoweth and Craig do not even feel the need to provide evidence in support of their implied claim about oppression of Anglo Saxons. If alive today.

Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans could be no more frank.

No one should be surprised to know that Chenoweth has been associated with the so-called unorganized militia movement

421 and praised by at least one racist tabloid for her "race-

based politics" (Mathis lA).

Despite my use of Pat Buchanan as an example

throughout this dissertation, his Klannishness is slightly

less obvious than that of Chenoweth and Craig. A two-time

Republican presidential candidate, Buchanan's significant

primary support in the 1992 campaign embarrassed sitting

GOP president George Bush. In 1996, Buchanan won the New

Hampshire Republican primary before eventually losing the

GOP presidential nomination to U.S. Senator Bob Dole.

Buchanan has never been linked to the Klan or any other patently racist organization, and he has dismissed campaign volunteers who have been associated with such organizations. In opposing the NAFTA free trade agreement, he has occasionally referred to NAFTA as wrongly hurting non-whites. Buchanan specifically promises to speak "for those who have no voice in

America," including "minority Americans" and poor women, during a 1996 South Carolina presidential primary debate

(hereafter, SC).^'^ In short, calling Buchanan a Klan sympathizer without providing evidence of such sympathies would be angrily denounced as unfair by both Buchanan and his supporters.

However, evidence of Buchanan's Klannishness is available in his campaign discourse. Despite his attempts

422 to suggest inclusiveness and compassion, Buchanan's opposition to affirmative action and antipathy to most welfare programs does not seem conducive to representing the voiceless; he referred to some welfare programs as encouraging "anti-social behavior" in a 1996 Arizona presidential primary debate (hereafter, AZ). He has defended the flying of the Confederate battle flag as symbolizing a "heritage" equivalent to that of the civil rights movement: "My friends, there is room in America for the fighting song of the civil rights movement, 'We Shall

Overcome'. There's got to be room for 'Dixie', as well"

(SC).

Perhaps most remarkable in Buchanan's campaign discourse is his advocacy of a "security fence" to be built across the U.S. border with Mexico. This fence, to be monitored by the military, would keep out illegal

Mexican immigrants. As Buchanan explains,

the Constitution obligates the President and Congress to defend the states of the American union from foreign invasion. And when you have one, two, three million people walking across your border a year, breaking your laws, you have an invasion. . . . The immigration laws are being violated .... 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 walking across every weekend, most coming for work, some coming f'or [sic] crime, some coming for welfare. I have said this, within six months I will stop the illegal immigration from the southern border of this country cold. I will do it with a security fence . . . (AZ).

423 Moreover, Buchanan's security fence is also a device for

fighting the war on drugs: ”[Y]ou've really got to make an

all-out effort at the . . . border to stop the drugs from

coming into . . . the United States. And we're going to

. . . build a security fence along the Mexican border, whence most of these drugs now come" (SC).

The uses to which affirmative action, welfare reform, and the Confederate flag have been put in the contemporary politics of race have been analyzed elsewhere (e.g., see

West; Patricia J. Williams). As a presidential candidate with national media exposure, Buchanan is only one of the best known of many political candidates who are playing the so-called "race card." Moreover, Buchanan's security fence demonstrates his commitment to the old-fashioned union of nativism and racism. Despite the contributions of immigrants, even illegal immigrants, to U.S. economic activity, Buchanan concentrates instead on the criminal character of such immigration. Not only are these immigrants illegal by definition, but they also cross the borders to commit crimes or to collect welfare benefits, which is itself a kind of "theft" from taxpayers.

Ignoring the enormous guantities of illegal drugs shipped via boat or plane— or produced inside the United States—

Buchanan also indicates that his fence will stop or greatly reduce illegal drug trafficking, another kind of

424 crime. While the primary crime of these immigrants is

being born into poverty, Buchanan de-emphasizes this

problem to blame Mexican nationals for the audacity of

wanting to claim some of the most miserable, menial jobs

available in the United States.

Alas, Buchanan is not content to emphasize the criminal activity of these immigrants. While one can

justify building a security fence to keep out criminals,

Buchanan goes a step further by attributing a menacing

intent to these Mexicans, who are mounting a "foreign invasion" into the United States. Remember, these immigrants are "walking across" the border by the thousands, suggesting the orderly march of an advancing army. Whether criminals or not, individual immigrants have only their personal motives for trying to move across the U.S. border. Not so with a foreign, invading force, which has a collective purpose inimical to the well-being of that which is invaded. To accuse Mexican immigrants of invading the United States by the thousands is to suggest the grandest of organized conspiracies. By referring to the Constitution and defending the union from foreign invasion, Buchanan intimates that these immigrants are not immigrants at all, but a depersonalized, malevolent force bent on doing harm. In Buchanan's world, illegal Mexican immigrants are the modern equivalent of yesterday's yellow

425 hordes. Whether based on racism or a desire to preserve

U.S. culture (see Greene, "Malthusian”), Buchanan's

vilification of the alien other suggests that nativism did

not die with the decline of Klan membership in the late

1920s or the late 1960s.

I do not wish to suggest that opposition to

affirmative action and welfare programs necessarily is

racist, or that U.S. immigration policy could never

benefit from reform. I would not argue that the

Confederate battle flag has no place in U.S. history,

though I would assert that flying it atop any state capitol is an affront to all African Americans and others who reject the white supremacy for which the flag has been made to stand. Generally, these are difficult questions of public policy on which people of good will might disagree. Nevertheless, on these questions politicians like Chenoweth, Craig, and Buchanan have demonstrated the durability of Klan principles, now taking the form of

Klannishness, whether in political campaign discourse or in everyday life.

Anti-Klan Activism and Postmodern Klannishness

The frontispiece for this dissertation points to a central concern, perhaps the central concern, for Klan opponents. The Klan has waxed and waned ever since the

426 nineteenth century, but it has shown no signs since World

War Two of returning to its political prominence of the

1920s. However, both Hiram Wesley Evans and the editors of the Nation indicate that the Klan poses a threat to the polis that goes beyond the number of Klan applications

filled out in a given year. While Senator Joe McCarthy's paranoia about Communist fellow travelers never was grounded in substantive evidence that such people existed or posed a threat, the extent of white racism in the 1990s suggests that Klannish sympathies are found among millions of U.S. citizens who would hasten to condemn the Klan and would deny accusations of intolerance (Feagin and Vera).

Such sympathies should concern us because they presumably would make audiences more receptive to Klannish rhetorics and policies.

Notwithstanding the small membership of various U.S.

Klan organizations in the 1990s, I contend that the Klan remains a threat to women, gays, lesbians, non-whites and all those defined by the Klan as "other." While this threat is often immediate and violent, it more often is the result of a comparatively subtle Klannishness, defined as adherence to the core Klan principles described above while denying any current Klan connection. Such Klannish rhetorics are manifested in a multiplicity of idioms that cross the usual ideological and political party lines in

427 the United States. After the civil rights movement of the

1960s, such rhetorics usually do not make their

Klannishness obvious, in the fashion of the white- supremacist Citizens' Councils formed in the 1950s. The persistent reappearance of Klannishness in a dizzying variety of idioms suggests that Klannishness is part of the unstable and mutating postmodern landscape. The genre theory described in this dissertation provides one approach to analyzing contemporary discourse for sometimes-subtle signs of Klannish influence.

Beyond the suggestion made previously, I wish to conclude this dissertation with five suggestions for anti-

Klan activists and public intellectuals. I hope that these suggestions are immediately practical and free from any hint of the tediousness that often permeates academic discourse. First, those who wish to combat racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant sentiment should be alert to the imbrication of rules historically associated with the

Klan in contemporary discourse. Despite the Klan's own borrowing and evolution (e.g., abandoning anti-

Catholicism, embracing heterosexism), there are running themes in the 130-year history of Klan rhetoric with which we should be familiar. When revealed, these continuities can demonstrate the Klannish character of many contemporary rhetorical artifacts, and demonstration of

428 such Klannishness could inspire some of those who embrace

such artifacts to rethink their positions.

Second, we should not mistake an individual's subject position or life history for Klan (or anti-Klan) rhetoric.

For example, the rules governing the production of racist discourse are not germane only to the Klan and other white-supremacist groups, as the examples above demonstrate. Those rules may be found in surprising places; they are not the property of any one region, organization, or social class.

Third, the rhetorical features of the most successful

Ku Klux Klan movement, the 1920s Klan of Simmons and

Evans, are still commonplace today. Law and order was a selling point for Richard Nixon; traditional womanhood remains a central theme for Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle

Forum; white-supremacist remarks can be overheard in supermarkets and restaurants in every part of the country, despite almost a generation of multicultural education and strong messages advocating racial tolerance. The absence of explicit Klan activity in a community is no necessary indication that the Klan's ideology (as evidenced in discourse) has no influence.

Fourth, Klan critics must be especially sensitive to depictions of history (or its irrelevance) as manifested in Klan or Klannish discourse. As historians like J. H.

429 Plumb have shown, the past can be an important resource

for those advocating the most repugnant of policies. A

historical consciousness is no guarantee of progressive

tendencies, as J. C. Barr's remarks concerning the

essentially white and Protestant character of Americanism

should demonstrate. Such interpretations of the past

should be examined critically and rebutted when

appropriate. In contrast, when disadvantageous to their

causes, rhetors like Frank Tripp and David Duke are only

too happy to forget history. Reminders that history

deserves our continued scrutiny in the present also can be

a valuable resource for opposing the Klan. These

precautions concerning history are also applicable to the

(typically selective) use of science to support Klannish claims.

Fifth, we should carefully examine the use of

culturally significant signs— what Michael Calvin McGee would call ideographs— in Klannish rhetorics. This is

particularly important because such ideographs frequently have ever-shifting significations (e.g., "equality,"

"liberty"). The Klan of the 1920s thrived in part because

it was associated with many ideographs that had a positive valence at the time (e.g., "American," "white supremacy").

One task of the critic or activist is to investigate the

links built between Klannishness and such ideographs.

430 problematizing either those linkages or the ideographs

themselves. For example, when Klannish rhetors defend

racist principles as fundamentally American, the activist

should point out that any exclusion of African Americans

from standing as "American" seems absurd on its face.

Implications for Research and Pedagogy

A final generic requirement of the doctoral dissertation is the discussion of implications for research and teaching that are suggested by my analysis.

Some of these implications already have been adumbrated in my analysis above.

