Ku Klux Kulture

by Felix Harcourt

  That centralization had also made it far easier to fund broadcasting from the regulated and standardized sale of advertising time. In this, WTFF was a proud outlier. As the Forum asserted, the station “owes allegiance to none.” It was “not affiliated with any ‘chain’ system.” The broadcaster would remain true to ideals of Americanism. In doing so, it refused to “solicit or broadcast advertising programs.” WTFF, the Forum declared, would never “advertise or promote the sale of horse-collars, razor blades, or whiskered cough drops.”51

  It was possible to take that kind of stand against advertising as long as the newspaper could afford to support the broadcasting arm as a promotional tool. But the Klan’s membership was collapsing, and the Forum’s circulation had begun a severe decline. Vance had to do something if his entire operation were not to collapse, and he refused to demean his greater purpose with radio commercials. So, in October 1928, a little more than fourteen months after WTFF’s first broadcast, the editor launched a rebranding effort in the hope of making up his revenue shortfall. Vance wrote to the FRC to declare that he would soon “change the policy and improve the quality of all programs flowing through the microphone of Station WTFF.” To mark “separating the past from the future,” he requested that the station’s name be changed to WJSV. This “new” station would carry religious programming only on Sundays and devote the remainder of its time to the same kind of general-purpose programming offered by the fledgling networks. Asked whether WJSV “would continue to run as a pro-Klan station,” Vance told reporters that it would not.52

  In November 1928, WTFF became WJSV. Klan broadcasts all but disappeared from the air, although their motivating sentiments remained—the station continued to broadcast vicious attacks on 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith throughout the transition. The holding company that owned both the radio station and the Fellowship Forum, the Independent Publishing Company, was soon approached by a “new country-wide network now being formed,” the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), about selling the station. Vance refused.53

  The station continued to limp along, but could not last for long. By 1932, with the Forum weakened, the Klan all but defunct, and still refusing to carry advertising, the Independent Publishing Company could no longer absorb the financial loss of operating WJSV. Instead, it accepted a new offer—from Jazz Age impresario William S. Paley and CBS. Starting with only sixteen affiliates to NBC’s fifty, the new network had grown rapidly since 1928. By 1930, there were forty-nine affiliates in the CBS family, but the network needed more. And so it was that in 1932, Paley, that fixture of New York nightlife, leased the Ku Klux Klan’s valuable high-power transmitter to carry the network’s programming. In 1935, CBS bought the station outright. The Invisible Empire’s foray into the world of early radio was over.54

  Though easily forgotten, the formative years of broadcast radio had been molded by the same world that propelled the Ku Klux Klan to prominence. Even as Klan members traveled widely to use radio to spread their message on stations around the country, a blackface minstrel performer from Chicago named Wendell Hall used similar itinerant appearances to make himself the first national radio star. While CBS sought to expand its reach, the network’s The Majestic Theater Hour made stars of George Moran and Charlie Mack, the “Two Black Crows.” By 1929, radio audiences could switch back and forth from the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to the antics of the Mystic Knights of the Sea on NBC’s new blackface sensation Amos ’n’ Andy. In a symbol of the irregular cultural divisions at the heart of the 1920s, the show’s theme was Joseph Carl Breil’s “The Perfect Song”—the love theme from The Birth of a Nation. Radio and the Klan did not exist in separate worlds. Rather, they were often uncomfortably closely entangled. Once again largely divorced from organizational control, Klannish broadcasters found audiences around the country, an Invisible Empire of the airwaves. While the Klan movement’s active participation in the world of radio may have been short-lived, it left a lasting mark. What started as WTFF still operates today in the nation’s capital as WTOP, broadcasting traffic and weather on the eights.55

  9

  Invisible Umpires

  The Ku Kluxers are going to have their own baseball league next year and we suppose they will use invisible umpires.

