CHARLES MERZ, The Independent, February 12, 1927
Klannish culture left behind no great works, no aesthetic marvels—no reason to be memorialized. And not only were such cultural products not remembered, they were often actively and aggressively forgotten. By the end of 1928, the Ku Klux Klan organization was all but defunct as a national power, and the movement had begun its precipitous slide from public consciousness. Out of public sight, and increasingly out of mind, the “spice” of the fictional Klan held less appeal as the Invisible Empire lost its cultural relevance and commercial cachet. The multifarious depictions of the second Klan that reflected the spectrum of America’s cultural response to the organization in the 1920s largely disappeared. Klannish protestations of the organization’s virtue fell out of favor. Public interest faded. Like the organization itself, the efforts to capture or capitalize on the Klan would soon be consigned to obscurity, relics of a misbegotten decade. Our cultural memory is short—especially when it comes to things we would rather forget.
With no literary titans like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner to memorialize it, the once thriving subgenre of Klannish fiction was quickly forgotten. By 1965, the hit song Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet had become an out-of-context historical curio, an oddity for newspapers to reflect on and find “rather amusing.” In 1957, members of the third iteration of the Klan formed a softball team in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The New York Times declared that “in the long history of the Klan’s nocturnal activities,” this was “the first instance in which the terroristic organization sought to ‘advertise’ openly its cause to the public through the widely popular method of fielding a ball team in a friendly contest with umpires and the accepted rules of the game.” In 1947, when the Port Arthur News ran a profile of theatrical producer Jimmy Hull, the Ku Klux Klan’s involvement in Hull’s success had been expediently forgotten. In his decades as a producer of amateur shows and one of the “leading tent-show impresarios,” the News noted, The Awakening had been Hull’s largest and most popular production. Rather than mention the show’s Klannish subject matter, or the involvement of Klan members in staging, performing, and attending the show, the newspaper noted only that it had been shown under the auspices of undefined “men’s and women’s service clubs” across the country. Such convenient historical amnesia is typical. The ghosts of the Invisible Empire were seemingly quickly exorcised.1
It is indicative of our selective memory when it comes to the Ku Klux Klan that there is one cultural manifestation of the organization that has managed to retain a hold on both the popular and the scholarly imagination. For three weeks, beginning June 10, 1946, radio listeners heard the story of a multiethnic youth baseball team and its star pitcher, Chinese American Tommy Lee. Unfortunately, youthful jealousy of Lee had blossomed into prejudice, and the team had attracted the attention of an organization of professional bigots. Fortunately, the team was managed by Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s best friend. And for sixteen episodes, listeners thrilled to the superhero’s struggle with the thinly disguised Klansmen of the “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”
In just the past fifteen years, the story of Superman and the Klan has appeared in a young adult nonfiction book, in the best-selling Freakonomics, as a story on the public radio show This American Life, and in the Comedy Central show Drunk History. It is not difficult to understand why the radio serial has been far better remembered than the ambiguity and ambivalence displayed in the 1920s. For one thing, the serial itself offered a familiarly reassuring condemnation of the organization. Here, unlike in the 1920s, Silas Bent’s claim that the press offered unqualified opposition to the Klan rang true—Daily Planet editor Perry White excoriates them as “lunatics in nightshirts” and “hate-mongering ghouls.” The “Grand Imperial Mogul” of the Clan openly admitted that it was simply a means of fleecing the weak and gullible. Superman himself, embodiment of truth, justice, and the American way, told listeners that the “intolerant bigots” of the Klan were simply un-American: “They don’t judge a man in the decent American way by his own qualities.”2
