Big Skies, White Hoods The 1920s Klan and a History of Hate in Montana

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 vi