It may well be true that the national Klan had no financial interest in Cavalier. Fowler had left the Klan’s leadership after Simmons was deposed, and Haywood reportedly resigned his position. Cavalier, conversely, was most certainly interested in the Klan. The company had initially announced that its first picture would be A Portrayal of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, but that project never materialized. Instead, Cavalier’s first and only production was The Traitor Within, accurately advertised as “the super-Klan film,” and prominently featuring footage of the Klan’s 1923 “magnificent parade” through Fort Wayne, Indiana. No print of the film survives, and plot details are scarce, but The Traitor Within seems to have revolved around Klan efforts to combat political corruption.42
As with other Klan-centered films, The Traitor Within was predominantly exhibited in churches and schools throughout the Midwest, with occasional forays into local movie theaters. Klan publications greeted the production as “a motion picture of great educational value.” This “most spectacular display” purportedly offered so many thrills that during a run in Illinois a Klan nurse was “present at each performance to render service if necessary.” Again, no quantifiable data survives on how successful the film was, but it did remain a significant draw through at least the end of 1925.43
Although Klan members comprised the bulk of the audience for these entertainments, they did also actively attract sizable non-Klan crowds. In the unlikely case that any non-Klan patrons attended these productions for a clever plot or nuanced character development, they would most likely have been disappointed. The real draw seems to have been the continued public interest in the Klan organization. Just as it sold newspapers and fueled a minor literary industry, the promise of revelations concerning the nominally secretive Invisible Empire drew patrons to these shows. Nor were distributors and exhibitors reticent about using this allure to drum up business.
Advertisements for The Mysterious Way promised that audience members would “Know the Truth” and, like The Flaming Cross, relied on the lure of a scene showing the inner workings of a full-regalia Klan Klavern. The Fifth Horseman was billed as an “exposé of the order.” Movie Weekly hailed The Toll of Justice as a means of revealing the Klan’s “secret purposes and innermost workings.” Even the only notable anti-Klan play of the decade, Behind the Mask by ex-Kleagle C. Anderson Wright, was reliant on the promise of “many startling revelations” about the Invisible Empire to (unsuccessfully) try to draw an audience. Publicity for The Traitor Within asked, “What Do You Know About the Ku Klux Klan?” and “Is the Ku Klux Klan Guilty or Not Guilty of all the Crimes and Vices Laid at Their Door.” Only attendance at the film—with “Klan Oath Exposed”—would tell you. Advertisements for The Invisible Empire in non-Klan newspapers were particularly blunt—“It Tells You About the Ku Klux Klan.” These promotions clearly understood the kind of attraction these entertainments held.44
Most tellingly, the same kinds of advertising techniques were used even for productions that did not actually feature the Ku Klux Klan. As Exhibitor’s Trade Review noted in 1923, “Any idea which is suggestive of the type of activities which characterize the Ku Klux Klan, has an appeal to the general public at this time.” Similarly, Exhibitor’s Herald observed that “anything smacking of the mysterious and seeming to point to the KKK attracts considerable attention.” The Three Musketeers, starring Douglas Fairbanks, was teased in 1921 with only the words “All for one and one for all” to draw parallels with similar Klan phrases. The same year saw a minor western retitled The White Masks to capitalize on the “advertising value” of the Klan. C. B. McDonald drew attention to his 1923 vaudeville revue in New York by printing pamphlets warning that “the K.K.K. is coming”—the Keith Komedy Karnival. In Boston, Leon J. Rubinstein similarly attracted crowds to the film Three Ages by promising the K.K.K.—Keaton, Keaton, Keaton.45
Many others offered more than just the promise of the Klan, as the image of the organization was appropriated for commercial entertainment. As in the world of fiction, popular portrayals of the Klan were carefully shorn of any ideological baggage for maximum commercial potential in the emerging consumerist society. The Invisible Empire’s presence represented only an easy means of signifying mystery and excitement. In co-opting this image, these productions often sanitized the organization and functioned as an implicit endorsement of the wider Klan movement.