  Wisconsin Superior Telegram, March 1924

  Sport—like popular novels, songs, and films—offered another stage on which the nation’s postwar cultural psychodramas played out. Perhaps no story gripped Americans in the 1920s more than the battles of Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. In 1926, when Tunney beat Dempsey for the world heavyweight boxing title, newspapers dedicated almost as much space to the fight as they had to the armistice that ended World War I.1 The New York Times alone gave over nearly thirteen pages to the fight. Congress adjourned early to allow lawmakers to attend, joining Henry Ford, Al Jolson, and a bevy of other national notables. More than three hundred thousand people listened on a special radio hookup organized by NBC’s David Sarnoff. A year later, the Tunney-Dempsey rematch was aired coast-to-coast on eighty-two radio stations, drawing an estimated fifty million listeners—or 45 percent of the U.S. population. When Dempsey knocked down Tunney in the infamous “long count,” NBC broadcaster Graham McNamee’s breathless coverage reportedly resulted in eleven deaths from heart failure.2

  As the Dempsey-Tunney mania demonstrated, boxing—and sport in general—had become a popular obsession for a wide cross section of Americans by the mid-1920s. While its wider significance is often overlooked in histories of the period, sport was a central pillar in the creation of the new mass society that bound the nation in a common cultural identity. The spectacle of sporting achievement provided popular melodrama to a rapidly growing mass audience. Members of the Ku Klux Klan were no exception. Yet the clash between the Klan’s rhetoric on boxing and the lived ideology of the movement is another telling example of the Invisible Empire’s complex and ambivalent relationship with a modern pluralist mass culture.

  The growing popularity of boxing was a remarkable reversal from prewar trends. Between the turn of the century and the end of World War I, boxing had been widely viewed as “more a crime wave than a sport.” Fixed fights, brutal tactics, and fatalities in the ring all served to discredit boxing in much of the public mind. State after state outlawed the sport as even proponents of the pugilistic arts were forced to acknowledge that the situation had become untenable. At the time of the Dempsey-Tunney fight, it was illegal to even transport films of boxing matches across state lines.3

  The New York Klan newspaper the American Standard attacked boxing as a “brutal and crooked business.” It had become a “rotten spot in American life” and “an injurious influence to American children and youths,” appealing only to “savage blood-lust and hate.” When the Maryland Athletic Club’s boxing arena was burned down in 1923, most local residents believed it to be the work of the Klan, which had allegedly threatened to destroy the venue. Similarly, when the Klan of Marion, Ohio, purchased a new meeting place in 1924, its first act was to cancel a prizefight that the property’s previous owners had scheduled. As the local Kleagle explained, “Clean athletic contests will be sponsored by the Klan, but no prize fights.”4

  Boxing was theoretically a ripe target for nativists like the Ku Klux Klan, who complained that the sport was “almost entirely in the hands of Jews and Roman Catholics.” As an avenue to success with comparatively fewer barriers of religious and racial bigotry, boxing was particularly popular with second-generation Jewish Americans. Through the 1920s, Jewish boxers dominated prizefighting in the United States, closely followed by those of Italian and Irish heritage. The management, promotion, and training of fighters also saw Jewish Americans take “disproportionately prominent roles.” These boxers, who often remained closely attached to the same neighborhoods in which they had been raised, were a source of ethnic pride and pushed for the acceptance of the immigrant communities they represented. In particular, Benny Leonard, the lightweight champion of the wor
ld from 1917 to 1925, was, according to historian Peter Levine, a “folk hero” to East European Jewish immigrants and their children.5

  Equally obnoxious to the Klannish sensibility was the notable place of African Americans within the ring. As one historian of interracial boxing has suggested, black boxers “were competing in a sport where their mere involvement scraped white insecurities.” Around the turn of the century, the burgeoning talent of African American boxers like Jack Johnson and the appeal of the sport to a predominantly immigrant male urban working-class crowd had allowed for a weakening of the color line. Boxing became one of the few professional sports in which African Americans were allowed to excel prior to the Second World War.6

