And soon they sought to take their show on the road. If the Klan could replicate across the South—small vigilante groups, suppressing the vote in each town, intimidating Black people and carpetbaggers, scalawags and Federal troops—the Southern white man could be more than buoyed, he could “redeem” the South, overthrow Reconstruction’s federal occupation and get back to the so-called good old days. But doing so required organization, a mission, a leader.
Which brings us back to the Maxwell House Hotel and to Nathan Bedford Forrest. That night the men present allegedly signed a sort of constitution that outlined a hierarchy: the Grand Wizard at the top, a Grand Dragon in every state, a Titan for every district, and a Gorgon for every county’s Klan. They would operate in a decentralized, local way but still needed someone to catalyze the movement—a figurehead who might add some celebrity sheen to the cause. As one of the founders, James R. Crowe, later put it in a letter to the UDC historian Laura Rose, “The younger generation will never fully realize the risk we ran, and the sacrifices we made to free our beloved Southland from the hated rule of the ‘Carpetbagger,’ the worse negro and the home Yankee. Thank God, our work was rewarded by complete success. After the order grew to large numbers, we found it was necessary to have someone of large experience to command. We chose General N. B. Forrest . . .”
While I leaned on the Do Not Enter sign by the corner of the bank building where the hotel once stood, I thought again of what James Perkins, Jr., the former mayor of Selma, had told me. Same war, same general.
After that meeting here in downtown Nashville, Klans rode across the south. Upon seeing photographs of Richmond after the war was over and the siege had ended, more than one journalist proclaimed America an old country now that it had ruins. And if it was finally old, it could be made anew. Reconstruction, as its name suggests, sought not only to rebuild the physical landscape but also to forge a new ideological foundation—for the South and for the country. The Fourteenth Amendment would vest full citizenship to the formerly enslaved and, essentially, write the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution. It sought to cut out the sickness—the organization of American society around a false belief in white supremacy—and dispense with the palliatives. But vesting the formerly enslaved with full citizenship required a military occupation, one that was met with a fierce resistance.
“Under Forrest’s control, the Ku Klux Klan became a major force of counterrevolution in Tennessee and the rest of the South,” writes biographer Brian Steel Wills. Wills identifies a pattern that developed over the late 1860s: Forrest was then the president of a railroad company and often traveled across the South. He’d show up in a given town and, while there, would parley with the town’s former Confederates. Wills then notes how, soon after Forrest’s visit, notices about the Klan would appear in the local paper. Thousands across the South eagerly joined. There’s a famous story that goes some way toward explaining why. Toward the end of the war, a formerly enslaved man encounters his old master at a Confederate prison and greets him, “Howdy Massa. Bottom rail on top, this time.” The need to restore those rails to their prewar setting swelled the Klan’s ranks. And so when a crew of Klansmen menaced Simon Elder, a Black landowner prosperous enough to hire some white laborers, he knew why: “I was getting too much for them.”
Take, for instance, a sample case from Elder’s home state of Georgia: the ten months between January to November, 1868, when the Freedmen’s Bureau reported 336 instances of violence. There were two elections during that time, for governor in April, and for president in November. In one county, 1,144 voted Republican in the April election, by November only 116. In another county that number went from 1,222 Republican votes to just one. The Klan subverted Reconstruction with an extraordinarily vicious set of tactics: they burned crops; threatened families; beat, raped, and lynched Black people and those who wanted to include them in society. The Klan attacked an estimated 10 percent of Black people who attended Southern state constitutional conventions in 1867 and 1868. All told, the Klan was responsible for thousands of murders.
In 1871, Congress opened an investigation: the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of the Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. Their report runs thirteen volumes and is the definitive story of the early Klan. During that investigation, Attorney General Amos Akerman and Army General Lewis Merrill traveled to South Carolina, where a local Klan den had reportedly killed eleven and assaulted 600. Merrill described what he saw there as a “carnival of crime not paralleled in the history of any civilized community.”
The committee called Forrest to Washington to testify. In his testimony, Forrest gave elusive answers, denying involvement in or knowledge of the Klan. Asked if he took any steps to organize under the Klan’s prescript, he responded, “I do not think I am compelled to answer any question that would implicate me in anything; I believe the law does not require that I should do anything of the sort,” and when asked who were the members of the organization, Forrest told them it is a question he does not wish to answer then, before asking for more time to consider his response. He would eventually describe Klan members as “worthy men who belonged to the Southern Army.” In 1868, Forrest had given a newspaper interview in which he demonstrated an intimate familiarity with the group’s numbers and tactics and indicated that he lent support to their cause. Asked about this interview before Congress, however, Forrest claimed he had been misquoted. Historians Paul Ashdown and Robert Caudill characterize Forrest’s testimony as “a tactical masterpiece of verbal feints, dodges, assaults, and retreats,” while noting that Forrest allegedly told a friend after his testimony that “I have been lying like a gentleman.”
