Ku Klux Kulture

by Felix Harcourt

  As the New York Times remarked, although the book’s attempt to discourage membership in the resurgent Klan would “seem a good purpose,” it did not make this a good book. The New York World noted that the novel was “a book of intensely melodramatic quality” that seemed to have been written “in a good deal of a hurry.” The book’s sales seem to have reflected this point. Nonetheless, Dixon had made his point. The World review commended The Black Hood’s “rebuke and condemnation” of the reborn Klan’s “worst possible impulses and auspices.” The author reiterated his arguments to interviewers during a press tour, calling the Klan’s disguise “a provocation to violence and disorder” and the organization “a menace to American democracy.” The original Clansman would remain a vocal opponent of the Invisible Empire until its collapse.37

  Dixon was not alone in channeling his antipathy toward the revived Klan into fiction. Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint, for example, presented a sorely underrepresented African American viewpoint on the organization that scandalized many white Southerners. White, who worked for the NAACP as “an investigator and reporter of racial violence” (and who would head that organization from 1931 until his death in 1955), hoped to promote “a literature and art that told a truth about African Americans and made no concessions to stereotype.” In White’s words, “Writing about Negro life as it really exists” was a subject “as yet practically untouched.” The Fire in the Flint was his attempt to rectify the situation by depicting the struggles of African Americans living in a Georgia plagued by the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.38

  Just as much a message novel as Dixon’s The Black Hood, The Fire in the Flint was redeemed by its journalistic attention to detail and its realistic dialogue. Although the book was his first foray into fiction, White understood that the best means of communicating his meaning was through an engaging plot and effective characterization rather than lectures shoehorned into the discussions of his characters. The Fire in the Flint is particularly successful at conveying White’s argument for black group consciousness as the prerequisite for an end to discrimination, particularly in Southern farming, as well as a need to debunk the idea that lynchings were somehow justified by imagined “outrages” against white womanhood. White was also able to convincingly present an unflattering portrait of “stodgy, phlegmatic, stupid citizens” with “a natural love of the mysterious and adventurous and an instinct toward brute action.” For White, this group as a whole comprised the racially charged Ku Klux Klan, without nice distinctions between members of the organization and sympathizers to the wider movement. The Fire in the Flint even managed to summon up some small measure of sympathy for Klansmen as “creatures of the fear they sought to inspire,” living in “constant dread” that African Americans would prove themselves the equal, if not the superior, of white men.39

  White’s ideas were embodied in the novel by the character of Kenneth Harper, a black doctor returning home after attending college and serving in the First World War. Harper’s involvement with a black tenant farmers association (which draws the ire of local Klansmen, including the sheriff and other local landowners and officials) stimulates a growing awareness of himself as an affluent black man in the South. That process is hastened considerably when a gang of white men rape Harper’s sister, pushing Harper’s brother, Bob, to kill several of the rapists. Bob, pursued by a mob bent on lynching him, then kills himself.40 The Klan, in turn, murders Harper—ostensibly to prevent him from avenging his family, although in large part because of his success in organizing local black farmers to resist the poor treatment they have faced at the hands of white landowners—and successfully avoids any repercussion for the crime by falsely claiming that Harper had assaulted a white woman and been lynched.41

  White’s unflinching condemnation of antiblack violence and his aspersions on the “honor” of white womanhood were rooted in his experiences touring the South for the NAACP, where he had observed firsthand white reaction to black labor movements.42 Concerned that the novel would offend white Southerners and hurt sales, publisher George H. Doran rejected The Fire in the Flint. White refused to downplay the severity of the situation in the South and weaken his stance. To one correspondent, he wrote that he “would destroy the manuscript before I would submit to emasculation which would kill the effectiveness of the novel.” Instead, White took it to Alfred A. Knopf, one of the few progressive major publishing houses, which issued it in late 1924 to great success.43

