The Ku Klux Klan lay largely dormant until 1915, when D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (originally titled The Clansman) helped spark its rebirth. Griffith presented the Klan as crusaders for white civilization itself, and as one of the noblest forces in American history. The film quoted a line from A History of the American People, written by a renowned historian: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” The historian in question was U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, onetime scholar and president of Princeton University.
By the 1920s, a revived Klan claimed eight million members. This time around, the Klan was not confined to the South but ranged throughout the country; this time, it concerned itself not only with blacks but also with Catholics, Jews, communists, unionists, immigrants, agitators, and other disrupters of the status quo. In 1933, with Hitler ascendant in Germany, Will Rogers was the first to draw a line between the new Klan and the new threat in Europe: “Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini,” he wrote. “Looks to me like it’s the Ku Klux that he is copying.”
The onset of World War II and a number of internal scandals once again laid the Klan low. Public sentiment turned against the Klan as the unity of a country at war trumped its message of separatism.
But within a few years, there were already signs of a massive revival. As wartime anxiety gave way to postwar uncertainty, Klan membership flourished. Barely two months after V-J Day, the Klan in Atlanta burned a 300-foot cross on the face of Stone Mountain, site of a storied rock carving of Robert E. Lee. The extravagant cross burning, one Klansman later said, was intended “just to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is back on the market.”
Atlanta had by now become Klan headquarters. The Klan was thought to hold great sway with key Georgia politicians, and its Georgia chapters were said to include many policemen and sheriff’s deputies. Yes, the Klan was a secret society, reveling in passwords and cloak-and-dagger ploys, but its real power lay in the very public fear that it fostered, exemplified by the open secret that the Ku Klux Klan and the law-enforcement establishment were brothers in arms.
Atlanta—the Imperial City of the KKK’s Invisible Empire, in Klan jargon—was also home to Stetson Kennedy, a thirty-year-old man with the bloodlines of a Klansman but a temperament that ran opposite. He came from a good southern family which claimed ancestors including two signers of the Declaration of Independence, an officer in the Confederate Army, and John B. Stetson, founder of the famed hat company and the man for whom Stetson University was named.
Stetson Kennedy grew up in a fourteen-room house in Jacksonville, Florida, the youngest of five children. His uncle Brady was a Klansman. But Kennedy would go on to become a self-described “dissident at large,” writing numberless articles and several books that railed against bigotry. He first worked as a folklorist, traveling around Florida to collect old native tales and songs. Years later, when he served as a rare white correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s largest black newspaper, he wrote under the pseudonym Daddy Mention—after a black folk hero who, as myth told it, could outrun the blast of a sheriff’s shotgun.
What drove Kennedy was a hatred of small-mindedness, ignorance, obstructionism, and intimidation—which, in his view, were displayed by no organization more proudly than the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy saw the Klan as the terrorist arm of the white establishment itself. This struck him as an intractable problem, for a variety of reasons. The Klan was in cahoots with political, business, and law-enforcement leaders. The public was frightened and felt powerless to act against the Klan. And the few anti-hate groups that existed at the time had little leverage or even information about the Klan. “Almost all of the things written on the subject were editorials, not exposés,” Kennedy would later explain. “The writers were against the Klan, all right, but they had precious few inside facts about it.”
So Kennedy set out to gather those facts. He would spend years interviewing Klan leaders and sympathizers, sometimes taking advantage of his own background and lineage to pretend that he was on their side of the issues. He also attended public Klan events and, as he would later write, he even set about to infiltrate the Klan in Atlanta.
The Klan Unmasked, Kennedy’s memoir of his exploits “inside” the Klan, is in fact more of a novelization than a straight nonfiction account. Kennedy, a folklorist at heart, apparently wanted to put across the most dramatic story possible, and therefore included not only his own anti-Klan activities but those of another man, code-named John Brown. Brown was a union worker and a former Klan official who had changed his ways and offered to infiltrate the Klan. It was John Brown who apparently performed many of the most dramatic and dangerous episodes portrayed in The Klan Unmasked—physically attending Klan meetings and other functions in Atlanta—but since Stetson Kennedy was the man who later wrote the book, he rendered Brown’s actions as his own.
Regardless, there was a great deal of information to be gleaned from this Brown/Kennedy collaboration. Brown divulged what he was learning at the weekly Klan meetings: the identities of the Klan’s local and regional leaders; their upcoming plans; the Klan’s current rituals, passwords, and language. It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.) The secret Klan handshake was a left-handed, limp-wristed fish wiggle. When a traveling Klansman wanted to locate brethren in a strange town, he would ask for a “Mr. Ayak”—“Ayak” being code for “Are You a Klansman?” He would hope to hear this response: “Yes, and I also know a Mr. Akai”—code for “A Klansman Am I.”
Before long, John Brown was invited to join the Klavaliers, the Klan’s secret police and “flog squad.” For an infiltrator, this posed a particularly sticky problem: What would happen if he were called upon to inflict violence?
But as it happened, a central tenet of life in the Klan—and of terrorism in general—is that most of the threatened violence never goes beyond the threat stage.
