In examining these varied fictional representations of the Klan, we see clear exemplars of the fluid cultural continuities and conflicts of the period. Even as the organization’s secrecy was criticized, the carefully cultivated air of mystery and excitement that surrounded the Invisible Empire made it a popular backdrop for crime and adventure stories. Satirists like Sheehan tried to highlight the threat of the Klan, often by tying the organization to an identity of toxic Americanism—an identity that the Klan itself embraced. At the same time, popular authors like Herman Petersen and Rex Beach implicitly legitimized the organization in their work and often explicitly championed the aims and ideals of the wider Klan movement.
Whether it was the “good fiction qualities” identified by Black Mask or the “spice” in a Beach novel, the Ku Klux Klan found itself widely commercialized and sanitized in popular fiction in the 1920s. In divorcing the fictional Invisible Empire from its more unsavory aspects, these stories often echoed the cultural identity of Klannish heroism promulgated by Klan propagandists. Around the country, working largely independently of the Klan organization, these enthusiastic amateurs hammered home a largely uniform vision of white Protestant virtue in polemical novels like Harold the Klansman and Knight Vale of the K.K.K. Yet these “bad books” have often been absent from literary studies of the period. Henle’s Sound and Fury disappeared from the historical record, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury was written in. In the process, we have forgotten the significance of the Invisible Empire as both hero (or at least antihero) and villain for a mass literary audience in the 1920s. As the Klan consumed popular fiction, popular fiction consumed the Klan—and neither was entirely sure what to make of the other.
6
Just Entertainment
One splendid field for our efforts is the movies. The screen offers the best possible opportunity for propaganda.
Searchlight, November 15, 1924
Go fuck yourself.
EUGENE O’NEILL to unknown Georgia Klansman
The theatrical entertainments of the 1920s displayed the same commercial hunger for a dash of Ku Klux Klan to add spice. The Invisible Empire was not just featured on the front page of newspapers across the country, but also in Variety, alongside stories on George M. Cohan and Mary Pickford. As the entertainment trade publication noted, “A touch of the Ku Klux Klan that serves as a thrill” was a key feature in a “successful screen production.” Just as on the page, commercial productions on the stage and screen offered mixed assessments of the Klan organization, but frequently served to sanitize and legitimize the wider Klan movement. The ambiguous attentions paid the Invisible Empire often furthered the conceptions of a heroic white Protestant identity shaped by local Klan members and individual sympathizers, who appropriated popular dramatic forms even as the organization denounced those same entertainments.1
This hostility was perhaps best exemplified by the reaction to Eugene O’Neill’s acclaimed but divisive All God’s Chillun Got Wings. It had already caused a rift between H. L. Mencken and his coeditor, George Jean Nathan, over whether it warranted publication in the American Mercury—though that was an argument over quality. The content proved even more problematic. O’Neill’s 1924 play told the story of Jim Harris, an ambitious young black man, who marries Ella Downey, an insecure white woman. In the face of Harris’s struggles to become a lawyer, Downey feels increasingly inferior to her husband, despite her “superior” skin color. Coming to equate Harris’s efforts to pass the bar exam with the efforts of African Americans to “pass” in white society, Downey attempts to undermine his career at every turn. Ultimately, her growing prejudice drives her insane.2
Even before All God’s Chillun opened, Klan publications complained of the “nauseating and disgusting” nature of the interracial production, arguing that the play should be suppressed lest it “stir the negroes of the country to violence.” Members of the cast, including star Paul Robeson, received a deluge of intimidating letters allegedly written by Klan members. The Long Island Klan threatened to bomb the theater if the play ever opened. O’Neill himself was the target of a number of explicit death threats. One, sent from Georgia on official Klan stationery, warned O’Neill that he would never see his sons again if the play opened. The playwright responded by scrawling “Go fuck yourself” across the face of the letter and mailing it back to the Georgia Klan.3
