Published amid Simmons’s losing struggle with Hiram Evans for control of the Klan’s national organization, this muddled defense of Klannish ideals and belabored justification for the organization’s existence met with little success.35 With its failure, and Evans’s rise to Imperial Wizard, the Klan’s national organization had by late 1923 moved away from the world of book publishing. Instead, the Imperial hierarchy refocused its efforts on pamphlets, supposedly penned by Evans, reaffirming the Klan’s “100% American” stances on political topics ranging from “the menace of modern immigration” to the World Court to the “public school problem.” Short, cheap to produce, and easy to distribute, the pamphlet offered the Klan’s leadership a far more effective outlet for its propaganda.36
The Klan’s national leaders, however, were not the only ones looking to promote the Invisible Empire. Unlike in the world of newspapers, in which local organs had been largely supplanted by a single official voice, the Klan leadership’s withdrawal from book publishing was followed by independent ventures around the country. While official and semiofficial volumes dominated the early days of Klan publishing, 1923 onward saw an increasing heterogeneity in voices representing the Invisible Empire at all levels as lengthy and abstruse works of Klannish movement philosophy proliferated alongside shorter defenses of the Klan’s organizational activities and attacks on the Catholic Church.
These “unofficial” books came from both local Klan officials and average Klan members, and were usually published by small local presses, often affiliates of a local newspaper. One of the earliest was Alabama Klan leader John Stephen Fleming’s What Is Ku Kluxism? published by the Masonic Weekly Recorder of Birmingham, Alabama. The foreword boasted that Fleming “is not a scholar. He is not even a writer. He makes no pretension to being skilled in the art of coherently assembling statements of facts.” Although this would usually be seen as something of a handicap to those with authorial aspirations, it was a badge of pride for many of the Klansmen who put pen to paper to defend their organization and their way of life.37
Underlining the cohesion of the wider cultural Klannish movement, these books tended to follow the same basic pattern. Even as they offered virulently bigoted arguments against foreign influence, they defended the “Pure Americanism” of the Klan and denied any hatred or wrongdoing on the part of Klan members. Any opposition to the organization was blamed on “scurrilous propaganda” that had led potential allies in the wider movement to wrongly turn against it. This unshakable belief—that the only reason a white Protestant American could be opposed to the organization was because they did not properly understand it—was the cornerstone of independent Klan publishing. Following the example of Simmons’s Klan Unmasked, these independent authors defensively dismissed what they saw as the ungrounded fears of non-Klan members. Their work attempted to expound the organization’s principles in such a way as to make the organization’s opponents realize their mistake. Ironically, this more often than not simultaneously reinforced many of those original fears.
One of the best examples of this was K.K.K., Friend or Foe: Which? published in 1924 by Blaine Mast, the district attorney of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. The purpose of the book, Mast explained, was to establish a “correct representation and interpretation” of the Invisible Empire in order to dispel a “great deal of misunderstanding.” Throughout the book, Mast complained of “ignorant and misinformed folk” who wrongly characterized the organization. The Klan was not an enemy to anyone, Mast argued. It “does not oppose the Hebrew race.” It was “a million miles from attempting to cause harm or to endeavor to defame the Roman Catholic Church.” It was “not hostile to the colored race” and “desires to rend it all the help possible.” In every case, though, Mast promptly undermined his own argument—declaring that the Klan was “tired of the outrages inflicted upon innocent girls by Hebrew libertines,” decrying the “hypocrites” of the Catholic hierarchy, and denouncing the “unnamable crimes” perpetrated by “bad niggers.”38