More than that, the show also reinforces a comforting popular myth about the ability of American cultural heroes to defeat the evils of the Klan—both within the world of the Superman story and in reality. The “Clan of the Fiery Cross” story represented an overt piece of anti-Klan storytelling that met with significant commercial success, primarily in increased ratings for the radio show. This was something that narratives dedicated to discrediting the Invisible Empire in the 1920s signally failed to achieve. More than that, the Superman story purportedly represented a successful attack on the recruiting efforts of the real life Ku Klux Klan. As such, it became a key part of the Stetson Kennedy mythos.3
In the telling and retelling of the legend of Superman’s fight with the Klan, the reality of Stetson Kennedy’s contribution has become blurred. In Kennedy’s narrative, he personally—and at great risk—infiltrated one of the more powerful Klaverns of the 1940s. He proposed the idea of fighting the Klan to the producers of the Superman serial, and allegedly supplied them with the Klan’s own secret “code words” for inclusion in the story—all the better to strike at the absurdity of the real-life Klan. It was this story that Freakonomics uncritically repeated, and which was depicted on an episode of Drunk History.4
The reality is somewhat more murky, and it is oddly apropos that the best consideration comes from Rick Bowers’s study, aimed at young adult readers. As the authors of Freakonomics noted after their book met with criticism, Kennedy seems likely to have infiltrated a few meetings himself but appears largely to have relied on information garnered from a mole known only as John Brown, whom Kennedy “handled” for the Anti-Nazi League and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It seems unlikely that it was Kennedy’s suggestion that sparked the Superman serial, but producers did receive information from Kennedy via the ADL. That information may or may not have included secret “code words” of the Klavern, but, as anyone who has listened to the show can hear, it does not seem those “code words” were actually aired as part of the serial. The Man of Steel definitely fought the “Clan.” Everything else about the story appears to be up for debate.5
Again, though, it is easy to understand why we would be drawn to the Kennedy story. This version of events is inherently appealing. As Mark Gagliardi recounted on Drunk History, it seems as though racism and intolerance could be easily overcome by one courageous man simply revealing “the childish, dumb shit that these guys would do.” With their own children poking fun at their antics, “thanks to Stetson Kennedy, the Klan was defeated.” In the face of reasoned ridicule by civilized society, the Ku Klux Klan would surely crumple—a deeply reassuring narrative. It is far more flattering to remember the Klan as kooks and crazies, un-American anomalies, brought down by brave men and women representing the American way. While Superman did not save the day until 1946, the remembrance of his radio heroics allows us to imagine the existence of clearly defined adversaries in a struggle for America’s future. We can comfort ourselves that the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was little more than an aberration in our progress toward modernity.6
When we look at the postwar period more closely, it is evident that all these efforts at self-delusion really leave us with is an incomplete understanding. As historians of the Invisible Empire have come to agree, the men and women of the Klan were far from aberrant and far from marginal. This awareness is strengthened and deepened when we recognize the Klan not only as a social and fraternal organization but also as a deeply rooted cultural movement. The lack of permanence of Klannish cultural “ephemera” should not be mistaken for a lack of significance.
Far from having to choose between the Invisible Empire and other leisure activities, many Americans inextricably combined the pursuits. When we move away from a singular focus on the paying membership of the Klan organization, and the vagaries of the rise and fall of that membership, we better appreciate the cultural clout of the Klan movement. Members of that wider movem
ent produced newspapers, created books and films, staged plays, recorded jazz music, built a radio station with national reach, even fielded baseball teams against Jewish and Catholic opponents. They did so largely divorced from—and often in contention with—the organization’s leadership, an organic expression of a lived ideology.
