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Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan
Elaine Frantz Parsons
| The Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan movement was intimately intertwined with, and completely dependent on, contemporary popular cultural forms and institutions. The degree and significance of this entanglement is most immediately obvious in the Klan's origins in Pulaski, Tennessee. According to the founding member James R. Crowe, his fellow founder Frank McCord played the violin and Calvin Jones the guitar. The group would "go serenading and amuse ourselves as best we could." In an unpublished 1911 historical novel about the Klan, Frank McCord's younger brother Lapsley (himself an early member) remembered that in its early days "there were parties of them out nearly every evening calling upon their sweethearts." Though that description does not mention musical performance, his account is consistent with serenading. It would, of course, be a mistake to accept early members' self-interested explanations of their origins at face value. Fortunately, ample additional evidence supports their accounts. The future founders of the Klan first appeared in the post—Civil War public record working together in May 1866, about a month before the Klan was most likely founded. Three of the six founders, Richard Reed, J. C. Lester, and James Crowe, appeared in the Pulaski Citizen (edited by Frank McCord's brother Luther) on a list of organizers of tableaux staged to raise funds to provide artificial limbs for maimed Confederate veterans. Crowe appeared in one scene as the emperor Aurelian, and Lester appeared in "Queen Elizabeth Discovering her Favorite's [Sir Walter Raleigh's] marriage." Most of the scenes expressed domestic sentiment or provided opportunities for the belles and beaux of Pulaski to display themselves, though Crowe's Zenobia and Aurelian tableau, for instance, had an obvious political message. McCord's newspaper reflected that in the scene showing Zenobia, the conquered warrior princess, "raising her deprecating, but manacled hands," "the fetters degraded not [her] but the haughty Roman [Aurelian] who had imposed them." Just as these future Klan founders' first public appearance was performative, so were two of the earliest Klan activities noticed by outsiders: a moonlight dance at which the Klan made a costumed appearance and a parade replete with costumes and musical entertainment.1 |
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There is also material evidence of the Klan's theatrical roots. Frank McCord's fiddle still exists, in the custody of the Tennessee State Museum. More intriguing, a contemporary image supports such an account of the Klan's origins. (See figure 1.) Recently discovered by the independent historian Bob Wamble, the carte de visite likely represents an early incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. The image, labeled "Midnight Rangers, Pulaski, Sept. 3, 1866," depicts seven young men with musical instruments, including fiddles, a guitar, and a banjo. Their informal dress, jaunty poses, hats askew, and choice of instruments indicate that they are performing in either the minstrel style or a closely related folk tradition. If the Klan founders were not the men depicted in this image, they were down the street doing the same thing; if the men in the picture were not the Klan, their name associated them with nocturnal violence. (To Civil War—era Americans, "rangers" were roaming groups of armed men of dubious legality.) While origins as an entertainment troupe may seem incidental to, or even inconsistent with, the violent group the Klan soon became, the Reconstruction-era Klan movement remained closely intertwined with popular cultural forms throughout its existence. Klansmen's mobilization of popular cultural traditions and popular cultural institutions' simultaneous appropriation of the image of the Klansman profoundly affected not only the spread of the Klan movement, but the nature and meaning of Klan actions. By attaching themselves to discourses about race, gender, civilization, and violence that had been built up through many years in such popular cultural forms as minstrelsy and carnival, Klansmen would develop and find ready audiences for new ideas about how civilization could dominate barbarism and mobilize it for its own purposes. |
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