A brief history of modern white supremacy and the paramilitary movement leading up to the Capitol siege will provide the necessary twenty-first-century context to invite comparisons between Reconstruction and the present. Trump called his staunchest supporters to action at the January 6 rally. Embedded among them were paramilitary forces, strengthened by four decades of white domestic terrorism, that would transform a march on the Capitol into a violent attempted coup d’état. In Bring the War Home, a comprehensive study of the modern white power movement, Kathleen Belew argues that it stemmed from and was framed by the Vietnam War. It matured into an umbrella social movement, something new in the history of white supremacy, accepting a diverse range of white power symbols and ideology. Following Vietnam, disparate groups from different socioeconomic backgrounds and levels of education, both urban and rural, coalesced, united by economic hardship, institutional distrust, and a growing culture war. In this narrative of crisis and betrayal reminiscent of white southern Democrats during the Reconstruction era, military leaders and politicians betrayed soldiers who had fought a horrific war. This developing coalition rose above the country’s military defeat and purported social and economic emasculation by embracing militant white masculinity. By the early 1980s, the white power movement successfully combined Cold War anticommunism, racism, and anti-Semitism into a rhetoric that a nonwhite globalist elite dominated government, banking, and the media. The violence this messaging incited resulted in assassinations and attacks on infrastructure, abortion clinics, synagogues, and federal sites. With stolen weapons and landmines from the military, members established militias and then paramilitary camps where they trained with discipline. On the fringe yet bigger than the John Birch Society, the movement made a distinct turn in 1983 toward apocalyptic revolution against the state, developing a successful leaderless strategy and cell-like structure. This strategy permitted covertly organized violence that would be difficult to link to either the larger movement or a particular leader. As the movement metastasized in the 1990s, it grew to the size of the revived Ku Klux Klan that spread across the nation a century prior. The federal response to two high-profile events incited the crescendo of the movement. The first was the standoff at the Weaver family’s white separatist Page 147 →compound in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, which resulted in the death of an officer and the family’s mother and a son. The second was the loss of seventy-six Branch Davidians in a fire in Waco, Texas, the following year, which angered Timothy McVeigh and like-minded militants. Operating without leadership but within a cell comprising himself, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier, McVeigh killed 149 adults and 19 children and injured hundreds in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The largest mass casualty event between the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Al-Qaida’s terror attack on September 11, 2001, McVeigh’s bombing temporarily inspired copycats and more white nationalist violence before a federal crackdown. The movement then retreated to its thriving internet community. The meek federal response, a public unaware of the threat that coordinated white power posed in the mid-1990s, and a failure to convict other white power activists invited future violence such as the 2021 Capitol insurrection.⁶

In the year leading up to the attack, congressional testimony from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism warned of the pervasiveness of white nationalism and the terror threat these groups posed. Empowered and emboldened by Trumpism, more hate groups proliferated in the United States than ever before. Right-wing extremists, most of whom are white power activists, committed two-thirds of all extremist-related killings, making 2020 the most lethal year for political extremism since Oklahoma City. The movement quickly escalated from a priority for DHS to the number-one terrorist threat, eclipsing radical Islamic and leftist extremism.⁷ SPLC worried about the individuals such as Dylann Roof, perpetrator of the 2015 Charleston massacre, who was radicalized online at home yet served as a foot soldier of the nationwide white supremacist movement, according to Belew.⁸

Cultural bias, misinformation, zealous nationalism propagated by rightwing media to downplay the current threat, and historical misunderstanding about the topic cloud the nation’s ability to see clearly the continuous danger posed by white domestic terror from Reconstruction to the present. Historic Columbia expected these same factors to complicate the task of delivering the interpretation to MoRE’s visitors that political terrorism conducted by white Democrats in the 1860s and 1870s ultimately fostered Reconstruction’s demise and violently ushered in Jim Crow. However, the organization felt confident that the facts and artifacts supported their interpretive claims.⁹ The MoRE’s northeast bedroom exhibit about the Red Shirt campaign and election of 1876 supports generations of historical scholarship that white South Carolinians continued to use extreme violence against Republicans Page 148 →and Black Americans to retain power after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. The space, likely the first HHM to do so in South Carolina, overturns what Bruce Baker, in his study of Reconstruction memory in South Carolina, called a “white supremacist narrative.” It overshadowed a counternarrative created by and centered on Black citizens in the public sphere, helping to buttress Jim Crow and divide Black and white workers.¹⁰ The interpretation also marks an example of vernacular challenging official cultural expression, which in the case of Reconstruction are both over a century old.¹¹

MoRE docents worked to topple the dominant white supremacist narrative that justified violence and terrorism. However, this powerful narrative, particularly the idea that Red Shirts were heroes, would not easily be unraveled. It had endured for more than a century, generationally passed down through white family history and prominently in South Carolina’s public sphere. Textbooks, historic house museums, a federally funded tour guidebook, and other public history sites across the state cemented the white supremacist narrative of Red Shirt glory in print, stone, and brick. One MoRE docent initially proudly proclaimed his Red Shirt lineage but then grappled with it as a result of his training. This pride in Red Shirt heritage was made possible by the way public white supremacist spaces like Oakley Park glorified Red Shirts. The United Daughters of the Confederacy still maintain the rarely open and nearly forgotten HHM in Edgefield belonging to Confederate general Martin Gary. One of the key architects of the 1876 Red Shirt campaign, Gary rallied thousands of red-clad followers from the plantation home’s balcony. Inside Oakley Park visitors can search for three authentic red shirts displayed among thousands of artifacts. Even the Red Shirt connection to contemporary right-wing militancy was not lost on Elizabeth Ready, local UDC president and part-time museum director. In 2014, after seeing a bit of the Red Shirts in Clive Bundy’s standoff with federal officials over grazing fees on public land in Nevada, she proudly predicted that “pretty soon the Red Shirts are going to ride again.”¹² Two years later jurors acquitted Bundy’s son and other militants of charges related to their occupation and standoff at Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Kathleen Belew compared this acquittal to another—the 1988 Fort Smith, Arkansas, sedition trial, the first and last serious attempt by the federal government to prosecute assorted white power groups for violent felonies and seditious conspiracy as a unified social movement.¹³

