Deja Vu - Almost

 Another pleasant evening at Esther's home where we all enjoyed butternut soup and other treats as well as stimulating, shared friendships and conversations.  The book for this month was "A Fever In the Heartland" by Timothy Egan.  We have read other books by Timothy Egan and have found them to be well researched.  Many of us did not want to read this book as we didn't want to read details of lynchings in the South.  We found that the Ku Klux Klan was against more than blacks and had a reach far beyond just the South.  They closed the door on anyone they considered inferior - "not of strict Nordic stock".  This included Jews, Polish, Italian, Irish, Greeks, Asians, Catholics and the list goes on.  They wanted complete Americanism - the absolute superiority of one race and one religion, and the inferiority of all others.  They considered themselves the law itself and had police and politicians in their back pockets.  They had one prominent leader who thought he was "the embodiment of Napoleon".  We found it hard to imagine that so many would join and follow such an organization.  "These people needed to hate something smaller than themselves as much as they needed to have faith in something greater than themselves."  It is obvious that nothing that is going on in our nation politically today wasn't first done almost 100 years earlier.  "What if the leaders of the 1920's Klan didn't drive the public sentiment, but rode it."  We have to be strong and vigilant to not let these things happen again.