Ku Klux Kulture

by Felix Harcourt

  Nor was that the organization’s only attempt at controlling its press. Part of the reason for the similar language in early reports of Klan events was Imperial Kleagle Clarke’s shrewd tactic of rarely releasing typewritten or printed copy. Instead, as one historian has noted, he would send press releases “already in stereotype form for type casting from molten metal.” Editors would not and could not alter the piece before publishing it. Photographers were also usually prohibited so that the Klan could control what was and was not seen of the organization. The Indiana Klans, growing particularly inventive, hired their own photographer, W. A. Swift of Muncie, who would then supply chosen newspapers with illustrations for their articles—at a price.51

  As the Klan grew, and Hiram Evans took control from William J. Simmons, these restrictions lessened. By summer 1923, reporters still noted the “weird,” “ghostly,” “statuesque” nature of Klan activities, but also remarked on the Invisible Empire’s increasing disinterest in a pretense of secrecy. A rally on Long Island was described by the New York Times as “manifestly held in the open as a dramatic gesture of strength.” A year later, “the oath of the Klan and instructions to candidates were given loud and clearly” at a meeting in Boise, Idaho, “so that press representatives might hear.”52

  The Klan’s leaders also reached out to publications in the hoping of trading access for favorable coverage. In a special issue of the illustrated monthly McClure’s, journalist Max Bentley lauded the Indiana Klan as “a real factor for the betterment of municipal rule” and lavished praise on Indiana Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson (soon to be arrested for sexual assault and murder), acclaiming him as “the outstanding man of the young generation.” Both the Chicago Daily News and the Los Angeles Times printed lengthy interviews with Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, while periodicals like the Forum and Current History, an affiliate of the New York Times, turned to Evans for comment on current affairs. In 1926, the North American Review, a prestigious literary quarterly, printed a thirty-page explanation of Klan principles from Evans. Shorter criticisms of the organization were published in the following issue, as part of a symposium to form “a nationally comprehensive estimate, pro and contra, of the Ku Klux Klan and its place among American institutions.” Time, founded in 1923 and quickly gathering a mass following, put Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans on its cover in 1924—a few months before Sigmund Freud was similarly featured, and only one week after Pope Pius XI had appeared.53

  After 1924, however, the novelty of the Invisible Empire seemingly began to wane for many readers—or at least for many publications. Reports on Klan events were also beginning to suffer from diminishing returns. Initiations and parades had been supplemented and then supplanted by picnics and carnivals. Seeking to stem the decline in journalistic attention, Klans competed to create news with the most lavish display of fireworks and the largest fiery cross (a record taken by the Boise, Idaho, Klan with a cross allegedly five hundred feet tall and two hundred feet across). Airplanes performed stunts, displayed electric fiery crosses, and dropped aerial bombs. Yet even as the Klan most needed the publicity to prevent an increasingly rapid fall in membership, the glut of events competing for attention diminished their news value. By 1925, as participation in the organization collapsed, and fewer and fewer sizable events were held, the torrent of press coverage slowed to a trickle, and the Klan organization was locked into a vicious circle of decline.54

  For years, as journalist Ross Garrigus noted, many newspapers had not carried “any big expose stories.” Instead, they “covered Klan rallies, and like that, but as far as getting in their inner workings, they never touched it at all.” Once the organization’s power began to crumble, the press seemingly rediscovered the idea that criticizing the increasingly Invisible Empire could boost circulation. Even in Georgia, as scandals and the Klan’s constant infighting took its toll, the Atlanta Constitution (which Julian Harris had previously deemed the “Atlanta Morning Molly-Coddle” for its soft treatment of the Klan) moved to openly oppose the organization. With the risk minimized, newspapers around the country flaunted their opposition to the Klan organization. As they did so, they constructed the myth of a unified front of dedication to “drubbing” the Invisible Empire.55