  The 1908 victory of Jack Johnson over white Canadian Tommy Burns for the heavyweight title—a fight in which Johnson taunted and humiliated Burns in front of a white audience—and his crushing 1910 defeat of the “Great White Hope” Jim Jeffries upended notions of racial superiority. As a result of these performances and his well-publicized romances with white women, Johnson became “the central sexual and racial scapegoat of the era.” His victories irredeemably sullied boxing’s reputation among many whites. With such a public preponderance of Jewish and Catholic involvement, and with the racialized specter of Johnson’s “unforgivable blackness” (in the words of W. E. B. DuBois) looming over it, it would seem inevitable that the Klan would condemn boxing.7

  Yet among the nation as a whole—including members of the Invisible Empire—the popularity of pugilism was rapidly increasing in the 1920s. Many Americans had learned to box while serving in the military during World War I and carried a newfound appreciation for boxing back into civilian life. The newly formed American Legion reflected this changing attitude, promoting fights in many areas. The Klan was little different. In Indiana, for example, the Fiery Cross boasted of the “leading exponents of the fistic arts” who were plying their trade at nearby Fort Benjamin Harrison. The organizer of these military bouts had “succeeded in lifting the boxing game to a higher plane,” and was allegedly reviving considerable interest in the sport.8

  By 1924, Junior Klans were encouraging amateur boxing matches as a means of manly development. With the Klan headquarters in Georgia leading the way, it was soon a regular occurrence for boys across the United States to lace up their gloves. At the end of regular meetings, a makeshift gym was erected, and members made “the Klavern ring with leather-pusher thuds.” The indoor sport was particularly popular among Junior Klansmen with the encroachment of the winter months, when outdoor activities were restricted.9

  The apex of the Invisible Empire’s involvement with boxing came in the Klan stronghold of Colorado. In 1925, the Denver Klan staged its First Annual Ku Klux Klan Boxing and Wrestling Tourney.10 Over eleven days (with no bouts on Sundays) at the Klan’s own Cotton Mills Stadium, 250 fighters competed in eight different weight categories. To broaden appeal, each night’s program was preceded by tumbling acts and live music “to add zest,” while promotional materials heavily emphasized the respectability of the event with the fact that “women are especially invited.”11

  For the majority of the eleven days, the sports page of the Denver Post was dominated by banner headlines promoting the Klan tournament, with full results of every bout and extensive details of the best fights of each night. The Post’s enthusiasm for the event reached fever pitch with its claim that a battle between Mike Verant and Jack Dale was “one of the greatest comeback fights ever staged.” Although the Post always made sure to highlight the Klan’s role in organizing the competition, the Invisible Empire’s involvement in organizing a major sporting event seems to have drawn little comment and even less criticism. The newspaper focused solely on the boxing itself and not on what the event suggested about the Invisible Empire’s place in Colorado life.12

  This incongruous disconnect was particularly noticeable in the January 25 edition of the Post. The front cover was dominated by news of the bloody Klan riot at Herrin, Illinois, that left four dead.13 The sports page was dominated by the “A1 program” of the Klan’s boxing tournament, which was “unmarred by one instance of inferior sport.” Whatever was happening in the larger world, it seems, it did not immediately affect the Klan’s place in American sporting life.14

  With the Post’s enthusiasm and the Klan’s showmanship behind it, the tournament was a notable success, drawing crowds of between three thousand and four thousand most nights. Notable spectators included prominent local boxing enthusiast Clarence Morley, a Klansman and the newly elected governor of Colorado. The event was such a triumph that organizers declared their intentions to hold monthly Klan boxing shows “featuring some of the best mitt slingers in the country,” but no evidence can be found that this plan came to fruition. Nor was the Denver Klan ever able to equal its accomplishment. By 1926, a vicious internecine battle within the Colorado Klan had left the organization moribund. The second (and final) annual Klan boxing tournament was overshadowed by the Denver Athletic Committee boxing tournament and received scant attention.15

