Ku Klux Kulture

by Felix Harcourt

  Team manager Steve Ellis told the United Press that the Klan team would be no different from any other in the league. The uniforms would feature a fiery cross on a white background, and the team’s caps would be marked with the letter K, but “the only player to wear a mask on the field will be the catcher,” Ellis announced. A month after the team formed, a campaign event by Felix D. Robertson, the Klansman attempting to win the Democratic nomination in the Texas gubernatorial campaign, featured a game between the Klan players and the local American Bodies team. Trying to boost attendance, the campaign billed it as “one of the biggest ball games of the season” and “a battle that will be worth seeing” between two well-matched teams. Outside of those advertisements, though, the Klan team received little publicity and, despite Ellis’s best efforts, left little impression.42

  A Klan team formed that same year in Atlanta met with considerably more success. The fact of the Invisible Empire’s involvement drew little attention. It was just one of the forty-six sandlot teams playing each weekend. The Knights of Columbus had already been playing in the Spalding League, the most prestigious of the city’s five amateur leagues, for years. The Klan players found themselves in the Dixie League, otherwise known as the City League, competing against teams fielded by the Peachtree Road Presbyterian Church (which neighbored the Klan’s Imperial Palace), the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Atlanta, the Western Electric Company, King Hardware, the Tech Rehabs, Georgia West Point, and the Georgia Railroad and Power Company.43

  The Atlanta team bore the imprimatur of the Klan organization and the Imperial Wizard. Its manager was T. J. McKinnon, one of Hiram Evans’s top lieutenants, known to be “head of the secret service department,” as well as manager of the organization’s lucrative printing and regalia business.44 Perhaps more importantly, the Klan players were actually good. By early July, the Atlanta Constitution described a victory for the Klansmen over the Tech Rehabs as “one of the closest and best games so far this year.” At the end of the month, a rematch between the two teams was eagerly anticipated, and did not disappoint, with “brilliant fielding” displayed by both sides.45

  Both games between the Klan and the Tech Rehabs received more attention than one of the Invisible Empire’s nonleague games in late June. Since it had no bearing on the pennant race in their respective leagues, little note was paid at the time to the June 30 game between the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of Columbus. A confrontation between the two organizations might well have been expected to end in bloodshed. Yet the two sides met with equanimity. Drawing a “good crowd,” the game was described as “clean and fast.” The Knights of Columbus, generally regarded as the superior team, found themselves outmatched on this occasion by “the heavy hitting of the battery of the K.K.K.” No violence was recorded, on or off the field. The Klan and the Knights of Columbus may have feared, distrusted, and hated each other, but they were apparently capable of meeting peacefully. For all the jokes made about the improbability of such an engagement, the cultural complexities of the period were made manifest on the ball field.46

  Revealing as this meeting was, contemporary commentators in both the Klan and non-Klan press were far more interested in the fact that the Klan team won the Dixie League that year. In celebration, McKinnon threw a lavish “barbecue and entertainment” at his home, where all the players were presented with individually engraved miniature baseballs made of gold. Klan player Eldon Carlyle’s brother, “Dizzy” Carlyle, praised the team as “one of the best amateur teams in the south.” An Atlanta Constitution report on the event (reprinted wholesale by the Searchlight) explained that everyone present “came away with most pleasant memories of the occasion.”47

  Overlooking the apparent incongruity of the game against the Knights of Columbus, it could be argued that the success and acceptance of a Klan baseball team were to be expected in Atlanta, birthplace of the second Klan. It is difficult to make the same case about the Klan baseball team that came to prominence later the same year—in Los Angeles, California. The L.A. Klan baseball team made its initial appearance in August 1924. The Los Angeles Times seemed unsurprised by the Invisible Empire’s incorporation into the city’s sporting life, noting only that a large crowd was expected at their first game. Despite an inauspicious start to the season, the Los Angeles Times soon remarked that the Klan was playing “good consistent baseball.” Less than two months later, Los Angeles Klan No. 3 had also organized a team.48

  Much as in Atlanta, the Klan teams were received like any of the sixty or so other amateur and semipro teams that played around Los Angeles every weekend. Only particularly interesting games warranted more than a short report and a full box score in local newspapers. Klan No. 1 and No. 3 were treated no differently—including having their names printed for all the city to see. The L.A. Klan’s record was relatively pedestrian, and, for the most part, the Klan’s games did not draw any special attention. The Invisible Empire was not so invisible when it reached the sports pages, but it was also seemingly not that remarkable.49

  There was a singular exception to this. In October 1924, Los Angeles Klan No. 1 played a three-game charity series. Their opponents were the local chapter of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, the oldest Jewish service organization in the world. Although Jews were not, for the most part, vilified by Klannish rhetoric to the same degree as Catholics (and particularly the Knights of Columbus), anti-Semitism remained a significant part of the Klannish worldview. As far as most Klan publications were concerned, Jews were fundamentally un-American, as well as materialistic, economically rapacious, and (depending on which Klansman you asked) willing allies or dupes of the international Catholic conspiracy. American Jews, for their part, did not hold Klan members in much higher regard.50

