Ku Klux Kulture

by Felix Harcourt

  “Knights of the Open Palm” was not a complex story. Only twenty pages long, it was concerned more with tough-guy wisecracks and two-fisted action than promoting a particular philosophy. Race Williams was tasked with investigating the kidnapping of a boy who had witnessed a woman being tarred and feathered by the Klan, allowing Daly to quickly stake out an anti-Klan position without expository pontificating. Daly also clearly understood that the backdrop of the Klan was the main appeal of the piece, and exploited many of the widely known secrets of the Invisible Empire—its codes and signals—as easy shorthand in building a suspenseful atmosphere.12

  Williams’s distaste for the organization’s activities was made clear as he “searched” (mostly using his fists) a small, Klan-dominated town. At the same time, Daly managed to include a defense of the original Klan and a vaguely sympathetic nod to the Klannish protestation that “half the crime laid to their doors wasn’t true.” The story’s anti-Klan message was also subverted somewhat by Daly’s hard-boiled style. Williams engaged in precisely the violent vigilantism that was supposedly being condemned. While the Klan organization was being overtly criticized, Williams was in many ways emblematic of that larger cultural Klan movement.13

  “Knights of the Open Palm” clearly emphasized entertainment over any kind of moral stand. In this, Daly was following the path Black Mask had laid out for him. In the magazine’s advertisements for the issue, the editorial team had proclaimed absolute neutrality. Their reason for publishing an issue of Klan-based stories was instead that “the Ku Klux Klan—with its vital and far-reaching possibilities—has become almost a household word throughout the length and breadth of our country.” The editors believed the organization would make “an excellent background for fiction stories,” with its atmosphere of “action, mystery, emotion, and other good fiction qualities.”14 A note from editor George Sutton in the “Ku Klux Klan Number” itself explained further:

  We felt that the attempt to revive the old Ku Klux Klan—with new ideas and new purposes—was the most picturesque element that has appeared in American life since the war, regardless of whether we condemn its aims—whatever they may be—or not. And yet no magazine has used it as a background for fiction stories. A few wishy-washy articles have appeared against it, but nothing of an entertaining nature.15

  Despite the long-term literary impact of Daly’s story, it is this attempt by Black Mask to exploit the “picturesque” nature of the Ku Klux Klan that is most revealing. “Knights of the Open Palm” was only one of the thirteen original pieces published in Black Mask’s Klan issue, its luridly alluring cover by L. L. Balcom depicting a Klansman brandishing a smoking cross. Nine of these explicitly dealt with the Invisible Empire, and offered a spectrum of opinions on the organization. Daly’s story was not even first billed. That honor went to the issue’s longest piece, “Call Out the Klan,” a “Complete Novelette of the Invisible Empire” by Herman Petersen, a prolific pulp author. Petersen’s story, as well as his correspondence with George Sutton, the editor of Black Mask, offers a telling insight into the complex process of the co-option, commercialization, and sanitization of the Klan by popular fiction in the 1920s.

  In February 1923, Sutton wrote to Petersen to request a “humdinger of a Ku Klux Klan story.” This was a commercial decision, not an ideological one. The magazine, Sutton explained, had already bought a Klan-based cover, and now they needed “a rip-snorting dramatic tale” to go with it. The pulp did not want a “controversial tale,” but “if it must take sides it might lean a little toward the Klan rather than against it.” Petersen, for his part, had no problem with this. As he explained in a letter to Sutton, “I may favor the Klan a bit—I lived south in 1917 and 1918—but I’ll start no controversy.”16

  In “Call Out the Klan,” Bruce Martin, a World War I veteran, returns to his Virginia home, where Klan members are stirring up trouble.17 Martin considers the Klan little more than interfering “would-be reformers.” His love interest, Lois D’Aprix, is a staunch defender of the organization: “If a man offends the Klan, he offends because he in some way has gone contrary to one of the great principles embodied in its constitution. . . . The Klan never gets the wrong man.” When D’Aprix is apparently kidnapped by the Invisible Empire, Martin searches for her in the mountains, where he discovers the body of a dead Klansman. A group of Klansmen catch Martin and, believing him to have shot their dead member (the brother of their Grand Cyclops), prepare to lynch him. The sheriff arrives in the nick of time, informing the gathering that they have the wrong man, and the Grand Cyclops meekly submits to his authority. Rather than arrest him, however, the sheriff deputizes the Klan gathering, and instructs them to “call out the Klan.”

