Friday, January 20, 2012

The Invisible Empire Launches a Crusade of Militant Protestants

The Canadian Manifesto: The American Conservative Movement's Invasion of Canada

The 1918 midterm elections in the United States proved to be a turning point for American politics.

The Ku Klux Klan had been revived in 1915 and were enjoying enormous growth as they fed off the upheaval created by war and domestic migration - African Americans moving to Northern States, Yankee businessmen (many Jewish) to the Southern ones and destitute farmers into urban centres.

Immigration, which tripled between 1890 - 1910, had also changed the ethnic makeup of the country, fuelling people's fears.  Prior to that time most newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe, but by 1910,  Eastern and Southern Europeans made up 70 percent of the immigrants entering the country. 
Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, Bohemians, and Italians flocked to the coal mines or steel mills, Greeks preferred the textile mills, Russian and Polish Jews worked the needle trades or pushcart markets of New York. Railroad companies advertised the availability of free or cheap farmland overseas in pamphlets distributed in many languages, bringing a handful of agricultural workers to western farmlands. But the vast majority of immigrants crowded into the growing cities, searching for their chance to make a better life for themselves. (1)
While those from Northern and Western Europe easily assimilated, since most were English speaking, this new group preferred to move into ethnic neighborhoods populated by their fellow countrymen, where they could converse in their native tongue, practice their own religion, and take part in cultural celebrations.

Exploited by industry as cheap labour, they also became easy targets for groups like the Klan, who fed into the xenophobia of a threatened nation.

Allan J. Lichtman, in his 2008 book, White Protestant Nation, traces the modern conservative movement to that time, when the Ku Klux Klan led a well organized and well financed resistance movement.  And what they resisted was open immigration, African Americans, ethnics, unions, liberalism, loose morals and non-Protestants.

Arguing that they were not bigots, they claimed to only "uphold the family and stop crime and vice from ruining their communities". (2)

The Political Arena

At the time of the 1918 midterm elections, the United States was at war, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson was in the White House.  Elections during war time are difficult, but Wilson made a huge mistake by suggesting that if Republicans gained control of either House, they would not support the President in his effort to fight the evil "Huns".

Political sniping was nothing new, but Wilson challenged the patriotism of the Republicans, and the backlash was immediate.  The Klan's new mantra of 100% American, helped to propel the GOP to power.  By 1920, there were 49 Republicans and  47 Democrats in the Senate, and 210 Republicans, 216 Democrats and 6 others in Congress.

But more importantly, Republican Warren G. Harding was the new President of the United States.

Many have suggested that Harding was actually a member of the Ku Klux Klan, based in part on the deathbed confession of former KKK member Alton Young.  He claimed to be there at Harding's swearing in ceremony, conducted at the White House, and that "Harding rewarded the members of the induction team with special War Department license plates that allowed them to run red lights."  It sounds just bizarre enough to be true.

Others argue that Harding championed "lynching laws" in an attempt to outlaw the practice, so was hardly a KKK sympathizer.  But then, so did the upper echelon of the Klan.

Whether Harding was a member of the organization or not, is irrelevant.  The Republican platform at the time, reflected the Klan's goals.    From Case File 28, Calvin Coolidge papers, there is a letter from Wizard Edward Young Clarke to President Calvin Coolidge, dated December 27, 1923, suggesting that the Klan was a political machine, that could be used to "up-build and develop spirituality, morality, and physically the Protestant white man of America.”

And at the 1920 Republican convention, many presidential hopefuls played to this "conservative" base, and the party:
... endorsed a platform that reflected the growing strength of conservatives in the party and the waning influence of its progressive wing ...  Along with the standard condemnation of Democratic policies, the platform advocated governmental economy, tax revision [and]  included a plank condemning strikes and lockouts as well as one promising immigration limits, especially for non-Europeans. (3)
Once elected, Harding made good on the promises and immigration was reduced to a trickle.

