Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  The paroxysms ended on January 1, 1920, when the Justice Department conducted raids in 33 cities and arrested 6,000 “dangerous aliens.” Three guns and no explosives were found. Yet in Hartford, Connecticut, anyone who visited the jailed aliens was also arrested.

  LATER THAT YEAR Republican Warren G. Harding won the presidency saying, “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not surgery but serenity.”

  A new Congress, seeking to prevent further dilution of 100 percent Americanism, passed “emergency” laws restricting immigration. Percy, ever concerned with the labor supply, unsuccessfully urged former Senate colleagues to defeat the bill, arguing that their fears were “fancied and certainly far distant,” that the danger of Bolshevism was “not real,” that “the crippling of the manpower of this nation is the one thing which will check its prosperity, check it effectually and for an indefinite duration.”

  But much of the nation wanted to smother change. The Fundamentals, a book financed by an oil millionaire and espousing a literal interpretation of the Bible, was published, and the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association was organized. Christian fundamentalism began a war against the teaching of evolution.

  Perhaps at no other time in American history, even including the 1960s, did so wide a gap develop between a mainstream culture that clung to its certainties and American intellectuals. Sinclair Lewis mocked Main Street, while F. Scott Fitzgerald declared “all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”

  The mainstream defended itself. The magazine of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce editorialized: “Dare to be Babbitt!…Good Rotarians live orderly lives, and save money, and go to church, and play golf, and send their children to school…. Would not the world be better with more Babbitts and fewer of those who cry, ‘Babbitt!’?”

  An article in American Magazine simply attacked anything that stood out. Entitled “Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men,” it explained, “[B]usiness and life are built upon successful mediocrity.”

  Normalcy reassured; sameness was comfortable; to be average meant to be secure.

  When Dr. Hiram Wesley Evans, a dentist, became Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, he defined himself as “the most average man in America.”

  D. W. GRIFFITH’S Birth of a Nation appeared in 1915. Its epic sweep, its driving narrative, its technical magnificence, and its length revolutionized Hollywood. Before it, movies rarely lasted more than thirty minutes and cost a nickel or less to attend (hence the name “nickelodeon”). Birth of a Nation cost $2 and ran for three hours. Yet in city after city lines stretched for blocks. By the end of World War I, nearly 25 million tickets had been sold.

  Thomas Dixon had written the novel The Clansman upon which the film was based. It portrayed blacks during Reconstruction as virtual jungle beasts who stole from, brutalized, and raped whites. It portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as mythic heroes fighting for decency and honor. He explained: “The real big purpose of my film was to revolutionize northern sentiment by [our] presentation of history…. Every man who comes out of our theaters is a Southern partisan for life.”

  The film had many critics and sparked many demonstrations. To counteract the criticism, Dixon showed it at the White House to his college classmate Woodrow Wilson, telling him the film marked “the launching of the mightiest engine for moulding public opinion in the history of the world.” After viewing it, Wilson, a southerner who had segregated the previously integrated federal bureaucracy, said: “It is like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

  A few days before the film’s 1915 opening in Atlanta, Colonel William Joseph Simmons climbed Stone Mountain, burned a cross, and announced the rebirth of the Klan.

  At the time, Simmons sold memberships in the Woodmen of the World for a living, and the Woodmen—not the military—had made him a colonel. He also belonged to eleven similar groups, and when asked his profession he replied, “I am a fraternalist.”

  Simmons’ sale of memberships in his new Klan went slowly until, in 1920, he signed a contract with Edward Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler, whose Southern Publicity Association had raised money for the Red Cross and the Anti-Saloon League of America. The three agreed that new Klan members would pay an initiation fee of $10. Of that, Clarke and Tyler would get $8, out of which they paid $4 to “kleagles,” full-time commission salesmen, for each recruit, and small commissions to other Klan officers. Eventually, 1,200 kleagles were on the road. Membership exploded.

