23. Imperial Night-Hawk, July 4, 1923; New York Times, November 3, 1924; Mecklin, Ku Klux Klan, 13, 15, 30, 95–6, 157.
24. Mecklin, Ku Klux Klan, 103–4, 106–7, 109, 233–34.
25. New York Times, February 24, 1924, March 16, 1924; The Bookman, March 1924; Janesville Daily Gazette, May 29, 1924; Ogden Standard-Examiner, October 26, 1924; Washington Post, September 19, 1937. For more on Mecklin’s influence, see chapter 1.
26. Frost, Challenge of the Klan, 41, 77, 251–53; Jackson, Klan in the City, 235.
27. The series had been widely reprinted in both mainstream publications and Klannish newspapers, including the Searchlight, the Fiery Cross, and the Fellowship Forum (Frost, Challenge of the Klan, vii–viii; Searchlight, December 29, 1923, January 5, 1924; Minnesota Fiery Cross, February 22, 1924, April 25, 1924).
28. Frost, Challenge of the Klan, 78, 80, 105, 171.
29. As historians have pulled away from Mecklin’s thinking, Frost’s argument has played an increasingly important role, echoed in the “civic activist” school of thought pioneered by Leonard Moore and Shawn Lay (Frost, Challenge of the Klan, 115; Minnesota Fiery Cross, April 25, 1924; Oakland Tribune, May 11, 1924; Washington Post, May 18, 1924; Fellowship Forum, March 21, 1925).
30. Jones was actually the son of the superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League of Georgia, while his brother (soon to become assistant Prohibition director of Georgia) was described as a “constant attendant” of Imperial Wizard Simmons during the congressional hearings into the Klan. It is unclear whether Jones was an official member of the Klan at the time of writing his book, but he was certainly an admirer and ally. By the time of the abridged reissue of his book in 1941, he was sharing an apartment with “Colonel” E. N. Sanctuary, an “arch Klansman” who ran a small Klan publishing firm (Randel, Century of Infamy, 170, 179; Jones, Story of the Klan, 9; New York Times, April 19, 1925; Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, February 12, 1942).
31. Jones, Story of the Klan, 34, 40, 94, 105.
32. Fowler, Ku Klux Klan, 3; Dyer, “Klan on Campus,” 454, 459, 462, 468–69; Fellowship Forum, May 17, 1923; San Antonio Express, September 10, 1923; Dawn, March 10, 1923, April 7, 1923; Brown, Facts Concerning Klan, preface; Sawyer, Truth about the Invisible Empire, 5–6.
33. Badger American, August 1923.
34. Simmons, Klan Unmasked, 13, 105.
35. The ex-Imperial Wizard’s book did not even receive particular attention in the Klan press. Simmons ignored the fact that his book was an incoherent shambles and instead blamed Evans for its failure, later claiming that his rival had tried to prevent The Klan Unmasked from even being published (Simmons, America’s Menace, 143).
36. It was not until 1930, far past the peak of the Klan’s power, that Evans did eventually write a book, The Rising Storm. An analysis of the growing menace of Catholic influence in politics, The Rising Storm did not mention the Ku Klux Klan at all.
37. Fleming, What Is Ku Kluxism? 2.
38. Mast, K.K.K., Friend or Foe? 6, 17, 22, 28, 40, 48, 73.
39. Fellowship Forum, April 26, 1924; Lougher, Klan in Kentucky, 17; Winter, What Price Tolerance, v, 19, 81.
40. Both Roman Katholic Kingdom and Old Cedar School were by Oregon Klan propagandist George Estes, although they are usually credited to their publisher, Luther Ivan Powell, King Kleagle of the Pacific Northwest.
41. Wright, Religious and Patriotic Ideals, 1; White, Klan in Prophecy, 14, 26. See also White, Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty (1926) and Heroes of the Fiery Cross (1928).
42. Stanton, Christ and Other Klansmen, 34, 39; Curry, Klan under the Searchlight, 32, 41.
43. Fry, Modern Klan, vi–vii, 17, 24, 94, 105, 124, 185–91; The Messenger, May 1923.
44. Chicago Defender, January 14, 1922; New York Times, January 15, 1922; Syracuse Herald, March 5, 1922; Oakland Tribune, February 19, 1923.
45. Dever, Confessions; Monteval, Klan Inside Out; Likins, Patriotism Capitalized; Likins, Trail of the Serpent; Sletterdahl, Nightshirt in Politics; Simmons, America’s Menace, 81.