First, whether in the classroom or in conducting research, scholars need to avoid the easy assumption that

Klan and Klan-identified rhetors are unsophisticated or incapable of rhetorical subtlety. Almost thirty years after the heyday of the civil rights movement, activists in Louisiana were surprised and frustrated by David Duke's rhetorical competence, at least where appeals to working- class white auditors were concerned. My greatest initial surprise in studying the Klan was the ability of many past and present Klan rhetors to weave together a complicated series of ideographs and appeals that continue to have considerable potential for influencing (white) audiences.

That an audience of left-liberal academics, among whom I

431 include myself, think the Klan so thoroughly wrong about just about everything does not mean that we can dismiss

Klan arguments with little consideration. To do so would underestimate the potential influence that Klan rhetoric might exert at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

Second, my analysis of the twentieth-century Ku Klux

Klan has concentrated on a very few rhetorical artifacts, with almost no attention given to sixty years of Klan activity between the late 1920s and the late 1980s.

Further confirmation of my conclusions about the common features of Klan rhetoric would be useful. A comprehensive rhetorical history of the Klan has yet to written, and such a history is needed. As one of

America's longest-lived and most destructive social movements, the Klan deserves further attention from communication scholars. In the classroom, instructors in public address or rhetorical history courses should not slight the importance of studying the Ku Klux Klan, even though one can understand the preference of such instructors for working through more pleasant and admirable materials with their students.

Third, any theoretical claim made on the basis of a case study of a single movement, no matter how comprehensive the evaluation of the case study.

432 necessarily risks the possibility that the material

studied was somehow idiosyncratic and yielded conclusions

that are difficult to generalize. The conclusions drawn

here concerning genre theory need additional testing and

clarification to demonstrate their value for rhetorical

criticism and/or pedagogy. For example, whether in the classroom or in some theory-building effort, scholars might try to envision the conditions for a satisfactory

litigation more completely and satisfactorily than does this dissertation or the work of Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard.

Fourth, especially in the classroom and in activism, my conclusions about the recurrent features of Klan rhetoric and how we should respond to Klan rhetorics need to be tested and revised accordingly. The relative success of David Duke in electoral politics and the rise of new white-supremacist groups like the Aryan Nation indicate that responding to Klan rhetoric is not only a classroom exercise, even at a time when, numerically, the

Klan is almost dead. Klan rhetoric is still with us, and

Klannishness remains a disturbingly common feature of our rhetorical milieu. As I have suggested, those who wish to oppose the Klan and, even more importantly, to criticize

Klannishness need to reflect further on their rhetorical options for doing so. Public intellectuals and activists have not been particularly successful in demonstrating the

433 Klannishness of much of what now passes for public deliberation in the United States.

The Klan has been with us in one way or another for

130 years. It is with us still. In many ways, it remains a synecdoche for the worst that America has to offer. If the Klan and Klannishness are to be un-American, the next generation will have to construct a new American identity, one that makes the likes of the Klan unintelligible to our children and our children's children.

434 Notes

^ "Reviving the Ku Klux Klan" 434.

2 The Ku Klux Klan in the City 1915-1930 xv.

In Chapter One, I admitted that I sometimes refer to "discourse" when discussing situations or ideas that also are applicable to non-discursive rhetorics. I continue to do so in this chapter. I acknowledge that wearing a Klan robe or throwing human feces at an anti-war protest is an example of a rhetoric conforming to the demands of an idiom.

^ Both the modern and the postmodern are genres; attempts by scholars like Steven Best and Douglas Kellner to describe the postmodern admit to the possibility of "genre-alizing" about postmodernity. Modernity requires the search for justified and true metanarratives and embraces the development of systems to guide decision making. In contrast, postmodernity is associated with the rejection of such systems and championing local knowledge claims whose systemic imperatives have not been reduced to grandiose prescriptives for finding the true and the good. Nevertheless, the postmodern still has its rules (however unstable), its idioms, and its genre.

^ "Disagreement" 307.

® van Eemeren and Grootendorst's pragma-dialectical model for argument, complete with its ten rules for critical discussion, is well known among argumentation theorists. Examples of their rules include "parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints" (Rule 1) and "a party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point" (Rule 6). Brian R. McGee and Greggory Simerly have criticized the pragma-dialectical model for paying insufficient attention to local, context-specific concerns and giving short shrift to ethos and pathos in argumentation.

^ Reagan's presidential candidacy was endorsed in late July, 1980, by the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which claimed that the "Republican platform reads as if it were written by a Klansman" (qtd. in "'Racism'" 7). On August 5, 1980, Reagan rejected the endorsement: "I have no tolerance with what the Klan

435 represents and I want nothing to do with it" (qtd. in "'Racism'" 7).

® The political advantages of such labeling are not restricted only to the left. In 1988, the Bush presidential campaign's demonization of liberals and liberalism seemed to influence some voters. The fury of the attack on liberals at the time paralleled the 1920s Klan attack on liberals in some respects (see Chapter Five). In 1992, successful Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton won election as a "moderate"— the most vacuous and nugatory of political ideographs— who steadfastly resisted the liberal label.

^ Such announcements need not be discursive. Wearing a Klan robe, a kind of visual rhetoric, also signals the commitment of the robe wearer to following the requirements of a Klan genre. The existence of such a presupposition rule that guides rhetorical production is the only thing that necessarily separates Klan and "Klannish" genres, as I explained in Chapter Six.

Genres predicated only on a rhetor's subject position typically are of little intellectual interest. One can imagine a generic category called "Brian McGee's rhetoric," but I cannot guess how such a genre would be helpful or important to anyone not required to associate with me.

"Whiteness" and "blackness" in the U.S. imaginary have been notoriously elastic concepts, changing with time and place. In her Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison argues that the construction of Africanness has been essential to the (white) sense of American identity:

Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom. (7)

Like many of the other principles listed here, allegiance to white supremacy hardly is limited to Klan members. Many of those who denounced the Klan in the 1920s, including pro-Jim Crow Southern newspaper editors,

436 would have agreed with Lothrop Stoddard that "the white races [have] pressed to the front and proved in a myriad ways their fitness for the hegemony of mankind [sic]" (Rising 299). According to Stoddard, the "rising tide" of non-white races was threatening by 1922 to overwhelm the "superior" white breed with higher birth rates.

On 1920s Klan methods of covering up violent activities, see Nancy MacLean CBehind 168-173).

My quotations from Buchanan are drawn from the 1996 presidential primary debates in South Carolina and Arizona. Transcripts for both debates were taken from the "Current News" library of the Lexis/Nexis full-text database. The February 29, 1996, transcript of the South Carolina debate is attributed to the Cable News Network (Transcript # 717-1). The February 23, 1996, transcript of the Arizona debate comes from the Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.

437 APPENDIX A

SERMON OF FRANK TRIPP, 1922

This appendix contains the entire verbatim text of an article printed in the March 3, 1922, Morehouse Enterprise. Most or all of Reverend Tripp's pro-Klan sermon of the previous Sunday appeared in this text. 1 have reproduced the article here because it is not widely available and because of the poor quality of extant microfilm copies of the paper. No author was listed for this article, which appeared on the newspaper's first page. A few days before Tripp delivered this sermon, on February 22, the Monroe, Louisiana, Ku Klux Klan in neighboring Ouachita Parish had sponsored a large parade, in which hundreds of Morehouse Parish Klansmen allegedly participated. The pro-Klan editor of the Enterprise estimated that 600 to 800 Klan members participated in the parade while "many thousands" observed ("Monroe Ku Klux" 2 ).

Newspaper: Morehouse Enterprise (Bastrop, LA) Title: MONROE BAPTIST PASTOR DELIVERS SERMON ON K.K. Date: March 3, 1922

"The Parade as 1 saw It Pass" was the subject of a sermon delivered by Rev. Frank Tripp, pastor of the First Baptist church of Monroe, Sunday night, in which the Monroe pastor gave consideration of the Ku Klux Klan.

"1 want to say unhesitatingly and unqualifiedly that 1 am 100 per cent for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan," said Pastor Tripp, "and 1 join them hand and heart with all other moral forces of Monroe to make our city a better place in which to live."

The church building was packed, it being estimated that 800 persons heard the sermon. The crowd at one point in the sermon broke into cheers that shook the building.

438 "As I stood on the corner of DeSiard and St. John streets last Wednesday evening at 7:30 and watched the parade of the members of the Ku Klux Klan," said Rev. Tripp, "I had an impression first of all that there is such an organization now existing and operating in the City of Monroe, and the parish of Ouachita. The appearance of these hooded gentlemen on the streets leaves no doubt in the minds of our citizens that we have such an organization on our hands and whether the public wants to or not, we have to do with this organization.

"I also discovered that they were not few in number. If the purposes and plans of the organization as expressed on the written banners borne by the Klansmen are true, I am persuaded that they are law-abiding citizens and wnat [sic] to enforce the law and not destroy it; that they want to co-operate with our officers in their program of law enforcement and not to do anything that will conflict with such efforts.

"I am sure that the people of our city and parish will have a different attitude toward the organization than they have maintained in the past. Some have regarded them to be promoters of mob violence and opposed to law and order, but judging from their expressed purposes, that impression is far from right. I am of the opinion that this parade will do more toward bettering the moral conditions of Monroe than anything, aside from the efforts our churches, that has happened in many years. A concerted effort on the part of this organization with its select men of our community and our churches is bound to get results.

"As I watched the parade pass by (and I DID watch it pass), I had a vision. In this, I imagined if all the criminals could be corraled [sic] on DeSiard street that we would yet, as a great Christian people, have to perform the supreme duty, which would be to give them 'another chance.' I am for the rigid and conscientious enforcement of all criminall [sic] laws which I believe is the only remedy for the unpleasant conditions that exist, but after the criminal has been run down and punishment provided by the law has been inflicted, then it is my business, and the business of every other Christian man and woman [sic] to see that he or she has the privilege of coming back and making good. The spirit of 'giving a man another chance' was tried out in the life and ministry of the Man of Nazareth. He is our example and if we would reform the City of Monroe and the Parish of Ouachita, with a

439 reformation that will last, we must apply the principles of the Christian religion in all of our efforts."

440 APPENDIX B

ADDRESS OF J.C. BARR, 1923

This appendix contains the entire verbatim text of an article printed in the February 14, 1923, News-Star of Monroe, Louisiana. I have reproduced the article here because it is not widely available and because of the poor quality of extant microfilm copies of the paper. No author was listed for this article, which appeared on the newspaper's first and fifth pages.

