That so many businesses were willing not only to be associated with the Ku Klux Klan but to pay to advertise in the movement’s publications points to the wide readership of these Klannish periodicals. Delivered directly to Klaverns and Klan officials, these newspapers were also carried on public newsstands and by newsboys on street corners across the country.14 By 1923, Dawn boasted a circulation of fifty thousand. The five-cent Searchlight claimed to have over sixty-eight thousand readers and could be found at least as far west as Montana and at least as far north as Pittsburgh. The Fiery Cross went one better, with a paid circulation of over a hundred thousand throughout the Midwest. The paper was so popular in surrounding states that, in April 1923, the Fiery Cross announced plans to create additional “state editions” in Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois. The Fellowship Forum, meanwhile, boasted of being read by more than half a million people every week.15
This “newsy” business was a profitable one. As of March 1923, the Fiery Cross alone claimed to employ more than nine hundred newspaper vendors to circulate the publication throughout the Midwest. The Indiana newspaper also proudly listed more than a dozen newsstands in Indianapolis at which the publication was available. Some news vendors even took out advertisements to announce the availability of Klan publications at their establishments. A few—like “K.K. Kore, the Kluxer Newsman and his Leather Lunged Newsboys”—flaunted their allegiance to the organization, but most operated from commonplace stalls.16
It is suggestive that much of the impetus for this success was commercial. Some sellers were certainly Klan members, and would even appear on street corners in their robes to pass out literature. Nevertheless, most “newsboys” were seemingly motivated more by financial than by ideological concerns. In June and August 1923, the Fiery Cross ran a competition offering a thousand dollars in prizes to those vendors showing the greatest gain in sales. The Searchlight allegedly paid well to distribute bundles of the newspaper to local newsstands for sale. One Fiery Cross salesman, Charles Holder of Indiana, told a local newspaper that he was a salaried employee who didn’t “know anything about the Klan except what is in the paper,” and claimed to be “as much at sea regarding it as you are.” He had already sold almost a thousand copies in just one of the towns he was responsible for.17
Holder’s sales were not out of the ordinary. The Fiery Cross broke down its sales agents into four categories, the highest-ranked of whom regularly sold more than a thousand copies. In Cleveland, more than a thousand copies were sold on a single corner in one Saturday afternoon. Some special issues sold even faster. One paper reporting on Klan-related murders in Louisiana (and absolving the Klan of all blame) managed to sell more than two thousand copies in a small Nebraska town. When the Fiery Cross issued an extra attacking the anti-Klan American Unity League, distributors “formed a steady stream into the circulation department until midnight.” Corner sellers, meanwhile, “left the office with every pound of papers they could possibly lug” and “did not get a block . . . before having to return for more.”18
These sales were not entirely without issue. Klan newspapers complained about “Irish” police who charged newspaper sellers with interrupting traffic, operating without a license, disturbing the peace, and “soliciting business in an offensive manner.” One “newsboy,” Eugene Leavengood, was arrested four times in ten days for selling the Fiery Cross—leading him to file a writ of prohibition against the local judge. Vendors in Cleveland claimed to have been “continually threatened by a ring of toughs and pugilists.” Perhaps the most abused Klan newspaper salesman was Thomas Lowe of Cincinnati. Almost fifty, and with one leg amputated at the knee, Lowe was abducted and beaten on three separate occasions. Klan newspapers heavily publicized the assaults, emphasizing the vicious nature of anti-Klan activists willing to attack a “crippled news boy.”19
Yet the fact that demand for these Klan publications was high enough and broad enough to warrant and sustain a widespread public distribution network is an important indicator that cultural tension did not denote cultural separation. Low-level clashes did not prevent Klan newspapers and magazines from being sold openly, publicly, and, most important, profitably. In doing so, the Klannish press largely avoided ghettoization. Members of the organization would have been able to find these publications through their Klaverns. The prevalence of public sales represented the appeal of the movement to a broader swath of the American public. Whether motivated by sympathy or curiosity, hundreds of thousands of Americans were engaging with the imagined community of the Klan on a regular basis. In finding a sizable audience both inside and outside of the organization for messages of a virtuous and heroic Klannish identity, these newspapers were a tremendously valuable form of propaganda.