46. Fry, Modern Klan, vi; Dever, Confessions, 4, 6, 29; Dawn, May 12, 1923; Bakersfield Californian, May 2, 1923; Monteval, Klan Inside Out, 11, 29; Likins, Patriotism Capitalized, 63; Likins, Trail of the Serpent, 5–6, 67; Simmons, America’s Menace, 81, 230; Booth, Mad Mullah, ix, 3–4.
47. Ball, Faults and Virtues, 23; Gordon, Unmasked! preface; Randel, Century of Infamy, 187.
48. Dalrymple, Liberty Dethroned, 27, 35; Blake, Ku Klux Kraze, 2; New York Times, September 8, 1923, October 3, 1923, October 11, 1923, October 22, 1924.
49. Minnesota Fiery Cross, May 23, 1924; Fiery Cross, February 2, 1923.
50. Dawn, December 2, 1922; Fellowship Forum, October 27, 1923; Kourier Magazine, December 1924, May 1925. For the best analysis of the Ku Klux Klan and public education, see the chapter “Learning Americanism” in Pegram, One Hundred Percent; and Laats, Other School Reformers.
51. Fiery Cross, December 8, 1922; New York Times, March 21, 1923; Searchlight, April 7, 1923, November 8, 1924; Imperial Night-Hawk, May 9, 1923; Wisconsin Kourier, January 9, 1925.
52. Pegram, One Hundred Percent, 106; Zimmerman, “History Wars,” 92–93; Zimmerman, Whose America? 16–20, 24–26; Slosson, Great Crusade, 316.
53. Condemning the charges as “inherently and obviously absurd,” the American Historical Association adopted the resolution, “Genuine and intelligent patriotism, no less than the requirement of honesty and sound scholarship, demand that text-book writers and teachers should strive to present a truthful picture of past and present. . . . Criticism of history text-books should therefore be based not upon grounds of patriotism, but only upon grounds of faithfulness to fact.” (Slosson, Great Crusade, 316–17).
54. Zimmerman, Whose America? 18–19; Dawn, September 1, 1923; Call of the North, September 7, 1923.
55. Zimmerman, Whose America? 18, 21, 24–25; Zimmerman, “History Wars,” 92–93, 96, 105; Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1927, November 19, 1927; Slosson, Great Crusade, 316.
56. By all accounts, the contents of Convent Cruelties paled in comparison to Jackson’s lectures, often held at the behest of local Klansmen. Sections of the book with sexual undertones were made overt at these live events, at which Jackson described the “sexual horrors” of the convent, where nuns were raped by priests and then forced to have abortions (or have their newborn children murdered) to eliminate any evidence. Catholics across the country (mainly the Midwest) took out newspaper advertisements in which they denounced Jackson’s stories and attempted to provide the true details of her life, although they seem to have had little impact on Jackson’s popularity (Blee, Women of the Klan, 89; Massillon Evening Independent, December 7, 1923; Sheboygan Press, May 3, 1924; Logansport Pharos-Tribune, November 3, 1924).
57. In 1922, Hearst’s Magazine printed a letter that purported to be from F. S. Webster, a Wisconsin Kleagle, to J. O. Wood, editor of the Searchlight, in which Webster encouraged Wood to print an article on the book, which “every Klansman should read,” but “do not mention the fact that Stoddard is a Klansman” (MacLean, Behind the Mask, 270; “Lothrop Stoddard,” American National Biography Online; Capital Times, December 29, 1922; Chicago Defender, January 20, 1923, January 27, 1923).
58. Kourier Magazine, September 1926; Jackson, Convent Cruelties, 7; Baker, Gospel, 149; Blee, Women of the Klan, 89; Searchlight, September 2, 1922, April 12, 1924; Fiery Cross, December 8, 1922, April 13, 1923; Dawn, June 2, 1923, February 9, 1924; Fellowship Forum, May 17, 1923, January 31, 1925; Badger American, June 1923; Call of the North, August 24, 1923; Stoddard, Rising Tide, 5.
59. It can only be assumed that the Klansman who recommended Cable’s fiction had never encountered his nonfiction, or even his earlier fiction, in which he advocated for racial equality and expressed his abhorrence toward Southern racial attitudes.
60. Fiery Cross, April 27, 1923, June 29, 1923, July 20, 1923, October 5, 1923; Fellowship Forum, August 23, 1924; Kourier Magazin
e, December 1927; Knights of the Klan, Meeting of Grand Dragons, 85.