  In the tale’s denouement, crosses are lit across the mountains to signal all Klansmen in the area, who ride out in search of D’Aprix.18 Together with Martin and the sheriff, they rescue her from the troublemaker who has stolen Klan robes and been pretending to be a member so that his crimes would be blamed on the Invisible Empire. Martin then renounces his earlier opinions: “I’m sorry for the ill feeling I bore the Klan. Since last night I have come to view your organization in an entirely different light.” With its virtue fully established, the story ended with the sheriff’s decision to join the Ku Klux Klan.19

  It is unclear whether Petersen had any direct connection with the Klan. In his correspondence with Sutton, he noted that “practically every incident in the whole yarn has been taken from newspaper clippings,” implying no inside knowledge on his part. What is certain is that an official Klan propagandist could scarcely have done a better job at espousing the organization’s merits. Petersen offered a thrilling conversion narrative that implicated readers in Martin and the sheriff’s endorsement of the Invisible Empire. He also stayed true to his promise to Sutton and carefully stripped the organization of any controversy—at no point in the story was any sense of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, or racial hatred even hinted at. Moreover, the plot device of having the Klan mistakenly thought guilty of a crime, only to be vindicated and have some imposter unmasked as the true culprit, reflected widespread Klannish denials of any association with criminal misdeeds, and would become a popular trope. Petersen’s story presented the Invisible Empire, in a popular, nationally distributed magazine, as a (generally) law-abiding adjunct to official law-enforcement, helping to punish evildoers and keep the peace. It was the same view of the Klan that the Invisible Empire’s leaders had long emphasized, the same imagined heroic self-image that bound an otherwise fractured and localized organization and appealed to a wider cultural movement of Klannishness. With just enough mystery and action to make it attractive, the Ku Klux Klan was a “picturesque element” indeed.20

  The remainder of the stories in the Black Mask’s “Klan Number” continued to mine the organization’s “good fiction qualities.” In “The Color of Honor” by Richard Connell (soon to become famous for his story “The Most Dangerous Game”), a Klansman discovers that he’s actually of mixed race and subsequently helps a Northern black voting rights activist escape from the rest of the Klan. In “T. McGuirk—Klansman” by Ray Cumming, a “humorous tale” of the Klan, McGuirk (a petty criminal and one of Black Mask’s favorite recurring characters) joins the Klan and uses it as a cover to rob a rich loafer, but offers no real opinion on the organization. A “historical” article on Reconstruction took the Dunning school line, firmly endorsing the first Klan while condemning carpetbaggers as “human scum.” Robert Lee Heiser’s “Devil Dan Hewett” was avowedly “neither for nor against the Klan” but “just a fine BLACK MASK yarn” with “a lot of the KKK action.”21

  The overwhelming response to publication of the special issue prompted Black Mask’s editors to establish a “Ku Klux Klan Forum” in the next three issues to allow readers to have their say. Having been “literally flooded with mail,” this “only open, free, absolutely unbiased discussion” ran heavily in favor of the Invisible Empire. Klan members were certainly pleased: “Oth
ers together with myself bought the magazine and gave it away, so personally I can account for six sales that would not have been made were it not for the significance of the issue.” But even nonmembers responded favorably to the pulp magazine’s “picturesque” use of the organization. Not counting those who explicitly identified themselves as members of the Klan, the letters published in the Black Mask ran two to one in favor of the Invisible Empire.22

  This pro-Klan outpouring is not altogether surprising. Virtually all the stories and features in the issue (including Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams story) had either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the “100% American” ideals of the Klan movement, whether or not they supported the organization’s activities. This division of sentiment was made abundantly clear in the story “Hoodwinked” by Newton Fuessle, published in the following issue because of lack of space in the “Klan Number” itself. Although the story detailed one businessman’s turn against the Klan, it was their activities, not their aims, with which he disagreed. As Fuessle wrote, “He realized that, while the ideals of the Klan might be right, certainly their practices that he had been able to observe at close range were wrong.”23