Endorsed by Sam Rich, King Kleagle of Pennsylvania, and advertised as “the work of a judicial mind” containing “no rabid, wild statements,” the self-contradictory and self-defeating nature of Mast’s work apparently went unnoticed by both the author and the Klan in general. The same lack of self-awareness could be found throughout many of these highly repetitive works from around the country. The same themes, the same arguments, the same defenses, of a heroic and virtuous Klannish identity could be found in Grand Klaliff E. H. Lougher’s Kall of the Klan in Kentucky in 1924, in New Jersey Grand Dragon Arthur Bell’s nationally popular The Ku Klux Klan, or The Knights of Columbus Klan in 1926 (issued by the California-based Q. Cluxton Clanning Publishing), and in Kleagle Paul M. Winter’s New York–based What Price Tolerance in 1928.39
Regardless of the temporal or geographical disparity of these works, the Klannish cultural identity they presented was largely immutable, and it was rare for independent Klan publishing during the 1920s to deviate too far from this model despite its flaws. Nonetheless, a number of interesting variations on the theme appeared. George Estes’s Roman Katholic Kingdom and the Ku Klux Klan and Old Cedar School delved into greater detail on specific anti-Catholic issues: the former focused on the Catholic Church’s position as an “untaxable corporation,” and the latter on public policy relating to parochial schooling.40 Reverend Walter Wright’s Religious and Patriotic Ideals of the Ku Klux Klan and Bishop Alma White’s three-volume series placed a heavier focus on the Klan’s Protestantism. Wright, a Texan Baptist, emphasized the nondenominational qualities of the Klan to unify Protestants, while White stressed apocalyptic concerns over the “Satanic power” of the Catholic Church and the “money-grasping Jew.”41
A somewhat odder variation (although fully endorsed by the local Missouri Klan) came from E. F. Stanton, a self-professed “preacher, poet and musician,” who seemingly took inspiration from Bruce Barton with his depiction of Jesus Christ as the “Great Klansman.” Perhaps the most unusual contribution came from Leroy Curry, an American Legion official in Missouri. The first chapter of his fantastical The Ku Klux Klan under the Searchlight, for example, was an extended dream sequence in which Curry witnesses the pre-historic creation of a “Divine Klansman.” Nonetheless, Curry still offered up the usual defenses and the litany of complaints against those “who do not believe in the pre-eminence of our American free institutions.”42
Opponents of the Invisible Empire responded by publishing equally vehement denunciations of the organization. Usually drawing unfavorable comparisons between the modern Klan and its Reconstruction-era forebear, these books also often simultaneously endorsed the ideals and aims of the wider movement. The most common subset of these denunciations was a string of “exposés” by ex-Klansmen. The first hit bookshelves in 1922 and came, fittingly enough, from Henry P. Fry, the ex-Kleagle who had provided much of the information for the 1921 New York World series. Critical and bellicose, The Modern Ku Klux Klan is most striking for the highly conflicted attitude of Fry toward the Invisible Empire, and the implicit line drawn between the organization and the movement. The second Ku Klux Klan, for Fry, was a “monstrosity” whose use of secrecy “tended to inculcate lawlessness,” and was unworthy of association with the heroic Reconstruction-era Klan. Fry claimed to have become “revolted” by “the spirit of religious and racial hatred which it inculcated.” At the same time, he made clear his belief in the United States as “a white man’s country,” in which segregation better served both races. His opposition to the Klan’s religious bigotry ultimately stemmed from Fry’s fear that “it is splitting the white race into factions” when they needed to stand together against “the negro.” As journalist William Pickens noted in the African American socialist magazine The Messenger, Fry “only pretends to expose and condemn the Klan in so far as it is a menace to white people.”43
Yet Pickens still recommended the book to readers for the same reasons as many other reviewers—The Modern Ku Klux Klan was im
