by Rory McVeigh
Delegates debated the issue for hours. “As the voting began, most of the remaining order dissolved beneath the cries of the galleries and the angry, milling delegations on the floor. Arguments flared into fistfights.”75 The Klan opposition was primarily concentrated in northeastern industrialized states, whereas the Klan delegates hailed from everywhere else: the South, the Midwest, and the West. Klan supporters won the vote by a razor-thin margin, and the plank was excluded.76
Through public speeches and newspaper articles, Klan leaders lobbied in considerable depth for their national policy preferences. Immigration was their chief concern, but they also staked positions on everything from economics to Prohibition to public schooling. In fact, the Klan strongly favored the formation of a new Federal Department of Education, in large part motivated by their opposition to Catholic parochial schools.77 Because the movement drew its supporters from both parties, Klansmen were expected to place loyalty to the Klan above all partisanship.
Evans sought to exploit the leverage they held over political candidates through their enormous voting blocs, which he promised to whichever candidate would promote their agenda. But siding with the Klan came with a risk: alienating the rest of the electorate who opposed its racism and religious bigotry. Although the Klan enjoyed enthusiastic support in many quarters, its enemies were equally inflamed. Father James Martin Gillis, a Catholic priest, summed up that sentiment in an anti-Klan tract published in 1922: “If the Klan antagonizes and persecutes Catholics, Jews and Negroes, then Catholics and Jews and Negroes have at least equal right to antagonize their antagonists, and persecute their persecutors.”78
In the 1924 campaign, third-party candidate Robert La Follette—who had once earned praise from the Klan press for his staunch advocacy on behalf of progressive goals, like eliminating government corruption and resisting monopolies and trusts79—faced a dilemma. Condemn the Klan and lose their vote; fail to condemn the Klan and lose the Catholic and immigrant vote. The Democratic nominee, John W. Davis, found himself in the same situation. To win the election, he needed the support of Southern Democrats and he needed to fare well in the rural states of the West and Midwest. At the time, the national Democratic Party had attracted the support of working-class Catholics and immigrants in northeastern states. La Follette and Davis both chose to condemn the Klan to win Catholic voters.80
The 1924 Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden from June 24 to July 9 was one of the most contentious conventions in U.S. history. Delegates registered a record 103 votes before ultimately settling on John Davis for the nomination. The event is often referred to as a “klanbake” because of the heated debate over whether or not to condemn the Ku Klux Klan. Photo © New York Daily News / Getty Images.
Republican incumbent president Calvin Coolidge, on the other hand, neither embraced nor condemned the Klan. Evans interpreted this silence as an implicit endorsement and, when Coolidge later won, boasted of the Klan’s role in electing a “100-percent American President.”81 To the satisfaction of Klansmen everywhere, that same year Coolidge would back the Johnson-Reed Act, which imposed severe restrictions on immigration, staunching the flow of European Catholics and Jews to America.
Johnson-Reed set annual immigration quotas from any particular country to 2 percent of the number of residents from that country already living in America in 1890. The 1890 reference year was key. The wave of Italian immigrants, for instance, did not begin until the turn of the century. In 1890, only 52,000 Italian immigrants entered the United States. From 1900 to 1914, however, the average annual immigration from Italy topped 200,000. All immigration plummeted during the war, but by 1921 Italian immigration was back up to 222,000. In 1925, just one year after the passage of Johnson-Reed, the United States admitted only about 6,000 Italian immigrants.82
But in the aftermath of the 1924 election, after keeping Coolidge in the White House and successfully restricting immigration—along with a slew of Klan-supported electoral and legislative victories in the states—Evans struggled to keep members engaged. The Klan, it seemed, had accomplished what it set out to do. With the White House supposedly captured, who needed an organization acting outside political institutions? Membership declined steadily. Then, in 1925, Stephenson was convicted of the rape and second-degree murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a young employee of the Indiana Department of Public Instruction. The widely publicized trial and downfall of the Grand Dragon prompted ashamed Klansmen to quit en masse.
