by Jon Meacham
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On Monday, June 2, 1919, an anarchist’s bomb exploded at the Washington home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on R Street Northwest. The terrorist accidentally blew himself up; bits and pieces of carnage were scattered on the lawn. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, a neighbor of Palmer’s, had just arrived home after a dinner party. After checking on his son James, who was home to study for his entrance tests for Groton, Roosevelt rushed over to help. His cousin, TR’s daughter Alice, soon arrived with her husband, Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio. “As we walked across [R Street] it was difficult to avoid stepping on bloody hunks of human being,” Mrs. Longworth recalled. “The man had been torn apart, fairly blown to butcher’s meat.” Eleanor wrote her mother-in-law, Sara: “Now we are roped off, and the police haven’t yet allowed the gore to be wiped up on our steps and James glories in every bone found!”
Understandably furious, Palmer launched an organized campaign against what he saw as the radical threat to the nation. Seven other bombings around the country took place on the same night. “My information showed that Communism in this country was an organization of thousands of aliens…direct allies of Trotsky, aliens of the same misshapen caste of mind and indecencies of character,” Palmer wrote.
He later recalled the fear of the moment: “The blaze of Revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order…eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat…licking at the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.” His action officer as he raided suspected Reds and fought dissent was a young John Edgar Hoover. Much of the press approved. “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty,” The Washington Post wrote amid a series of January 1920 raids.
Palmer’s assault came at a time when support for the idea of “100 Percent Americanism,” a phrase championed by a collection of national organizations (including the Klan), was on the rise. “Innumerable patriotic societies had sprung up each with its executive secretary, and executive secretaries must live, and therefore must conjure up new and ever greater menaces,” wrote the journalist and historian Frederick Lewis Allen. “Innumerable other gentlemen now discovered that they could defeat whatever they wanted to defeat by tarring it conspicuously with the Bolshevist brush. Big-navy men, believers in compulsory military service, drys, anti-cigarette campaigners, anti-evolution Fundamentalists, defenders of the moral order, book censors, Jew-haters, Negro-haters, landlords, manufacturers, utility executives, upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad, and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin.”
It was the age of Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt. Conformity, the order of the day, required open avowals of fidelity to America as defined by jingoists and sloganeers. In Harper’s, the writer Katharine Fullerton Gerould observed: “America is no longer a free country, in the old sense; and liberty is, increasingly, a mere rhetorical figure….The only way in which an American citizen who is really interested in all the social and political problems of his country can preserve any freedom of expression, is to choose the mob that is most sympathetic to him, and abide under the shadow of that mob.”
Palmer, who craved the presidency for himself in the 1920 election, capitalized on the moment. His raids were numerous, opportunistic, and often unjustified. The attorney general was able to take advantage of the vacuum created after President Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in early October 1919. Though the president remained in office, he was largely a convalescent in the White House. (“He looked as if he were dead,” Ike Hoover, the chief White House usher, recalled of Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the stroke.) Palmer thus had a freer hand than he might otherwise have had, and the president failed to rein in the Justice Department as it attacked radical threats both real and imagined.
President Woodrow Wilson and attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer—whose Washington house was bombed in 1919 by an anarchist who accidentally blew himself up while carrying out the attack—curbed civil liberties in an attempt to suppress dissent.
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Reason, however, prevailed. The system worked: The fervid public atmosphere was unsustainable, and activists and the courts stepped in where a more engaged president might have done. Opinion turned in part after the New York state legislature voted in January 1920 to bar five duly elected lawmakers who were members of the Socialist Party—they’d been elected from districts in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn—on the grounds that the Socialist platform was “absolutely inimical to the best interests of the State of New York and of the United States.” One assemblyman, the historian Robert K. Murray reported, “suggested they ought to be shot” rather than simply expelled.
Watching the drama from England, George Bernard Shaw remarked, “Americans are savages still; that the primitive communities prosecute opinion [is] a matter of course.” The Schenectady Citizen wrote, “Even the Czar of Russia in his palmiest days permitted Socialists to sit in the Duma.” Writing on behalf of the New York Bar Association, Charles Evans Hughes, the former Supreme Court justice (and future chief justice) and 1916 Republican nominee for president, described the assembly’s moves as undemocratic and un-American.