Newspaper: Monroe News-Star (LA) Title: KLAN TENETS GIVEN AT MONROE MEETING BY N. ORLEANS MAN. More than Thousand Hear Rev. J.C. Barr at Roof Garden Last Night. INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS BY KLAN'S SPOKESMAN. Date: February 14, 1923

It is estimated that 1000 or more persons availed themselves of the opportunity of listening to Rev. J.C. Barr, Presbyterian minister from New Orleans, who spoke Wednesday night at the Ouachita Roof Garden under the auspices of Monroe Klan No. 4 in defense of Klan principles and condemnation of influences which he claims are at work to wreck the fundamental principles of America.

Nearly 800 chairs were provided last night for the audience and these were occupied long before the hour announced. The crowds continued to arrive in relays, keeping the elevators busy, until the very moment when Dr. Bar opened his address. There was a continuous line from the entrance to the roof garden, where many were compelled to stand during the evening, all along the walls, and every available table and place which might serve as a seat, being utilized.

Half of those present were women and girls, many who attended unchaperoned.

441 Barr Introduced

R.W. Germany, in a brief address introduced Dr. Barr.

He expressed himself as feeling proud to be able to be a member of an organization which numbered on its roster such men as Dr. Barr.

The speaker, explained Klansman Germany, did not intend to apologize for any acts of the order. He declared that if one-tenth of what had been said and written about the Ku Klux Klan, were true, [neither] he, nor Dr. Barr, would speak in its behalf.

"If we have erred," declared Klansman Germany, "we are ready to make good. Doubtless we have men in our organization who have erred. The Klan probably more than any other body of men, has been cussed, discussed, and condemned. It is a human organization, liable to commit mistakes, but nevertheless it claims to be built and organized on the principles of the Constitution for which we are fighting, and on the teachings of Christ."

Amid the applause of those present Klansman Germany asserted that if the mask "of which so much is talked [BEGIN PAGE FIVE] about" must come off, it will be taken off by the members and not by anybody else.

"We the [sic] pledged," continued Mr. Germany, "to uphold the principles of the Constitution and the cherished rights of our country. When the Ku Klux Klan takes its mask off, it will have done so with the unanimous consent of its membership."

Following a brief reference to the excellence of the speaker, Mr. Germany introduced Rev. Barr who spoke as follows :

Rev. Barr's Address

Yesterday was Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Within ten days, we shall celebrate again the birthday of George Washington. These two mighty characters stand out not only in the history of America, but in the annals of the race. They tower. The further we get away from them the more towering they appear. I am reminded of a vision that I had a number of years ago in Switzerland, where we had waited beside Lake Thun for a considerable number of weeks. The mists were over the line, and all seemed level, but late one evening suddenly the clouds parted.

442 the heavens were opened and there was before us the transforming vision of the Ung Frau, and just against that mighty peak the Eliger.

The significance of America is in the fact that these are her product; and these are not her sole product, for I would rather have as a comparison another vision that broke one day upon us as we stood in the city of Berne, and looked out on the Bernese Oberland, and beheld peak on top of peak, range added in range, as far as the eye could see. America is great, not simply in the extent of her territory, and in the richness of her natural resources, and in the strength of her material effects, magnificent as these are. Primarily America has her place among the nations because of the spirit of her people, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were not accidental. They are typical, and we love them, and honor them, and the world rejoices in them because they are mighty exponents of a type of manhood.

Now as we come to consider tonight America between the birthdays of the two greatest Americans, there must dawn on us the realization of the fact that here lie great fundamental causes that find their manifestation in our nation that make us different, and I want to talk to you tonight about three of the outstanding possessions of Americanism. Let us remeber [sic] that (l) America has a history; (2) America has a flag, and (3) America has a religion.

When we trace the story of our nation, we are lead [sic] into the old lands, and we find that those who first came to our shores were themselves the product of great causes. America did not come to be by haphazard. Indeed, she owes her being on the human side to a great Frenchmen [sic]. Admiral Coligny, who conceived the idea and undertook to propagate it, of a great Protestant power in the new found world. He not only conceived the idea, but he arranged much of the plan and started in to the fulfillment of it, but when that fateful night came that is known as "St. Bartholomew's", he and thirty thousand Hugenots [sic] were put to the sword, and out of that dismal and horrible event came woe to France, for had she been able to avoid that awful massacre, as far as the human eye can see, this land, our America, would still have been a Protestant land, but it would have been a French speaking land. Coligny died, but his idea lived, and you and I are taken back into Holland, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland to get the sources out of which the streams have run to make America.

443 It was in 1607 that the first Anglo-Saxon venture was made. They settled at Jamestown, Virginia. And in 1620 they were followed by another band in the "Mayflower" thta [sic] landed at Plymouth. Keep these matters in mind, for no man can understand American until he knows her sources, and they have been essentially Christian, and essentially Protestant from the beginning.

And that Jesuit priest that recently reminded his people that we are coming into an inevitable contest between what he was pleased to call traditional Americanism and modern Americanism knew whereof he spoke. In this great conflict, ideal and real Americanism has the advantage that always belongs to the original owner. Let the real Americans make the most of this advantage.

We need to go into the development of that history. The colonists came where they could find a place where they could worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. You will remember that that Pilgrim band did not come immediately to America. They spent years in Holland. Their expedition to America meant a grim fight from the beginning, but they had faith in God and through that faith won a heritage that in its lordly grandeur surpasses, [sic] that which belongs to any other people. They had to battle in the night as well as in the day against wild men, wild animals and all manner of foes, both seen and unseen. With one hand they fought the Immediate [sic] foe, and with the other the distant but ferocious tyranny from which they had fled across the sea.

Then come on down to the Revolution, and consider it in its transforming, uplifting power. Concededly [sic] it is one of the mightiest efforts in the history of our race. Make the comparison between the Revolution led by George Washington and the French Revolution that followed a few years later. Ours was constructive, blessed by the Spirit of God in generous restraint, and you and I can look back and marvel that mere men should have laid such a foundation and then built such a structure as America has proved to be.

And so we come on down into the great struggle that produced Abraham Lincoln. Humanity will ever rejoice that those years of internecine warfare when a nation was about to be torn to pieces, resulted, instead of epochal destruction, in the birth of a nation.

America has a flag. Beautiful among the emblems of the nations is our flag. There it floats with its white

444 stars, its blue field, and its red and white stripes! Its real beauty, however, is in that which it represents.

It stands in the first place for the sovereignty of the individual. Men in other lands have thought that their benefactors were those that ruled over them. It has been given us to know the sovereignty of the individual man. Our flag stands not for the divine right of kings, but for the divine right of the people, who are the source of all authority. Our rulers are not our masters; we elect them, we give them a limitation both in power and in time of service. Our flag stands for that.

It stands for the glorious principle of the separation of church and state. America has proven the possibility and the worth of "a free state and a free church." Each is in a separate realm. Each is the good friend of the other. Each recognizes the use and the place of the other. That in itself justifies the flying of Old Glory.

That flag stands for free speech. It makes every man responsible for what he says. If you want to find an elemental cause in the building up of this great people, you may behold it in the "right of free speech."

This country of ours stands for a free press. Not only the right to speak; [sic] but also the right to print and the right to publish, with no man to make afraid. It is difficult for you and me to climb back into the conditions that existed before the days of the printing press. All of our conceptions, our life, our all, in America, owe their rise and persistence to a free press.

Our flag stands for the free public school. You cannot have a citizenship that is worthy of the name without intelligence, and you cannot make use of that intelligence unless you train it. America found that out early in her battles against enemies within and without. The free school is one of her largest contributions to humanity. When I say a free school, I mean more than a school to which children can go without paying money. I mean a school where American ideals will be taught, where truth will be taught, hewing to the line, letting the chips fall where they may.

Now it stands to reason that a flag that represents such principles would have to be carried through many a cannonade, and go over many a battlefield, and you and I need not think that that precious emblem has been put into

445 our hands simply to watch it. It has its enemies, and its bitterest enemies, according to the man who helped lift it himself, Lafayette, are the enemies from within. It is those who have come in to enjoy our hospitality and occasionally think they can take possession of the house. It is like the story I heard about the German who was on a departing ferry, and who cried to a belated companion who came running-down the approach after the ferry was under way. The German yelled "Yoomp Reinrich. Yoomp. You can make it in two yoomps." We stand here to serve notice that that flag is going to fly and anybody who intends to pull it down or change that for which it stands will have to take two "yoomps." And we know that one of these yoomps" will be interrupted by a splash. It becomes wearisome, friends, to listen to some of these hyphenated Americans. They tell us we cannot enforce the prohibition law; that we cannot enforce the principles of our constitution, and they make us very weary. They also make us very angry— just how angry they may soon find out.

America has a religion. America is relgious [sic]. Some of our friends who will insist on the hyphen, are making great mistake of overlooking that fact. America hasn't got a "church." But America has a religion. America is religious. And I think we have gotten into some of the troubles in which we find ourselves because there has been a lack of clear thinking upon this point. Do I have to argue that America is religious? Mr. Harding made a request that he should have the privilege of being sworn in on the Bible that was used by George Washington. America is religious. She not only stands by great political principles, but she stands for faith in Almighty God. What is it we have on our money? "In God We Trust." Mr. Roosevelt concluded once that no future coin, silver or gold, should bear it. Then congress took a hand, and both houses by a large majority decided that the words should remain on the coins. These words mean what they say. I was sent as a representative to one of the great conventions of the Federated Churches of Christ that met during the war in Pittsburg [sic]. There came a man before that body asking that a petition be endorsed requesting the president to set apart a day for humiliation, fasting and prayer. There came a day when the president, under the direction of both houses of congress ordered such a day to be set apart— a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. You will find that that day synchronizes almost to the minute with the turning of the tide of the war at Chateau Thierry. God has led us, righted us, and used us, and every true American wants Him still to be our King. America is

446 religious. Not only in the consciousness of her people, but in the life of her institutions. If you want to know what it is that has gotten us into some of our present troubles, I believe you will find among other reasons that it is our recent weakness, politically, in regard to the Word of God. A nation cannot live without God. Are we not ready here, as Americans, to signify to one another and to the world that our hope is in God? We are not content simply to say that there is a God. We believe we have a connection with Him. That His truth is our portion, that His power can be depended upon. And if any man were to ask me what is going to happen should the Ku Kulx [sic] Klan decide to take off its mask, I will tell him what I told a prominent editor of a religious paper recently. I said, "Do you know what is going to be seen when the Ku Klux Klan takes off its mask?" "Oh, no, what will we see?" You will see the American flag, the Holy Bible, and the fiery cross. And that's why our organization goes on. That's why it grows by leaps and bounds. That's why each chapter that is added to its persecution increases its enthusiasm and its numbers.

