by Linda Gordon
But we can ask, what did a person stand to gain by joining? The Klan had a few rich members, but on the whole the rich had little to gain from membership.2 The very poor could not afford it. “Middling” people, by contrast, often had much to gain. Few of the Klan’s national leaders were born wealthy; they became rich at the expense of their members. The boycotts could promote economic success by shoring up some businesses at the expense of others. The opportunity to earn a commission by recruiting new members attracted some. The connections made through the Klaverns could lead to jobs, customers, investment opportunities. Sinclair Lewis noticed this, writing in Elmer Gantry of “the new Ku Klux Klan, an organization of the fathers, younger brothers and employees of the men who had succeeded and became Rotarians.”
Class identities, aspirations, and insecurities were not, however, only economic. In many areas Klan membership brought prestige, perhaps more in the North and West than in the South. Recognizing this shows how off-base were eastern liberal stereotypes of Klanspeople as backward, bored small-town dwellers. Klansmen were often ambitious, and not only economically. In bringing community status, Klan membership could not only advantage those on the way up but also offer compensatory status to those stuck in one social level or even on the way down.
Moreover, local Klans typically brought lower-middle-class people together with skilled workers, as Robert Johnston found in studying Portland. In the process, the Klan helped redefine “middle class” so as to bring in men who did manual labor. Its emphasis on patriotism, religious affiliation, temperance, and sexual morality made membership a marker of respectability, and thus helped some working-class members become middle-class. That status required not only constructing a personal identity with these attributes of respectability but also being seen by others as middle-class.3 (Precisely because respectability was fundamental in building the Klan, when it was ruptured by scandals the Klan went into free fall.) This was as true of women as of men. Joining was often a sign of ambition. One could become middle-class by being treated as an equal through the brotherhood and sisterhood of local Klan groups.
Prestige could be equally important to those who already considered themselves middle-class. Historian Arno Mayer’s argument about the European petite bourgeoisie of this interwar period—that it was the most insecure and status-conscious of all social strata—fits the Klan well.4 Masses of immigrants intensified that insecurity. Those newcomers, no less ambitious than the native-born, threatened a dominance that many white native-born Protestants considered a form of social property. This anger at displacement, blamed on “aliens,” sometimes rested on actual experience but more often on imagination and fear stoked by demagoguery. We know this because the Klan flourished in locations with few “aliens,” and many local leaders were prosperous.
In this process of reclassifying working-class people as middle class, the Klan contributed to shaping that new, broader class identity. Klan spokesmen confirmed that spreading identity, paradoxically, in its claim that its adherents came from “all walks of life,” that its “100% Americans” transcended class. It might seem that the Klan was contradicting that claim when it boasted of representing the “best” citizens, but that boast could also be read as a statement that the middle class was “best.” For example, while more than three-quarters of Oakland, California, members lived in the affluent outer areas and suburbs of the city, often in Berkeley and Piedmont, many got there through upward mobility. For example, Klan Klaliff William H. Parker, starting as a real estate agent and insurance salesman, became a key developer of Oakland’s new upscale residential areas, and first president of the East Oakland Consolidated Clubs, an organization dedicated to getting improved service for the new neighborhoods. He soon became city commissioner of streets.5 Thus in examining the Klan’s class base, we once again confront the need to see the class trajectory of its members.
Still, the Klan’s contemporary opponents who labeled it a populist group, representing people who were losing out, or unsophisticated and ill-educated, were mistaken. Some Klaverns included a community’s most influential people; in California’s six largest cities, for example, Klansmen constituted “a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of local and county officials.”6 Whether their status was new or old, many Klansmen belonged to a distinctly upper middle class, often managers, businessmen, or professionals. Membership lists included engineers, chemists, physicians, pharmacists, dentists, accountants, schoolteachers, artists, and veterinarians. Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, the noted sculptor who designed the carved faces on Mount Rushmore, was a member.7 In Oregon members included numerous attorneys, owners of big farms, a prominent automobile dealer, and officials of the telephone company, Standard Oil, and the Southern Pacific Railroad.8 Moreover, these data include only members; if Klan sympathizers could be counted, we might very well see more upscale men. No study has yet examined class differences within the Klan, so we do not know if its officers were of higher status than its rank and file. Research on that question could be productive.