  Despite these wildly differing worldviews, the two teams managed to arrange to peaceably face each other on the ball field. Nor was it just any sandlot diamond. The games were played at Vernon Ball Park, home to the Double-A Vernon Tigers team and able to seat a capacity crowd of ten thousand. Adding to the unique quality of the games was the fact that the B’nai B’rith had somehow been convinced to play the Klan to benefit the city’s Crippled Children’s Christmas Fund. Reality was beginning to far outpace the joke.51

  Newspaper coverage of the series completely ignored any clash of creeds. Instead, the Los Angeles Times exulted that the matchup was a “corker” with both teams “playing fast ball.” Adding to the excitement, the Klan and the B’nai B’rith had won a game apiece by the time of their final meeting on October 19. Those two games had been “hotly contested,” with victories only coming after the games had gone into extra innings. The matchup was expected to draw a large crowd—not for any novelty value, but because the clash of well-matched teams “should be hotter than ever.” It was simply a matter of baseball.52

  In May 1926, Creth Bailey Hines, a junior member of National Capital Klan No. 2 and a student at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, organized a sandlot team in Washington D.C.—“believed to be the first in the East.”53 Hines was a sporting-minded young man. Inducted into the Georgetown Athletic Hall of Fame in 1927 for his remarkable skill with the javelin, he went on to represent the United States at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam alongside Johnny Weissmuller. The Klan team, Hines boasted, was “capable of taking on the best.”54

  Local newspapers were again initially skeptical. The Washington Evening Star made references to the need to “doff their white robes in favor of baseball uniforms.” As in Atlanta and Los Angeles, however, press coverage of the Klan players quickly came to resemble that of any other local sandlot team. Home to the organization’s national offices and to a sizable but largely nonviolent local Klan, the District of Columbia was neither a Klan stronghold nor a center of opposition. Few there seemed to mind the Klan’s place in the sandlot leagues. The Star went so far as to call 1926 “the most successful sandlot baseball season in Washington’s history.” By the beginning of the 1927 season, the Klan was considered t
o have “one of the strongest teams in the district.” Newspapers reported on the Klan nine’s “winning rampage” and “triumphant march.” Garnering twenty-five wins in thirty starts, the Invisible Empire was a viable challenger for the District of Columbia’s 1927 independent unlimited baseball title. The Klan nine had “trounced some of the best teams in and around Washington, creating quite a few upsets in their lists.”55

  It would be naive to think that there was no element of publicity seeking to the Klan baseball team. Novelty games had long been used by evangelists and others for promotional purposes. Billy Sunday, as an ex-player himself, was particularly keen on the technique. In 1917, he had organized a team to compete with Hollywood celebrities, including Douglas Fairbanks, in a game umpired by Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. And for the Capital Klan, baseball was the linchpin of one of their most successful public events—an annual charity benefit game against the D.C. chapter of the nativist Junior Order of United American Mechanics.56

  In 1926 and 1927 (the annual tradition was not a long-lived one), the two teams met on the field at Clark Griffith American League Stadium, then home to the Washington Senators. Takings from the gate went to the Mechanics’ orphanage in Tiffin, Ohio, and to the Klan Haven orphanage in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 1926, the game drew a crowd over six thousand strong to see the Klan team defeat their opponents. In comparison, two months earlier the stadium had played host to the much-anticipated first congressional baseball game in over ten years, which attracted a crowd of roughly four thousand—and that had included the draw of the Republican team riding on a live elephant. The 1927 Klan game drew only a little over three thousand spectators—still a respectable crowd, but an obvious indication of the Invisible Empire’s waning popularity. What is notable, however, is not how much publicity these games garnered for the ailing Klan, but how little publicity the rest of their games received, and how little the Klan courted it.57

  In September 1927, the baseball team of National Capital Klan No. 2 faced the Hebrew All-Stars. The game against the all-Jewish team—including Abe Povich, brother of sportswriter Shirley Povich—had been organized by local doctor and Jewish sandlot baseball star Carl “Ikey” Dreyfus.58 The Klan, after scoring all its runs in the first inning, held the All-Stars at bay until the seventh inning, when heavy rain meant the game had to be called. The Invisible Empire beat the Hebrew All-Stars four runs to none, and the closest either side came to violence was three beanballs, all likely unintentional. Local newspapers barely found the game worthy of note. The Washington Evening Star gave the game less than an inch of column space.59

  This was not the only “anomalous” game for the D.C. Klan. The Klan nine played against at least three different Catholic teams on multiple occasions. Less than a month after Creth Hines formed the team, the Klan played “Wee-Willie” Glascoe’s Shamrocks, all Irish Catholics, losing badly. Later in the season, the Klan not only played the St Joseph’s Catholic Church team, it also joined them to successfully petition for amalgamating leagues from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. The next time that the Klan met the Shamrocks, toward the end of the 1926 season, the Klan bested them by a single run, thirteen to twelve, in what newspapers described as “a big game” for “two hard hitting teams.” The game was not “big” for any religious or political reasons, but rather because “both teams are still hopeful of grabbing the unlimited crown.” When the Klan played St. Mary’s Celtics in June 1927, the game was met with no more or less interest by the newspapers than any other pairing. It was “a spirited game” in front of “a large crowd,” characterized by “a brilliant pitchers battle” that the Celtics won, two to none. The Post even described, without any apparent irony, how a “snappy double play” by the Celtics put an end to “a threatening Klan rally.”60

