Sport in the 1920s itself presents a telling paradox. Segregation in sport often served as a reminder and symbol of enduring racial division. Yet as a mass institution of modern national identity, sport was a pillar of the American civil religion and a key tool of immigrant assimilation. Sport, in the words of historian Peter Levine, was a “middle ground,” a “significant cultural institution” that “encouraged . . . enthusiasm for full integration into American life.” Levine was referring specifically to the Jewish immigrant experience, but his observations apply to a broad range of “fringe” groups, from Mormons to the House of David. Anyone who “played the game” theoretically had the opportunity to assert their place in American society. Sport allowed the men and women of the Invisible Empire to come together to reinforce the virtuous imagined identity of the Klannish community. They could prove both to themselves and to the world at large that the Klan movement was to be celebrated, not feared.19
It is revealing both of the fractured nature of the Klan organization and of the extent to which Klannishness was already embedded in the American mainstream (and vice versa) that this was seemingly a largely unconscious process. The Invisible Empire’s forays into the world of athletics were sporadic and haphazard. Sports results were never prominently featured in Klan publications. Klan athletic teams were never organized within any kind of uniform structure or subjected to some kind of national regulation. Sport was rarely a focus of the organization’s official activities. Some events (or simply plans for events) were obviously intended to draw as much attention as possible. On the whole, though, such games tended to be the exception. Newspapers, Klannish or otherwise, rarely highlighted the Invisible Empire’s sporting endeavors. On the occasions Klan games did attract notice, the commentary elicited tended to be heavily weighted toward the mechanics of the sport rather than toward any deeper ideological context.
This haphazard engagement meant that sport was often not a shining beacon of achievement for the Ku Klux Klan. Even as attendance at college football games doubled, the closest the Invisible Empire came to Knute Rockne was causing a riot with the Catholic students of Notre Dame. In 1925, the first race at the Klan’s own auto-racing stadium in Denver was won by Ralph De Palma—a world speed record holder, a winner of the Indianapolis 500, an Italian immigrant, and, as the Colorado Springs Gazette gleefully reported, a Catholic. There is no record of the Klan reaction to De Palma’s win of the four-thousand-dollar prize, but, as the Gazette described it, “smiles are the order around sporting circles of Denver.”20
The world of basketball was a little more welcoming to the Invisible Empire. Although most professional basketball teams in the 1920s hailed from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania (where, like boxing, the sport was dominated by second-generation Jewish Americans), it was in the Midwest that passion for the amateur game reached its peak. As Phillip M. Hoose has written, basketball was an “epidemic” in Indiana, played in every available space. Fittingly, the Klan’s basketball teams seem to have been most successful in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, although viable Klan teams could also be found in Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and California.21
Local observers were initially skeptical of the Klan’s involvement with the game. The most pressing question for the Kokomo Daily Tribune was, “How’re they gonna shoot baskets with their masks on?” Nonetheless, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan were all home before long to a sufficient number of Junior Klan basketball teams that by 1924 they were each able to organize large statewide tournaments. Their respective champions then battled for top interstate honors. The winning team stood to receive a special Ku Klux Klan trophy, and gold medals would be awarded for sportsmanship and for the most valuable player.22
Klan members and sympathizers from all over the Midwest gathered to watch and play basketball. Local newspapers offered a subdued response. The Logansport Pharos-Tribune best encapsulated the seeming apathy, reporting simply that “another basketball tournament has been announced to the already long list of tourneys held in Indiana.” The Klan may have been involved, but the prospect of another round of basketball games apparently offered little novelty or surprise. The tournament would be reported on much as all the others were—local newspapers cheering their respective hometown teams and lamenting their defeats—with little or no editorial comment on the fact that it was the Klan that was competing.23