  The book sold well (helped in no small part by White’s use of NAACP branches to build a distribution network and boost sales), and was received with great acclaim by many Northern and black critics, who praised the book for both its message and its literary merit. Joel Rogers used the pages of The Messenger to praise its “rough-hewn, Rodinesque vigor and its crisp, tense narrative.” The New York Times called it “an inevitable novel” that “deserves serious consideration.” The Independent declared it “a cry of the oppressed” and an “indictment of white civilization.” W. E. B. DuBois, writing for Crisis, called The Fire in the Flint “a stirring story and a strong bit of propaganda against the white Klansman and the black pussyfoot.” The Baltimore Afro-American listed it among its best books of the year, and tried to convince White to let the newspaper serialize it.44

  Even some Southern white critics commended The Fire in the Flint. A. S. Bernd of the Macon Telegraph reviewed it favorably, losing the newspaper a number of subscribers. Lawrence Stallings, a Georgia native, wrote an overwhelmingly positive review lavished with criticism of his home state that was published in the New York World and widely republished by sympathetic newspapers. Stallings called the plot “a melodramatic story, garish and hysterical,” but conceded that White’s case “is so fiery a one of truth” that “overstatement is almost necessary to a fighting book.”45

  A more typical Southern response came from the Savannah Press, which published an editorial review of The Fire in the Flint entitled “A Book of Lies,” and was similarly widely republished—although in most cases it was republished by Northern newspapers as an example of Southern intolerance. The Press, carefully avoiding any mention of the Klan, called the book “the worst libel we have seen on the South and Southern men and women.” With no apparent irony, the paper accused White’s book of encouraging “unfair prejudice.” The novel’s claim that nine out of the ten “trifling” women who claimed to have been raped by African Americans were actually just trying to save their reputations, and were willing to see a man lynched to do so, attracted the most criticism. Even white Southern liberals reacted with dismay to such an idea, as The Fire in the Flint had suggested they would. The Press called it a “palpable, outrageous lie” and “a deadly insult to the women of the South.” With characteristic restraint, the newspaper implicitly threatened White with violence if he ever returned to Georgia.46

  Few novels dealing with the Klan had the same kind of literary merit as The Fire in the Flint. As with nonfiction publishing, the decade saw the creation of a cottage industry of polemical novels arguing the wonders and dangers of the Klan organization. These were often widely read, but have been largely forgotten as (per Erin A. Smith’s formulation) “bad books.” The New York Times commented in 1926 that “controversial matters” like the Klan were “very rarely . . . presented with the breadth of vision and insight which is imperative for their genuine success.” Worse, “the controversial matter spoils in most instances what might otherwise prove to be a good narrative.” This is all too true. Yet what we must not forget is that sufficient people were reading these novels to compel the New York Times to bemoan their quality, even as these books offered disparate and heterogeneous definitions of Klannish identity for popular audiences.47

  The year 1922 did not just see the publication of Ulysses and Babbitt. Texas academic Hubert Shands’s White and Black, published by Harcourt, Brace, also reached shelves that year. The story of Bob Robertson, a young white Texan preparing to leave for college who became embroiled in the lives of
the tenant farmers on his family’s plantation, Shands’s novel was really a clunky diatribe against the methods of the Invisible Empire. The Klan, the novelist argued, “disregarded every civil right of a citizen,” substituted “the savagery of a mob for ordered judicial processes,” and would plunge society “back into barbarism.”48

  Concerned primarily with the “dangers” of fraternization between the races, the Texan used the novel to underline his support for a “non-partisan, non-sectarian organization” that would promote “racial purity.” Shands’s issue with the Klan was not its ideas, but the “outrages” perpetrated by the organization in pursuit of its admirable aims. In this, the novelist’s approach was similar to anti-Klan nonfiction like Henry Fry’s The Modern Ku Klux Klan, attacking the organization while promoting the movement’s racial ideology. This conflicted attitude was reflected in reviews of the book. Burton Rascoe in the New York Tribune deemed Shands’s story “an elementary tale” but a “frank picture.” A decade later, the novel was remembered by critic Herschel Brickell as “fiction primarily concerned with the race question.” White and Black understandably garnered more attention for its message than for its half-baked plot.49