Still, most studies agree that the majority of Klanspeople came from the “middling” classes and that white-collar and low-professional employees, along with small businessmen, were overrepresented among Klansmen.9 In Chicago, 61 percent were in white-collar occupations.10 Historian Robert A. Goldberg classified 71 percent of Denver Klan members as high and middle nonmanual workers, as compared to 41 percent of all Denver men.11 Samples of membership lists from Colorado, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee show, for example, that Klansmen had slightly higher rates of literacy than their peers. But studies of state and local Klans make generalization more difficult. In Oregon, one of the strongest Klan states, literacy was nearly universal, so that measure does not apply. In one location Klansmen were more likely to be heads of household than were their peers, but in most locations Klan and non-Klan men were equal in this regard. In some locations Klansmen were more likely than other residents to own their own homes, but in some locations they were not.12 The Oregon Klans showed great local variation, including variation in what counts as “middling,” as for example in Tillamook, where dairy farm owners dominated.13
While labeling Klansmen “middling,” “white-collar,” or “petite bourgeois” tells us little, other characteristics provide more information. A large proportion were members of other fraternal orders, especially Masons. Kleagles, the Klan’s traveling recruiters, always approached Masons first when entering a new town, and Klan advertisements often specified “Masons preferred,” a designation that served also to imbue the Klan with the Masons’ prestige.14 Men already socialized to the advantages and pleasures of fraternities were ready to join a new one. In a Michigan county, for example, 73 percent of Klansmen also belonged to other fraternal orders, the majority to the Masons and Odd Fellows, and 46 percent of Klanswomen likewise.15 It bears repeating that the Klan was no more discriminatory than most fraternal orders, which were racially, religiously, and gender-wise exclusionary.16
An occupational breakdown tells us more about the groups most attracted by the Klan. The single largest group were small businessmen, including farmers, and their employees, typically white-collar employees. Employees’ participation is not surprising, since they were likely to share employers’ values, to be subject to employers’ pressure, to want employers’ approval, or to enjoy participating in a fraternity alongside their employers.17
The second-largest group, proportional to their numbers in the population, was probably ministers, particularly among Klan officers. Among the estimated forty thousand Protestant ministers who were members, many became Exalted Cyclopses and Grand Dragons. Many more who were not members praised the Klan in sermons or revivals and allowed Klanspeople to use their churches; their captive audiences made them particularly valuable to the Klan. Accomplished orators, Klan ministers preached at big Klonvocations and became traveling Klan lecturers.18 The Klan’s denunciations of non-Protestants naturally appealed to ministers, but it also helped that men of th
e cloth could join without paying dues.19 Ministers, like others, could earn from Klecktokens through their influence on others. If the ministers could not be enticed by personal gain, it was hard for them to refuse the frequent Klan donations to their churches.
When David Curtis Stephenson took over as Indiana Grand Dragon, he criticized the previous focus on recruiting prominent citizens and looked toward employees in the law-and-order business. He knew what he was doing: lawmen and their families joined in large numbers, not only in Indiana but throughout the country.20 Police chiefs and sheriffs were particularly likely to join, which encouraged their subordinates to follow. Often whole police forces were in or allied with the Klan (except, of course, in locations with many Irish Catholics on the force, as in Boston or New York). The Klan’s law-and-order orientation and its unquestioning support for law officers invited their allegiance. Klan membership strengthened the “blue line” of “police brotherhood, right or wrong.” The Klan-police fit was mutual: professional lawmen enjoyed the support and help of amateur vigilantes, while the amateurs relished the imprimatur of the professionals. Both groups pulsed to the Klan’s masculinist beat and to its racial and religious assumptions that it was people of color, Catholics, and Jews who committed crimes.
