The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  As individual Klan writers and speakers elaborated their ideas imaginatively, one set of emotional tropes dominated: fear, humiliation, and victimization. “The Nordic American today is a stranger in . . . the land his fathers gave him . . . a most unwelcome stranger, one much spit upon, and one to whom even the right to have his own opinions and to work for his own interests is now denied with jeers and revilings.”14 Many social movements, even those that represent the privileged, thrive by positioning themselves as victims. Still, that the fears were unfounded did not mean they weren’t genuinely felt. Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that this ressentiment, though rarely based on resentment of actual injuries, nevertheless created “a whole tremulous reality of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in its outbursts.”15 Klansfolk and their many sympathizers experienced their world, the America they imagined as traditionally unified and virtuous, as under attacks both open and surreptitious.

  Klan discourse created “feeling rules” for its supporters. Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” concept put the usually solid “structure” together with the usually airy “feeling” in order to characterize ways of thinking and apprehending the world that differ from formal political ideologies. He was making the point that culture is a material political force. True, Klan propaganda was also instrumental, using these anxieties as a recruitment strategy. But instrumentality and conviction were so fused that those who created the discourse probably could not tell them apart.

  These alarms about the erosion of “true” Americanism flowed through stories of allegedly actual events. Because the threats were communicated through tales of distinct happenings, they were not easily susceptible to counterargument: a counterargument would have to deny what Klanspeople took to be facts, facts accepted because of their respect for those who told the stories. (After all, to challenge someone’s anecdote or claim is more insulting than to offer a different perspective about a general claim. How does one prove the falsity of a concrete event that someone claims to have witnessed?) Suspicion of science—associated with elites and particularly with Jews, and inimical to faith—armored Klanspeople yet further against evidence. The Klan’s multiple media—newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, radio stations—often limited its members’ exposure to information that might have challenged their fears.16 In some Klan-strong locations, members might never read or hear news from other sources.

  Suspicion of science reflected a larger anti-intellectualism. That stance combined distrust of urban cosmopolitanism with reverence for faith. “We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership,” Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans declared proudly. “We are demanding . . . a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock.”17 The attitudes of urban, educated elites toward the Klan confirmed this populist resentment; they did look down their noses at people they took to be uneducated buffoons and made fun of the “old-time” values the Klan was determined to defend.

  In response, the Klan used the criticisms leveled against it as more evidence of victimization. It claimed that its enemies constantly lied. Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd’s famous study of 1920s Muncie, Indiana, reported that “Klan feeling was fanned to white heat by constant insistence . . . that ‘every method known to man has been used and is being used by the alien-minded and foreign influence to halt our growth.’ ”18 The media hurled false accusations against the Klan, calling members “ ‘tar-buckets, floggers, thieves, murderers,’ etc., but never in a single instance have they been able to prove their accusations,” wrote one Klan minister.19

  Klan anti-Catholicism continued an old American tradition—historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it the “deepest bias” in US history. Nineteenth-century nativists had been virulently anti-Catholic. Honored nineteenth-century figures such as Lyman Beecher (father of feminists Isabella Beecher Hooker and Catharine Beecher, and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe) urged excluding Catholics from western US settlements; some scholars have even blamed his rhetoric for stirring up episodes of anti-Catholic violence.20

  The Klan’s story about the Catholic threat focused similarly on the fact that the religion was global. Disloyal to America, Catholics functioned as underground warriors for their foreign masters. The pope was their one and only lord, so Catholics—also known as “crossbacks”—could never be loyal Americans. From his international headquarters, the Vatican, he sent out emissaries to do his mischief. The Vatican had minions everywhere, working full-time toward world domination. Klan speakers frequently implied that Catholics had a unique “lust” for public office, and that priests egged on their parishioners to that end.21 Furthermore, that the pope and his flunkies commanded absolute allegiance demonstrated Catholics’ authoritarianism, and consequent unfitness for democracy. The papal bull of 1894 forbidding Catholics to join secret orders exemplified this demand for total subservience. His priests and nuns brainwashed children through parochial schools, and the pope dictated what was taught there.

  Klan leaders fought back with “black psywar.” This is the name applied to a type of psychological warfare used by the United States during the Vietnam War, when it distributed material disguised as emanating from the National Liberation Front, also known as the Viet Cong. The Klan, along with earlier anti-Catholic groups, similarly invented, distorted, and used out of context material allegedly emanating from the Vatican. For example, “The Pope has received a detailed report of the elections in America, and has learned with great satisfaction of the successes attained by a number of Catholic candidates . . . we are trying to make the United States a Catholic country.”22 The pope had declared, in a rhyming allegation put out by the Klan,

  “I’ve planned for this for many years, and I’ve started out to kill

  All who refuse to bow in submission to my will.”23

  The Denver Klan forged a Catholic list that targeted eight hundred Protestants for economic ruin.24 One might wonder whether the distributors of these items knew they were false. Probably not; as with many rumors, the source was obscure even to those who purveyed them. I think of this black psywar as similar to police planting evidence because they “know” that the suspects are guilty.

