by Linda Gordon
Women did not always wait to get Klansmen’s permission to join the movement but organized themselves independently through churches, clubs, sororities, and Klan picnics. Male leaders, alarmed by these initiatives outside their control, formed competing women’s groups,5 producing a variety of organizations with names such as Kamelias, Queens of the Golden Mask, and Ladies of the Invisible Empire. In 1923 Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, seeing that women could not be kept out of the Klan movement, managed to merge these groups forcibly into the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). Some preexisting women’s groups resisted this merger, and then, after acceding, refused to accept a subordinate status. An Oregon group proclaimed that “the women’s organization is an exact counterpart of the Klan itself, with no difference whatever except that of gender. They will use the same constitution, ritual, regalia and methods.”6 In another assertion of its independence the WKKK set up its headquarters in Little Rock, hundreds of miles from Atlanta, home of the Klan headquarters. By November 1923, the WKKK claimed chapters in all forty-eight states. In Indiana, the state of greatest Klan strength, where the population was 97 percent white and Protestant, the WKKK boasted of 250,000 members; if true (not likely), this would have meant that 32 percent of the state’s native-born white Protestant women belonged.7
BRIEF PROFILES OF THREE WKKK LEADERS illustrate their combination of conservatism with assertiveness, a combination that many might find surprising. We have already met Elizabeth Tyler, cohead of the Klan’s PR firm, who defied almost all the gender norms of the time and displayed a business acumen that might befit a CEO today. Her extraordinary career grew from both nativist and fraternal traditions. Born in 1881, married at fourteen, either abandoned or widowed at fifteen, she made several further brief marriages, becoming a multiple divorcée. In Atlanta in the 1910s she was a member of a sororal order, Daughters of America, an anti-immigration organization associated with the American Protective Association and many fraternal orders.8 Tyler participated in the eugenics cause as a volunteer “hygiene” worker, managing publicity and organizing parades for a “Better Babies” campaign. Through that activity she met Edward Clarke. Together they sensed the profitable opportunities that could arise from professionalizing and commercializing their efforts and set up the Southern Publicity Association, selling their services to groups like the Red Cross and the Anti-Saloon League. In their first fifteen months of work for the Klan, they claimed to have netted upward of $200,000 ($2.7 million in 2016); this is probably an exaggeration, but they were doing well. Tyler personally owned and profited from the Searchlight, a Klan newspaper, and built herself a large Classical Revival house on fourteen acres in downtown Atlanta. It was she and Clarke who turned Colonel Simmons’s feeble attempt to revive a southern organization into a mass national movement and a profitable business. When she turned her energies to creating an early women’s division of the Klan, she took advantage of Simmons’s temporary absence to put Clarke in titular control of the entire Invisible Empire.9
In 1919 their position became precarious when Atlanta police literally rousted them out of bed and arrested them for disorderly conduct; the “disorder” was the fact that they were sexual partners while married to other people. When the arrest was discovered two years later, newspaper coverage revealed not only the illicit sex but also that they had used false names and had been in possession of whiskey. The scandal was big news, covered even in the New York Times when the New Jersey Klan demanded firing Clarke and Tyler.10 Learning of the arrest some Klansmen were doubly dismayed—by the alleged immorality but also by the discovery that a woman was a key organizer of the KKK. One vilified her, adding that her experience “in catering to [men’s] appetites and vices had given her an insight into their frailties.”11
Meanwhile, Klan opponents forced congressional hearings on the Klan in 1921. Fearing further exposure, since he was guilty of other improprieties, Clarke immediately announced his resignation. This made Tyler furious. She publicly denounced him, saying he was “weak-kneed and won’t stand by his guns.” She refused to resign.12 She even survived an attempt on her life when unknown assailants shot up her home. The congressional report treated her with both respect and misogyny, as the éminence grise behind the Klan. Instead of backing down, she skillfully turned the negative publicity from the hearings into a successful membership drive that grew the Klan exponentially.13
Tyler was finally forced to resign by accusations, almost certainly true, of embezzling Klan money.14 But she had been a gift to the national Klan. The organization might well have grown without this driven, bold, corrupt, and precociously entrepreneurial woman, but it would likely have been smaller.
