by Linda Gordon
The 1920s was not the first time that evangelical Protestantism wielded great political influence, but it may have been the first time that bigotry became a major theme among its preachers. That so many ministers and preachers endorsed the Ku Klux Klan and even declared membership in it underlines two important Klan characteristics: its assimilation to conservative Protestantism and its respectability within mainstream politics.
Klansmen ride, Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Associated Press)
Chapter 6
VIGILANTISM AND MANLINESS
THE NORTHERN KLAN WAS NOT PRIMARILY A VIOLENT group. But that depends on one’s definition of violence. Take the Klan’s terrifying 1925 attack on the family of Malcolm Little, the future Malcolm X. The family lived in Omaha, where Malcolm’s father, Earl Little, was both a Baptist minister and an organizer for Garvey’s “back to Africa” movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association. (Had the perpetrators known anything about Garvey’s impulse to persuade African Americans to leave the country, might they have supported him? Perhaps not: they no doubt sensed that any organizing among African Americans was dangerous to white supremacy.) Rev. Little had been threatened many times, but one incident drove the family out of Nebraska entirely. While Rev. Little was away, preaching in Milwaukee, a group of Klansmen on horseback arrived and ordered Malcolm’s mother to bring out her husband. They proclaimed, in her account, that “the good Christian white people” would not stand for his “spreading trouble” among the “good Negroes” of Omaha. Mrs. Little, visibly pregnant with the future Malcolm, and alone with three small children, explained that her husband was not at home and tried to convince them to leave. Undeterred, they galloped several times around the house, carrying burning torches, whooping and yelling. They shattered all the windows. Had Earl Little been there, his wife thought, they would have lynched him. Their threat worked: soon after Malcolm was born a few months later, the family moved, first to Milwaukee, then to Lansing, Michigan. Attacks on the courageous reverend did not stop, however. In Lansing a group calling itself the “Black Legionnaires,” determined to stop him from opening a store outside the black neighborhood, burned the Little home to the ground.1
The Omaha attack was not only terrifying but also terrorist, continuing the first Klan’s strategy: its intention was not only to stop Rev. Little’s activism but to warn other African Americans that they must not challenge white supremacy. Behind the attack, no doubt, was the Klansmen’s confidence in their impunity. With some forty-five thousand fellow Klansmen in Nebraska, the attackers could be confident that juries would never convict them.
The attack on the Littles was typical of the northern Klan’s vigilantism—usually stopping short of murder or physical assault, but nevertheless communicating a credible threat of violence to Klan enemies. The vast majority of Klanspeople never participated in this vigilantism, but some did, and their attacks were in many ways an unsurprising result of the Klan as an organization and a movement.
Like all fraternal orders, the Klan drew in members by offering the pleasures of male bonding. This was particularly attractive because those opportunities were shrinking, due to the transformation of the economy. In the rapidly corporatizing world of the 1920s, ever more men performed white-collar work, spending their days at jobs not previously considered manly. They worked not with hammers or drills but with paper and pen. New white-collar and service-sector workspaces increasingly included women, whose presence constrained homosocial male camaraderie. All this just as fraternal orders of the older sort were fading and women were transgressing gender and sexual norms. The Klan, as a fraternal order, offered compensation for these losses.
Klan rhetoric not only featured masculinist language, appealing to “real Men,” but also employed feminine labels to shame enemies. “Remember when you come to lodge that this is not an old maid’s convention,” the minutes of an Oregon chapter read.2 An Oregon Klan political candidate called an anti-Klan newspaper a “poor old female . . . busy feathering its nest,” while a Klan minister spoke of his contempt for “mollycoddle Masons” and “softshell” preachers who urged ecumenism.3 These quotations could be multiplied by the hundreds. At the University of Wisconsin, the Ku Klux Klan fraternity required pledges to parade around the capitol pushing baby carriages as part of their hazing.4 Klan writings and lectures painted the Protestant Jesus as virile and aggressive, the vengeful Redeemer, in contrast to the gentler, empathic Jesus of the mainline, liberal churches.5
Klan speeches and publications harped on crime as evidence of the need to restore manliness. Urban crime rates were escalating—nationally, crime rose 24 percent in the early 1920s—but not escalating nearly as much as Klan talk suggested. Besides, much of the increase was in auto theft, hardly surprising since autos were rapidly increasing in numbers and typically had to be parked on the streets, where they were vulnerable.6 Where African Americans were part of local populations, the Klan blamed them for the alleged increase in crime, no matter the actual statistics.7 So did many non-Klan whites: rumors among Omaha whites blamed rapes and assaults on black men despite the fact that whites carried out most of them.8
Crime surged also because of Prohibition, which had criminalized previously legal bootlegging and saloonkeeping. For the Klan, making home brew or drinking alcoholic beverages was now criminal. Defense of Prohibition was universal among the Klan’s diverse Klaverns, and arguably responsible for the fact that many relatively tolerant citizens shrugged off its racist rhetoric. One journalist called the Klan “the extreme militant wing of the temperance movement.”9 (See figure 5.)
