An excellently rendered, unsettling narrative of America at its worst.
A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award chronicles a dark period when the Ku Klux Klan was ascendant.
In 1866, in a small town in Tennessee, six White war veterans formed a secret brotherhood to share their disgust about the emancipation of Blacks. By 1868, the Klan had 500,000 members “in every province of the former Confederacy.” By the 1920s, the Klan’s raids, beatings, lynchings, and arson had spread throughout the country. It was, Egan writes in his shocking, horrifying history, the “largest and most powerful of the secret societies among American men.” Klan members included ministers, politicians, judges, policemen, bankers, and businessmen, united in their belief in White supremacy and their virulent hatred of immigrants, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Blacks. Central to Egan’s narrative is David C. Stephenson, bluff and arrogant, a manipulator and liar, a vicious sexual predator, a “carouser, a gasbag, a petty thief” who demanded unconditional adoration from his lackeys. Charming when it suited him, ruthless toward his enemies, he harbored an insatiable lust for power. Stephenson’s “unbridled energy” fueled the exponential growth of the Klan in Indiana, where, he boasted, “I am the law.” Klan members filled positions at every level of government, and Stephenson himself aimed for a presidential run. Klan vigilantes rampaged on morality patrols, and the group allied with the eugenics movement to pass the nation’s first forced sterilization law. In 1924, Congress, filled with Klan members, passed the National Origins Act, vastly limiting immigration. Egan reveals the bold efforts of journalists, lawyers, and Black and Jewish leaders to oppose the Klan despite being threatened constantly. He also reveals the scandals and infighting that imperiled Stephenson’s position—until one woman’s deathbed testimony took him down. The Klan’s grievances, the nation’s polarization, and a blustering politician who saw efforts to bring him to justice as a “hoax and witch hunt”: This riveting history seem disturbingly familiar and undeniably chilling.
An excellently rendered, unsettling narrative of America at its worst.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780735225268
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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