8. New York World, September 6, 1921–September 26, 1921.
9. New York World, September 8, 1921, September 27, 1921; New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 22, 1921; Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword, 113–14; United States Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings on the Klan, 6–7.
10. Call of the North, February 15, 1924; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 38; Jackson, Klan in the City, 12; Blee, Women of the Klan, 21; Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword, 114–15; Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 10; Fuller, Visible of the Invisible Empire, 19; American Mercury, June 1925; Knights of the Klan, Meeting of Grand Dragons, 93, 95.
11. Jackson, Klan in the City, 12; Newton, Ku Klux Klan, 373–74; Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 60.
12. Jackson, Klan in the City, 12, 16; Newton, Ku Klux Klan, 375–77; Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 17–18.
13. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 108. For the best study of the female auxiliary, see Blee, Women of the Klan. For the best analysis of the Klan’s parochial school fight, see Pegram, One Hundred Percent.
14. Jackson, Klan in the City, 145–46, 154; McVeigh, Rise of the Klan, 187–89; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 171–72; Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 206–7. For the best treatment of the Stephenson case, see Tucker, Dragon and Cross; and Lutholtz, Grand Dragon.
15. Washington Post, November 2, 1930; Jackson, Klan in the City, 252; Blee, Women of the Klan, 175; Rice, Klan in Politics, 91; Cash, Mind of the South, 340–42; Newton, Ku Klux Klan, 17.
16. Much of the early consideration of the Klan was inspired by the work of John Moffat Mecklin in what became known as the “Mecklin thesis.” The sociologist’s 1924 study of the Klan, The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind, emphasized the “uninformed” and “unthinking” nature of Klan members “reared in obscure towns and country places.” Mecklin’s ideas found purchase in a number of influential post–World War II texts. Richard Hofstadter wholeheartedly endorsed Mecklin’s interpretation of the Klan in The Age of Reform. Placing “uncultivated” and “gullible” small-town Protestants at the center of the Klan’s membership, Hofstadter buttressed the concept of the Klan as a senseless and instinctive reaction to imagined evils with his own ideas on status anxiety. Although less willing to speculate on the motivations of Klan members, John Higham’s Strangers in the Land similarly stressed that the movement was an outgrowth of postwar “emotional ferment” in the small towns and “ordinarily tranquil countryside.” It was not until the late 1960s, with the publication of Charles C. Alexander’s Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest and Kenneth T. Jackson’s Ku Klux Klan in the City, that Mecklin’s ideas were fundamentally challenged. Focusing on analysis of local Klan activities and surviving membership rosters rather than the bluster of the Klan’s national leadership, these studies began to reshape the understanding of who joined the Klan and why. Robert A. Goldberg’s 1981 study of the Klan in Colorado and William D. Jenkins’s 1990 work on the Klan in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley built on the idea that the interwar Klan garnered members from across the socioeconomic spectrum. Nancy MacLean criticized this work for minimizing the role of violence in the Klan’s impact. Even MacLean, though, was compelled to acknowledge that “the core elements of Klan ideology were not as aberrant as one might imagine.” Scholars coalesced around Shawn Lay’s “civic activist school,” which suggested that the Klan “bore a remarkable resemblance to other locally oriented political and social movements in American history,” albeit in unusual garb. A slew of local area studies have reinforced this conclusion, with minor variations, best reiterated in Pegram’s wide-ranging survey of the Klan’s rise and fall, which places particular emphasis on the importance of the organization’s concern about public education (Mecklin, Ku Klux Klan, 14, 82, 99, 103, 107; Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 293–96; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 286, 291; Alexander, Klan in the Southwest, 18; Jackson, Klan in the City, xi, 251; Moore, Citizen Klansman, 11; MacLean, Behind the Mask, 187; Lay, Hooded Knights, 6, 188; Blee, Women of the Klan, 102).
17. Lawrence Grossberg, “History, Politics, and Postmodernism,” in Morley and Chen, Stuart Hall, 157–59.
18. Denning, Cultural Front, xvii, 26, 63, 67, 202.
19. Denning, Cultural Front, xvii, xx, 26, 63, 67, 202.
20. Pound, Kulchur, 184; See Nash, Nervous Generation, 1970 and 1990. Gilman M. Ostrander, “The Revolution in Morals,” in Braeman et al., Change and Continuity, 137–38; Gist, Secret Societies, 43; Schlesinger, “Nation of Joiners,” 20; Erickson, “Kluxer Blues,” 56. For an example of strong recent scholarship, see McGirr, War on Alcohol.
21. Levine, Unpredictable Past, 191, 196, 201, 205.
22. Cather, Not under Forty, Prefatory Note; Jackson, Klan in the City, 18; Coben, Rebellion against Victorianism, 136; Alexander, Klan in the Southwest, 32; Jenkins, Steel Valley Klan, ix; Kyvig, Daily Life, 166.
