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Hate-State: Klansmen, Communists, and America’s Perpetual Red Scare
Schmack, Benjamin David
Schmack, Benjamin David
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Abstract
This project details the under-examined warring between American Communists and the KKK from the 1920s to the present day. It also uses this feud as a lens to analyze interactions between State, radical, and extremist elements within the American capitalist system. Communist-Klan-State interactions prove essential to understanding the history of anti-racist activism, the antecedents for modern clashes between the far-Left and the far-Right, and the manner in which white nationalists operate with levels of State approval never given to Communists. Communist activism in the US has largely existed within the political framework of the nation-state, while the KKK is built on over a century of lynching and intimidation. Yet, presumptions that the Left and Right ends of the political spectrum are equally nefarious often present these groups as reflections of one another. Because of this, critiques of inequality are cast as similar to overt endorsements of racial superiority, patriarchy, and antisemitism. This work argues that many of the generalizations made regarding the Left by the Right are reflective of the rhetoric of the Klan, which paints lack of conformation to white, heteronormative, patriarchy as Communism. The reason for this Klan preference is that Communist activism critiques capitalism, whereas the Klan endorses the maintenance of racial capitalism. It is these long-standing anticommunist connections and preferences between State actors and white supremacists outside of the State that defines my titular term: The Hate-State. This dissertation consists of four case studies detailing the history of the Hate-State and the consistency through which anticommunism has defined it. In chapter one, I discuss the origins of the Communist and Klan feud in the 1920s, paying particular attention to a largely forgotten wildcat strike in the mining town of Zeigler, Illinois. The strike and legal battles that followed it, pitted a Left-led United Mineworkers of America local and their Communist allies against a coalition of Klansmen, union officials, and the Illinois court system. In chapter two, I shift focus to the 1930s and the South and trace reactionary Klan efforts to suppress the Communist Party USA’s southern organizing drive. At every stop of this tour through the Southland, Communist organizers met Klan violence. This chapter reveals not only the consistency of Klan opposition to Communists in the region, but Hate-State alliances between the KKK and local police, prosecutors, judges, and elected officials in every instance. Chapter three traces the history of a State constructed conspiracy theory that proclaimed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be a Communist, as well as its long influence over the KKK. In 1957, the Georgia Commission on Education published pictures of King attending Highlander Folk School, which they claimed to be proof of King’s Communist affiliations. Klan rhetoric regarding MLK in the sixty years since has consistently remained that he was proven a Communist through this investigation into Highlander. The perdurance of the Highlander-MLK conspiracy speaks to the continued potency of anticommunism in the rhetoric of the Right. In the final chapter, I analyze this feud through the lens of the film and book BlacKkKlansman, as well as critiques of the film made by Communist activist and director Boots Riley. The chapter also compares the surveillance and infiltration tactics in the memoir and film with a more representative example of Communist-Klan-State interactions: the Greensboro Massacre of 1979. Comparisons between the Greensboro Massacre and the presentation of the police in BlacKkKlansman reveal much about the effort to erase the repression of Leftists by the State from the collective memory and the manner in which State infiltration consistently to benefits white nationalists over radical Leftists.
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Date
2022-08-01
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
American studies, American history, Black history, Communism, Ku Klux Klan, Labor, Radicalism, The State, White Nationalism