Then what is your duty and mine as we stand in this solemn moment between the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington? That good gentleman who spoke his gracious words of introduction went home with me last night, and as we were on the way, said "We need to educate and train." It will pay us to turn aside for a little while again, to seek out the sources of our nation, to view again her flag, and to worship in sincerity her God. We need to be educated and trained. These periods of intensity through which we are passing are going to present to us the reason for there having come upon us in compelling us to educate ourselves and one another in the glorious truths and principles that belong to us as a nation.

What else do we need? We need to get better acquainted. There is a man in Old Hickory No. 1 who tells that in Pulaski during Reconstruction, they had 1,700 members,and every man knew every other man. Not only knew his face, his voice, but knew his life, loved him, was knit together with him. These formed a compact, unbreakable band. Now today we have all kinds of orders, and isn't it something to thank God for that we have an "American" order. An order in which Americans shall meet one another, plan with each other, get to know each other, and be welded into one. Recently the library on which Abraham Lincoln fed was again published. It contained the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Weem's Life of Washington, and a

447 history of the United States, with Shakespeare's works. One of the stories that he got out of Aesop's, was one that no doubt steadied him during that awful crisis of the war. It was about the man who had seven sons, and who called them together and handed them in turn a bundle of seven sticks, asking them to break these. Each tried to break them and failed. Then the father took the bundle and separatd [sic] the sticks, and easily broke each stick separately, telling them the moral, "in union there is strength." We must not deceive ourselves. An occasion like this is not incidental, it is not accidental. There is a tremendous [illegible] in America today, and much that you and I hold dear is waiting for its re establishment .

I cannot close without laying before some of those who have latterly come within our gates, take the benefits and privileges of free America and are now trying to change the spirit of our people [to theirs?]. There are our Jewish friends. Now, I remind them that this is the one nation in all history that has not persecuted the Jew. The Jew has here had his rights. There are here no ghetto, no pogrom. We ask him to look in all thoughtfulness at these institutions of ours and ask him again whether he can find it in his heart to raise his voice, or to raise his hand against these sacred institutions that have made America what she is.

I want to say just a word to our Catholic friends. We ask them to be our friends. We are their friends. We want them to be Americans. Some of them are. We have no quarrel with the Catholics. If you would ask me what I am, I would tell you that I am a Catholic, but not a Roman Catholic. And we kindly and lovingly and, if you please, firmly, invite our friends to be simply Catholics, and to please leave the Roman off when it comes to political relationships. Was it Abraham Lincoln who said "America cannot exist half slave and half free?" Is it too late to intimate that it is impossible for us to be Americans in the absolute sense of the word, and to be anything else politically. Just as long as there is propaganda to put the [illegible] spirit of America under control of any man, or sect, ie. [sic] that be spiritual head or temporal king, or both, that propaganda must be met and crushed if that free spirit is to be preserved.

America should be absolutely first and last all the time. The Declaration of Independence meant a Revolution. And if the reannouncement of it means another revolution, then in the name of God, let's have it.

448 America has a Bible, and God helping us Americans, we are going to try to crush the evils that have crept into our body politic and into our homes by putting that Holy Word back not only into the home but into our schools. And no system that cannot live in the light of that Word need think that the American people will sit idly by while that Book is removed from its original and rightful place in the life of our nation.

We know where we are going, and in prayer to God, with charity to all, and malice toward none, we will make that goal.

449 APPENDIX C

STUDYING THE OTHER?:

A REVIEW OF RESEARCH ON THE KU KLUX KLAN

In early January, 1995, Newt Gingrich, newly elected

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, suffered his first post-election political setback when embarrassing revelations regarding his choice for House historian were published by the national press. Dr. Christina Jeffrey, an old Gingrich friend, allegedly suggested in 1986 that a proposed junior-high history curriculum was flawed because it failed to include the point of view of Nazis and the

Ku Klux Klan on the question of race. Gingrich was near the peak of his influence in January, yet his political popularity was not sufficient to save Jeffrey's appointment. There were no impassioned pleas by Gingrich concerning the marketplace of ideas, and no one suggested that Jeffrey only was demanding the same treatment for the

Klan given by historians to other, unpopular groups (e.g., the Know-Nothing Party or Eugene V. Debs's socialists).

Representing a Klan perspective as worthy of inclusion in a history curriculum was deemed sufficient to warrant

450 Jeffrey's removal from the public spotlight after she

served only seven days as House historian.^

This odd footnote to the first weeks for a new

Congress demonstrates the peculiar hold that the Klan has on the American imagination. The Klan's political

influence peaked in the mid 1920s and has been minimal outside the South since the 1930s. After the organization's sharp membership decline in the early

1970s, the Klan has been limited to fomenting sporadic violence and staging "media events" at rallies or marches where protesters almost always outnumber Klan supporters.

After the civil rights era of the 1960s made public expressions of racism unpopular, membership in the Klan became a liability for anyone with an interest in elected office or public service; even David Duke has publicly renounced his former Klan associations. Today, the nationwide membership of the Ku Klux Klan numbers only a few thousand, if law-enforcement and Anti-Defamation

League estimates are trustworthy (Stanton; George and

Wilcox). However, despite the decline of the Klan's membership and influence over a period of several decades, referring to the need for representing the point of view of the Klan (and its sibling organizations) in history courses still cost an otherwise-qualified political appointee her position.

451 The material in this appendix fulfills the usual

requirement that a dissertation review the subject-matter

literature pertinent to the rhetorical artifacts studied.

Such a review ensures that the doctoral candidate does not

replicate unknowingly a study that already has been

conducted. Beyond meeting this pro forma requirement,

this appendix has two goals. First, it demonstrates the

limits of our understanding of the rhetoric of racism in general and Ku Klux Klan rhetoric in particular. Second,

it provides an "outsider's" perspective on academic debates in history and political sociology over the Klan's

influence on U.S. society. I will ask whether or not past research on the Klan provides a satisfactory explanation for Jeffrey's dismissal as House historian.

Research on the Klan: An Overview

There is a considerable body of literature dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan, ranging from the earliest nineteenth- century polemics, such as Beard's K.K.K. Sketches (1877), to a series of recent works signaling a renewed interest in Klan scholarship. In addition to the expected secondary sources, Klan members have produced and continue to produce a wide array of rhetorical artifacts, which serve as primary sources for this study. Given the enormous number of entries in extant bibliographies of

452 Klan material, this literature review is admittedly

superficial.2 Lenwood G. Davis, Janet L. Sims-Wood, and

Marsha L. Moore's bibliography of research on the Klan

lists over 9,700 citations for newspaper articles, books,

pamphlets, master's theses, doctoral dissertations, and

other sources. Even a Klan encyclopedia has been produced

(Newton and Newton). Moreover, in addition to primary and

secondary sources that deal with the Klan directly, an

even larger collection of articles and monographs treats

the Klan in some tangential fashion in discussions of

Southern history, the rhetoric of racism, and so on.

Historically, journalists and political activists

have been the most frequent students of the Ku Klux Klan.

Many book-length Klan studies published since the

nineteenth century have been penned by non-academics

(e.g., Lutholtz). Stetson Kennedy in the 1940s and Jerry

Thompson in 1979-80 were among those who "joined" the Klan

in order to expose Klan activities.^ Also, journalists

like John Maginnis have been among those who scrutinized

the life and ideology of former Klan leader David Duke.

Among activists. Bill Stanton, who once worked for the

Southern Poverty Law Center's "Klanwatch" project, has

recounted in print the anti-Klan efforts in which he was

involved, as has Mab Segrest of North Carolinians Against

Racist and Religious Violence. Multiple essays in Douglas

453 D. Rose's edited volume The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race were written by local Louisiana activists or by journalists, in addition to the original scholarly research published in the Rose book. Finally, the only available biographies of David Duke have been authored by Michael Zatarain, who lists no academic affiliation, and Tyler Bridges, a journalist.

With a few exceptions, this literature review is limited to original research projects written for academic audiences in communication, history, sociology, and political science. While not relying on a systematic citation analysis, I have endeavored to review the most widely cited essays and books on the Klan, especially for disciplines other than communication studies.

Rhetoric and Communication

Given the wide range of research projects pursued by communication scholars, the paucity of disciplinary studies devoted to the Ku Klux Klan is not particularly surprising, especially if one recognizes that there are far fewer communication scholars (at least in the field sometimes called speech communication) than in such disciplines as history and sociology. When a common complaint of senior scholars in communication is that not enough studies of proto-canonical speech texts have been

454 conducted (e.g., William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold"

speech), we might forgive the meager effort so far devoted

to scrutiny of Ku Klux Klan r h e t o r i c . * No book-length

study of the Klan has been published by a communication

scholar.

While the founding of communication's first disciplinary journal, the Quarterly Journal of Public

Speaking (later the Quarterly Journal of Speech). coincided historically with the parturition of the twentieth-century Klan, only one article devoted specifically to the Klan has appeared in the seventy-year history of communication studies. Now over thirty years old, Donald E. Williams's "Protest Under the Cross" provides a traditional, neo-Aristotelian investigation of

Klan speakers and speaking during the 1960 presidential campaign. Relying heavily on Klan quotations culled from

Southern newspapers, Williams focused on the "large-scale problem of ethos" with which the Klan had to cope at that time (46). By 1960, even segregationist Southern newspaper editors were denouncing the Klan, as Williams documented. Given the Klan's "inferiority complex" (48) and ethos problem, Williams concluded that "the Klan in

1960 offered no inviting program of constructive action"

(53) and that "the speeches, the core of the Klan's

455 persuasive effort, were not shaped according to what 1960

demanded" (54).

Following the decline of neo-Aristotelianism as a

critical method, the emergence of the movement study

should have provided a rationale for Klan investigations.

While the first call for movement studies by S. Judson

Crandell in 1947 did not list the Klan among examples of

"social reform movements," Leland M. Griffin's classic

1952 essay, "The Rhetoric of Historical Movements"

provided an expansive definition of historical movements broad enough to encompass the Klan (see Chapter One, n.

