Ku Klux Kulture

by Felix Harcourt

  Figure 6.1. “The Awakening”—A James H. Hull Production for Beaumont Klan No. 7—KKK, Beaumont, Texas, May 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 1924. Photo by Reeves. 1924. Image retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2001695587/.

  Figure 6.2. “The Awakening”—A James H. Hull Production for Beaumont Klan No. 7—KKK, Beaumont, Texas, May 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 1924. Photo by Reeves. 1924. Image retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2001695592/.

  After the Port Arthur run, The Awakening went on the road in productions sponsored by local Klans and manned by local actors. Playing to “crowded houses” and rave reviews in Dallas, Birmingham, Atlanta, and Tulsa, Hull’s production had made its way to Virginia by 1926. In Norfolk, the “dazzling” and “astounding” production broke all local attendance records and had to run for an extra week. The profits from the estimated twenty thousand ticket sales went to a building fund for a new Klan meeting hall. In Richmond, the show may have featured an early appearance by the Andrews Sisters. When the show arrived in Roanoke shortly after, it drew an opening night crowd of twelve hundred. As local Thelma Deel, then sixteen years old, later recalled, her whole family auditioned to be in the show. No matter that the play was held under the auspices of the local Klan. “Of course we said yes. . . . We were all in it.”64

  In February 1927, The Awakening arrived in Washington, D.C., now with a cast of over five hundred, ranging from “tiny but distinctively talented tots” to women in blackface as “oldtime darkey-dancing . . . mammies.” King Kleagle Louis A. Mueller gave the show the organization’s imprimatur, appearing nightly to lead the oath in a scene depicting the first ever Klan initiation.65 Although the “combination of melodrama and revue” met with a mixed review from the Washington Post, the show’s weeklong run at the Belasco Theatre was successful enough that it returned for another week a month later. The Washington Herald called it “a dramatic musical extravaganza of the very highest type.” The Fellowship Forum attributed the play’s success to its “real patriotic, Protestant, American” nature and its thrilling portrayal of “the white-robed host of liberators.” The “miles of bare knees” and “acres of shimmering shoulders” on display almost certainly did not hurt either.66

  As Lewis A. Erenberg has noted of the New York cabarets, the chorus girl formed the backbone of the revue, and The Awakening was no different. The “Diamond Chorus,” which featured Hull wearing a 112-pound rhinestone costume and backed by sixteen “beautiful co-stars” in much skimpier versions of the same outfit, was singled out for particular praise. Hull’s show culminated in Charleston, West Virginia, in the summer of 1927. With most of its lead roles openly populated with “local talent by the Ku Klux Klan,” and a cast of nearly six hundred, the show’s five-night appearance was greeted by the Charleston Gazette as a “stupendous and gorgeous musical-spectacle-drama.” During its run, Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans came to deliver a public address and see the much-discussed show for the first time. Unfortunately, no record can be found of his opinion on the rhinestone-studded extravaganza, but it is suggestive that this seems to have been the last time The Awakening was staged.67

  The creation of an entertainer without formal links to the Klan, propelled to success by local Klan members and sympathizers rather than any official support, The Awakening underscores the split between the Klan organization and the Klannish cultural movement. The production offered little of the dignified respectability that the organization’s leaders so desperately craved. In many ways, not least its miles of bare knees, it was seemingly the epitome of the “degenerate sensuality” in modern entertainment denounced in the rhetoric of the Invisible Empire. Yet at heart it was a deeply conservative production, appropriating modern musical and theatrical forms—plus some sex appeal and a little dazzle—to promote the same reassuring narrative of white Protestant Klannish heroism that productions like The Fifth Horseman and The Toll of Justice had carefully cultivated.