Historically, seemingly male-dominated white supremacy movements have depended on white women’s public performance of virtue and support. As discussed in chapter 1, during the eras of the New South following Page 149 →Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, middle-class and elite white women in memorial associations launched public campaigns to vindicate and memorialize the Confederacy and Lost Cause narrative. The UDC, the largest women’s club by World War I, proved the most successful Lost Cause defenders and preservers of white supremacy. Karen L. Cox contends the UDC won a cultural victory by creating a “Confederate culture” of ideas and symbols, most visible though monuments and flags displayed in public spaces such as courthouses and town squares. As part of their vision of Confederate motherhood, the UDC also indoctrinated children with textbooks and membership in the Children of the Confederacy. To vindicate the Confederacy and to interpret the central issue of the Civil War as a battle over states’ rights and not slavery, the UDC gathered artifacts, manuscripts, and accounts from former Confederates to deposit in museums and archives. The UDC installed exhibits in government spaces, sponsored essay contests, and published historical fiction and nonfiction.¹⁴ This concerted effort was part of what historian David Blight defined as a larger “reconciliationist vision” that over the course of a half-century allied itself with a “white supremacist vision,” segregating and southernizing both Civil War and Reconstruction memory. This narrative reinforced the need for Jim Crow laws, the racist system born out of this national reconciliation that lawfully and culturally enforced segregation until the 1950s and 1960s. During this period most white women never defied traditional norms of race and gender. The racial contexts of their lives socially and legally forbade it. White women thus buttressed Jim Crow’s apartheid system and permitted their presumed purity and the myth of the Black rapist to cement white supremacist rule. The mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement overturned Jim Crow and chipped away at the white supremacist narrative with its emphasis on white terror, which was no longer palatable as a response to activists.¹⁵

For the last half-century, white women have continued to strengthen and support modern white supremacy. The contemporary movement is nationwide and has directed its racism toward Jews and nonwhites (as well as Black Americans), similar to the nativist Ku Klux Klan revival of the 1920s. However, women’s participation in white supremacy since the post-Vietnam era is less mainstream than at the peak of UDC and Women of the Ku Klux Klan membership in the 1920s. At that time conceivably half a million white Protestant women joined the Klan and were the majority of Klan members in some states. Membership in white supremacist organizations is difficult to track, but the performance of white supremacy for the public and press is not. From the antebellum period to the twenty-first century, white Protestant women launched their auxiliary organizations and fundraised. They performed vulnerable white womanhood and the need for protection from Page 150 →men of color. They were key players in violence and also enforced white supremacy through social networks and economic influence, including boycotts and fundraising. In the 1920s “poison squads” ruined reputations through rumor, and Women of the KKK adherents circulated their ideology at church and social engagements and among family. Modern white power groups thrive through marriage, which symbolically weds differing white power ideologies and white power groups. These activities also point to an enduring and evolving “cult of motherhood” within white supremacy. While the UDC created the Children of the Confederacy, more recently membership to white supremacist organizations required bearing and indoctrinating Aryan children, enough to one day populate a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest. An updated strategy to unite white women supremacists is a social network of sharing recipes and homeschool lessons. In addition, women’s domestic support, including sexual service as wives, lends credibility to their partners as activists. Finally, in service to the modern war against the state, white supremacist women are recruited from and trained in nursing and survival prepping. They occupy, domesticate, and in some cases co-own paramilitary compounds.¹⁶

There is a long history of white Protestant women across the nation supporting white supremacy via their social, familial, and economic circles. In South Carolina two white women used their intellect and public-facing historical writing to enshrine and defend the activities of the state’s Red Shirts. The Red Shirts were men who served as a paramilitary wing of the white Democratic Party during Reconstruction and used intimidation and violence to deter Black and Republican voting in the election of 1876. Similar to other racist women that publicly defended white supremacist narratives and actors, Mary Simms Oliphant and writer and editor Louise Jones DuBose upheld the memory of Red Shirts as heroes in the most important historical assessments produced in the state in the twentieth century. Chapter 3 demonstrated the notorious generational influence of Oliphant’s textbook, A Simms History of South Carolina, particularly on volunteer MoRE docent John Clark. The chapter argued that many white docents at the MoRE used the tour’s narrative, which challenged the myths about how Reconstruction failed and violently ended, to help overturn their own indoctrination in the Lost Cause and white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction. Clark recalled that Oliphant’s textbook praised the terrorism of the Klan and Red Shirts as necessary and morally just in their efforts to restore the rights of white men, especially in the election of 1876.¹⁷

With state support, Oliphant indoctrinated generations of students. Her reach extended to South Carolina classrooms for a half-century, well into the 1980s. During the New Deal and less than a decade after Oliphant’s Page 151 →first textbook appeared, however, the federal government vested Louise Jones DuBose with the power to draft a literal road map of Reconstruction-era sites that buttressed the white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction. These driving tours included public history sites similar to Oakley Park that celebrated the Red Shirts and the election of 1876. As assistant director of South Carolina’s Federal Writer’s Project, DuBose became the leading force in producing South Carolina: The WPA Guide to the Palmetto State, published in February 1941. The state guidebooks were an attempt to find an American homogenizing national identity and spirit while celebrating the country’s cultural diversity across forty-eight individual states. The racial dynamics, poverty, and folk traditions associated with the South made the region both an asset and obstacle to these federal goals. In the first section of South Carolina’s volume, essays on culture dominated, but others explored environmental issues, ethnic groups, economics, and education. Part II detailed cities and towns. A description of twenty-one-day trips rounded out the guide. Ideally the WPA guides would help safeguard historical relics and promote local preservation while simultaneously encouraging citizens to rediscover their nation.¹⁸ By emphasizing whiteness and othering Black Americans, states like South Carolina got trapped in a nostalgic tourist mode, a problem still present at many of the South’s HHMs today and one that the MoRE attempts to correct. By making Black and often white folkways “exotic and quaint” in the plantation tradition, the WPA guides revealed more about how white southerners wanted to depict the South than the region’s reality. Thus the southern guides supplemented fictional works such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) that supplied the “cultural beliefs that underwrote apartheid.”¹⁹ Washington officials criticized the South Carolina edition for offering local patriotism rather than truth and demanded multiple revisions of the essay “The Negro.” In the preface director Mabel Montgomery and DuBose acknowledged the “disagreement of historians as to fact, and the argument between fact and fantasy.” When poet and literary critic Sterling Brown claimed that South Carolina relied on simplistic and misleading sociological support, Montgomery reframed the issue as a battle between a “picturesque and interesting account” and a “sociological discourse carrying a Northern slant.”²⁰

