The "Progressive" Klan

Jesse Walker has an interesting article, "Hooded Progressivism:  The Secret History of the Ku Klux Klan," in Reason magazine.  It brings up a lot of things that Philip Hamburger explored in more detail in his recent (excellent) book, "Separation of Church and State."  Here's a snippet:

The progressives and the Klan shared an interest in mandating public education and eliminating urban political machines. The civic-activist historians tell us that the rank-and-file Klansman's interest in such reforms was frequently a sincere response to corruption and inadequate schooling, though it's clear that their urban proposals owed at least something to their fear of immigrants, and that their education proposals were transparantly anti-Catholic. If the Klan's motives were not purely nativist, then neither were the progressives' purely benign: Just as the Klansmen sometimes shared the progressives' hopes, the latter sometimes shared the Klansmen's fears.