  E. R. Hagemann, the preeminent chronicler of Black Mask, noted that “one gets the distinct impression that Mask supported and upheld the Klansmen and that it favored their racism and vigilantism. No other argument seems logical.” This idea is underlined when we also consider the readership that Mask was trying to foster. Joseph T. Shaw, Black Mask’s editor after 1926, wrote that the pulp’s reader was “vigorous-minded; hard, in a square man’s hardness; hating unfairness, trickery, injustice, cowardly underhandedness.” This reader would be “not squeamish or prudish, but clean, admiring the good in man and woman,” “responsive to the thrill of danger, the stirring exhilaration of clean, swift, hard action.” Those who read Black Mask were “always pulling for the right guy to come out on top.” Shaw’s characterization of his readers could have been lifted directly from a Klan recruitment pamphlet. In fact, the Imperial Night-Hawk had encouraged Klan members to purchase the special themed issue, claiming that the mayor of New York was attempting to suppress Black Mask to prevent publication of anything favorable to the Klan.24

  Two studies of hard-boiled fiction have expanded on this relationship between detective stories and the Klan. Erin A. Smith makes the case that hard-boiled fiction functioned as an imagined community that addressed a need for male sociability that would once have been found in the saloon. Detective fiction concerned itself with “work, manliness, and the embodiment of class and social position in dress, speech, and manners”—all concerns shared by the imagined community of the Klan movement. Sean McCann has taken this argument further, making the case that the Invisible Empire itself rose to prominence “championing a social fantasy that closely resembled the mythology implicit in hard-boiled crime fiction.” Both “railed against class parasites and social decadence,” both “spotted the signs of corruption,” and both saw vigilante justice as “the only effective response to social ills.” Given their common touchstones, it seems reasonable that scholars might find considerable support for the Klan within Black Mask’s readership of hard-boiled detective fiction, and to find considerable appreciation for the world of detective fiction among members of the Klan.25

  This mutual admiration, though, was not limited to the rough-and-tumble world of the mystery pulps. To some extent, the very existence of the Invisible Empire was built on chivalric romances in the vein of Sir Walter Scott that lionized the Reconstruction Klan and an idealized Old South. These stories had arguably done even more than the Dunningite historians to forge a new national consensus on Reconstruction and Southern identity. As K. Stephen Prince has argued, Southern writers were able to “win with the pen what they had lost with the sword.” In reinventing the period as proof of the dangers of “wrongheaded northern intervention,” in Prince’s words, these Reconstruction novels secured Northern complicity in Southern racial thought. In celebrating the racial violence of Southern white men in the past, popular novelists shaped a contemporary white supremacist masculinity that welcomed the resurgent Klan movement of the 1920s.26

  This was not a one-sided literary struggle. Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand, published in 1879, had achieved tremendous success as an anti-Klan novel that lionized the Union League and Northern Republican “carpetbaggers.” But Tourgée’s book disappeared under a flood of Southern authors who acclaimed the Klan’s role in liberating the South from the heinous rule of the Radical Republicans. N. J. Floyd’s Thorns in the Flesh came first in 1884, followed by Thomas Jefferson Jerome’s Ku-Klux Klan No. 40 in 1895. Their somewhat lackluster efforts were significantly overshadowed by the publication of Red Rock in 1898 by Thomas Nelson Page, one of the most celebrated of the Southern “magnolias and midnight” romantic authors, and then Gabriel Tolliver in 1902 by Joel Chandler Harris, best known for his popular Uncle Remus stories.27 The genre reached its apex, however, with Thomas Dixon Jr.28

  Dixon’s “Reconstruction Trilogy”—The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907)—was key in creating the romantic myth of a heroic Reconstruction Klan that had fostered a fertile atmosphere for the organization’s rebirth. Although his writing left something to be desired, Dixon’s breathless narration of the Klan’s night-riding heroics garnered him millions of readers. The Atlanta Journal hailed The Leopard’s Spots—in many ways, an explicit refutation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—as “an epoch-making book.” The novel would go on to sell over a million copies and establish Doubleday, Page & Co. as a major publisher. When The Clansman was published in 1905, Firmin Dredd noted in The Bookman that it was “a very poor novel, a very ridiculous novel,” but “a novel which very properly is going to interest many thousands of readers, of all degrees of taste and education.” Dredd was not wrong—the Clansman sold an estimated forty thousand copies in just ten days. Those readers, in turn, were inculcated into a literary public centered around the idea that the Klan had “saved” the South.29

