Startling as the content may have been, these polemics are primarily useful in understanding how Klan members and sympathizers defined themselves. They are less useful to our understanding of the wider cultural 1920s than the ways in which the Invisible Empire’s presence infiltrated novels with less propagandistic concerns. This most often meant following the same model as many newspaper editors or the editors of Black Mask—to increase sales by exploiting the “picturesque” atmosphere presented by the Klan while leaving the organization itself largely incidental to the plot. The purpose was entertainment rather than judgment. Thus, these stories often implicitly legitimated and promulgated the aims and ideas of the wider Klan movement.
Even H. L. Mencken’s lofty American Mercury was not beyond co-opting the Klan into its short stories, albeit to lambast the very idea of Americanism. In David Purroy’s “On the Lam,” the detective hero complained that leads were “as scarce as Jews at a KKK pig roast.” Somewhat more substantially, “Ku Klux” by W. A. S. Douglas saw a Polish-born war veteran driven insane by the Klan’s subversion of American values. Perhaps most effectively, the Mercury featured one of mystery writer (and close friend of Mencken) James M. Cain’s earliest stories. In 1928, six years before The Postman Always Rings Twice, eight years before Double Indemnity, thirteen years before Mildred Pierce, Cain published “Trial by Jury.” The short dialogue sketch saw jurors deliberating their verdict in the case of a man who had murdered a Klansman in self-defense. After bribing the simpleton Klansman in their midst to offer a favorable account of their deliberations to his organization, the jurors ultimately vote to soften the conviction to manslaughter, and leave, paying lip service to “Citizenship . . . Patriotism . . . All like of that” as they do so. The only kind of Americanism that seemed to matter, to Cain, was the kind that might get you targeted by the Ku Klux Klan.59
Similar ideas were offered by James Stevens, another friend and protégé of Mencken, best known for his tales popularizing Paul Bunyan as an American folk hero. In 1924, Stevens published “Uplift on the Frontier” in the Mercury, mocking the “simpletons” lured by the “childish excitements” offered by the Klan. Three years later, his novel Mattock would take similar aim at such excitements in a thoroughly Menckenian excoriation of prejudiced and ignorant Americans who made mealymouthed professions of Christian faith. These tendencies were made flesh in his protagonist, “upright honest Christian” Parvin Mattock, who soon succumbs to temptation—in the form of drink, gambling, cigarettes, and French whores—when he joins the army. His self-righteous attitude also propels him into a role as an informer inside his unit, looking for Bolshevist influence in “the grand, new, patriotic, religious, upliftin’ American game of snoop, spy, frame up, and stool.”
A postwar religious awakening puts Mattock back on the straight and narrow—married to a reverend’s daughter, taking a lead in the local American Legion, and, best of all, becoming an official of the Kansas Ku Klux Klan. The Invisible Empire barely features in the plot, but Mattock’s membership is the effective climax of the novel, as Stevens used it to display the ignorance and hollow faith of such men. Critics praised the “imperceptible irony” and “superb detachment” of the novel. Stevens’s “solid and humorous” novel painted the Klansman as an ultimately pathetic figure, continually struggling for “decency.”60
Stevens was not the first to take such satirical aim. Journalist James Henle’s Sound and Fury (which beat Faulkner to the title, minus a few definite articles, by five years) was published by Knopf in late 1924. Henle’s book focused on the plight of George “Goody” Guthrie, whom the New York Times called “an individual knight gallantly leading a lost cause against a ruin and a havoc of regimented democracy and industrial materialism.” For Henle, the Ku Klux Klan (which included the local mayor and chief of police) was the personification of soul-sapping regimentation, “the most typical product of America and 100 per cent Americanism,” who “merely went one step further than the prohibitionists.” It was with no small symbolism that the novel ended with a mob of Klansmen murdering Guthrie.61
This satirical attack on not just the Klan organization but the wider Klan movement and the effort to impose an alien morality on individuals like Guthrie was received with mixed reviews. Some lavished praise on a “distinguished” novel filled with “true and sham-smashing observation and comment” that made the book “decidedly good and decidedly out of the ordinary.” Others complained that Henle’s work was “platitudinous and unconvincing” and that the Klannish climax was “too dramatic.” Nonetheless, Sound and Fury offered a notable critique of the Invisible Empire for its vicious enforcement of a hectoring moralism.62
