PREFACE

As any author will attest, writing a book is an arduous process that requires the assistance of many people to make the work successful. Among the people playing important roles in this book was my research assistant, Chloe Koscheva-Scissons. Chloe spent many hours poring through hundreds of copies of archived newspapers and other documents in her efforts to help me examine the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Wood County. Without Chloe’s tireless efforts and useful suggestions, this book would not have been possible.

Thanks also to the editors at The History Press for accepting the book proposal and seeing it through the production and marketing stages. This is a talented group of publishing professionals who provided me with a great deal of knowledge of the industry.

The folks at the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University were extremely helpful during the time I spent in the archives. Thanks to Steve Charter, Marilyn Levinson, Samantha Ashby, Libby Hertenstein and everyone else at the CAC who ran back and forth to locate materials I needed. Thanks also to the staff at the Wood County Historical Society, especially Dana Nemeth, Holly Hartlerode Uppal and Mike McMaster.

Many thanks to the following colleagues who provided insightful comments on drafts of this book: Michael Carver, Amílcar Challú, Rex Childers, Douglas Forsyth, Benjamin Greene, Beth Griech-Polelle, Walter Grunden, Ruth Herndon, Nicole Jackson, Rebecca Mancuso, Scott Martin, Dustin McLoughlin, Ian Mladjov, Apollos Nwauwa and Tina Thomas.

Special thanks goes to Tony DeIuliis, who discovered in the mid-1970s the cache of Wood County Klan documents that was critical to the research for this book. His understanding of the importance of these materials, plus his persistence in getting archivists interested in preserving them, deserves recognition, and I hope that this book lives up to Tony’s vision for what might be possible with these KKK documents.

My deepest debt of gratitude goes to my wife, Kimberlyn, who encouraged me to return and restart my academic career after a long hiatus. She patiently provided support throughout my undergraduate and graduate years, helped me transcribe source material for this book and offered a number of thoughtful suggestions on the manuscript that seemed to be the exact advice I needed at the moment.

Finally, the general topic of white supremacy can be something of a minefield for researchers as for many people, wounds from the civil rights struggles of the second half of the twentieth century are still fresh. In my research and writing, I have uncovered a great deal of archival information that by twenty-first-century standards would be considered strongly offensive. For the purposes of historical accuracy, I have elected not to censor any of the historical sources to spare sensitive readers. Keep in mind that in a contextual sense, the racist language used in the primary sources referenced in this book was considered “normal” for the time period.

In addition, the emergence of the Internet has provided white supremacists, neo-Nazis and white nationalists a particularly powerful recruiting and broadcasting tool since the mid-1990s, and there has been a growth of activity by such groups. In some ways, racial tensions have increased in the past decade due to the unlimited exposure that hate groups can generate via electronic media and the resultant backlash by concerned citizens. Thus, my apologies to those who might be offended by the words and deeds of historical actors, but often history is not pretty. Sometimes it can be downright ugly.