To be sure, one lynching is one too many. But by the turn of the century, lynchings were hardly the everyday occurrence that they are often remembered as. Compare the 281 victims of lynchings in the 1920s to the number of black infants who died as a result of malnutrition, pneumonia, diarrhea, and the like. As of 1920, about 13 out of every 100 black children died in infancy, or roughly 20,000 children each year-compared to 28 people who were lynched in a year. As late as 1940, about 10,000 black infants died each year. What larger truths do these lynching figures suggest? What does it mean that lynchings were relatively rare and that they fell pre-   cipitously over time, even in the face of a boom in Klan member- ship? The most compelling explanation is that all those early lynchings worked. White racists-whether or not they belonged to the Ku Klux Klan-had through their actions and their rhetoric developed a strong incentive scheme that was terribly clear and terribly frighten- ing. If a black person violated the accepted code of behavior, whether by talking back to a trolley driver or daring to try to vote, he knew he might well be punished, perhaps by death. So by the mid-1940s, when Stetson Kennedy joined up, the Klan didnt really need to use as much violence. Many blacks, having long been told to behave like second-class citizens-or else-simply obliged. One or two lynchings went a long way toward inducing docility among even a large group of people, for people respond strongly to strong incentives. And there are few incentives more pow- erful than the fear of random violence-which, in essence, is why ter- rorism is so effective. But if the Ku Klux Klan of the 1940s wasnt uniformly violent, what was it? The Klan that Stetson Kennedy found was in fact a sorry fraternity of men, most of them poorly educated and with poor