Both Oliphant and DuBose described Reconstruction as the “darkest period” in that state’s history. Their writings argued that the chaos of emancipation and Reconstruction warranted the violent and illegal efforts by the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts to return South Carolina to white supremacist rule.²¹ Oliphant claimed that Klansmen were the “best men” of the state, sworn protectors of property and white lives, especially that of Page 152 →white women threatened with “insults” on the street. She later explained away less than palatable violence by noting that disguises were sometimes adopted by the occasional carpetbagger, scalawag, and Klansman for “private vengeance.”²² DuBose shared KKK tales that ranged from benign to horrific. On highway 215 at West Springs, tour twelve provided a resting spot at the Confederate Holly. Also known as the Ku Klux Holly Tree, it stood as a reminder of the three Klansmen with arrest warrants who evaded soldiers overnight by hiding in its branches, even as the soldiers camped beneath them. Tour sixteen recounted the first KKK group organized in the state in 1868. The WPA guide’s history of Rock Hill and York County in the upstate noted these communities were a hotbed of Klan activity and Reconstruction-era terror. DuBose advised readers to see tour sixteen of York County for further information on the Klan crackdown in the early 1870s by the federal government, a response to the group’s growing control. DuBose insisted that corrupt officials arrested 195 citizens, many distinguished lawyers, doctors, and clergy, without warrant or evidence.²³ The MoRE works to correct this myth in room 14 as part of the discussion of domestic terror. A panel notes that the US Army arrested the Klansmen, and that their 1871 trial in Columbia, which would have taken place during Tommy Wilson’s residency, was an attempt to “interpret” what citizenship and due process meant under the Fourteenth Amendment.²⁴

The most persistent myths that Oliphant and Dubose perpetuated about the Klan were that it formed to protect white people from legally armed Black men and that the Republican government only allowed Black militias. In truth militias formed under Gov. Robert Scott in March 1869 after the Klan’s appearance. Mostly comprising Black men since most white men feared serving, membership in militias swelled to one hundred thousand by fall 1870. Narratives by Democrats that Republican-backed militias intended to target and oppress whites generated fear in the white community; yet the militias, maintaining a difficult balance of respect and restraint to avoid “self-defeating violence,” initially were successful in protecting the Black community and officeholders. But they too came under attack as part of a larger pattern of violence against Republicans and freed people.²⁵ When local Black citizens became “threatening,” the Klan, argued Oliphant, righteously executed ten incarcerated Black militiamen accused of murdering a Confederate veteran. In later editions of her textbook, Black militias took on a less villainous role and were simply ill prepared to bear arms. Republicans in the state received the blame for inciting fear and suspicion.²⁶ Tour ten in the WPA guide included the National Guard Armory, the site of an 1870 Laurens riot by “armed Negroes, led by a ‘scalawag.’” Historically a white mob fired on the armory after Black citizens of Laurensville came to the aid of a constable in Page 153 →a dispute with a local white constable. Nine Republicans, Black and white, perished, and Governor Scott ordered the Black militias to turn their weapons over.²⁷

Similarly DuBose defended the 1870 Klan violence in Union County, for it quickly disarmed militias and inspired Scott to withdraw his support. She ignored, however, the larger and more dangerous conspiracy represented by the two extralegal jail raids, simply noting that the KKK retaliated against a Black militia by killing several of them. Politically the Republican coalition of Black voters and a few white scalawags in Union County was tenuous but powerful. Alex Walker, a Black trial justice and militia leader, was one of these Black leaders, along with three state representatives, two of the three county commissioners, and the school commissioner. Months of violence targeting trial justices both white and Black, Black ministers, and other Black citizens and politicians precipitated the violence that erupted on New Year’s Eve 1870, which was, as Bruce Baker surmises, “fueled by a fatal combination of alcohol and nervous bravado, with a strong undercurrent of fear on both sides.” That evening, in the absence of Alex Walker, Sylvanus Wright led his twenty-five-man militia as it guarded Budd Williams, a white constable and election commissioner, from Klan violence. The militia was one of two companies that intercepted Matt Stevens and Benjamin Robinson, two armed men moving illegal liquor cargo to a local hotel. Post-encounter rumors speculated that the militiamen wanted the whiskey to celebrate the new year, though it does appear some militia shot at the wagon. Under the influence, the bootleggers fled; Stevens, who DuBose described as a one-armed Confederate veteran, was captured and killed by members of the militia. What Elaine Frantz characterized as a white coalition of “respectable elites” and “violent, marginal men” responded the next day, ultimately seizing militia weapons and attacking a Black home with prominent Republicans and militiamen inside. Soon after the vigilantes arrested Walker for ordering the murder, pulling him from a train bound for the state’s capital, where he was headed to inform Governor Scott of recent events. Thirty of Walker’s militia attempted to rescue him, but they were told he would be executed immediately upon their assault. The first of two jail raids took place on January 5, 1871, ending with the murder of two of five Black Republicans being held there. Though W. J. Whipper and Robert Brown Elliott, two prominent Black state legislators, considered it an act of war warranting a strong response, Scott sent no reinforcements. The three men who escaped the mob returned to jail the next day and were murdered in a second raid a month later before they could be moved to Columbia to name and testify against their kidnappers. The masked mob, a substantial portion of which was on horseback, materialized in the rain on the night of February 12 and Page 154 →far exceeded the previous raid, numbering in the hundreds, perhaps as many as fifteen hundred. This time ten men were abducted, and no one survived. With the short-term goal of extinguishing the militia complete, the Klan was largely free to implement a six-month-long coup that forced local Republicans to resign. The lessons learned by those who implemented the Red Shirt campaign were that domestic terror was effective and that the federal government was slow to react, sending military companies and passing the Enforcement Acts too late. On the state level, Governor Scott made more Democratic appointments, demonstrating capitulation in the wake of white political violence.²⁸ DuBose’s account reproduced the Klan’s note defending their use of force against force and equating themselves with martyrs for Michael, the angel of justice. Historian Elaine Frantz argues that the long, “performatively literate” note, written after the grisly second raid, was an attempt to court national attention and convey that competent elites controlled a well-coordinated Klan in Union. As a result the press further disseminated the idea of the Klan nationwide, and the federal government launched an investigation. The 1871 Enforcement Act yielded arrests in Union County and across the South, but few ever entered a courtroom for trial.²⁹