portant for the information it revealed about a supposedly secret organization. It is clear from its critical reception that the book’s main selling point was not Fry’s arguments, but his willingness to share details of membership applications, to outline the theoretical command structure of the Klan, and to reveal the meanings of mysterious ranks like “Grand Goblins.” A full guide to the “secret” Klan language and codes was provided, while the Ku Klux Klan oath was reprinted in its entirety. For readers of The Modern Ku Klux Klan, the Invisible Empire was invisible no longer in a book advertised as “more interesting than fiction”—a tempting proposition for readers who were bombarded daily with newspaper accounts of an organization that purportedly cloaked itself in secrecy.44
In both form and tone, The Modern Ku Klux Klan established a clear template for the books that followed it as ex-Klansmen competed to reveal the most complete, and most damning, “inside story.” Lem Dever, previously publicity director for the Klan in Oregon, published Confessions of an Imperial Klansman. Edgar Fuller, former secretary to Imperial Kleagle Edward Young Clarke, wrote The Klan Inside Out (under the pseudonym of Marion Monteval) and The Visible of the Invisible Empire. William Likins, an ex-Klan newsman from Pennsylvania, published Patriotism Capitalized, The Trail of the Serpent, and The Ku Klux Klan, or The Rise and Fall of the Invisible Empire. Another ex-newspaperman, Peter Sletterdahl of the Minnesota Fiery Cross, wrote The Nightshirt in Politics, while ex-Simmons aide Edgar Allen Booth synthesized all the previous work to draw his own particular conclusions in The Mad Mullah of America. Simmons himself joined the trend, using America’s Menace, or The Enemy Within to lambast Hiram Evans’s “crafty methods.” By the end of the decade, a dedicated reader of Klan exposés may well have had a better understanding of the rituals of the Invisible Empire than the average Klan member.45
The melodramatic tell-alls of the ex-Klansmen also combined to tell a specific narrative of innocent and decent god-fearing Americans tricked into becoming a secretive band of law-breakers by a conniving and greedy leadership. To a substantial extent, this was a self-serving story that often pointed to changes in leadership to justify the author’s own membership and subsequent exit from the organization, while endorsing the values of the wider Klannish movement. At the same time, this argument subtextually underlined the fact that the author’s decision to leave the Klan was less out of moral disgust than a change in fortunes or perceived slight. Despite its dubious foundations, this narrative was repeated so often that it contributed heavily to popular perceptions of the Klan at the time.
Whether a self-serving literary device or an expression of genuine disgust, these exposés uniformly featured ever more hyperbolic denunciations of the Klan’s leadership. Fry, the earliest author, offered a mixed view of Simmons as “either insanely visionary or superlatively cunning.” Dever excoriated the Klan’s leadership as “mean and petty Kaisers of a queer and special type.” Fuller attacked both Simmons’s “physical laziness, mental inertia and moral insensibility” and Evans’s “atrophy inside the cranium.” Likins deemed Evans a “great American monster” and one of “the earth’s most despised beings.” Readers of these books learned not only the meanings of Klan codes and the true nature of Klannish ritual, but also how to hate the organization’s leadership like only an embittered ex-Klansman could.46
Ex-members were not the only ones to put pen to paper to detail their disgust with the Invisible Empire. For the most part, other anti-Klan authors were no less hyperbolic than their Klannish counterparts, producing titles like The Strange Society of Blood and Death (see fig. 4.1) and Liberty Dethroned. At the same time, many of these complaints centered on a perception that the Klan organization did not live up to the ideals of the Klannish movement. Frank P. Ball of New York, for one, spent the majority of his Faults and Virtues of the Ku Klux Klan expressing his concern for the maintenance of white supremacy. His condemnation of the organization stemmed from a fear that Klan members were “guilty of the very worst kind of filthy, intimate social equality with the negroes and mulattoes.”47
Figure 4.1. Cover illustration for Ezra Cook’s Ku Klux Klan: The Strange Society of Blood and Death! Exposed! (Racine, WI: Johnson Smith, ca. 1923).