Some apologists for Forrest point to this testimony as evidence that he was “acquitted” by Congress of his role in the Klan, but Forrest wasn’t on trial—he was testifying before a committee. “Our design,” the committee noted, “is not to connect General Forrest with this order (the reader may form his own conclusion upon this question) but to trace its development.” Still, Forrest always publicly denied his role in the Klan. Confirmed Klan members gave and endorsed accounts of Forrest’s initiation, but they did so only after the fact, in 1905, when Dixon’s account was published, and in 1907, when Crowe sent the letter to Rose. Laura Rose includes Crowe’s letter in her book on the early Klan, a work endorsed by both the UDC and the SCV. Minor Merriwether, a close friend of Forrest’s in Memphis, even admitted to being his Grand Scribe. Still, though, pinning down the exact story of Forrest’s role gets murky. In preparation for my visit to the Maxwell House Hotel, I had called Elaine Frantz Parsons, the historian of the early Klan. “There’s no reason to think that he wasn’t” tapped as the first Grand Wizard, she told me, but there’s no contemporaneous account. And although it’s hard to discern his exact role (it was a secret society after all), Parsons does write that Forrest offered himself up as a figurehead.
And we do have an order from Forrest to the Klan: “General Order Number One,” issued January 1869. “Every Grand Cyclops shall assemble the men of his Den and require them to destroy in his presence every article of his mask and costume and at the same time shall destroy his own,” the order reads. So Forrest held sufficient authority over the group to hand down orders. It’s disputed, though, what the order is actually saying. The common shorthand is that it’s an order to disband the Klan—no robes means no riding—though others see it as a call to be less conspicuous in their ways and means. Biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that Forrest issued the order after the Klan grew beyond his control. The decentralized cells perhaps proved too difficult to corral from Memphis and so he’d rather be done with it, officially. A sort of resignation, then. In Thomas Dixon’s account of Forrest’s time in the Klan, the one John Morton endorsed and was the likely source for, he suggests that the order came because of the group’s success. “The white race had redeemed six Southern States from negro rule,” and, Dixon argues, with mission accomplished, Forrest “issued a
t once his order to disband.”
“Redeemed”—that’s their term to describe ex-Confederates’ return to power. Having terrorized newly enfranchised freemen and Southern Republicans, the ex-Confederates retook control of Tennessee in October 1869, just ten months after Forrest’s decree. Still, Klan violence continued for years in the states where Southern Democrats had yet to take back power. The Klan routinely menaced the 1870 elections in northern and central Alabama, in one instance lynching a teacher and five students of a Freedmen’s School. But as ex-Confederates returned to state capitals and city halls across the states of the former Confederacy, more dens hung up their hoods. Federal troops officially withdrew in 1877 as a part of the brokered election of Rutherford B. Hayes, allowing white Southerners’ return to full power and the reimposition of white supremacist rule. Reconstruction, such as it was, was over. As sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
Still in Nashville, after about an hour of casing the SunTrust building, I was getting hungry, so I wandered into a chain sandwich shop across the street for lunch. While I waited for the same mediocre Reuben I could get in Tuscaloosa or in Lancaster, I thought about an idea from Parsons’s book about the Klan—how, in the years after the Civil War, the consciousness of Americans shifted from an essentially local one to a more national one. The transcontinental railroad linked the nation, allowing people and information to connect at a much faster pace. And the Klan rode into that breach. On the ground, the Klan operated in secret, riding at night and under veil, but they donned conspicuous costumes so you’d know they were there, even when you didn’t know who they were. They wanted to be both seen and unseen. Newspapers North and South reported their attacks; Congress investigated them. And Forrest, the figurehead in this vigilante war, didn’t need to ride with any one Klan—as an idea, a symbol, he rode with them all. He could slip in and out of time and space, replicate across the South. In the years after the war that never really ended, the charging cavalry leader found the power of retreat. By lending his name, his support, his image, to the Klan, he could be everywhere and nowhere. Ten years before he died, his symbolic afterlife had begun. And, I realized, picking at my Reuben and looking out at the former Maxwell House Hotel, the threshold of that transformation was the door to Room Ten. There and not there. Everywhere and nowhere. Same war, same general.
Sixteen
The Resistance
Thomas Dixon, Jr. was preoccupied with Nathan Bedford Forrest throughout 1905. It was the year he wrote the account of Forrest’s initiation at the Maxwell House Hotel and also the year he published his infamous novel The Clansman. The novel is a fictionalized portrayal of the rise of the Klan. It’s set in South Carolina instead of Tennessee, but even so, Dixon felt compelled to give Forrest a shout-out in his note to the reader: “The organization was governed by the Grand Wizard Commander-in-Chief, who lived at Memphis, Tennessee.” The Clansman is a love story that unfolds against the backdrop of “the Black Plague of Reconstruction,” and depicts the Klan’s rise as a heroic overthrow of corrupt, oppressive Northerners and lecherous, incompetent Black men. It’s filled with noxious racist caricatures and it sold over 100,000 copies.
