In the early 1920s, amid rising anti-Catholic sentiment and hysteria generated by World War I, the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan found new footing in many states outside the Deep South-including Montana. In Big Skies, White Hoods, Christine K. Erickson explores the little-known history of the Klan in Big Sky Country, revealing what this western incarnation had in common with its antecedents, how it differed from the Klan's reappearance elsewhere, and what it might tell us about the resurgence of white nationalism in Montana and across the West. The early-twentieth-century Klan, unlike its Reconstruction-era forbear, was a national phenomenon, with 3 to 4 million members across the country. But it was also highly localized-and in the forty-six Montana communities where it organized, that meant focusing less on race than on religion and class. Big Skies, White Hoods sets the historical stage for the Klan's arrival with an account of the influence of the American Protective Association, a virulent anti-Catholic organization, and the social fallout from World War I, as seen in the emergence of the notorious Montana Council of Defense. In its organizational structure and recruiting methods, its political interests and membership, and its deep connection to white Protestant culture, the Klan in Montana echoed iterations elsewhere. But Erickson shows how the state's weather and geography complicated the task of organizing its scattered, isolated communities, and how local ambivalence challenged the high-minded extremist ideals of the Klan's leaders-especially Grand Dragon Lewis Terwilliger, whose ambitions were finally thwarted when discrepancies between the national, state, and local organizations proved intransigent. Although Big Skies, White Hoods documents the ultimate downfall of the Klan in Montana, the book's epilogue confirms that its legacy of hate continues, as other racist organizations have written their white nationalist hopes upon Montana's history.
Christine K. Erickson is Associate Professor Emerita of History at Purdue University Fort Wayne.
"With a historian's judgment and a native's understanding of place, Christine Erickson analyzes the course of the Klan's turbulent presence and lingering influence in Montana, a state with an oversize presence in the American imagination."-Thomas R. Pegram, author of One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s "Erickson makes a significant contribution to the field by linking Klan membership in Montana to traditions of fraternalism among white middle-class men. Local Klans demonstrated a kind of Protestant, white supremacist complacency, seeing the Klan as another business network. Erickson also explores anti-Klan pushback, as Butte's immigrant Catholics decried KKK ideology, and as locals in small towns criticized Klan violence and terror in the South. Altogether, a fascinating and nuanced look at the rise and fall of the Klan in 1920s Montana."-Dee Garceau-Hagen, author of Portraits of Women in the American West "Far-right extremism takes on a different character in every state and Big Skies, White Hoods is a critical piece of scholarship on the hate movements that have taken root in Montana. To understand modern political divisions, one must look to the past; Christine Erickson is a clear-eyed guide to this important history."-Leah Sottile, author of When the Moon Turns to Blood
