The Politics of Losing

by Rory McVeigh

  Then, in 1871, as Klan violence continued undeterred in the South, Congress appointed a joint committee to investigate. That same year, President Ulysses S. Grant deployed federal troops to put down the Klan rebellion in South Carolina. Grant sent Major Lewis W. Merrill, who soon sent word back that “night riders were responsible for three to four hundred whippings and murders in York County alone, yet civil authorities refused to prosecute.”28 Merrill’s troops took aggressive action to restore order in the state. He surveilled the county covertly to identify guilty parties, and then, with only limited force, he “crushed [the Klan] as easily as a man would an egg-shell.”29 Klan activity in other Southern states largely subsided after its defeat in South Carolina.

  While the Klan died, it left in its wake a trail of destruction. From 1866 to 1871, “men calling themselves ‘Ku-klux’ killed hundreds of black Southerners and their white supporters, sexually molested hundreds of black women and men, drove thousands of black families from their homes and thousands of black men and women from their employment, and appropriated land, crops, guns, livestock and food from black Southerners on a massive scale.”30

  The demise of the first Ku Klux Klan did not take with it the daily prospect of white violence against black Southerners. But the North’s determination to protect them waned. The faction of the Republican Party who labeled themselves “radicals” for their support for strong intervention in the South were losing their grip on Congress. A financial panic in 1873 triggered a long recession that preoccupied the federal government.31 The election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 pulled the last of the Northern armies out of the South, forever closing the era of Reconstruction.

  Without the supervision of Northern armies, Southern states began to pass Jim Crow laws.32 At the same time, landowners developed a system of sharecropping, which shackled black Southerners to the land through debt.33 And while they still feared death at the hands of white mobs, circumstances no longer required the Ku Klux Klan to organize and personify that violence. The collapse of the Klan was sudden and complete, but its violence lived on. From 1823 to 1930, in just ten Southern states, approximately 2,500 black Americans were lynched.34

  THE 1920S KLAN

  The legacy of the Reconstruction Klan lived on in the memories of white Southerners and the stories they passed down to their children. On Thanksgiving 1915, a former Methodist preacher named William Joseph Simmons climbed to the summit of Stone Mountain in Georgia, lit a burning cross, and founded the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Simmons appointed himself Imperial Wizard. He claimed his father had been a member of the original Klan, and he was fascinated by stories he’d been told as a child—even stories conveyed by his “old Negro mammy,” who would tell the children how the Klan “used to frighten the darkies.”35 Simmons was thirty-five years old when he began organizing the Klan, and with his medium build, spectacles, tailored suits and neatly coiffed hair he looked the part of a preacher or school teacher. He was a physician’s son, but gave up his own dreams of being a doctor when his father died at forty-six. After serving in the Spanish-American War in 1898, he worked as a circuit-riding preacher in the backwoods of Alabama and Florida.36 There, he honed his oratory, riding from town to town, delivering sermons with titles like the “Kinship of Kourtship and Kissing.”37 The work paid poorly, and in 1912 the Alabama Conference of the Methodist Church voted to deny him a pulpit for “inefficiency and moral impairment.”38 He took various sales jobs but soon found that work organizing fraternal lodges could be more lucrative. Between 1912 and 1915 he attached himself to Masonic lodges and other orders and earned the title “Colonel” for his work with the Woodmen of the World.39

  Besides his skills in oratory and organizing, Simmons had a knack for opportunism, and he saw the glowing spark of public interest in a Klan revival. In 1915, an American director named D. W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation. The film enraptured contemporary audiences for its cinematographic innovations—it was the first to ever use close-ups or fade-outs—but also for its story. Based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, The Clansman, Griffith’s film glorified the Reconstruction-era Klan, which he depicted as the guardian of persecuted white Southerners, while he painted black men as sexual predators and accomplices to political corruption. In the film, the Klan delivered the kind of racial justice that appealed to many white Americans of the 1910s—lynching Gus (a white actor in blackface) after the white Flora Cameron rejected his marriage proposal and leapt to her death when he chased her.40 During the climactic scene, in which mounted Klansmen pursued Gus through the woods, white audiences cheered them on in nickelodeons across the country.41

  That same year, in Atlanta, Georgia, a Jewish factory superintendent named Leo Frank was accused of raping and murdering Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old girl in his employ. When the outgoing governor of Georgia commuted Frank’s sentence from death to life in prison, a local group calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan plotted Frank’s abduction from prison. On August 16, they raided the Milledgeville State Penitentiary, took Frank, and drove him 175 miles to Frey’s Gin near Marietta. There they hanged him from an oak branch—his body turned to face the direction of Phagan’s home.42

  In the aftermath of the lynching, former Populist leader Thomas Watson, then a congressman, suggested that the Ku Klux Klan could have a renewed role in America, that perhaps they could “restore home rule.”43 Simmons, according to popular legend, took care to include members of the lynch mob at the Klan’s inauguration some months later.44 An appeal to the spirit of Mary Phagan, writes historian Nancy MacLean, “would always be a part of the Klan. Its promise of swift and secret vengeance, more than anything else, distinguished it from contemporary organizations with whom it shared ideas.”45

