Mystic Knights of the Forest: Nature and Nativism in the Ku Klux Klan’s Lumber Wars

• In Event: Extraction, Extremism, and the Environment: Using Land the (Far) Right Way

Abstract

After World War I, the emerging, frontier-like lumber towns of the Deep South’s longleaf pine belt became fertile recruiting grounds for the Ku Klux Klan. Conflicts over labor and natural resources created vectors for the spread of the Klan’s nativist ideology, as White workers turned to anti-Black, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic violence to secure the most desirable jobs or most profitable land. This paper argues that the environmental devastation wrought by the lumber industry played its own role in cementing the Klan’s cultural hold on the region thereby reordering the social fabric of entire communities in its wake. In the case of Louisiana and Mississippi, ethnic and religious ties that might have been in place since the colonial period were overwhelmed by new émigrés from across the South, the nation, and the world. When clearcutting effaced the traces of the old order from the landscape, it created an opportunity for Klan members to define themselves as bearers of tradition and defenders of forests that some had only recently begun to call home.

In contrast to southern caricatures of civil rights activists, it was the Ku Klux Klan that acted as “outside agitators.” In the words of planter and poet William Alexander Percy, who fought his own highly publicized battle to keep the Klan out of Greenville, MS, the group represented “an alien breed of Anglo-Saxon” that interfered with the paternalism of the old southern gentry and amplified violence across race, religion, and region. When the Third Klan organized to fight integration in the 1960s, they resurrected their predecessors’ revisionist project to produce alternative histories in which their communities “had always been klannish.” This paper uses the industrialization of the southern forest to examine how landscape change and historical memory shaped a century of right-wing extremism.

Author

• Owen Hyman, University of Mississippi