While Tyler’s audacity might seem surprising in a woman of the 1920s, the career of Daisy Douglas Barr undoes today’s assumptions even more, because she was a Quaker. In the late twentieth century Quakers became associated with liberal theology, anti-racism, and other progressive attitudes. But a century ago the Friends church included plenty of racists and conservatives and was moving rapidly toward evangelicalism. Barr was by no means the only Quaker in the Klan; in the town of Richmond, Indiana, for example, some 7 percent of Klansmen were Quaker.15
A native Hoosier, Daisy Douglas Brushwiller was born in 1875 into a devout Quaker family. She was a prodigy: she was only four, she later said, when she first felt inspired to testify to her spiritual commitment, and at eight and again at twelve she felt “the personal call from God” to preach and spread the word. At sixteen—her autobio-graphical narrative placed these experiences, conveniently, every four years—she reportedly preached her first public sermon, after which she was “saved” at a United Brethren service conducted by a woman evangelist. (“Girl evangelists” were in vogue at the time.) At eighteen she married schoolteacher Thomas Barr, who joined the Klan at her urging and began leading tent revivals around the state. In 1910 she became pastor of the Muncie, Indiana, Quaker meeting. (Female ministers were uncommon in mainstream white Protestantism but by no means entirely absent.) Soon she too was preaching at revivals, causing many of her listeners to be “saved” and at least one sick man to be cured. She was prolific on paper as well as out loud, writing a great deal of poetry like this:
I am clothed with wisdom’s mantle . . .
I am strong beyond my years;
My hand typifies strength,
And although untrained in cunning
Its movements mark the quaking
Of the enemies of my country.
My eye, though covered, is all-seeing;*
It penetrates the dark recesses of law violation,
Treason, political corruption and injustice,
Causing these cowardly culprits to bare their unholy faces . . .
My feet are swift to carry the strength of my hand
And the penetrations of my all-seeing eye.
My nature is serious, righteous and just,
And tempered with the love of Christ.
My purpose is noble, far-reaching and age-lasting . . .
I am the Spirit of Righteousness.
They call me the Ku Klux Klan.
I am more than the uncouth robe and hood
With which I am clothed.
YEA, I AM THE SOUL OF AMERICA.16
Daisy Barr thus fused religiosity and Klannishness with extraordinary confidence and without a touch of feminine meekness.
Like many other clubwomen of the time, Barr was a joiner, never limiting herself to a single affiliation. A woman of formidable energy, she also threw herself into an array of reform causes: president of the Indiana Humane Society, active in the campaign for Prohibition, creator of the Muncie YWCA (the Y’s were then fierce temperance and revivalist organizations), and founder of a “refuge,” the Friendly Inn, for former prostitutes. (Like many such reformers, she was baffled that the “fallen women” were not interested in being “rescued” by evangelicals.) When the Barrs moved to Indianapolis in 1917, Daisy became president of Indiana War Mothers. Soon after the woma
n suffrage amendment passed, she became the vice chair of the Republican State Committee, the first woman to hold such a position; the male co-chair joined the Klan, quite possibly, considering her charisma, at her urging. Meanwhile, her husband became Indiana’s deputy state bank commissioner. This was a power couple.
Barr soon became Imperial Empress of a women’s Klan affiliate, Queens of the Golden Mask. She wielded considerable bargaining power with Klansmen, a power enlarged when she established the “poison squad,” a statewide women’s network (of which more below). The squad practiced black psywar, spreading rumors, allegedly from Catholics or Jews, designed to make the alleged sources appear immoral and thus to build support for Klan political candidates. By 1923 she was head of the Indiana WKKK and a traveling speaker for the Klan itself. A whirlwind of energy, in July of that year she led a naturalization ceremony with two hundred women and claimed that one thousand would-be members were present but lacked the proper regalia required for admission. Three months later she led Indiana’s most spectacular Klan parade yet. So influential was the Indiana WKKK under her leadership that she almost succeeded in moving its national headquarters to Indianapolis.
