Customer Reviews

Invisible Empire, The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871 (Patterson Smith reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems, Publication No. 81)

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Stanley F. Horn's Invisible Empire, written in 1939, evokes a significant degree of pro-Klan bias, but in general it still provides a decent overview of the original Reconstruction-era Klan's origin, growth, and demise throughout the Southern states. The author discusses the various states encompassing the realm of the Invisible Empire and relates relevant events which took place in each one. Horn openly characterized his book as the first complete story of the Ku Klux Klan, told in a narrative style for effect. Despite his pro-Klan position, this work served for decades as the standard account of the history of the original Ku Klux Klan. Describing the organizational motivation of the Klan as promotive of amusement and adventure, Horn defends its evolution into a band of protective regulators as an admirable move toward achieving law and order. The movement expanded throughout the South not for reasons of political strategy, he argues, but as a measured response to the existence and activities of the Union League. The Klan, in his judgment, assumed the role of law-enforcerment in its members' own minds, with no contingent tendencies toward offensive violence. In concluding pages, he considers the Congressional Klan investigation in 1871 and the resulting collapse of the Klan. All in all, Horn gives an informative overview of the Klan. Though biased, the book is not an outright apology for the Klan, though--Horn seems to recognize a degree of political motivation behind Klan actions, but he would be sure to insist that any such goals were strictly defensive in nature. A glaring weakness in the account is the lack of documentation. While insisting his story was historically accurate and providing a list of references, Horn refrained from the use of footnotes in order "to avoid interruption to the flow of the narrative."

Horn's Invisible Empire remained an important and lasting work through several decades of shifting viewpoints. While it has largely been relegated to the ash heap of history due primarily to its pro-Klan biased nature, it still affords the reader an illuminating window through which one can gain insight into the thinking of the past and observe the nature of shifting ideologies over time.