Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915â1930 by Kelly J. Baker

 Reviews during the first thirty years of the 1900s was comprised of transient, male laborers from around the world, this goal is far from idle curiosity. Shah works to unravel the yawning disconnect between the United States’ and Canada’s dominant political vision and narrative of white family settlement from the reality of the international mix of migrant,and largely male, workers whose labor fueled western economic expansion and whose associations often threatened the two republics’social pact. This sea of humanity converging on the West conjured, among other things, a myriad of interpersonal possibilities and realities. While theoretically inclusive of associations of all sorts, Shah’s research primarily highlights and examines that great diversity — or “messiness,” as he puts it — on the ground of domestic relations and gender identity and roles compiled largely through his reading of legal cases and press articles. Just as it stands, this research is an important contribution to the literature of theWest and of SouthAsians in the region in particular. Shah, however, utilizes those amassed anecdotes and cases to track the shifting moments and assignments of outlier status to the broad range of intimacies and domesticities of the day. From that analysis, he makes two important conclusions. First is that the process of establishing the borders of the outlier was central to the process of defining and privileging a monolithic, settled “family.” Second, and for this reviewer likely his most important conclusion, Shah draws an intimate connection,inallsenses,betweenthestruggleto define accepted intimacies with racial and class disempowerment.Throughthemanyexamples drawn from varying locales, Shah makes a compelling argument that historians cannot responsibly trace the development of North America’s moves toward racial apartheid without the simultaneous consideration of North Americangovernments’movestostructureand constrict the myriad personal ties and relations of the people who came to do its work. It likely is already clear that Shah is not a proponent of the so-called natural order of things,whether sexuality,marriage,citizenship, or any other human institution. Because of the labyrinthine ways in which such customs and institutions come to be, unraveling their threads is not the easiest of tasks. Largely for this reason,Stranger Intimacy,however rewarding , is not a breezy read. For me, this is further complicated by the fact that the archival record for SouthAsians of this time period is thin and largely unknown,and this fact further burdens a contextual evaluation. But that said, it is well worth the effort.Shah’s intriguing examination provides not only innovative historical thinking and analysis, but for anyone grappling with the present-day, know-nothing national hysterias over same-sex marriage, contraception ,and immigration,perhaps offers an unexpected ,but welcome,long-range and blessedly reasoned lens. Johanna Ogden Portland, Oregon Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 by Kelly J. Baker University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2011. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 352 pages. $34.95 cloth. Students of Oregon history are familiar with the impact the “second” Ku Klux Klan (KKK) made in this state during the early 1920s. Embracing Americanism, Protestantism, white supremacy,law enforcement,and purity reform, the hooded order’s campaign against foreign influences attracted fifty thousand Oregonians during that decade. Kelly J. Baker’s Gospel According to the Klan seeks to demonstrate the complexity of the national movement’s ideology by pointing to  Reviews how white supremacy and nationalist creeds meshed with Protestant religion. Without minimizing the Klan’s ethnic and religious intolerance, particularly when it came to Roman Catholics, the author hopes to move beyond stereotypes of white-robed terrorists and vigilantes and place the Klan within the context of American cultural and religious history and the morally turbulent environment of the Jazz Age. Endorsing ethnographic strategies that allow subjects to speak for themselves, Baker insists on reading, hearing, and engaging the Klan’s words and comprehending its moral universe in members’ own terms. She accomplishes this through an exhaustive survey of KKK print culture, including movement newspapers, lectures, and pamphlets. Her goal is to use those sources not simply to reveal the order’s ideology and sense of community but also to illustrate its hopes and fears and the interplay between members and...

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