Plenty of working-class men did join the Klan. Robert and Helen Lynd, in their iconic study of Muncie, Indiana, got the impression that businessmen were early joiners but that after a year or so “the Klan became largely a working class movement.”21 If this trajectory is correct, it supports the conclusion that workers thought Klan membership would bring higher status, aka middle-class identity. In some locations even workers in large-scale industrial operations joined, and while their motives reflected the ambiguity and local diversity of Klan sentiments—sometimes denouncing big money, sometimes proudly advertising wealthy members—they were almost always angry about immigrants.22 Eighty percent of one Indiana UMW local were Klan members, 50 to 75 percent of another.23 In Kansas in 1922, railroad workers on strike flocked into the Klan. In Wisconsin, many German American socialists joined the Klan, and John Kleist was elected to the state supreme court as a Klansman on the Socialist Party ticket.24 In Evansville, Indiana, among those who were “deputized” when the Klan paid off the police, 40 percent were railroad and factory workers, miners, and servants.25 But in other places workers fought the Klan, and in Oregon, the only district giving Klan candidates less than a two-thirds majority was an area where railroad workers lived.26 These apparent anomalies remind us of the Klan’s great local variation.
The membership evidence demonstrates at the very least that white industrial workers, even those loyal to their unions, had no immunity from bigotry. That blue-collar workers were a minority in the Klan cannot be taken as a sign that their class consciousness made them critical of it. Those workers hostile to the Klan may have been motivated more by ethnic and/or religious identities than by class consciousness, and those who joined may have been motivated by a bandwagon effect or a desire to hobnob with social superiors. It bears repeating, also, that the cost of Klan membership may have kept out many workers.
Still, Klan power rested on the willingness of elites, both political and economic, to go along. “For courts and legislatures . . . are controlled by one power and one alone, in Oklahoma—money, and not the Klan,” charged a writer for the New Republic.27 As a historian summed up the Klan’s success in Indiana, “The business-first crowd held the fort, with organized labor on the run, the ‘yellow-dog’ contract nailed to factory doors.”28 The Klan advanced no reforms that could help workers, farmers, or small-business people, let alone those who were struggling.
Sociologist Kathleen Blee analyzed the characteristics of Klanswomen (in a small Indiana group), the only scholar to do so, although she could not compare their demographics to those of their town. Her findings match what we know about Klansmen, with a few surprises. Only 16 percent were probably single—they had no “Mrs.” in front of their names, as was customary then. But even that small proportion of single women was higher than in the general population (10 percent).29 Of the 84 percent who were or had been married, few had husbands also in the Klan (Blee could find only five); this might suggest women’s independent initiative and support for Klan values. Most surprising is the fact that a quarter of the women worked for wages, a higher figure than the overall 15 percent of white women, including immigrants, who were wage-earners in 1920. (The rate for African American women was double that, 30 percent, but of course they were not eligible to be in the Klan.) Of those whose occupations could be found, 28 percent were professionals or business owners, while 33 percent of their husbands were. An astounding 44 percent worked full-time in politics, as party officials, officeholders, or paid staff for the WKKK; however, it seems likely that more information was available about these than about the other Klanswomen, so the actual proportion of paid political operatives was probably smaller. Less surprising is the fact that the majority belonged to other organizations, especially the women’s auxiliaries of the fraternal societies.30 This information comes from a very small sample in one state, but it matches what we know about the men. The information also suggests something quite logical: that women who were inclined toward community activism and comfortable with public visibility joined the Invisible Empire.
The Ku Klux Klan, then, attracted just enough class diversity that it could claim to represent “middle America.” Its community- and identity-building served to construct a collective political subject that simultaneously denied class differences, asserted a class position—middle-class—and repudiated class conflict. Its recruitment, rituals, and celebrations functioned, or tried, to obscure class differences within the Klan. It claimed to represent all “right” Americans. By defining those in restricted racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological terms, it contributed both to myths of classlessness and to today’s notion of a vast middle class that includes all except the very rich and the very poor. And it helped some to become middle-class while broadening that label in such a way as to dilute its content.
KKK pageant, 1925. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC [LC-F81-36625])
Chapter 11
LEGACY: DOWN BUT NOT OUT
IN THE LATE 1920S, THE KLAN WANED IN INFLUENCE and membership fell almost as rapidly as it had arisen. By 1927 Klan membership had shrunk from several million to about 350,000. Leaders’ profiteering—gouging members through dues and the sale of Klan paraphernalia, not to mention criminal embezzlement—grew harder for members to ignore. Power struggles among leaders produced splits and even rival Klans under different names, such as the Allied Protestant Americans and the Improved Order of Klansmen. Rank-and-file resentment transformed the Klan’s already high turnover into mass shrinkage as millions of members either failed to pay dues or formally withdrew.