That propaganda value also meant that the press was of key importance in 1923 in the struggle for control of the organization between founder William Simmons and his erstwhile successor, Hiram Evans. An effort at a bloodless coup—convincing Simmons to become the titular head of the Klan while relinquishing all control to Evans—backfired badly. Unhappy with his new position, Simmons had attempted to either retake his title as Imperial Wizard or create a rival Klan organization. In April 1923, even as the two factions went to court to sue for effective ownership of rights to the Klan organizational brand, the Klannish press fought a proxy war for the support of rank-and-file members.
To combat the loyalist Searchlight, which declared “there is only one Klan and Simmons is its head,” Evans established the Imperial Night-Hawk. The new weekly was an oddity in the Klan press, clearly and expressly created to address members of the organization rather than the wider public. Unlike any other Klan publications, the Night-Hawk was not available on newsstands or street corners, or for purchase of any kind. Nor did it carry any advertising. It was distributed weekly to Klaverns around the country for free as “the house organ of your order.” The Night-Hawk declared its sole mission to be to “promote the high ideals of the Klan,” even as it engaged in attacks on the Americanism of Simmons and his supporters.20
The balance of power in the battle for the hearts and minds of Klan members lay with the Fiery Cross, the most widely read of the publications under Imperial control. After editor Ernest Reichard was ousted and replaced by Evans ally Milton Elrod, it became clear that the tide had turned decisively in the battle for control of the organization. Final victory against Simmons arrived in November 1923, when Evans supporters took control of the Searchlight as well. By then, however, the new Imperial Wizard had decided that control of the Imperial publications was not enough.21
Now secure in his position, Evans hoped to use the Invisible Empire as a power base for entry into national politics. To do so, the Klan head would need to appeal not just to members but to a wide coalition of white Protestant Americans. Evans had to reach beyond the organization to rally the broader movement. The fractious and fractured nature of the independent Klan press, though, represented a fundamental challenge to his political power. Nowhere was the federalized nature of the organization more evident than in the multiplicity of voices offered up by these publications. While they coalesced around a common culture, their failure to speak as one—to challenge and contradict the authority and decisions of Evans and his administration on many issues—represented an embarrassment to the Klan’s ostensible leaders. As the Imperial Wizard explained to an interviewer, one of the greatest problems the organization faced was the “control of newspapers” that attempted to speak for the Klan without authority. High-ranking members, with no apparent sense of irony, even went so far as to complain that the use of the “hate programme” to increase circulation by these publications was tarring the good name of the Klan.22
By early 1924, it was clear to Evans that something had to be done. The solution presented itself in the unassuming form of Milton Elrod of Indiana. Despite somewhat unorthodox journalistic credentials, his backing of Evans had won him editorship of the Fiery Cross and a position among Evans’s top lieutenants.23 Now he would bec
ome the head of the Klan’s new Bureau of Publication and Education. Elrod was responsible for “renovating Evans . . . and selling him as an impeccable product to the American people.” To do so, he would have to take control of the Klannish press.24
Elrod set about his task with aplomb. While its ideas were nothing new, the bureau’s aims and organization were thoroughly modern. Seeing the growing control of press chains and syndicates, Elrod declared the bureau to be a competitor to increasingly large wire services like the Associated Press. The Klan’s new news-gathering service would operate as an alternative “national news service” for true Americans. The existing media, increasingly monopolized by a few outside interests, could not be trusted to supply the “vital facts” that the Klan wire service would provide.25
The notable success of the Fiery Cross had already moved the Klan press toward original reporting. Under Reichard, the Indiana weekly began to establish an organization of staff correspondents throughout the Midwest tasked with covering “every event of importance and happenings in, and of interest to, the citizens of the Invisible Empire, as well as to hundreds of thousands of 100 per cent Protestant American citizens.” The Bureau of Publication and Education would extend this network nationwide. In accordance with Evans’s growing political aspirations, the wire service would have its base in the nation’s capital, and allow any sufficiently patriotic periodical to carry the news provided by the new bureau.26
