One hundred years ago, next week, on August 8, 1925, the Ku Klux Klan marched in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.

Here’s the description from A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan:

They marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in lines twenty-five abreast, from the Capitol to the Treasury Building, wave after wave of white, sheets on but masks up. Here was the Invisible Empire unveiled, not afraid of daylight or the mass of policemen posted along the parade route. The press had predicted that only 5,000 would attend. But there were up to 50,000 in the parade, cheered by spectators ten deep, roughly 200,000 people on the sidelines. Some of the marchers formed a letter K or a cross as they marched.

History Pod covered this historical event in a short YouTube video:

Wouldn’t it be great if this were all long in the past and our society was well and truly over judging people by random facts like their ancestry and skin color?

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

There have been marches by a white supremacist group this summer. They were in Kansas City in late May (where they got themselves in trouble for violating their U-Haul contracts and transporting people in the cargo section of the rented trucks). They were in Louisville in early July where the local residents were none too pleased with either their message or the way that they hid their faces.

Clearly, the past isn’t in the past on these issues.

At the time of the August 8, 1925 march, the downfall of the KKK was already in motion. The subtitle of A Fever in the Heartland is “The Ku Klux Klan’s plot to take over America, and the woman who stopped them.” The woman was a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of one of the KKK’s leaders. She managed to tell her story before she died and the scandal ended the 1920s resurgence of the KKK.

I’m not the only one to notice similarities in the problems faced by the Republican president over the Epstein files. An opinion column published on Friday on Sparta Live (a local news outlet for Sparta, Tennessee) traced the parallels.

I read A Fever in the Heartland in December 2023. This is my sixth post inspired by that book. It’s an important one for our time. Here are the other five posts:

• Research about the KKK in Tipton County, Indiana, where my grandfather participated
• A book review, after discussion with my book group
• A look at the 100th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924
• A look at the 100th anniversary of the Democratic National Convention of 1924
• A reflection on the book for Nonfiction November