Uniform Threat: Manufacturing the Ku Klux Klan's Visible Empire, 1866-1931

Abstract

This dissertation examines a symbol central to the racial consciousness of the contemporary United States: the white robe and hood worn by members of the modern Ku Klux Klan. In this cultural history of Ku Klux Klan regalia, I argue that the development of the idealized image of the uniformed Klansman shaped the formation, expansion, and decline of the infamous white supremacist fraternity in the early twentieth-century.

This project maps the relationship between images of uniformed Klansmen, the garments that made these images possible, and the ideological project that the Klan espoused. I approach the mutual constitution of images, objects, and ideology through the Klan’s engagement with and emergence from institutions of the Progressive Era United States. Klan regalia, and the meaning that these garments conveyed, reflect the organization’s development within the burgeoning institutions and industries of a national mass culture. Industrially-produced regalia facilitated a view of the Klan as a “uniform” organization that could act as a coordinated body across vast geographic distances. At the same time, processes of manufacturing and large-scale distribution helped the Klan to establish an ambivalent relationship to contemporary capitalism and the violence for which the organization was best known. Thus, the Klan’s use of Klan regalia as a symbolic and material threat of violence was representative of larger processes of making meaning in a period of widespread industrialization and cultural transformation.

This project approaches the study of material and visual culture through archival history, using a mixture of documents, images, artifacts, and extant garments to show how the Klan used their iconic regalia in the early twentieth-century. At the core of this project is a concern with the ways that ideas about race, gender, and nationality were crafted and embodied in the early twentieth-century. Members, leaders, and critics of the organization used robes and hoods to grapple with whiteness, masculinity, American citizenship, and violence in their everyday lives. The embodied experience of making, participating in, and fighting the violent ideology that the Klan championed is thus illuminated through a study of the organization’s material remains.