  Some of the alleged Catholic plots were ferociously violent. For example, a counterfeit Knights of Columbus initiation pledge circulated by the Klan required a promise to “wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants, and Masons . . . burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip open the stomachs and wombs of their women and crash their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.”25 It is impossible to resist the suspicion that in attributing such violence to Catholics, Klanspeople’s own suppressed impulses leaked out.

  Despite attributing such violence to Catholics, Klan discourse typically gendered the Catholic Church female, referring to it as “the scarlet mother” or the “whore of Babylon” mentioned in the Book of Revelation. The gendering of Catholicism was filled with contradictions that similarly leaked Klanspeople’s own anxieties. In charging that the pope demanded total allegiance, Klanspeople were feminizing Catholics, because blind obedience was antithetical to manly “independence.” Yet in a different gendered twist, the Klan harped on Romanist crimes against women. Catholic masculinity was thus deformed, in failing to honor and respect women. Nuns were exhibit A. Alleged exposés by “escaped” nuns were already an old tradition of fake news—Maria Monk had published her escape story in an 1836 bestseller—and the Klan revived it. Convents were allegedly prisons, keeping women as slaves. “The crimes committed in Rome’s sweatshops, where the girls have to toil under the eye of inhuman task-mistresses, are enough, if the truth were known, to cause the civilized world to revolt. The penalties meted out . . . are not far below the inquisitorial methods of the Dark Ages.” A Mun
cie woman told Robert and Helen Lynd that when a nun was caught wearing rings, the sisters “just burned them off,” leaving her with stubs for fingers.26 Moreover, the nuns “were forbidden to write to their relatives and friends, and even when letters were allowed . . . they had to go through the hands of the censors and every word and phrase was eliminated that would give the slightest idea of discontent or ill treatment.”27 (The alleged censoring thus explained the lack of evidence for these claims.) In some convents “inmates” were “sentenced to lives of silence. Why should they be doomed to silence unless there is fear that through their conversation the iniquitous system may be exposed.”28 Klan talk deprived nuns of any agency of their own, an assumption that may have reflected some Klansmen’s attitude toward their own women.

  Worse, the nuns served as the sex slaves of priests. If “the first amendment gives a priest a right to run a harem in this country,” a Bethel, Vermont, Klan supporter wrote to a newspaper, why did the government have the right to ban Mormon polygamy?29 The Klan sponsored speaking tours by Helen Jackson, an “escaped” nun (and ex-convict), who peddled salacious tales of sadomasochistic and scatological practices by priests and female Catholic superiors. References to “moral leprosy,” “vendors of filth,” and secret doors to priests’ bedrooms often figured among the charges.30 One speaker even charged that nuns were forced to sleep with their excrement. These sensationalist reports increased newspaper circulation, and were intended to.31 Occasionally they were disproved: in Indiana a Klan attorney filed a writ of habeas corpus against a mother superior, to liberate a girl who had alleged abuse, only to have the girl tell authorities that she was home-sick and had used the complaint—successfully—to get her passage back to Ireland paid for by the state.32

  Even within the United States, the Catholic Church remained foreign. Not only was its Rome hierarchy “wholly Italian,” but its US hierarchy also consisted mainly of foreigners. To make matters worse, it persisted in using foreign languages in its churches. The Klan called for prohibiting the American publication of newspapers or magazines not in English.33 It denounced Catholic attempts to prevent intermarriage with Protestants by requiring that children be “bound in advance to Romanism,”34 the assumption being that only by becoming Protestant could children be assimilated.

  Centralization intensified the Catholic threat; while Protestants divided among countless sects, there was but one “Romish” Church. It had established fourteen US provinces, within which were one hundred dioceses ruled by “one hundred vassal kings of the Imperial Monarch, the Pope of Rome.” Each king was an “omnipotent judge over his subjects.” The twenty thousand priests constituted an army that collected taxes from their servile believers, sending a “steady stream of gold” to Rome to support its plan to acquire “world supremacy.”35 Thus Protestants needed a militant Protestant organization to resist, and the Klan arose for just this purpose.

