by Linda Gordon
Some contemporary 1920s critics made the erroneous assumption that merely exposing the Klan would isolate and shrink it. That folly was demonstrated when in 1921 the New York World newspaper published a series of investigative reports on the KKK by a disaffected former Klansman, including an official list of its recruiters; the articles were syndicated and published simultaneously in newspapers throughout the country. The reporters and editors expected these revelations of KKK bigotry and vigilantism to put an end to its revival. Instead they generated a large increase in its membership,30 signs of the any-publicity-is-good-publicity effect and of the welcome its ideas received.
Similarly, opponents generated congressional hearings about the Ku Klux Klan, conducted by the House Committee on Rules in 1921. This too grew the Klan. As its spokesman, Simmons presented the KKK as a benign fraternalist and nativist organization—nativism, aka anti-immigrationism, being completely respectable. The hearings concluded that no action was required.31 As a journalist for Collier’s wrote, “Congress, by failure to act, gave Simmons a chance to say that it had put its stamp of approval on the strange new order.” When Simmons returned to Atlanta, “calls began pouring in from . . . all over America for the right to organize Klans.” Simmons told a journalist that “we worked twenty-four hours a day trying to meet the demand.”32 In other words, testimony that liberals would find appalling appealed, by contrast, to many Americans.
Many contemporary scholars and critics, such as Frank Bohn, Clarence Darrow, Frank Tannenbaum, and William Allen White, branded the Ku Klux Klan an aberration, an outlier in the national political culture. In that understanding they shared, ironically, a key Klannish idea: that one and only one ideology was truly American. For most of these critics, that was liberal individualism. This premise led them to diagnose the Ku Klux Klan’s rise as the inane hysteria of uneducated, lowbrow hicks, a “booboisie.” In branding Klansmen as backward, uneducated, isolated from culture, provincial, insane, busybodies, believers in ghosts, gullible, shabby of mind, social deviants, and representative of the lower classes, critics were expressing a snobbish disdain often repeated in urban elite responses to populism. The liberal New Republic magazine echoed this disdain, even suggesting that people joined the Klan because of the monotony and boredom of small-town life.33 (Klanspeople simply ricocheted that disdain, condemning the immoral vices and mixed cultures of the metropolis.) More accurately but equally disdainfully, the renowned southern historian Francis Butler Simkins called it “an authentic folk movement.”34
Scholars also condemned the Klan as an example of the irrationality of the crowd, a theme developed in the 1960s by historian Richard Hofstadter.35 He identified a “paranoid style” in American mass politics, which he identified with its reliance on conspiracy theories, as in the Klan’s allegations of secretive Catholic and Jewish plots to take over the United States.
Popular writers also mocked Klanspeople’s conformity. Novelist Sinclair Lewis regularly made fun of the Klan type: George Babbitt, in his 1922 novel Babbitt, gave birth to a common noun that describes a close-minded, narrow-minded, conformist whose interests and ethics were confined to his business world: “Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief . . . so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.”36 In his 1926 Elmer Gantry, Lewis specifically ridiculed the evangelical and racist beliefs of his hero.
Writing in 1967, historian Kenneth Jackson disproved the small-town-hick thesis by showing the Klan’s great strength in the cities. Studying nine cities between 1915 and 1930, he showed that 50 percent of active Klanspeople were urbanites, and 32 percent lived in the country’s larger cities: there were at least fifty thousand Klansmen in Chicago, thirty-eight thousand in Indianapolis, thirty-five thousand in Philadelphia, and the same number in Detroit, for example.37 Others have since shown that in many states Klan per capita membership was larger in cities than in smaller places.