Not all of these portrayals were flattering. On the stage, the cabaret heartily embraced mockery of the Invisible Empire. One producer’s “very novel, timely, and striking” bit in his new show had to be jettisoned after he discovered how many other productions were already incorporating similar Klan-themed musical numbers. Eddie Cantor, one of the best-known performers of the day, used Klan-based patter in his vaudeville act. By late 1923, Cantor’s Klan bit had become so popular that it sparked a minor controversy as a number of other performers plagiarized the joke.46
While Cantor may have been the bigger name, arguably the most culturally significant of these Klannish appearances was in the play Processional. Written by future Hollywood Ten blacklistee John Howard Lawson and produced by the influential and innovative Theatre Guild, the play ran for ninety performances at the Garrick Theatre in New York in 1925. A self-conscious effort by Lawson to create a new theatrical method that would “express the American scene” in its vaudevillian “native idiom,” Processional was described by the playwright as a “jazz symphony of modern life.” The overtly political and often absurdist plot, one reviewer noted, could be replicated “by reading the headlines of any sensational American newspaper from cover to cover.” In such a play, an appearance from the Ku Klux Klan was an inevitability.47
Very loosely based on labor disputes in Mingo County, West Virginia, Processional was set in a West Virginia mining town during a strike. The first act saw tensions grow between the miners and the soldiers sent in to break the strike. In the second act, a miner, Dynamite Jim, kills one of the soldiers in a struggle. Going on the run, Jim rapes Sadie Cohen, the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper. Caught by the combined forces of the soldiers and the local Ku Klux Klan in the third act, Jim is taken offstage, where he is strung up to a tree and blinded.48
In the final act of the play, in what one theatergoer referred to as “The Ballet of the Ku Klux Klan,” the Klan returned to the stage in full regalia to persecute the now-pregnant Sadie Cohen for her allegedly loose morals. The plutocrat responsible for the miners’ woes, now an eight-foot-tall King Kleagle, led the Klansmen. In rhythmic, lyrical chants, the group proclaimed that they were “Native-born Americans, Patriotic Protestants, regular citizens” who had “taken the oath to exterminate foreigners.”49 Their task, according to their leader, was to “clean up the dirty foreigners, make ’em kiss the flag! Skin the Jews, lynch the niggers, make ’em kiss the flag!” Adopting a Christ-like pose, one outstretched arm on the American flag and the other on the cross, the King Kleagle declared that the Klansmen must give Sadie “Christian punishment.”50
Although Sadie was saved from her punishment by her father, disguised in Klan robes, Lawson turned the end of Processional into a disturbing and sardonic parody of happy endings. In a grotesque reworking of The Face at Your Window, the Klan puts down the strike. The plutocrat reappears on stage, sans robes, to quash any bad publicity and declare a peaceful reconciliation. His mealymouthed protestations of patriotic values are undermined by a side exchange that reveals he plans to have the strike leaders murdered later. Finally, the blinded Dynamite Jim returns and marries Sadie in a “jazz wedding.”51
Reviews of Processional were mixed. On the one hand, the conservative mainstream of critics found little to like. Walter Winchell said that he had never seen anything so bad—and that was “being kind.” Alexander Woollcott declared the play “pretentious” and “boring.” More liberal-minded critics, like Gilbert Gabriel of the New York Telegram-Mail and Heywood Broun of the New York World, on the other hand, greatly admired Lawson’s work. Stark Young of the New
York Times called Processional “creative and streaked with genius” with “a strange, fresh, young, robust, half brutal pathos unique to our drama.” Robert Benchley went even further, taking to the pages of Life to favorably compare the play to Othello.52
Almost every review, favorable or not, made prominent reference to the last act’s “mock dance of the Ku Klux Klan.” As Stark Young understatedly phrased it, the “Ku Klux scene dropped into a poor tone indeed.” Gilbert Seldes liked the Klan scene, but criticized the “pretensions” of the production. Thornton Wilder declared that the last act “approached greatness.” “What,” the playwright asked in a question that defined the cultural tensions of the 1920s, “could be more attractive than a play that intermingles strips of vaudevillian patter, exciting drama and burlesque, a Klux Klan ballet and a Negro song and dance?”53