Although Coolidge’s immigration policies undoubtedly pleased Klan supporters, the president remained committed to large-scale capitalism and big business and paid little heed to the Klansmen’s economic complaints. Within a decade, the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression. By then, the former Klan constituency had aligned in opposition to what would become the New Deal coalition—the working class, farmers, immigrants, Catholics, blacks—which would keep Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in the White House for decades to come. It was only in the late 1950s, and especially the early 1960s, that a new Klan would once again rise, this time to challenge the ascendancy of civil rights.
THE 1960S KLAN
The Klan of the 1960s was a return to its post–Civil War namesake. Most of its activism took place in Southern states, and its primary motive was to resist the advancement of African Americans. As North Carolina Klan leader Bob Jones put it, “People just won’t stand for this Civil Rights stuff…. Somebody has got to organize this state, and I’m the one who’s doing it.”83
This Klan appealed primarily to working-class whites, who, while not enjoying class privilege themselves, benefited from what sociologist Charles Tilly called “opportunity hoarding.”84 The oppression of black Southerners under the rubric of Jim Crow confined them largely to less desirable work and denied them basic political rights, including the franchise. Jim Crow is the label given to laws passed in Southern states, beginning in the 1870s and enduring into the 1960s, designed to subjugate African Americans. They were forced to use separate public facilities like restrooms and drinking fountains, and were denied service in all-white restaurants and hotels. But Jim Crow was more than just a series of laws. There was a strong cultural component that required blacks to offer deference to whites in any social interaction.85 Black Southerners knew that violating these norms provoked legal punishment—and often extralegal violence.86
The classes of the white South were bound together by Jim Crow. Wealthy whites worked to uphold Jim Crow segregation through the Citizens’ Council, which emerged on the heels of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Council, a network of white supremacist organizations, was particularly strong in Mississippi, but soon spread throughout the South. Business leaders used it to protect Jim Crow segregation from legal challenges, and especially to fend off the integration of their public schools. States instituted poll taxes and literacy tests to de facto deny black southerners the vote. Race baiting became an acid test for election to public office. In his classic 1949 book on Southern politics, V.O. Key wrote, “It must be conceded that there is one, and only one, real basis for Southern unity: the Negro.”87
As the civil rights movement mobilized an effective challenge to legal oppression, working-class white Southerners returned to the Klan’s style of resistance: violence and intimidation.88 In the years immediately following Brown there were well over five hundred acts of racial violence.89 And there were likely many more that went undocumented. It would take only a few years for the Klan to once again organize into a formidable resistance.
Klan chapters existed in the 1950s, but they were small, scattered, and without any single national overseer. Then in 1955, a Georgia auto-body worker named Eldon Edwards founded the “U.S. Klans” and began consolidating the chapters. Edwards’s Klan soon spread outward into other Southern states. Like Klan leaders of earlier eras, Edwards’s second-in-command, Grand Dragon Alvin Horn, ran into legal trouble. After his wife’s suicide, the forty-si
x-year-old Horn, looking for a new wife, married a fourteen-year-old without her parents’ knowledge. He was jailed, charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and subsequently dismissed from the Klan leadership. Edwards replaced Horn with Robert Sheldon, an employee of Goodrich Tire Company, who was emerging as a strong Klan leader in Alabama.90
Edwards died unexpectedly in 1960 of a heart attack, temporarily stalling the Klan’s momentum. Sheldon stepped in and began an aggressive organizational campaign, inaugurating new chapters and consolidating existing ones into the United Klans of America. By 1966, the Klan under Sheldon had organized 350 chapters, or “Klaverns,” across the South and established a small foothold in the Midwest and Northeast.91 Like the Klan of the 1920s, the 1960s Klan claimed to be primarily an organization of patriots, and Klansmen oriented themselves against what they saw as the rising communist menace. Communists, they believed, were the puppeteers behind the civil rights movement. Grand Dragon Bob Jones claimed that black Americans had neither the “brains or money” to finance the civil rights revolution. Instead, “This country’s being torn apart by this civil rights mess—this ain’t no small thing that’s going on—and these Communists are making all they can of it.”92 Like the Klan of the 1920s, they linked communism to black militancy to conjure the illusion of coordinated attacks on white interests.
