The Grand Dragon of Oklahoma had once trumpeted the ability of the Forum to attract readers who avoided Klan newspapers. That ability now seemed to disappear, and with it the readers. Nor could the Forum rely on Klan members to simply replace those numbers. The Klan itself was crumbling. Unable to maintain their official newspaper, there was little chance that the organization would be able to support the Forum. Although exact circulation figures do not exist, the Fellowship Forum had once boasted a circulation of somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million copies—a powerhouse of Klannish propaganda. By the beginning of 1928, it was “a starving little sheet.”60
Although weakened, the Forum was not yet defunct. It had retained a surprising amount of its former power by diversifying into radio. More importantly, like the Klan organization, it regained a modicum of momentum with the news that there was a Catholic running for president. Governor Al Smith of New York had finally secured the Democratic nomination, and in so doing breathed fresh life into the Ku Klux Klan and its newspaper of choice. An anti-Prohibition Catholic, Smith was everything the Forum had fought against since its inception. The fact that he was a Democrat did not help—among the Forum’s major stockholders by this point were R. H. Angell, Republican Party chairman for the state of Virginia, and William G. Conley, the Republican nominee for governor of West Virginia. The Baltimore Afro-American went so far as to allege that the Forum was part of a coordinated appeal by Herbert Hoover’s campaign to racial and religious prejudices in an attempt to break the Solid South of the Democratic Party.61
Whatever the strength of the official links between the Fellowship Forum and the Republican Party, there is no doubt that the Forum was one of the most vocal and influential voices of the anti-Smith movement. The paper filled its pages with attacks on the Catholic Church in general, and on Smith in particular. It also focused heavily on what the Afro-American called “scurrilous attacks” linking Smith with “Negro Equality.”62 Across the South, issues of the paper were distributed in rural districts “by the bale,” allegedly at the expense of the anti-Smith organization. Virginia was flooded with copies, as were Alabama and Tennessee. Editor James S. Vance claimed that the Forum now had a readership of over a million, and publicly begged for funds to print an additional hundred thousand copies. Vance explained that if he could succeed in meeting the demand, he was “perfectly confident” the Solid South could be broken by those who believed that electing Smith would mean “Romanizing our Government.” It is unclear whether he ever received these funds, but the Forum certainly “waxed opulent,” in the words of the Pittsburgh Courier.63
Although it is impossible to determine how effective the Fellowship Forum’s anti-Smith campaign was, some measure of its impact is evident in the fact that Governor Smith was drawn to publicly denounce the paper on multiple occasions. During a radio address from Oklahoma, Smith answered some of the “senseless, stupid, foolish attacks” offered by the “notorious” Forum. At a speech in Baltimore before a crowd of over twenty thousand, Smith condemned “that gallant band of patriots known as the Ku Klux Klan” for “promoting the Republican candidacy.” For “a sample of their handiwork,” he encouraged the audience to read “their official organ,” the Fellowship Forum. Every “contemptible” issue, Smith declared, contained “the most outrageous abuse that it would be possible to direct against a large body of American citizens.” The Badger American would have been proud.64
On November 6, Herbert Hoover won forty states to Al Smith’s eight. Among those that had gone for Hoover were Virginia, which had not gone to a Republican since 1872, as well as Tennessee, West Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas. The Fellowship Forum had won its victory against Smith and the threat of “Romanized government.” But in its victory, the newspaper found defeat. Without an immediate threat like Smith’s candidacy to inflate circulation, and without anti-Smith forces (whether official or unofficial) providing funding, the boom in the Forum’s fortunes soon vanished.
As with the Kourier Magazine, the Forum did not disappear immediately. The weekly continued to limp along until early 1937, but it had receded into irrelevancy. Without the Klan to lend it a crusade or a readership, the Forum had little to offer to its dwindling audience but run-of-the-mill histrionic diatribes against the publication’s new enemies, Communists and Bolsheviks. The Invisible Empire disappeared from public view, and the Forum—like the Kourier before it—disappeared from newsstands. As it did so, it disappeared from popular memory. The Fiery Cross-Word, and all that it signified, were swiftly forgotten. In the process, we lost our understanding of what the success and squabbles of the “newsy” Klannish press revealed—the fluid cultural divisions of the period as Klan members and sympathizers railed against the press even as they adopted the trappings of the modern newspaper to promote a national identity of white Protestant heroism; the Invisible Empire’s strained efforts to garner both visibility and respectability; and the shattering tensions between the Klan organization’s leadership and the wider Klan movement.
4
The Good, the Bad, and the Best Sellers
The power of the printed page is so great that it is folly to ignore the influence of books and magazines.