21). Moreover, during the heyday of movement studies in the 1970s and early 1980s, rhetoricians occasionally referred to the Klan as a movement. Along with

McCarthyism, Dan F. Hahn and Ruth M. Gonchar labeled the

Klan a "fear-oriented" movement (48), while Malcolm 0.

Sillars cited the Klan and the Black Power movements as examples supporting his rejection of Robert Cathcart's linkage of movements to confrontation (Sillars 25).

Despite this recognition of the Klan as a kind of social movement, a movement study of Klan rhetoric did not appear until 1991. Gregory Robert Miller explicitly conceived of his unpublished dissertation as a movement study, with his announced critical reliance on Kenneth

Burke's dramatism strongly influenced by Griffin's

456 application of dramatism to movement criticism (Griffin,

"Dramatistic”). Conceptualizing the Klan as an exemplar

of white supremacy in American thought, Miller limited

his efforts to the original, nineteenth-century Klan. His

conclusions about the initial success and subsequent

failings of the Klan's "rhetorical drama" led him to

outline the features of the rhetorical situation during

Reconstruction that made the Klan a major force in the history of that era. According to Miller, the decline of the nineteenth-century Klan is coeval with the passage of the first Jim Crow laws in Southern states. While the enactment of such laws allowed the Klan to claim victory, such laws also enshrined white supremacy and, as a consequence, removed a primary motive for continued Klan activity. One of Miller's concluding observations is that

"[f]uture research should also focus on other phases of the Klan's development . . . in the 1920s and 1960s"

(186).5

Although Williams's article and Miller's dissertation are the only two studies in communication to deal explicitly with the Klan, other scholars have studied the rhetoric of racism in ways that illuminate an investigation of Klan rhetoric. For example, Haig

Bosmajian's The Language of Oppression includes a chapter on white racism. Bosmajian's thesis is that white racism

457 is pervasive in the discourse of white Americans, whose language choices reveal their definition of African-

American and other non-white individuals as racially inferior. According to Bosmajian, "as long as language is used to define a people as inferiors and nonpersons, the potential to do massive violence against those so defined is everpresent" (60). Given the use of such language by

Klan members, as well as the continued utilization of racist language without any sense of irony by those who allegedly reject Klan racism, Bosmajian's work is an important resource for rhetorical studies of the Klan.

A more recent monograph by Mark Lawrence McPhail seeks to explicate the connections between rhetoric, racism, and Eurocentric epistemology. According to

McPhail, the argument for a distinct identity is crucial to the development of racism. While McPhail's analysis goes well beyond this focus on identity in the rhetorical and ideological construction of racism, the Klan emphasis on identity politics, with "100-percent Americans" taking on all comers, seems to confirm McPhail's identity thesis and to suggest the utility of McPhail's scholarship for a critical analysis of Klan rhetoric. Celeste Michelle

Condit and John Louis Lucaites's Crafting Equality;

America's Analo-African Word takes a similar position, describing how "the people" historically were defined in

458 ways that excluded African Americans from full citizenship

and participation in the white public sphere.

Research by Historians

While the venerable intellectual history project of

Barnet Baskerville ("Must We") and Ernest Wrage does not have the influence in public address studies that it once did, the importance of historically-informed criticism has not been forgotten in rhetorical and communication studies. Without an understanding of the historical and cultural milieu surrounding the production of their rhetorical artifacts, critics run the risk of reinventing the wheel or, worse, of making crucial analytic e r r o r s . ^

Most Ku Klux Klan research has been done by scholars in history, although much of this research is reported in unpublished theses and dissertations. Many of these unpublished studies concentrate on Klan activities in a specific state or region, such as Kenneth Earl Harrell's dissertation on the Louisiana Klan and Clement Charlton

Moseley's dissertation on the Georgia Klan. Some students of the Klan have been able to interview participants who had first-hand knowledge of the 1920s Klan, as did Embrey

Bernard Howson in the process of collecting data for his thesis on the Ohio Klan. According to F. Mark Cates, in a study of the 1920s Klan, "[t]here were many in Indiana

459 eager to talk about the burning of crosses; some . . . took me into their homes and proudly displayed their hoods and robes, resting at the bottom of trunks for so long"

(15).

While not treating the Klan directly, some students of history have produced background material crucial to any informed study of the Ku Klux Klan. For example, while the Klan had more success outside the South than in the South during the 1920s, studies of Jim Crow legislation in the South help to explain the racial climate that surrounded the re-emergence of the Klan in

Georgia in 1915. Appearing originally in 1954, C. Vann

Woodward's classic study. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, chronicled the emergence of Jim Crow laws in the American

South following the end of the Civil War and discussed the decline of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s. According to

Woodward, the uncompromising Jim Crow model of segregation in the South did not coalesce until over two decades after the end of the Civil War; until that time, there was a period of experimentation and uncertainty regarding the shape of race relations. In another monograph, American

Counterpoint. Woodward traces the intellectual history of the development of Northern and Southern (white) attitudes on chattel slavery and race relations.

460 While not as well known, I. A. Newby's Jim Crow's

Defense provides an excellent summary of the scientific,

historical, and religious arguments used to justify white

superiority and racial segregation. Newby's monograph

supplies an intellectual history of racist thought in the

United States from 1900 through 1930, complete with a

careful cataloging of racist assumptions among the

educated white elite of this period. This scholarship

serves to remind us that overt and persistent white racism was a systemic feature of these decades, rather than belonging exclusively to the uneducated white masses and a

few white Southern intellectuals with an affection for the

"Lost Cause."

In a different vein, Richard Hofstadter's memorable essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" does much to inform my own study. When David Duke portrayed the entire belief system of his white, Louisiana audience and the American political system as threatened by welfare and affirmative action programs, he was not merely mimicking the right-wing rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. In a larger sense, Duke was taking advantage of a recurring

American political tendency, especially on the political right, to wallow in persecution complexes and to take conspiracy theories seriously. Duke is only the latest

Klan or Klan-inspired rhetor to make use of the "paranoid

461 style." To summarize. Woodward, Newby, and Hofstadter

provide vital information for understanding the

intellectual and social environment that has nurtured the

Klan.

An excellent review essay addressing historical

scholarship on the 1920s Klan has been written by Leonard

J. Moore ("Historical"), and I see no reason to replicate

the thoroughness of his effort. According to Moore, Klan

historiography can be divided into two distinct schools of

thought. The first, "traditional" view maintains that the

Klan ranks in the 1920s were filled with the poorly

educated, a congeries of ne'er-do-wells, and those on the economic fringes of society.? In the face of sweeping changes brought about by the industrial revolution,

increasing urbanization, and the emergence of the United

States as a world power, traditionalists argue that the

1920s Klan succeeded for a time because the Klan represented traditional values and argued for the repression of everything different and alien to the white,

Protestant experience. This explanation accounts for the

Klan's unapologetic racism, sexism, and anti-immigration sentiment.

In contrast, Moore identifies a group of "populist revisionists" who suggest that the 1920s Klan was different in character and scope from the vigilante Klans

462 of the 1860s and 1960s. According to Moore, who places himself among these revisionists, the 1920s Klan

(sometimes called the "second" Klan) was less violent than the 1860s and 1960s Klan movements; attracted members who were ordinary white, Protestant citizens; and involved women in auxiliary organizations who could support the expansion of women's rights and various Klan causes without any sense of inconsistency. Moreover, revisionists note that the 1920s Klan had significant support in metropolitan areas, rather than existing primarily as a rural phenomenon. While by no means arguing that the Klan deserves any measure of admiration for its racism, for example, Moore concludes that "[t]he

[traditionalist] argument that the Klan movement can be explained primarily by the 'backwardness' of the Klansmen seems extraordinarily condescending ..." (342).

For the remainder of this subsection, I will use

Moore's distinction to organize my review of Klan studies conducted by historians. After separate discussions of traditionalist and revisionist Klan histories, I will conclude by discussing the continued tensions in these two historiographical traditions. The debate between traditionalists and revisions also is treated in Chapter

Three.

463 The Traditionalists

The traditional account of 1920s Klan success has

been common in unpublished master's theses and doctoral

dissertations on the second Klan. For example, Embrey

Bernard Howson concluded over forty years ago that the

Klan's success in Ohio in the 1920s was the product of a

nativism inspired by religious intolerance. According to

Howson, the Klan was particularly successful in states

like Ohio because of their Bible-belt fundamentalism.®

While acknowledging that the Klan attracted a few upper- class professionals and politicians, Howson concludes in traditionalist fashion that "[t ]he vast majority of

Klansmen, nevertheless, were not members of professional groups, but were recruited from among the intellectually and socially mediocre" (24). Unless written by Klan apologists (e.g., Stanley Frost, Blaine Mast), books, journal articles, and newspaper and magazine stories appearing prior to the 1950s were quite likely to adhere to some version of the traditionalist Klan membership depiction.

One of the best traditionalist Klan histories is

David M. Chalmers's Hooded Americanism: The Historv of the

Ku Klux Klan. which has been through multiple editions and printings. Because of Chalmers's state-by-state recounting of Klan activities, particularly during the

464 1920s, Moore maintained that this work "remains the most

comprehensive history of the Klan" (Moore, "Historical"

345). Regarding the 1920s Klan, Chalmers argued that "it

was the combination of violence, politics, and

exploitative leadership which destroyed the power of the

Invisible Empire," after "[t ]he godly came to realize that

the Klan was not" (Hooded 4). Chalmers maintained that

the 1920s Klan organization was intrinsically violent, as

were incarnations of the Klan in other historical periods.

The national Klan organization in the 1920s did little to

discourage local Klan violence, and the local klaverns

frequently were responsible for violent incidents.

Chalmers systematically provided accounts of Klan whippings, shootings, and other violent acts in numerous states, arguing that Klan violence likely was underreported and underestimated at this time (see

Chalmers, Hooded 297-299). The support of respectable citizens needed to protract Klan strength could not be sustained amidst press reports of Klan misdeeds. Charles

C. Alexander's regional study of the 1920s Klan, The Klux

Klan in the Southwest— published about the same time as the first edition of Chalmer's book— gave a similar, traditionalist account of Klan violence and nativism in

Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

465 Another historian, David H. Bennett, devoted a

lengthy chapter to the Klan in his history of nativism in

the United States. According to Bennett, the 1920s Klan

was the last gasp of traditional nativism in the United

States; the second Klan had a nativist intellectual

pedigree stretching back to the Know-Nothing Party of the

nineteenth century. Despite the general improvement of

material conditions and real wages for most white U.S.

citizens during the early 1920s, Bennett contended that

fear of rapid economic and sociocultural change,

especially among those unlucky rural whites who were

"losers in the boom years" (204), made Klan success possible. The 1920s Klan was nothing less than a

"traditional nativist crusade" that fell apart largely because of the ineptness of its leadership (Bennett 210).