Despite the extremism evident in these threats, the Klan’s general reaction was firmly within the American mainstream. As O’Neill later remembered, it seemed “as if all the feeble-witted both in and out of the K.K.K. were hurling newspaper bricks in my direction.” The Pittsburgh Courier noted that the play lay at the center of “a veritable storm of pro and con discussion,” while critic Heywood Broun commented on “the most violent sort of controversy” surrounding the production. One study of All God’s Chillun claimed that so much newsprint was dedicated to the play that the clipping service cost more than the sets. The American Mercury lamented the number of “half-wits” responsible for a “copious flood of ga-ga” about the play. From the American Legion to a Princeton faculty member to the Salvation Army to half the Southern newspapers, the Ku Klux Klan was in “respectable” company.4
This was not an unusual alliance. Although their criticisms of theater tended to be more overtly racialized, the concerns of Klan members fell generally within the mainstream of American moralizing. Even as the organization’s leaders bemoaned the “degenerate sensuality” of the “vicious and depraved” stage, Catholic periodicals like The Sign complained of “vile plays” that violated “every canon of morality and common decency.” Booth Tarkington took to the pages of Collier’s to dismiss most of the 1926–27 season’s plays as “sheer dirt.” Even as Broadway solidified its theatrical prominence, New York’s 1927 Theater Padlock Law banned “obscene, indecent, immoral or impure” productions. The city’s mayor declared his vehement opposition to “disgusting or revolting degenerate plays.” The mayor of Boston, meanwhile, instituted a theatrical “Code of Morals” and was empowered to revoke theater licenses “for any reason whatsoever.”5
The same was true in film, where the industry saw a series of scandals stir public outrage—most notoriously the arrest of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle for manslaughter in 1921. As the presiding judge in Arbuckle’s first trial noted, “We are not trying Roscoe Arbuckle alone. . . . We are trying present-day morals, our present-day social conditions, our present-day looseness of thought and lack of social balance.” These concerns were similarly present in a letter sent by Pittsburgh Klan No. 1 to popular fan magazine Movie Weekly in 1923. “High morals, clean living, respect for religion and our flag” and “respect for law and order” in films, the Klan argued, would help the country produce “he-men and patriotic womanly women.” The alternative was “cigarette-smoking devils who love poodle dogs more than they do babies.”6
It was difficult for Movie Weekly to disagree. Reprinting the Klan’s letter in its entirety, the magazine was forced to admit that “we find ourselves in accord with many of the sentiments expressed in this communication.” Indeed, writer T. Howard Kelly encouraged “right-minded citizens of this country in all levels of life” to “applaud the order for such a stand.” Although disavowing the organization’s “secret methods” and intolerance, the magazine implicitly endorsed the wider Klan movement and argued that in fighting for high morals and clean living, “we can work shoulder to shoulder with Ku Kluxers.” Many did just that, as local efforts to fight “indecent motion pictures” around the country—including the appointment of Will Hays as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America—intertwined with Klannish efforts to subdue the “corrupting influence” of cinema.7
Their success in this was most notable in the attacks leveled against Charlie Chaplin, and particularly his 1923 short The Pilgrim. Prefiguring later Nazi criticism, Klan members accused Chaplin of being Jewish and using his popularity to make the “crowning insult” to Protestant cle
rgy. “For a long time,” the Searchlight argued, it had been generally known that “a deliberate attempt was being made by certain Jew picture-show magnates” to “ridicule the Protestant ministry.” The Pilgrim, in which Chaplin played an escaped convict who poses as a parson in a small Texas town, was the final straw. In a widely publicized move, the Klan of Walla Walla, Washington, persuaded the mayor to have all showings of the picture canceled. Inspired by this example, Klans in Iowa, South Carolina, West Virginia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New York launched similar successful protests to have Chaplin’s film suppressed.8