  These pro-Klan novels generally followed the same basic, highly successful formula. Each told the story of a sterling example of Southern manhood who fought unscrupulous carpetbaggers, suppressing their attempts at “stirring up racial strife.” In the process, these Southern gentlemen would usually find great romantic and/or financial success. Simplistic and repetitive, these narratives of Klannish heroism nonetheless found fertile ground both in the popular imagination and in the work of many historians at the turn of the century. Literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels credits Dixon’s work with helping to rewrite American definitions of “whiteness” and “American” in the early twentieth century. Joel Williamson has similarly argued that Dixon had more impact on the lives of modern Americans than some presidents.30

  Contemporary observers certainly noted the influence these novels had on the national white imagination. African American author Joel Rogers, for one, argued in 1923 that popular writers had given the original Klan “a clean bill.” Their romanticized view of the Invisible Empire had taken root in both the popular mind and the academic community, leaving Americans ready and even eager for a revival of the organization. Novelists had to bear, in Rogers’s estimation, “a great deal of blame” for the success of Simmons’s efforts. In many respects, the new Invisible Empire owed its existence more to a fictionalized ideal of the Reconstruction Klan than it did to the brutal reality of the Southern night riders.31

  Yet, that same year, Thomas Dixon appeared at the Century Theatre in Detroit at an anti-Klan meeting organized by the American Unity League to condemn the resurgent Invisible Empire as “the acme of stupidity and inhumanity.” Although he made sure to praise the Reconstruction Klan as “the bravest and noblest men of the South,” Dixon’s criticism of the Klan revival was unremitting. The author was particularly concerned that the organization’s anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic sentiments undermined racial unity. Like Henry P. Fry, he feared any division that would leave w
hites weakened in the unceasing competition with other races. He saved his harshest words for the Invisible Empire’s opposition to immigration, arguing that the Klan’s plan to “meet the humble immigrant of today with a mask and dagger and push him back to hell” denied America’s heritage as a nation of immigrants. “If this is 100 per cent Americanism,” Dixon told his audience, “I for one spit on it.”32

  It is a reflection of the fluid tensions of the cultural 1920s that Dixon, that professional Southerner, was also arguably the most important voice of anti-Klan fiction in the postwar period. The frenzied adulation with which Dixon described the valiant efforts of the Reconstruction Klan as a stout band of Southern patriots obscured an important fact. The author believed that the organization had accomplished its task and had been rightfully dissolved. The Traitor, published in 1907, told of the dangers of a Klan that was reconstituted after the organization’s leaders had ordered it to disband.33 Having already achieved its purpose of protecting the South from Reconstruction, the aimless Klan was turned to petty ends, pitting “faction against faction, neighbor against neighbor, man against man,” and leading to “martial law, prison bars and the shadow of the gallows.”34

  This theme was reinforced in Dixon’s 1912 novel, The Sins of the Father, which harped on the idea that the Invisible Empire was an inherently “dangerous institution” that gained its virtue in its “absolute obedience” to “an intelligent and patriotic chief.” Without that leadership, the organization would degenerate into “a reign of terror by irresponsible fools.” Although in both books the “good” Klan is ultimately able to take control of the “bad” Klan and force it out of action, Dixon’s disapproval of a Klan revival was clear.35

  As the second Klan rose in power through the early 1920s, then, it seemed obvious to the author what he needed to do. In the summer of 1924, Dixon published The Black Hood, explicitly warning the revived Klan to disband. The story of a Reconstruction Klavern that outlives its purpose, The Black Hood returned to the themes and heavy-handed preaching of The Traitor, forcing additional lectures on religious tolerance and the dangers of anonymity into already labored dialogue. The revived Klan of the book—whose white robes are replaced, without any attempt at subtlety, with a black hood—abused the power of the organization, leading to score settling, attempts to “regulate the private life of individual men and women,” and a disintegration into “a weapon of religious persecution.” The “criminal folly” soon descended into violence. To rule out any misunderstanding, Dixon underlined his ham-fisted sermonizing about the awful dangers of the Klan with the deaths of both a crippled Jewish boy (the son of a Polish immigrant bearing “a remarkable resemblance to Hoffman’s Christ”) and the boy’s dog.36