Ironically, these local efforts reflected what, in many ways, bound together members of a supposedly national organization. Klannish newspapers insisted the Invisible Empire was not an “anti” organization of bigoted vigilantism, but rather a law-abiding and law-enforcing union of white, native-born, Protestant, patriotic “100% Americans.” Klannish authors promoted the same idea. Whether in (supposed) nonfiction like Blaine Mast’s K.K.K., Friend or Foe: Which? or in novels like George Alfred Brown’s Harold the Klansman, the Klan was consistently depicted as a heroic defender of “pure Americanism” that had been unfairly maligned by scurrilous propaganda. On stage and screen, in The Invisible Empire and The Fifth Horseman, wrongful accusations were discredited and the stoic white heroism of the Klan celebrated. The musicians of the Invisible Empire reinforced that image in songs like “Wake Up America!” sold as sheet music and phonograph records and broadcast around the country. Across media, the cultural signifiers of the Klan—the cross and the hood—became a consumable cultural identity of white Protestant virtue. A fractured and federalized organization united behind this heroic self-image, an imagined community of Klannishness.
This communal identity was no frail flower, wilting in the face of scorn. Newspapers, novels, cartoons, songs, and plays all heaped ridicule on the “childish, dumb shit” of the Klan of the 1920s. Yet within “the thickest bombardment of custard tarts,” in George Jean Nathan’s words, the organization prospered, and the movement grew. It should be no surprise that Klan sportsmen felt comfortable in having their names and faces splashed across newspapers and programs. So what if newspapers ran stories that alleged Klansmen had committed crimes of violent hatred? Everyone knew—from reading stories like Herman Petersen’s Call Out the Klan or listening to songs like Francis Roy’s “They Blame It on the Ku Klux Klan”—that it was really criminals and Catholics to blame. For as much as the robes of the organization may have been stained with blood in reality, the signifier of the robe remained unsullied as an emblem of virtue for the movement. Klansmen couldn’t be criminals—they stood for law and freedom and America. Newspapers, novels, cartoons, songs, plays, and films from all around the country cultivated a bedrock of belief in an unassailable identity of Klannish valor.7
In promulgating that image, the men and women of the Klan movement demonstrated their immersion in contemporary popular culture. The cultural Klan strained to make the Invisible Empire visible. To disseminate their propagandistic message, they consciously and unconsciously appropriated the culture around them, even as the organization denounced that culture. The ambivalent and often conflicted embrace of jazz, tabloid newspapers, pulp fiction, and more reflected the reality that rhetoric denied. The men and women of the Klan were thoroughly modern Americans, both a part and a product of postwar society, who simultaneously resisted and helped to create modern American culture.
As we recognize the Klan’s ambivalent consumption of modern culture, we must also recognize modern culture’s ambivalent consumption of the Klan. A complex and inconsistent mix of antagonism and accommodation, the mass culture of the 1920s—from newspapers to movies to radio—offered audiences around the country multifarious and heterogeneous popular representations of the Klan. While many declaimed the Invisible Empire as an existential threat to the nation, others sanitized and normalized the organization, whether for reasons of profit or principle or both. These tensions were present both between apparently antithetical groups and within those same groups, even within individual responses. Shifting alliances and porous boundaries made a mockery of cultural partitions between supposed incompatibles.
The Knights of the Klan navigated the same cultural terrain as most Americans in the 1920s. Though their robes were white, the daily existence of the organization’s members was drawn in shades of gray, nothing quite so clear-cut as polemicists on either side insisted. Tempting as it is to depict the postwar decade as a Manichaean struggle between the forces of progress and reaction, the reality of American cultural politics is far more ambiguous. When we reevaluate the period through the lens of the Invisible Empire, we find a pattern of coexistence and compromise that fundamentally challenges our ability to draw stark divisions. The twenties were a decade in which a touch of the Ku Klux Klan could serve not simply as a threat but also as a thrill, as a bit of spice, as the “most picturesque element” in an emergent pluralist mass culture.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments are a tricky beast. At what point does a project really begin, and how far back must the thanks go? So, let us begin with a blanket acknowledgment of all who have played a part in this process—even if there is not enough room to name you, know that you are appreciated.
I began research for this book at George Washington University. I am eternally in debt to Leo Ribuffo, adviser and fearless foe of historical cliché, even if I still think “whilst” is a perfectly valid conjunction. My thanks and respect also to Eric Arnesen, Ed Berkowitz, and Richard Stott for their feedback and help. Denver Brunsman provided a model for teaching and collegiality that I can only hope to emulate.
