The book discusses how and why the Klan achieved a level of power and influence unmatched by any other American right-wing movement. The second Klan mobilized a nationwide following largely through campaigns over concerns such as Prohibition violation, premarital sex, lewd movies, women's changing roles, and waning parental authority. Yet, the book claims, crusades over "morals" have always operated in the service of the Klan's larger agenda of virulent racial hatred and middle-class revanchism. Comparing the Klan to European fascist movements that grew out of the First World War, the book maintains that the remarkable scope and frenzy of the movement is less a measure of members' power within their communities than of the challenges to that power posed by African Americans, immigrants, Jews, Catholics, labor, and white women and youth who do not obey the Klan's canon of appropriate conduct. The book examines the class composition of the Klan, and the politics of class, of sex and age, of race, and of terror. Notes, bibliography, appendixes, index