The Klan was not satisfied with just influencing politics in the United States, but branched out to New Zealand, Cuba, Mexico and even Germany.  However, according to the authoritative Klan historian, David Chalmers, only in Canada did the Ku Klux Klan evoke a "a substantial answering response".  (4)

Sources:

1. Immigration in the Early 20th Century, Eye Witness to History

2. White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, By Allan J. Lichtman, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008, ISBN: 10-0-87113-983-7, p 42

3. National Politics: The 1920 Republican Nomination Race, 2001, Encyclopedia.com

4. Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada 1920-1940, By Martin Robin, University of Toronto Press, 1992, ISBN: 0-8020-5962-7, p. 2 

Next:  Reconstruction, Redemption, Deliverance and Resurrection

Friday, January 13, 2012

Reconstruction, Redemption, Deliverance and Resurrection

The Canadian Manifesto: How the American Conservative Movement Took Over My Country

On December 24, 1865, six young men, one of them the editor of the local newspaper, and several veterans of the Confederate army, formed the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in opposition to post Civil War Reconstruction, which would give freed slaves and poor whites, democratic rights.

Taking their name from the Greek kuklos, meaning circle or band, they began as little more than a social club for "disaffected, wealthy young whites".

However, with the support of many prominent southerners, including Gen. John C. Brown, who would go on to become governor of Tennessee and president of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, the Klan would become "the shock troops of a displaced Southern aristocracy determined to undermine a new popular order and restore the old way of life." (1)

The first Grand Wizard, was Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Confederate army, a wealthy slave trader; and the first order of business was to prevent as many of the 700,000 freed former slaves, who had registered as new voters, from casting their ballots.  To do this they often resorted to bloodshed.   Yet despite the violence, 17 African Americans were elected to the General Assembly, 15 Representatives and two Senators.

The gains would be short-lived however, when the Compromise of 1877 initiated the period known as Redemption, which reduced  voting by blacks with the passing of more restrictive electoral and voter registration rules.  By 1900, they had lost the right to vote in every state in the South and not a single elected black official remained in office.

Ironically, it was the Democrats who were then working to restore and maintain white supremacy in the South, until Democratic President Lyndon Johnson stood up for civil rights in 1968, even though it meant losing the Southern vote. 

Deliverance

There is no doubt that the Klan played a major role in breaking the Reconstruction forces. Beatings, whippings and outright assassinations, helped to terrorize, both blacks and poor whites, who were seeking democratic reform.  The Klan also set fire to newly-built schoolhouses and killed teachers of former slaves.

However, once the plantation owners and southern aristocrats were back in power, the Klan's services were no longer required, and their membership dropped considerably, until they ceased to exist, except in the minds of the ex-hooded riders.

It would be several decades before the KKK would be called back into service, this time to deal with the social upheaval brought about by the Great Migration.

Beginning in 1910, African Americans left the South for the North in search of manufacturing jobs, 1.6 million in all between 1910 and 1930.  Because it was so many in such a short period of time, the new arrivals encountered significant discrimination.  Meanwhile, in the South, many poor farmers were being forced to move to urban areas for work and found that work at factories owned and run by migrated Northerners, mostly Jews.

An event would take place in 1915 that would give the Klan the incentive and support, to rise up again.

The Knights of Mary Phagan

Fourteen-year-old Mary Phagan had been working since she was ten.  Her last job was at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta Georgia, where she worked 55 hours per week for a wage of $ 4.05; about a third of the national average.

On April 21, 1913, she was laid off, and on April 26, returned to the factory for her final pay, amounting to $ 1.20.

She was seen going in but not coming out. 

At about 3:17 a.m. the following day, her body was discovered by the night watchman, who called the police.

Unceremoniously dumped in the basement, battered and bruised, with wrapping cord around her neck, and her dressed hiked up; the police believed that she had been raped and then strangled so that she couldn't name her attacker.  After speaking with co-workers, they began to build a case against the company's superintendent,  Leo Max Frank.  Some of the girls had suggested that Frank was a bit of a flirt.

Though there was no physical evidence implicating him, the media spun the story to suggest that it was open and shut.  They even allowed the testimony of a black man, Jim Conley, to be entered against a white man,  a unique event in this region at the time.  But then that white man was a Jew.

Jim Conley was in all likelihood Mary's killer.  He was drinking heavily that day and was looking for cash.  Mary's purse with her wage packet was never found, and in later years, descendants of Conley claimed that he was indeed responsible.

So why was Frank convicted instead? 