On the afternoon of April 5, Kokomo beat Elwood to become state champions. A few hours later, the interstate championship was settled as Kokomo was thoroughly beaten by New Philadelphia, the Ohio state Klan champions. Indiana newspapers lamented the loss, but the Junior Klan had found acceptance into Indianan sporting life. The change was most noticeable in the initially dismissive Kokomo Daily Tribune. By the end of 1924, the newspaper was taking the Indianapolis Star to task for having ignored the Kokomo Junior Klan’s victory at the basketball tournament in its annual roundup of Indiana’s 1924 state champions. Hometown pride seemingly trumped any qualms the newspaper may have had about the Invisible Empire.24
By 1926, no team reflected the widespread popularity and acceptance of Junior Klan basketball more than the Xenia Klan of Ohio, composed of “a number of well known players,” including “several ex-high school luminaries.” Competing against teams from seven other cities, the Xenia Junior Klan won that year’s state championship. The local newspaper, the Xenia Evening Gazette, excitedly reported the Klan’s victories, praising the team’s “fine floor games.” Despite this powerful performance, the Xenia’s team dominance did not extend into the 1927 season (the last year that the championships were held), when the Lima Junior Klan’s players took top honors.25
Unlike some teams, the Xenia Junior Klan did not confine itself to competing only with other Klans. Little attention seems to have been paid to its organizational affiliation as both the local newspaper and other teams treated the Junior Kluxers as just another youth basketball team (albeit a successful one with a strong record) in a town filled with them. When a new independent basketball team, the Xenia Celtics, was formed in February 1926, their first order of business was to challenge the best teams in the city—including the Xenia Eagles, the National Guard team, and the Junior Klansmen. An even greater indication of the Junior Klan’s integration into the city’s sporting life came in March of that same year. When another local team, the Xenia Buckeye Big “5,” were unable to secure the court at the local high school to play a game, the event was shifted to the local Klan “tabernacle” to play on the Xenia Junior Klan’s floor. The fact that the Buckeye Big “5” was an all African American team seems to have evinced little mention.26
The incorporation of these Junior Klan teams into the Midwestern basketball community is a significant indicator of the extent to which the Klan movement was invested in American cultural life in the 1920s. Like other Midwesterners, the Junior Klansmen were swept up in the phenomenon that basketball represented in that section of the country. As Robert and Helen Lynd noted in their study of the Midwestern Middletown, “more civic loyalty centers around basket-ball than around any other one thing.” The cheering crowds were not divided by their beliefs. “North Side and South Side, Catholic and Kluxer, banker and machinist,” all came together to support the local team.27
That enthusiasm was even greater when it came to baseball. Sports historian Steven Riess has argued that baseball in the 1920s was “probably more successful in helping socialize and integrate Americans than ever before.” A Utah team, the Salt Lake City Mormons, helped the church “prove its American character” without surrendering its community identity. The Christian Israelites of the House of David fielded one of the most popular and successful barnstorming baseball teams of the decade, an “evangelistic tool” that promoted the group’s “religious acceptability.”28 Ku Klux Klan members were, to a significant extent, just another group of “athletic assimilationists.”29
But not everyone took the idea of the Klan playing baseball entirely seriously. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, minister
of New York’s First Presbyterian Church, declared that “the millennium will come when the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of Columbus play a baseball game with a negro umpire for the benefit of the Jewish employees of Henry Ford at Zion City.” Walter Dill Scott, president of Northwestern University, was more optimistic, telling “a story of a friend who said he would not be surprised if some day the Knights of Columbus would play a match ball game with the Ku Klux Klan, with a colored umpire, and the gate receipts going to Jewish charities.” A correspondent in the African American Chicago Defender joked about the game being for the benefit of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. The socialist African American magazine The Messenger declared that such a game, with the proceeds going to a Jewish orphan asylum, would be the very definition of “good old-fashioned Americanism.” The joke was repeated so often, with slight variations, that as early as 1923 the Klan’s Imperial Night-Hawk referred to it as an “old chestnut,” while fake tickets for these imaginary games were sold as novelty items (see fig. 9.1).30
Figure 9.1. Popular joke item: a ticket for an unlikely event, ca. 1924.