  Simmons strategically placed advertisements for his new organization alongside ads for showings of The Birth of a Nation in Atlanta. On Thanksgiving night, 1915, Simmons led the charter members to the top of Stone Mountain, just outside Atlanta. “With a flag fluttering in the wind beside them, a Bible open to the twelfth chapter of Romans, and a flaming cross to light the night sky above,” writes MacLean, “Simmons and his disciples proclaimed the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”46

  While the time seemed ripe for a Klan revival, Simmons struggled to attract members in the early years. He was still searching for a message that would galvanize Americans. Simmons saw the Klan as just another fraternal organization, like the Masonic lodges he spent years organizing, not a political movement. His oratorical themes of white supremacy and Protestant Christianity were hardly a call to action in Southern states where blacks were already politically and economically subordinate and most people were already Protestant.

  By 1920, the Klan could claim only a few thousand members and was fast running out of money. Simmons turned to two publicists, Mary Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke. The pair headed the Southern Publicity Association, and they were masters of “the art of modern propaganda.”47 Clarke was “slim, graceful, with a mass of curly dark hair.”48 Tyler “was a large woman, with blue eyes and auburn hair. She favored black, from her patent-leather pumps to her broadcloth cape, and her definiteness and decisive manner of speech gave her an air of forcefulness.”49 They put together a staff of professional recruiters who worked on commission: four dollars of the ten-dollar fee paid by each new member they signed up. Recruiters, while scouting local communities, identified the issues that concerned them and promised the Klan would fight on their behalf.50 Perhaps most fatefully, it was Tyler and Clarke who expanded the list of issues and enemies of the Klan. Besides advocating white supremacy, the Klan now railed against Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and Bolsheviks, enemies they would later engage in grand public battles over schooling and Prohibition.

  Their strategy worked. By 1921, the Klan, which the year before was maybe 5,000 strong and confined entirely to Georgia and Alabama, now had 200 recruiters (or Kleagles) spread across the country, and C
larke reported recruiting 48,000 new members in only three months.51

  As the Klan grew beyond the South, America watched. In 1921, the New York World ran an exposé about the Klan that ran for twenty-one days and documented 152 alleged violent acts committed by Klansmen.52 The first story, published on September 6, splashed across the front page: “SECRETS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN EXPOSED BY THE WORLD; MENACE OF THIS GROWING LAW-DEFYING ORGANIZATION PROVED BY ITS RITUAL AND THE RECORD OF ITS ACTIVITIES.”53 The coverage was syndicated in papers all over the country, and mounting public concern about the Klan prompted congressional hearings in 1922. Simmons was called to testify. He forcefully denied any Klan involvement in violence and passionately defended his organization against accusations of bigotry. Echoing the words of Christ on the cross, Simmons closed his testimony saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”54

  The newspaper series and the hearings resulted in nothing but free publicity for the Klan, and they boosted recruiting tremendously. Within four months of the World’s coverage, the Klan had opened two hundred new chapters, now active in all forty-eight states, with nearly one million members.55

  The rapid growth of the Klan, unsurprisingly, was attended by scandal and dissension in the ranks. A group of Klan leaders—among them a Texas dentist named Hiram Evans and Indiana’s own D. C. Stephenson—saw Simmons as an obstacle. Simmons suffered ill health (rumored to be from too much drink), and in his detachment from the day-to-day supervision of the Klan he had ceded substantial power to Clarke. The course of the congressional hearings had also revealed an affair between Clarke and Tyler; Clarke, who had already been charged by his wife with desertion, “had been found tipsy, half-dressed, and in compromising company with the widowed Tyler.”56 The final blow to Simmons’s credibility came in September 1922, when Clarke was arrested in Indiana on charges of liquor possession (this was during Prohibition). In late November, on the eve of the First Imperial Klonvokation, the mutineers Evans and Stephenson tricked Simmons into a figurehead position—“Emperor of the Invisible Empire”—that held no actual power. Hiram Evans succeeded Simmons as the new Imperial Wizard.57

  Simmons, according to the Imperial Night-Hawk, was now the “titular head” and “the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a revival of the chivalric ideals of the old South, [was his] brain child.”58 But in the same edition, a different article made clear that Evans was in charge, and that Clarke had become persona non grata. “Not only has Mr. Clarke ceased to be an official of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but it also is true that he no longer derives one cent of revenue from this organization.”59 In case there remained any doubt about who was in charge, the Night-Hawk published a full-page photo of Evans and declared, “Dr. H.W. Evans, Imperial Wizard, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, is the man directly responsible for the present tremendous growth of this order in all sections of the United States.” Evans, according to the Klan press, was “a clear thinking businessman” who had made “many changes in the national organization for its general betterment. He is busily building this structure of Americanism so that it will undoubtedly be ‘here forever.’”60

  Evans described himself as “the most average man in America.” Of normal height and somewhat overweight, he was not a physically imposing figure. But he “was unusually ambitious. His eyes were large, restless, and sometimes took on a hard, pitiless quality. The Klan had offered him a path to prominence beyond where his small-time dental practice could take him, and he embraced it.”61 This ambition served him well as he centralized power (and resources) in the Klan. It also put him on a collision course with his equally ambitious coconspirator, Stephenson.

