The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  In fact, to many observers—and members—the Ku Klux Klan was just another such fraternal order; one Klan advertisement even called it “a Standard Fraternal Order.”16 A Wisconsin Klan recruiter called the Klan “a high, close, mystic, social, patriotic, benevolent association having a perfected lodge system.”17 Some recruiters invited men to meetings without naming the KKK.18 Like the Klan, many fraternals employed arcane rituals—oaths, ordeals real or symbolic, initiation and installation rituals, and esoteric ceremonies. Like the Klan, they set out hierarchical ladders for members to climb, as in Scouting, but with fanciful, typically military titles—Field Marshal, Most Excellent Commander, Sublime Augustus, Dictator, Grand Knight, and Chancellor Commander. And almost all kept their rituals secret.19 So Klan practices seemed ordinary to members of fraternal orders. In Indiana, the Klan appeared to some rural people merely an addition to their familiar Order of Patrons of Husbandry, known as the Grange. That organization, deeply rooted in midwestern America, already functioned as a center of sociability, with picnics, dances, and meetings that included Protestant worship. Maine fisherman Charlie York explained, “I never enjoyed any Lodge so much as I did the Klan at first. It had the principle of brotherly love for feller members and they was a high moral tone to it.”20

  In its exclusiveness the Klan was not particularly exceptional among fraternals. Almost all of them were religiously segregated: Catholics had the Knights of Columbus, among others; Jews had B’nai B’rith. Most were also ethnically delimited; different Slavic groups, for example, had separate fraternal organizations. “Since Catholics, Jews and Negroes all had their own secret orders,” why shouldn’t white Protestants do the same, a California Klansman argued.21 Accused of excluding non-Anglo Saxons and non-Protestants from membership, the Imperial Wizard asked why it should be targeted when so many other groups limited membership similarly.22 In some ways the northern KKK was more catholic (pun intended) than other fraternals, because it was open to a large majority of Protestant residents in its strongholds, regardless of their ethnicity, provided they were “Nordic.” This meant that in places where Catholics, Jews, and people of color were few, Klan membership was open to almost everyone.

  Christian evangelicalism was the fifth parent. Evangelicals never united into a single denomination but had been a major force in American Protestantism since the revivals of the early nineteenth century. The evangelical mission—to bring ever more people into born-again commitment—faced challenges by the 1920s, to the extent that some historians have argued that it was in crisis. Fundamentalism, the belief in the literal and inerrant accuracy of the Protestant Bible, was poaching members from the traditional evangelical groups, spreading particularly its denunciation of new science and social science. The “mainline” Protestant sects were also growing, drawing in congregants who tended to be more educated, more urban, and more liberal than the evangelicals. Clarence Darrow’s humiliation of fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” further threatened the prestige of evangelicals.23 As often happens when closed worldviews are challenged, after the trial many evangelicals turned to more extreme creeds, such as premillenialism, the belief that Jesus would return bodily to gather in his saints, those whose rebirth had thoroughly cleansed them of sin. Accordingly, in this prediction, Jesus would then rule a world of peace for a thousand years, the final age of earthly history. These beliefs would appear in some local Klans, and as a whole the Klan could be said to represent an evangelical rebirth.

  The Klan, in turn, strengthened the evangelical battle against sin. Defending Prohibition, one of the Klan’s highest priorities, particularly attracted evangelicals, while the Klan fostered their anger at immodest entertainments (movies, dance halls, burlesque), advertising, and women’s clothing, especially bathing suits. In doing so, the Klan also strengthened evangelical hostility to the groups they charged with purveying indecency: Negroes, Catholics, Jews.

