In 1923 the Ku Klux Klan produced two films, The Toll of Justice and The Traitor Within. This article considers, for the first time, what the representation, promotion and exhibition of these films suggests about the ways in which the Klan sought to promote and define itself at the height of its power. It examines the cinematic articulations of Klan policies and explores the broader engagement of the Klan and cinema. In doing this, the article repositions film as a contributing factor in the growth and development of the modern Klan during the 1920s.

The problem of defining a coherent cultural identity is one that has confronted generations of Afro-Americans. As part of the justification and defence of slavery and the slave trade many whites rationalized their actions by arguing that all Africans were cultureless savages. The same combination of guilt and arrogance induced them to attempt to suppress and denigrate surviving elements of a culture whose very existence they had already denied. Most black Americans responded to these pressures by rejecting Africa and their African heritage as a source of shame and by trying to deny and to erase their blackness. Malcom X clearly understood this when he proclaimed in 1965: ‘ We have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our black heads, we hated the shape of our noses …, we hated the color of our skin.’ Identification with the dominant white culture took many forms. For some Blacks it involved the use of hair straightening and skin bleaching; for others it meant the elimination of any ethnic quality in their speech, dress, cuisine and religion; for many more it meant a life of morality and hard work lived according to the dictates of the Puritan ethic. The loss of any distinctive cultural identity involved in this process was made worse by the unwillingness of white society to recognize and accept the Afro-American as part of the dominant culture. In these circumstances many blacks found themselves in a cultural limbo without an adequate self-image. White domination of the media meant that they sometimes felt literally invisible. James Baldwin drew attention to this dilemma in a speech delivered in June 1963, when he noted that:

A black child born in this country … discovers two terrifying things. First of all he discovers that he does not exits in it, no matter where he looks – by which I mean books, magazines, movies – there is no reflection of himself anywhere … [if] he finds anything which looks like him, he is authoritatively assured that this is a savage, or a comedian who has never contributed anything to civilization.

If one forgets the past, he will not be prepared for the future.

The Militia of Montana

YES! TODAY JUST AS YESTERDAY.

The Michigan Militia

When the militia movement emerged in the United States during the mid 1990s its members were widely seen as simply the latest practitioners of what Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.” There was much comfort to be had in this characterization. It fitted the militia movement into a long-standing model for understanding right-wing extremism in American life, one in which the principal characteristics of such extremism were readily understood: conspiratorial, Manichean, absolutist – if not apocalyptic – and, of course, paranoid. The problem with this approach, though, is that it tends to discourage any examination of mainstream culture's role in the creation or sustaining of those defined as extremists. It downplays the extent to which the pool of ideological resources employed by the extreme right exists not just on the margins of American life, but also in the very fabric of the American ideology. Little attempt is made to explore the extent to which the ideas and beliefs of these “extremists” are related to, and are drawn from, key periods in US history: from the American Revolution, the period of the constitutional settlement or the settling of the American West, for example. Yet such ideas and beliefs are absolutely central to how groups like the militias see themselves and the world around them.

Jean Lartéguy's 1960 novel The Centurions, which follows a group of French paratroopers through the wars in Indochina and Algeria, is one that has achieved cult status within the US military. In embracing this novel as a valuable how-to guide for counterinsurgents, those who promote The Centurions ignore the sexual violence and misogyny at the heart of the work, reflecting deeper silences over the issue of sexual violence in war. This article explores both the depictions of sexual violence in The Centurions and the silences that surround those depictions.

It has often been said that the desertion of disproportionately large numbers of Irish and German voters from the Democratic party in 1920 was a major factor in producing the Republican landslide of that year. Warren G. Harding certainly had a German-American father-in-law, had had pro-German sympathies before 1917, and as early as 1916 had been spoken of as a man whom the German-American community could support for the Presidency. The Democratic candidate was undoubtedly identified with Woodrow Wilson, who through his unwillingness to press for self-determination for Ireland could be said to have ‘alienated nearly all of Irish America’. But it is difficult, lacking knowledge as we do of the precise numbers of Irish and German voters who swung away from the Democrats, to feel that a final statement on the matter has been made, while those statements which have been made have not been finally convincing, even where based on statistical evidence.

The first Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts was a congressional leader of the highest calibre. W. Stull Holt has written: ‘no one can read in the Congressional Record during [Lodge's] career without being impressed by his mastery of parliamentary technique, by his adroit maneuvers to extract his party from a tight situation or to entangle his opponents, and by his knowledge of what to do under all circumstances’. Similarly, Denna Frank Fleming has said: ‘in skill of parliamentary maneuver, in ability to manipulate factions against each other and to his own purpose Lodge may never be excelled’. The picture conveyed by these two authorities is one of an extraordinarily talented congressional leader dedicated to the greater glory of the Republican Party. But as Holt and Fleming also recognized, it is not enough to dismiss Lodge as a mere partisan; he was also a devoted son of the Senate, keenly aware of the importance of the separation of powers and particularly sensitive to encroachment on the legislature by the executive. Most of the earlier assessments of Lodge's part in defeating Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations policy were made before the Senator's papers became available, but a re-examination of his role, in the light of his correspondence and other documents, clearly demonstrates his overwhelming concern for the two institutions that he served so long and so well, the Republican Party and the Senate.