Atlanta had the largest Jewish community in the South, many prominent business owners.  Frank himself was originally from New York, a graduate of Cornell, and president of the Atlanta chapter of the B'nai B'rith.

By contrast, many of the white Protestant citizens in the region were poor, uneducated farmers, who had left near destitute conditions in the Georgia countryside to find work in the city, and for many that work meant toiling for Jewish bosses.  The resentment was there, if not always visible.

Now they were being given an opportunity to put one of them in their place.  Jim Conley was a poor drunk who posed no threat to their standing as descendants of the "conquering race", while Frank was a symbol of the "foreign" exploiter making money from the labour of their children. 

Originally given the death sentence, the judge, who had doubts that Frank committed the crime, commuted  his sentence to life in prison.  Publisher Tom Watson, fanned the flames of anger, calling on the citizens of Georgia to take justice into their own hands and inflict the death penalty on this "Yankee Devil."  A virulent racist, he hurled anti-Jewish epithets at Frank, while making wild, unsubstantiated charges.

What happened next, was predictable.  On August 17, 1915, a caravan of eight vehicles with 25 armed men, arrived at the Georgia State Prison where Frank was being held. Calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan, they cut the telephone lines, surprised the guards and kidnapped Leo Frank.

At Frey's Grove near Mary Phagan's girlhood home, they hung him. Photographs were taken but newspapers refused to publish them since they implicated many prominent citizens. Frank's body was put on public display and postcards made of the lynching sold by the thousands. "Justice" was served.  The white Protestant was still boss.


Resurrection

After the sensationalized trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, William Joseph Simmons, of Harpersville, Alabama, son of an original Klansman, decided that it was time to do something to protect the white Protestant heritage of America.  He claimed to have interpreted a pattern in the clouds as a divine command to save their honour.  (2)

He had watched D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and was drawn to the heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was Simmons who led the charge on October 16, 1915, up Stone Mountain, to burn a cross in honour of Mary Phagan, the young girl that Frank was wrongfully accused of murdering.

Cross burning was not a practice of the first Ku Klux Klan.  Griffith borrowed the idea from the Scottish Clans, who had burned crosses as a method of signalling from one hilltop to the next.

Simmon's cross burning, highly visible to the surrounding area on that fateful night, was the symbol of a religious rebirth, and the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was brought to life .  It was to be a fraternity of native-born Anglo-Saxon or Celtic Protestants who would rid the country of at least the influence, of Blacks, Jews and Roman Catholics, or anyone else who "didn't belong".

Tom Watson, the publisher who had helped to incite the mob that lynched Leo Frank, had already began calling for the Klan's reorganization, creating an interest, and in 1920, with the help of the Klan, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

The Leo Frank case, also resulted in the creation of the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith, (3) the nemesis of the Ku Klux Klan and other like-minded groups.


Making a Mountain Out of a Mountain

Stone Mountain as the site for the first Klan cross burning was not without meaning.  Long held as a sacred place by indigenous groups, Creek and Cherokee leaders used the peak for political gatherings and religious rituals.

If Simmons was going to resurrect the Klan, he had to reclaim the mountain for white Protestants. 

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, a Klan member himself, was charged with turning the mountain into a memorial to the Confederacy*, and began carving enormous images of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, right into the granite dome. (4)

Virginia Governor and promoter of the project, Elbert Lee Trinkle (in suit), shown shaking hands with  Borglum in 1923, described Stone Mountain as "consecrated ground that God himself has raised up", a "mecca of glory," a "sanctuary of truth," 'and a "sermon in stone," where the South's "golden age ... defied the future"  ( 4). It was no longer a holy place for the First Nations.  It had been conquered.

Gutzon Borglum would go on to create another masterpiece, again on sacred aboriginal ground, that would become one of the most visited sites in the United States:  Mount Rushmore.  Long a catalyst to the Native community, who still own the land**, the memorial was again a tribute to white supremacy.

Borglum had apparently been on Stone Mountain that fateful night and was a staunch anti-Semite and well known bigot.  His granddaughter inherited his papers, and says that she is often embarrassed by the things that he wrote.

