White Robes, Silver Screens Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan [Hardcover]

The Ku Klux Klan was reestablished in Atlanta in 1915, barely a week before the Atlanta premiere of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffiths paean to the original Klan. While this link between Griffith's film and the Klan has been widely acknowledged, Tom Rice explores the little-known relationship between the Klans success and its use of film and media in the interwar years when the image, function, and moral rectitude of the Klan was contested on the national stage. By examining rich archival materials including a series of films produced by the Klan and a wealth of documents, newspaper clippings, and manuals, Rice uncovers the fraught history of the Klan as a local force that manipulated the American film industry to extend its reach across the country. White Robes, Silver Screens highlights the ways in which the Klan used, produced, and protested against film in order to recruit members, generate publicity, and define its role within American society.

Indeed, the book could not be timelier, given the nativist and racist rhetoric inflaming discourse among Republican Party presidential hopefuls as the 2016 American presidential campaign gathers steam. . .White Robes, Silver Screens provides an essential historical perspective on these phenomena, with lessons we would all do well to heed.Rices study of the complex, mutual development of the modern Ku Klux Klan and the American film industry, visual culture, and politics is a benchmark example of the contribution film studies can make to our understanding of American history.Rice is alive to the irony of the Klans simultaneous antimodernist response to film and the embrace of this influential new medium when it suited the organization . . . Rices volume is a masterful, definitive account of this underexplored phenomenon, and it is written with a confident grasp of the complex and often contradictory forces that shape films and their place in American social history.Quickly moving us beyond everything we knelc