The Klan projected its anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism onto violations of Prohibition, presuming that those religions and demon rum were exactly coterminous: Catholics and Jews drank and purveyed alcohol. Its speeches and publications always tied Prohibition violations to “wrong” religions: “A certain Catholic priest named Father Grace was . . . convicted of illegally securing five barrels of whiskey from the United States warehouse by means of liquor permits to which he had forged the name of the Mother Superior of a Catholic Home for the Aged”; “a certain Jewish Rabbi in a Midwestern city was convicted of securing absurdly large quantities of liquor for sacramental purposes and selling it.”10 In Colorado the Klan tried to ban the use of “intoxicating beverages” in religious ceremonies, a move that targeted both Catholics and Jews.11 Alliances between temperance advocates and the Klan happened in many places, as in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where the Civic-Church League joined the Klan to dry up New Jersey’s resort towns.12 As one Klan writer put it, “People used to say that the saloon was a recruitment agency for crime. But . . . some religions are recruiting agencies for crime, too.”13
Unsurprisingly, plenty of Klanspeople drank. Oregon provides many examples of this hypocrisy: Klansman Ray Cook was arrested on a charge of violating Prohibition. Grand Dragon Fred Gifford allegedly treated new Klan initiates to alcoholic drinks. At one Klan event the food was so good “we forgot our crave for moonshine for the time being.” One Klavern member was criticized for bailing out “bootleggers and Chinks.” He was reminded, “You are living in America, now, not in a foreign country.”14 (Ultimately Klan drinking led to exposures of hypocrisy and contributed to its demise.)
Klan crime talk sounded a steady drumbeat announcing the collapse of law and order. In fact, the Klan became the leading law-and-order spokes group in the 1920s. Its crime talk functioned as a potent recruitment strategy, kindling fear and promising a satisfying moral superiority to potential members. Crime discourse also evoked resentment, typically shared by police, that criminals were going free through trivial, procedural legal loopholes. Law-and-order talk could thus authorize action outside the law.
Vigilantes occupied a central place in Klansmen’s traditions and venerations. In their recruitment campaigns they frequently showed the virulently racist film Birth of a Nation, in which the protagonist, Klan Grand Dragon Ben Cameron, and his mounted followers saved “white womanhood” from the �
�savage lust” of black men. The film not only intensified latent racism but also stirred the imagination of Klansmen longing to be equally heroic.15 Aware of the attractions of these heroes, Klan spokesmen talked a slippery and sometimes bluntly dishonest line about vigilantism. Hiram Evans tried to protect the Klan’s respectability, in large part so as not to jeopardize its profitability. In order to scrub their reputation clean, Klan leaders not only denied that members ever broke the law but insisted that the accusations were calumnies spread by Klan opponents.16 When Klansmen were seen, leaders typically claimed that the guilty ones were actually “aliens” who masqueraded in white robes in order to defame the Klan—“thugs parading under the guise of the Invisible Empire,” as a Washington Klan minister put it. Moreover, leaders claimed that accusations were simply inventions of the allegedly Catholic-controlled press.17
Evans and his allies may have tried in earnest to keep Klansmen within the law. But they also understood that vigilantism attracted members, so their recruitment pitches frequently hinted at vigilante opportunities. (See figure 17.) One 1934 article wrote about “night-riding” that “these methods are the great attraction . . . that renders the greatest personal satisfaction.”18 Klan fraternalism sent the message that true manhood required action against the forces antagonistic to true Americanism. As William Reich wrote about Nazi street violence, it allowed “little men” to act “big.”19