Some have wondered why he would then include Lincoln on the carving, given that it was he who freed the slaves.  However, Abraham Lincoln was not really anti-slavery.  In fact, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, called Lincoln "the white man's president".   Lincoln only began to listen to the abolitionists, mid-way through the Civil War, when he realized that emancipation could speed victory for the North.  Almost 200,000 black soldiers then joined the fight.  Besides, the Klan themselves, are not pro-slavery, only pro-white Protestant. 

The  idea of this group was that they stood for the Glory of the United States.  Its Manifest Destiny.

Footnotes:

*Stone Mountain is now a popular theme park, fashioned after Gone With the Wind.  In 1995, the state privatized the management of the park, partnering with Herschend Family Entertainment, a Christian company that operates Dolly-wood and a number of theme parks in Branson, Missouri.

** The federal government has made several attempts to buy the land, but all offers have been refused by the indigenous people, since it goes against their religious beliefs to buy or sell land. 

Sources:

1.  White Hoods: Canada's Ku Klux Klan, By Julian Sher, New Star Books, 1983, ISBN 0-919573-13-4, p. 20

2. J. Edgar Hoover and the Klu Klux Klan, By R. J. Stove, National Observer, No. 47, Summer 2001

3. Website Names Alleged Lynchers of Leo Frank, Cobb Online

4. Grounding religion: a field guide to the study of religion and ecology, By Whitney Bauman, Taylor & Francis, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-4157-80162, p. 213

Friday, January 6, 2012

Kleagles, Wizards, Goblins and Dragons Rebirth a Nation

The Canadian Manifesto: How the American Neoconservatives Stole My Country

After the sensationalized trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, William Joseph Simmons, of Harpersville, Alabama, son of an original Klansman, decided that it was time to do something to protect the white Protestant heritage of America.

He had watched D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and was drawn to the heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was he who led the charge on October 16, 1915, up Stone Mountain, to burn a cross in honour of Mary Phagan, the young girl that Frank was wrongfully accused of murdering.

Cross burning was not a practice of the first Ku Klux Klan.  Griffith borrowed the idea from the Scottish Clans, who had burned crosses as a method of signalling from one hilltop to the next.

Simmon's cross burning, highly visible to the surrounding area on that fateful night, was the symbol of a religious rebirth, and the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was brought to life.  It was to be a fraternity of native-born Anglo-Saxon or Celtic Protestants who would rid the country of at least the influence, of Blacks, Jews and Roman Catholics, or anyone else who "didn't belong".

As Grand Wizard, Simmons created titles like Kleagle (organizer and field worker) Kloncilium (supreme advisory board) and Klonsel (legal counsel), while maintaining the Goblins, Dragons, etc. of the original Klan.  For his services he was provided with a home called Klan Krest and a monthly salary of $1,000.00. (3)

The Klan had gone from obscurity, to a well organized and well financed resistance movement.

In October of 1921, concern with the Klan's popularity led to a federal hearing, where Simmons repeatedly stressed the benevolent and fraternal nation of the Klan, himself denouncing the violence.  After his appearance, letters poured in from across the country, with requests for assistance in creating local chapters.  The Klan then garnered over a million new members.  Simmons would later say that "Congress made us". (1)

In 1922, the torch was passed to Edward Young Clarke, an advertising executive from Louisiana.


Clarke was the ultimate promoter, but alas turned out to be the ultimate swindler. 

In 1922, Louisiana Governor John M. Parker, sent J. Edgar Hoover (then Assistant Director of the Bureau of Investigation), a request for help in dealing with the Ku Klux Klan, that had grown so powerful in his state that it effectively controlled the northern half. Initially, the feds did not want to get involved, believing it to be a state matter, until Parker reminded them of their duty to protect the states from domestic violence. (2)

Once they started digging, they found that Clarke had been skimming off the top, keeping $ 8.00 of every $10.00 membership fee, and cashing in on the sale of "uniforms" (white bed sheets?).  The only thing they could convict him on, however, was transporting a mistress across state lines, in violation of the 1910 Mann Act; legislation that prohibited white slavery and the interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes”.

A Change in Direction

Though lynchings remained popular throughout the 1920s, despite attempts to create anti-lynching laws, the membership of the "new" Klan was more urban, and publicly denounced the practice. 