Under the direction of Elrod and the bureau, the Fiery Cross would become the official national newspaper of the Invisible Empire, supplementing the Imperial Night-Hawk as a mouthpiece for Evans’s ambitions. To be effective in that role, it seemed to the organization’s leaders that the Fiery Cross and the Night-Hawk would need to be the only Klan publications. All others would either be bought out, kowtow to Evans, or be run into the ground. As journalist Stanley Frost explained, Elrod’s task was to “organize a string of Klan papers throughout the country which shall be under absolute control” and “reform or drive out the present sheets.” Ex-Klansman Edgar Allen Booth described the process more colorfully, and perhaps more accurately, as “the strangling to death of papers opposing Evans.” Either way, change was at hand.27
By 1924, there were already eleven state editions of the Fiery Cross, including the main Indiana publication, with a claimed circulation of over two hundred thousand. Elrod now planned to create a network of up to thirty state editions of the paper, estimated to reach a circulation of over seven hundred thousand and an actual readership of more than four million. Under strict central control, these state editions would carry “state news and editorial matter of state interests.” The Bureau of Publication and Education would provide centrally distributed and approved “honest” news, “uncontrolled and unbiased.” Such was their conviction that the success of the weekly was assured, Elrod and Evans also suggested that once the Fiery Cross’s national prominence had been assured, the Invisible Empire would establish three daily newspapers.28
The bureau’s announcement of these plans came with more than a suggestion of hostility to all newspapers not a part of this official network, underlining once again the fractures between the Klan organization and movement. Independent publications, the Night-Hawk explained, although they had “rendered and are still rendering a great service to the organization,” were expressions of “personal opinions and policies.” Thus, the magazine argued, the “controversial matter” they often offered did not represent “the national Klan thought.” If so desired, the bureau would supply papers with content if they “honestly desire the service and use it in the spirit which it may be given.” It was time for the press of the Klan movement to fall in line or face the wrath of the organization’s national leadership.29
As one of the newspapers that had rendered “great service” to the Invisible Empire, the Call of the North transitioned seamlessly into its new role as the Minnesota Fiery Cross without any interruption to its regular publication schedule. Although the paper was now credited to the Klan’s own Empire Publishing Company, the switch had not even required a change in editor. The focus of the newspaper would remain on “news of the Klan arising within the borders of the Gopher state.” If a distracted reader had not noticed the change of name when they picked it up, there was little to immediately point to the fact that it was technically a different paper.30
Others refused to go quietly. In September 1924, when its official state rival appeared for sale, the Badger American responded defiantly. “Many were under the impression that the Badger American would quit,” an editorial explained, but “the only thing that would cause this publication to quit is lack of support.” Having long proclaimed its autonomy from the national organization, the newspaper quickly jettisoned most of its Klan news and renewed its focus on anti-Catholic attacks. It was to little avail. As it moved away from the “newsy” style of the popular Klan press, and with an organization-approved competitor, the Badger American saw a steep decline in subscribers and the departure of most of the newspaper’s advertisers. Shortly thereafter, the publication, which could once have claimed to be a major source of Klan power in Wisconsin and allegedly circulated from Alabama to Montana to New York, disappeared entirely.31
Similar scenarios unspooled across the country as the Klan flexed its financial muscle, and paper after paper was either bought up or forced out of business. Ex-Klansman Edgar Allen Booth called the process an “orgy of spending” that saw newspapers purchased “with reckless abandon.” At the organization’s 1924 Klonvokation (or annual conference), the national Klan’s Finance Committee reported that twenty-one papers had been purchased for the oddly precise amount of $86,368.41. Booth estimated the cost in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” The Imperial Wizard noted only that “putting the Klan press under control” had been a “difficult task.” Whatever the price, “it was achieved and the achievement was of great value.” The Klan’s leaders felt no need to hide the fact that dissenting voices would be “discontinued at an early date.”32