  “Populism,” a label often applied to the Ku Klux Klan, points to another of its ancestors. But “populism” is a slippery term. In the 1890s “populism” was a left movement. Especially strong in the rural and small-town West and Midwest, the Populist Party elected eleven governors and forty-five members of Congress. It expressed the economic grievances of small grain and cotton farmers, coal miners, railroad workers, and small businessmen against big finance and big business, especially the railroads, whose policies were hurting them. These Populists shared a “producerist” ethic, which honored those who produced goods or services while denigrating those who earned without producing, by merely managing, owning, lending money, or buying and selling. But that ethic was malleable; as in many social movements, populists were varied and inconsistent. The producerist ethic did not stop clerks, merchants, or even “managers” such as school principals from supporting the party. Still, the Populists laid out specific proposals designed to benefit working people, both agricultural and industrial. The Populist platform called for a progressive income tax, abolition of national banks, direct election of senators, an eight-hour working day, and government regulation of railroads, telegraphs, and telephone services. This populism not only spoke in the name of the common people but also mobilized common people into political activism.24

  Like most other broad movements, populism encompassed regional variation and contradictory sympathies. Populists of the 1890s could be found on both sides of labor conflicts, could be both bookish and studious but also anti-intellectual, and could be racist or anti-racist. In the South, leaders mobilized white support by exploiting and intensifying racism. Congressman Tom Watson of Georgia, for example, supported the whole Populist program; his most lasting victory was institutionalizing rural free delivery of mail, a major boon to farmers. Yet he became a virulent racist when that became a way to win elections.

  A century later, “populism” has become a term applied to social movements that express anger. By this definition any movement critical of the status quo and evoking grassroots activism could be called populist, and the term thereby loses any specificity. The label is also applied to movements that claim to speak for “the people,” and in this sense it can denote movements of both left and right. Hence the phrase “right-wing populism,” used recently to delineate a movement more narrowly. Salvaging the term’s usefulness, however, requires more precision. One common denominator in populism is its claim to be the authentic voice of “the people,” and a manifestation of “the people’s” will. That presumption has often led populists to deem their enemies inauthentic, to denounce not only their opinions but their entitlement to be considered honorable citizens—or even, in the case of the KKK, citizens at all. Thus populist rhetoric often asserts that the nation is being stolen by those who do not represent the people; that the people are being robbed of their birthright. It is that claim to a unique authenticity that often moves populism to the political right, because it evokes a mystical, doctrinal, ahistorical concept of “the people,” a concept that often demands racial “purity.”

  These attitudes make some populists illiberal, uncomfortable with diverse opinions, and disinclined to protect dissenters. Among the many dangers of imagining the existence of one genuine nation is a call for the people to be undivided in their will. The second Klan trafficked in precisely that mystification of the nation. Its call for homogeneity provided the underlying ostinato in the Klan’s song of patriotism. The Populist Party had encompassed political diversity, while the Klan formulated and imposed a singular set of beliefs. Even its perspective on immorality boiled down to a racialized Protestant intolerance of cultural difference. It is this conception that makes right-leaning populists so often hypernationalists, hostile to internationalism and cosmopolitanism.

  Within the sacred nation, the KKK fumed, powerful but stealthy forces were injuring the majority and its values. But the KKK never enunciated an agenda that might have benefited working people or even small businessmen. Neither did it aim its fury at those responsible for injuring the
people. For example, when the Klan praised Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party in 1924, it was not because he called for public ownership of railroads but because of his isolationism, notably his opposition to US membership in the World Court.25

  The Klan’s enemies were not economic exploiters, unlike those of the Populist Party. While spouting a small-business ethic—honoring individual entrepreneurship as the basis for American greatness—it did not challenge economic policies that served big capital. Instead it blamed the country’s woes on two overlapping categories of unpatriotic Americans: African American, Catholic, and Jewish minorities, but also big-city liberals, “a cosmopolitan intelligentsia devoted to foreign creeds and ethnic identities,” whose culture was “without moral standards,” that is, secular. When the Klan railed against big money, as it did very occasionally, it did so because it saw big money as Jewish.

  Corrupt politicians arose, the Klan thought, from these enemy groups. It condemned corruption not among corporate or political leaders but only among small-time, big-city pols, and they were always identified as Catholics or Jews. (One major inconsistency marked this perspective: the Klan condemned the political class even as it worked to elect its own politicians.)