Henle’s lament for the decline of rugged American aristocratic individualism in the face of conformism and conventionality owed no small debt to Sinclair Lewis, who also incorporated the Klan into his controversial 1927 best seller Elmer Gantry. The self-serving attitude of the eponymous antihero toward the Invisible Empire was the perfect example of the evangelical minister’s disingenuousness. Lewis presented the Klan as a political problem for “many of the most worthy Methodist and Baptist clergymen,” who looked favorably on the organization. Gantry’s own inclination in the novel is as a member of the Klannish movement, favoring the desire “to keep all foreigners, Jews, Catholics, and negroes in their place, which was no place at all.” That enthusiasm is tempered by his awareness that there are “prominent people, nice people, rich people,” who oppose the Klan organization. As such, Lewis’s antihero takes a typically Gantry-esque stance: “It seemed to him more truly American, also a lot safer, to avoid the problem.” The hollowness of Gantry’s conviction is reflected in a statement on religious liberty so generic that it pleases both Klansmen and their opponents—the approach many real clergymen, as well as newspaper editors and authors, had taken. The Klan’s part in Elmer Gantry was short and incidental to the plot, but operated as ideal shorthand for Lewis, allowing the author to explicate his scathing condemnation of American moral hypocrisy in a nutshell.63
This approach reached its apogee with the bizarre but much-admired 1927 novel Half-Gods by Murray Sheehan, which took Lewis’s satirical approach but added a fabulist twist. A professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas, Sheehan set the story in the small town of Roosevelt, Missouri.64 There, the Durnan family’s old black mare gives birth to a centaur, whom the family names Dick. This “half-god” then spends the rest of the novel struggling between an honorable barbarism, symbolized by ancient Greek art and culture, that allows him to occasionally encounter Pan and wood nymphs, and the crude civilization of the small town that he longs to be accepted by—a conflict none too subtly embodied by his own dual biology. Even as Dick’s innate nobility is vulgarized over the course of the story by contact with the ignorant bigots who populate the town, one of Durnan’s sons, Daniel, is drawn to higher cultural aspirations, embodied by the town’s recently arrived artistic free spirit, a married Frenchwoman named Lolla Delacourt.
In the novel’s denouement, Dick—whose struggle took on an increasingly sexual nature, torn between dalliances with mares and a growing attraction to humans—abducts a young woman. In response, the Klan (including the town’s reverend, its leading businessmen, and Durnan himself) springs into action. Instead of tracking the centaur, however, the posse soon heads for Delacourt’s home. The Frenchwoman having obtained a reputation for “ungodly thinking and loose morals” (symbolized by her affinity for “dirty” art like Greek statues), the moralizing mob moves to burn down the house, with or without Delacourt inside, as a lesson to those “who thought to contravene . . . the customs of common decency and American virtue.”65
After several members suggest that burning the house would be bad for the town’s reputation and, by extension, their businesses, the Klansmen limit themselves to burning a cross. “It is one thing,” the mob is reminded, to have a Klan “serving admirably to keep in order the black dwellers” and the “mean citizens of no import.” It was
quite a different matter if the Klan became “destructive of property values” and injurious of “those with bank balances.” With the abduction completely forgotten, the Klan dissipates back into the night. Dick, who is almost instantly henpecked by his abductee, returns the girl the next day with little recrimination. By the novel’s end, Delacourt has been forced out of town, Daniel has left for better things in California, and the men of the town have finally accepted Dick as one of them.66
With its fashionable criticism of a reactionary and unenlightened “booboisie,” Half-Gods was received with critical acclaim as a “daring and satirical story” that offered “humor, tragedy, satire and gross realism.” Praising Half-Gods’ ability to illustrate the idea that small-town religion was “not a refinement of the spirit” but “an emotional outlet for stunted souls and dreary lives,” reviews hailed the book as an “odd tour de force” in which “the Klan adds its bit to the shallow performance.” As many reviews of the novel pointed out, the Invisible Empire’s place in the book was not as a plot point. Instead, the organization embodied the townsfolk’s inability to understand that morality should be “acquired from within, rather than applied from without.”67