Consider lynching, the Klan’s hallmark sign of violence. Here, compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, are the decade-by-decade statistics on the lynching of blacks in the United States:
Bear in mind that these figures represent not only lynchings attributed to the Ku Klux Klan but the total number of reported lynchings. The statistics reveal at least three noteworthy facts. The first is the obvious decrease in lynchings over time. The second is the absence of a correlation between lynchings and Klan membership: there were actually more lynchings of blacks between 1900 and 1909, when the Klan was dormant, than during the 1920s, when the Klan had millions of members—which suggests that the Ku Klux Klan carried out far fewer lynchings than is generally thought.
Third, relative to the size of the black population, lynchings were exceedingly rare. To be sure, one lynching is one too many. But by the turn of the century, lynchings were hardly the everyday occurrence that they are often considered in the public recollection. Compare the 281 victims of lynchings in the 1920s to the number of black infants who were dying at that time as a result of malnutrition, pneumonia, diarrhea, and the like. As of 1920, about 13 out of every 100 black children died in infancy, or roughly 20,000 children each year—compared to 28 people who were lynched in a year. As late as 1940, about 10,000 black infants died each year.
What larger truths do these lynching figures suggest? What does it mean that lynchings were relatively rare and that they fell precipitously over time, even in the face of a boom in Klan membership?
The most compelling explanation is that all those early lynchings worked. White racists—whether or not they belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—had through their actions and their rhetoric developed a strong incentive scheme that was terribly clear and terribly frightening. If a black person violated the accepted code of behavior, whether by talking back to a bus driver or daring to try to vote, he knew he might well be punished, perhaps by death.
So it
may be that by the mid-1940s, when Stetson Kennedy was trying to bust up the Klan, it didn’t really need to use as much violence. Many blacks, having long been told to behave like second-class citizens—or else—simply obliged. One or two lynchings went a long way toward inducing docility among even a large group of people, for people respond strongly to strong incentives. And there are few incentives more powerful than the fear of random violence—which, in essence, is why terrorism is so effective.
But if the Ku Klux Klan of the 1940s wasn’t uniformly violent, what was it? The Klan that Stetson Kennedy wrote about was in fact a sorry fraternity of men, most of them poorly educated and with poor prospects, who needed a place to vent—and an excuse for occasionally staying out all night. That their fraternity engaged in quasi-religious chanting and oath taking and hosanna hailing, all of it top secret, made it that much more appealing.
Kennedy also found the Klan to be a slick money-making operation, at least for those near the top of the organization. Klan leaders had any number of revenue sources: thousands of dues-paying rank-and-file members; business owners who hired the Klan to scare off the unions or who paid the Klan protection money; Klan rallies that generated huge cash donations; even the occasional gunrunning or moonshine operation. Then there were rackets like the Klan’s Death Benefit Association, which sold insurance policies to Klan members and accepted only cash or personal checks made out to the Grand Dragon himself.
And, even though the Klan may not have been as deadly as generally thought, it was plenty violent and, perhaps worse, had ever greater designs on political influence. Kennedy was therefore eager to damage the Klan in any way he could. When he heard about Klan plans for a union-busting rally, he fed the information to a union friend. He passed along Klan information to the assistant attorney general of Georgia, an established Klan buster. After researching the Klan’s corporate charter, Kennedy wrote to the governor of Georgia suggesting the grounds upon which the charter should be revoked: the Klan had been designated a non-profit, non-political organization, but Kennedy had proof that it was clearly devoted to both profits and politics.
The problem was that most of Kennedy’s efforts weren’t producing the desired effect. The Klan was so entrenched and broad-based that Kennedy felt as if he were tossing pebbles at a giant. And even if he could somehow damage the Klan in Atlanta, the hundreds of other chapters around the country would go untouched.
Kennedy was supremely frustrated, and out of this frustration was born a new strategy. He had noticed one day a group of young boys playing some kind of spy game in which they exchanged silly secret passwords. It reminded him of the Klan. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, to get the Klan’s passwords and the rest of its secrets into the hands of kids all across the country—and their parents too? What better way to defang a secret society than to make public its most secret information? Instead of futilely attacking the Klan from the outside, what if he could somehow unleash all the secret inside information that John Brown was gathering from the Klan’s weekly meetings? Between Brown’s inside dope and everything that Kennedy had learned via his own investigations, he probably knew more Klan secrets than the average Klansman.