23. Kyvig, Daily Life, 156; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 20; Fass, Damned and Beautiful, 3; Miller, Supreme City, 47; Denning, Cultural Front, 39, 42.
24. Levine, Unpredictable Past, 296; Rubin, Middlebrow Culture, 33.
25. Nye, Unembarrassed Muse, 4; Frederick Hoffman, “Fiction of the Jazz Age,” in Braeman et al., Change and Continuity, 310, 322; Weaver, “Klan in Wisconsin,” 40–41; Grossberg, “History, Politics, and Postmodernism,” 157, 159.
26. Denning, Cultural Front, 42; Lears, No Place of Grace, xiii–xv, 6; Susman, Culture as History, 76, 97.
27. Chapman, Prove It on Me, 6–7; Davarian Baldwin, “New Negroes Forging a New World,” in Baldwin and Makalani, Escape from New York, 16; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Kingdom of Culture,” in Brundage, Beyond Blackface, 2–4, 14; Baldwin, “Our Newcomers to the City,” in Brundage, Beyond Blackface, 171.
28. Motion Picture News, January 13, 1923.
29. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 38; Waterloo Evening Courier, September 13, 1927.
30. Mencken, Damn! 32–33; Rodgers, Mencken, 181; Nash, Nervous Generation, v, 5–32; Miller, New World, 1, 175; McParland, Beyond Gatsby, ix–x.
Chapter Two
1. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35–36; Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, xx, 12; Hilmes, Radio Voices, 6, 11; Tarde, Public and Crowd, 278, 281, 284.
2. American Mercury, March 1926; Bent, Newspaper Crusaders, 138–39, 154; Scharlott, “Hoosier Journalist,” 122; Moseley, “Invisible Empire,” 75–76; Imperial Night-Hawk, July 11, 1923; Fellowship Forum, July 21, 1923; Call of the North, July 27, 1923, January 25, 1924; Searchlight, October 4, 1924.
3. Yale Review, June 1920.
4. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 471–72; Sumner, Magazine Century, 2, 57, 61–62, 72; Drowne and Huber, American Popular Culture, 189–90.
5. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps, 4–5; Kyvig, Daily Life, 190–91; Miller, New World, 329.
6. Miller, New World, 329–30; Peterson, Magazines, 313.
7. Douglas, Golden Age of the Newspaper, 231–37; Burnham, Bad Habits, 35–36; Drowne and Huber, American Popular Culture, 189–90; Brazil, “Murder Trials,” 165; Dumenil, Modern Temper, 72–73; Bohn, Heroes & Ballyhoo, 5–6; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 18; Miller, Supreme City, 358; Weaver, “Klan in Wisconsin,” 92.
8. The original seventeen papers that carried the series were the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Sun, Cleveland Plain Dealer, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Houston Chronicle, Dallas News, Galveston News, Seattle Times, Milwaukee Journal, Minneapolis Journal, Dayton News, Toledo Blade, Oklahoma City Oklahoman, Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, Syracuse Herald, and Albany Knickerbocker Press. An eighteenth paper, the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer-Sun, began printing the articles several days later.
9. Fry, Modern Klan, vii, 223–24; Boylan, World and the 20s, 5, 61, 63; Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword, 112–13; Harrell, “Klan in Louisiana,” 54; Jackson, Klan in the City, 12–13; United States Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings on the Klan, 8–9; The Crisis, October 1921; New York World, September 1, 1921, September 6, 1921, September 7, 1921, September 19, 1921, September 21, 1921, September 24,
1921; New York Times, June 28, 1958.
10. New York World, September 7, 1921, September 8, 1921, September 10, 1921, September 11, 1921, September 13, 1921, September 16, 1921; New York Times, September 7, 1921, June 4, 1925; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 38; Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword, 115; Jones, Story of the Klan, 95. Reprinted editorials included the Pittsburgh Sun, the Bronx Home News, the Plainfield (NJ) Courier-News, the Chattanooga Times, the New York Times, the Boston Post, the Buffalo Courier, and the Duluth Herald.
11. House of Representatives, Hearings on the Klan, 56, 75, 141–42; Jones, Story of the Klan, 95; Broad Ax, September 24, 1921; Oakland Tribune, October 12, 1921; Washington Post, October 13, 1921; Racine Journal News, October 15, 1921; Fellowship Forum, December 15, 1923.