  The “Romish” drive for world domination was also responsible for wars. God had been warring with the antichrist since the time of creation, and he punished those who yielded to satanic temptation by raining war and destruction upon them. In the Klan’s version of religious history, starting in the year 606 the popes had led Satan’s campaign to enthrall the human race, producing yet further “divine retribution.” “When America was discovered, the pope calmly announced that he would divide the new world into two parts, giving one part to the King of Spain and the other to the King of Portugal.” The current pope, said the Klan, continues that campaign; the devil has never given up.36

  JEWS WERE EQUALLY GUILTY of foreign allegiance, but to a different sort of master: a secular international cabal of financiers who planned to take over the American economy through its financial institutions—or even to establish “a government within our government.”37 These charges substituted a laic for a religious conspiracy, because, of course, Judaism had no central religious authority. The alleged conspiracy regurgitated the old libel that Jews were by nature swindlers loyal only to their tribe. The Jew was such a devious merchant that an “honest Gentile American cannot successfully compete with him.”38 (To the Klan “Gentile” meant Protestant.) The proof of the finance cabal’s existence and purposes lay in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” but to the Klan it was outdated, because the Jews already controlled the nation’s finances. (The Klan tried but failed to create its own banks so that its members could avoid using un-American ones.39) There was a populist charge to Klan anti-Semitism: Jews did not “produce” anything but functioned only as middlemen, buying and selling, and therefore contributed no economic value to the United States.40 At the same time, allegations about Jews’ alleged excessive love of money served to deflect attention from the Klan leaders’ own profiteering, examined in the next chapter.

  In one remarkable silence about the Jews, Klan discourse did not often employ the reverse side of classic anti-Semitism: that these dishonest merchant capitalists were also Communists. Those accusations would appear in American Nazi and fascist groups of the 1930s, but the 1920s Klan was notably disinterested in actual foreign issues. Moreover, the Klan was weaker in the cities where many Jewish socialists and Communists were found. On the other hand, recognizing that Jews were often cosmopolitans confirmed the Klan conviction that they could not be patriots.

  Conservative anti-Semitism has been categorized as anti-modernist, a revulsion toward modern artistic, commercial, and social culture, and the Klan shared those attitudes. It blamed Jews for women’s immodest dress, makeup, and amusements through their control of department stores, garment manufacture, and the media—Hollywood above all. “The great Jewish syndicates, the rulers and promoters of the motion picture industry,” were corrupting women and children. Attacks on “Jew Hollywood” were unrelenting: “Jew Movies urging sex vice” and “The poisonous flood of filthy Jewish suggestion, which has been paralyzing the moral sense of America’s children” typified thousands of fear-mongering complaints. The Klan launched an attack on The Pilgrim, a 1923 silent film with a cameo appearance by Charlie Chaplin, on the grounds that his “burlesque” version of a hypocritical minister was an insult to Protestantism. (The Klan’s reference to burlesque evokes, of course, the many Jews in the world of live performance and New York’s risqué commercial culture.) Several states bowed to Klan pressure and banned the film. The Imperial Night-Hawk referred to Chaplin as a “vulgar” Jewish comedian.41 (He was not Jewish but refused on principle to say so.)

  As with attacks on Catholics, the Klan put out a great deal of fake news about Jews, its allegations safe from challenge because of the closed media world in which they circulated. Jews not only conspired to subvert decent women’s morals, Klan publications alleged, but actually kidnapped women for their “white-slave dens.” “What happens to the army of young girls who are lost every year? From 60,000 to 75,000 of them disappear annually. . . . The Jews get them and sell them as white slaves. They have a regular price list.”42 If this discourse had any effect, it might have been not only to cause women to fear Jews but also to confirm the imperative for women to stick close to home and avoid the public sphere.

  Klan ideologues recognized that these Jewish campaigns worked because they sold. Jews “procured” young women “to enhance their own monetary interests. . . . The Jew knows what sort of motion picture will pay best.”43 In this understanding Klan spokespeople revealed a blind spot that has long characterized religious conservatism, blaming religious apostasy for subverting morality while discounting the influence of commercial economic motives.

  But the Klan was never thoroughly anti-modernist. It fit what Jeffrey Herf, writing about Germany, called reactionary modernism: enthusiasm for modern technology combined with rejection of Enlightenment and liberal values.44 Despite suspicion of science and what liberals call critical thinking, Klanspeople adored and exploited the technological products of science, as we will see below. The most offensive science was, of course, evolutionary theory, and anyone who defended it became a Klan
target. “Investigation of attorney John Hodgin revealed the fact that he is an evolutionist . . . [who] believes that man and monkey are true kindred spirits. . . . He needs a little fixing over.”45 Evolution theory too was a Jewish project, promoted in order to undermine the glorious story of creation (an accusation that overlooks the fact that the biblical creation story came from the Jews). The Klan became the first national organization to deny evolution and to sponsor state laws against teaching it, on the grounds that it was not only anti-Christian but also part of a foreign and Jewish conspiracy.46 When William Jennings Bryan died, just after the Scopes trial of 1925, the Klan threw him a large memorial service in Dayton, Ohio, where it burned a cross with the inscription “In memory of William Jennings Bryan, the greatest Klansman of our time.” “We will take up the torch as it fell from [his] hand,” the Grand Dragon of Ohio pledged, for “America cannot remain half Christian and half agnostic.”47 (Note the use of Lincoln’s anti-slavery formulation.)