These condemnations, though, represent only one part of the multifarious cultural tensions over representation and race on the stage and screen in the 1920s. Our understanding here, as in the world of the book, has often been blinkered by cultural condescension. As Gilbert Seldes noted at the time, “In America no one cares for revues except the unenlightened millions who pay to see them.” Much as theatrical plaudits may have gone to the likes of Maxwell Anderson or O’Neill, many more theatergoers went to see Rachel Crothers’s Nice People laud the virtues of hard work and rural life over modern society—and many more than that went to see the smash hit No, No, Nanette. Revealing of the cultural tensions of the time, the slender plot of the light comic musical was propelled along by the spending habits of a wealthy Bible publisher. H. L. Mencken, meanwhile, complained that the movie business was built upon “a foundation of morons,” turning “bad novels and worse plays” into films that they had to sell to “immense audiences of half-wits.” To an extent, this was true. Just as there were plenty of “bad” books, there were plenty of “bad” plays and films. And just as with bad books, plenty of these bad films and plays attempted to exploit the commercial possibilities of the Klan—even as the Klan movement attempted to exploit the propagandistic possibilities of the stage and screen.9
While the total number of theaters in the country declined after 1915, and competing attractions gained steam, the United States remained a nation enthralled by the stage in the 1920s. Broadway’s importance as a multimillion-dollar industry was cemented as the number of shows staged rose from 192 in 1920 to a peak of 268 in the 1927–28 season. This was not, however, where most Americans found theatrical entertainment. Outside of New York, local stock companies surged in importance. Offering cheap tickets to comfortingly old-fashioned comedies and melodrama, these theaters became the “principal venues for dramatic entertainment” for much of the country. In localities that couldn’t sustain a stock company, popular itinerant “tent shows” offered affordably priced melodramas, classics, light comedies, adaptations of popular novels, and variety performances. By 1925, some four hundred traveling tent shows plied their wares in sixteen thousand communities, selling almost eighty million tickets—twice as many as “legitimate” theater. As Russel Nye has noted, these were audiences looking for “just entertainment; if you wanted culture, you didn’t go.”10
Motion pictures, meanwhile, were soaring in popularity. By 1926, more than fifty million people paid admission to more than twenty thousand movie theaters every week. Following the example of the Roxy in New York, which grossed more than a hundred thousand dollars a week in its first year of operation, most sizable urban areas had their own specialized “picture palace” with an average turnover of three to four films a week. Smaller towns may not have had such luxurious surroundings to watch in, but showed an equally inexhaustible appetite for film, fed by nickelodeons, itinerant movie shows, and popular church and community screenings. To keep up with this demand, the industry produced an average of seven hundred pictures a year. In 1930, Fortune magazine hailed the growth of the motion picture industry—particularly with the introduction of sound in 1927—as “beyond comparison the fastest and most amazing revolution in the whole history of industrial revolutions.” Moviegoing was quickly becoming an almost universal recreation.11
One of the most important steps in this rise of American cinema was the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, directed by D. W. Griffith. Based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, The Clansman, The Birth of a Nation was the story of the Stoneman family in the North, headed by abolitionist Austin Stoneman (loosely based on Thaddeus Stevens), and the Cameron family in the South. At the beginning of the story, love blooms between the children of the families, but the Civil War soon tears them apart. Following the assassination of Lincoln, and with the urging of his treacherous mulatto protégé Silas Lynch (the monster to the abolitionist’s Frankenstein), Stoneman leads the charge to impose punitive measures on the Reconstruction South. The ensuing outrages inflicted on the South under Lynch’s direction compel Ben, the eldest Cameron son, to form the Ku Klux Klan, although it costs him his relationship with Elsie, Stoneman’s daughter.
