The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  Jews, unlike Catholics, were irredeemable. Their dangerousness was of their essence. We see this in the Klan language, referring to Jewish “blood” or “race” in contrast with Catholic “faith.” (“Blood” was of course the vernacular term for biology.) In viewing Jews as a “race”—a term then widely used indistinguishably from “ethnicity”—the Klan was in the mainstream. History had made Jewishness both an ethnicity and a religion, and well into the twentieth century, most Europeans considered the Jews both. Catholics could convert to Protestantism, but Jews would remain strangers to the nation even if they converted. They could not walk away from their faults, could not reject sin, because they were eugenically unassimilable. Hiram Evans announced that “they will never emerge for a real intermingling with America . . . not in a thousand years of continuous residence.”48 Biblically, the Jew was not only a Christ-killer but through the centuries proved himself “inflexible and unbreakable.” One visceral Klan reinterpretation of Jonah and the whale made that clear: he emerged whole from the fish, not a bone in his body broken, because he was “indigestible,” too hard even for the “powerful digestive machinery in the stomach of the monster.”49

  Another interpretation, in which historical characteristics are said to become biological traits—a standard eugenics move—argued that the Jews’ history, their lack of a nation, made them congenitally incapable of virtue or patriotism. As the Imperial Wizard summed it up, the Jew could never be an ideal American because he was an ideal Jew.50 There is some truth in his statement if we invert its value structure: many Jews, especially urban Jews, did share a cosmopolitan history and culture, a characteristic of considerable value in resisting ultra-nationalism. A corollary—that Jews “did nothing to wrest human rights from despotic power [while] the Cavalier, the Puritan, the Quaker and the English Catholic [i.e., Anglican], all Anglo-Saxon and all white, and all of Christian faith, had overthrown tyranny”—has less truth.51 Jews numbered among the eighteenth-century American revolutionaries and were plentiful in nineteenth-century European struggles for republican governments.

  Contradicting Jews’ alleged inability to assimilate, they were also charged with a propensity for miscegenation. “The modern Jew” had “no code to restrain him in his dealings with Gentile women,” to whom he was irresistibly attracted.52 As a result of their lust for Gentiles, Jews were attracted to intermarriage. Jews lacked, the Klan explained, “that inborn feeling of supremacy toward the black races that is peculiar to the better born Americans.”53 Yet even if they did “miscegenate,” thousands of years of persecution had made Jews “indelibly” unable to fit in.

  Toward the end of the Klan’s 1920s career, some of its leaders appeared to soften their attitude toward Jews. This may have resulted from the influence of Anglo-Israelism, a sect that first appeared in late-nineteenth-century England and is today found in the Christian Identity movement; it holds that Anglo-Saxons are the direct descendants of two of the “ten lost tribes of Israel” and that the Jews’ claim to that descent is false. This argument rests on a nonstandard creation story: there were two creations—the first fashioned superior men of clay; the second, the accursed children of Ham, of mud. The mud people have no souls.54 But the Anglo-Israelites often distinguished between the wealthier, more prestigious German Jews and the poorer Jewish immigrants from the eastern European pale of settlement. In 1926 Imperial Wizard Evans modified his earlier anti-Semitism in line with the Anglo-Israelite position: the true Hebrews, made of clay, were separated from true Americans only by religion and were thus assimilable—they had “shown a tendency to disintegrate and amalgamate.” Eastern Jews, the mud people, were by contrast not “true Jews” at all “but only Judaized Mongols—Chazars. These, unlike the true Hebrew, show a divergence from the American type so great that there seems little hope of their assimilation.”55

  Oddly, Klan discourse placed the Catholics and Jews in cahoots. “The sons of Abraham have therefore become a strong ally to the papacy; they have nothing in common in religion, but they are one in their political propaganda against American institutions and principles.”56 “The press is largely controlled by the Roman Catholic priesthood and their Jewish advertisers.”57 That alliance appeared in Jewish support for Al Smith, the 1924 Catholic presidential candidate, whose closest adviser was the Jewish Belle Moskowitz. As the American Standard headlined in 1925: OCHS (JEW) WANTS SMITH (R.C.): OWNER OF NEW YORK TIMES WOULD GIVE WET PAPIST LIFE TENURE OF NEW YORK GOVERNORSHIP.58 A Klan illustration entitled “The Men Who are Refusing to Bow to the Great Image,” honoring Klansmen who turned their backs on the pope, shows Catholics and Jews side by side bowing and reaching out to him. (the Jew is identified by his large hooked nose; both the Catholic and Jewish men are bald, presumably another racial trait.)59 The enemy attacked on many fronts, but its plots were connected through underground, invisible ligatures.