  Many commentators think of populists as demagogues. If we define demagogues as rabble-rousers, leaders who exploit and build prejudice to elicit feverish rage while shutting down deliberation, it becomes clear that not all populist leaders were demagogues. Earlier progressive populists indeed spoke in honorific terms about salt-of-the-earth citizens and fulminated against economic and political barons, but also propounded structural criticisms and proposals for reform. The Ku Klux Klan, by contrast, used demagoguery as its exclusive approach—to recruitment, to persuading voters, to coercing elected representatives. Its leaders built fear through outrageous conspiracy allegations, fake news, and scapegoating. They whipped up intense rage. Passionate oratory, of course, marks many political campaigns, of all ideological persuasions. But the Klan used it exclusively to banish nonconformists and people of the “wrong” race and religion from Americanism. While the northern Klan carried out few lynchings or beatings, its propaganda constituted cultural, religious, racial, and political violence, and thereby legitimated physical violence in the eyes of angrier members.

  In these ways the Ku Klux Klan created a populism focused on defending a privileged status—of race and religion—that it saw eroding. To categorize the Klan as “populist,” then, requires modifiers that distinguish it. Its populist heredity is apparent, but so are its other five ancestors. And out of those the Klan created something new.

  New but not, of course, completely original. The Klan had absorbed and remixed earlier influences, but its novelty never took it out of the American mainstream. In its prejudices it was, just as it claimed, “100% American.” Never an aberration, the KKK may actually have enunciated values with which a majority of 1920s Americans agreed. But the Klannish spin whirled these ideas into greater intensity. The Klan argued that the nation itself was threatened. Then it declared itself a band of warriors determined to thwart that threat. In the military metaphors that filled Klan rhetoric, it had been directed by God—a Protestant God, of course—to lead an army of right-minded people to defeat the nation’s internal enemies.

  Anti-immigration cartoon. (The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum)

  Chapter 3

  STRUCTURES OF FEELING

  IN PROMOTING ITS IDEOLOGY, THE KLAN DID NOT only enunciate a set of principles, a faith, an ideology. It also fused its political and social ideas with an intense emotionality. This may well be an aspect of demagoguery, though it happens in many belief systems. To understand Klannish ideals we have to examine how Klanspeople felt. Like earlier nativists and racists, recruits entered the Klan because its ideas jibed with their own but then had their often inchoate attitudes organized into a particular “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s concept.1 To grasp this, we must rid ourselves of the notion that emotions are “innate” and instinctive; they can be learned as much as information can be, constructed as much as political positions can be. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes how groups develop shared emotions through “feeling rules”;2 the rules can be consciously and unconsciously taught, as for example when schoolchildren learn national pride through reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or singing an anthem, or when anti-abortion discourse “taught” women to feel guilty after abortions. To understand Klan assumptions and principles, then, we need to conceive of them as emotions as well as ideas.

  The first Klan fought for a simple goal—to maintain white supremacy over African Americans—but its actions also intensified white fear of blacks. Although anti-black prejudice was not a major theme for the second Klan, it fostered those fears: “We believe in the supremacy of the white race, and that it is just and right the younger brothers should be taught to respect those lines of birth and color which the Creator in His superior wisdom has drawn.”3 At times Klan racism reflected white dependence on black labor: “By some scheme of Providence the Negro was created as a serf.” At other times it apparently did not register this dependence and even argued for genocide, as when it debated the relative merits of reenslavement or extermination.4 Despite this, Klan officers frequently insisted that the Klan did not preach hate but sought the “best interest” of black people—which meant keeping them in a servile place with few political and civil rights.

