Ku Klux Kulture

by Felix Harcourt

  The reading program of the Invisible Empire encompassed far more than simply textbooks, however. There were plenty of best sellers that were eagerly endorsed by Klan publications and avidly read by members and nonmembers alike. Some of this literary enthusiasm stemmed from wider anti-Catholic sentiment, which reached far beyond the Klan’s paying membership. The literary advertisement most commonly seen in Klan publications was for Helen Jackson’s Convent Cruelties, or My Life in a Convent, first published in 1919. Jackson’s anti-Catholic autobiography, which purported to detail the horrors of her life confined in a convent and her eventual escape, sold to a much larger readership than simply Klan members. Anti-Catholics across the United States paid their fifty cents to read her lurid tales, propelling the book to seven printings between its original publication and 1924.56

  Authors like Lothrop Stoddard reached an even wider audience, and had an enduring influence on American popular thought. Walter White, then assistant secretary of the NAACP, alleged in 1923 that Stoddard was a member of the Invisible Empire, claiming “a reputable citizen of Atlanta in possession of secret Klan documents” as his source. White went so far as to name Stoddard as the Exalted Cyclops of Klan No. 1, Realm of Massachusetts, and claim that the author was tasked with leading the Klan’s expansion into European countries. Stoddard denied any official affiliation with the Klan. Whether or not he was a dues-paying member, though, he was undoubtedly affiliated with the wider Klan movement. His ideas had a powerful effect on shaping the thinking not just of Klan members but also of what one biographer has called his “paradoxically broad yet elitist readership.”57

  Lothrop Stoddard’s best-remembered work, The Rising Tide of Color, published in 1921, was an evaluation of race as “the basic factor in human affairs.” Supplementing this first work through the decade with The Revolt against Civilization, Racial Realities in Europe, Re-forging America, and more, Stoddard offered a dire warning. What he identified as the “radical negro movement” in the United States was only part of a global shift in racial power. A growing race consciousness and racial militancy threatened the continued dominance of global white supremacy. For many in 1920s America, this was a compelling and chilling threat. President Warren G. Harding, for one, encouraged those concerned with the national and global “race problem” to read Stoddard. This was not an uncontroversial position, but it was a popular one for many—including Klannish readers.58

  Telling as Stoddard’s popularity was, it would be a mistake to reduce Klannish reading simply to ideological tracts. Klan members were more than happy to give their blessing to the westerns of Owen Wister and Zane Grey, classic adventures in the vein of Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, and the idyllic Southern romances of George Washington Cable.59 Similarly, Klan members may have felt uncomfortable engaging with the “New History,” but were encouraged to read popular biographies of “great Americans.” The muscular Christianity of Teddy Roosevelt and Dunning-school depictions of Lincoln as a Southern hero who would never have endorsed Radical Reconstruction were particularly popular, as well as such classics of nonfiction as Macaulay’s History of England, Jean-Henri d’Aubigne’s History of the Reformation, and Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly.60

  Similarly, both Klan members and nonmembers shared a passion for advertising executive Bruce Barton’s 1925 runaway best seller, The Man Nobody Knows, and its 1926 sequel, The Book Nobody Knows. Barton’s work, which depicted Jesus and scriptural texts as a role model for the modern businessman, was widely ridiculed by contemporary critics. Many historians have similarly, as Erin A. Smith has noted, dismissed Barton as “a third-rate writer of boosterish prose who embraced a theologically empty and intellectually bankrupt consumerism.” Yet hundreds of thousands of Americans not only read but loved Barton’s books. Among these readers were Klan members, who rhapsodized that Barton must surely know Jesus personally to describe him so intimately.61

  Klan officials and publications were certainly not reticent in endorsing these books and other suitable reading—much of which was seemingly published by Bobbs-Merrill. The Fiery Cross, in addition to its “Library Notes,” ran regular book reviews and recommendations, while the American Standard offered its suggestions in “The Patriotic Bookshelf.” The Kourier Magazine gave guidance to younger readers with its “Junior Klan Study Guide,” and the Kourier network offered numerous reviews to help Klansmen find enjoyable and educational books. As the Fiery Cross explained, the reader should not “gulp down literature at random” but instead plan a well-balanced “intellectual diet.”62