“Is it not clear,” Hughes asked, “that the Government cannot be saved at the cost of its own principles?” In Massachusetts, the Springfield Republican raised the largest of questions: “And where will it all end? Shall we sometime see Republicans excluding Democrats and Democrats excluding Republicans from our law-making bodies, on the ground that the other party’s principles are ‘inimical to the best interests’ of the United States? Every party has always thought that of its rivals, but it is something new in America for parties to translate the idea into action.”
The fever was breaking. “The action of the New York assembly more than any other event underscored for the entire nation the dangerous effect of continued hysterical fear, and the grotesque spectacle of New York solons being frightened by five mild Socialists made many Americans laugh,” Robert K. Murray wrote in a history of the era. “Citizens could now see their own exaggerated fears mirrored in those of the New York legislators and the reflection appeared ridiculous.”
Albany was a skirmish in a larger war, and the forces of proportion were making progress on different fronts. Signed by future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, among others, a sixty-seven-page document entitled To the American People: Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the U.S. Department of Justice drew attention to Palmer’s excesses. “Talk about Americanization!” a Massachusetts judge said. “What we need is the Americanization of the people who carry out such proceedings as these.” Arthur Garfield Hays, the lawyer and ACLU general counsel, later summed up the view that was slowly but steadily coming back into vogue after the Red Scare: “I hate,” Hays remarked, “to see people pushed around.”
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W.E.B. Du Bois understood what was happening. “In 1918, in order to win the war, we had to make Germans into Huns,” he wrote. “In order to win, the South had to make Negroes into thieves, monsters, and idiots. Tomorrow, we must make Latins, South-eastern Europeans, Turks and other Asiatics into actual ‘lesser breeds without the law’ ”—a quotation from Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 imperial poem “Recessional.” “Some,” Du Bois wrote, “seem to see today anti-Christ in Catholicism; and in Jews, international plotters of the Protocol; and in ‘the rising tide of color,’ a threat to all civilization and human culture.”
The “rising tide of color” was an allusion to a 1920 book by Lothrop Stoddard that laid out, in the words of his subtitle, “The Thre
at Against White World-Supremacy.” In 1925’s The Great Gatsby, in a sign of how such views were in circulation among the affluent in America, F. Scott Fitzgerald had Tom Buchanan endorse Stoddard’s views. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it,” Buchanan says. “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
An 1892 poem by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “The Unguarded Gates,” had captured the ethos two decades before:
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng—
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,—
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
Fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care
Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn
And trampled in the dust. For so of old
The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,
And where the temples of the Cæsars stood
The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.
Nine years earlier, in 1883, Emma Lazarus had written a sonnet that struck radically different notes; she composed it in order to raise funds for the completion of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. (Her poem would be included at the site in 1903.)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
The second Ku Klux Klan was thriving on Aldrich’s sentiments, not Lazarus’s. “Millions of Americans are in arduous quest of leadership toward better government, adequate law-enforcement, the elevation of society and a more perfect national patriotism,” the then–imperial wizard, Hiram Wesley Evans, a dentist by trade, told a national meeting in 1924. “The Klan, alone, supplies this leadership….The blood which produces human leadership must be protected from inferior blood….You are of this superior blood. You are more—you are leaders in the only movement in the world, at present, which exists solely to establish a civilization that will insure these things. Klansmen and Klanswomen are verily ‘the salt of the earth,’ upon whom depends the future of civilization.”
Anxiety about the new, about the unknown, was pervasive. “We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support and trained leadership,” Evans once said. “We demand a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized average citizens of the old stock.”
Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but the best scholarly estimates put Klan membership at two million or so in the mid-1920s. Others fix it between three and six million. In explaining the economic and technological anxiety that leads to collective political action—of which the Klan of the 1920s was a towering example—the sociologist Rory McVeigh offered a revealing analogy. “If I am the only person in town who is willing to mow the lawn for the wealthy widow at the end of the block, I can demand a sizable reward for my services,” McVeigh wrote in a study of the Klan’s political influence. “My purchasing power would undergo devaluation if (a) the new kid on the block made his services available to her, or (b) the widow becomes tired of dealing with the lawn and replaces it with Astroturf.” It is a useful way of thinking about why the Klan opposed immigration (which brought a bunch of new kids to the block who might mow the lawn for less money) and was anxious about technological change in general (the move from agrarian life to industrialized economy and then the attendant march of automation in factories meant jobs would become ever more difficult to come by).