  The Klan’s message combined the binding forces of hyperpatriotism and moralistic Christianity with the excluding forces of disdain for elites, cities, and intellectuals. And of course the Klan preached hatred of Catholics, blacks, foreigners, and Jews. The world, the Klan said, was falling apart, but a crusading Klan would put things right. One Klansman proclaimed: “It is going to drive the bootleggers forever out of this land. It is going to bring clean moving pictures…clean literature…protect homes. It means the return of old-time Southern chivalry and deference to womanhood; it means that ‘the married man with an affinity’ has no place in our midst.”

  The message struck home. By the early 1920s at least 3 million Americans belonged to the Invisible Empire; some estimates were as high as 8 million. It had 300,000 members in Ohio, 200,000 in Pennsylvania. It seized control of state governments in Colorado and Indiana, where one scholar estimates between one-quarter and one-third of all native-born white males belonged. It elected the mayors of Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine. It recalled the governor of Oklahoma, dominated parts of California, and passed a state law in Oregon requiring Catholic children to attend public schools.

  There were two Americas now, one accepting and advancing into the insecurity of an uncertain age and one holding back and searching for something to grasp onto. And the two nations were growing further apart. “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” observed Willa Cather.

  In 1922 the Invisible Empire entered the demesne of LeRoy Percy.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IN GREENVILLE the tone of race relations was shifting. Before World War I, when a court outside Washington County ordered Nathan Taylor, a black Greenville attorney, to stand in the gallery with black defendants, white Greenville attorneys objected and protected him from a sheriff who tried to beat him. In 1920, Taylor was elected president of the National Equal Rights League. One night four white men tied his hands behind him, rowed him out to vicious whirlpools in the middle of the Mississippi River, and told him he was leaving Greenville one way or another. Taylor moved to Chicago and became the first black there to run, though unsuccessfully, for Congress.

  A year after the Taylor incident, a Klan klavern was organized in Washington County. Its leaders were ambitious men, men who intended to use the Klan to become bigger men.

  Percy had run the county for as long as anyone could remember. Deep into the night the lights often stayed on in his law office in the Weinberg Building, where he sat down with a few men to decide who would serve as county supervisor, or city councilman, or mayor, or state senator. Notably absent from those meetings was LeRoy’s son and law partner Will, a war hero and a poet. Usually present were Joe Weinberg, a wealthy Jewish banker, planter Alfred Stone, and Billy Wynn, younger than Will and also a war hero, a comer with his own law firm who also owned a Mississippi River ferry on which passengers could play slot machines. Their support nearly always meant victory; their opposition meant defeat. “Percy would almost draft people he wanted to run for office,” recalled one man. “I’d walk by and look up and see the lighted window and think, ‘They’re running the city up there.’”

  The men organizing the klavern believed it was time for that to change. By early 1922 the Klan had already taken over the Mississippi hill country, the central part of the state, and penetrated even the Delta counties of Bolivar and Coahoma north of Greenville, Sunflower to the east, Issaquena to the south.

  The klavern met for weeks without Per
cy’s knowledge, itself a sign of weakness and change. Years before, nothing of consequence could have been kept secret from him. Then the klavern arranged for Colonel Joseph Camp, one of the most successful of the Klan’s organizers, to hold a recruiting rally at the county courthouse.

  IN FEBRUARY 1922, Percy could look out his office window across the levee and see the Mississippi River rising. It had been several years since the last flood, and the river worried him. It took priority over everything—except, just for the moment, the Klan.

  The Klan was personal. His wife, Camille, was Catholic; her parents had emigrated from France to New Orleans, then come upriver to Greenville after the Civil War. And the kind of men who joined the Klan, men whom his son Will described as “the inflammable, uneducated whites whom the best part of our lives is spent in controlling,” had humiliated him once already, during his Senate campaign.

  After that Senate campaign, LeRoy had retreated to Washington County. Now the Klan was challenging him in his home. His father had kept the Klan out of the county even during Reconstruction. Now, no matter what happened in the rest of Mississippi, even in the rest of the Delta, LeRoy Percy would tolerate no rebellion in Washington County. If the Klan spread there, it would shatter the society he had struggled to build.

