The origins of the white supremacist terror organization known as the Ku Klux Klan. We explore its emergence during the post-civil-war reconstruction era, its roots in “charivari” and how it came up with its bizarre aesthetics. The episode is guest-written by the ever-excellent Devin Thomas O’Shea.
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Devin O’Shea: https://x.com/devintoshea / https://linktr.ee/devintoshea
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
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QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast Premium Episode 261, Ku Klux.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Devin O'Shea, Julian Fields, and Liv Agar.
One night in May 1866, in the Civil War-torn interior of the United States, some young men in Pulaski, Tennessee met in a judge's office to do guy stuff.
Some of these men were the most prominent members of the Pulaski Bar Association, some were newspaper fellas, and some were just really good on a mandolin and fun to drink with.
As Frank McCord recalled, In the course of the conversation, one of the numbers said, boys, let us get up a club of society of some description.
Suggestion was discussed with enthusiasm.
I hope everyone is very ready for some southern accents.
Yes, it's one of the few that I can do, so.
Perfect.
Or at least that people don't get mad at me for doing.
I guess you can do a bad Southern accent and people don't get too mad.
Of course.
Apologies to our 11 Southern listeners.
There's a few episodes that we've never put out that we just keep as compromise on Jake.
Nice.
That's smart.
This committee of drunk guys immediately found the task of naming themselves difficult.
They were trying to discover or invent a name that would be... Suggestive of the character and objects of the society.
In this number was the name Kukloi, from the Greek word kuklos, meaning a band or a circle.
I'm starting to understand what group of guys this is.
Yeah.
This is the founding story of the Ku Klux Klan, which began as a non-violent fiddle group and escalated into a nationwide wave of racist terrorism, including a brutal assassination program.
And just a heads up, we are going to discuss some pretty disgusting violence here.
Yeah.
Why couldn't they just stick with the fiddle?
This is so fucked up.
You've included a picture of what I assume are the founding members and they're all holding instruments instead of weapons.
It's really actually kind of insane.
Guitars, fiddles, clarinet looks like.
That guy who's really blurry in the back row of the left.
Yeah, he's a ghost.
Yeah, no one's ever been able to identify who that is, so we just don't know.
Could be the devil.
Could be.
Look at how low his hat is tilted.
Yeah, very cool.
Only a creature from the netherworld tilts and curls their brim like that.
I agree, yeah.
But they are, I will note, they are holding the instruments like weapons, and they don't look like they're having any fun, which is a telltale sign this is about to go bad.
Absolutely.
I mean, one of them looks like a child.
Yeah, the bottom row.
Yeah.
Yeah, he looks 13.
Yeah, yeah, he looks like a Dickens character or something.
He was the worst of all, as it turns out now.
There's a plaque on a building in Pulaski that commemorates this boozy evening in which the Klansman, the most potent symbol of American racism, was first named.
But there's always something lacking in descriptions of the Klan origin.
As soon as I say Klansman, there's probably a fully formed image in your head that involves white-robed men in a field at night with burning crosses and white-steepled hats and little eyeholes cut out of the veil.
Maybe John Goodman in Oh Brother Where Art Thou comes to mind.
It's all fairly pagan and occult, and if it's not in a field at night, the Klansman is often paired with the red, white, and blue bunting.
There's that iconic photograph from 1926 when a Ku Klux parade marched right down the center of Washington, D.C.
Do you guys know that image?
I don't think I do.
Stop humiliating us by asking us if we know about anything.
You guys have an encyclopedic knowledge of clan images, right?
Like I do.
I think it would have been concerning if Liv all of a sudden piped up and was like, oh, very familiar actually.
Very familiar with those images.
Very familiar with that knight.
She's like, that's my favorite one.
That's my favorite.
Once we learned about that, about American history in school, I stopped learning anything else.
I do like the idea that Canada teaches its people more American history than America does.
Yeah, that's true.
That is probably true.
Keeps your eyes off homegrown racism.
It's like, racism, that thing they do down there.
Where's Rhode Island?
I don't know.
Well, that Washington D.C.
photo is not the first wave at all.
White-clothed Klansmen are stuck in our heads because of the second wave in the 1920s, which was incredibly popular and powerful and murderous, but today we're here to demystify the first wave.
The Klan aesthetics, it turns out, were all stolen and assembled out of bric-a-brac in popular culture, In the same way that the Boogaloo Boys draw their inspiration from Call of Duty, and Patriot Front takes its inspiration from the J.Crew catalog.
Can you guys name the three waves of the clan, then?
I don't know.
The first one.
There's a first, a second, and a third.
Yeah.
What is the third one associated with?
I don't know.
I'm being corny.
I'm quizzing you.
Yeah, we're back to school.
Sorry, I shouldn't quiz you.
In backwards order, the way I remember it is that there's the David Duke in our modern era, which is like Louisiana politics, kind of, or American history acts or whatever.
And then there's the big second wave, which basically arises in direct opposition to the civil rights movement.
And then there is the wave we're talking about today, which is in Reconstruction, the oldest and sort of least understood one.
Just wanted to get the timeline right there.
Absolutely.
The fact that this wave of the Klan is back in Reconstruction sucks because they had very little photography back then.
And so we have to go back into the written word archive in the great study hall of degenerate topics.
So join me back in the Victorian section where we are going to learn about how the original Klan was made up of spare women's dresses, ancient French jokes, and furry cosplay.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, you learn something new every day.
Yeah, Goku t-shirts.
That would be funny if there was, like, ancient Japanese water drawings of, like, Goku.
And they were like, these are sick.
Contrary to popular assumption, the first wave was not necessarily Southern.
Most of the first wave Klan activity occurred in the borderlands between North and South, in Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas.
It's the second wave that gets really big in Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.
Pulaski, Tennessee, ground zero, is a great example of the kind of town that broke out in a case of the Klan after the Civil War.
Pulaski is in the northern part of the South, and the number one indicator of a Klan infection was if an area had been stressed by military occupation.
This usually meant that a Kentucky town or a Tennessee county in which the Union forces had massed and then needed to eat.
So the battles of Shiloh and Nashville are both near Pulaski, but Union generals trying to keep their guys in line out of the chicken coop, stealing their dinner.
That didn't work out too well, especially once Grant took over and foraging became very necessary.
Damn yeah.
They're fighting us but they're also drinking our mint juleps.
All the mint is gone.
It's just a julep.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA Podcast.
For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA Podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Pervers with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA.
