THE KKK AND MODERN SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES

The modern social conservatives constantly whine about the lack of values, not only in the in large cities, but in entire sections of the country, notably the East and West Coasts. The Klan also thought something like this was the case:

The Klan impulse was not usually a response to direct personal relationship or face-to-face competition, but rather the result of a growing sense that the code by which rural and small-town Anglo-Saxon America had lived was being ignored and even flouted in the wicked cities, and especially by the "aliens," and that the old religion and morality were being snickered at by the intellectuals. ... The blame fell upon the immigrants, the Catholics, the Jews—and not really upon the harmless ones who lived in the neighborhood, but upon those who peopled the remoter Babylons like New York and Chicago. The Anglo-Saxon Americans now felt themselves more than ever to be the representatives of a threatened purity of race and ideals, a threatened Protestantism...

SOURCE: The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter, page 292.