What those who jested about such matters did not realize was that members of the Invisible Empire were busily engaged in attempting to organize exactly those kinds of games. In July 1924, perhaps inspired by the “old chestnut,” Colonel Evan Watkins, Klan pastor and lecturer of Youngstown, Ohio, challenged the Knights of Columbus to a baseball game during an upcoming Klan picnic. As far as the Klan organization was concerned, the Knights of Columbus were a fundamentally subversive force, out to bring the United States under papal domination. The Columbians saw the Klan as little more than organized thuggery designed to crush Catholicism in America. Yet, as Watkins explained in the invitation, a “colored referee” and “2 Jewish friends on the gate” would be features of the matchup so that the game “ought to take out of the day all the usual sting of bigotry which the enemies of the Klan usually attribute to it.”31
These were not simply abstract references to the oft-repeated imaginary game. The umpire was identified as Claude Johnson, a “well known negro athlete.”32 The takings from the game, which would be donated to charity, were to be handled by Max Brunswick, a “Jewish lawyer.” An Associated Press report on the invitation was picked up by newspapers across the country. The Chicago Defender headlined its article, “Scorekeeper Should Add Casualties to Box Score Columns.” No casualty report was ever needed though, as the Knights of Columbus declined the invitation.33
A similar situation arose a year later in Orange, Texas. Local newspapers reported that the Orange chapters of the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of Columbus would play a charity baseball game to benefit the town’s school, said to be in dire financial straits. One report claimed that Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans and two Catholic cardinals would sign the balls for the game. Another suggested that music at the event would be provided by the Orange Negro Band and that ticket sales would be handled by members of the local Jewish community. Reactions to the announcement ranged from bemused to approving. One newspaper compared the game to the biblical prophecy of Isaiah “that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,” and unimaginatively joked that the umpire would be a rabbi and an African American would serve as batboy. At the other end of the spectrum, the Hutchinson News declared that the game represented the “real cooperation” of “opposing factions” uniting “for the good of all.” Similarly, the Mexia Daily News declared that “religious prejudices will be cast to the four winds” for the public benefit. The Messenger’s dream of good old-fashioned Americanism was apparently alive and well. Despite these high hopes, the game once again failed to materialize. The flurry of news reports on the “much-heralded game” and the claims of the local Knights of Columbus notwithstanding, the Orange Ku Klux Klan alleged that they had never actually been asked to play.34
That same year, in Sterling, Illinois, a slightly different challenge was leveled. There, it was the Sterling Browns, “a local all-star colored baseball team,” that issued an invitation to the Klan for a game to be played during the organization’s outdoor celebration at the end of July 1925. The Klansmen apparently rejected the Browns’ offer of “a real battle” in favor of playing a team fielded by the Illinois Northern Utilities Company. Instead, according to the Sterling Daily Gazette, the Klan scheduled a game against the Browns for Labor Day weekend.35
It is unclear whether that game ever came to pass, but an analogous matchup—one of the few Klan sporting events to receive any real historical analysis—was held in Wichita, Kansas. In June 1925, the Wichita Monrovians, “Wichita’s crack colored team,” played local Klan No. 6. The Monrovians were a particularly successful African American semipro team. Popular and profitable enough to own their own ballpark, they had just returned from a barnstorming tour of the state. The Klan, conversely, had recently been ruled to be operating illegally in Kansas by the state supreme court, a serious blow to the organization. Nonetheless, the two teams (it is unclear which approached the other) came to an agreement to meet on the baseball diamond.36
To “get away from all possible favoritism,” two well-known local amateur umpires were selected to score the game—“Irish” Garrety and Dan Dwyer, both Irish Catholics. Fearing the combination of elements could result in trouble, the local newspaper warned that “strangle holds, razors, horsewhips, and other violent implements of argument will be barred.” Whether because of or despite the threat of violence due to “the wide difference of the two organizations,” the local newspaper predicted that “the novelty of the game will attract a large crowd of fans.” Both teams promised that “all the fans will see is baseball,” and the game did indeed go off without a hitch. The Monrovians defeated the Klan ten to eight in a “close and interesting baseball battle.” And that was an end to it. Although it was described as the “best attended and most interesting game” held that day, the matchup was not apparently so much more fascinating than any of the other baseball games as to warrant anything other than a two-sentence report on the mechanics of the game. If Fosdick was right, the millennium had come. Yet the game seemed to stir little interest—both at the time and among historians ever since.37