In the London Quarterly Review for January 1814 appeared a long and brilliantly written review of an anonymous American pamphlet entitled Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters, which had been published in New York some four years earlier. The pamphlet, indeed, was only of passing interest to the Quarterly. The real issue was the moral condition of the United States, an enemy which had to be dealt with during the coming year first militarily then diplomatically. The British reader was to be assured that the Americans should be handled no less severely than the French. To this end, the essayist revealed the distressing truth: through Gallic influence the Yankees had become imperialists, and the mania pervaded every aspect of life in the States. It followed that such a people should be chastised without scruple — whatever their English affinities. American magazines called the review a “collected mass of calumny and falsehood against a whole nation,” a “nefarious tissue of calumnies on the American character,” a copy of “all the effusions of malevolence, misrepresentation, and ignorance” which the Quarterly could find against “American taste, customs, morality, and literature.” Even a few notable Britons were embarrassed: the venerated Wilberforce called on John Quincy Adams in London to explain that the Quarterly's opinions of the United States were not those of the British people, and Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate and a major contributor to the magazine, told young George Ticknor in Paris after the war (a conflict that the Tory Southey had supported enthusiastically) that nothing in his literary career had caused him more mortification than “being thought” the author of the piece.

During the American sixties, the resurgent interest in Wilhelm Reich and the widespread impact of Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation encouraged the idea of coupling psychoanalysis and Marxism. Reich's works reminded radicals once again of the integral connection between political revolution and sexual freedom, while Marcuse's critique, a bold attempt of the mid-fifties to read Freud as a revolutionary utopian, suggested the desirability of a marriage between Marx and Freud, a marriage that would have seemed unnatural to many of the Old Left generation. Certainly, too, the writings of Norman O. Brown and Paul Goodman gave credence to the idea that sex, psychology, and radical politics were necessarily interrelated.

The Warren Court induces schizophrenia. On the one hand it is difficult for anybody with a civilized political sensibility not to admire the policy content of the Supreme Court's judgments during Earl Warren's Chief Justiceship. If the three areas of decision-making with which this paper is concerned — segregation, reapportionment, and the rights of the criminal suspect — are examined, the Supreme Court clearly was on the side of the angels. It declared segregation to be unconstitutional. In a series of decisions the Court ended the gross malapportionment of legislative districting both at state and federal levels. Finally, the Warren Court attempted to change the balance between the criminal suspect and the police, by substantially increasing the restrictions on the latter's freedom of action. And yet, despite one's approval for the policy embodied in these decisions, there is something curiously disconcerting about the Court's judgments. One has a very strong sense that something has gone awry. This sense arises from the manner and mode in which the opinions of the Court are constructed. All the judgments under consideration in this paper — Brown v. Board of Education, Baker v. Carr, Reynolds v. Sims, and Miranda v. Arizona — share a common characteristic, a curious lack of substance, a lack of historical, constitutional, and legal substance. In other words, there is an absence of the kind of argument in the Supreme Court's opinions in these cases, which distinguishes a judicial decision from any other sort of decision.

During his life, as after his death, Charles A. Beard was a controversial figure. An unsympathetic Allan Nevins dismissed him as the exponent of “a smart, hard materialism.” His former student and long-time friend Raymond Moley regarded him as the exemplar of a “hard-bitten realism,” a realism heavily laced with skepticism toward “orthodoxy — even his own earlier orthodoxies.” His “real spirit,” the “essential ‘style’ of the man,” his friend and neighbor Matthew Josephson found, “was realistic, skeptical, pragmatic.” Yet there was another side to Beard. He had, an admirer wrote, “a deep concern about human beings, a profound respect for human dignity.” The philosopher Irwin Edman, who took his course in American government when an undergraduate at Columbia, recalled how he conveyed to his students not simply his “passionate concern for an understanding of the realities of government,” but his “ideal of government: the liberation of the energies of men.” The problem, his wife perceptively recognized, was that Beard was such “a highly complicated person” that he “cannot be classified into any mere category of man, thinker, historian. He was not mentally static enough for that simplification.”

Beard's multifarious accomplishments and activities were more than sufficient to fill the lifetimes of several men.

Lionel Trilling is generally regarded as one of the most important American critics self-consciously indebted to Matthew Arnold's idea of critical humanism. But his legacy draws little interest now that humanism has presumably been “unmasked” in academic circles to reveal the various political agendas beneath its program of disinterested idealism. For many critics on the Left, he is remembered, in Cornel West's phrase, as “the godfather of neo-conservatism,” and perhaps a precursor of such recent advocates of the humanities as Allan Bloom and former Secretary of Education William Bennett. Much of this is doubtless due to Trilling's opposition to the general tenor of the 1960s counter-culture, some of whose participants are now today's academic cultural critics. But if Trilling is to be remembered as a kind of mandarin apologist for “high culture,” he should be remembered as a very troubled and ambivalent one.