Materials for the project came from archives around the country, and it is impossible to thank all those institutions individually, but I want to express my gratitude to librarians and archivists around the United States—and around the world—for the vital work they do. Much of this book was researched and written in one of the many reading rooms of the Library of Congress. It is an unsurpassed institution, and I will not soon forget reading about the Klan chasing a centaur while glancing up at the Jefferson Building dome.
Support has come from a wide variety of institutions and individuals, all of whom deserve praise and gratitude. Christy Regenhardt, Chris Brick, Mary Jo Binker, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project helped support me through the doctorate, financially and intellectually. To Eleanor Roosevelt herself, I say thank you for the inspiration your life and work still provide, although I wish your handwriting were easier to read.
Academia can often be a forbidding environment, and so my great thanks go to all in the History and Geography Department at Columbus State University (especially Amanda Rees) for their collegiality and great generosity of spirit. Particular thanks go to Gary Sprayberry for both hiring me and then encouraging others to hire me. On the collegiality front, I must also thank the visiting lecturers at Georgia State University—Will Bryan, Rachel Ernst, Jay Watkins, Carolyn Zimmerman, Bryan Banks, Allyson Tadjer, and Deanna Matheuszik—for their companionship and support, and their feedback in developing this book.
This manuscript was completed at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, and I am grateful to Keith Anthony, Martine Brownley, Colette Barlow, and Amy Erbil. The Center’s ongoing commitment to support work in the humanities is a vital task, and is much appreciated by all their fellows. It is certainly appreciated by me.
Tim Mennel, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, has been an invaluable help. Rachel Kelly has been a great source of support. The excellent feedback from the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript challenged assumptions and helped shape and clarify my arguments.
A portion of chapter 9 is drawn from my article “Invisible Umpires: The Ku Klux Klan and Baseball in the 1920s,” which was published in NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 23, no. 1 (2015), and is reprinted with permission from the University of Nebraska Press.
Thanks are due for the moral and immoral support offered by my Anglo-American swirl of friends and family, including Annah Slack, Margie Navas, Chris Culig, Nate Jones, Daniel Leighton, Burns Eckert, fellow Ribuffites Andrew Hartman and Christopher Hickman, the entire Washington Nationals franchise and especially those sea
ted in section 401, and those paragons of nontoxic masculinity David Lindfield, Luke Henning, Tom Cherry, Nick Taylor, Michael Koutas, and Laurence Stellings.
My love and thanks to my extended family—to Dick and Martha, Katie and Steve, and Elizabeth and Will. To my grandparents. And, most especially, to my parents, Chris and Stella. From them comes my love of reading, my interest in history, and my desire to fight for a more just society. None of this is possible without them.
And also Christina, I guess.
This book is dedicated to her.
Notes
Chapter One
1. The allegation had come from columnist Drew Pearson in committee testimony a few months earlier. New York Times, June 26, 1947, October 29, 1947.
2. New York Times, October 29, 1947.
3. New York Times, October 28, 1947; Washington Post, October 28, 1947; Horne, Final Victim, 28, 30, 32.
4. Lawson, Processional, v; Fisher and Londre, Modernism, 384; New York Times, February 1, 1925; Chicago Tribune, January 18, 1925.
5. Jackson, Klan in the City, 4–7; Alexander, Klan in the Southwest, 3; MacLean, Behind the Mask, 4, 14; Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 7.
6. Jackson, Klan in the City, 7–10; Lay, Hooded Knights, 7; Alexander, Klan in the Southwest, 7; Tucker, Dragon and the Cross, 70; Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 8.
7. Jackson, Klan in the City, 10–11; Newton, Ku Klux Klan, 371–72; Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 9–10; Hohenberg, Pulitzer Prize Story, 336; Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, March 4, 1999.
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