Good or bad, Processional certainly made an impact. Louis Bromfield in The Bookman called it “the most interesting” play in New York. Playwright Elmer Rice praised Lawson’s “brilliant effectiveness” in creating “a psychograph of America.” Edna St. Vincent Millay and Ogden Stewart placed an advertisement in the New York World calling Processional “one of the most thrilling plays ever written.” In Vanity Fair, John Dos Passos proclaimed the play a groundbreaking abandonment of the fourth wall. At a sold-out public discussion of the play hosted by the Theatre Guild in February 1925, “debate ranged strongly” with “violent speeches” on both sides. Fanny Hurst and Dorothy Parker were among the voices present championing Lawson’s work.54
One newspaper in the Midwest, attempting to summarize the controversy, called Lawson’s show “the play all America loved to argue about.” The St. Paul Minnesota Pioneer Press referred to Processional as “the most irritating and the most questioned, discussed and defended of all plays.” Debate over the show’s merits lasted for so long that when it moved to a short run on Broadway, Alexander Woollcott reversed his initial review. Although “gauche and brash and at times cheap,” the New York Sun critic wrote, Processional contained “a rare and exhilarating quality of beauty and high excitement.” The Ku Klux Klan was one of the most memorable parts of one of the most discussed plays of the 1920s.55
Yet Processional was also largely unrepresentative of the ways in which the Klan was represented in more popular entertainments. On stage, “a dash of Ku Klux Klan for spice” was a more common phenomenon. Willard Mack’s Raw Law in Los Angeles added the Klan to the “usual Mack tradition” of “much pulling of guns.” A British music-hall show saw a noblewoman and naval officer taken captive by the Klan, but freed through comic means. These efforts were typified by The Gorilla, a successful touring “mysterious melodrama” that featured the Invisible Empire as just one of many plot points. As the play’s press materials put it, the show contained “a playwright in love with the tenant’s niece, two detectives, a butler, a locked chest, a dead sailor, the Ku Klux Klan, screams, pistol shots, sliding panels, and the inevitable reporter.”56
This trend was even more pronounced on the screen, where sanitized representations of the organization further served to normalize and even glorify the Klan. The “novel and timely” 1921 Hal Roach comedy short Law and Order, for one, showed a local district attorney organize his own—highly unsuccessful—Klan to fight local car thieves. But the emphasis was on the excitement added by the trappings of the Klan, not its ideology. As Rice astutely observes, “The representation of the Klan appears secondary to the Klan costume.” Thus, in two other Hal Roach comedies, the popular “Our Gang” members actually joined idealized Klan analogues: in 1922’s Young Sherlocks, the crime-solving J.J.J.’s; and in 1923’s Lodge Night, the Cluck Cluck Klams, who foil a gang of criminals.57
Newsreels placed Klan rallies on the same level of “momentous” event as Marconi demonstrating wireless or celebrated racehorse Man o’ War winning the Kentucky Derby. The fictionalized Invisible Empire made appearances in the Harold Lloyd comedy An Eastern Westerner (as “masked angels”), in the “Torchy” comedy Ghosts (in which Klan robes played a central part in a farcical elopement), and in the Fox comedy The Chauffeur. In the westerns The Prodigal Judge, Big Stakes, The Night Riders, and Shadows of the West, a Klan or Klan analogue appeared as a nonviolent vigilante force. The Pathé cartoon The Wayward Dog drew “a lot of laughs” with a canine Klan.58
Rather than appearing as bigots leading a lynching (which would never have made it past most censorship boards), the Klan was generally depicted as a moralistic organization dedicated to law enforcement. The 1928 screen adaptation of one of the most popular novels to use the Klan as background color, Rex Beach’s The Mating Call, was so hesitant to offend that it did not even name the organization, referring to it simply as “The Order.” Nonetheless, reviews noted that the Invisible Empire was “an interesting and vital part of the picture” and enthused over the “more or less accurate exposé of the workings of the Klan.” Exploiting public interest in the group was far more important than taking an ideological stand.59