Worse, scandals exposing its leaders’ crimes, hypocrisy, and misbehavior hit both local and national newspapers. In Oregon, dentist Ellis O. Willson was twice convicted for raping his secretary and killing her while attempting to perform an abortion. Philip Fox, editor of the Imperial Night-Hawk, was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing his rival, William S. Coburn. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans attempted to stanch the bleeding from Fox’s crime by calling it a “personal affair.”1 In Indiana, Klan member Governor Ed Jackson was indicted for bribery, the officers of the state’s major Klan bank were indicted for embezzlement and grand larceny, and a Klan minister was accused of crimes “so sensational that persons who heard the sordid details were loath to believe they were true.”2
Klan vigilantism evoked protests and occasional arrests, and once its brazenness forced even the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, hardly known for his liberalism, to act. (This case was in the South, where Klan violence was far greater than in the North.) The anti-Prohibition governor of Louisiana discovered in 1922 that Klansmen were not only intercepting his mail and monitoring his phone calls but had killed two of his allies. Examination of the corpses
showed that they had been tortured, but Klan-supporting juries refused to convict the accused. Hoover sent FBI agents to investigate. With a chutzpah that reflected their naïveté, Klansmen warned that they would “take care” of the federal agents. Pressed by the governor, Hoover charged eighteen Klan operatives with conspiracy, but once again the jury refused to convict. So he tackled the Klan at an angle: as it had done in charging Al Capone with tax evasion, the FBI prosecuted Klan leader Edward Clarke for violating Prohibition and the Mann Act (which criminalized taking an unmarried woman across state lines for “immoral purposes”).3
At a more mundane level, merchants frequently complained that the Klan did not pay its bills, no doubt partly because its leaders’ megalomania led to extravagant expenditures and unrealistic projects.4 Supposedly loyal officials betrayed their Klan backers, refusing to meet demands regarding patronage appointments. Oregon’s Governor Pierce, no doubt receiving some anti-Klan pressure, refused to appoint the Klan’s favored candidate as secretary of the Oregon State Board of Control, a position desirable because the occupant could collect bribes, or “commissions,” from businesses contracted with the state government.5
The Klan’s final undoing was Indiana Grand Dragon Stephenson’s conviction for kidnapping, raping, and murdering his secretary, an over-the-top scandal covered widely in the national press. Always one of the least disciplined of Klan leaders, Stephenson provided an irresistible subject for journalists and writers; the first biography appeared just a few years after his trial, in 1927.6 His hypocrisy is stunning. He drank heavily and entertained lavishly, with Klan money; on one gig he sailed Lake Erie on his yacht accompanied by a senator, several congressmen, and a large group of state-level politicians. He would often go directly from heading a Klan parade to “private orgies of dissipation.” His lieutenants kept their complaints in-house, sworn to Klan secrecy and no doubt bought off by the spoils that Stephenson distributed to his loyalists.7 Soon after he assumed power in Indiana, rumors of immorality began to circulate, not only about his drinking but also about sexual assaults. One woman who survived an encounter with him at the Kokomo Klonvocation, described in this book’s opening, called him “a beast when he is drunk.” He pled guilty to indecent exposure when caught with his pants down in his Cadillac with another young woman. In January 1924, he tried to force himself on a manicurist whom he had summoned to his hotel room. Later that year yet another woman told police investigators that during a party at his house, he locked her in a room, knocked her down, bit her, and attempted to rape her. (His biting was not only spooky but also a repeated behavior, suggesting serious derangement.) Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, alarmed but anxious to avoid negative publicity, had Stephenson tried by a Klan tribunal, which found him guilty and called for his expulsion from the Klan. But his Indiana power base apparently made it impossible for Evans to oust him. Stephenson responded defiantly and continued to rule the Klan in Indiana, transforming it de facto into an autonomous organization.