Many Americans would agree with Henry Ford’s famous statement that “History is bunk.” Do the events of a century and a half ago really have any relevance to our daily lives in the twenty-first century? Fergus Bordewich, in his new book Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, argues that America’s critical missed turning point in the 1860s and ‘70s continues to haunt the present.

In the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War in 1865, federal forces attempted to rebuild the post-slavery South as an industrial, biracial democracy. The policy of this Reconstruction was made in Washington by a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans — members of the Republican Party who were committed to a thoroughgoing transformation of the South. Former Union general Ulysses S. Grant, elected as president on the Republican ticket in 1868, was equally committed to this revolutionary transformation. But Reconstruction increasingly was thwarted by the Ku Klux Klan – a secret paramilitary group formed in late 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee – which morphed into what Bordewich calls “the first organized terror movement in American history.” The Klan used threats, abuse, arson, rape, torture, and lynching to terrorize African Americans into servility and to destroy the Republican Party in the South.

In this podcast discussion, Bordewich discusses how Grant pushed Congress to grant him the powers he needed to combat the Klan, and how he used these powers to shatter the “Invisible Empire.” But Grant’s efforts were largely undone by members of his own party who formed the so-called Liberal Republican faction, largely because they distrusted strong central government. In the aftermath of Grant’s presidency, the Klan faded away because Democratic-controlled legislatures in the South increasingly were able to enforce white supremacy on the region through legal means. One of the lessons from this episode of history, in Bordewich’s view, is “the danger of politically crippling what is necessary for government to do to sustain what’s best in society and to sustain the rights and protections of Americans.”