In the film, the abuses of Reconstruction reach their height when Flora Cameron, Ben’s sister, jumps to her death to avoid the advances of a brutish freedman. Ben and the Klan hunt the culprit down and murder him. The freedman’s body is dumped at the house of Silas Lynch, who furiously attempts to suppress the heroic efforts of the Klan. When Lynch confesses that he also intends to wed Elsie, even Austin Stoneman is forced to concede that he does not favor total equality. In the film’s climax, Ben Cameron and his Klansmen defeat Lynch’s militia and save Elsie. On the next election day, order is restored to the South by armed and mounted Klansmen who prevent African Americans from voting. The film ends with the double marriage of Phil Stoneman to Margaret Cameron and Ben Cameron to Elsie Stoneman, symbolizing the reunification of the nation.12
D. W. Griffith’s groundbreaking adaptation of Dixon’s novel was a technical masterpiece. It was also a national phenomenon. Setting records for the longest and most expensive film made to that point, The Birth of a Nation was the most popular film of the silent era, perhaps “the most widely seen single cultural document of the industrial age.” One film historian has called it “the world’s greatest motion picture, if greatness is to be measured by fame.” Louis Menard has estimated that by 1926 over one hundred million people had seen Griffith’s portrayal of the Klan. The Birth of a Nation created a new kind of audience for a new kind of moviegoing experience. And the film’s impact reached even further—not least in providing early work to later Hollywood stalwarts like Raoul Walsh and John Ford, and early success to Louis B. Mayer’s fledgling distribution network.13
The importance of this tale of the Reconstruction Klan to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s has been dealt with at length in studies of the organization and is difficult to overstate.14 It is an exaggeration to say that the film was the sole motivator behind the birth of the second Klan, but The Birth of a Nation did play a uniquely important role in popularizing and publicizing the organization. In remaking history into a morality play, the film carried the message of the Dunningite historians and turn-of-the-century novelists to a vast new audience. By portraying Reconstruction as a tragic mistake, the film wiped the sins of the first Klan clean. In this, The Birth of a Nation built on two of Griffith’s earlier works, His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled (both 1911), in which a faithful slave protected the family of his Confederate master from the depredations of Northerners. The director himself was open in his desire to rework the past on screen. The time was nigh, Griffith declared, “when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures” and “will never be obliged to read history again.”15
In rewriting (or rewhiting) history, Griffith and The Birth of a Nation also labored to remake the present. The epic film was, as Davarian Baldwin has noted, as much about contemporary racial uncertainty as Reconstruction itself—a Stoddard-like warning to a new imagined community of whiteness to stem the rising tide. In transporting viewers into a world of racialized righteousness, Amy Wood argues, Griffith made lynching itself into an act of sensationalized melodrama. Audiences saw racial violence not as the barbarity of a frenzied mob, but as the necessary action of stoic white heroes. Contemporaries agreed. Thomas Dixon claimed that “every man
who comes out of one of our theatres is a Southern patriot for life.” A more somber assessment came from NAACP lawyer Morefield Storey, who believed that white people who saw the film “will want to kill every colored man in the United States.” It is doubtful that the Klan of the 1920s could have achieved the success it did without the influence of The Birth of a Nation on public opinion and its endorsement of white vigilantism.16
The Birth of a Nation was, without a doubt, the urtext of the revived Klan. Too often, however, we allow Griffith’s groundbreaking film to dominate any discussion of cultural Klannishness. To do so is to forget that, as film scholar Tom Rice adroitly observed, there is life after Birth. It is also to forget that racism was, in the words of Thomas Cripps, the “normal intellectual baggage” of much of the popular entertainment of the day. Before The Birth of a Nation, Griffith had worked for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, the studio responsible for Watermelon Feast (1896), Dancing Darkies (1896), Hallowe’en in Coontown (1897), and A Nigger in the Woodpile (1904), among others. In producing these films, Biograph was only extending the persistent themes of theatrical minstrelsy from the stage to the screen, and from the nineteenth into the twentieth century.17
Within this context, it is unsurprising that Klan members and sympathizers would be able to find plenty of cultural fare more suited to their palate than The Pilgrim. While the movement’s publications did not engage in film and theater criticism in the same way as they did for the printed word, Klaverns across the country staged “clean, wholesome comedy-dramas” and screened pictures that met with the movement’s favor throughout the 1920s. Supplying “clean and legitimate entertainment” became a valuable component of the Invisible Empire’s public face and recruitment efforts, extending the imagined identity of heroic Klannishness into new media. This had become particularly apparent by the beginning of 1925. As membership in the Klan organization began to fall, the Klan movement identity was reinforced in theater and film.18
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