To recruit members, Klansmen staged public rallies, held weekly meetings, and hosted fish fries and turkey shoots.93 But they never forgot their role as vigilantes. To the Klan, black Southerners and their white allies who dared challenge racial norms were lawless troublemakers who deserved harsher punishment than the law was willing or able to mete out. In many towns, some policemen were also Klansmen, or were at least willing to turn a blind eye to Klan violence.94 Klan chapters organized “wrecking crews,” elite groups to carry out the most violent missions, and whose members were held in high esteem by rank-and-file Klansmen.95 This violence prompted a covert investigation by the FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTEL),96 and soon FBI director J. Edgar Hoover would warn about the “Resurgent Klan”: “FBI investigations over a period of years have grimly documented participation by members of Klan groups in murders, bombings, mutilations, whippings and abductions.”97
But neither the violent resistance of the Klan nor the legal resistance of Southern legislators could halt the march of civil rights.98 Martin Luther King Jr., along with other activists, successfully prodded Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. At last, de jure segregation ended when Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.99 Both passed with bipartisan support outside of the South, overcoming strong resistance from Southern Democrats.
When Johnson, a Democratic president, signed the acts, he severed the tie that bound Southern white voters to the national Democratic Party. Former Alabama governor and staunch segregationist George Wallace would later run as a third-party candidate in 1968 and secure a plurality of votes in Arkansas (38.6 percent), Louisiana (48.3 percent), Mississippi (63.5 percent), and Alabama (65.9 percent).100
The success of the Wallace campaign signaled an opportunity to the national Republican Party. Their response soon coalesced into Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”: courting disaffected white voters by demonstrating a Republican will to resist civil rights advances, but without the inflammatory and blatantly racist appeals of Wallace.101 In the 1972 election, Nixon, carried by strong support in Southern states, won a landslide victory over George McGovern. Four years later, Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter fared well in the South when he defeated incumbent Republican Gerald Ford. But even Carter, a native son of Georgia, struggled to win votes from white Southerners in 1980 when he lost to Ronald Reagan. In fact, Nixon and Reagan secured such decisive margins that in American electoral history they have only ever been surpassed by FDR, James Monroe, and George Washington. Democrat Bill Clinton’s roots in Arkansas weren’t enough to carry most Southern states when he won the presidency in 1992 and 1996. In the decades since Nixon first reached out to Southern white voters with conservative race policies, and since the emergence of the Religious Right in the 1980s, the Republican Party has captured the South wholesale.102
The political alignments that formed after the 1960s civil rights movement and its conservative backlash extended far beyond the borders of the South. More and more, the Republican Party depended on a core constituency: an alignment between those who preferred policies that preserved the wealth of the privileged class, those who preferred policies that resisted racial equalities, and those who preferred policies to preserve and even enshrine in law the values of conservative Christians. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, moved in opposition to these same privileges.103 White nationalist organizations would rise again in the years ahead, but only on the radical fringe, shells of the movements that once steered national politics. The federal government’s disruption of Klan activity through COINTEL, combined with the Republican Party’s adoption of race conservatism, crippled the Klan that thrived in the 1960s. Once again, party alignments integrated the politics of white nationalism.
* * *
In the introduction we explored how the actions and rhetoric of the Trump campaign appealed to white Americans who harbored prejudices, and how the alt-right, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates embraced him. This, of course, does not mean that every Trump voter is a bigot or a Klansman, or even that most are. At the very least, though, it shows that Trump’s displays of bigotry were not enough to dissuade them. Through selective summaries of the Ku Klux Klan at its three historical peaks, we begin to see the forces at work that can mobilize a group into a social—and then a political—movement. From this we can develop a picture of what made so many voters receptive to Trump, and understand why voters embraced him in some places and reviled him elsewhere. While Trump’s victory was an electoral triumph secured within traditional political institutions, he, along with many commentators, referred to his following as a “movement.”104 It was also an uprising of sorts within the Republican Party, where voices that once carried little influence found expression in Trump’s candidacy.