  Klan leaders and members also worked actively to foster interest in (and financing for) public libraries to help allow Americans of all ages to access these reading materials. The Fiery Cross published a lengthy poem extolling the virtues of the library as “a teacher bigger than the schools.” Like others concerned with the nation’s “Americanism,” Klan members championed the library’s ability to teach recent immigrants about the wonders of the United States and, in the process, “make him an American.” Even prisoners could benefit, with the Klan trumpeting the results of the installation of a library in the Pueblo, Colorado, jail. As the Kourier Magazine explained, anyone could become educated by reading “well-selected books.”63

  Klan publications, particularly in the North, often urged Klan members to visit their local libraries. The Fiery Cross’s regular feature “Library Notes” detailed the latest arrivals and events at the Indianapolis Public Library. In Chicago, all Klansmen were encouraged to “read and study and make the best possible use of the facilities in hand” as well as supporting any effort to improve the city’s libraries. In Colorado, the Grand Dragon offered a more ambitious plan, suggesting that each individual Klan in the state create its own “Klan Circulating Library.” Promising that it would not entail “a great deal of trouble and expense,” the Grand Dragon emphasized that the library would pay “big dividends in the creating of a ‘mind.’”64

  The Klan as a literate public is perhaps best understood in the context of another Bobbs-Merrill author, John Erskine. His 1925 novel, The Private Life of Helen of Troy, a portrayal of Helen as a thoroughly modern vamp, was a highly acclaimed best seller quickly adapted for film. Yet Erskine’s greater impact was as a Columbia professor who proposed the first full-scale “great books” curriculum. As Joan Shelley Rubin has noted, the “great books” program was, fundamentally, an “Americanization” program concerned with “the reassertion of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant superiority” in molding all Americans—including new immigrants—to fit “an existing white middle-class mold.” It is not hard to imagine how the same impulses drove the creation of a canon of Klannish reading recommendations. Much like the Invisible Empire itself, the appeal of this “great books” ideology lay in “its capacity to provide familiar touchstones (self-reliance, character, Western civilization)” while bending to contemporary society’s “heightened demands for information, social performance, and personal growth.” In their concern with reading not only as a means of personal gratification and personal betterment but also as a cornerstone of an educated, literate, “Americanized” public, members of both the Klan organization and the wider Klannish cultural movement were engrossed in a wholly contemporary debate.65

  Moving beyond the organizational rhetoric of “filthy fiction” to the lived experience of readers allows us to understand that members of the Ku Klux Klan movement seem to have shared in both mainstream concerns with modern literature and in mainstream literary tastes. At the same time, a consideration of the proliferation of “bad” books of the postwar period that concerned the Invisible Empire highlights the fact that many Americans shared a taste for reading about the Ku Klux Klan. Klan members and nonmembers alike battled in print to define public perceptions of the Klan—a literary Klannish identity. They did so in a disorganized and disordered process that played out predominantly at a local level, with little input and even less control from the organization’s national leaders. That these considerations of t
he Klan and its place in contemporary society often offered mixed assessments reminds us how heterogeneous cultural reaction to the Klan was in the 1920s. Even as the Klan displayed ambivalent sentiments about American literature, American literature displayed ambivalent sentiments about the Klan.

  5

  Good Fiction Qualities

  It occurred to the editors of BLACK MASK that the Klan and its mystic atmosphere would make an excellent background for fiction stories and other Black Mask features. It contains action, mystery, emotion, and other good fiction qualities.

  Black Mask, May 15, 1923

  The ambivalent relationship between American literature and the Ku Klux Klan was, if anything, even more evident in the realm of popular fiction. The Ku Klux Klan and its “good fiction qualities” appeared everywhere from the Saturday Evening Post to Sinclair Lewis. Even as their image was commercialized and co-opted, Klan members and sympathizers put pen to paper to promote a Klannish identity of heroic and virtuous white Protestantism. The porous boundaries of cultural division saw Klan authors adopt a modern pulp sensibility as modernist authors embraced nativism.