  A fuller consideration of the Klan movement’s engagement with baseball, then, undermines an understanding of these kinds of sporting events as anomalies. It is also difficult to make a case for them as publicity stunts. Time and again, these athletic competitions proved to have little actual publicity value for the Klan organization itself. Although it is impossible to know for sure, none of these ventures seem to have been particularly successful in recruiting new members to the Ku Klux Klan or even in preventing current Klansmen from leaving. The Monrovians game did not prevent the ongoing collapse of the Kansas Klan. The L.A. baseball teams did nothing to hurt the organization’s image, but their ability to draw new members was seemingly negligible. The rapid decline of the D.C. Klan was not stemmed by their games against the Shamrocks or the Hebrews. Engaging Jews and Catholics (especially the Knights of Columbus) on the sports field not only risked embarrassing defeat, but also undermined Klan rhetoric of inherent and unbridgeable differences. Far from increasing the Klan’s numbers and strengthening their ideals, these games were more likely to alienate those who believed that Catholics and Jews represented a clear and present racial, religious, and political danger.

  If we move away from the narrative of organizational affiliation and disaffiliation, the participation of Klan members in public sporting events becomes more understandable and makes for a revealing insight into the movement’s place in American cultural life in the 1920s. Not least, the Klan’s ongoing commitments in tournaments and leagues belie the importance that many contemporaries—and many historians—placed on an organizational need for secrecy. Members of Klan teams in cities and towns across the country had their full names published on a regular basis in the sports pages of major newspapers, in souvenir programs, and on scorecards. The open nature of these events meant that members of the public could see as many unmasked members of the so-called Invisible Empire as they wished. The managers of the L.A. and D.C. baseball teams, like the managers of most other sandlot teams, regularly put notices asking for games in the newspaper—notices that gave not only their name, but often their address and telephone number. The Washington Evening Star might have scoffed at the idea that Klansmen would doff their hoods for baseball uniforms, but that is exactly what they did, as team photographs published in that same newspaper showed. Klan sportsmen were some of the most visible members of the Invisible Empire.61

  The motivating idea behind a thousand contemporary editorials and the passage of a number of local antimasking laws was that when the hoods were removed and members exposed to the light of day, the Klan would shrivel and collapse. Fearful of mainstream disapproval, members would shed the fringe organization for societal respectability. The “mediocre men,” “cowards,” and “weaklings” who made up the Klan (per John Moffat Mecklin) would abandon the “glaring historic anachronism” without the shield of anonymity. Their identity known, they would bow to the judgment of the “high-minded and independent members of the community.”62

  None of these assumptions seemingly held true for the members of Klan sports teams. Rather, their ability to operate freely in the world of amateur sports underlines the fact that there were no clear delineations between a cultural “mainstream” and a Klannish “fringe.” Despite their overt institutional affiliation, players for Klan teams found little hindrance to playing for a variety of other organizations as well. Members of the Xenia basketball team and the Atlanta baseball team saw successful collegiate sporting careers. Steve Ellis of the Fort Worth Klan became player/manager for the Texon Oilers, leading the successful semipro team to victory in the 1928 sixteen-state Denver Morning Post championship. Bill Howser, pitcher for the D.C. Klan, went on to play for the Chambersburg Maroons in Pennsylvania. When the Maroons won their league, the Washington Post ran a picture of Howser with his teammates, openly identifying him as an ex-Klan player in a story celebrating the success of a local native. Creth Bailey Hines, founder of the D.C. team, went on to a minor league career in Florida. The decision to not only affiliate but openly identify with and play for the Invisible Empire seemingly carried little consequence for any of these men.63

  From the Denver Klan’s boxing tournament to the Junior Klan basketbal
l team of Xenia to the Los Angeles sandlot baseball teams, sport offered another avenue for the construction of a unified identity. These sporting events helped project the heroic, inclusive vision of the pro-Protestant, pro-white, pro-American Klan that underpinned the imagined community of the national Klannish movement. But to dismiss these forays into the world of sport as merely a propagandistic concern—a conscious effort to attract members—is to ignore the importance of differentiating between the organizational rhetoric and the lived ideology of the wider movement. The average Klan member needed no Imperial officer to tell them to enjoy baseball, or to be caught up in their community’s fervor for basketball. While issues of legitimization, of assimilation, of Americanization, and of publicity may all have percolated through the conscious and subconscious minds of Klan members, the Invisible Empire’s engagement with the world of sport was ultimately a reminder that Klansfolk were not strange, otherworldly creatures. Tentative as their embrace of the new mass culture of the 1920s was, Klan members shared the same ordinary interests as other Americans. In doing so, they became part and parcel of the emerging pluralist mass culture of the United States.

  Epilogue

  The Most Picturesque Element

  I am aware that the net effect of it might be to argue that Klansmen and Klanswomen are ordinary, two-footed human beings, without either tails or horns. But I am afraid that after all this is just what they are.