  The Awakening reflected the complexities of the Klan’s ambivalent and sometimes ambiguous relationship with modern popular culture. At the same time, it was “just entertainment”—and by all accounts entertaining enough to draw a vast audience. A 1929 article promoting a new show by Jimmy Hull claimed that the theatrical producer had attained “national importance” with the “great dramatic success” of The Awakening. While that success was more regional than national, the play was purportedly seen by over a quarter million people, with perhaps “the biggest run of any home talent production ever presented in America.” That feat provides valuable insight into the Klan movement’s position in American popular culture in the 1920s. Even as the organization’s image was appropriated for mass entertainment, the lived ideology of the Invisible Empire’s cultural engagement reached far beyond rhetorical condemnation. Both critics and supporters of the Klan saw value in the spectacle of a song-and-dance number featuring the Invisible Empire. There was room for long-legged showgirls in the imagined community of Klannishness, just as there was room for a thrilling “touch of the Klan” in a Louis B. Mayer picture.68

  7

  That Ghastly Saxophone

  Sheet music and phonograph records are among the few artifacts which afford insight into the inarticulate Americans of the twentieth century.

  H. F. MOONEY

  We have the best organization

  In this whole world of nations

  That’s why we have our Ku Kluxers

  We have our Ku Klux Klan today.

  KLAN SONGBOOK SELECTION, to be sung to the tune of “Yes! We Have No Bananas”

  In 1925, after renting the local opera house to hold a rally and entertainment, the Klansmen of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, found that the same establishment was to host a performance by Paul Robeson two nights beforehand. Despite being assured that Robeson was “one of the highest musical exponents of his race,” according to the Baltimore Afro-American, Klan representatives met the news “with disdain” and launched a protest. After failing to force the venue to cancel the concert, Klan members conceded the need to share the space. Even as the piano was being tuned for Robeson, the Afro-American reported, amplifiers were being erected for the Klan rally. In another illustration of the fluid divisions of the period, while neither may have cared for the other, Paul Robeson and the Invisible Empire shared the same cultural—and physical—spaces in the 1920s.1

  Popular music is, as Gilbert Seldes argues, “a clue to the social history of our time.” Sigmund Spaeth has similarly suggested that “what America has sung . . . is the people’s own record of our history.” The 1920s were undoubtedly a crucial time for the development of music in America, in both form and content. Edison’s phonograph, Berliner’s flat disc recordings, and the domestic radio set transformed the consumption of music. As Philip K. Eberly has noted, it was now possible to speak credibly of truly “popular” songs. Arnold Shaw has argued that the decade saw “a group of new tonalities” enter American music, “fixing the sound and the forms of popular music” until the rock revolution of the 1950s. It was the time, in the words of music historian Nicholas Tawa, for Americans to discover the country’s “authentic voice”—in blues, on Broadway, from Tin Pan Alley, and, most of all, in jazz, the “rich and permanent fusion” of black and white American music. “Hot sounds” coming out of New Orleans and Kansas City enthralled audiences ready to shake off the musical styles of the prewar period—“an antidote to conformity, boredom, custom, tradition.”2

  Yet the popular understanding of the 1920s as, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s formulation, the “Jazz Age” is arguably the most deeply engrained and most pernicious of the cultural myths surrounding the postwar period. Jazz has become a signifier of “the end of an earlier era and the transition to a modern one,” even as “the music itself and the circumstances under which it was performed embodied social change.” Arguments over jazz in the 1920s, as Kathy Ogren persuasively suggests, then become used as a synecdoche of larger arguments over national identi
ty in the postwar era. To overstate the extent to which jazz represented a wider transition to modernity, however, is to lose the ambiguity, ambivalence, and compromise of the era. To understand the cultural 1920s, we must fully appreciate both the inter- and intragroup tensions of the period. Jazz, for example, actually represented one of the very few subjects upon which H. L. Mencken, the New York Times, and the Ku Klux Klan could theoretically agree.3

  “The number of genuine music-lovers in the United States,” Mencken argued, “is probably very low.” You could tell the number of “tone deaf” Americans from the crowds who could “not only sit through the infernal din made by the current jazz-bands,” but “actually like it.” For Mencken, the “hot sounds” of Jazz Age America were akin to “the sound of riveting.” In this opinion, he found a diverse slew of allies.4