61. Smith, What Would Jesus Read? 107–11; Kourier Magazine, September 1926, February 1927, November 1927.
62. Fiery Cross, May 11, 1923.
63. Fiery Cross, February 2, 1923; Kourier Magazine, May 1925, February 1927.
64. Fiery Cross, July 20, 1923; Kourier Magazine, December 1927; Wisconsin Kourier, December 5, 1924.
65. Rubin, Middlebrow Culture, 149, 159–60, 174–79.
Chapter Five
1. Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 9, 86.
2. Michaels, Our America, 23–27, 136; Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 13, 23, 86.
3. Mordden, That Jazz! 228–29.
4. Hart, Popular Book, 207, 215, 235, 241, 244; Denning, Cultural Front, 197; Miller, New World, 215; Smith, What Would Jesus Read? 55; Greif, Crisis of Man, 109, 112, 116–19.
5. Nash, Nervous Generation, 99, 102, 137–40; Nye, Unembarrassed Muse, 38–40; Skinner, Reagan, 6.
6. Klannish readers may have been particularly fond of the novel because of its anti-Catholic undertones, including blaming the outbreak of the Civil War on a European conspiracy centered on a secret Treaty of Verona (Babcock, Soul of Abe Lincoln, 52, 72; New York Times, June 10, 1923; Dawn, June 30, 1923; Badger American, February 1924; Nash, Nervous Generation, 140).
7. For a recent example of literary histories of the 1920s that ignore Wright and other mass-market writers, see McParland, Beyond Gatsby (Smith, What Would Jesus Read? 3, 48, 51–55; Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, 38).
8. Rodgers, Mencken, 148–50.
9. Nolan, Black Mask Boys, 19–20, 22; Hagemann, “Black Mask,” 35; Smith, Hard-Boiled, 18; Nye, Unembarrassed Muse, 255.
10. Smith, Hard-Boiled, 27; McCann, Gumshoe America, 40; Mertz, “Carroll John Daly,” 21.
11. Moore, Hard-Boiled Detective, 4, 39; Nolan, Black Mask, 35–36.
12. Black Mask, June 1, 1923, 44–46.
13. Black Mask, June 1, 1923, 46.
14. Black Mask, May 15, 1923, 48.
15. Black Mask, June 1, 1923, 32.
16. George W. Sutton to Herman Petersen, February 17, 1923, Herman Petersen Papers, Collection 1339, Box 1, Folder 18b, Department of Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, Los Angeles, California; Herman Petersen to George W. Sutton, February 19, 1923, Herman Petersen Papers, Collection 1339, Box 1, Folder 18b, Department of Special Collections, UCLA.
17. Petersen originally set the story in West Virginia “because the Klan is fairly strong there,” but changed the locale to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where he had lived for several years, on the advice of Sutton (George W. Sutton, Jr., Memo to Herman Petersen, n.d., Herman Petersen Papers, Collection 1339, Box 1, Folder 18b, Department of Special Collections, UCLA; Herman Petersen to George W. Sutton, Jr., March 16, 1923, Herman Petersen Papers, Collection 1339, Box 1, Folder 18b, Department of Special Collections, UCLA).
18. In Petersen’s first draft, the Klan was summoned through the ringing of church bells, but Sutton told him to change it because the Klan was “a private organization.” Petersen resisted the alteration, arguing that in many localities—including the one in which the story was set—the Klan was certainly popular enough to make use of the local church bells as an alarm. Nonetheless, he eventually acceded to Sutton’s request (George W. Sutton, Jr., Memo to Herman Petersen, n.d., Herman Petersen Papers, Collection 1339, Box 1, Folder 18a, Department of Special Collections, UCLA; Herman Petersen to George W. Sutton, Jr., March 16, 1923, Herman Petersen Papers, Collection 1339, Box 1, Folder 18b, Department of Special Collections, UCLA).
19. Black Mask, June 1, 1923, 18, 26, 31.
20. Herman Petersen to George W. Sutton, March 2, 1923, Herman Petersen Papers, Collection 1339, Box 1, Folder 18b, Department of Special Collections, UCLA.
21. Black Mask, June 1, 1923, 59–60, 78, 90.
22. Correspondents included a Canadian and his wife living in Michigan, who expressed their sadness that they were not eligible to join the Klan, and Robert E. Lee Klan Number One of Birmingham, Alabama (Black Mask, August 1, 1923, 118–22; August 15, 1923, 117–21).