Minnesota Fiery Cross, May 23, 1924
The publication of Civilization in the United States in 1922 “made a considerable sensation,” according to H. L. Mencken. Edited by Harold E. Stearns, a young friend and admirer of Mencken, Civilization was an ambitious consideration of “the problem of modern American civilization as a whole.” Thirty-three commentators—many of whom had been suggested by Mencken, who also contributed a chapter on politics—offered what the Sage of Baltimore called a “sharply realistic point of view.” Arthur M. Schlesinger, in his review of the collection, was less favorable in his appraisal. The noted historian and intellectual called it “supercilious” criticism, and complained that important subjects were treated “cynically and flippantly.”1
Stearns’s collection marked an early example of what one historian has referred to as the “new estrangement” of American intellectuals in the postwar period. As Louis Raymond Reid bemoaned in his chapter “The Small Town,” the intellectual “may try to get in” to American cultural life, “but the doors are usually barred.” Contributors like George Jean Nathan, Lewis Mumford, and Frederic C. Howe bemoaned the “unmistakably provincial” nature of American civilization. For many, there was no choice but to escape the “emotional and aesthetic starvation” of the United States for the virtues of the great nations of Europe.2
Much has been written on this avowed estrangement. Yet it is important to remember that, for all the discussion that surrounded the publication of Civilization, the collection had by 1924 sold less than five thousand copies in the United States, Canada, and England combined. Even in 1922, Schlesinger argued that “the future historian of American life” would find Civilization “valuable not as criticism of present-day civilization but as an aid to understanding a certain type of intellectual activity and outlook which is well represented in the persons of the authors.” As Mark Greif has noted, generations of critics have retroactively canonized a pantheon of cultural masterpieces to serve contemporary needs. Doing so has simultaneously served to delimit popular understanding of “American literature.” Too often, we have focused on the critics and not on the subject of their criticisms.3
Mencken divided the world of publishing between the books “that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.” Best sellers are often the worst cultural survivors. In losing this work from analysis of the period, though, we lose the reading habits of the majority of Americans. By ensuring what might now be deemed middlebrow or lowbrow fare is folded into the historical record alongside more sophisticated works, we garner a far richer understanding of American culture and society. In following Erin A. Smith’s cue to engage seriously with “bad” books, including the literary lowlights of the Invisible Empire, we garner greater insight into the Ku Klux Klan’s ambiv
alent consumption of American literature and American literature’s ambivalent consumption of the Klan.4
We need to understand the popular in American literature not least because more Americans were reading more books than ever before. The term “best seller” came into common use for the first time in the 1920s as the decade saw a literary boom in American life. Almost six thousand books were published in the United States in 1919. Ten years later, that number had increased almost 60 percent, fueled by a rise in the consumption of everything from hardbound scholarly works to inexpensive paperbacks, from reprinted classics to pulp fiction. The ranks of American publishing houses swelled, encouraging an increasingly literate population to devote their time to reading—romance novels and biographies of great Americans, mysteries and journalistic studies. The number of public libraries grew, as did the size of their collections and their use. The “average American” of the twenties apparently read seven books a year—buying two, withdrawing four from public or circulating libraries, and borrowing one from a friend.5
Even these growing numbers likely underestimate the number of books being produced and read by Americans in the 1920s. Before the First World War, an estimated 90 percent of books were sold outside bookshops. While that was beginning to change, there were still only around fifteen hundred book dealers in the United States by 1925, almost all of whom were found in large cities. For those outside major urban areas, door-to-door and mail-order sales were often the primary means of obtaining reading material. These alternative supply networks often make it difficult to obtain reliable information on the sales of certain titles, even as the decade saw major new avenues of distribution. The Book of the Month Club (BOMC) appeared in 1926, sending out almost five thousand copies of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, an English comedy of manners. The BOMC was soon joined by the likes of the Literary Guild, offering curated middlebrow fare to increasing numbers of American readers, and the Religious Book Club, as the number of religious books published increased dramatically.6
Just as there was no one type of distribution, there was no one type of publisher. For some, Horace Liveright was the emblem of this publishing boom, the “Ziegfeld of his profession.” His firm, Boni & Liveright, was “the Jazz Age in a microcosm.” Representing Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, and Sherwood Anderson, among many others, he published seven Nobel Prize winners in a decade. Key members of the firm went on to found Simon & Schuster and Random House, shaping the future of American publishing.7
But Boni & Liveright was an outlier. In H. L. Mencken’s estimation, most of the major firms dedicated themselves to “merchandising garbage that should make any self-respecting publisher blush.” Established publishing houses tended to be bastions of conservatism, unwelcoming to African Americans and Jews, hostile to avant-garde or radical literature. At the same time, these companies were often looking for profits over Nobel Prizes. Hemingway might have brought plaudits, but—as trade publishers increasingly aware of the lucrative religious market knew—Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ was going to sell more copies.8
A publisher like Bobbs-Merrill arguably offers a far better understanding of the wider culture of the 1920s. The Indianapolis-based publishing house may not have attracted the same acclaim as Boni & Liveright, but it issued some of the most popular books of the decade. Race or Nation by Gino Speranza, which attracted praise from the Klan for its argument on the Anglo-Saxon underpinnings of American democracy, sat alongside adventurer Richard Halliburton’s best-selling The Royal Road to Romance in the publisher’s catalog. Felix Weiss’s nativist tract The Immigration Sieve and Albert Wiggam’s eugenicist New Decalogue of Science rubbed shoulders with Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary. This groundbreaking novel offered an unsentimental depiction of African American life, attracted praise for the white author from W. E. B. DuBois, and won the Pulitzer Prize. Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows, depicting a rugged Jesus as an example to modern businessmen, became one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century. All were published by Bobbs-Merrill.