The condescending diagnoses of the Klan’s popularity by its critics ignored how many other elites and intellectuals shared its worldview. The Klan’s favorite term for the whites they approved of, “Nordic,” probably came from Columbia- and Yale-educated lawyer Madison Grant, a distinguished exponent of “scientific” racism; his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race raised an alarm about the new non-“Nordic” immigrants, such as Italians and Jews; he recommended requiring that these “unfavorable races be kept segregated in ghettos.” Woodrow Wilson and many in his administration regularly voiced anti-Semitic opinions. American colleges and universities systematically applied quotas to Jewish applicants; as Jewish immigrants began to achieve academic success, Columbia’s medical school reduced its proportion of Jewish students from 47 percent in 1920 to 6 percent in 1940.38 Congressional debate on the immigration-restriction bills of the 1920s referenced the deplorable “fact” that 80 to 90 percent of the undesirables were Jews. As H. L. Mencken pointed out, “If the Klan is against the Jews, so are . . . three-quarters of the good clubs.39
Anti-Catholicism was not confined to the Klan either. A weekly newspaper from Missouri, the Menace, devoted specifically to anti-Catholicism, had a circulation of 1.5 million. Populist southern politician Tom Watson used “tested and proved” anti-Catholicism to win.40 The Sons and Daughters of Washington (referring to George, not the location), various Protestant newspapers, immigration restrictionist groups and politicians—the list of Catholic-haters included many organizations, politicians, and media across the nation. The bigoted Hearst newspapers were then the largest media conglomerate in the world. Frank Bohn, a Klan opponent who published in the American Journal of Sociology, wrote of the “dangerous theory . . . that anyone over twenty-one . . . can vote intelligently” and lamented that “barbaric and totally illiterate negro slaves, directly after their emancipation, were permitted to vote and sit in the state legislatures” and that “millions of peasants . . . mostly illiterate and possessed of not the slightest background of political experience . . . have been invited to join us and hastily receive all the rights and privileges of citizenship.”41
Klan race thought mirrored the principles of eugenics, accepted in the 1920s as state-of-the-art science. Resting on Lamarck’s mistaken genetics, eugenical theory assumed that socially acquired characteristics could be inherited. From this pseudo-science it logically followed that those of northern European ancestry ruled because they were superior and deserved to rule. Leading eugenists such as Madison Grant and Harvard PhD Lothrop Stoddard led the campaign to encourage greater fertility among the “superior” class and to discourage fertility among the inferior class—and their definitions of these classes were identical to the Klan’s. Many universities and colleges required students to study eugenics. Every biology textbook of the period included a chapter on eugenics. The National Education Association formed a eugenical practices committee.42 Thirty states passed eugenical compulsory sterilization laws. In short, there was nothing aberrant in the Klan’s racial hierarchy.
Cartoon from Sound Money magazine, 1896.
Chapter 2
ANCESTORS
THE KU KLUX KLAN OF THE 1920S HAD SIX ANCESTORS, each of them long embedded in American history. Each of them contributed one of the Klan’s six main ideological components: racism, nativism, temperance, fraternalism, Christian evangelicalism, and populism.
The first parent, obviously, was the original Klan. This lineage was familial as well as organizational: Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Imperial Wizard of the first Klan, was the grandfather of Nathan Bedford Forrest II, Grand Dragon of the Georgia realm of the second Klan. That Simmons wanted to appropriate the Ku Klux Klan name for his new venture resulted from both lack of imagination and filial pride. He continued not only the Klan’s name but also its alias, the Invisible Empire.1
The first Ku Klux Klan arose in 1866, just after the Civil War, but became most potent after the federal gover
nment abdicated its responsibility to guarantee the political citizenship of black men (not women) through the franchise and declined to create a basis for the economic survival of the freedpeople. Klansmen convinced themselves and their supporters that the abolition of slavery put the south into a crisis: freedpeople and “carpetbaggers” were running amok, assaulting white women, and threatening white power. To prevent disaster, the Klan claimed, white men of courage had no choice but to defend their society. They did this through terrorist lynchings and beatings, strategically employed, suppressing black citizenship at the polls and in the courts, and reimposing black economic subjugation through sharecropping. This Klan used a veneer of secrecy to maintain the fiction that the perpetrators of racist violence were unknown. In fact, they were well known: their lynchings rested on widespread white consent and the open collusion of law-and-order officials. Klan secrecy served not to protect its members, who needed no protection, but to intensify its fear-inducing aura.