  In the construction of this myth, the complex and inconsistent relationship of antagonism and accommodation between the Klan and the nation’s press was quickly, and conveniently, forgotten. Spurred by a desire to attract new readers without losing existing subscribers, newspapers around the country publicized a growing Klan. The frequently uncritical coverage of the organization’s parades and picnics implicitly stripped the Klan of its controversy. Even when that controversy was foregrounded—whether for reasons of principle or profit—the effect was often to boost the Invisible Empire. At the same time, as much as they lambasted newspapers supposedly dominated by “alien” Catholic and Jewish interests, Klan members and sympathizers embraced modern advertising and public relations techniques to promote the movement to a national audience. Far from “emasculating” the Invisible Empire, the press engaged millions of Americans around the country in a daily discourse in which the Klan movement was far from marginal and the Empire far from Invisible.

  3

  Fiery Cross-Words

  The latest literary arrival in the cause of the Klan is the Patriot, published at St. Louis, Mo., every week. It’s a pretty husky baby, too. Eight seven-column pages chock full of Americanism and live enough for the most critical of newspaper readers to enjoy.

  Imperial Night-Hawk, July 11, 1923

  The nation’s press propelled the Ku Klux Klan to the forefront of the American conversation, but with mixed assessments. For many, this was not good enough. To offer a Klannish alternative, the organization’s national leadership acted to construct its own national newspaper syndicate. To do so, though, the official Klan newspaper would have to fend off dozens of local competitors established by individual Klan members and sympathizers. The press of the Invisible Empire shaped an imagined community of Klannishness, coalescing a national movement around a consumable cultural identity. At the same time, the struggle to control the delivery of that message revealed the federalized and fractured structure of the Klan organization.

  Whether officially sanctioned or not, the Klan publications that were created are revealing. Klan newspapers were shaped by, and reflected, an accommodation to modern press trends—particularly in the tabloidization of news. Perhaps the clearest example of the commingling of these cultural strands was the collision of the Klan’s antimodern rhetoric with the puzzle craze that gripped the emerging consumerist society. The porous boundaries of cultural division in the 1920s were on full display in the popularity of the “Fiery Cross-Word Puzzle.”

  From the tenure of editor Edward M. Kingsbury at the New York Sun in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the booming market of the 1920s, the growth of tabloid newspapers saw a changing definition of what was “news.” The pioneering Daily News in New York, for example, sponsored (and wrote at length about) skating parties and dance competitions, offered beauty tips and lifestyle advice, sold horoscopes, and helped readers find lost pets or sell clothes. By 1926, it was the best-selling daily newspaper in the country, read by “plumbers and plasterers, secretaries and stenographers,” for “entertainment, gossip, and useful information” on navigating life’s hurdles. At the same time, as Donald L. Miller has noted, the newspaper was roundly criticized for pandering “in a blatant and unashamed way” to “basic instincts and vulgar tastes.” It was a description that could have been, and was, equally applied to the increasingly popular Klan press.1

  The organization’s Imperial leadership dominated the Ku Klux Klan’s first forays into the world of American newspapers. The Searchlight had been founded in Atlanta in 1919 by the nativist Junior Order of United American Mechanics (JOUAM). By 1921, the newspaper’s principal stockholder was Elizabeth Tyler, head of the Klan’s public relations team, while local politician and Klan organ
izer James O. “Joe” Wood edited the paper. The eight-page weekly proclaimed proudly that it stood for “Free Speech. Free Press. White Supremacy.”2 Similarly, in the Klannish stronghold of Indiana, an anti-Catholic publication called Fact! was converted in July 1922 into the Fiery Cross, another eight-page Klan weekly. Dedicated to maintaining “a policy of staunch 100 percent Americanism without fear or favor,” the Fiery Cross was controlled by David C. Stephenson, the immensely powerful King Kleagle (and soon to be Grand Dragon) of Indiana, who had effective dominion over the northern Klans.3