  Before his involvement with the Klan and his eventual appointment as Grand Dragon, Stephenson hopped from job to job and state to state. Although the Klan was virulently opposed to “Bolshevism,” Stephenson had done organizational work for socialist politicians in Oklahoma. He later moved into newspaper printing, served briefly in the army during World War I—there is some dispute over whether he achieved the rank of lieutenant or major—and spent some time as a traveling salesman before settling in Evansville, Indiana, where he worked as a coal dealer.62 There he discovered the burgeoning Klan, and with it the opportunity to make much, much more money.

  As the Klan spread, the relationship between Evans and Stephenson grew tense. Stephenson wanted a larger cut of Klan revenue because he oversaw the most profitable Northern states. By 1923 the Klan was bringing in about $25 million per year—$375 million in today’s dollars—of which Stephenson and Evans each claimed at least a couple million.63 Stephenson also thought that Evans was too timid when it came to the Klan’s move into politics. In 1924 he even temporarily broke ties with the national Klan. Stephenson’s followers elected him Grand Dragon of an autonomous Indiana Klan. He continued to feud with Evans, who appointed another Hoosier, Walter Bossert, to take Stephenson’s place as Grand Dragon of the national organization.64 But the profitability of their work and the growing political influence of the movement encouraged them to hold things together ahead of the 1924 presidential election.65 They controlled an organization that had established chapters in every state in the country, chapters containing millions of dues-paying members. They had also established the Women’s KKK, which, in some regions of the country, attracted as many members as the men’s chapters.66 The thousands of recruiters employed by the Klan found that changing conditions in the country had opened many American minds to their brand of white nationalism.

  What were these conditions in which the Klan flourished? Undoubtedly, the Klan’s decision to organize as a “100-percent American” organization for native-born white Protestants attracted their constituents on cultural grounds. Prejudices against Catholics and immigrants—who typically came from southern and eastern European nations and often spoke little or no English—ran deep in the 1920s. So, of course, did antiblack prejudice. But more than that, these religious and ethnic prejudices mapped easily onto the economic and political transformations of the day.

  The Klan linked cultural identities to the changing economy: A massive wave of immigration in the early 1900s, the migration of African Americans from the South to Northern cities, and the accelerated entrance of women into the labor force were fueling a new capitalism, one built on unskilled labor and mass production. It was pushing out the old economy of skilled artisanship. The Klan was particularly successful recruiting members in towns where local economies were disconnected from mass-production capitalism and were in recession, in part from policies (like protective tariffs) designed to benefit large-scale manufacturing in northeastern states.67 This was not simply a rural-versus-urban conflict—the Klan thrived in cities like Indianapolis, Portland, Denver, Dallas, and Seattle.68 But these economies were still adjusting to the mass-production capitalism that was already entrenched in the northeastern cities. Small-scale producers could no longer compete with national firms, and wealth was shifting from these smaller producers to the owners of large factories. According to Evans, “Humanity has become a commodity. For mercenary motives, our importers of it want the most inferior grade. Industry desires cheap labor, therefore, we have had this recent flood of five- and ten-cent citizenship.”69

  As was the case with the Reconstruction-era Klan, the rise of the 1920s Klan coincided with a sizeable expansion of voting rights. While the large influx of immigrants in the early part of the century spurred large-scale capitalism, it also changed American elections, as new voters with new interests entered the electorate.70 Then in 1920 Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. Doubling the size of the eligible voting population made electoral outcomes much less certain.

  Evans and Simmons recognized too late how women’s suffrage affected their own political fortunes. They suspected that Catholic women and immigrants turned out in the 1920 presidential election, in which Republican Warren Harding defeated Democrat James Cox in a landslide (60 percent to 34 percent), while women sympathetic to the Klan’s
cause stayed home. They hoped that the Women’s KKK would counter the political influence of this flood of new voters.71 It is not that the Klan had strong feelings for either Harding or Cox. But as they looked ahead to 1924, they were intent on electing a candidate aligned with their goals. The Klan press harped on the importance of turning out the vote among women friendly to their agenda: “The exercise of women’s rights in the affairs of the state is inevitable. The women’s day is here. The right to vote carries with it the obligation to vote.”72

  While Klan chapters infiltrated local politics, Evans and Stephenson were determined to make the Klan’s presence felt nationally. Klansmen were a visible presence at the 1924 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and even more so at the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden in New York City, which Evans attended and where many of the delegates were themselves Klansmen.73 The Klan issue bitterly divided the Democratic delegates, and the anti-Klan element introduced a plank to the party platform that, if approved, would have denounced the Klan by name. “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,” it read. “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.”74