Martin Meenagh blog

There have been at least three distinct versions of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in American history. The first, as described by the republican congress of the 1870s, was established by the former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee in 1866. It was a collection of night-riders, lawbreakers and terrorists whose structure might well have been unsystematised but whose purpose throughout the Deep South was to undermine African-American votes, rights, and equality by legal and extralegal means. This Klan was effectively suppressed by the Grant Administration, which turned federal troops against it, though ballot intimidation, lynching, and the exclusion of black people from civil society continued via other means. The Second Klan arose in the years before World War One, and was heavily influenced by nativist suspicion of Catholics, Jews and Hispanic minorities as well as African-Americans. The Klan’s third existence was as a congeries of putative ‘white rights’ groups that ...

Many historians, particularly those on the political left, tend to become confused over Al Smith. The ‘Lincoln of the tenements’, four times Governor of New York and a reformer who was personally transformed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, the consensus more or less goes, was simply bitter when he reacted against FDR’s New Deal in 1934. His rich friends in the Liberty League somehow corrupted him. Al Sold out. These underlying explanations of motive are not in fact explanations at all, but rather attempts to ‘retro-fit’ Smith’s class, background and views to the assumption that the New Deal was universally supported within the progressive centre and on the left. Though complex, Smith was in fact more consistent in his political perspective than many writers have allowed for. Smith had been a leader of the Progressive movement, and had roots in the lower East Side. He was working class, and was not a university man. He arose in the early twentieth century. His career ha...