by Rory McVeigh
The Klan was vulnerable. If its scandals, violence, and deceptions were exposed, that would torpedo its claims to be a benevolent patriotic organization devoted to the public good. Fending off threats to their reputation required a press strategy. And so the Klan created one. They founded their own alternative papers to disseminate their message, worked to secure friendly coverage from local newspapers, and aimed to discredit those publishers unfriendly to them.
The Imperial Night-Hawk was an eight-page weekly produced for members and distributed to Klan chapters across the nation. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans established the paper in 1923 as the Klan’s national newspaper. It was created, at least in part, as a replacement for the Klan’s paper the Searchlight, which was published in Atlanta. The Searchlight remained loyal to prior Imperial Wizard William Simmons after the new leadership pushed him out, and Evans needed a new paper to promote his agenda.4
The Night-Hawk was unique in that it was not written for a general audience but instead distributed only to Klansmen. According to their records, at the movement’s peak in 1924, the Night-Hawk enjoyed a weekly circulation of more than thirty-six thousand.5 It was the primary means that the national organization had to communicate its broad goals to its geographically dispersed members. It also framed the Klan in its most favorable light, emphasizing its charity, patriotism, and piety.6 This insulated Klansmen from challenges to the movement by presenting a filtered look at the parts of the Klan that the leaders wanted members to see.
Most importantly, the Night-Hawk reminded readers that they were part of a vast movement, active in every corner of America. The very first issue proclaimed its central mission: to “keep Klansmen informed of activities at the Imperial Palace in their behalf and of the progress and advancement of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan throughout the nation.”7 Each issue listed Klan activities taking place across the country and commonly included attendance estimates. A Klansman reading the paper in Ohio could learn that “Klansmen from all sections of Chase and Marion counties in Kansas were present last week when Florence Klan Number 4 held an out door naturalization ceremony accompanied by fireworks display. Five thousand people attended the demonstration.”8 Or, “El Dorado Klan Number 92, Realm of Arkansas, led by three mounted Klansmen and a bugler sounding ‘The Call of the Klan,’ paraded before thousands of spectators last week.”9 These routine reminders of the movement’s popularity and geographical reach encouraged and reassured members that the movement was vast and powerful—powerful enough to change their lives.
CONTROLLING THE KLAN’S PUBLIC IMAGE
The Klan positioned itself as an outgrowth of the progressive movement of the early 1900s, which denounced monopoly power and political corruption.10 Evans framed the Klan as a bastion of moral certitude and uprightness, an organization that held itself to only the highest standards. But from its earliest days it suffered from hidden scandals that, if discovered, threatened to destroy it.
Perhaps the greatest of these was that the Klan, nominally a movement in service to its members, was also a plot for its leaders—not just Evans and Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson and publicists Edward Clarke and Mary Tyler, but even chapter officers—to make themselves rich.11
Evans and Stephenson understood the advantages of presenting themselves as successful men with the political savvy to solve the problems of their supporters. Simmons had initially billed the Klan as a “high-class order for men of intelligence and character.”12 As Imperial Wizard, Evans resided at the Imperial Palace on Peachtree Road in Atlanta. Clarke and Tyler were in the real estate business, and they purchased the two-story antebellum style home that would house the Imperial Wizard and serve as Klan headquarters in 1921 for $75,000, or just over a million dollars in today’s money.13 In Indiana, Stephenson impressed visitors to his office in downtown Indianapolis with a phone that he claimed had a direct line to the White House.14 An aura of success, wealth, and importance, they believed, would appeal to those who turned to the Klan in hopes of reclaiming their own lost influence. But little did Klansmen know how much wealth their leaders piled up at their expense.