  Significant sections of American society were openly hostile to jazz. The Reverend Dr. Percy Stickney Grant of New York City, for one, called it “a savage crash and bang.” Anne Shaw Faulkner, national music chairman of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, took to the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal to ask whether jazz put the sin in syncopation. This upstanding American, writing in one of the most popular publications of the day, noted that the music stimulated “the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds.” Both Faulkner and Fenton T. Bott of the American National Association of Masters of Dancing claimed to have evidence that listening to jazz actually caused brain damage, causing the young to become rowdy, if not to entirely lose their ability to tell right from wrong. The Ninth Recreation Congress, led by critic Sigmund Spaeth and Professor Peter Dykeman, among a host of other cultural highfliers, declared “war” on jazz. The New York Times was compelled to complain that jazz “offends people with musical taste already formed,” especially when it made use of “that ghastly instrument,” the saxophone.5

  The Klan’s condemnations of jazz were, therefore, hardly exceptional—although the organization’s rhetoric leaned more toward overt anti-Semitism than most critics, who were more concerned with the music’s black roots. Isaac Goldberg, writing in Mencken’s American Mercury in 1927, described jazz as “musical miscegenation” between “the American Negro and the American Jew.” Klan members perceived a double threat in this alliance, and the publications of the Invisible Empire attacked “Jew-monopolized jazz” as part of a concerted campaign to “lower the standard of morals” by inflaming “animal passions.” Jewish “songs that rock with sex,” full of “sensual jazz rhythms,” would destroy “the moral fiber of American pulchritude.”6

  Nor were the organization’s criticisms limited to jazz. Broadway songs, “written and published by Jews,” were “the limit of inanity, filthy suggestion, and vulgarity.” Like jazz, Broadway tunes transmitted the “low and degrading influence” of Jews into the homes of morally upright Protestants. Music on the vaudeville stage, the Fiery Cross complained, made “sly sport” of “all the worthwhile things in life.” Critics of opera, meanwhile, sounded a familiar anti-Catholic refrain. “A foreign, alien expression, with a far-reaching influence for evil,” their arias allegedly broadcast a “poisonous taint” of Romanism.7

  Not all of these attacks were verbal. Dance halls often found themselves subject to protest by Klansmen and allied groups. Klan members in Michigan and Wisconsin passed resolutions barring all dancing at any function held under Klan auspices. In some areas, Klansmen patrolled to monitor for infractions. Institutions that repeatedly flouted warnings about inappropriate dancing might find themselves victims of property damage and arson. Dancers in Oakland, New Jersey, were left “panic-stricken” after Klansmen allegedly exploded several bombs outside a charity ball, leaving burning crosses at the front and rear.8

  If we accept the Klan’s rhetoric that the organization represented a unified bloc of resistance to jazz and all that it supposedly represented, though—that is, that the cultural signifiers of the hood and the saxophone were diametrically opposed—we lose the reality of the contemporary ambiguities. Per Spaeth, scholars have often seen jazz as the “inevitable music” of a new era, an “ideal expression of complete freedom from convention” in an “unrestrained society.” Yet jazz was in many ways still restrained. Even as the Cotton Club played host to talent like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington, the nightclub’s stage saw scenes of the “Old South” or “darkest Africa.” As Philipp Blom has noted, all too often, “Harlem nights became show nights for the Nordics.” Even those white Americans who celebrated jazz frequently tended to do so in a way that reinforced racial tropes, enthusing over the ability of the music to express the “more intense” traits of “carelessness” and unthinking “instinctive qualities” of African Americans.9

  At the same time, it was a music that no one seemed able to successfully define. Popular understanding of what could be considered jazz broadened. A white mainstream consensus formed around a “jazz” that would encompass all up-tempo dance music—what Eberly calls “razz-ma-tazz music.” While we may better remember Armstrong and Ellington, the decade’s self-proclaimed “King of Jazz” was a white man named, with no small irony, Paul Whiteman. And following the example of musicians like Whiteman, Klan members were among the many white Americans who picked up instruments and formed “jazz” bands of their own.10

  It should not be surprising that an organization like the Ku Klux Klan would make use of music. Most big tent revivalists traveled with a music leader, and some had a full musical entourage. As Josh McMullen has noted, music and singing were frequently identified as the most popular features of revival meetings, while revival musicians became well-known personalities in their own right. Billy Sunday, for one, traveled with band members, singing groups, and soloists. His music director, Homer Rodeheaver, even recorded albums of revival music to allow the message to reach a wider audience. Little wonder, then, that the Invisible Empire would follow a similar path—so similar that Rodeheaver would also play an important part in the recording of Klan music.11

  What may be more surprising was the kind of music that Klan members integrated into their organizational life. In addition to the significant role that organizationally sanctioned music played in official Klan rituals, performances of unofficial musical pieces quickly became commonplace at regular Klan gatherings. As in other popular entertainments, this was an almost entirely unstructured process, with little to no oversight from the organization’s national leaders. Rather, the Klan’s relationship with music offers a telling insight into the wider movement’s involvement in contemporary popular culture.