The town’s success in replacing Dick’s youthful ideals with their own standards (unable to find middle ground between “salacious” and “rigorously moral”), though, illustrated the enduring power of Klannish moralists. A short story in the best-selling Saturday Evening Post, “Tar and Feathers” by George Patullo, further underlined this point. Patullo’s story, ostensibly a satirical barb in the vein of Sheehan et al., explicitly endorsed the ability of the Klan to “put the quietus on a lot of evils” in the postwar period. The real problem of the “mask and shroud” organization, the piece argued (alongside national advertisements for Pepsodent and Buster Brown Shoes), was that it allowed “riffraff” to join and subvert the organization to their own purposes. Ultimately, the local Klavern in the story disbands—save for the heroic “true” Klansmen who set out to punish those who had subverted the movement.68
Even this mild criticism was blunted in the work of many authors who, like Black Mask, saw only good literary (and commercial) material in the “childish excitements” identified by James Stevens. The Ku Klux Ball by Glenn Gordon, published in 1926, is a significant example of the trend. Gordon’s run-of-the-mill story aped Petersen’s “Call Out the Klan,” as a local Klavern rescues the Catholic main character from his kidnappers, who are falsely posing as Klansmen. Yet the Invisible Empire remained fairly incidental. The novel was predominantly concerned with the niceties of the “younger set,” worried more with the etiquette of when the Victrola should be turned off than with the Klan. When the New York Times described the book as “a story of the Klan,” the author wrote to the newspaper to make the telling complaint that the organization was “unimportant” to the novel, and was “used merely as a background to justify the title and popularize the book.” Gordon was not interested in presenting an argument for or against the Klan. The Invisible Empire was simply a selling point.69
Much the same was true of a series of adventure novels published through the 1920s that often lauded the Klan. Cyril “Sapper” McNeile’s The Black Gang, a tautly plotted thriller originally published in England, was widely serialized in the American press and published in the United States by the George H. Doran Company in 1923. McNeile’s story was the second of what would become a highly popular nineteen-book series. His formidable protagonist was Bulldog Drummond, an ex-military man and unorthodox private detective, and acknowledged model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
Although the novel was set in England, the heroic Black Gang was an overt heroic fictional Klan equivalent. Drummond, secretly the head of the group, led the Gang to foil the malevolent plans of a group of Jewish Bolshevik spies (who also dabbled in white slavery and drug peddling), largely by kidnapping and flogging the evildoers. For Drummond (and, by extension, McNeile), the ends more than justified the brutal means—just as they had for John Carroll Daly and Race Williams in Black Mask. As the head of Scotland Yard argued in the novel, the Black Gang’s methods “were undoubtedly illegal,” but “the results were excellent.”70
The organization’s similarity to the Klan was not lost on American readers. The New York Times commented that McNeile “has apparently taken for his model a Konklave of the Klan as its most loyal adherents imagine it to be.” This did not stop the New York Times reviewer from praising the book’s “spectacular and daring adventures.” The International Book Review noted that the Klan analogue’s adventures would make even “the most jaded reader of crime stories” bound to “sit up and take notice.” McNeile wasted no time on sermonizing. The Black Gang was simply an adventure novel that used the Ku Klux Klan as a model for its heroic protagonists, reinforcing the Klannish self-image that polemical novels had worked so hard to promulgate. This exploitation of the Klan’s cultural prominence certainly did not seem to hurt the book’s success.71
Novelist Ridgwell Cullum’s The Saint of the Speedway similarly featured a lightly disguised Invisible Empire as a heroic vigilante organization. Published in 1924, again by George H. Doran—who had rejected White’s The Fire in the Flint—Cullum’s Klan analogue added character to the novel while remaining largely incidental to the plot itself. Cullum himself was a popular author of the Jack London school of rough outdoor adventure and red-blooded romance. Like many of his Alaska-set adventure stories, The Saint of the Speedway told a fairly familiar story of an indebted family set to lose their farm until a rough-hewn man sweeps into town to romance the daughter, save the farm, and set all things right. Cullum’s minor twist in this book was the reveal of the rugged hero as the Chief Light of the local Clan. Although depicted on the book’s striking cover as possible villains and drawn, without any pretense otherwise, as Klansmen (see fig. 5.1), the Clan served throughout the book as a civilizing moral force that defended the weak while punishing those outside the law, including gamblers and drug dealers.