  In 1923, the Fellowship Forum of Washington, D.C., joined the ranks of semi-independent Klan publishing. The paper was the creation of George Fleming Moore, a high-ranking Southern Mason, while the funding came from local “drugstore impresario” James S. Vance. The nationally circulated twelve-page weekly had been founded in June 1921 to report on fraternal organizations across the country, but by 1923 was clearly governed by the Klan. In September of that year, at a stockholders meeting for the Forum’s publisher, the Independent Publishing Company, the shift was evident. Earlier directors of the company had mostly been prominent Masons. Now, Moore and Vance were joined on the board by Herschel C. McCall, Grand Dragon of Texas, the Invisible Empire’s “ambassador” to Washington, D.C., and one of Imperial Wizard Evans’s most trusted lieutenants.4

  Nonetheless, the Imperial officers did not hold a monopoly on the Invisible Empire’s journalistic endeavors. As members flocked to the Klan’s banners through the early 1920s, the movement’s press representation rapidly diversified. From the Jayhawker American in Oklahoma to the Protestant Herald in Colorado to the aptly named Crank in Arizona, new mouthpieces of independent Klannish sentiment appeared around the country. Dawn: A Journal for True Patriots materialized on Chicago newsstands in late 1922. Larger than the Searchlight or the Fiery Cross at sixteen pages, with an eye-catching front cover of a mounted Klansman holding a fiery cross aloft, Dawn had the feel of a magazine rather than a newspaper. By June 1923, the Chicago weekly claimed, with justification, to be “one of the strongest publications in the country supporting the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and other all-American organizations.” The Dawn Publishing Company incorporated itself with a capitalization of forty thousand dollars. In Ohio, meanwhile, there was the Buckeye American. In Iowa, the Hawkeye Independent. In Seattle, the Watcher on the Tower. In Dallas, the Fiery Cross Magazine. Some Klan dailies, like the Pekin Daily Times in Illinois, even began to appear. Generally run independently of any official oversight, and offering a multiplicity of voices and opinions, these publications nevertheless were strikingly effective in creating a national press culture that centered on the promotion of the Klan as an appealing and positive force for white Protestant Americanism. Even as the organization fractured and federalized in its operation, the movement united behind a common discourse of heroic Klannish identity.5

  Not everyone appreciated this content. Mayfield’s Weekly, a Klan publication in Texas, caused a minor firestorm in October 1921 after it claimed Mayor John F. Hylan of New York City had ordered New York police to shoot Klansmen on sight. The New York Times described it as “journalism of a peculiar sort.” Similarly, in 1924, the paper of record complained that it would be difficult to find “a duller paper” than the Searchlight. It would be hard to imagine, the New York Times argued, a newspaper “less useful to its readers, if they want anything in the way of world or local news.” The Gray Lady’s estimate of utility, however, was based on a rapidly changing definition of what constituted news.6

  The ideas presented in Klan publications were nothing new. Minus the lavish self-praise that oozed from every page, readers could have found many similar arguments in anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic periodicals like the Railsplitter or Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. The presentation, though, was distinctly modern. While Klan members may have bemoaned the state of the mainstream media, their own publications owed much to the increasingly popular tabloid model and the growth of news magazines.

  Some of the Klan publications were notable primarily for their anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic diatribes. One of the most notorious—and most popular—was the Badger American, a Wisconsin monthly with subscribers in fourteen states. It was set apart by the editorial cartoon that graced each issue’s cover. A typical month might depict “Romanism” as a vicious-looking buzzard nestled on a pile of skulls, or show the Knights of Columbus as brutish thugs brandishing shillelaghs, guided by a papal phantasm. It was also “one of the vilest, most noxious Klan publications to receive a widespread circulation,” which may be an understatement for a publication that venomously attacked black World War I veterans as “bloated with self-importance.”7