The Klan was a pyramid scheme.15 Kleagles, the Klan recruiters, worked on commission by collecting ten-dollar initiation fees. Kleagles received four of those dollars. The King Kleagle took one dollar; the Grand Goblin, fifty cents. Two dollars went to the Klan treasury, ostensibly for operating expenses, including salaries for the men at the top. And the master recruiters, Clarke and Tyler, split the remaining $2.50 between themselves.16 After joining, Klansmen paid monthly dues, from eight to fifteen cents, directly to their officers.17 Klan leaders sold Klan-related commodities at extravagant prices—simple robes, for example, cost members more than six dollars, or about ninety dollars today.18 From time to time, Klansmen were asked to contribute to special projects, like the construction of a new building, and they were encouraged to carry out local charitable activities. When Clarke and Tyler were ousted, Evans took charge of their money-making enterprise, renaming it from the “Propagation Department” to the “Extension Department.” He announced, “With all the funds derived from extension work now available for broadening the bounds of the Invisible Empire and for upbuilding of the spirit of real Americanism throughout the nation, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is assured of a growth even more vigorous and amazing than that which has characterized its progress in the past.”19
Economists estimate that the Klan at its peak took in $25 million per year, or $342 million in 2016 dollars.20 Local chapter leaders also had opportunities to cash in, but they had to pay a tax to the national headquarters, which fostered some resentment. Rank-and-file members, too, complained about not knowing how their dues were used.21 With the vast amounts of money flowing through the organization, it was nearly impossible to keep members completely in the dark. In the state of New Jersey, “The rapaciousness of national and local leaders led to splits and resignations,” writes historian David Chalmers. “Two of the leading Klan ministers resigned over the Klan’s high-handed financial manipulations.”22
Money strained relations between Evans and Stephenson. Stephenson, like Simmons before him, was determined to establish a Klan University and “was angry when Evans refused to fund his plan to buy out Indiana’s Valparaiso University for that purpose.”23 But despite this tension, Klan members and the public were largely unaware of the heaps of money piling up behind the doors of the Imperial Palace. Economists Ronald Fryer and Steven Levitt estimate that by 1925, Stephenson alone was raking in $2.5 million dollars every year.24
VIOLENCE
Although the Klan of the 1920s was less violent than the Klans of the Reconstruction and civil rights eras, vigilantism was still common among local chapters. Most of it, however, was directed toward fellow white Protestants suspected of bad behavior.25 Historian Nancy MacLean describes a common practice used by the Klan chapter in Athens, Georgia, when moral offenders ignored the Klan’s warnings: “If the offenders failed to oblige, a group of Klansmen, often robed and wearing black masks—known as ‘the wrecking crew’—would abduct them from their homes under the cover of night. After taking them to a secluded site, usually a spot outside city limits, Klansmen would flog their victims with as many as fifty lashes with a thick leather strap.”26
Klan chapters placed newspaper advertisements in local papers indicating that they could help women deal with husbands who were not fulfilling their responsibilities. On one occasion Stephenson even broadly distributed a circular instructing Klansmen to conduct a search for a man named C. C. Yoke, who had apparently run off with a female companion, “leaving his crippled wife and seven-year-old daughter destitute.”27 But at other times Klansmen would also flog women accused of infidelity, child neglect, flirting, disobeying their husbands, or even simply working a paying job.28
Though they were careful to present themselves as paragons of law and order, they sometimes used vigilantism as a recruiting tool. In Indiana, Kleagles distributed thousands of cards with this ominous message:
“Remember, every criminal, every gambler, every thug, every libertine, every girl ruiner, every home wrecker, every wife beater, every dopepeddler, every shyster lawyer, every K of C [Knights of Columbus], every white slaver, every brothel madame, every Rome-controlled newspaper—is fighting the KKK.”29
Klan violence was more frequent and uncontrolled in the early years of its growth. In August 1922, Klansmen in Louisiana who were concerned about disrespect toward the Invisible Empire in the town of Mer Rouge decided to go after two men, Watt Daniel and Tom Richards, who “had been saying belittling things about the Klan.”30 They carried out a dramatic abduction of Daniel and Richards, also capturing their fathers and another man. As the men were leaving a barbeque and baseball game, Klansmen blocked the road with a car and selected their victims from the subsequent traffic jam. As women screamed, the five men “were seized by the masked figures in black robes, who blindfolded and hog-tied them and heaved them into the back of a waiting Ford truck.”31 The plan was to take the men to the woods for flogging, but a scuffle ensued and Daniel managed to remove the mask of a Klansmen, revealing his face. This proved a fatal mistake. The Klansmen shot and killed him and Richards. Although tensions roiled between Klan and anti-Klan factions, the Klansmen escaped serious legal consquences.32