  Tar and Feathers by Victor Rubin, a Chicago newspaperman, was not much of an improvement. The 1923 novel described the ethical awakening of Robert Hamilton, a young Georgian, the grandson of a Confederate captain, and heir to an extensive cotton plantation. Returning home after World War I, Hamilton joins the “Trick Track Tribe,” where he meets William J. Simmons’s fictional counterpart. By the novel’s end, though, the Georgian has been disabused of the organization’s worth by his true friends, a Catholic soldier and Jewish doctor.50

  An effective argument against the real-life Klan’s official propaganda, Rubin’s novel met with some success, and was rushed into a second printing by his publisher, Dorrance & Company of Philadelphia. Once again, however, the book’s true appeal seems to have resided not in its story but in its message—combined with the Klan’s seemingly ever-present ability to attract public attention. Reviewers noted that Tar and Feathers kept “the interest sustained,” but it was the “timely enough, and incidentally worthy enough,” theme of the book that would “justify its publication.” Much the same was true of Ellen Corrigan Scott’s That Fool Moffett, the story of a lapsed Catholic whose lack of faith loses him true love, and who ends up married to the anti-Catholic daughter of a Klan lecturer. A tedious debunking of various myths spread by the Klan, framed within an exaltation of the “moral superiority” of “inviolable Catholic marriage law,” That Fool Moffett offered little in the way of plot, and even less in the way of enjoyment.51

  Literary merit took a backseat to propagandistic intent. The same was true of most pro-Klan novels. If historical fiction had endorsed the idea of Klan as savior, the organization’s continued appearance in contemporary American fiction served to endorse the movement’s supposed virtues. Most of this writing was extraordinarily mediocre, yet was nonetheless able to find an audience. In doing so, Klannish authors situated a localized and federalized organization within a largely uniform cultural identity that was reproduced nationally, as books from around the country drew readers into an imagined community of white Protestant heroism. Thus, we must consider 1922 not only the year of Ulysses and Babbit and White and Black, but also the year of Egbert Brown’s The Final Awakening, a thoroughly bad book.52

  As Brown explained in a foreword, the “sole idea and intention” of the novel was “to convey to the alien world, from a Klannish standpoint, the true attitude of the organization.” Given that aim, it is unsurprising that The Final Awakening was marked by shoddy dialogue and awkward characterization. It is also unsurprising that the “true attitude” Brown claimed to present was one that attempted to divorce an imaginary heroic Klannish identity with (theoretically) wide appeal from the violent bigotry of reality. This fictional Klan had no hatred toward Catholics, Jews, or African Americans, but merely a desire to see laws enforced and “Americanism” reign supreme. To that end, Brown told the story of Roger Wilson, a Catholic and the stepson of a bootlegger. Over the course of the novel, Wilson slowly realized the error of his opposition to the Klan, renouncing both his stepfather and his religion, while Brown bolted on a romantic subplot with the sister of a Klansman for good measure. In the process, the Klan saved local African Americans from themselves by shutting down the (white Protestant) bootlegger, whose whiskey was rendering them useless to their white employers. The novel also saw the organization kidnap and beat a (white Protestant) doctor responsible for a string of botched illegal abortions resulting in the death of multiple young Jewish women.53

  The Klan was thereby presented as the savior of morality, without regard to race or religion, with all violence in the novel leveled only against other white Protestants and done so to protect other groups. Simultaneously, Brown reinforced bigoted frames of understanding—African Americans as the only group weak willed enough to fall under the power of the bootlegger, Jewish women as the only clients of the abortionist. In both disclaiming and appealing to intolerance, Brown crafted a poor story but an effective call for new members. As the Fellowship Forum described it, “If you are NOT a Klansman now, you will want to be one after you have finished reading it.”54