Figure 5.1. Book jacket for the Readers Library edition of Ridgwell Cullum’s The Saint of the Speedway (New York: George H. Doran, 1924).
While Cullum spent little time dwelling on the nature of the organization, preferring to push on with his narrative, he made clear his admiration for the “passionate exasperation” of a Klan movement desirous of a world “made safe for decent democracy,” and “prepared to purge it without regard to the rest of the world’s opinions.” The New York Times met this exaltation of Klannish philosophy with praise in a review that clearly demonstrated an understanding that the “Clan” was “an organization very similar to the Ku Klux,” making for a “real mystery” filled with “dramatic and thrilling” adventure. Bruce Gould in the New York Herald Tribune agreed. The introduction of the vigilante organization “when quicker measures are needed than those provided by the processes of law” made for “plenty of action and somewhat of mystery.” The Bookman called it “as possible as it is exciting.”72
One of the most popular adventure novelists of the period was Rex Beach, part of the flood of self-consciously masculine melodrama of the early twentieth century, alongside Stewart Edward White and James Oliver Curwood. His action-packed oeuvre made him one of the most popular writers in America, selling more than three million books by 1926. He had also earned the mockery of H. L. Mencken, who ridiculed the “gaudy tales of a Rex Beach, with their bold projections of the Freudian dreams of go-getters, ice-wagon drivers, Ku Kluxers, Rotary Club presidents, and other such carnivora.” The Sage of Baltimore was not far wrong. Beach’s brand of escapist fiction was exactly the kind of middlebrow literature that the American public—including Klan members—adored. The Fiery Cross had, for example, particularly praised Beach’s Flowing Gold in 1923.73
Beach, for his part, offered the same conflicted attitude on the Klan as many other writers of the period. Where the adventure novelist was approving of the movement’s “100% American” aims, he was critical of the organization’s met
hods. This was particularly clear in Beach’s 1927 novel, The Mating Call. Leslie Hatten, the poor but noble Southern protagonist, reiterated throughout the novel that he could not support “secret influence or mob violence.” At the same time, he had no objection to “the principles of the Klan advocates.”74
Those patriotic and moralistic Klannish principles were omnipresent themes in The Mating Call, even as Beach largely elided any idea of the violent implementation of those principles. The growing presence of the local Klan (which included local luminaries such as the judge, clergymen, and several of Hatten’s friends) was a constant source of interest for the characters, and one of the primary topics of conversation. The only direct action taken by the organization, however, was limited to a threatening note—and even that note was revealed to be the work of an impostor.75
The Invisible Empire’s role in The Mating Call was ultimately inconsequential. The Klan did not even warrant a mention in the New York Times review of the book, which praised Beach’s “detail and colorful description.” Will Cuppy in the New York Herald Tribune noted the novel’s “exciting bouts with the Ku Klux Klan,” but they were only one aspect of Beach’s “first rate cinematic mystery.” The Invisible Empire was there purely to add flavor to the plot. As one review tellingly noted, the book had “a dash of Ku Klux Klan to give it spice.”76
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