So the Klan’s belligerent rhetoric encouraged vigilantism even without an explicit call for extralegal action. Simmons called for the “Klan army” to be drilled and equipped. “When the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan take their place upon the firing line to preserve and save the most sacred heritage of the white race,” he declaimed at a 1922 Klonvocation, “something is going to crack in America.”20 Several contemporary critics pointed out that World War I veterans “never had quite enough excitement” from their war experience, since American participation was so brief. As Frank Bohn wrote in 1925, to “organize a thousand healthy, sturdy, adventure-loving young men, half of whom have just been mustered out of the army and navy; to fire their hearts with the thought that their beloved country was in imminent danger of destruction; and then expect them to be satiated by repeating the Klan ritual once a month and waiting for election day, surely that was expecting to pluck figs from thistles. . . . Such an outfit would quite likely look around for a way of saving the country described neither in the four gospels nor the federal Constitution.”21
Given the enormous size of the 1920s Klan, it was no doubt true that only a small percentage of Klansmen participated in vigilantism. Bohn guessed that “probably nine-tenths of them . . . do nothing but repeat the ritual, pass pious resolutions, and go home.”22 But some did more, and if leaders tried to control them, their efforts were unsuccessful. The least violent vigilantism targeted saloons and roadhouses, gambling parlors, dance halls, and prostitution. Klansmen would raid these locations together with police officers or do so themselves and turn offenders over to the police. Or they might issue warnings, either verbally or through cross-burnings.23 In New Jersey they burned a cross in a field owned by an Irish Catholic, and another at a corner in the main African American shopping district in Metuchen.24 But they tended to go after local, small-time offenders rather than producers and distributors of liquor, who often had powerful supporters. In Indiana, Grand Dragon David Stephenson set up his “G-2” system, recruiting Klansmen to gather intelligence on violators—not only on “aliens” in their communities but also on other Klanspeople. (A Stephenson rival claimed that he had modeled his spy network on that of tsarist Russia.)25 A Klan letter to a newspaper in the Ozarks threatened not only bootlegging but “parking automobiles along our highways . . . for what is believed to be immoral purposes.”26
A smaller number of raids were large-scale: In Anaheim, California, for example, Klansmen launched raids on several locations in one evening, turning up and turning in, they claimed, fifty-two bootleggers. In a much publicized series of raids in Indianapolis, the Klan got 125 people arrested and convicted.27 One Indiana sheriff worked with a civilian “booze squad” to arrest liquor scofflaws, and we can be sure that it included Klansmen. The violators then appeared before Klan-sympathizing judges—one a future Klaliff—who always convicted them.28 In Oklahoma, and perhaps elsewhere too, Klan membership was automatically suspended for any man called for jury duty, so that he could deny it and not be excluded for bias.29 Occasionally Klansmen threatened or even attacked women for immodest dress; vigilantism extended to behavior that was not illegal but, to the Klan, evidently immoral.
Violence varied by region and by the level of resistance to the Klan. In New England, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, the Klan confined itself mainly to threats. Some were verbal: “If you are the mouthpiece of American labor in this locality,” an Oregon Kleagle warned, “and do not endorse the above principles . . . then you would be a fit subject for a Vigilance Committee.”30 Or a threat to a Vermont journalist: Unless “certain newspaper reporters . . . stop attacking the Klan, they will be taught the same lesson that some editors in the south have learned.”31 Others were symbolic, as when Denver Klanspeople pasted placards announcing their meetings on the walls of synagogues and Catholic churches.32 The Klan’s “black psywar,” distributing frightening material allegedly from Catholic sources, constituted a form of vigilantism.33 Taken in the aggregate, it seems clear that these threats also constituted terrorism, aimed not only at particular individuals but at sending a message to whole communities of people—intimidating nonconforming groups into submission to Klan “law.”
