Today in History, October 12, 1871 "US President Grant condemns Ku Klux Klan-- a lesson for how to deal with the Vigilantes and Paramilitary Neo-Confederates of today"
Yes kids, there was a time when we had Presidents who attacked the Ku Klux Klan, rather than enabling them and describing them as "very fine people".
The article linked below summarizes concisely the history and background of President Grant's personal actions to defend the 14th Amendment abolishing Slavery, by using the pulpit of the Presidency, and motivating the Congress to legislate against the terrorist insurrection which continued in the former Confederate States, even during and after Reconstruction.
Like the Right Wing Neo-Confederate Militias today, they were a terrorist organization which continued fighting on the side of the Slaveowners Rebellion, with firebombings, lynchings, and a variety of other tactics designed to instill fear. These Klansmen wrapped themselves in their Confederate traditions, claimed they were Patriots, and were defending their "States Rights", using the same anti-government rhetoric and discredited arguments which to this day, is still simply a cover for institutional racism, and economic exploitation.
Here, is a chart showing the various stages of membership in the Klan, where you can see that in the aftermath of the actions by President Grant, they dwindled down to very few, forced to go underground. Only after President Woodrow Wilson publicly praised the KKK propaganda film, D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", did the estimated Klan membership shoot up from 5,000 in 1920, to over 350,000 in 1927.
How many Americans know that President Grant pushed through a Law against the Klan, known as the "Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871", and was forced to intervene into the internal politics of the State of South Carolina to deter their actions prohibiting African Americans from exercising their Constitutional Rights under the 14th Amendment?
The new "Klan", in the form of MAGA, is deploying its heavily armed Paramilitaries and Vigilante groups to disrupt the elections, install a Trump Dictatorship, and literally blow up or kill State Governments and their elected Representatives who insist on maintaining Public Health measures to mitigate against community spread of covid19. They are truly an insurrection, except they are fighting for the Rights of a Virus to spread and kill off Americans, and reflect the irrational will of the most "Virulent" President in our history. And like the Klan, their movement is driven by hatred, rage, and psycho-sexual impotence.
President Grant, though his administration was rife with corruption, and he unfortunately made regrettable decisions vis a vis Native Americans, was strongly committed to Lincoln's tradition and outlook. His opposition to the system of Slavery was unshakeable, and he was genuinely outraged at the guerilla warfare continued against the United States by these "stay behinds" of the Confederacy.
We have such an insurrection today, with the main difference being that the current incarnation is opposed to wearing masks, or hoods. They are brazenly stupid people who feel comfortable in displaying their identity, since the President of the United States has their backs.
The question I have, is "will a President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spare no quarter to do what Grant did"? If they don't, this version will become a very big problem. A Tim McVeigh type problem.