  The Klan also built emotional abhorrence of “race mixing,” an obsession built in part through titillating and sexually suggestive rhetoric. Classical Greek culture “receded as a result of absorption of the blood of colored races,” and “Rome fell because she mixed her blood.”5 A Klan lecturer worked up a crowd by declaring that 113 mixed marriages were performed in Boston in the last year; “I’m sorry to say it was white women marrying black men. We must protect American womanhood.” To which “a shuddering ‘Yes, yes’ went up from the crowd.”6 Local Klans showed and reshowed Birth of a Nation throughout the country (see figure 1) and used Birth of a Nation–type scare talk in speeches and publications: “The negro in whose blood flows the mad desire for race amalgamation is more dangerous than a maddened wild beast.”7

  Like many other racisms, the Klan’s attitude toward African Americans exhibited a contradiction. On the one hand, it characterized African Americans as incapable of “understanding, sharing, or contributing to Americanism,” let alone strategic action.8 It frequently published “darky” jokes, and its speakers repeated them, with their demeaning renditions of allegedly ignorant African American speech and logic. Such a people, in the Klannish mind, could never operate in a modern society, let alone in a democracy. They were happy in their servility, uninterested in political participation. On the other hand, Klan propaganda sometimes argued that African Americans were dangerous because they were organizing to challenge white supremacy, even going so far as to demand the vote—a view that betrayed an unconscious awareness that they were not unintelligent after all.9

  But the second Klan became biggest in locations with very small black populations. Moreover, in spreading north and west, it faced a more diverse population. Not only were immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East arriving in large numbers through eastern ports; not only were Asians from China, Japan, and the Philippines coming into the West (despite official immigration bans); but in the western states there were also Mexicans. (The Klan by and large ignored Native Americans, whom they probably regarded as noncitizens, safely controlled on reservations.) So white supremacy for the second Klan had to be defined more narrowly. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans wrote that “the Negro is not the menace to Americanism in the same sense that the Jew or the Roman Catholic is a menace.” Supremacy belonged only to native-born, Protestant whites, sometimes identified by the term “Nordic,” sometimes “Anglo-Saxon,” sometimes “right” or “true” or “100%” Americans. No Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Christians,
or Muslims, and no people of color, could be truly American. A poem from Dexter, Maine, written by a fifteen-year-old Klan girl, expressed a Klan supporter’s pride and pleasure in this version of whiteness:

  There is an organization started called the K.K.K.,

  Members are joining by the thousands every day;

  Every true American surely ought to go,

  If they do not like it, they can just say so.

  But if you go once, you’ll a member be,

  It’s nice to be a ‘white man,’ you’ll very soon agree.10

  As Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans wrote, “The Ku Klux Klan of today is a new organization to meet a new problem.”11

  The Klan did not view Catholics and Jews as biologically inferior, in contrast to its anti-black racism, but charged them with specific offenses; these were neither minor nor victimless crimes but a form of treason, aimed at undermining the nation. The Klan saw itself as a public crier calling out an emergency, and as a civic movement responding to that emergency through cleansing the society of its filth. It was “divinely appointed to set the forces in operation to rescue Americanism and save our Protestant institutions from the designs of the Scarlet Mother,” as anti-Catholics liked to call the Catholic Church.12 In Klan theology, evangelical Protestantism was what the founding fathers had imagined and decreed—an entirely false and ahistorical rendering, of course, of their eighteenth-century religious creeds.

  Another aspect of Klan Americanism was its suspicion of “elites.” Central to this resentment lay a form of class analysis that enabled the Klan’s claim to stand for the little men against the big men. This definition of elites differed from the more common usage in the mainstream press of the time, which typically defined elites as those with political and economic power. The Klan shared half of that definition, in its disgust with politicians (though Klansmen would soon join them); it represented “the people” against the pols. The Klan targeted neither large-scale economic power nor successful businessmen; in fact, it called for putting “big” men in office.13 Its primary adversaries, those responsible for the erosion of American values and the American way of life, were not capitalists or men of significant wealth. Instead the elites it condemned were cosmopolitan, highbrow urbanites, who were often liberals. That stratum was eroding American morality, particularly its sexual morality. This anxiety was of course aimed at women, but not exclusively, as local chapters occasionally tried to discipline predatory and adulterous men. Klan theology also expressed nostalgia for an imagined, once-perfect America of farms and small towns. (The fact that the Klannish understanding of elites has reappeared in the political rhetoric of recent decades suggests that it has long formed a powerful stream of thought and feeling in the United States.)