The best expression of this tendency to exploit the Klan image for commercial entertainment was the 1922 film One Clear Call. Loosely based on the 1914 book of the same name by Frances Nimmo Greene, the mawkish melodrama told the story of two friends in a small town in Alabama—one a doctor, the other a dying bootlegger and gambler—divided by a woman. Among the many changes the First National production made to Greene’s book was the introduction of a group of Klansmen who led the charge to shut down the bootlegger’s gambling establishment and possibly kill the proprietor, but were dissuaded by the doctor. Although the doctor reprimanded the Klan members as cowards for wearing masks, the wider Klan movement was implicitly presented in the film as an admirable force for justice.60
Producer Louis B. Mayer, who had made his first fortune from the New England distribution rights to The Birth of a Nation, clearly recognized the commercial value of the Invisible Empire to One Clear Call. As one exhibitor noted, it was “a good picture, with a misleading press sheet.” The Klan’s effort to shut down the gambling joint was only one facet of the story, lasting only a few minutes, but the organization took primary place in efforts to market the production. Newspaper articles highlighted the “nightly ridings of the Ku Klux Klan,” while advertisements placed the Klan’s name above that of the picture—“We Present the Ku Klux Klan in A Screen Drama Ever to be Remembered.” One exhibitor happily “played it while the newspapers were full of K.K.K. stuff” so that “the Ku Klux end of the picture drew them in fine.” In some towns, exhibitors even engaged local Klansmen to publicize the film, or ran it in a double bill with the Klan’s own The Toll of Justice. The only judgment made on the Klan was its entertainment value. Variety hailed the film as having “everything that goes to make a successful screen production”—which included a “wandering boy and blind mother bit, comedy, and a touch of the Ku Klux Klan that serves as a thrill.”61
While One Clear Call was perhaps the most successful commercial exploitation of the Ku Klux Klan, the pro-Klan stage production The Awakening was an even more evident embodiment of the porous cultural boundaries of the 1920s. Producer-writer-director-star James H. “Jimmy” Hull of Port Arthur, Texas, began staging annual “home-talent” amateur shows in the Southwest in 1915. It was not until 1924, though, that Hull struck upon his biggest success. The Awakening combined a thinly veiled rehash of The Birth of a Nation’s story of Reconstruction with music, comedy, and “very beautiful women in somewhat abbreviated costumes”—all staged with the help of local Klan members.
Patricia Bradley has observed that in many ways the stunning success of the Ziegfeld Follies lay in the production values dedicated to “Glorifying the American Girl.” The emphasis “on opulence, on breathtaking technique, on light and color,” dazzling with sex appeal, brought in mass audiences. The Awakening was a Follies for the rest of the country. An almost three-hour spectacular, Hull’s show was described in one early review as “a variety of dramatic situations.” The vaudevillian revue combined son
gs and dances, tableaux, “plantation-day melodies, many of which have long ago been forgotten,” and jazz music. The play’s “scenes of the past and present” presented audiences with an “undeniable touch of patriotism and a beautiful love story running throughout.” It was the perfect vehicle for the second Klan, and a pure expression of the cultural contradictions that marked the postwar period.62
The Awakening was first staged in Beaumont, Texas, in May 1924, in a production sponsored by the local Dick Dowling Klan No. 25 and its female counterpart (see figs. 6.1 and 6.2). The mammoth spectacle, with a cast of over three hundred locals, ran for a week of sold-out shows and reportedly raised over ten thousand dollars for the local Klan. A month later, it opened in nearby Port Arthur with a cast of over four hundred, where its entire run of nine days sold out before opening night. The Port Arthur News rhapsodized over the “fire, originality, genius and devotion,” the “great inspiration,” and the “magnificence, opulence, magnitude, vastness” of the show. The play not only conveyed “the ideals of the Ku Klux Klan, their allegiance to their country, and their high ideals of womanhood, of home, and of right,” it did so with blackface minstrels, high-kicking chorus girls, and lavish musical numbers that would not have been out of place in a New York cabaret.63
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