There’s a grim historical precedent in America for such aggressive skepticism of the causes of political violence. Today it’s universally recognized as historical fact that the Ku Klux Klan was responsible for a reign of terror throughout the South during Reconstruction. But many contemporary newspapers and politicians openly doubted the truth about the Klan’s purported mission, its crimes, even its very existence. The various motivations for this campaign of denialism are all too familiar today—and more worryingly, it worked.
Elaine Frantz Parsons, a historian who studied the organization, noted in her 2015 book, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction, that Klan denialism shaped public perceptions of the group as well as the responses to it. While journalists and federal officials went to great lengths to document the group’s atrocities, “the national debate over the Klan failed to move beyond the simple question of the Klan’s existence,” she wrote. “Skepticism about the Ku-Klux even in the fact of abundant proof of the Ku-Klux’s existence endured and thrived, perhaps because people on all sides of the era’s partisan conflicts at times found ambiguity about the Ku-Klux desirable and productive,” Parsons wrote.
There was overwhelming evidence to refute the denialists’ claims. Klansmen routinely engaged in murder, rape, and other forms of violence that left behind scars, corpses, and witnesses. Larger cells carried out massacres and skirmished with local militias and federal troops. The Justice Department, which was founded in 1870 to enforce federal anti-Klan laws, prosecuted and convicted hundreds of its members in public trials.
But still the denial persisted. Perhaps the most dramatic example came in 1872, when a joint congressional committee published a thirteen-volume report on Klan activities and trials in the Southern states. Lawmakers questioned witnesses in multiple states and drew upon testimony from them and the anti-Klan trials, aiming to produce a comprehensive and definitive account of the crisis. The majority report concluded that the Klan did exist, that many of its members had evaded punishment for their crimes, and that the “terror inspired by their acts, as well as the public sentiment in their favor in many localities, paralyzes the arm of civil power.”