  Many literary scholars have noted the appearance of the works of “Goddard”—a portmanteau of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard—in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Tom Buchanan extols the virtues of Goddard’s ideas at multiple points, warning that “civilization’s going to pieces,” that intermarriage threatened the American family, and that the “white race” risked becoming “utterly submerged.” It is fairly evident what Fitzgerald himself thought of Stoddard, as Nick Carraway notes the “pathetic” nature of Buchanan’s “impassioned gibberish.” The endorsement of these “stale ideas” is a means of underlining the fundamental character defects of Buchanan—the wealthy, athletic, well-bred, and well-educated Midwesterner whose arrogance and cruelty feature prominently in the novel.1

  Those “stale ideas,” though, are hardly limited in The Great Gatsby to Buchanan. Daisy, who fondly remembers her “white girlhood,” ultimately remains with her deeply flawed husband rather than leave him for the ethnically ambiguous Jimmy Gatz. Gatsby’s own library prominently includes an (unread) copy of the “Stoddard Lectures”—a travel series by John Lawson Stoddard, Lothrop Stoddard’s father. Jordan Baker’s attempt to defuse Buchanan’s rage with a reminder that “we’re all white here,” Lucille McKee’s relief at having avoided marriage to “a little kike,” even Fitzgerald’s own portrayal of Meyer Wolfsheim, the “small, flat-nosed Jew” who lapses into dialect, are all reminders of the nativistic and racialized modernism identified by Walter Benn Michaels.2

  At the same time, in focusing on the racial undertones in Fitzgerald’s work or the anti-Semitism of Hemingway or the “Anglo-Saxon chauvinism” of John Dos Passos, we risk losing sight of the wider cultural picture. The 1920s has long been celebrated as a decade of “exceptional richness” in the “flowering of the literary arts.” The year 1922 alone—the year in which the world split in two for Willa Cather—saw the appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. It was a decade in which Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Wolfe published their first major works.3

  While Gatsby may have been a critical success, however, its sales were modest. Similarly, James D. Hart has noted, many people in the 1920s may have been talking about Hemingway, but not that many people were reading Hemingway. William Faulkner was not quite as obscure as some have made him out to be, but his books were little read. It was only in the 1940s, as Mark Greif details, that critics retroactively rehabilitated him into the pantheon of great American novelists. If, then, we are to garner a more rounded understanding of the 1920s, we must consider the literary tastes of “America in the bulk,” as The Bookman put it in 1923. And America in the bulk was not reading Hemingway or Fitzgerald. It was reading Jack London and Harold Bell Wright.4

  A Disciples of Christ minister with a flair for “awkward, mawkish, and ingenuous” melodramatic fiction that was “both blatantly commercial and blatantly evangelical,” Wright was excoriated by contemporary critics for his forays into “pseudo-literature.” He was also one of the most popular novelists of the first quarter of the twentieth century, selling more than ten million books. Until 1926, he was the third most popular writer in the United States—with an audience that included a young Ronald Reagan, who claimed his baptism into the Disciples of Christ was prompted by reading Wright’s That Printer of Udell’s in 1922. Champions of heroism and morality in fiction like Gene Stratton-Porter were similarly popular. A flood of authors in the Jack London school of rough, red-blooded adventure, like Stewart Edward White and James Oliver Curwood, complemented the high sales of sentimental romantic fiction. Zane Grey, master of the western, remained one of the nation’s top ten best-selling authors well into the decade.5