These anti-Klan jeremiads were also largely written by individuals with their own personal vendettas against the organization. Liberty Dethroned, for example, was written by A. V. Dalrymple, a staunch ally of “Ma” and “Pa” Ferguson, Texas politicians who were engaged in heated battle with the Klan for control of the state. Similarly, The Ku Klux Kraze was written by Aldrich Blake, executive counselor to Governor J. C. Walton of Oklahoma, who was impeached for having declared martial law in his state to combat the Klan. Many of these books represented individual grudges more than an expression of the Ku Klux Klan’s status within the world of the 1920s.48
As important as it is that we recognize the existence of this pro- and anti-Klan material, we must also recognize that these tracts were not popular best sellers. While the rhetoric of What Price Tolerance or The Strange Society of Blood and Death might suggest cultural war, the lived ideology of the Klannish movement—what Klan members and their allies were actually reading—is more suggestive of a cultural spectrum that did not lend itself to clear divisions. The Ku Klux Klan was less interested in burning books than it was in having its members read them. “Have you read a book this week?” asked the Fiery Cross. If not, “your life may not have been so rich as it might have been,” since “nothing adds so greatly to all the things that make life worth while as reading a good book.”49
The Klan was particularly concerned with literacy rates in America, intertwining the issue with nativist concerns. Concerns over illiteracy, which Dawn called “a disgrace to the nation,” were folded into the Klan’s well-documented crusade for universal public schooling, claiming that Catholic parochial schools and poorly funded public education were responsible for dragging down literacy rates among American children. The Kourier Magazine even cited John Dewey on the “moral right of every child to have an education.” Articles in the Klan’s official publications criticized the United States as “a democracy which expends in a year twice as much for chewing gum as for school books.” An educated citizenry, after all, was the only way to foster American democracy—and thereby avert a papal takeover.50
This passion for public school education led the Ku Klux Klan to also engage full-throatedly in contemporary debates over school textbooks. The primary focus of Klan members was, expectedly, rooting out perceived “Catholic propaganda” and “sectarianism.” It was remarkably successful in this task. The Invisible Empire managed to have books removed from schools across America, including in Michigan, New Jersey, Indiana, Louisiana, and Georgia. In Tennessee, the Ku Klux Klan actually did burn the offending textbooks while charging admission to the bonfire to raise money to buy replacements. A 1916 introduction to American history by Jennie Hall called Our Ancestors in History was one of the organization’s favorite targets. Concerned that it would instill “a deep respect for Romanism in the hearts of the Protestant boys and girls,” Klan members launched multiple attacks on the book between 1922 and 1925.51
Other Klannish concerns over schoolbooks found far more support in the wider movement outside the organization. The “New History” of scholars like David Muzzey and Charles Beard rejected “great man” interpretations of history in favor of socioeconomic analysis. This apparent diminution of the role of the Founding Fathers did not sit well with many. The attempt by some historians to take a more nuanced view of the American Revolution and the place of British policies further exacerbated the issue. In what historian Jonathan Zimmerman has termed the “textbook wars,” more than twenty legislatures were by 1923 considering the regulation of “treasonous” textbooks. Wisconsin, for example, passed a bill banning textbooks “defaming or misrepresenting the heroes of the War of Independence or the War of 1812.”52
These supposedly “unpatriotic” histories received criticism from a wide range
of sources, including the American Legion, Mayor John F. Hylan of New York, the German American Steuben Society, the Hearst newspaper chain, and the Knights of Columbus.53 Walter Lippmann observed in 1928 that it seemed “as if there were hardly an organization in America which has not set up a committee” on textbooks. The Ku Klux Klan was no exception. As early as 1923, Dawn had devoted more than a page and a half to denouncing the “venomous slanders” on Sam Adams that were to be found in The Causes of the War of Independence by Claude H. Van Tyne, a historian at the University of Michigan. The Call of the North hailed the work of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Sons of the American Revolution to combat “not entirely satisfactory” textbooks.54
A clear indication of the fluidity of the boundaries in these cultural struggles came in 1927, when Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson of Chicago launched his own investigation into what he called “pro-British, un-American propaganda.” The notoriously corrupt and anti-Prohibition mayor found (much to his chagrin) that he had the full support of the local Ku Klux Klan on this issue—albeit nothing else. Gail S. Carter, Grand Dragon of Illinois, announced to reporters that the organization was in complete accord with Thompson’s attempt to “drive King George from history text books.” The Kourier Magazine agreed, welcoming Thompson’s scrutiny of the books but criticizing the mayor for neglecting the “vast evil” of Catholic influence. The fact that attacks on “unpatriotic” textbooks nationwide, including Thompson’s investigation, were also backed by American Catholic organizations was carefully ignored by the Invisible Empire.55
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