All three Klans were rebellions carried out by those in danger of losing privileges they enjoyed at the expense of others in American society. Perhaps this is most apparent in the Reconstruction-era Klan and the Klan of the 1960s.
The first Klan rose from the ruins of war, which had eradicated an entire economic, political, and social system based on black slave labor. In the South, manumission presented an existential threat to the privileges of class and race. The wealth of the landed elite had rested on the exploitation of slaves, so elite Southerners subsequently had to find new ways of turning a profit. The majority of slaves in the South were owned by relatively few large plantation owners. It’s true that slavery depressed the wages of nonelite white Southerners, since so much of the work that drove the Southern economy was performed by slaves.105 Still, the end of slavery threatened the interests of poor whites in the South and in border states too—these less-prosperous white Southerners now had to compete with freed slaves in an open market for jobs they held and for land they might buy. The size of the black population in the South had grown substantially by the mid-1860s. According to the 1860 census, nearly four million slaves lived there. Full suffrage for them constituted a new and significant threat to a system of white privileges.
The Klan, emerging from a long tradition of slave patrols and night-riding vigilantes,106 acted as terrorists in service of the Southern elite who wanted to preserve their source of cheap labor. But the group became particularly popular among non-elite whites, because through it they could “hoard opportunities,”107 preventing black Southerners from sharing in the economic, political, and social benefits previously reserved for whites. Because poor whites and poor blacks together greatly outnumbered the white Southern elite, the Klan cemented an alliance between rich and poor whites, one that would keep blacks subordinate and su
stain the dominance of the landed elite.108
The rise of the Klan in the 1960s was hardly different. Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, it was relatively organized and routinely held meetings, marches, and rallies.109 But like the first Klan, its mandate was terror. It existed to preserve the old racial hierarchy through intimidation and violence. Among a rash of other, less-publicized beatings and slayings, Klansmen murdered three civil rights activists during the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign in 1964 and bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four young black girls.110
Working-class white Southerners were not vulnerable to civil rights in the same way that businesses were. They instead faced the prospect (once again) of competing directly with black Americans for jobs, housing, and schooling.111 The Klan appealed to working-class white Southerners determined to defend racial privileges from civil rights and, ultimately, from the passage of federal legislation. As was true of the first Klan, the later movement declined partly after a crackdown from the federal government.112 And as was also true of the aftermath of the first Klan, the decline of the movement did not end white privileges. White Southerners were drawn instead into a new national political alliance, as the Republican Party enticed them with promises to oppose, tooth and nail, remedies for racial inequality. Rather than forming a working-class alliance that cut across racial barriers, many white Americans joined an alliance, forged by Republicans, that cut across class divisions. This alliance transcended the regionalism that had lasted for over a century, in which Southern Democrats defended the racial order alongside the interests of the Southern elite.
The 1920s Klan was, in many respects, different from the other Klans. It was larger and better organized; it oriented itself toward national as well as local issues; and it directed more of its antipathy toward Catholics and immigrants than toward black Americans. But like the other two Klan uprisings, the movement appealed to those feeling the brunt of economic and political changes. Klan organizers mobilized millions of disgruntled white Americans, linking their economic and political grievances to their prejudices against immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and blacks. In the presidential election of 1924, the Klan embraced Coolidge’s candidacy when his two competitors spurned them.113 It is likely that the majority of Southern Klansmen voted for Democratic candidate John Davis, despite his condemnation of the Klan,114 because of the ironclad bond between white supremacy and the Democratic Party in the American South at the time. But the Klan aided Coolidge outside the South: Klan membership figures for Indiana show he fared much better than his Republican predecessor in counties where the Klan had grown strongest.115 The Klan’s national newspaper took credit for electing the president, and they praised him when he signed into law severe immigration restrictions. Although the Klan struggled to retain members after the election—once they captured the White House, who needed the Klan anymore?—they wrote glowingly of Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928 and condemned his Catholic Democratic opponent, Al Smith. They embraced the Republican Party, even though it was baldly unmotivated to halt the transition to mass production—something the Klan had once demanded.