I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
About those burning crosses
February 1, 2008
Turns out that burning crosses weren’t a “Klan” thing after all:
The Scottish apparently originated cross-burning, but it was your friends in the mass media who helped sell the idea to the KKK–media being somewhat broadly construed here to include novelists and filmmakers. You think media complicity in the more disreputable aspects of pop culture is a recent phenomenon? Uh-uh. Try 1810.
Eighteen-ten was the year the Scottish romantic writer Sir Walter Scott, a great admirer of ancient Scottish traditions, first brought the “fiery cross” to modern attention in his poem The Lady of the Lake. In the poem the cross is set ablaze on the hilltops to summon the Scottish clans. Scott’s work was especially popular in the American south, where much of the populace was of Scotch-Irish extraction.
The original Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in 1866 and disbanded in the early 1870s, didn’t burn crosses, but that didn’t stop author Thomas Dixon from saying they did in his pro-KKK novel The Clansman (1905). “The Fiery Cross of old Scotland’s hills!” a character in the book announces. “In olden times when the Chieftain of our people summoned the clan on an errand of life and death, the Fiery Cross, extinguished in sacrificial blood, was sent by swift courier from village to village.”
Though it had done well enough on its own, The Clansman didn’t become a national phenomenon until Dixon sold the movie rights to the pioneer filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who used it to make his groundbreaking film The Birth of a Nation. In a dramatic scene, the movie’s hero rears up his horse and brandishes a flaming cross to summon the Klans to drive out the black oppressors (!) and their northern white allies who controlled the south during Reconstruction. Meanwhile the movie theater’s orchestra (remember, this was the silent era) struck up Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Southern white audiences generally when nuts at this point, clapping and cheering.
Knowing a good idea when he saw one, William J. Simmons, the founder of the Klan in its second incarnation (1915-1944), cobbled together a cross and burned it at a meeting of the newly-established Knights of the Ku Klux Klan on Thanksgiving night, 1915, on Stone Mountain near Atlanta. Flaming crosses have been a Klan trademark ever since.
Just one problem. The fiery cross of Scottish legend wasn’t the upright Roman cross commonly used by the Klan. Rather it was the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew. St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, and an X-shaped cross probably also was a lot easier to make a signal bonfire out of. But nobody ever said the Klan’s big attraction was its meticulous sense of detail.
In other words, it looked cool in a movie and made for an exciting read in print…so the burning cross was adopted as a symbol by the KKK. What is more, they adopted the wrong cross as a symbol.
The point, I guess, is that it wasn’t a religious statement at all. That’s not to say that many in the Klan didn’t call themselves Christian — many very likely did. Of course, calling oneself Christian and being Christian are…different concepts entirely.
You know, I almost feel sorry when I and other stumble over little facets of history such as this; it gives the atheists less to complain about, the little darlings.
(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)