  KLANNISH FEAR OF IMMIGRANTS was indistinguishable from these religious hostilities, for the bulk of the 1890–1920 immigrants were non-Protestant. That they were newcomers intensified fear and hostility, a reaction by no means confined to the Klan. “Strange shoddy has lately crept into the loom on which we weave our destiny. . . . Ominous statistics proclaim the persistent development of a parasite mass within our domain—our political system is clogged with foreign bodies.” Moving from a weaving metaphor to one of illness, at a time when people were just learning germ theory, the author defined the problem as invasion. This particular screed appeared not in a Klan publication but in McClure’s Magazine, a popular and mainstream monthly known for its Progressive Era muckraking, publishing Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffens, and Jack London, among other distinguished writers.60 In a remarkable similarity to a discourse common decades later, Klan leader Evans charged that immigrants were stealing jobs from true Americans: “While the American can out-work the alien, the alien can so far under-live the American as to force him out of all competitive labor.”61

  Fear-inducing narratives like these usually take the form of conspiracy allegations, which strengthen the victim sensibility. If ordinary anecdotes or assertions are difficult to disprove, conspiracies can never be contravened, since they are secret, and all the more unprovable if they are accompanied by sham “facts.” Brandolini’s law, developed in the context of twenty-first-century social media, is equally applicable to 1920s Klanspeak: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”62 Conspiracy theories are the opposite of institutional, economic, or social-historical analyses, which examine the long-term behavior of known institutions, as recorded in verifiable documents.63 Explanations based on conspiracies appear most commonly among out-of-power groups, of course, and elites commonly disdain them, but that is partly because elites may see discreet decision-making by small groups as legitimate leadership.

  In social movements, moreover, conspiracy theories that may be absurd and specious on their face nevertheless contain valid information about the motivations, grievances, insecurities, and even panics among their promoters, so they cannot be simply dismissed. Among Klan leaders, conspiracy theories also did a great deal of organizing work: they provided identifiable and unifying targets, supplying a bonding function that explanations based on historical analyses do not deliver.

  The major function of Klan conspiracy talk was to instill fear. There were many things to be afraid of: Crime, for example, blamed on immigrants even though in the 1920s, as today, immigrants were less likely to commit crimes than the native-born. And that immigrants, and occasionally blacks, were stealing jobs from “true” Americans, that is, Anglo-Saxons. In fact there was little evidence of such theft of jobs, but mere allegations, often accompanied by fraudulent “data,” nevertheless constructed anxiety. Many ministers participated in this construction of fear because it hotted up their sermons and very likely brought people into the churches.

  The Klan tended to blame conspiracies for everything it disliked, even if it had to posit conspir
acies including millions of people. Examples abound. A “class of cultured Negroes have organized societies to promote mixing of white and colored blood. The members of these societies are oath-bound to marry none but white women.” Europe plotted to dump its criminals in the United States. Immigrants plotted to enter the country in order to “plunder, pillage, rape and murder” and thereby take over.64

  In the case of anti-Catholicism, the existence of an individual leader—the pope—multiplied the conspiracy narratives. (See figure 4.) He was the butt of endless accusations. He had ordered the immigrants to come to the United States and told them exactly where to settle.65 This “dago priest on the Tiber,” as the Klan’s Fiery Cross magazine liked to call him, had devised strategies to Catholicize the minds of American children through his schools and to seize control of police departments and local governments by infiltrating employees sworn to do papal bidding. The takeover had already begun. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans asserted that “sixty-two percent of all our political positions, elected or appointed,” and 90 percent of the police forces, were “occupied by Roman Catholics.” A 1923 Klan candidate for governor of Maine charged that Irish Catholic women dominated the ranks of schoolteachers.66 The pope was building a palace in Washington, DC, with a throne of pure gold, to prepare for the takeover that would occur once Al Smith was elected president.67 In an alternative report, the pope had already arrived in person in Indiana, in disguise, to set up an alternate Vatican there.68

  STORIES LIKE THESE WORKED ALSO because they were so rich in symbolic and emotional meanings. One overarching principle, purity, formed a core Klannish yearning.69 The desire for purity involved not only a longing for innocence but also a fear of pollution. It functioned through a set of oppositions that brooked no nuances or qualifications: anything less than purity was pollution; anything less than godliness was ungodliness. This all-or-nothing form of thought intensified passions. The desire for purity was so emotional, even visceral, that it cries out for a psychoanalytic interpretation; but to the historian the fear seems less elemental than contingent, produced by an ocean of flamboyant, even garish rhetoric.

