Why does the Ku Klux Klan burn crosses?
I’ve heard this comes from a Scottish ritual of some sort, but I shudder to think that a downhome American tradition like the Klan has actually been a subversive plot by wily Scotsmen — Anonymous, Madison, Wisconsin Cecil replies: 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