23. Black Mask, June 15, 1923, 50, 66.
24. Hagemann, “Black Mask,” 36; Nolan, Black Mask, 28; Imperial Night-Hawk, May 2, 1923.
25. Smith, Hard-Boiled, 31, 44; McCann, Gumshoe, 40–41.
26. Prince, Stories, 91–93, 99, 137, 209, 215, 232; Stokes, Birth, 42; Lowery, “Reconstructing the Reign of Terror,” 3, 68.
27. Harris was also, ironically, father of newspaper editor Julian Harris, a leading crusader against the Invisible Empire in the 1920s.
28. Randel, Century of Infamy, 141–43, 151, 157–59; Hart, Popular Book, 204; Lowery, “Reconstructing the Reign of Terror,” 46, 68. For more on The Clansman and The Birth of a Nation, see chapter 6.
29. Dixon, Clansman, 341–42; Atlanta Journal, April 20, 1902; The Bookman, February 1905; Stokes, Birth, 41–42.
30. Randel, Century of Infamy, 143; Michaels, Our America, 10; Scott Romine, “Thomas Dixon and the Literary Production of Whiteness,” in Gillespie and Hall, Thomas Dixon Jr., 124; Williamson, Crucible of Race, 141.
31. Randel, Century of Infamy, 143; Rogers, Ku Klux Spirit, 36.
32. Jackson, Klan in the City, 131, 176; Slide, American Racist, 16; New York Times, January 23, 1923, February 5, 1923; Syracuse Herald, January 23, 1923; Appleton Post-Crescent, January 23, 1923.
33. In Dixon’s understanding of the Reconstruction Klan, President Grant’s investigation into the South and the passage of the Ku Klux Act had no bearing on the demise of the organization—it simply decided to disband without prompting once it understood that it had fulfilled its mission.
34. Dixon, Traitor, 58.
35. Dixon, Sins of the Father, 19.
36. Dixon, Black Hood, 60, 84, 168.
37. New York Times, June 22, 1924, August 5, 1924; New York World, June 15, 1924; Slide, American Racist, 173; Jackson, Klan in the City, 176; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 93.
38. Janken, White, 89, 95–96, 110; Baltimore Afro-American, October 17, 1924.
39. White, Fire, 123, 126. The plot of White’s novel was overtly indebted to Ida B. Wells’s investigation of allegations of rape as a cover for lynchings motivated by the threat of black economic progress. For more, see Ida Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age, 1892).
40. Although this did not deter the mob in the novel from dragging Bob’s body through the streets and burning it.
41. White, Fire, 230–37, 242, 300.
42. As the NAACP’s field secretary, White traveled to Elaine, Arkansas, after the 1919 massacre of African American sharecroppers who had attempted to unionize. The results of his interviews with members of both the black and the white communities were widely republished and represented a major advance in his career (White, Man Called White, 47–50; Janken, White, 50–53).
43. Janken, White, 107–8.
44. Janken, White, 108–11; New York Times, September 14, 1924; The Messenger, October 1924, December 1924; Baltimore Afro-American, October 17, 1924; The Independent, September 27, 1924.
45. Janken, White, 111; Chicago Defender, September 13, 1924; Baltimore Afro-American, December 6, 1924.
46. Chicago Defender, November 1, 1924; Baltimore Afro-American, December 6, 1924.
47. New York Times, February 7, 1926.
48. Shands, White and Black, 136.
49. Shands, White and Black, 193, 232; The Messenger, December 1922; The Bookman, June 1922; New York Tribune, April 23, 1922.
50. Rubin, Tar and Feathers, 16, 190–92.
51. Daily Northwestern, October 6, 1923; The Bookman, November 1923; Scott, Moffett, 356.
52. The novel gave the author’s name as Egbert Ethelred Brown. This may have been an alias, mocking the black Unitarian minister of the same (uncommon) name.
53. Brown, Final Awakening, 4, 155, 157.
54. Fellowship Forum, Sept
ember 15, 1923.
55. Brown, Harold, 5; Wade, Fiery Cross, 182.
56. Dawn, December 29, 1923, February 9, 1924; Badger American, February 1924; Fellowship Forum, December 10, 1927.
57. Saxon, Knight Vale of the K.K.K., 65–6, 111.
58. King, 100%, 319–23; Gaffney, Son of a Klansman, 5–6; Fellowship Forum, June 9, 1928.
59. American Mercury, January 1928, March 1928, August 1928; Hoopes, Cain, 178–79.
60. Stevens, Mattock, 8, 236, 317; Maguire, James Stevens, 5, 27, 33; New York Times, April 24, 1927, May 15, 1927; The Independent, May 14, 1927; The Bookman, July 1927; American Mercury, April 1924.
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