Under the Mormon scheme of things in 1831, somewhere in Indian territory (somewhere it was thought, west of Independence, Missouri) a city was to be built by those who accepted the gospel restored through Joseph Smith, Jr., God's prophet for the latter days. It was to be a city of refuge – a place where the saints would be safe from both the corruptions of the day and the judgement that was to fall upon the world – and a city of righteousness, endowed with the Spirit of the Lord.

Among the most intensely absorbed viewers of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was Adolf Hitler, who knew almost nothing of the United States but who observed how degenerate the “Okies” had become. He believed that immigration had already mongrelized the general populace and, since even farmers of Anglo-Saxon stock had succumbed to racial disintegration, the Americans would be pushovers for the Wehrmacht. This particular movie-goer failed to notice the resilience and endurance also flickering on the screen; and it would be foolish to claim that his decision to declare war on the United States was based only upon a misinterpretation of The Grapes of Wrath (which he watched several times). But since no treaty obligation compelled the Third Reich to make war, after Pearl Harbor, upon an industrial power of which the Führer was so ignorant, any analysis of his motives must remain speculative. It may have been a mad urge for apocalyptic destructiveness (and self-destructiveness), springing from subterranean depths that the psychobiographer can fathom more readily than the military or diplomatic historian. Perhaps Hitler's miscalculation was not utterly irrational: with Holland's surrender in 1940, its place as the world's nineteenth largest army was ceded to the Americans.

Your diddler is ingenious. He has constructiveness large. He understands plot. He invents and circumvents.

The attempt to bridge the chasm between multiplicity and unity is the oldest problem of philosophy, religion and science, but the flimsiest bridge of all is the human Concept, unless somewhere, within or beyond it, an energy not individual is hidden; and in that case the old question instantly reappears: – What is that Energy?

This paper examines the representation of American everyday life and the language of the legal system in the work of Charles Reznikoff. It draws comparisons between Reznikoff's accounts of the lives of immigrants to America in his work, and Jacques Derrida's experience of colonial relationships as described in his book Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Charles Reznikoff was the son of Russian Jews who moved to America to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. His parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, his grandparents spoke Hebrew, and Reznikoff's first language was English. This familial linguistic complexity was further added to by his associations with experimental modernist poetry and poetics through the “Objectivists,” an environment that provided him with the poetic forms in which to explore relationships between language, experience and its representation. I cite two other linguistic contexts: that of the law, acquired through his legal training, and that of commerce and sales, acquired through working as a hat salesman for his parents' business. Reznikoff therefore had no naturalized relationship between language and either family or national identity, or between language and place. I use Derrida's notion of “a first language that is not my own” to explore the implications for Reznikoff's poetry, and particularly the relationship between the specific accounts of experience in Testimony and the more general notions of nation and justice. While I conclude that a concern of the poems is always language, and what language means in different contexts, the poems also seek to connect with the material consequences of injustice for the fleshly bodies of the victims.

From his position as editor of the Nation from 1865 until 1899, E. L. Godkin steered one of the liberal standard-bearers in a transatlantic network of cosmopolitan liberals. From this position he helped define nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism. However, while Godkin fitted in the mainstream of liberal thought in 1865, by the time he retired he occupied the conservative fringe. Godkin never made the transition from a nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism to a newer nationalistic democratic liberalism because democracy failed him. Instead of peace, commerce, and learning, democracy created an American Empire rooted in war, protectionism, ignorance, jingoism, and plunder, culminating in the Spanish–American War. Godkin's critique of American imperialism was thus based on his pessimistic but perceptive reading of the flaws of American democracy. Godkin believed that the rise of “jingoist” democracy had doomed the American “experiment” and thought that the nation had slipped into the historical, degenerative cycle of empire. By tracing Godkin's increasingly bitter warnings about the dangers of democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, we can catch a glimpse of a dying worldview that questioned the ability of democracy to act as a moral force in the world.

The CIA is increasingly symbolic of major controversies in American foreign policy. It also presents the academic researcher with a fascinating paradox – since it is simultaneously secret and yet high-profile. In part, this is due to the CIA's willingness to allow former operatives to write memoirs. We argue that the memoir literature, authored by CIA personnel both high and low, together with others who worked alongside them, is now so dense that this allows us a degree of triangulation. Yet these memoirs are increasingly collective productions, involving censors, ghostwriters and teams of researchers, introducing conflicting voices into the text, and adding layers of separation between author and reader. We suggest that these ghosted memoirs, therefore, operate on several levels. For good or ill, these books shape the American public's perception of the CIA and should be studied closely, especially by those interested in the subjectivities of image management. This essay seeks to explore these issues by comparing four memoirs by CIA directors and acting directors who have served since 9/11.