Other threats were physical. In Lewiston, Maine, the Klan set off a “dynamite bomb” to announce its presence.34 Two Colorado Catholic businessmen received a letter from the Klan threatening them with “death or worse” if they did not leave town.35 “Warning parties” might beat or humiliate a target. One repeated stunt involved capturing a man, telling him he would be hanged, hanging a noose from a tree and then around his neck to induce him to plead for his life, then releasing the terrified and humiliated prisoner. In Arkansas City, Kansas, Klansmen invaded “Darktown” and kidnapped a black man who, they claimed, stole suitcases from the train station, and hung him until he “confessed,” then forced him to leave town forever.36
Three Oregon cases known as the “Oregon outrages” captured widespread press attention when night riders terrified their victims with such lynching threats. J. F. Hale, a piano salesman—white—was accused of illicit sexual affairs, and the would-be lynchers demanded that he break off the improper relationships. He may have been targeted also because he owed money that a Klansman was having trouble collecting. Sam Johnson, described as “part-Mexican,” was accused of stealing chickens and being an “idler.” Arthur Burr, an African American bootblack accused of bootlegging, received the worst treatment. Vigilantes abducted him and took him to the very crest of the Siskiyou Mountains, where they strung him up and let him down three times. Releasing him, they fired revolvers near his feet, demanding that he leave the area permanently, yelling, “Can you run, nigger?”37 Though charges were brought against three groups of Klansmen, in each case juries acquitted the culprits, on the grounds that because the victims were morally bad, their vigilante punishment benefited the community.38
By contrast, Oklahoma, Indiana, Kansas, and southern Illinois—locations that were as much southern as northern—experienced a great deal of actual Klan violence: whippings, tar-and-featherings, and lynchings. In all four places, some degree of racial segregation was in place, and Klan violence helped keep it in place. In Oklahoma, Klan-provoked violence became so widespread—with a reported “one flogging for every night of the year”—that the governor placed parts of the state under martial law; Klan efforts got him impeached in 1923.39 Oklahoma law officers sometimes handed suspects over to Klan whipping parties or even participated in the beatings. In Kansas, Klansmen abducted an anti-Klan mayor, tied him to a tree, and “laid thirty stripes on his bare back.�
�� In “Bloody Williamson,” as one southern Illinois county became known, the local Klan and the Anti-Saloon League merged into the Williamson County Law Enforcement League, which soon became run by the Klan. Attacks on the operators of the wide-open bars produced lethal battles in 1924 and 1925, involving gunmen and the deployment of military forces, and ended by forcing the anti-Klan sheriff out of office. These armed skirmishes killed twenty people.40
The North was not entirely immune to Klan violence, however, and sporadic episodes transpired in many locations. In La Grande, Oregon, Klansmen were warned “that all K.C. [Knights of Columbus] carry a 32-automatic when they go out at night,” surely an intimation that Klansmen might start fights.41 Particularly dramatic was the protracted struggle between the Klan and the Catholic University of Dayton. Klanspeople burned crosses repeatedly on and around its campus, including one cross allegedly a hundred feet high. As crosses burned, several hundred Klansmen in dozens of cars would drive “in single file ‘past the blazing emblem,’ all the while issuing ‘a volley of threats.’ ”42 At one point the Klan set off twelve bombs throughout the campus; luckily, or perhaps deliberately, the bombings took place during Christmas vacation, and no one was hurt.43 In Steubenville, Ohio, masked Klansmen attacked a meeting of the Sons of Italy and shot two men to death.44 In Denver in 1922, Klan death threats and physical violence became so common that the Denver Post pronounced the situation “on the verge of civil war.” The Catholic newspaper there reported that a Klan plan to burn Catholic churches was scotched only when the Grand Dragon pointed out that since the churches were insured, Catholics would just rebuild them.45 In Inglewood, California, a city in Los Angeles County, Klansmen raided an alleged bootlegging operation run by Basque immigrants Fidel and Angela Elduayen. Two hundred Klansmen first blocked off the surrounding streets, then moved in; they tied up and beat the couple and destroyed their furniture. Presumably others came to the defense of the business, because Klansman police officer Medord Mosher was killed and two others wounded in the struggle. One hundred fifty subpoenas were issued, thirty-seven Klansmen indicted, all acquitted.46