Wyn Craig Wade's The Fiery Cross provides yet another traditionalist account of Klan violence. While written for a popular audience, this history is meticulously documented. In Wade's judgment, Christian fundamentalism in the opening decades of the century made a substantial contribution to the Klan's recruiting successes of the

1920s. Following in Howson's footsteps, Wade noted that

"as many as forty thousand fundamentalist ministers joined the Klan" (Wade 171). He also contended that the decline of fundamentalism following the Scopes trial of 1925

466 contributed to the Klan's diminution in the latter portion

of the 1920s. Finally, Wade made much of the fact that

the earliest defections from the Klan, following

embarrassing published revelations about Klan activities,

primarily came from the ranks of its most respectable

members from the upper- and middle-classes.

The Revisionists

The traditionalist contention that the core membership of the Klan is composed of unsuccessful, working-class "losers" has been challenged in recent years

by revisionist Klan histories. If Klan revisionism can be

traced to any single text, that text would be Norman

Fredric Weaver's unpublished 1954 dissertation, "The

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan." Following his treatment of these four state Klan organizations in the Midwest, Weaver's novel conclusion, in opposition to traditional Klan scholarship, was that the conception "must be eradicated . . . that the

Klan was essentially a terroristic movement devoted to a technique of violence" (296). Instead, Weaver maintained that the Klan generally was not violent, with Klan concerns and recruitment messages varying widely from region to region. For Weaver, the national Klan organization was far less important to rank-and-file

467 members than were the local Klans, which attracted new members by emphasizing issues of local import and fulfilling many of the functions expected of relatively benign fraternal orders.

At least two of Weaver's conclusions now seem suspect. First, Weaver's claim that Klan violence was infrequent, particularly outside the South, has been contradicted by more recent analyses. Second, Weaver's emphasis on the rural character of the Klan has been called into question, given substantial evidence of urban

Klan recruitment and activity. Nevertheless, Weaver's classic study of the Klan suggests a more complex, variegated interpretation of Klan recruitment methods and organizational functions than traditional, reductionistic explanations of Klan nativism as the major impetus for

Klan success.

If Weaver's dissertation encouraged a re-examination of the received rationale for Klan success in the 1920s, then Kenneth T. Jackson's investigation of Klan urban activity cast further doubt on traditional assumptions about the composition of the second Klan. Against those who characterize the Klan as a rural organization (e.g.,

Mecklin; Weaver), Jackson's study of 1920s Klan membership suggested that the Klan was far more active in major cities than previously was believed. Changing patterns of

468 migration from Europe to the United States and from the

South to the North created a climate in which lower-class,

native-born white citizens in urban areas were apt to find

the Klan's anti-immigrant message appealing. Like Weaver,

Jackson concluded that many Klan members during this

period did not join the Klan because of anti-black bigotry

or racism.

More recently, Robert Alan Goldberg issued another

challenge to traditional histories of the Klan. Using partial 1920s Klan membership lists for Colorado, Goldberg

found that Klan members in that state generally were representative of white Colorado citizens of that period.

While Klan violence did exist in Colorado, it was concentrated locally in areas with a sizable non-white population. Overall, Goldberg maintained that the

Colorado Klan was oriented towards peaceful political reform. Also, like Weaver, Goldberg suggested that

”[l]ocal [Klan] leaders and needs shaped an already pliable program to fit a particular time and place. Each klavern program distinctively fused issue and non-issue appeals, drawing a heterogeneous membership" (163). For

Goldberg, satisfactory explanation of 1920s Klan requires careful scrutiny of local community activities. In a conclusion later embraced by Moore, Goldberg argued that

469 urban and rural locales were equally receptive to Klan

organizational efforts.

Finally, in one of the strongest revisionist

responses to traditionalist explanations of the Klan,

Leonard J. Moore, in his Citizen Klansman. maintained that the most infamous state Klan organization— D. C.

Stephenson's 1920s Indiana Klan— did not fit the traditionalist mold. Basing his analysis on recently discovered membership documents, Moore argued that Hoosier

Klan members represented a broad cross section of the white citizens of Indiana. Further, Moore's analysis of the historical data convinced him that the Indiana Klan was notably non-violent, preferring political activity to lynching. While not denying that many Klan members were racist and nativist, Moore maintained that Klan chapters in Indiana typically did not harass minority communities in the state or concern themselves with immigration.

Instead, according to Moore, "Klan activities and membership patterns demonstrate that the main stimulus of the Klan movement had been the deterioration of a sense of cohesion, order, and shared power in community ..."

(Citizen 189).

Given the new evidence on which the revisionists base their arguments, one might conclude that the traditionalist position has been thoroughly discredited.

470 However, two historians recently have questioned

revisionist interpretations of this new evidence. First,

Michael Kazin suggested in a thoughtful review essay that

Moore's revisionism in Citizen Klansmen does not account

adequately for the rapid decline of the Hoosier Klan.

While the Klan in Indiana certainly had its scandals,

other movements have weathered similar difficulties in the past without disastrous membership losses. According to

Kazin, Moore's "rather thin, repetitive descriptions of the Klan's 'populism' and 'traditional beliefs' cannot account for why it fell as quickly as it rose" (Kazin

143). Kazin argued for a larger framework that explains the appeal of various right-wing groups as essential to understanding the meteoric rise and fall of the 1920s

Klan.

Second, Kazin's erudite observations about the limitations of Klan revisionism are extended further in

Nancy MacLean's impressive study. Behind the Mask of

Chivalry. While Kazin largely limited his critique of

Klan revisionism to Moore's book-length study, MacLean casts doubt on the entire revisionist reading of available historical data. While agreeing with Moore and other contemporary Klan historians that a bottom-up history of the Klan should "take seriously what they did, and . . . listen carefully to what they said" (xvii), MacLean

471 rejects the traditionalist-revisionist dichotomy offered by Moore. Like Kazin, MacLean found previous 1920s Klan

studies to be limited by the scope of their analysis.

According to MacLean,

the main problem with prevailing accounts of the Klan's decline is the parochial vision that serves as their starting point. State or local in conception, almost none of the scholarly studies on the Klan, particularly those in recent years, examines the American movement in its international setting. . . . Bounded on one end by the First World War and on the other by the Second World War, this epoch was marked by pervasive social change and political crisis, above all by the contest between right and left .... (Behind 178-179)

In MacLean's judgment, Klan historians routinely have underestimated the ideological similarities between the

Klan, German Nazism, and Italian Fascism during the 1920s, a connection nevertheless perceived by more than one critic of the Klan at the time. Almost seventy years before the publication of MacLean's monograph, Frank Bohn observed that "[h ]ere [in the Klan] were the beginnings of the American Fascisti" (397).

MacLean's conclusions about the roles played by class, race, and sex in the 1920's Klan are the product of what one might call her neo-traditionalism. Without ignoring the evidence of Klan popularity across class lines or the possibility that the Klan provided recruits a way to address significant social problems, MacLean argued that the revisionists made the Klan appear rather benign.

472 just as the traditionalists too quickly dismissed Klan

adherents as uneducated and misguided racists.^ Without perceiving any inconsistencies in their positions, Klan members were "at once mainstream and extreme, hostile to big business and antagonistic to industrial unions, anti elitist and hateful of blacks and immigrants, pro-law and order and prone to extralegal violence" (MacLean, Behind xiii). MacLean sought to explain these tensions in the nexus of class, race, sex, violence, and transnational ideological disputes.

MacLean's conclusions are not likely to remain uncriticized. Her Behind the Mask of Chivalry. which by all appearances is a revision of MacLean's doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, relies heavily on her study of a single 1920s Klan chapter in Athens, Georgia. Moore labeled her dissertation largely a retelling of the traditionalist Klan history and concluded that her study "is long on analysis of the

Klan's ideology and rather short on evidence about the

Klansmen and their activities" (Moore, "Historical" 357, n. 46). However, MacLean's efforts minimally confirm that the historical explanation for the 1920s popularity of the

Klan is by no means settled.

473 Political Sociology

The 1920s Ku Klux Klan has not been ignored by

sociologists and political scientists. However, when

compared to their colleagues in history departments,

neither sociologists nor political scientists have come to

distinctly different conclusions about the Klan, as this

section demonstrates. For example, Dartmouth sociologist

John Moffatt Mecklin's 1924 monograph has been regarded as

a classic early statement of the traditional explanation

for Klan success in the 1920s. Mecklin explained that the

"strength of the Klan lies in that large, well-meaning but more or less ignorant and unthinking middle class" (103), coming especially from small towns and regions known for their "drabness and deadly monotony" (105). These statements about the composition of the Klan membership would be systematically debunked by revisionist students of the Klan in subsequent decades. As historian Shawn Lay concluded following his own review of Ku Klux Klan historiography, it "is very doubtful . . . that the

Mecklin thesis will ever be credibly resurrected" (Lay,

Hooded 189).

Another early, traditionalist study of the Klan was published in 1936 by political scientist Emerson

Hunsberger Loucks. When explaining the success of Klan recruiters in Pennsylvania, Loucks noted that prospective

474 Klan members were cajoled by "clever speakers" trained in

demagoguery: "When the Kleagle . . . read again this list

of [Klan] principles . . . the average citizen was

defenseless. Not trained in the various uses of language, he [or she] did not notice the meaninglessness of such generalities . . ." (33). While we might give credit to

Loucks for offering an early rhetorical explanation for

Klan success, he did not depart from the tradition of treating Klan sympathizers as passive, unreflective bumpkins unable to see through the empty bombast of Klan rhetors.

More recent analyses of the Klan in sociology and political science have sought to explain why the Klan was so uniquely successful in Indiana (Cates), or why the resource mobilization perspective on social movements largely fails to account for the decline of the 1920s

Klan (Jessup). However, by far the most influential Klan study by a non-historian in recent years has been produced by Kathleen M. Blee, whose study of 1920s Indiana

Klanswomen finally has given us a definitive statement on the role women played in the second Ku Klux Klan. For

Blee, a comprehensive history of the Klan cannot be told without giving attention to the role played by women in

Klan activism and proselytizing. As members of various

Klan-affiliated organizations, among which the Women of

475 the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) was most prominent, women organized boycotts against businesses owned by Klan opponents and systematically used rumor, gossip, and innuendo to discredit those not favored by the Klan.