12. Knights of the Klan, Meeting of Grand Dragons, 94; Call of the North, February 15, 1924.
13. Even in Klan strongholds like Texas and Indiana, and the reborn Klan’s home state of Georgia, newspapers leveled sharp criticism at the organization. Most of the major dailies in Dallas held well-earned reputations as “implacable foes” of the Klan, as did the Houston Press. In Indiana, the South Bend Tribune was “notorious” among Klan members for almost daily front-page articles that the organization deemed “perfidious attacks upon the Invisible Empire.” Atlanta’s Wesleyan Christian Advocate condemned the “un-American and thoroughly undemocratic” nature of an organization fueled by “demagogic drivel.” Other liberal Protestant periodicals like the Northwestern Christian Advocate and the Presbyterian Advance followed the Atlanta publication’s lead to try to distance themselves from the Klan. Sherwood Eddy took to the pages of Christian Century to label the Klan as a “travesty” of Americanism and a “prostitution” of Protestantism (Morris, “Saving Society,” 77–78; Bent, Newspaper Crusaders, 141; Scharlott, “Hoosier Journalist,” 128–29; Baker, Gospel, 105; Melching, “Klan in Anaheim,” 178; Hatle and Vaillancourt, “Minnesota’s Klan,” 363; Randel, Century of Infamy, 192–93, 196; White, Autobiography of William Allen White, 630–31; Johnson, White’s America, 342–43, 375–77, 385; Hoffman, The Twenties, 382–83; Fiery Cross, January 5, 1923, February 2, 1923, July 6, 1923; Atlanta Constitution, August 4, 1921; Literary Digest, October 1, 1921; Mexia Evening News, April 5, 1922; Fellowship Forum, November 3, 1922; Christian Century, July 6, 1922, August 10, 1922; Call of the North, February 15, 1924; Literary Digest, September 24, 1921; Baltimore Sun, September 11, 1921; Portsmouth Herald, January 6, 1923; Searchlight, January 20, 1923; Dawn, February 3, 1923; Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1921, September 22, 1921, November 27, 1923; Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1922, August 19, 1924, August 26, 1924; Atlantic Monthly, July 1922; The Forum, February 1923; Leslie’s Weekly, September 10, 1921, September 18, 1921, October 15, 1921; New Republic, September 21, 1921; Nation, September 14, 1921, November 15, 1922; Bakersfield Californian, December 26, 1922; New York Times, July 21, 1923, November 6, 1923, March 19, 1924; Washington Post, July 21, 1923; Bridgeport Telegram, July 21, 1923; Imperial Night-Hawk, August 8, 1923; Dawn, October 6, 1923; Pittsburgh Courier, November 3, 1923; Thomasville Daily Times-Enterprise, November 5, 1923; Atlantic News-Telegraph, January 7, 1924; Chicago Defender, February 2, 1924; Searchlight, July 12, 1924, July 19, 1924; San Antonio Light, December 11, 1938).
14. Collier’s, January 27, 1923; New York World, September 8, 1921, September 15, 1921, September 26, 1921; New York Tribune, December 17, 1922, November 27, 1923; Pittsburgh Courier, January 20, 1923, November 3, 1923, November 17, 1923, May 17, 1924, June 21, 1924, June 28, 1924; Washington Post, December 11, 1922; Chicago Tribune, December 27, 1922; Buffalo Commercial, September 17, 1921, September 20, 1921; Buffalo Express, September 19, 1921, September 27, 1921; Lay, Hooded Knights, 41; Wade, Fiery Cross, 161; Knights of the Klan, Meeting of Grand Dragons, 95–96; Call of the North, February 15, 1924; Nation, January 3, 1923; North American Review, June-August 1926; Nathan, Autobiography, 175–76.
15. Salesman William R. Toppan claimed that after his name was published, many of his previous customers (primarily those in groups targeted by the Klan) “wholly refused and still do refuse to have any transaction, acquaintance or discourse with me.” J. William Brooks, an undertaker, claimed that after being named in the pages of Tolerance “practically all of his clients . . . deserted him” and his business was “nearly ruined.” Augustus Olsen, one of the rising stars of Chicago’s business world, was forced to step down from his position as president of the Washington Park National Bank after depositors withdrew thousands of dollars (Craine, “Klan Moves North,” 17–18, 20; Jackson, Klan in the City, 104; Goldberg, “Unmasking the Klan,” 39–41; Broad Ax, August 19, 1922; Chicago Defender, September 2, 1922; New York Times, December 8, 1922; New Castle News, December 9, 1922; Mansfield News, December 10, 1922; Fiery Cross, December 29, 1922, January 5, 1923; Dawn, January 27, 1923; Tolerance, July 8, 1923, July 15, 1923).