The Zangwill-TR “melting pot” of immigration and assimilation, Hiram Evans said, was therefore among the “superficial doctrines” and “fallacious arguments” destroying the country. “The Klan believes in the upbuilding of the American nation—founded, as history emphatically declares, on the supremacy of the white race, the genius of the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, and the free private interpretation of God’s word,” Evans said. (“Jesus was a Protestant,” was a Klan byword.)
The Klan of the 1920s gave its adherents a social and political program that spoke to both the practical fears of the moment and to a mythology of identity. In a speech entitled “Americanism Applied,” the governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, addressed the “Second Imperial Klonvokation,” held in Kansas City over three days in September 1924. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Georgia and a former attorney general of the state, Walker had lost an earlier gubernatorial election when his opponent, Thomas Hardwick, had courted the Klan. Learning his lesson, Walker joined the organization and became an enthusiastic advocate for the Klan.
Speaking in Kansas City of the need for education, for roads and highways, and for extending healthcare, Walker offered a platform for white working-class voters while enumerating the dangers foreign immigration posed to the destiny of his listeners. “What good will it do, I ask you, to train and develop the minds and hearts and bodies of our boys and our girls, what good will it do if we build a bridge across their chasm and at the end of the highway of youth—at the maturity of the boy and the girl—there is a darkened and a poisoned and a decadent nation for them to live in?”
There was more. “I would build a wall of steel,” Walker said, “a wall as high as Heaven, against the admission of a single one of those Southern Europeans who never thought the thoughts or spoke the language of a democracy in their lives.”
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It became known, mordantly, as the “Klanbake.” Inside Madison Square Garden from June 24 to July 9, 1924, the floor of the Democratic National Convention was the scene of platform battles and ballot after ballot after ballot—103 in all—to nominate a presidential candidate to stand against Republican Calvin Coolidge, who had succeeded Warren G. Harding after Harding’s death the previous summer. The delegates included an estimated 343 Klansmen, and the “Invisible Empire” was all too evident on the convention floor. Their main mission in New York: the defeat of the Irish-Catholic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith.
With the imperial wizard and his team headquartered at the Hotel McAlpin at Herald Square and at the Great Northern on Fifty-seventh Street, the Klan also fought an anti-KKK platform plank, and the struggle revealed a sad but inescapable political reality: The organization was big enough, and dispersed enough, to make many in the mainstream of the party fearful of opposing a movement with such support. “Outnumbering the a
nti-Klan members…will be those who are either in sympathy with the Knights or who deem it politically expedient to be neutral,” the Klan newspaper The Fiery Cross wrote. “The delegates from the west and south, where the Klan is powerful and exercises great power, do not want to go to the voters of their states with a platform that says thumbs down to the millions of Klansmen throughout the nation.”
A contentious fight ensued over the plank, which read:
We condemn political secret societies of all kinds as opposed to the exercise of free government and contrary to the spirit of the Constitution of the United States. We pledge the Democratic Party to oppose any effort on the part of the Ku Klux Klan or any organization to interfere with the religious liberty or political freedom of any citizen, or to limit the civic rights of any citizen or body of citizens because of religion, birthplace, or racial origin.
The anti-Klan delegates were eloquent, but given the KKK’s power—and the politicians’ fear of its power, which of course multiplied its influence—the vote was certain to be close. “If you are opposed to the Ku Klux Klan,” Bainbridge Colby, a former Wilson secretary of state, told the convention, “for God’s sake, say so.” It was, he added, “this un-American, this poisonous, this alien thing in our midst, abhorrent to every American, hateful to the genius of our institutions, in conflict and at variance with every throb in the precepts of Americanism that have come down to us through the decades from the fathers of our Country.” Edmund Moore of Ohio said that “if 343 members of the Klan who are members of this Convention can control the action of the other eight hundred, if the Imperial Wizard has got us all in his pocket, I, for one, am going to crawl out.”