  As in nonfiction, there was little here to differentiate between popular tastes and Ku Klux preferences. It was the department-store impresario John Wanamaker, not a Knight of the Klan, who wrote to Zane Grey to praise his “distinctively and genuinely American” work that offered none of the “decadence of foreign writers”—though a Klan member would certainly have agreed. A notable example of this cultural continuum was prolific author Bernie Babcock’s 1923 novel, The Soul of Abe Lincoln. In this romance spanning the length of the Civil War, President Lincoln played a crucial role in bringing two lovers—one, a spy for the North; the other, a nurse for the South—together. The New York Times described it as a “moving and appealing story” that was “well worth reading for its vivid and thrilling and historically accurate portrayal.” The Badger American, a Klan newspaper, agreed, describing Babcock’s book as “wonderful.” Dawn went further, telling its readers that “every Klansman should read it, as it is the premier of historical novels of those times.”6

  If we are to understand the 1920s, then, we must understand it as the decade of both Fitzgerald and Wright. Yet condescension toward the aesthetic and stylistic failings on view in much of this literature too often colors scholarly understanding of the literary 1920s. As Erin A. Smith has persuasively noted, Wright is one of the more egregious absences from literary histories of the 1920s. His novels are among a host of other “bad books” that have been largely ignored by scholars. Following H. L. Mencken’s cue, we have dismissed books that seemed not only to have been “primarily addressed to shoe-drummers and shop-girls,” but also to have been “written by authors who are, to all intellectual intents and purposes, shoe-drummers and shop-girls.”7

  The great irony here is that Mencken himself was responsible for some of the most successful pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s—including Black Mask, which would afford the Klan its most striking appearance in the popular fiction of the period. In 1915, with their prestigious Smart Set struggling financially, coeditors Mencken and George Jean Nathan pseudonymously launched Parisienne. The new magazine saw glamorous heroines and aristocratic heroes swan about in short stories that had not made the cut for Smart Set, the location changed to the French Riviera in a cynical attempt to cash in on contemporary Francophilia. Noting its success, Mencken and Nathan followed in short order with Saucy Stories, a monthly collection of short fiction offering “the drama of poison and jealousy and the triumph of love.” Shoe-drummers and shop-girls surely loved it.8

  In 1920, Mencken and Nathan supplemented their collection of money-spinners by establishing Black Mask. One of the earliest pulp collections of detective stories, Black Mask quickly became one of the most popular “mystery magazines” on the market and would soon introduce what one historian has called “the greatest change in the detective story since Poe,” pioneering the “hard-boiled” fiction genre. Sold to the Pro-Distributors Publishing Company of Eltinge “Pop” Warner (also the publisher of Smart Set) and under the editorship of George W. Sutton, the magazine began to focus almost exclusively on detective stories.9

  By 1930, the magazine had reached its pe
ak circulation of over one hundred thousand, and was widely recognized as “the elite of the tough-guy fiction pulps.” Black Mask defined the detective genre with stories from Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade and The Maltese Falcon, as well as the Thin Man and Continental Op stories; Erle Stanley Gardner, best remembered for the Perry Mason series; and, later, Raymond Chandler, author of classics including The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye. Preceding Hammett and Chandler to the pages of Black Mask was Carroll John Daly, one of the most popular pulp writers of the 1920s and creator of both the first hard-boiled private-eye story and the first successful hard-boiled private detective, Race Williams. Williams, in turn, made his very first appearance in Black Mask in the magazine’s special June 1923 “Ku Klux Klan Number,” an issue devoted to stories of the Invisible Empire.10

  While Daly had sold his first story to Black Mask in 1922, it was not until 1923 that he began to perfect his super-tough style—and in the process forged the “hard-boiled” genre. Daly’s story for the Klan issue, “Knights of the Open Palm,” predated Dashiell Hammett’s first Continental Op story by several months, though his writing did not bear comparison to Hammett’s. One critic accurately deemed Daly “an artificial, awkward, self-conscious pulpster, endlessly repetitious, hopelessly melodramatic” with “no ability for three dimensional characterization” and “impossibly stilted dialogue.” Nevertheless, by virtue of being first, Daly’s impact was significant. In creating Race Williams, who continued to be a major pulp attraction into the 1950s, Daly “set the boundaries for the [hard-boiled] code either to be observed or transgressed.” Those boundaries were originally set in opposition to the Ku Klux Klan.11