Klan violence became a federal concern in 1921. That September, the New York World began to report routinely on Klan attacks and syndicate its coverage in local papers all over the country.33 Their reporting provoked Congress to call on Imperial Wizard Simmons to testify that October. Simmons, charming as ever, assured them that the Klan was nothing but a patriotic and nonviolent fraternal organization. Congress took no action against Simmons or the Klan, and membership skyrocketed—the World’s coverage and the congressional hearings turned out to be invaluable publicity.34
Neither did the congressional hearings put an end to the violence. In 1923, the Klan turned Oklahoma into a war zone. At first, Klansmen befriended police in the state by helping them crack down on drinking and vice in the cities, albeit through rough tactics. Soon after, Klansmen butted heads with the newly elected governor, Jack Walton, who was backed by the socialist-inspired farmer-labor coalition. “An Oklahoma City crowd of nearly thirty thousand cheered as an airplane with a crimson cross outlined on its wings wheeled over the city amusement park during a Klan ceremony,” writes historian David Chalmers. “Klan floggings now numbered in the hundreds, and perhaps the thousands. In Atoka and Blak Knob, Klan posses beat IWW and union organizers and announced their intent to break up any attempts to form a farm labor union.”35 Representing a mostly middle-class constituency, the Klan was hostile toward labor radicals and unfriendly toward unions, anticipating that gains made by the Left, as well as threats to property ownership, would come at their expense.36
When Evans and Stephenson wrested control of the Invisible Empire from Simmons in November of 1922, they too claimed that the Klan was nonviolent, and made a deliberate effort to curtail violence (or at least keep it secret) as they set their sights on grander politics.37 Many Klansmen, it seems, did not know how violent the Klan had become, so Evans could make public proclamations about the movement’s support for law and order without fear of refutation. He was fond of saying that the movement’s role was to assist—rather than subvert—the work of lawful authorities.38 And all Klansmen were reportedly required to take an oath: “In the presence of God and man, I solemnly pledge, promise, and swear that I will at all times, in all places and in all ways, help, aid and assist constituted officers of the law in the proper performance of their legal duties, so help me God.”39 This air of lawfulness protected the Klan from the scrutiny of the authorities and preserved the support of those who would have left the Klan if ever they discovered its vigilantism.
A local chapter of the Klan gathers in Muncie, Indiana, in 1922. One sign reads, “We stand for law and order.” Photo courtesy of Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
LEADERSHIP SCANDALS
Klansmen believed that their movement was, among other things, a moral crusade. According to Evans, “The present and recent flood of inferior foreigners has vastly increased our illiteracy, vitally lowered the health level, and visibly menaced America by inheritable mental and moral deficiencies.”40
But from the beginning, the Klan’s leaders failed to live up to their own moral standards. In 1919, Atlanta police arrested Edward Young Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler for disorderly conduct. When the police raided their room they found whiskey and the couple in bed together.41 News of the scandal did not travel far until a few years later when the press picked it up, most likely tipped off by Evans or his collaborators as they sought to remove Simmons, Clarke, and Tyler from power.42
Simmons too suffered weaknesses and moral failings easily apparent to those close to him. He was not a skilled organizer. His attempt to launch a “Klan University” in 1921 had failed spectacularly. He had purchased the financially struggling Lanier University in Georgia with lofty aspirations,43 that “at this university the American mind was to be mobilized for its stupendous task. This task was the salvation of the white man’s civilization from submergence by the colored races.”44 But his plan failed within the year.45 Some Klan leaders “objected to Simmons’s morals: never a hard-line social-purity man, he liked horse races and prizefights, and his partying was making him a noticeable drunkard.”46 The coup launched by Evans to remove Simmons from power was motivated at least in part by concerns that Simmons, left at the helm, would steer the movement to ruin.