For the second Klan, by contrast, northern society, economy, and law created more constraints. Liberal tenets of the rule of law were stronger, so without maintaining a law-abiding legitimacy the Ku Klux Klan could not have spread so widely. Legitimacy did not make the 1920s Klan less reactionary or bigoted but did underlie its success.2 These latter-day Klansmen practiced various secret rituals and paraded in masks but often proudly proclaimed their membership; the Klan ran candidates in elections, advertised openly, and sponsored popular events open to all. (When the state of Michigan prohibited wearing masks in public, the state’s Klan membership actually increased.3) While the second Klan did little lynching, it did at times employ nonlethal and occasionally lethal terrorism, in which police forces were active participants.
The Klan’s second parent was nativism, an anti-immigrant movement and state of mind. Its bequest provided its offspring a route to legitimacy. Nativism already had a long and respectable tradition in the United States, a tradition that encouraged the second Klan to broaden its enemies list beyond African Americans. Nativism’s major organization had been the American Protective Association (APA), founded in 1887, which descended, in turn, from the “Know Nothings,” an anti-immigrant political party begun in 1855.4 The Daughters of the American Revolution similarly resented immigration and used language that the Klan would adopt—creating the category “pure Americans” to refer to those of undiluted Anglo-Saxon heritage.5 Thus hostility to new immigrants was already seventy years old when the second Klan reinvigorated it. The APA prefigured many of the second Klan’s principles: although denying that it was anti-Catholic, the APA denounced “Romanism” as inimical to patriotism—because Catholics obeyed the pope’s teachings, they could not be truly republican. The APA took up the victim position, a stance characteristic of many conservative groups. It claimed that Catholics were not only plotting to take over the country but immigrating in order to effect a takeover. Its false claims—that 60 to 90 percent of government employees were illiterate Catholics, that the army and navy had already been “Romanized,” that priests regularly desecrated the American flag—went unchallenged by many. APA members, like Klansmen later, had to swear that “I will do all in my power to retard and break down the power of the Pope . . . will not countenance the nomination . . . of a Roman Catholic for any office . . . [and] will not employ a Roman Catholic.”6 Nativist attitudes toward Jews were equally hostile but more complex, even contradictory. They branded Jews both congenitally stupid—eugenist Henry Goddard’s “tests” allegedly showed that 60 percent of Jews were morons—and diabolically clever communists even as they were rapacious money-grubbers squeezing money out of virtuous Protestants. In both respects, the Klan and similar nativists saw Jews as a threat to American values.
Opposing immigration might seem a tricky posture in a country where none of the whites (or blacks) were indigenous, but these organizations focused specifically on the large-scale inmigration of Catholics, Orthodox Christians (sometimes called “Greek Catholics”), and Jews that had begun in the 1880s. The Klan argued not only for an end to the immigration of non-“Nordics” but also for deporting those already here. The date of their inmigration, their longevity in the United States, mattered not. The country should expel “certain types and races which will not in a hundred years of residence here be anything but a menace. They should be kept out—and put out.”7
Today these claims might be read as religious prejudice, not racism. But at the time, religion, race, and nation were concepts loosely applied. For nativists, Protestantism was patriotism, and non-Protestants were disloyal. Replicating this fusion, Klan ideologues also denied that they were hostile to Catholics and insisted that if Catholics would practice their religion without their “Roman” hierarchy, the Klan would have no objections to their presence. Catholics were welcome to convert. By contrast, Jews and nonwhites—and many at the time still considered Jews nonwhite—were unredeemable, “hopeless,” never able to participate in American citizenship.8 In Klanspeak, “white” sometimes meant Protestant; an Oregon Klavern worked to defeat a Catholic running for Congress “in order to have three congressmen who are white men.”9
A pair of anti-liquor organizations—the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL)—also passed on their genes to the Klan. The larger association, the WCTU, called for prohibiting not only liquor but also tobacco, prostitution, immorality in entertainment, and Sunday store opening. Its temperance ideas were complex, imbued with some feminist impulses—fueled particularly by anger at the violence and deprivation that women and children suffered as a result of men’s drinking. WCTU temperance rhetoric foregrounded stories of drunken men who were not only abusers but also nonsupporters, leaving their families in want by spending the household budget in saloons. Like earlier social-purity organizations, the WCTU offered a Victorian feminist analysis of prostitution, as the victimization of helpless women by male sexual predators. Its hostility to risqué imagery and entertainments reflected the assumption that any erotic material was injurious to women. Its anti-tobacco rhetoric expressed gendered resentment of male-only spaces, which reinforced men’s conviction that they were born to rule—over both the country and their women and children.