More recent work by Frantz and Bruce Baker has created a clearer picture of white domestic terror in Union County, South Carolina, during Reconstruction. Both provide thorough accounts of mob and Klan activity and underscore the importance of Klan and lynching narratives in shaping the response to the aftermath. Militias, mobs, and criminal vigilante groups formed in the early years of Reconstruction, often comprising members from the old antebellum slave patrols and Confederate home guard. The Union County Slickers, for example, emerged in December 1865. According to Frantz, political violence arose in Union County twice, once in 1868, which outsiders, rather than the local residents and perpetrators, labeled as Klan activity, and again in 1870 to challenge successful Black leadership and political power that threatened local criminal and vice activity. Using network analysis, she examines the social relationships that appear in the county’s criminal indictment records to argue that social elites and small, violent criminal bands coalesced around William Faucett to conduct this organized political violence. Bootleggers Stevens and Robinson, for example, were landless white friends of Faucett. Newspapers provided misleading or partial accounts of the violence. National coverage of the Klan was a narrative for northern white audiences to reconcile the violence. These stories reminded readers of their own white supremacist beliefs and presented a performance of whiteness that demonstrated coordination, strength, and effectiveness. By the fall and winter of 1870–71, these men, many of them masked in recycled Page 155 →costume ball attire, adopted a culturally constructed concept of the Klan that validated their brutality and soothed local class tensions with a new coalition centered on whiteness. As it had become one the most violent and well-organized KKK groups during Reconstruction, the bloodshed left by the Union Klan’s attacks rivaled the number of deaths in neighboring counties’ riots. As a result, the Union County Klan’s actions prompted federal investigations and legislation.³⁰ This Klan was but one of a number of white terror groups, such as the White League, whose members viewed themselves as part of the “revolutionary tradition,” were unafraid of public association with their revolutionary performance of violence, and invoked the Second Amendment to defend that violence constitutionally.³¹ As Carole Emberton astutely articulated, “Violence brought white supremacy into being, not the other way around.”³²

No story of white-led violence in South Carolina during the election of 1876 looms quite as large in public memory as the Hamburg Massacre in July. Oakley Park’s Red Shirt shrine and the works of Oliphant and DuBose all justified this white violence. However, the MoRE’s text on “The Red Shirt Campaign” panel in room 14 overturns this narrative. The panel clearly places responsibility on “Reconstruction opponents” who “executed six members of a militia unit that hesitated before permitting two whites to drive a wagon through the militia’s Fourth of July parade.”³³ Oliphant blamed the Black militia for refusing to apologize for the legal, armed policing of white citizens or to disarm after fortifying themselves in a building. Only in her last revisions did she concede that reports of the militia’s threat to lynch two white citizens were not confirmed and that no one knew who shot first.³⁴ The narrative defending the massacre was so accepted among white South Carolinians that DuBose openly included in the guide that the executed men at Hamburg had surrendered.³⁵

The plantation home Oakley Park displays the 1860 Springfield rifle that future South Carolina governor, US senator, and white supremacist “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman carried during his participation in the massacre.³⁶ Hamburg marked a turning point when, as the MoRE reminds visitors, Gen. Martin Gary, the same proprietor of Oakley Park that rallied the Red Shirts, could implement his strategy of “a ‘straight-out’ Democratic campaign of aggressive white supremacy,” which used coordinated intimidation, economic coercion, and massacres. Violence escalated, culminating in the so-called Ellenton riot that September, which “resulted in the deaths of two whites and dozens of African Americans, including a state legislator shot in the head while praying for mercy.”³⁷ The history of the city of Aiken that DuBose wrote for the WPA guide called the events in Hamburg and Ellenton “two of the bloodiest race riots of the period.” She estimated that “three Page 156 →hundred whites led by rifle clubs massacred between thirty and fifty Blacks over a two-day period in Ellenton.” These massacres, she argued, led to a “smoothly functioning” state government and community prosperity.³⁸

Where the Klan had failed to restore native white supremacy, the Red Shirts succeeded. Both Oliphant and DuBose noted the central role white women and families played in the movement, including by perpetuating its memory as righteous. Oliphant viewed the campaign as a family affair, the support of which defined good citizenship. White women were complicit, sewing red shirts and abandoning farms and businesses to participate. By the 1970s Oliphant had removed her claim that “every decent white man went to work to deliver the State from its evil rulers.”³⁹ Hero worship continued, however, as part of an assignment where students, presumed to be white, were asked to draft a story about a Reconstruction-era student whose father took part in the campaign.⁴⁰ DuBose vindicated the Red Shirts as well, on numerous occasions referencing their “flaming costumes.” However, both the city sections and driving tours that she wrote did this most effectively by playing up violent Red Shirt roots and tracing the path of Wade Hampton’s 1876 gubernatorial campaign.⁴¹ In Anderson, Hampton delivered his first of forty speeches to six thousand enthusiastic people, a “highlight in the city’s history.” Bands played, banners flew, and long lines of cheering Democratic club representatives marched until the “mounted rifle club members, wearing brand new ‘Red Shirt’ uniforms, swelled the parade.”⁴² DuBose invited driving tourists to seek out the Hampton Oak in Sumter. The tree offered to visitors the same shelter that shaded Hampton, flanked by his Red Shirts, as he spoke to a crowd on October 7, 1876. DuBose also implied that white women’s purity fueled the Red Shirts. She described a woman draped in funeral regalia and chains at this same event. As Hampton made his way to the platform, the woman’s cloak fell away to reveal her white dress and golden crown, and the crowd supposedly yelled the famed battle cry “Hampton or Hell!”⁴³ DuBose’s account is part of what W. Scott Poole describes as the “aesthetic of the Lost Cause,” which during Reconstruction and the “Hampton Days of September and October 1876” ritualistically exhibited young, beautiful women’s bodies to be read as “public texts” that validated the beliefs of southern Democrats.⁴⁴ The performance was political theater that framed the governor’s race in religious terms as a battle between good and evil and played on white male southerners’ anxiety about race and gender. Though Black men were not yet being branded rapists and beasts, the women represented purity and symbolic victims of Republican Reconstruction, a disease for which the only cure was Democratic power. The tableau also doubled as a response to Gov. Daniel Chamberlain’s disbanding of rifle clubs.⁴⁵

Page 157 →Of the twenty-one tours in the WPA guide, five include “points of interest” or history lessons related to Hampton’s 1876 campaign for governor or the need for violent white supremacy to intimidate armed Black citizens. Tour nine moved through Columbia highlighting Hampton’s long life there, including when the state summoned him to lead the Red Shirts and restore Democratic rule by bribery, intimidation, and voter fraud. Tour nineteen brought tourists to the courthouse where Hampton laid the cornerstone for his namesake county. A white community had recently formed Hampton County because Beaufort had been “overrun” with the usual villains of the white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction (northern soldiers, carpetbaggers, and scalawags).⁴⁶