16. The signature on Wrigley’s application form was a copy of the signature that adorned the wrapper of Wrigley’s gum—and which did not resemble Wrigley’s actual signature. W. J. Winston, the Klansman who had passed the application form to Tolerance, soon admitted that it was a forgery. Wrigley’s lawsuit ignited long-held differences among members of the AUL board. Patrick O’Donnell, who wrote the article naming Wrigley, was convinced of the millionaire’s Klan affiliation and had published over the objections of other members of the editorial staff. With the backing of AUL treasurer Robert Shepherd, O’Donnell refused to allow Tolerance to print a retraction, and attempted to dismiss those who disagreed. When Grady K. Rutledge, the president of the publishing company and executive secretary of the AUL, and assistant editor Lionel Moise attempted to publish the retraction anyway, they were allegedly removed from the premises by force by Shepherd and his son. Rutledge promptly sued for an injunction against the newspaper, while Moise filed suit for assault and battery. For several weeks, the newspaper was forced to cease publication until the judge overseeing the case agreed to take on an advisory position that would allow him final decision over what articles Tolerance could print until the suit was settled. By March 1923, Tolerance was back in print, but continued to struggle. Lawsuits continued to mount—for twenty-five thousand, fifty thousand, and even one hundred thousand dollars. Butcher Harry Junker, for example, also sued the AUL for fifty thousand dollars, claiming that being named as a Klansman had cost him all his Catholic customers. Junker, however, was only awarded a single dollar in damages. The editorial infighting had lent credence to the Klan’s charges that the newspaper’s attacks on the organization were nothing more than the “venom and virulence” of “Mad Pat” O’Donnell, the “prophet of hate.” Circulation collapsed to less than forty thousand. By the end of April, Tolerance and the AUL were forced to file for bankruptcy, listing assets of $4,000 and obligations of $475,000. The newspaper’s subscription solicitor was arrested for allegedly bombing the businesses of Klansmen. In May, the Klan further hamstrung the beleaguered organization by suing to prevent the publication of membership lists that had allegedly been stolen from the Klan’s Indiana headquarters. The newspaper continued to limp along until the beginning of 1925—mainly through a series of countersuits against the Klan—but circulation had fallen to less than five thousand, and Tolerance would never regain its short-lived effectiveness as a Klan opponent (Craine, “Klan Moves North,” 20–23; Goldberg, “Unmasking the Klan,” 40–41; Jacobs, “Catholic Response,” 95; Chicago Tribune, February 3, 1923, February 6, 1923, February 8, 1923, February 9, 1923, February 20, 1923, February 24, 1923, March 16, 1923, May 12, 1923; Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1923; Appleton Post-Crescent, February 16, 1923; Fiery Cross, February 16, 1923, March 2, 1923, March 9, 1923, March 16, 1923, April 6, 1923, April 13, 1923, April 27, 1923, February 23, 1924; New York Times, February 16, 1923, June 29, 1924; Burlington Hawk-Eye, March 20, 1923; Sandusky Register, March 20, 1923; Dawn, March 24, 1923, April 7, 1923, April 14, 1923, April 21, 1923, May 17, 1923, June 16, 1923; Washington Post, April 22, 1923; Badger
American, August 1923, December 1923; The Kluxer, October 20, 1923; Deposition of Harry Junker, Harry Junker v. American Unity Publishing, S-388057, Cook County Superior Court, 1923).
17. Hohenberg, Pulitzer Prize Story, 336, 348; Scharlott, “Hoosier Journalist,” 128; Wade, Fiery Cross, 202; Jackson, Klan in the City, 47, 115; Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword, 115, 120–24; Washington Post, May 14, 1923; New York Times, May 14, 1923, January 10, 1941; Imperial Night-Hawk, May 23, 1923; Badger American, September 1923; Chicago Tribune, December 1, 1926; Literary Digest, September 24, 1921; The Spectator, February 17, 1923; The Forum, November 1924; Montgomery Advertiser, July 4, 1927; Baltimore Afro-American, May 26, 1928; Atlantic Monthly, May 1928.
18. The award committee would also later cite the Enquirer-Sun’s work in fighting the passage of a law banning the teaching of evolution, its exposure of governmental malfeasance, and its opposition to lynching (Thomasville Daily Times-Enterprise, March 22, 1921, March 29, 1921; Chicago Defender, May 7, 1921; Leslie’s Weekly, October 15, 1921; New York World, September 10, 1921, September 15, 1921; Leslie’s Weekly, October 15, 1921; Hohenberg, Pulitzer Prize Story, 336; Wade, Fiery Cross, 202; Moseley, “Invisible Empire,” 58, 85; Mugleston, “Julian Harris,” 284, 286–87, 289–90; Lisby, “Julian Harris,” 8).
19. Moseley, “Invisible Empire,” 85; Mugleston, “Julian Harris,” 290–3; Lisby, “Julian Harris,” 1; Hohenberg, Pulitzer Prize Story, 69, 336; The Forum, July 1926; American Mercury, August 1926; Leslie’s Weekly, October 15, 1921; Chicago Defender, June 17, 1922, May 15, 1926; Baltimore Afro-American, May 8, 1926; Topeka Plain Dealer, May 14, 1926; Broad Axe, May 15, 1926; The Sign, September 1927.
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