Those few who have remarked upon these games have viewed them largely as novelties, usually publicity-seeking stunts in an effort to boost membership. Brian Carroll argues that the fixture was “a Klan ploy to curry favor with the public at large and the black community especially.” Jason Pendleton dismisses it as “anomalous.” William Jenkins situates Reverend Watkins’s invitation in the context of a crumbling Ohio Klan, riven with infighting and driven to desperate lengths to rebuild its popularity.38
This interpretation does have its merits. It does seem as if a number of these unorthodox baseball games were the actions of Klaverns whose power had faded. They were apparently relatively few and far between, and a reasonable case could be made that the proposals for the games were done for publicity purposes. Klans that had passed their apex were grasping at straws in an attempt to put themselves back into the public eye and regain the influence they once had. But this explanation fails to answer convincingly how the Klan hoped to use the game as a recruiting tool. Staging the event to disassociate the organization from the “sting of bigotry” might “curry favor” with the local black community, or provide a patina of respectability. But in almost every other medium, from newspapers to radio, declining Klans made efforts to energize the core movement to boost membership rather than engage in the earlier politicking of the national leadership. By engaging—and potentially losing to—an African American team in a sport that was still largely segregated nationwide, the Wichita Klan organization would surely have run the risk of alienating their base, and actually losing members. Either way, the game certainly did nothing for the Klavern’s long-term prospects. If the event was a recruiting tool, it was not a particularly effective one.39
Moreover, the dismissal of these games as anomalies or publicity stunts is reflective of a larger issue in how we have understood the
Klan and the 1920s more generally. Concentrating on narratives of organizational affiliation means that we lose the wider implications of these games for the construction and reinforcement of Klannish community and identity. These games were far from an anomaly, and are revealing of the Klan movement’s relationship with American culture. On the baseball diamond, the cultural scripts of Klan propaganda took life. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the noteworthy success of Klan amateur sandlot baseball teams.
As attendance at professional baseball games stayed above ten million throughout the decade, more and more Americans were no longer content to simply watch. They began to play as well. Most major cities supported at least two or three different sandlot leagues, largely divided up between well-meaning but lackluster amateurs and more polished semiprofessional teams. Atlanta, for instance, had five amateur baseball leagues in the 1924 season, each featuring at least six teams. Companies, churches, or charities—organizations of every kind put together nines to take to the field in cities and towns across the country.40
The first Klan sandlot team seems to have been formed in the organization’s stronghold of Indiana. In March 1923, the Fiery Cross announced the creation of the Indiana Travelers Ball Team, composed of “ex-league players,” and boasted that it would be “one of the strongest semi-professional teams in the central states.” A month later, another Klan newspaper noted that “a dozen or more” Klans in Indiana had established teams, with challenges between them “flying thick and fast even this early in the season.” Despite the press excitement, none of these teams seem to have made much impact.41
The next Klan team appeared a year later in Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans’s home state of Texas. It was also something of a failure. The team from Fort Worth caused an initial flurry of national publicity when it was established. Much of this interest stemmed from the fact that it had been admitted to the Fort Worth Amateur Association league, which also included a team fielded by the Knights of Columbus. As newspapers across the country excitedly reported, the regular schedule for the season would call for several games between the two teams. Even more color was added to the story with the report that the Klan’s field was bounded by a Jewish cemetery and a Catholic hospital.
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