Both Oliphant and DuBose accepted voting fraud and violence as the price paid “to oust the Radicals at any cost” and proclaimed Hampton a defender of peace and moderate voice of reason. DuBose argued that Chamberlain, the last Republican governor, tried reform but simply could not compete with the “beloved” war hero Hampton and the organization, persuasion, and intimidation of his Democrats.⁴⁷ Two MoRE panels devoted to the election of 1876 explain further that, because of his moderation, Chamberlain was pursuing a fusionist ticket, under which Democrats would nominate him and his moderate wing of the Republican Party would support him. The straight-out Democratic ticket derailed this strategy with the support of the Red Shirt campaign and local rifle clubs. As the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party, these forces dispersed Republican rallies and on Election Day ignited violence and fraud. For example, in Edgefield and Laurens Counties, there were more votes for Democrats than registered voters for both parties.⁴⁸ Oliphant emphasized Hampton’s moderation over time, noting that he condemned violence to avoid federal intervention. But in her earlier text, eerily seeming to anticipate events 145 years later at the January 6 DC rally, Oliphant bragged that Hampton pleaded for peace and nonviolence “from the steps of the state house” in an attempt to mollify angry Democrats and “the excited and outraged people,” who with “one word” from him would have killed federal troops and the Republican Coalition in the State House.⁴⁹ The Klan and mob violence in Union County at the beginning of the decade was central to ending Reconstruction in the state during the contested election of 1876, when both Democrats and Republicans claimed victory and maintained their own versions of the House. Judge William H. Wallace, who came to power in 1872 because of the 1871 Union coup, served as the interim Speaker of the House, which was run by Democrats. As Baker surmised, Wallace helped “carry off one of the great coups in the history of American politics, a political stunt that would shape the South and even Page 158 →the nation afterwards.” Today the Wade Hampton statue still stands on the State House grounds. The equestrian design and battles engraved along the bottom as well as its funding by the state and Hampton chapters of the UDC and United Confederate Veterans suggest that the 1906 monument honors Hampton’s Confederate service. However, drawing on Baker’s analysis of the monument as a hybrid version of Hampton from the Civil War and Reconstruction, a MoRE caption notes that the hair and beard depict Hampton as he appeared during the Red Shirt campaign.⁵⁰

Given the sustained hero worship of Wade Hampton and his Red Shirts via public history and white memory, docents must overturn decades of indoctrination in a matter of minutes. Two objects, a red shirt and a tissue ballot, are visitor favorites and vital artifacts in broaching these subjects.⁵¹ Though the red shirt became the symbol of the campaign for redemption in 1876, its origin is unclear. One theory is that Martin Gary, who was an avid reader of European history, modeled it on Giuseppe Garibaldi’s 1860 Red Shirts, who helped usher in Italian unification. During an 1892 speech in Anderson, Ben Tillman claimed that he was responsible for making the red shirt the movement’s symbolic costume.⁵² There are red shirts in collections across South Carolina, including the previously mentioned UDC-run Oakley Park and the South Carolina State Museum. The State Museum and the MoRE display red shirts to advance a conversation about white domestic terror. Oakley Park and the Sixteenth Regiment South Carolina Volunteers’ Museum of Confederate History, run by Camp 36 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Greenville, present white supremacist interpretations of the shirt. The Museum of Confederate History possesses the shirt of Thomas Bissell Crews, a Confederate cavalry officer in Hampton’s Legion, newspaper editor, and legislator from the upstate.⁵³

Most docents head directly to the red shirt upon entry into the space for a discussion of domestic and political terrorism that began with the Klan.⁵⁴ Heather Bacon-Rogers witnessed the shirt’s power to “drive home” the violence. When she opened the drawer holding an authentic red shirt, visitors realized someone wore it, and some asked, “What are those stains on it?” She too wondered, “Is it age? Is it blood? I don’t know.” She took her own discomfort with the brown stain on the object and directed it back on the visitor: “What does it look like to you?” Although Bacon-Rogers thought the reproduction red shirt in the sole glass exhibit case in the space looked “cheap” and added no value, weekend docent and public historian Halie Brazier preferred it. Clean and protected alongside a period rifle, it was “more Page 159 →menacing” and “creepy.” It offered a glimpse of the horror without going too far and putting off visitors. Bacon-Rogers also used the shirt to ask visitors about the difference between Klan and Red Shirt uniforms. Visitors had a strong reaction to realizing Red Shirts did not cover their faces. Some docents chose to privilege a gendered discussion of the shirt. Public historian Jennifer Gunter pointed out the shirt was a handmade garment and political terrorism was a “family affair.” She reasoned that “this is not just the men getting together. Somebody’s wife or domestic servant made this. This is the way a whole portion of society felt.” Volunteer docent Cyndy Storm fused the gendered origin with technology, noting that a “new gadget,” the sewing machine, was used to construct the shirt. As part of their participation in modern-day white supremacist cells, white women continue to prepare disguises as well as drive getaway cars, move people and weapons, and proofread important public documents.⁵⁵

Though decades separated them in age, three docents used the tour to contemplate their own family’s connection with white supremacy. Bacon-Rogers argued that familial connections to white supremacy hit “a little Page 160 →closer to home” with white visitors at the MoRE than with Historic Columbia’s other house tours because they recognize that their ancestors were possible executors of this violence. “This house makes me question too what my family was doing,” she revealed. “I’m telling audiences about these horrible things that are going on. Do I have these horrible things in my past too?” She grew up in Aiken County on the border of Edgefield County. She knew families that went back five generations in Edgefield, white families present during Reconstruction when locals incited a violent riot against their Black neighbors. She exclaimed, “Why did I not know this? The next county over. That [violence] was going on but not right next door.” She learned this information from the tour. Likewise Brazier knew, by virtue of her “heritage,” “history,” and “blood,” that the “violent perpetrators” could have been part of her family. While these two docents wondered whether their families had carried out Reconstruction-era violence, volunteer Walt Hall, a descendant of Red Shirts, struggled with whether he wanted to share this ancestry as a teaching tool.⁵⁶

The tissue ballot, the straight Democratic ticket cast in the election of 1876, engaged visitors about how voter fraud was conducted but carried less emotional weight than the red shirt. The ballot drew people in because it was “proof” of fraud, a unique object not normally seen in house museums that allowed visitors to connect to their own familiarity with modern political corruption. Sometimes guests recalled George W. Bush’s electoral victory over Al Gore in 2000 and contrasted that with the 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes–Samuel Tilden election.⁵⁷ But often visitors responded with laughter and chuckles rather than shock, as if they expect politics to be corrupt.⁵⁸ The false allegations of fraud in the 2020 election by former President Trump and his supporters will likely become a new reference point for visitors in the coming years. The new myth persists despite numerous federal agencies, a bipartisan group of government officials, and Supreme Courts on the state and federal level agreeing that there was no systemic fraud in 2020.⁵⁹