The Klan's hierarchy instead decided to become more political, by promoting candidates with a shared vision of the United States as a White Protestant Nation.  In his book of that name, Allan Lichtman, traces the Conservative movement back to those days.
From 1920 to 1925 the Ku Klux Klan grew more explosively than any political or social movement in U.S. history. In these few years the Klan recruited some three million to six million white Protestants from across America's working and middle classes, representing those who founded and "own this country" ...  Klan leaders used modern marketing techniques to build thriving chapters in both cities and small towns. The Klan flourished not only in the South but also in Maryland, Indiana, Pennsylvania, California, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, Colorado, and Kansas ... [they] sometimes resorted to violence but more commonly participated in direct civic action and electoral politics ... defended Nordic Americans and their traditional culture from Catholics, blacks, and Jews ... (4)
With ambiguous messaging, and a tough on crime stance, they reached out to middle America.
The Klan had an intensely local appeal as it worked to enforce traditional Protestant values by upholding Prohibition, fighting crime, and shutting down dance parlors, pool halls, and brothels. It backed public schools and hospitals and clean government but also boycotted Jewish and Catholic-owned businesses. Klan members benefited from this strategy, which sustained their economic privileges as white Protestant Americans." (4)
They also decided that it was time to change the system from within:
Klan members donned white robes of purity, hid their identities under hoods, burned crosses, exchanged secret handshakes and greetings, and spawned a rich bestiary of leaders termed kleagles, wizards, goblins, and dragons. But underneath the lavish ritual lurked a serious political operation. The Klan elected thousands of endorsed candidates to school boards and local governments and extended its reach to state and national offices.  Outside the solidly Democratic South, the Klan linked arms with anti-Pluralist Republicans.  Statistical analysis of all nonsouthern counties that white Protestants, both fundamentalist and mainstream, provided the vote for Klan-sponsored candidates.  Race and religion, not class or urban-rural residence, distinguished the Klan vote from support for other candidates.  At its height in 1924 the Klan swept nearly every major election  in which it had endorsed a candidate. (4)
Using side show tactics, like parading a goat around wearing the name of a candidate they opposed, or launching boycotts and whisper campaigns, the Klan referred to their political activism as "guerrilla warfare", a term that continues to be used by the conservative movement today.  Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition said of his activism to garner the white Protestant vote:  "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."  (5)

The media dismissed the Klan in the 1920s and mocked their rallies, in the same way that they allowed Reed to fly under their radar.
... and by the time it finally caught their attention, Reed's Christian Coalition controlled both houses of Congress and would later play a major role in putting George W. Bush in the White House, not once but twice. (6)
Gerry Nicholls, VP of the National Citizens Coalition when Stephen Harper was its president, also refers to the tactics used by the NCC as "guerrilla warfare".  (7)

This doesn't mean that Reed or the NCC supported the KKK, but does validate Lichtman's claim that the conservative movement did not begin in the 1940's as many believe, but the 1920s, when the toned down Klan attempted to recreate America in their image, by working to elect conservative candidates.

And they did not confine their activism to America, but crossed into Canada at the same time, said to be instrumental in electing the conservative government of James Thomas Milton Anderson, in Saskatchewan.  Though Anderson denied any involvement with the Klan, his policies reflected their "values".  Values which  included opposition to Catholics and the French language being taught in schools.

Later Pat Emmons, a Grand Wizard of the Saskatchewan Klan, scheduled a public meeting at which he said he would expose the alleged link, but "couldn't make himself heard over the shouts and jeers." (8)

Another Political Rebirth

When it was learned that former Canadian Klan leader, Wolfgang Droege, was the Reform Party's Ontario policy chair (9), Preston Manning immediately denounced him, claiming not to know.  He also purged the party of Droege's new group, the Heritage Front.  However, according to former Heritage Front member Al Overfield, he “let the Reform Party executive know about his political past, and they had no problems with it."  He also stated that Stephen Harper was well aware of his involvement in far right groups.

Any successful movement, left or right, needs the radicals and Canada's conservative movement was no different.  In fact at a Reform Party assembly, they actually passed a motion that would allow extremists to join. When someone stood up and asked "What about Doug Christie?" the response was "Ah, leave him in. We may need to use him later." (10)

Doug Christie was the controversial lawyer and monarchist, who defended most of Canada's neo-Nazis, including James Keegstra, the school teacher who taught his students that the Holocaust was a hoax.  Christie was also the founder of Western Canada Concept, a separatist party calling for Western provinces and territories to break away and form their own country (or join the United States).  Stockwell Days' father was a candidate for the Party.

