While it is true that at least a few Klansmen denounced European fascism (mostly due to its ‘foreignness’, among other petty distinctions), other Klansmen noted striking similarities between their antisocialist clique and the Italian Fascists:

Klansmen themselves were certainly struck by the family resemblance. In the same year as Owsley’s proclamation to the American Legion, Nancy MacLean observed that the Klan periodical Searchlight declared that Mussolini was a ‘sign of political health in Italy and a guarantee against the crazy and experimental forms of government with which Russia is afflicted’.

Hardly known to harbour sympathy for Catholics, the Klan could nonetheless find a mirror of itself in Italian Fascism. As the Klansman minister Charles Jefferson of New York state put it, post‐war Italy was a political mess, with established politicians failing to meet the challenges it faced. The discontent was finally addressed, he continued, by the ‘strong man’ Mussolini.

‘The Ku Klux Klan’, he concluded, ‘is the Mussolini of America’ which would address the ‘vast volume of discontent in this country with things as they are’. Another Klan publication, the Imperial Night‐Hawk, drew admiring parallels between the Black Shirts and themselves, claiming that

the Fascisti of Italy came into existence in a cloak of liberty, like a rainbow of promise, and was hailed by even the enlightened element of the world as a ‘voice in the wilderness’ of human freedom and religious tolerance.

Another article in the same publication applauded what the Klan perceived to be Fascist anti‐Ultramontanism: ‘Mussolini’s battle in his home country to subdue communism and anarchy and halt Papal aggression was an entirely worthy cause.’

Recently the sociologist Rory McVeigh has pointed to some intriguing similarities, albeit very passingly, between fascism and the Klan: both used a combination of mass politics, violence and intimidation to whip up nationalist fury and bridge class divides. Both were extremely anti‐communist, but also blamed big business for the impoverishment of family‐run small businesses.

He is also keen to address the societal underpinnings of success for both fascism and the Klan, pointing, for instance, to the fall in agricultural prices in the 1920s that made rural communities particularly susceptible.