To stress the severity of the situation, MoRE docents frequently asked visitors “to put themselves” in the election of 1876 and picture the violence. Docents instructed visitors to imagine the threats associated with open-air voting and risking their safety by asking for a Republican straight ticket. Visitors then considered whether they would vote their conscience with an armed Red Shirt present. Volunteer and former teacher Jean Morgan found that guests exclaimed, “No!” But Bacon-Rogers “stopped waiting for a response,” even though that question “probes directly into what’s important.” She noticed body language that demonstrated visitors were “physically uncomfortable,” so she spoke from her truth: “I’d love to think I’m brave and I’d march right up there and vote my conscience. But had I been a former Page 161 →enslaved male, would I? I don’t know. … I’m also a white female in the twenty-first century. Being brave now and being brave then are two different things.” The question still left visitors with a level of discomfort while not opening them up to judgment from their peers. However, on smaller, more intimate tours, people felt comfortable enough to share their thoughts.⁶⁰

Docents varied in how they presented Wilson’s family in relationship to the violence. Some simply noted that the family had moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, by 1874.⁶¹ Bacon-Rogers often referenced the 1926 historical account Ousting the Carpetbagger from South Carolina, which claimed Tommy Wilson’s extended family frequently took food to Presbyterian Klan members imprisoned during the Klan trials in Columbia in the early 1870s. The future president’s Aunt Felixina, wife of his Presbyterian minister uncle James Woodrow, and his sister Annie Wilson Howe’s mother-in-law delivered food to incarcerated men like Dr. John A. Leland, an elder leader in the church. According to the book, Leland wrote fondly in his diary about witnessing an excellent sermon from Tommy’s father, Rev. Joseph Wilson, during a temporary jail release. For Bacon-Rogers the story contradicted the impulse to paint presidents as coming from “wholesome backgrounds.” She argued that Page 162 →while Wilson may have grown up within the seminary and Presbyterianism, that same institution leased enslaved people, including for work in the Wilson family household. According to the 1860 Slave Schedule for Richland County, George Howe, Annie’s father-in-law, owned eleven women and eight men.⁶²

The Howe family’s slaveholding status was part of the research Historic Columbia presented to its docents as the museum approached its two-year anniversary. The new circumstantial evidence provided docents with tools to guide conversations with visitors about how Tommy Wilson might have responded to the rise of the Red Shirts. Two articles in the State newspaper in June 1946 and 1950 shared local Joseph Physioc’s remembrances of Tommy and the election of 1876. Physioc attended Columbia Military Academy, two blocks north of the MoRE, and like Wilson was a student of a former Confederate officer. Wearing his red shirt and gray military pants, he stood with his honor guard at events for Hampton’s gubernatorial campaign. He also played for the Alerts baseball team. Tommy, a decade older than Physioc, occasionally joined them as a “first rate first baseman, none better.” Physioc also told friends about swimming with Wilson and their friends at a Congaree River swimming hole. He remembered Tommy as head of his class, a leader, and defender of white children attacked by “wild” freedmen. Implying that he was an honorary Red Shirt, Physioc recalled that Wilson proved his bravery “many times in those Reconstruction days before seventy-six.” Tommy supposedly led his naked swimming buddies’ defense “with sticks and stones and old discarded horse pistols” against attacks to steal the boys’ clothes.⁶³

MoRE docents expressed fears about interpreting violence and conflict in the Wilson house. Before opening, initial docent concerns were about reactions from guests, especially older South Carolinians, to descriptions of white on Black violence. They might object to vilifying the formerly revered Hampton and his Red Shirts, who went from heroes to terrorists over the course of the tour. One docent credited repetition of the domestic terror theme for being able to smoothly convey this history.⁶⁴ Three others made their discussions on violence brief to curb blowback. Bacon-Rogers attributed the interpretive success to not focusing on “specific violence, such as the Edgefield riots,” partly due to the tour’s pace.⁶⁵ Visitors attending BIPOC-centered history museums are generally given a celebratory, “insider” version of a story of “adversity, struggle, and triumph.”⁶⁶ And while the MoRE celebrates accomplishments of the Reconstruction era, the violent and abrupt end of that era disrupts the traditional model of a happy or socially acceptable conclusion. For Brazier detailing the violence against Black people and Republicans was her “biggest interpretive challenge.” She struggled to find a balance, wanting to avoid gore but worrying about being perceived as “glossing over it flippantly.”⁶⁷

Page 163 →As the MoRE exhibit on domestic terror demonstrates, identifying systemic violence and selecting appropriate representations bring interpretive conundrums for public historians. For instance, the community of Memphis disagreed on what constituted appropriate language for describing the violence that took place in July 1866 when a white mob, including police, raped several Black women and killed dozens of Black people over the course of three days. Beverly Robertson, former director of the National Civil Rights Museum and member of the Tennessee Historical Commission, argued that she and the NAACP ultimately endorsed a private marker for the Memphis massacre of 1866 after the commission insisted on describing the incident as a riot on a state-sanctioned marker. The language choice shielded white perpetrators of the violence by evoking twentieth-century images of Black riots in neighborhoods outside the South, such as those in Los Angeles, California, as the civil rights movement evolved to address the struggles of Black urban areas.⁶⁸ For MoRE docents the limit was graphic images of lynching. Volunteer docent Kathy Hogan, a former educator, objected in part because lynchings were more common during Jim Crow and because children attend the museum. She had firsthand experience working with a teacher who had shown a graphic lynching image to children. Children understand intimidation, bullying, and the constitutional rights of assembly and speech, Hogan argued; thus a lynching image does not advance the narrative. Conversely docents needed time to establish trust with their audience and contextualize the images. Thomas Nast’s cartoon One Vote Less, with its less graphic depiction of the murder of an African American male voter, was a sufficient example from an exhibit panel that also engaged visitors. The story of Republican chairman Benjamin F. Randolph’s assassination in 1868 and a lynching hidden in the background of Nast’s cartoon Worse Than Slavery provided further evidence if needed. The panel about Randolph noted the “state legislature authorized a monument” at his grave in Columbia’s Elmwood Cemetery in 1871, which prompted “prominent African Americans” to initiate a radical public response that endures today as a challenge to the white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction. They bought several acres from the cemetery to create Randolph Cemetery “as a community institution and tribute to black resilience.”⁶⁹

The authenticity of evidence presented at the MoRE gave its docents the confidence to discuss Reconstruction terrorism, which was once celebrated by white South Carolinians. Weekend docent and public historian Casey Lee had no qualms about using the word terrorism. In addition to being the correct terminology, as a graduate student Lee had a “firm grasp” on Reconstruction terrorism’s history. Furthermore, the red shirt, rifle, and tissue ballot offered evidence that made it hard for visitors to dispute the MoRE’s Page 164 →interpretation on terror. She “planted seeds” in the rest of the house, but her narrative fully bloomed in room 14. “You’re not going to argue with me in that room,” Lee said, followed by light laughter. She continued, “You don’t have to like it. But you’re going to accept it.” Four docents never had a visitor contest the interpretation.⁷⁰ Docents also reported that most visitors were hearing the Red Shirt history for the first time and political terrorism held a high degree of interest for them.⁷¹