Given its woman-centered principles, the WCTU might not seem akin to the Klan. But that kinship was mutual: the Women’s Ku Klux Klan articulated similar women’s rights claims, while the WCTU’s racial and religious views mirrored those of the KKK. Both organizations identified immigrants and non-Protestants as the source of all the social vices. Both believed that Catholic immigrants had brought the scourge of alcohol into a culture that had previously been on a path to reject it. The temperance organizations made little distinction among different quantities and types of alcohol consumption. To them, Italian immigrants who drank wine (often watered wine) with their meals at home were no different from the Irish who drank ale and whiskey in pubs, and this blanket intolerance both reflected and strengthened anti-immigrant sentiment. So the anti-liquor groups looked askance both at big cities, with their commerce in alcohol and “loose morals,” and at mining camps and factory towns, where male leisure led to drunkenness, brawls, prostitution, and rape. Hostility to cities also stemmed from the belief that immigrants and liquor brought political corruption.
The WCTU, the ASL, and the KKK also drew on the same constituencies—mainly evangelical Protestants who lived outside the big cities. Moreover, their memberships overlapped: many Klans-women were also WCTU members, and many Klansmen were also members of the ASL.10 As Clarence Darrow put it in 1924, “The father and mother of the Ku Klux is the Anti-Saloon League. I would not say every Anti-Saloon Leaguer is a Ku Kluxer, but every Ku Kluxer is an Anti-Saloon Leaguer.”11
These three parents instilled a set of beliefs in their offspring. The Klan’s fourth parent—the hundreds of fraternal societies in the United States—bestowed upon its child a mode of male bonding through brotherhood and ritual. Fraternal organizations have received little recognit
ion in explaining Klan origins, no doubt because so many studies of the Klan focus on denouncing its outrages. By contrast, there seemed nothing outrageous about the fraternals. Many were mutual benefit societies, essentially insurance cooperatives providing for burials, medical expenses, and the support of widows. Their members contributed monthly or weekly payments and could receive help in crises—especially deaths, illnesses, or accidents. They provided a bit of security in the absence of a welfare state. Other fraternals were only clubs, creating conviviality, joviality, and economic opportunities. The largest were the Masons and the Odd Fellows, followed by the Knights of Pythias, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, the Knights of the Maccabees, and the Colored Masons. In 1897 some 5.4 million Americans belonged to fraternal orders, a number increasing to 10.2 million by 1926, with half a million children in affiliated youth groups. All provided opportunities for networking, a process even more important in this time before newspaper want-ads offered jobs. But above all the fraternals offered male friendship and entertainment in male-only spaces.12 (Klanswomen also belonged to many sororal groups, but these were more often service and church groups.)
Overlap was particularly large between the KKK and the Masons, an order that had long been anti-Catholic. One Mason reported that “Klan-joining became contagious and ran epidemic” throughout the Masonic lodges in the 1920s.13 In some locations, 60 percent or more of Klansmen were Masons.14 Wherever the Klan was particularly strong, so were the Masons. The Klan ritual created by Simmons—its props, ceremonies, and ranks—drew heavily on Masonic rites. Klan recruiters typically began by using Masonic lodge membership lists. Not all Masons approved of the Klan, and some denounced it, but their protests could not overcome the widespread perception that the two organizations were comrades in arms.15