  The novel’s link to the Klan organization is almost as murky as the book’s plot. While Brown claimed to have no official connection with the Invisible Empire, his book was published in the Klan stronghold of Brunswick, Georgia, by Empire Distributors, a common nom de plume for Klan publishing ventures. Certainly, The Final Awakening parroted the organization’s official line. Most novels of the Klan movement, though, were clearly produced independently of any control from national leaders of the Invisible Empire. Despite their disparate and uncoordinated origins, they offered an aesthetic of Klannish movement identity far more cohesive than the federalized organization itself—a consumable cultural identity in which signifiers of the cross and hood denoted white Protestant virtue rather than violence and hatred.

  That heroic self-identity was further reinforced in 1923 with the publication of Harold the Klansman by George Alfred Brown. Harold was certainly not devoid of the sermonizing that had plagued The Final Awakening. Like Egbert Brown, George Brown made clear the fact that the book had been written to provide “reliable information” about the Klan, and devoted pages of stilted dialogue to issues of papal infallibility and parochial school education. Unlike Egbert Brown, George Brown displayed a fairly deft hand at characterization and melodramatic plotting. The novel saw the eponymous Harold save his sweetheart’s family business from ruin at the hands of a greedy bootlegger and his Catholic, Jewish, and African American allies. By joining the Klan, along with all of the other leading citizens, Harold was able to clean up his unnamed western town, while also proving the Invisible Empire’s worth to his beloved. Historian Wyn Craig Wade has gone so far as to call the plot “engrossing,” although that may be overstating the case.55

  While it was not going to knock Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen from the top of the best-seller list, Dawn called Harold the Klansman “a story that both entertains and instructs.” The Badger American extolled it as “a volume that is without precedent in the fields of literature,” written “in a beautiful, sincere manner” that “sounds the tocsin for a greater service to America.” The Jayhawker American raved that it was “a great social novel destined to make its impress on the thought of Americans” and would prove to be “one of the great historical novels of this generation.” It certainly struck a chord with sympathetic readers, who kept Harold the Klansman in reprints until at least 1927.56

  A similar attempt at entertaining Klan fiction promoting a sanitized definition of Klannish identity appeared in early 1924, printed by Ohio’s Patriot Publishing Company. Knight Vale of the K.K.K. by William Andrew Saxon told the story of Fairfax Vale. A vigorously anti-Klan crusader in the employ of a vicious Catholic state governor (clearly modeled on Oklahoma’s governor J. C.
Walton), Vale came to realize the error of his ways and joined the Invisible Empire. Over the course of the novel, Saxon managed to include complete reprints of the “Klansman’s Creed” and of an alleged Knights of Columbus oath. He also displayed an interesting strand of defensiveness about the Klan’s anti-Semitism, claiming that Catholics were the real anti-Semites. On the whole, though, the Klan author seemed far less interested in the idea of furnishing reliable information than in presenting an adventure story with a byzantine plot. Black Mask’s influence was evident in the increasingly standard conversion narrative and in a denouement lifted almost wholesale from “‘Call Out the Klan,” as Catholics framed the Klan for the kidnapping of Vale’s sweetheart.57

  Even as the Klan’s power as a national organization began its rapid decline, movement authors continued to churn out message novels of dubious literary merit. The Son of a Klansman by Albert Gaffney bypassed the allegory of the allegorical novel and simply stated in the foreword which character personified the modern Ku Klux Klan and which personified political corruption, the Klan’s ultimate enemy. The tangled melodrama 100% by Albert Wentz (under the subtle pseudonym of Kenneth Kenelm King) was little better, as the usual criticisms of Catholics, Jews, and African Americans took the place of most dialogue. Wentz’s 100% was at least able to distinguish itself through the bizarre nature of its plot, which included rape, murderous nuns, baby strangling, and the revelation that the Catholic proscription of meat on a Friday was actually a conspiracy to slowly poison the Protestant population with arsenic-laced foodstuffs.58