Further, Blee's study suggests the difficulties in explaining the appeal of the Klan among native-born white

Americans, given the strange combination of racism and women's rights promotion to which many Klanswomen were faithful. As Blee concluded, "[t]he politics of gender in the 1920s Klan are more difficult to categorize than those of most modern right-wing movements. . . . [T]he women's

Klan was contradictory: a reactionary, hate-based movement with progressive moments" (177).

Students of sociology and politics also have scrutinized the activities and audiences of former

Klansman David Duke, who claimed the majority of the white vote in statewide Louisiana elections in 1990 and 1991.

Douglas D. Rose's edited volume includes multiple research reports on the support received by Duke during those election campaigns. Another analysis of voting patterns in these 1990 and 1991 elections is provided by David J.

Allen in his master's thesis in geography.

476 Critical Race Theory

Another body of literature, produced by scholars

working in several disciplines, I label "critical race

theory." This literature seeks to explain the social

construction of race as "blackness" and "whiteness," with

race constituting a source of identity in Western thought.

Where the construction of African American identity is

concerned, such studies demonstrating the complexity of

identity construction have a long tradition. W. E. B. Du

Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1905) might be considered the text that founded this tradition, with Du Bois's scrutiny of the problem of the "color line" and his sophisticated explanation of the problem of African-

American double consciousness:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness .... One ever feels his [or her] two-ness— an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (Souls 3; see Gilroy, Ch. 4).

This line of scholarship on the construction of black identity in the twentieth century is represented today in the work of scholars like Paula Giddings, Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Patricia J. Williams. For example, Giddings and hooks separately have examined the

"double discrimination" of race and gender endured and resisted by black women. More specifically, Abby L.

477 Ferber has demonstrated the importance of the white,

female body as the terrain on which white supremacists

wish to fight their race war, since "[c ]ontemporary white

supremacist discourse is obsessed with interracial

sexuality" (Ferber 8). One cannot consider only race and

ethnicity in studying the Klan or its sibling

organizations, as the work of scholars like Blee and

MacLean already should have demonstrated. Gender (and,

for that matter, class) also must be considered.

One of the many contributions of the literature on

critical race theory has been its explication of the

construction of whiteness and the role played by whiteness

in both defining and being defined by blackness (or,

alternatively, what Morrison calls "Africanism"). The ways in which many white Americans hide from their own

racial identity and voice approval for a "color-blind"

society cannot be made commensurable with the day-to-day

advantages that continue to be conferred on those who

construct themselves or are constructed by others as

white, even where whiteness comes with a price.The

irony here is that rank-and-file members of the Klan

throughout the twentieth-century have been willing and

eager to acknowledge and defend their privilege, so that

anti-Klan activist Mab Segrest reported being called a

"race traitor" by Klan members on numerous occasions. By

478 examining further the conscious adoption of racial

identity by Klan members, we might learn something about the complexity of whiteness, a complexity that has been recognized ever since Du Bois's time.

This literature suggests another nuance to which any investigation of Klan rhetoric must attend. White U.S. citizens have not hesitated over the years to denounce the

Klan, while guietly taking steps to preserve and maintain their privilege vis-à-vis African Americans. Critical race theory suggests another way in which presumably innocent discourses have more to do with Klan ideology and activism than many opponents of the Klan would like to believe.

Another implication of critical race theory has relevance for the reading and writing of Klan studies.

The academics who research the Ku Klux Klan ought to remember that their own race and consciousness of race necessarily will influence how they practice scholarship.

As Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek conclude their ethnographic study of the rhetoric of whiteness, "[o ]ur essay is an invitation for communication scholars to begin to mark and incorporate whiteness into their analyses and claims— an invitation to become reflexive" (305). As a white man, I cannot escape the conclusion that my own whiteness leads me to react differently to the Klannish

479 rhetorics of the 1920s or 1990s than would someone of

color who feels more personally and immediately threatened by such rhetorics.

Conclusion

In one sense, the 1920s Klan has received more academic attention than it deserves. While the considerable membership of the Klan, its political influence, its violence, and its longevity make it one of the United States' most significant social movements, other important historical and contemporary white racist organizations (e.g.. White Citizens' Councils, the Aryan

Nation) have received only a fraction of the scrutiny given the Klan. One wonders how much more is left to say about 1920s Klan activities. As John George and Laird

Wilcox state, "[t]here are few organizations as extensively studied as the Ku Klux Klan. . . . It's hard to imagine writing anything particularly new about it"

(395).

From another perspective, however, Klan scholarship is inconclusive and incomplete. While various explanations for the Klan's recruiting success in the

1920s have been offered, from a case of "nerves" following the First World War to the efficacy of populist appeals, no one explanation has gained pre-eminence since the

480 traditionalist "Mecklin" thesis was discredited, and no

simple alternative account seems likely to dominate future

explication of 1920s Klan popularity and principles. The

commitment of social historians to explaining the everyday activities of rank-and-file Klan members has taught us that Klan discourse and activities differ considerably from one locality to another. Since many Klan records have been lost and destroyed and 1920s Klan members are largely dead or unable to recount the events of the decade in much detail, the historical record remains frustratingly sketchy, a jigsaw puzzle doomed to remain unfinished.

So, what are we to do about future research on the

Klan? I contend that scholars should pay more attention to analyzing the documents already available to us, rather than waiting in the faint hope that more Klan records of the era will surface seven decades or more after the original events took place. The 1920s Klan left behind the effluence of a vast recruiting effort and highly visible attempts to influence local, state, and national politics. Primary archival source material pertinent to the Klan is easy to acquire, yet Klan students frequently rely on the reports of newspapers to the exclusion of examining the Klan's own explanations of its motives and programs.

481 Undoubtedly my disciplinary bias is showing here.

Historians are trained to seek out previously unavailable or unexamined evidence and to provide post hoc explanations for past events. Sociologists and political scientists are as likely to identify materialist and/or psychological explanations for human behavior as to find recurring argument forms or content-based rules in Klan discourse. Nevertheless, I find the lack of close scrutiny of Klan primary texts distressing. Beyond baseline definitions of the "rhetoric of racism" that do not go far beyond the contested definition of "racism" itself, what marks the presence of such a rhetoric in the utterances of David Duke, let alone in a few terse written comments by Christina Jeffrey?

Obviously, I do not believe that we have a satisfactory answer to this guestion. I have no intention of placing blame for this problem only on those who have done the bulk of Klan research. Those who are not conducting such investigations need to consider their potential scholarly contribution to such an understanding.

In communication studies, what do we know about such rhetoric? Remarkably little, if the number of relevant publications is taken as an indicator. Our disciplinary affection for examining admired rhetors and rhetorics makes investigations of racism relatively uncommon; this

482 disciplinary bias needs rethinking. More generally, our

attempts to theorize rhetoric have given racist discourse

short shrift in an era when the postmodern rallying cry of

Race! Gender! Class! should be pushing the discipline

toward critical scrutiny of such questions. If nothing

else, rhetoricians might want to consider the critical

examination of politically regressive rhetorical artifacts

as a special kind of disciplinary service project, which will provide the tools needed to map discursive terrains most of us would prefer never to travel.

What, then, are we to make of Christina Jeffrey's case? Surely Gingrich's political detractors found in her appointment the opportunity to embarrass a political foe.

But such a humiliation was possible only because the

"people" (however understood) would find her remarks in a ten-year-old curriculum review presumptively inappropriate. Why would the "people" read the text that was the Jeffrey controversy in this fashion? Clearly the

Klan has not left the public memory. If Jeffrey had referred to an anti-Masonic or Oneidist point of view, then she might yet be House historian, even though the aims of these other movements are hardly consistent with contemporary public mores. (The free love preached by the Oneidists is scarcely more popular today than in the nineteenth century, while the repressive measures

483 advocated by the anti-Masonic movement are almost

inconceivable in the current political milieu.)

The Klan remains particularly salient in public

memory because the Klan is still understood as a threat to

the community, even though it has not possessed the material resources to pose a major threat for some years. I do not mean that people calling themselves Klan members do not exist at the end of the twentieth century or that individuals are not beaten or tortured at the hands of those who believe they are doing the Klan's (and

God's) work. I maintain only that such events are rarely sponsored or planned by local, state, or national officers of the various Klan organizations that still exist. Anti-

Klan activists often depict the Aryan Nation and so-called skinheads as the more dangerous and violence-prone white racists in the 1990s (e.g., Stanton), with white supremacists becoming more violent as their numbers decline (see Ferber). While the Klan is part and parcel of the history and construction of white racism in the

United States, the Klan's few members often are the

"moderates" in the bizarre circles in which white supremacists travel.

The irony is that the "community" in the 1920s was defined by the Klan as excluding African-Americans, Jews, and other groups now accepted by most (but not all) white.

484 Anglo-Saxon Protestants as having a legitimate stake in the affairs of the community. Understanding this historical evolution of the "American" community's collective sense of identity to include those once banished to the margins might necessitate study of Klan rhetoric and history, even study by junior high students.

The greatest danger posed by the Klan is the extent to which Klan principles and politics still are instantiated in our civic discourse, even though those faithful to

Klan-identified principles would deny the influence of those principles on their own rhetoric.

Whether traditionalist or revisionist, Klan studies typically have told us little about the plexus of discursive practices that constitute Klan rhetoric. Only with a better understanding of this plexus could we assess the present rhetorical terrain, discerning what influence is still exerted on the polis by Klan and Klan-inspired rhetorics. Only with such an understanding could the community be confident that a review of the Klan's discredited racist and sexist imaginary in the junior-high classroom is not tantamount to calling a rejuvenated Klan movement into being.

485 Notes

^ Numerous newspaper accounts detail the hiring and firing of Christina Jeffrey (e.g., Alexander; Jeffrey; "Political Ax"). Jeffrey maintains that her review of a grant proposal in 1986 has been distorted and taken out of context. Her story of the written text and the intent of her response to the grant proposal differs from the account given by the national press.

^ I know of two comprehensive bibliographies of Klan primary and secondary sources. The larger and more recent of the two was complied by Lenwood G. Davis, Janet L. Sims-Wood, and Marsha L. Moore. While older and less comprehensive, William H. Fisher's Klan bibliography does provide annotations for some sources, a perquisite not included in the Davis et al. volume.