Kennedy turned to the most powerful mass medium of his day: radio. He began feeding Klan reports to the journalist Drew Pearson, whose Washington Merry-Go-Round program was heard by millions of adults every day, and to the producers of the Adventures of Superman show, which reached millions of children each night. He told them about Mr. Ayak and Mr. Akai, and he passed along overheated passages from the Klan’s bible, which was called the Kloran. (Kennedy never did learn why a white Christian supremacist group would give its bible essentially the same name as the most holy book of Islam.) He explained the role of Klan officers in any local Klavern: the Klaliff (vice president), Klokard (lecturer), Kludd (chaplain), Kligrapp (secretary), Klabee (treasurer), Kladd (conductor), Klarogo (inner guard), Klexter (outer guard), the Klokann (a five-man investigative committee), and the Klavaliers (whose leader was called Chief Ass Tearer). He spelled out the Klan hierarchy as it proceeded from the local to the national level: an Exalted Cyclops and his twelve Terrors; a Great Titan and his twelve Furies; a Grand Dragon and his nine Hydras; and the Imperial Wizard and his fifteen Genii. And Kennedy passed along all the information and gossip that John Brown gleaned by infiltrating the main Klan chapter, Nathan Bedford Forrest Klavern No. 1, Atlanta, Realm of Georgia.
During the war, the Adventures of Superman program had portrayed its hero fighting Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito. But now he was in need of fresh villains. The Klan was a perfect target, and Superman turned his powers against them. Drew Pearson, an avowed Klan hater, now began giving regular Klan updates on his radio show, and then gave further updates, based on John Brown’s inside reports, to show how the original updates were infuriating Klan officials. Pearson’s work created an echo chamber that seemed to be driving Grand Dragon Samuel Green crazy. Here is Pearson’s radio report from November 17, 1948:
Speaking at Klavern No. 1, Atlanta, Ga., the week after elections, the Grand Dragon wrung his hands and once again cautioned Klansmen to be careful about leaks.
“I have to talk frankly at these meetings,” he said, “but I might as well call Drew Pearson before I come to the meeting and give him the information, for [the] next day he gives it out to everybody from coast to coast. The A.P. and U.P. are both calling me about it next morning while I am eating breakfast.”…
The Grand Dragon spoke about plans for a big cross-burning to be held in Macon, Ga., on Dec. 10. It would be the biggest in Klan history, he said, and he expected 10,000 Klansmen to be there—in their robes….
He added that the Klavalier Klub—the Klan’s whipping and flogging department—was now on the job and had plenty of friends on the Atlanta police force.
As the Pearson and Superman radio shows played on, and as Stetson Kennedy continued to relay the Klan secrets obtained by John Brown to other broadcast and print outlets, a funny thing happened: attendance at Klan meetings began to fall, as did applications for new membership. Of all the ideas that Kennedy had thought up to fight bigotry, this campaign was easily the cleverest. He turned the Klan’s secrecy against itself by making its private information public; he converted heretofore precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery.
Americans who might have been philosophically inclined to oppose the Klan had now been given enough specific information to oppose them more actively, and public sentiment began to shift. Americans who might have been philosophically inclined to embrace the Klan had now been given all sorts of caution against doing so. Although the Klan would never quite die, especially down south—David Duke, a smooth-talking Klan leader from Louisiana, mounted substantive bids for the U.S. Senate and other offices—it was certainly handicapped, at least in the short term, by Kennedy’s brazen dissemination of inside information. While it is impossible to tease out the exact impact that his work had on the Klan, many people have given him a great deal of credit for damaging an institution that was in grave need of being damaged.
This did not come about because Stetson Kennedy was courageous or resolute or unflappable, even though he was all of these. It happened because he understood the raw power of information. The Ku Klux Klan—much like politicians or real-estate agents or stockbrokers—was a group whose power was derived in large part from the fact that it hoarded information. Once that information falls into the wrong hands (or, depending on your point of view, the right hands), much of the group’s advantage disappears.
In the late 1990s, the price of term life insurance fell dramatically. This posed something of a mystery, for the decline had no obvious cause. Other types of insurance, including health and automobile and homeowners’ coverage, were certainly not falling in price. Nor had there been any radical changes among insurance companies, insurance brokers, or the people who buy term life insurance. So what happened?
The Internet happened. In the spring of 1996, Quotesmith.com beca
me the first of several websites that enabled a customer to compare, within seconds, the price of term life insurance sold by dozens of different companies. For such websites, term life insurance was a perfect product. Unlike other forms of insurance—especially whole life insurance, which is a far more complicated financial instrument—term life policies are fairly homogeneous: any given thirty-year, guaranteed policy for $1 million is essentially identical to the next. So what really matters is the price. Shopping around for the cheapest policy, a process that had been convoluted and time-consuming, was suddenly made simple. With customers able to instantaneously find the cheapest policy, the more expensive companies had no choice but to lower their prices. Suddenly customers were paying $1 billion less a year for term life insurance.
It is worth noting that these websites only listed prices; they didn’t even sell the policies. So it wasn’t really insurance they were peddling. Like Stetson Kennedy, they were dealing in information. (Had the Internet been around when Kennedy was attacking the Klan, he probably would have been blogging his brains out.) To be sure, there are differences between exposing the Ku Klux Klan and exposing insurance companies’ high premiums. The Klan trafficked in secret information whose secrecy engendered fear, while insurance prices were less a secret than a set of facts dispensed in a way that made comparisons difficult. But in both instances, the dissemination of the information diluted its power. As Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis once wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
Freakonomics Revised and Expanded Edition Page 6