This process was anything but smooth, however. Evans first lost Elrod, whose departure from the Klan was surrounded by controversy, and then the name of the paper itself. The American Order of Scottish Clans, whose official publication was also called the Fiery Cross, finally won their lawsuit preventing the Klan from impinging on their copyright. The Invisible Empire was forced to change the name of their official publication to the Kourier. In an effort to save face, they did so while claiming that the change had always been intended.33
At the same time, the organization faced public embarrassment from the poor handling of the national expansion. In a number of the Invisible Empire’s newspaper buyouts, the previous publishers never received the promised compensation. The lucrative Kluxer of Ohio, for example, sued the Klan for two hundred thousand dollars in damages after it emerged that the reward for halting publication was never paid. The bureau had refused a written contract, as “they were all Klansmen together and Klansmen needed no written agreement because Klansmen always did the things they agreed to do.” In their efforts to unify the movement behind Evans and the organization, the Klan’s leaders were producing dissatisfaction and dissension.34
Nonetheless, the bureau’s campaign for control rolled on. By November 1924, even the Searchlight, the first paper taken over by Imperial Wizard Simmons, had been subsumed into the Kourier network. As an article in the last issue explained, the Searchlight had actually been placed under the bureau more than a year earlier. The intervening period had been dedicated to “perfecting a central organization,” the newspaper boasted, but now “all that is necessary” was complete. “Every section of the United States can be served” by the Bureau of Publication and Education—“all radiating from a single point, yet maintaining the local touch.”35
To a remarkable extent, this was true. The Klan’s leadership had succeeded in building a national newspaper syndicate that would effectively dominate the news much of its membership would read, and shape th
e public image of the movement. In doing so, the new national weekly built on the example of both its Klannish predecessors and the larger contemporary press landscape. The New York Herald Tribune, also established in 1924, would later be described as “a Protestant paper,” a publication not designed to appeal to “the ethnic mix of the city.” It was a description that the Klan’s leaders would happily have applied to their new newspaper. The Kourier represented a new means for the organization to advocate for the Klan as a respectable mainstream movement in American society.36
Combining the sensationalism of the New York tabloids with the local flavor of a state weekly, the Klan’s flagship publication exemplified the porous boundaries of cultural accommodation in the 1920s. The amalgamation of the “newsy” style with the Invisible Empire’s ideals had already proven highly popular with a wide audience. The Kourier solidified that trend to significant success. By December 1924, there were sixteen different editions of the newspaper. An eight-page weekly, sold for five cents, circulating in at least twenty-one states, the newspaper syndicate claimed a paid circulation of one and a half million. This number was likely inflated, but even if the Kourier only sold a third of what the bureau claimed, the Klan newspaper was one of the most-read publications in the country. Although nowhere near a rival to the perennially best-selling Saturday Evening Post, which claimed a total readership of potentially ten million people, the Kourier seemingly far outstripped the recently founded Time magazine, which claimed a circulation of fifty thousand.37
The front page of each edition of the Kourier was dedicated almost exclusively to Klan news from within the appropriate state or states. The organization relied on individual Klaverns to supply these local reports. The Grand Dragon of Illinois, writing to one Klavern, suggested that “if you have a newspaper editor or reporter among your membership” or “someone who is fitted for such work,” they should be appointed “Kourier correspondent.” This correspondent would be given special credentials and instructions from the bureau. The nominated member would then be responsible for offering “details of happenings,” or at least summarizing them for the capsule reports printed on the front page.38
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