^ A report of Stetson Kennedy's activities after successfully infiltrating Nathan Bedford Forrest Klavern Number One in Atlanta appears in Wyn Craig Wade (280-289). The complete story of Thompson's experience appears in his My Life in the Klan. The Rutledge Hill Press edition of Thompson's book includes a new afterword, which reports an unsuccessful lawsuit brought against him by a Klansman named in the book. This lawsuit led to his original publisher's decision not to release additional copies of the book. Representatives of G. P. Putnam's Sons, the original publisher, feared that an unsuccessful defense against the lawsuit would make them liable for damages.

^ While Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech routinely is reproduced in speech collections (e.g., Reid) and lauded as a classic text in American Public Address, a search of the Matlon index shows only eight studies devoted to Bryan published in communication journals from 1915 through 1990, with only one recent study of the "Cross of Gold" oration. A shortage of attention to traditional touchstones of excellence in public address is not limited to Bryan's efforts. As Michael C. Leff and G. P. Mohrmann complained in 1977:

We used to study speeches, right? Wrong! How about Clay, Calhoun, and Webster for openers? A total of seventeen articles in national and regional journals, but no writer has seen fit to deal with the entire text of one of their speeches. Emerson? Eight articles, none on a particular speech. Jonathan Edwards? Not one

486 article. Acres of Diamonds? No article. The New South? One, a Hegelian analysis. Abraham Lincoln? Thirty-two articles, but only if we are generous can we say that as many as three explore the rhetoric of a given speech. (qtd. in Mohrmann 273, fn. 50).

As a way to address "the lack of a corpus of critical masterpieces," Martin J. Medhurst called some time ago for a "nationwide project to produce one or more volumes of criticism of universally recognized oratorical masterpieces" along the the lines of the History and Criticism volumes edited by William Norwood Brigance and Marie Hochmuth (Medhurst, "Public" 40). In contrast, others rightly complain that typical lists of the public address canon, to the extent that a canon exists, display an impoverished sense of publicness; a marked preference for traditional platform speaking; and an unwarranted, patriarchal predilection for the rhetorical efforts of white males (see, e.g., Foss and Foss, Women Speak). From this perspective, the public address canon either (1) requires serious revision or (2) should be scrapped entirely. The dizzying array of rhetorical artifacts on which current Quarterly Journal of Speech articles now are based suggest that rhetorical critics in communication departments have not felt constrained by any sense of the public address canon in their selection of rhetorical artifacts.

^ There are many possible Klan studies for students of rhetoric. Some historical scholars have noted the wide variation of Klan appeals in the 1920s (e.g., Goldberg; Jackson). These variations were dependent in part on regional differences (e.g.. Midwest versus South) and on urbanization (e.g., city versus small town). Sociologist Kathleen M. Blee and historian Nancy MacLean (Behind, "Leo Frank") have made extensive contributions to our understanding of the role played by women and the construction of gender in the twentieth-century Klan. Studies of urban Klan rhetoric and women's Klan rhetoric have yet to be conducted. Ordained Quaker minister Daisy Douglas Barr, an advocate of women's rights and a leader in the women's Klan during the 1920s, could be the focus of a fascinating rhetorical study, as could the activism of anti-Klan women (see, e.g., Gozemba and Humphries).

^ For example, appeals to the importance and value of "equality" were common in the public discourse of the United States prior to the Civil War. A historically uninformed critic might conclude that such appeals

487 fundamentally were inconsistent with chattel slavery, as some Abolitionists of the time did in fact argue. However, Condit and Lucaites's perceptive and historically informed study of the ideograph "equality" during this era reveals that white Americans of that time did not perceive that equality claims extended beyond free white citizens. An understanding of historical context is required to minimize the risk of error in rhetorical criticism and, more positively, to expand the range of possible readings that one might give to any rhetorical artifact.

^ Moore's "traditional view" category does not include historical defenses of the nineteenth-century Klan, as represented by John C. Lester and D. L. Wilson's Ku Klux Klan; Its Origin, Growth. and Disbandment. Written in 1884 and reprinted in 1905, this monograph by a Klan co-founder and his collaborator explained that "the Klan had afforded protection and security to many firesides, and, in many ways contributed to the public welfare," whatever the excesses of a few Klansmen who engaged in acts of violence (129). A slightly altered version of Moore's essay on the traditionalist and revisionist perspectives appears in a volume edited by Shawn Lay (Lay, Invisible 17-38).

® Such religious explanations for Klan success, while common, have not gone unchallenged. In his 1952 dissertation on the Klan, Benjamin Herzl Avin detailed the second Klan's predilection for manufacturing Jewish and Roman-Catholic conspiracies. Taking a different position than Howson, Avin concluded that "religious prejudice had sapped its [the Klan's] vitality" (279). Curiously, Avin seemed sometimes to ignore Klan violence and racism in the coda to his lengthy study: "Had it [the Klan] concentrated upon the social amenities of life and stripped itself of the trappings of mystery, the Klan might have become a fairly good social club, as desirable as the Rotarians" (279).

^ Revisionist historians of the Klan have struggled with their desire to give a fair and generous reading to individual motives for Klan activity, as opposed to expressing their feelings of revulsion for Klan intolerance. A passage from the preface to Larry R. Gerlach's Blazing Crosses in Zion suggests the difficulties with which revisionist historians in particular have dealt:

It is traditional, almost de rigueur, in Klan studies to fashion, however subtly, a moralistic

488 scenario featuring good guys and bad guys, the misguided and the misunderstood. . . . But just as I have come to know the targets of the Klan's bigotry, I have also come to know former (and current) Klansmen, and I find them to be largely decent, generous, and principled individuals. This Invisible Empire was not a historical aberration, and its Knights, however distorted their perceptions and overzealous their practices, were anything but "un-American." (xxi)

Sociologist Kathleen M. Blee had a similar experience in her interviews with elderly Klanswomen of the 1920s: "Many of the people I interviewed were interesting, intelligent, and well informed. . . . Some . . . were active in progressive politics .... These former Klansmembers were not the 'other' . . . as I had earlier assumed" (6).

For example, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz has written about the loss of Jewish identity suffered by Jews, particularly U.S. Jews, who have embraced whiteness:

Many of us chose, or had chosen for us, a white path. A path of assimilation, of passing, often accompanied by extreme cultural loss. How many of us speak or read Yiddish or Ladino or Judeo- Arabic? What do we know of our own histories, our literature, our music, our cultural diversity, our rich traditions? (146)

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524 INDEX

Àlcoff, Linda, 232, 252-257, 261, 263, 276 n. 12, 276 n. 13 Atlanta, See Georgia Barr, J. C., 179-196, 207, 209-212, 214, 217, 441-449 Birth of a Nation. 61, 76-77, 84, 132 n. 2, 132 n. 3, 149- 150, 184, 219 n. 4 Bitzer, Lloyd F., 9-10, 17, 28-29, 234, 263-266, 277 n. 16 Black, Edwin, 8-9, 56, 88, 112, 270, 322, 392 Buchanan, Patrick, 29, 117, 403-404, 422-426, 437 n. 14 Catholicism, See Roman Catholicism Chalmers, David, 221 n. 12, 464-465 Chenoweth, Helen, 420-422, 426 Clansman. The, 4, 61, 75-81, 83-121, 126, 128-131, 325 Clarke, Edward Young, 151-152, 221 n. 10, 418 conseguential rule. See rule Craig, Larry, 420-421, 426 Du Bois, W. E. B., 134 n. 7, 229 n. 39, 235-238, 241-251, 257-262, 267-268, 270, 273, 274 n. 2, 275 n. 6, 275 n. 7, 293, 299, 303, 477 Duke, David, 117, 319, 332, 339-347, 352-372, 374-378, 379 n. 12, 379 n. 14, 380 n. 19, 381 n. 23, 402-405, 431, 477 Edwards, Edwin, 345-345, 379 n. 8, 380 n. 20 emotion, 281-293, 299-328, 333 n. 3, 333 n. 4, 334 n. 8 Evans, Hiram Wesley, 153, 238-240, 258, 267-268, 282, 292- 309, 311, 335-336 n. 20, 384 Fish, Stanley, 57-58 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 134 n. 9, 148 Frye, Northrop, 1, 49 Georgia, 75, 142, 149-153, 330, 459 Griggs, Sutton E., 86, 136 n. 13 Hall, Stuart, 59, 206 Hindered Hand. The. 86, 136 n. 13 idiom, 203, 320, 324, 389-390, 398; defined, 204; and meta-idiom, 127-128 imbrication, 3, 39-40, 391 immanent rule. See rule Klannishness, 5, 371-375, 381 n. 26, 409, 420, 422-423, 427-428, 430-431

525 Leopard‘s Spots. T h e . 61, 83-86, 98, 106, 111, 132 n. 3, 137 n. 16 Louisiana, 144, 146, 160-168, 225 n. 20, 225 n. 21, 225 n. 22, 226 n. 23, 226 n. 25, 226 n. 26, 226 n. 27, 227 n. 30, 339-347, 365, 431, 459 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 3, 33-42, 124, 140 n. 26, 259, 277 n. 15, 320, 324, 398, 405, 433 Miller, Gregory, 456-457 Miller, Kelly, 85-86, 103 Mitchell, Margaret, 83-84, 135 n. 10, 135 n. 11 Monroe, Louisiana, See Louisiana nativism, 146-147 Oberholtzer, Madge, 153 Ohio, 226 n. 23, 459 pathos. See emotion presupposition rule. See rule Reagan, Ronald, 323, 435 n. 7 Reconstruction, 80-87 rhetorical imbrication. See imbrication rhetorical situation. See situation Roman Catholicism, 159-160, 184-186, 193, 329 rule, 386-389; consequential, 206-207, 388; immanent, 205- 206, 388; presupposition, 204-205, 320, 325, 388 Simmons, William Joseph, 150-153, 222 n. 13, 330 Sins of the Father. The, 89, 139 n. 22 situation, 8-10, 263-272; strong situationalism, 27-30, 263-264 Southern Publicity Association, 151 Stephenson, D. C . , 153, 222 n. 14, 329 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, See Uncle Tom's Cabin transcendentalism, 30-31; not Transcendentalism, 31 Tripp, Frank, 173-180, 207-209, 211-212, 214-215, 217, 230 n. 44, 438-440 Tyler, Elizabeth, 151, 221 n. 10, 418 Uncle Tom's Cabin. 84, 91, 112, 115, 117, 328 Williams, Donald E., 342, 455-456 Woodward, C. Vann, 74, 81-82, 87, 108, 460

526