As WKKK spokeswoman, Barr frequently broadcast feminist messages. Her reform work had long been oriented toward women, and she campaigned to have a woman added to the Indianapolis police force—a typical Progressive Era cause, motivated by the belief that women were less corrupt and harder on moral offenses than men. She once publicly reprimanded a police officer for uncouth remarks. Her speeches honored woman suffrage and urged women to make active use of their new political citizenship. Her temperance arguments featured stories of drunken male brutality, as befitted a member of the WCTU. She hurled vitriol against gamblers, adulterers, and men who patronized prostitutes and despoiled young girls. She called on women to support female candidates, to step up and exert power in their churches.
Her affiliations arose, no doubt, from firm principle, but they were also lucrative. She contracted with the Klan to be chief WKKK recruiter for Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, and Minnesota. The agreement guaranteed her a dollar for each woman initiated and four dollars for each recruit within Indiana. Moreover, she became the conduit for purchases of robes, from which she likely received a percentage of sales.17 (No wonder she refused to “naturalize” women who lacked the regalia.) But like Tyler, Barr was apparently not satisfied with these profits, and Klan leaders complained that she did not deliver the required sums to national headquarters. Numerous male Klan leaders did the same; the flow of money, combined with lack of accountability, presented irresistible temptations to corruption.
Klan feminism also appeared prominently in the work and words of the Rev. Alma Bridwell White. (See figure 20.) Although never an official of a Klan group, she was easily as influential as Barr in spreading its message. As evangelist, minister, and bishop, she founded the Pillar of Fire “holiness” congregations18 and gained a national fame through multitudinous lectures and wrote thirty-five religious books and some two hundred hymns.19 Her Pillar of Fire religious movement ultimately established fifty-two churches, not counting a few abroad, seven divinity schools, two radio stations, ten magazines and newsletters, and two colleges.20 Like Tyler and Barr, she displayed extraordinary entrepreneurial skills, but her bigotry surpassed theirs and rivaled that of any Klansman in its intensity.
Born in 1862 in Kentucky, one of seven sisters, White was also a girl evangelist. She found rebirth at age sixteen at a Wesleyan Methodist revival where, she later wrote, “some were so convicted that they left the room and threw up their suppers, and staggered back into the house as pale as death.”21 She enrolled in Millersburg Female College, then at age nineteen traveled on her own to Montana and Utah, where she taught school—clearly an adventurous teenager. She married Kent White, a seminarian, and the couple started an unsanctioned Methodist Pentecostal church in Denver.22 They soon broke with Pentacostalism and moved their church into the holiness movement, christening it Pillar of Fire. Already impatient with her husband, Alma White took over and soon became its recognized leader.
Defying protests from the Methodist hierarchy, White remained committed to arousing Pentecostal-style “enthusiastic” worship, with singing, shouting, dancing, and fits. Time magazine wrote that she generated “fundamentalist ecstasy and hallelujah-shouting.”23 Never particularly modest, she claimed the power to bring people to their knees, sobbing in an agony of contrition, or to “make them skip about the aisles, singing and shouting with joy.”24 As she described her method, she never prepared a sermon but chose a text and then waited for the “heavenly dynamite” to explode. Many Klan lecturers worked to induce a religious commitment among listeners, and many claimed biblical authorization for the Ku Klux Klan, but none as diligently as White. In writing and performing, she not only surpassed the fervor of Klan lecturers but even claimed that many biblical heroes were actually Klansmen. One of her many books, The Klan in Prophecy, reported that the KKK had been divinely ordained.