  Immediately upon learning of the planned Klan rally, he called to his office influential men who opposed the organization. They decided that when the recruiter spoke, Percy would answer him, and they would try to pack the rally with Klan opponents. Typically, to a planter scheduled to be out of town on business, Percy sent a special delivery note explaining the plan: “A Ku Klux orator is booked to speak at the courthouse Wednesday evening at seven o’clock…. We concluded to pass resolutions condemning the Ku Klux Klan…. It would be advisable for you to attend…. It is very essential that we put through the resolution by a large majority.”

  The Klan had reserved the courthouse for March 1, 1922. That evening the crowd, not knowing who was friend or enemy, seethed inside the massive Victorian building. The black neighborhood, the black brothels for the white men, the juke joints, the pool halls, were within a few blocks, but no blacks were in view. Percy called for the county sheriff to chair the meeting. The sheriff said simply, “Colonel Camp will now address you.”

  Tall and angular, with square sharp shoulders, Camp had a riveting energy. He pumped his arms, pounded fist against lectern, strode the length of the platform and back, preaching pride: Pride in America! Pride in Mississippi! Pride in the white race! Then he began to preach hate. Who killed Garfield and McKinley? A Catholic. Who had bought land opposite West Point as well as in Washington? The Pope. Jews were organized! Catholics were organized! Niggers were organized! The only people in America who weren’t organized were the Anglo-Saxons! Debauchery, lechery, drinking, horrors that he hardly dare speak of were going on right here in Washington County. God wanted it to stop. The Klan would stop it. They were a million strong, and growing stronger every day.

  Camp finished in an uproar. Many clapped and shouted for him. Others broke into a loud chant: “Percy!” “Percy!” “Percy!”

  Camp had given hundreds of speeches, recruited thousands of men. Never before had any man answered him.

  Percy did. He spoke for an hour, mixing logic and sarcasm. His message was simple. They were a community whose members loved one another. He smiled with sarcasm and held out his hands to “this eminent orator, this colonel, under what flag he won his title or what battlefield he trod we know not.” He spoke of his Jewish partner and snorted that Camp was right, “There are times I think he needs straightening out.” Listeners laughed. This Jew had loaned Gentiles in the county $150,000 at less than half the market interest rates. “Don’t you know that Jew ought to be regulated.” He was “alarmed” about “this Catholic encroachment on our Government…. Do you know that after ten years of domination by that grand hierarchy of the Church…they have managed to get hold of our city government?…They have got Boots, as constable…. Took them ten years to get this far. Where will a hundred years take them?”

  Still, his concern was not “this war on Catholics and Jews…. They can take care of themselves. But I know the terror this organization embodies for our negro population and I am here to plead against it…. The shifting of the population from the South to the North—you cannot stop that trend. It is going on as the result of industrial call to better opportunity. You cannot stop it, but you can expedite it. Instead of making it a matter of 35 years or 50 years, during which the South can readjust itself, you can make it an exodus within a year…. You can make three parades in the county of Washington of your Ku Klux Klan and never say another word and you can start the grass growing in the streets of Greenville.”

  He concluded angrily, denouncing this “gang of spies and inquisitors,” then pleading: “Friends, let this Klan go somewhere else where it will not do the harm that it will in this community. Let them sow dissension in some community less united than is ours. Let this order go somewhere else if there is any place it can do any good. It can do no good here.”

  Dr. J. D. Smythe, officer of a bank on whose board Percy served, seized the moment. He rose and offered a resolution that he and Percy had drafted: “Be it resolved by the citizens of Washington County, Mississippi, in mass meeting assembled, that we do hereby condemn that organization called by itself the Ku Klux Klan, but having no connection with the real Ku Klux Klan, which, having served its usefulness, was dissolved many years ago…. Its impertinent assumption of the right to judge the private life of American citizens…is against the spirit of free institutions and the traditions and laws of our country, and is unAmerican.”