But Simmons’s deposition did not put an end to Klan scandals. Stephenson, a notorious womanizer, was “addicted to a more-than-common desire for booze and sex,” and “he and his boys followed a path that led through roadhouses and hotel rooms and made his new home in Indianapolis one of the bastions of high life in the state.”47 Stephenson’s wickedness would ultimately destroy him, when he brutally—and, it turns out, lethally—raped Madge Oberholtzer in 1925. News of this particular scandal, at a time when the Klan was already struggling to retain its members in the aftermath of the 1924 election, precipitated the downfall of the Klan.48
FAKE NEWS
By scouting local communities, Kleagles identified the issues on which they might capitalize. The hole where political and economic power and status once were left a vacuum that primed citizens for a mass social movement. As part of their recruiting strategy, the Klan sent Klan lecturers, who were mostly ministers, to travel from town to town.49 A lecturer in Athens, Georgia, felt the community’s anxiety about the spread of chain stores, which were pushing out small shop owners. He railed against chains like Sears and A & P Grocery, which, he claimed, were owned by “Jew, Jews, Jews.”50 Other lecturers pretended to be former nuns and spun sensational tales about the sexual depravity of Catholic priests behind convent walls. “They were saying that the Catholic priests and nuns were having sexual relationships, and they’d kill the babies,” remembered one Women’s KKK member. “They’d have abortions. All that kind of stuff.”51
The Klan forged fake documents outlining conspiracies and dire threats posed by cultural enemies. The Denver Klan constructed a list, purportedly written by Catholics, that identified eight hundred local Protestants as targets for economic sabotage. Another letter, which the Klan attributed to the Vatican, informed the Pope of Catholic successes at the ballot box. The (fake) Pope’s response: “I’ve planned for this for many years, and I’ve started out to kill all who refuse to bow in submission to my will.”52
Elsewhere, Klan papers published pieces warning against foreign threats, like Russian bolshevism: “In connection with these revelations of Communist intrigue a recent proclamation on the part of the African Blood Brotherhood which has been widely circulated among negroes both in the South and the North shows that agitators among the black race are teaching their followers to look to Russia for the establishment of Black Supremacy.”53 Perhaps not all Klansmen believed the Klan’s outrageous claims, but their slippin
g position in the American hierarchy made them eager to join an organization fighting on their behalf.54
* * *
Social movement theory says, somewhat intuitively, that people are more likely to participate in a movement when enough other people will participate to make it powerful enough to work.55 The core logic of political opportunity theory, for example, is that people for the most part will not put time and effort into a movement if they believe it’s doomed to fail. What’s more, the leverage that a movement has over politicians—leverage that can be used to win concessions—is a function of its capacity to show strength in numbers and a demonstrated commitment to hold politicians accountable.56 Movement leaders, therefore, often manipulate perceptions of a movement’s size and strength to attract supporters and influence public policy.57
The Klan exaggerated its size to make the movement seem even more formidable to friends and foes.58 Stephenson and other Indiana Klan leaders boasted that state membership ranged anywhere from a quarter million to half a million. But in 1925, when an Indianapolis reporter named Harold Feightner got his hands on an Indiana Klan roll sheet, it showed just over 165,000 members.59 Even without exaggeration, however, the Klan did draw many Americans into its net, and leaders took pains to make sure that didn’t go unnoticed. Referring to the Fourth of July ceremony in Kokomo, Indiana, that opened this book, a Klansman wrote, “It is conservative to say that fifty thousand Klansmen, most of them accompanied by their wives and families, were present in Malfalfa Park.” He added, “For miles on all sides of Kokomo automobiles, linked in a giant traffic jam, as thick as during the rush hours in a city’s streets, crawled slowly to their goal.”60 Only a week later, the Klan’s national paper noted seventy-five thousand Klansmen and their families assembled in Buckeye Lake, Ohio, for an occasion “of unbounded enthusiasm.”61