In 1907 one of the Whites’ converts, a rich widow, gifted them a large farm property in central New Jersey. The Whites moved there, naming it Zarephath, after the biblical village where the prophet Elijah raised the son of a widow from the dead. In 1918 White arranged for the evangelist who had converted her to consecrate her as Pillar of Fire’s bishop—the first woman bishop in the United States. She traveled the country speaking at revivals and camp meetings and established a mission in London, preaching against liquor and “present tendencies in women’s dress.”25 Her stamina and ambition outdid even the most committed Klan speakers; she claimed to have crossed the Atlantic fifty-eight times and traveled fifty thousand miles in one year.26
Zarephath flourished and expanded. Alma White was part of a trend: the 1920s produced numerous female preachers, particularly Pentacostal preachers, many of whom could arouse zealous followers through their tent revivals. Even a few more mainstream religious groups, such as Reform Jews, Northern Baptists, and Presbyterians, were giving women larger roles, and the Methodist Episcopals decided in 1920 to allow women deacons. (African American churches had female ministers much earlier.) In starting a new church, Alma White was following the example of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, although she labeled Eddy satanic. White compared herself favorably to Aimee Semple McPherson, the most popular evangelist of the time, who advertised her ten-thousand-member congregation as the largest in the world. White emulated McPherson in establishing a radio station, WAWZ, the letters standing for Alma White Zarephath. (In 1961 Pillar of Fire established station WAKW in Cincinnati, the letters referring to her son, Arthur Kent White.)27
Pillar of Fire distinguished itself from other holiness groups through its explicit and intensive support of the Ku Klux Klan. White’s writings and speeches focused on four pillars of Klan ideology: white supremacy, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and temperance. Perhaps because of her base in New Jersey, home of 117,000 African Americans in 1920, she emphasized racism against African Americans, while Klanspeople in locations with smaller black populations emphasized immigrants, Catholics, and Jews: “Social and political equality would plunge the world into an Inferno as black as the regions of night.” Noah cursed Ham, the black man, she reported, and ordered that he must be the servant of Japheth. “Whatever wrong may have been perpetrated against the Negro race by bringing black men to this country . . . the argument will not hold that they should share equal social or political rights with the white men—the sons of Japheth.” She advocated, therefore, repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. “America is a white man’s country and should be governed by white men. Yet the Klan is not anti-negro . . . [but] is eternally opposed to the mixing of the white and colored races. . . . God drew the color line and man should so let it remain.”28 “Red men” were equally doomed because God had given the land to the sons of Japheth.29
Her camp meetings and revivals began to feature cross-burnings and Klan l
ecturers. She published three books of praise for the Klan and a periodical devoted exclusively to the Klan, the Good Citizen, and offered positive appraisals of the Klan in her many other sermons, books, and hymnals.30 The Klan funded her purchase of Westminster College (later renamed Belleview College) in Westminster, Colorado, a dilapidated former Presbyterian school; located high on a hill, it proved a perfect location for cross-burnings that were visible for miles. She established there another Christian radio station, KPOF, known as AM91: The Point of Faith. Three years later the Klan provided the funds to establish Alma White College in Zarephath, used frequently for Klan meetings and large spectacles. In 1926 the Klan joined White in establishing a 396-acre summer resort for its members in Zarephath.
Alma White anointed the Klan as the country’s savior: “Now come the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in this crucial hour to contend for the faith of our fathers. . . . There is no longer any excuse for those who, like Elisha’s servant, have been blinded by the falsehoods propagated by the enemies of the Klan. . . . The Klan is a tree of God’s own planting.” She also situated the Klan in a historical patriotism: “Our heroes in the white robes are the perpetuators of the work so nobly begun by the colonists and the Revolutionary fathers.” She supported the Klan’s electoral activism: “They must name candidates who can be safely trusted, those who will not betray the public on questions of such vital importance as prohibition, restricted immigration, white supremacy and other issues.” She also called for “the prevention of unwarranted strikes by foreign labor agitators.”31
At the same time, White made no attempt to soft-pedal her feminism. She reprinted the 1848 “Declaration of Sentiments” from the famous Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in one of her books. She condemned women’s lack of legal rights vis-à-vis their husbands, calling for action against wife-beating and for women’s right to their own property and legal domicile. (In many states a husband could still control his wife’s property and require her to move with him anywhere he desired.) She called for sex equality in inheritance rights. Defying evangelical opposition to divorce, she argued for a woman’s entitlement to divorce in case of infidelity or threat to her personal safety. She denounced the practice of granting child custody to men in divorce—important because the risk of losing children was by far the most important factor keeping women in abusive marriages. And she supported the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923 (and, of course, still not ratified).32