Evidentiary support did not ease all of the docents’ fears and concerns, some of which were rooted in a lack of representation in the public history field. Brazier joked that visitors think far less about her failures than she does, but she still worried that her whiteness prevented her from understanding political and racial terrorism since she would “never have been the recipient” of that violence. She also was “very self-conscious” about describing the violence with the brevity required of a house tour but with proper respect for the victims who deserved to have their story told.⁷² Brazier and other docents acknowledged how problematic it was to have white docents address white violence against Black bodies to overwhelming white audiences in white spaces. The white narratives and representation dissuaded most people of color from coming to museums, and when they visited the MoRE, they heard her, a white docent, narrating a “Black story to Black people.” Gunter also questioned her role as both a docent and ally. Discussing race felt “strange,” especially when she had a diverse audience. White visitors like herself, who could never fully grasp the violence, made Brazier feel as though she was “talking over everybody’s heads a little bit.” Gunter confirmed that explaining white on Black violence during Reconstruction to white people, often for the first time, when most Black visitors present were familiar with this history was “a weird situation to be in.”⁷³

Several docents embraced the opportunity to talk about race in general and felt confident in their abilities because of their academic training. Gunter earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in southern studies, which placed great emphasis on sustained open dialogues about southern concepts of race. Lee thought more deeply about the racial elements of her MoRE narrative and honed her skills discussing race during a public history internship in Maine at the height of the Confederate flag debate in the summer of 2015. As a South Carolinian outside of the state, she learned to articulate how white South Carolinians regarded the flag and its history. For Lee tours were also cathartic. Visitors became surrogates for distant family members that she could not engage because it would “blow up.” But her family gave her greater insight into how visitors who embraced the Lost Cause think and how far she could push visitors before those firmly committed to white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction dismissed her and a new narrative.⁷⁴

Page 165 →One of the most successful but difficult interpretive spaces in the MoRE is the exhibit on political terror during Reconstruction. Docent experiences illuminate interpretive approaches to help sites discuss white supremacy and domestic terror with honest conversations and powerful artifacts. Yet volunteer Cyndy Storm wondered if “sometimes you can’t talk about this stuff until everybody’s dead.” Gunter, however, suggested the site could push further, that museums bear more responsibility in making their sites more racially and ethnically inclusive beyond white southerners explaining systemic racism to white people.⁷⁵ Within a year of opening its doors, the MoRE hosted docents from the Columbia Museum of Art, who were preparing for an African American art exhibit. Could the site do more? Historic Columbia did not design the space devoted to white violence during Reconstruction to discuss the history of white domestic terror. However, the exhibit and narrative provide visitors with a starting point for understanding how white supremacy brutally brought an end to Reconstruction and continues into the present, with many of the same strategies. The exhibit and a comparative approach can also offer opportunities to better understand the connection between political and racial violence via paramilitary forces during Reconstruction and the era of Donald Trump.⁷⁶

The Red Shirts and antidemocratic paramilitary forces in other reconstructed states arose because the federal government stopped intervening when white supremacist violence and political terrorism occurred. Similarly, for four decades the modern white power movement grew, successfully infiltrating the military, due to a lack of both consistency in federal regulations on white domestic terror and commitment to eradicating the problem. The Defense Department banned active participation in white supremacist groups in the late 1980s after active-duty Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, gave equipment and paramilitary training to the Klan. However, more “passive” activities, such as membership in these organizations, distributing racist propaganda, and listening to hate rock, continued among enlistees. Restrictions on extremist activities tightened again in 1995 following the Oklahoma City bombing.⁷⁷ Then a twenty-year War on Terror beginning in 2001 prompted lower recruiting standards and unclear regulations, which created an environment ripe for white power infiltration. The Defense Department refused to institute a zero-tolerance policy, rarely expelled extremists, and denied problems when members were publicly identified.⁷⁸ Not until 2009, under President Barack Obama’s administration, did the military reinstate the ban on active participation in white supremacist organizations. Casting a wider net this time, active participation covered recruiting, fundraising, demonstrating, rallying, training, organizing, displaying associated tattoos, and distributing propaganda, including on the internet.⁷⁹

Page 166 →Just two months before the Capitol siege, after the foiled plan to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was uncovered, Belew warned, just as she had in her book, that more organized white power attacks would follow. A new generation of activists, with Trump serving as a figurehead, had reshaped the movement. Iraq and Afghanistan, like Vietnam, fueled this second generation, many of whom were ignored by the public until Trump’s 2016 campaign. This ideological coalition of various white power groups, the militant right, tax resisters, and separatists produces paramilitary training camps, protestors like the “boogaloo boys,” and mass shooters. For example, Trump instructed the Proud Boys, avid promoters of the white power guidebook The Turner Diaries, to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate—to which the group responded favorably. This group was also linked to the plot to burn Whitmer’s summer home and bring her to a show trial, a step traditionally proceeding a lynching among white mobs. The Birth of a Nation depicts such a scene. The threats of violence, organized online, targeting Whitmer and politicians trapped in the Capitol were all coordinated efforts by white supremacists. Yet the public narrative, be it about the shooter at an El Paso Wal-Mart, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, or a Black church in Charleston, is one of a lone wolf or mentally ill attacker.⁸⁰ The only difference between Reconstruction-era terror and the militant movement today in its root causes is the medium of the internet. A powerful Black electorate, Black political leaders, toxic and racist rhetoric, extremist misinformation, and economic decline fueled both periods of domestic terror.⁸¹

Another lesson the MoRE’s Red Shirt room can teach relates to the class dynamics of white domestic terrorists and insurrectionists. Active service-members and veterans, some of whom were using the crowd as cover for a violent assault, certainly made up part of the Capitol rioters. However, they also included “respectable,” middle- and upper-class white people, leaders in business, and public servants in legislatures and law enforcement. There were stay-at-home moms and at least one stay-at-home dad.⁸² Elite white southerners blamed mob violence of the Reconstruction era on the spontaneous actions of their poor counterparts when in fact it was often orchestrated from above.⁸³ The assumption then and now that modern white supremacy campaigns and right-wing political violence are products of poverty is erroneous, even if Trump did complain that the rioters looked “low class.” Ideology drives the movement; thus “respectable” people plan and participate in this public violence. During Reconstruction, Wade Hampton and the Red Shirts as well as the rifle club equivalents in other states convinced elite planters, white middle-class professionals, the clergy, and skilled workers to join their paramilitary ranks or Black citizens and northern whites would steal the Page 167 →election. Mary Simms Oliphant and Louise Jones DuBose proudly asserted that Klansmen and Red Shirts were the “best men” of the state.⁸⁴