Dixon’s story reached even larger audiences and notoriety in its subsequent forms, first as a play, then as a movie. There is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story about a 1908 production of the play in Memphis, a performance that Forrest’s son, William, attended. “The curtain had been up but for a few minutes in the second act,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, “when in rode ‘the chief of the Ku Klux Klan.’ The actor was made to resemble Capt. Forrest’s father.” So startled was William Forrest that he “lean[ed] forward and topple[d] from his chair.” He was having a stroke. William Forrest lay paralyzed in bed for a day before dying of a second stroke. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s only son died from a cerebral hemorrhage he suffered after seeing his father depicted in a play. It was as if he had seen a ghost.
A third generation of Forrests, William’s son Nathan, would get caught in The Clansman’s wake, too. Seven years after the play came to Memphis, the story hit the big screen, directed by D. W. Griffiths, and renamed Birth of a Nation. To tell Dixon’s racist, romantic take on the early Klan, Griffiths pioneered new cinematic techniques such as the close-up and the cross-cut. One title card read: “The Ku Klux Klan, the organization that saved the South from the anarchy of Black rule.” The film was massively popular, the first real movie blockbuster. In the first year of its release, an estimated three million New Yorkers had seen it. It was also one of the first films to be screened at the White House, reportedly prompting President Woodrow Wilson to respond, “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
And the film also inspired a Georgia teacher named William J. Simmons to revive the Klan. He did so on Thanksgiving Day 1915, in a ceremony at Stone Mountain, under the Confederate portraits carved into the mountainside. Intrigued by the revival, Nathan Bedford Forrest, II, the late general’s grandson, moved to Atlanta to serve first as the group’s national secretary and later as the state’s Grand Dragon. This second-era Klan would again function as a vigilante group, but they pursued slightly different aims than the first. As Simmons put it in a meeting in Georgia in 1920: “Now let the N-----s, Catholics, Jews and all others who disdain my imperial wizardry, come out!” By the mid-1920s, the Klan had two million members nationwide, flexing political power not just in the South but in new strongholds such as Indiana and Oregon, where the governor of the latter admitted that it was really the Klan who ran the state. But soon infighting caused the Klan to fracture and lose political support. Then the IRS came after the organization for more than half a million in back taxes. Coffers shrank, influence waned, and membership declined.
The civil rights movement inspired a third rise of the Klan—an attempt to once more preserve the country’s racial hierarchy in a period of upheaval. Groups like the White Knights of Mississippi and the United Klans of America, headquartered in Alabama, committed gruesome acts of terrorism in the decade between the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act ten years later, including the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four little girls. When enthusiasm waned in the Birmingham Klavern meetings, its leaders knew it could buoy spirits by screening Birth of a Nation.
But the legislative victories of the civil rights movement meant that the racial hierarchy that these white supremacists fought to protect was no longer law. They weren’t upholding the government as it was—now they were in opposition to it. Katherine Belew writes in her book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America that “Unlike previous iterations of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist vigilantism, the white power movement did not claim to serve the state. Instead, white power made the state its target.” Leaders of this movement included men like William Luther Pierce, a white nationalist who founded the well-financed and highly organized National Alliance, and who authored the apocalyptic novel The Turner Diaries—the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Men like Richard Girnt Butler, who founded the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi, white supremacist group known as the country’s “first truly nationwide terrorist network.” And Louis Beam, a Klansman and an associate of the Aryan Nations, whose 1992 treatise on “Leaderless Resistance” has become the MO for white supremacists and white power groups in recent decades. Beam advocated for groups to organize in cells rather than a hierarchy, connected by ideology but not by leadership. Shared objectives, separate organizations; same war, different generals. This makes them harder to infiltrate, easier to disavow, and gives their actions the appearance of lone wolf violence (as McVeigh’s bombing was originally understood to be). The groups might occasionally come together for meetings like the World Congress of Aryan
Nations in Idaho, but would operate independently.
The standoffs at Waco and Ruby Ridge and the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City meant that the federal government paid close attention to domestic terrorism and right-wing extremism in the 1990s. But, as Janet Reitman reports in The New York Times, focus shifted almost exclusively to international terror threats after 9/11. In 2007, however, the possibility of a Black president prompted the Department of Homeland Security to survey possible domestic threats posed by right-wing radicals. They found no shortage of chatter across the web—animosity was rising and factions were forming. Their work eventually became a 2009 report titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” Affronted, Republican congressmen accused the Obama administration of a political “hitjob.” They created such furor that the report was withdrawn just weeks later. As a result, attention to domestic extremism again diminished, even as the number of hate groups was ballooning. By 2011, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that, for the first time, there were more than one thousand active hate groups in the United States.
Down Along with That Devil's Bones Page 13