  The Klan of Lagrange, Oregon, hailed their Klavern’s musicians as “a real inspiration” to their meetings, while an assembly might be brought to order by the singing of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” Klaverns of the Women’s Klan were even more evidently enthused by musical entertainments. The minutes of the WKKK of Denver, for example, record the organization of an “Entertainment Committee” that had members contribute to a regular musical revue. Selections for the piano (which the Denver Klan had assiduously raised money to buy) might be interspersed with solos by local musicians, songs by a choir, or even outside performers. On one notable occasion, the ladies of the Klan were entertained by the Berry family—Razz, Huckle, Blue, and Straw.12

  As the popularity of this Klavern music with members became evident, Klans across the country increasingly began to feature musical entertainments at larger public meetings and rallies through the early 1920s. Klan parades, to heighten the deliberately ghostly atmosphere, initially featured no music but the pounding of drums, while naturalizations might feature chanting and sacred music a cappella. When these events moved to shed their mysticism, Klannish musical attractions were at the forefront of the shift. As early as 1921, the New York World reported that Klansmen at an initiation in New Jersey “took the edge off the solemnity” by playing “popular airs.” The Klan repertoire included “Ain’t We Got Fun,” a hit foxtrot published that year, which Sigmund Spaeth called “the perfect
theme song for the carefree young people of the twenties”—including members of the Invisible Empire.13

  Bands, choirs, orchestras, and other musical groups quickly became a staple of events. As membership grew, and Ku Klux Klan demonstrations and rallies became ever more ostentatious, each local Klan attempting to outdo the other, music became a requisite. A Klan picnic without a performance of some kind began to seem distinctly underwhelming. To be a truly successful event and draw a sizable crowd, at least three or four different groups needed to perform. An initiation in Minnesota reportedly stood out “to a marked degree” because of the skillful performance of “patriotic, religious, and popular numbers.” A Los Angeles naturalization centered around a dramatic rendition of “Rock of Ages” that saw all lights extinguished, save for a single spotlight on the cross. In stark contrast to the muted drumming of earlier marches, a planned parade by New York City Klans featured twenty-five bands.14

  By 1924, these musical entertainments had often begun to dominate reports of otherwise quotidian Klan events. A story in the Searchlight on a Ku Klux Klan lecture in Kansas, for example, was headlined “Klan Quartette Provides Music.” Notices advertising Klan events increasingly featured the appearance of musical groups, and in ever-larger type. It soon became clear that these performances were sufficiently popular to draw crowds even without the additional enticement of Klan parades, lectures, initiations, or picnics. Recognizing the appeal that they held for members and nonmembers alike, the Invisible Empire was quick to exploit the allure of these musical entertainments.15

  Even as they policed the same behavior in nonmembers, Klans increasingly began to stage concerts and dances. In 1922, an Illinois Klan played host to three hundred people at a “Harvest Jubilee” where “dancing predominated the evening.” A 1924 “musical entertainment” by the Milwaukee Klan attracted nearly a thousand people. By 1925, local newspapers breathlessly advertised the Klan’s concerts and dances as major events. One open-air concert, in Missouri, allegedly drew a crowd upward of ten thousand. In some locales, Klan dances were such a fixture of the social scene that attendance was reported on the society pages. A “Ku Klux Mask Ball,” thrown by Chicago Klan members to celebrate George Washington’s birthday, satirized the organization’s supposed obsession with secrecy by having all Klansmen unmask “at the mystic hour of midnight.” In western Pennsylvania, a Klan-sponsored foxtrot competition descended into chaos after dancers bumped into one another, resulting in seven arrests. If any other organization had been responsible, local Klan members would doubtless have pointed to the event as proof of creeping Jewish and Catholic immorality.16