In addition to the varied class composition of domestic terror and insurrection movements, politicians participating in or endorsing them use white supremacy and the violence it wields to boost their careers. Donald Trump and Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley exploited the January 6 rally for their own political gain. Reconstruction’s bloody end not only brought Hampton to power but also shaped the Jim Crow policies of Benjamin Tillman. He implemented “new centralized institutions of control and surveillance” via the codification of Jim Crow, most notably through the 1895 state constitution that erased the gains made from the 1868 version. These examples are stark reminders that domestic terror often yields gains for the perpetrators and their political agenda. Tillman was in his late twenties when he participated in the Ned Tennant riot of 1874 and the Hamburg massacre two years later. As captain of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, he helped execute seven Black Republican militiamen and reveled the next morning with celebratory breakfast. As a politician in the early twentieth century, he defended the attack on a legal militia, confiscation of arms, and executions of its members as part of the American revolutionary spirit. Even when his political opponents condemned his actions at Hamburg and his speaking engagements at Red Shirt reunions, Tillman praised Red Shirt violence as necessary, manly, and patriotic. Tillman praised Matthew C. Butler and Martin W. Gary as the real heroes and architects of 1876, not Hampton, who like other paternalist leaders had distanced himself from violent men like Tillman. Presenting his own white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction advanced Tillman’s career and provided him legitimacy after he lost his eye to a cranial tumor and could not serve in the Civil War. Tillman was not alone as a white southern Democrat in his use of this memory. Others did so when it suited them, such as opposing the New Deal and referring to Franklin Roosevelt’s allies as carpetbaggers.⁸⁵

In addition, the MoRE’s interpretation of domestic terror and docent-led conversation on white supremacy can be of service to the comprehensive strategy that experts have recommended to combat the current white power movement’s public and military influence. Heidi Beirich, an expert on extremism, outlined eight requirements for the US military, two of which may also be applicable to the MoRE and similar historic sites. The MoRE most clearly meets Beirich’s call to speak out forcefully against white supremacy. Moreover, the bedroom devoted to domestic terror and the election of 1876 can help explain to military officials, policymakers, and the general public the historic relationship between militias, white supremacy, and election fraud. The interpretation of paramilitary forces and rifle clubs like the Page 168 →Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts reinforces Beirich’s recommendation to close loopholes for militia members in the military who plan insurrections and attend white supremacist events like that in Charlottesville.⁸⁶ In the wake of the Capitol siege, Kathleen Belew endorsed actions similar to those Congress initiated during Reconstruction. She called for Trump’s impeachment following the failure of Mike Pence and Trump’s cabinet to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment for the president’s role in inciting the insurrection. Most important, and reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, she advocated for updated statutes and policies to address legally the threat of white supremacy movements. The MoRE’s interpretation of political terrorism as having been temporarily combatted and then ignored by the state supports the need for this legislation. Lastly Belew argued for more preventative measures and deradicalization efforts to combat white supremacy in general.⁸⁷ Learning the history of white supremacy during tours and workshops at the MoRE can educate the public as a preventative step and thereby help people identify, report, and avoid white nationalist propaganda and recruitment. With grant funding this program could be part of the process of deradicalizing white nationalists.

In the recent past, the nation’s citizens, rather than use museums to process and learn from national trauma, instead use them to participate in a comfort culture and consumption of mass-produced goods, purchasing items like snow globes or teddy bears from site gift shops to shape memory. Here cultural memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch meet as part of the public’s deeper investment in the concept of innocent victimhood in American culture and a mediated depoliticization of the event. Marita Sturken labeled these visitors tourists of history. The process of creating innocence after the fact, as in the case of Oklahoma City when McVeigh was portrayed as a mentally unstable lone wolf, hides the role that empire and violence have had in shaping tragedy in the United States. For example, a narrative of innocence perpetuated by the media and the Oklahoma City National Memorial erased Timothy McVeigh’s militia and military past and the recognition of the bombing as coordinated by homegrown terrorism. McVeigh’s execution and the memorial, both sites of mourning that encouraged family members and survivors to grieve and offered little historical reflection, were the “twinned response” to the bombing itself.⁸⁸

Another workshop could use The Clansman, the novel that inspired The Birth of a Nation, to introduce The Turner Diaries, the text driving the modern movement. Because Wilson knew the novel’s author, Thomas Dixon, and watched the film in the White House, both works are featured in the space discussed in chapter 7. The modern white power movement retained a fondness for the film. As late as the 1970s, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led Page 169 →by David Duke, held bicoastal screenings of Birth in North Carolina and California, prompting violent clashes with protesters. Just as the novel and film framed the violence of Reconstruction as a moral and political good, the 1970s novel The Turner Diaries has inspired the violence accompanying contemporary white power ideology. The book’s plot centers on a coup d’état led by white-power paramilitary forces to exterminate non-whites and create a white nation. The Oklahoma City bombing bore striking similarities to events in the book, including the plan for the bomb McVeigh built with unidentified accomplices. He not only carried and read The Turner Diaries but also sold it on the gun show circuit.⁸⁹ Two events from the insurrection on January 6 mirror scenes depicted in the book. The mob erected a gallows, where people took selfies and assaulted journalists, and fashioned a noose from a television camera cord. Someone else scratched the words “Murder the media” on a door. These actions echo the novel’s “Day of the Rope,” a public hanging of “traitors,” including congressmen, interracial couples, and journalists. Most alarming, The Turner Diaries includes a mortar attack on the Capitol to show not-yet-radicalized people the vulnerability of federal sites. The revolutionaries in the novel do not intend to orchestrate a mass casualty event. Militants symbolically replicating the mortar attack at the January 6 Capitol insurrection viewed their penetration as a similar victory. Those that invaded the Capitol forced legislators to hide or flee as they raided offices and effectively halted the official tallying of electoral votes.⁹⁰

Trump’s speech preceding the riot claimed that catching fraud during the 2020 election allowed for a “very different” set of rules. Red Shirts and white southern Democrats believed the same. He warned that without strength and further voter disenfranchisement, the crowd would lose their country and the Republican Party. He endorsed voter ID and specifically mentioned the threat posed by Stacey Abrams’s success in voter mobilization and the election of two Democrat senators, one Black and the other Jewish, from the red state of Georgia.⁹¹ As during Reconstruction, Black political power and voters posed a threat to white power. In an echo of the Red Shirt battle cry “Hampton or Hell!,” Trump warned, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then the mob exited the rally with the President’s exhortation to walk down to Capitol, where violence, led by militias and white power activists, expectedly ensued.⁹² Page 170 →