  In the meantime, though, boxing had become big business in America—and for the Ku Klux Klan. The “sweet science” had become sufficiently popular that the Klan of Danville, Illinois, was allegedly able to fill a lecture hall to the rafters, with hundreds still left outside, when it invited a boxer to deliver a public lecture. The sportsman met with a “lively and friendly welcome,” and the audience expressed their approval of his talk on the “Golden Rule” in an “emphatic manner.” In a revealing insight into the fluctuating cultural boundaries of the 1920s, that boxer was the unforgivably black Jack Johnson.16

  The least well understood of the Invisible Empire’s cultural endeavors, the Klan movement’s relationship with sport offers perhaps the most significant insight into the complexities of American cultural life in the 1920s. Sports represented a unique expression of both American and Klannish identity. As such, they offered an important tool of legitimization. Rather than proclaiming the Klan’s all-American nature, Klan members were able to demonstrate it. Involvement in sports was a notable means of outreach and self-promotion, of constructing and reinforcing the imagined community of the heroic and virtuous Invisible Empire. It was also very much an outgrowth of the genuine enthusiasm of Klan members—everyday American men and women—for boxing, basketball, and, above all, baseball.

  In this, the Klan movement was no different from the majority of Americans of the era. Sports had a good claim to being the most popular of the popular arts in the 1920s. Historians have long described the postwar period as “sports crazy.” In 1922, the Literary Digest proclaimed the decade to be “a new golden age of sport and outdoor amusements.” The amount of space that newspapers devoted to sport increased from less than 1 percent in 1880 to nearly 16 percent by 1923. Baseball and boxing became radio staples. The “ballyhoo” that accompanied this “golden age” pushed athletic events to the forefront of the nation’s mind. Even the reliably misanthropic H. L. Mencken—who complained, “I . . . hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense”—privately harbored a fondness for baseball as “the best game ever invented” and spent his childhood as “a violent fan for the Orioles.”17

  In the process, sports fandom raised athletes to an often-mythic status, creating popular folk heroes whose names still resonate today. Dempsey and Tunney in the ring. Knute Rockne and the Notre Dame football team. Johnny Weissmuller, swinging from Olympic swimmer to movie Tarzan. Bobby Jones dominated the world of golf, even as Bill Tilden became an icon on the tennis court. And all the while, the big bat of George Herman Ruth grew the legend of the “Babe.”

  If we remove these sporting legends from their contemporary context, though, we lose the complex reality of the cultural 1920s. Even if we look only at the burgeoning world of professional baseball, it is evident that we cannot clearly divide the world of the Klan from the world of modernity. Player/manager Tris Speaker of the Cleveland Indians—who hailed from the same small t
own in Texas as Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans—was alleged to be a member of the organization. Fellow Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby of the St. Louis Cardinals was widely understood to be a citizen of the Invisible Empire. Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers, one of the best ever all-around baseball players, may or may not have been officially affiliated with the Klan. A virulent racist, he was undoubtedly sympathetic to the wider Klan movement in the 1920s. His fellow Georgian Roy “Dizzy” Carlyle is probably best remembered now for purportedly hitting the longest measured home run ever. He was certainly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, even as he played for the Washington Senators, the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Yankees—alongside Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.18

  This reality was not restricted to professional sports. Growing interest in athletic competition spurred greater participation at all levels of society as organizations across the United States formed sports teams and sponsored events. The Ku Klux Klan was no exception to this trend. Klan teams sprang up all over the country, playing baseball, basketball, and other sports. And in doing so, the movement thrived within the mainstream of American sporting life. Even as they espoused the rhetoric of cultural war, members of the Invisible Empire competed peaceably with other Klan teams, other Protestant fraternal organizations, Jewish teams, Catholic teams, and even African American teams.