  With a loud roar, by voice vote the resolution passed. Camp was shaken and asked for protection. With elaborate courtesy an Irish Catholic policeman escorted him back to the Cowan Hotel.

  PERCY’S SPEECH was reprinted in newspapers from New York to Houston. Leading Greenville blacks signed a letter to him reading: “If we had Mr. Percy in every county of the state there would be no Klan and the less fortune [sic] people would not be terrorized…. The colored people will feel much safer and more willing to live here and go on in trying to develop this our state of Mississippi.” The Knights of Columbus distributed thousands of copies of the speech. Ellery Sedgwick, the Atlantic Monthly editor who had visited Greenville as a guest of LeRoy and Will, ran it as an article. Letters of praise and requests to speak poured in from around the country. Percy always declined, telling those who invited him that it would have “much stronger effect” for a “local man to reply.”

  But Percy knew his fight had not ended. Preparing for an extended struggle, he contacted three newspaper clipping services for information on the Klan. And he seemed to consider the fight a last stand of his class. To a friend he confided, “The eagerness with which…this Ku Klux Klan folly is received in the South…is a reflection of the fading away of the old aristocracy of the South, which with its many faults and weaknesses is yet far and away the best thing the South has yet produced. In the olden days as gentlemen we were something of a success. In the latter days as money seekers we are sorrowful figures in the competition with the more highly trained brains of the East and the more virile and unscrupulous products of the West…. [H]e is an optimist indeed who today can name the day or point the way” to the disappearance of the Klan.

  Indeed, the night after being humiliated by Percy, Camp had spoken in Bolivar County, just upriver from Greenville, and announced that the Knights of Columbus had paid Percy, whose wife was a Catholic, $1,000 to confront him. Two weeks later the Leland Enterprise, located in the Klan’s Washington County stronghold, published a letter from the Klan: “To all Flag and Liberty Loving, Law Abiding Citizens: In the name of our venerated dead,…We are going to make this a place in which you will be glad to rear your children…. To bootleggers, gamblers, and all other law-breakers, We are making an appeal at this time to clean up…. There are married men in this town who are not treating their
wives right, we know who you are,…change your way…. To the boys who take girls out automobile riding, and park their cars by the roadside: Had you ever thought that what you do, some other boy is entitled to do with your sister?…To the Negroes: We are your best friend, but we wish you to do right…We have our eyes on you, and we are many; we are everywhere…. Dated this the Deadly Day, of the Wailing Week, of the Sorrowful Month…. Yours for a better country, Knights of the K.K.K.”

  THE TOWN OF MER ROUGE lay a little more than 60 miles south of Greenville, across the Mississippi River in northeastern Louisiana. Less than 10 miles from it was the town of Bastrop. Both towns were in Morehouse Parish (in Louisiana, counties are called parishes), but the hostility between them was palpable. Mer Rouge had the same alluvial soil as Greenville, and it was home to planters who traveled, gambled, whored with black women, mocked Prohibition, mocked the Baptists, and mocked the Klan. But political power in the parish had already shifted from the planters to populists; the parish was in the part of Louisiana that served as the base for Huey Long, then a rising politician.

  Bastrop sat beyond a ridge that was just high enough—about 15 feet—to contain the river’s floods and thus prevent the deposit of lush soil. The town epitomized the industrial New South, with gritty mills, poor whites who had been forced off the land, and a narrow-minded middle class. The Klan did not so much take over Bastrop as embody it, and J. K. Skipwith, the local Exalted Cyclops, was a former Bastrop mayor. Since 1889, on a per capita basis, more lynchings had occurred in Morehouse Parish than in any other county in the United States. One mob had bound a black man’s hands and legs and placed him inside the body of a dead cow with only his head sticking out, so he would die slowly while insects and birds were attracted to the moisture of his eyes, mouth, and nostrils, and crawled in his ears.