It can be very tempting for politicians to tap into the passion and energy of these extremist groups, to help them get elected.  The problem is what to do with them after.

They are Still an Important Part of History

According to Robert O. Paxton, the Ku Klux Klan was the first known  fascist movement. 
The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in its founders' eyes, no longer defended their community's legitimate interests. In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as its techniques of intimidation and its conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the group's destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. It is arguable, at least, that fascism (understood functionally) was born in the late 1860s in the American South. (11)
What was unique about fascism as a political theory, was that unlike other isms, that have clear formulated doctrines, fascism "introduced no systematic exposition of its ideology or purpose other than a negative reaction against socialist and democratic egalitarianism." (12) 

Seymour Martin Lipset said of the "radical right" involved with the conservative movement, that they are far from having a unified ideology.  The common denominator that unites the Radical Right is the identification of the policies which it opposes. (13)

In the 1920's the KKK opposed non-white immigration, Negroes, ethnics, liberalism, loose morals and non-Protestants.  They claimed to "uphold the family and stop crime and vice from ruining their communities". (4)

How is that any different from the Right's goals today?  They have included Jews and Catholics but only of the Orthodox variety.  Paxton states that religion plays a much greater role in authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms (11).  Many other respected authors and journalists, also refer to the Religious Right and the modern conservative movement as fascism.

No matter how we sugar coat it, by seeking alternative monikers, like neoconservatives, corporatists, or the least threatening term of all, "conservatives", used to differentiate them from Republicans or Tories, they are still fascists.

In fact, Paxton believes that we are doing history a grave injustice by not recognizing that.
A real phenomenon exists. Indeed, fascism is the most original political novelty of the twentieth century, no less. It successfully gathered, against all expectations, in certain modern nations that had seemed firmly planted on a path to gradually expanding democracy, a popular following around hard, violent, antiliberal and antisocialist nationalist dictatorships. ....We must be able to examine this phenomenon as a system. It is not enough to treat each national case individually, as if each one constitutes a category in itself. If we cannot examine fascism synthetically, we risk being unable to understand this century, or the next.
Allan Litchman in White Protestant Nation opened the door, by tracing the conservative movement to the albeit temporary rebirth of the KKK in the 1920s.  A time when Fascism was gaining popularity across Europe, before Mussolini and Hitler made it a dirty word.

The vast majority of today's conservatives would not support the violence of the Nazis or the KKK, but they need to understand that their political actions are just as undemocratic.  Even if they do refer to it as "direct democracy", it is the use of money, radicalism and religious authority, to dictate policy.  It doesn't get any moer fascist than that.

Sources:

1.The White Separatist Movement in the United States: "White Power, White Pride!", By Betty A. Dobratz and Stephanie L Shanks-Meile, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, ISBN:  13: 978-0801865374, p.38

2. A Byte Out of FBI History,Imperial Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan in Kustody, FBI Files, March 2004

3. KU KLUX KLAN: Simmony? Time Magazine,February 25, 1924

4. White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, By Allan J. Lichtman, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008, ISBN: 10-0-87113-983-7, pp 42-42

5. Inside the Christian Coalition, By Frederick Clarkson, Institute for First Amendment Studies, Jan/Feb 1992

6. The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, By: Marci McDonald, Random House Canada, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-307-35646-8 3, p. 5

7. How to wage political guerrilla warfare, By Gerry Nicholls, Report Magazine, June 5, 2008

8. Klan Gained Hold in Saskatchewan,  By Ron MacDonald, Winnipeg Free Press, May 8, 1965. p.14

9. Preston Manning: Roots of Reform, By: Frank Dabbs, Greystone, 2000, ISBN -13-97815-50547504

10. Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada, By Trevor Harrison, University of Toronto Press, 1995, ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6

11. The Five Stages of Fascism, By Robert O. Paxton, Columbia University, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 1. (Mar., 1998), pp. 1-23.

12. Fascism: Origins of Fascism, The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia

13. The Radical Right, Edited by Daniel Bell, Doubleday, 1964