| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida. By Michael Newton. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xvi, 260 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-8130-2120-0.)

Few books on the Ku Klux Klan have chronicled its activities in a single state from Reconstruction to the present. Michael Newton—a journalist from Indiana who has published 168 books, most of which are novels (p. 136) and popular historical reference works—has undertaken that task in Florida where the Klan has had a continuous, yet at times weak, existence for the past 135 years. Using secondary sources as a major part of the story, Newton portrays a Klan bent on the use of violent and illegal means to resist efforts of the black population to advance. The story also depicts the ignoring of Klan atrocities by judicial and political officials who often belonged to the Klan themselves. Gradually, however, the Klan devolved from a mainstream organization supported and protected by the "best" elements to a fringe group of multiple Klans with few members and widely condemned.

Newton highlights the traditional patterns of coverage—the Klans of Reconstruction, the roaring twenties, the Great Depression and war, the civil rights era, and the 1990s. Each Klan was a distinct entity arising in response to elements peculiar to the times. Although the Klans did share a consistent intent to stifle black progress, Klan members also expressed resentments in different eras toward immigrants, violators of vice laws, Catholics, Jews, Communists, and labor unions.

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