  Yet even the Badger American consciously aped many of the current publishing trends in its efforts to reach readers (see fig. 3.1). The newspaper humor column, critic Gilbert Seldes claimed in the 1920s, was “the most sophisticated of the minor arts in America.” The articles of “colyumists” (in Seldes’s formulation) like Don Marquis, Ring Lardner, and arguably H. L. Mencken himself were popular and influential mainstays of the major urban dailies. As such, it is unsurprising that the Badger American mimicked these features in its pages, drawing particularly on the tradition of popular dialect and vernacular humor that had long drawn readers to publications like the Saturday Evening Post. The regular column “Lissen Tu This,” ridiculing Irish Catholics, appeared under the byline of one Q. Cluxton Clanning, while Jews were lambasted in a column called “The Jolly Jewboy.” Where the appeal of content failed, the Badger American turned to Daily News–style tabloid sales gimmicks, including a promotion for a free “Wonder” telescope with every three subscriptions sold.8

  Figure 3.1. Cover of Wisconsin Klan newspaper, The Badger American, August 1924.

  These tendencies were even more pronounced among the largest and most widely circulated Klan publications. In many ways, these periodicals owed their success to one of the key publishing ideas of the 1920s. Like the newly founded Reader’s Digest and Time, much of the Klan press offered news and features in capsule form, presenting a ready-made opinion. The Searchlight in Atlanta led the way. Dedicated primarily to reporting on the good deeds and charitable works of the Klan, features like “Ku Kluxin,” a lighthearted roundup of local Klan activity, were typical. At the same time, these reports were mixed with short, reprinted news summaries and punchy populist attacks on the rickety schemes of venture capitalists in Georgia and restrictive “reform” politics—stances that, not coincidentally, also furthered editor Joe Wood’s own political career.9

  Indiana’s Fiery Cross, controlled by a council of influential Klansmen,10 similarly focused largely on self-flattery and on reprinting articles from popular publications around the country. The publication’s purpose was not original reporting, editor Ernest Reichard argued, but to “give the American viewpoint” on news of the day, largely by reprinting political criticisms of immigration from major national publications. Vainly attempting to veil its anti-Catholicism in the language of “aliens” and “organized opposition,” the newspaper consciously lurched toward the mainstream of American journalism. In a reflection of the split between the Klan organization and the lived ideology of the movement, these efforts apparently garnered the Fiery Cross “a number of complaints in certain sections because we refuse to say anything [overt] against the Catholics.”11

  Klan publications furthered these efforts toward at least a veneer of respectability with well-received forays into public-interest and lifestyle articles—a short history of the hatband, for example—side by side with the newspaper’s anti-Catholic concerns. While this same press style could be found in any number of Klan publications, perhaps the most evident example of this approach was Minnesota’s Call of the North. The St. Paul weekly mixed humor pieces (often reprinted from non-Klan publications, including the Los Angeles Times) and original poems with digested current events and longer articles on education, religion, and history to “stimulate constructive think
ing.” The Call’s content, claimed editor Peter J. Sletterdahl, was “newsy.”12

  This kind of “newsy” approach quickly proved popular with readers, which made Klan publications an attractive proposition for significant numbers of local advertisers. The Searchlight carried advertisements for a wide cross section of Georgia businesses, from shoe stores offering special discounts to Klan members to the powerhouse of Coca-Cola. The advertising director for the Fiery Cross, C. B. Salyer, boasted that the newspaper offered the best return on its display advertising (seventy-five cents per column inch) of any newspaper in Indiana. Whether or not that was the case, regional businesses flocked to advertise in the weekly. Some Klan periodicals clearly existed for little reason other than to carry advertising. The weekly Kluxer of Dayton, Ohio, regularly ran to more than fifty pages—more than half of which was advertising. The T.W.K. [Trade With Klansmen] Monthly, published in Alabama, weighed in at a hefty forty pages and generated sufficient revenue to print its advertising in tricolor.13