When we look at this wider reading culture, we better understand the Ku Klux Klan movement’s complex relationship with contemporary literary life—as consumer, creator, and subject. Popular perceptions of the Invisible Empire make it easier to imagine Klan members simply as self-righteous censors with a propensity for burning books. To an extent, this was true. Like many other groups, Klan members condemned “filthy fiction” and “salacious” literature. A significant section of postwar literature did not meet with Klannish approbation. Stories of “unmarried mothers, concubines, free-lovers, vampires, human wrecks,” would, they claimed, “tear larger the hole in the fabric of society” by helping corrupt the morals of the young. As the American Standard succinctly argued, “The reading of trashy novels and magazines poisons the mind.”9
This was not a fringe position to take. Many condemned the “lurid sensationalism” that could be found in the “diversions offered the shopgirl and the clerk” in the 1920s, in the words of literary scholar Frederick J. Hoffman. Leaders of the Catholic Church publicly declared war on “the moral offal that passes for the best sellers of the day.”10 Methodist periodical Zion’s Herald denounced postwar fiction as a “sea of filth.” The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice pushed for passage of a Clean Books Bill that would allow the censorship of any publication containing even a single passage judged “filthy or disgusting.” The Salvation Army, the Knights of Columbus, the Y.M.C.A, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and more came together to organize the “Clean Books” crusade of 1923–25. Historian Paul S. Boyer called this effort “the most far-reaching challenge to American literary freedom in the 1920s,” if not in the twentieth century. The Klan was far from alone in its blustery criticisms.11
If we are guided by this rhetoric of puritanism—and by the equally spiky complaints of the Menckenians about “provincial” American culture—it is tempting to imagine clear and immutable battle lines of cultural consumption. If we look less at rhetoric and more at the lived ideology of reading habits, however, then that cultural divide seems far less deep and far more fluid. Ironically, Stearns’s castigation of the state of civilization in the United States points us toward one of the clearest indications that there were few clear-cut divisions in these cultural debates. The concerns of Stearns were just one part of a boomlet of books that promised “an assessment of the status of civilization to date,” a “balance sheet” for the American people. Both Warren I. Susman and James D. Hart have identified these reflections on postwar life as one of the most widespread types of publication in the twenties. As Joan Shelley Rubin has noted, the boom in both book production and readership had made many publishers alive to the “journalistic and commercial opportunities” these kinds of books presented.12
Since no honest consideration of contemporary life in the Jazz Age was complete without the Ku Klux Klan, the movement was an inescapable presence in these assessments of “civilization.” The Lynds’ groundbreaking social study, Middletown, for one, was unable to provide a comprehensive view of modern life without frequent reference to the Invisible Empire. The same was true of Preston W. Slosson’s The Great Crusade and After, Chandra Chakraberty’s The United States of America, Philip Gibbs’s Ten Years After, and more. At the same time, the diverse spectrum of opinion on the organization that could be found in these works—often presenting approval and disapprobation in the same book—underlines the shifting and sometimes contradictory tensions both between different cultural groups and within those same groups.
It is particularly notable, as in newspaper publishing, that it was not just an intellectual choice to discuss the Klan organization and its implications, but often a commercial decision. Book critics frequently focused on a volume’s treatment of the Klan as representative of its general quality. The Bookman’s review of Slosson’s Great Crusade singled out the University of Michigan history professor’s discussion of the Klan movement as particularl
y praiseworthy. Chakraberty’s United States, conversely, was chastised by the New York Times for an account of the Klan that “would hardly be accepted by any but a member of that order.” At the same time, the Invisible Empire was central to advertising these narratives. Many publishers, realizing that the Klan was of considerable popular interest, specifically marketed their work as containing information on the organization. The George H. Doran publishing firm, for example, promoted Ten Years After as “ranging from the Dawes report to the Ku Klux Klan.”13
Popular histories also underlined the importance of the Klan, often implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—endorsing the movement. John W. Burgess and William A. Dunning of Columbia University had argued extensively in the early years of the twentieth century that Reconstruction had to be considered as a tragic mistake, a Northern assault that upended an idyllic South and imposed racial tyranny. Their students continued to promulgate this “cheap and false myth,” in the words of W. E. B. DuBois, through the 1920s. In doing so, these historians laid the groundwork for popular understanding of Reconstruction—and of the role of the Ku Klux Klan. The so-called Dunningite interpretation of the era, and particularly the work of Walter L. Fleming, described a besieged South in which the Reconstruction Klan could be understood only as saviors. The organization’s violence was a justifiable response to the “monstrous” threat of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Union League, and black voters. As DuBois noted, to accept this mangling of history necessarily meant that white Americans would have to “embrace and worship the color bar as social salvation”—not just in the past, but in contemporary America. These historians effectively laid a mental framework for the revival of the Klan, allowing William J. Simmons to claim the mantle of Southern redemption. As far as both the organization’s leaders and the wider cultural movement were concerned, the Klan had returned to save the United States once again.14
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