  Purity was a capacious emotional structure, packed with overlapping meanings. They began with whiteness. White skin, or racial purity, entitled Klansfolk to pure white robes (although the Klan’s simultaneous need for hierarchy led some of its leaders to wear robes of brilliant colors—purple and red, for example—to distinguish themselves from the rank and file, which contradicted the “scarlet” label they applied to the Catholic Church, since red was the color of sin).

  Whiteness also signified the purity of Protestant religiosity. Klan discourse saw Catholicism as having deformed or polluted the purity of Jesus and his apostles through establishing a corrupt hierarchy; the Reformation cleansed the Church, but the Catholic hierarchy remained corrupt. If Jesus were still walking the earth, one Klan minister insisted, he’d be a Klansman.70 Purity seemed to Klanspeople only available to white Gentiles; other religions could only masquerade as godly. Catholics and Jews were profane because they were controlled by unruly passions, lacking the discipline to resist temptation. Railing against the venality, self-indulgence, and licentiousness of the Church hierarchy, Klan leaders would later be revealed as hypocrites when their own sins and crimes became known.

  Whiteness also signaled sexual chastity, that is, purity in the Victorian sense, confining sexual activity to marriage and attributing sexual “needs” only to men. But sexual purity also created its opposite, as for many anti-smut zealots: the Klan’s stories of Catholic, black, and Jewish perversities formed a pornography that fused titillation with bigotry. These stories were sometimes smutty, sometimes scatological, sometimes veiled, whether about Jewish white-slave traders or Catholic abuse of nuns: “Language by both tongue and pen has been exhausted by those who have tried to give details of their lives in the convents.”71 One characteristic Klan illustration shows Catholic and Jewish men bowing to the pope, while another worshipper is a sinful woman, identified by her bobbed hair and low-cut shirtwaist.72 (She was probably wearing makeup, too, but that does not show in the etching.)

  Purity also required abstinence from alcohol. Pasting responsibility for violation of Prohibition onto Klan enemies was easy, because in Klannish imagining Catholics did the drinking and Jewish bootleggers supplied them.73 In reality this map of sin was inexact, since many Protestants manufactured, wholesaled, retailed, and drank liquor, and the majority of Americans opposed Prohibition. Hypocrisy about drinking, once exposed, would add to the Klan’s decline.

  Purity meant homogeneity as well. Diversity seemed to Klanspeople a form of pollution, uncleanliness. Antagonism to diversity saturates Klan discourse, conveying a structure of feeling hostile to the very essence of big-city life and cosmopolitanism. The wish for societal endogamy, for conformity, was the aspect of the Klan value system that most expressed its romance with small-town life. Fear of heterogeneity underlay also its extreme nationalism and isolationism; Klanspeople saw little to admire in any foreign culture. Many Americans shared (and still share) this anxiety; nativists abhorred the “Babel of voices” that arose from the immigrant enclaves in big cities and industrial or mining towns.74 These people looked and cooked differently, socialized with their own kind, spoke in foreign tongues. Such a hodgepodge led to chaos in the Klannish mind. Order required uniformity.

  Purity also demanded a conservative gender system. Blaming Jews for subverting it followed logically, since they allegedly controlled commercial entertainment. But it was harder to attribute improper gender relations to Catholics because, except for their priests and nuns, their model for “right” gender relations, especially the proper place for women, was identical to that of conservative Protestants. So the Klan’s gendered case against rank-and-file Catholics focused on men. Catholic men failed to protect and control their women and children, passively conceding to the Church the obedience women should owe to husband or father. Thus while obedience to the pope was itself a symptom of failed manliness, lack of authority over women compounded the weakness. These accusations were largely theoretical, and not conducive to specific allegations of conspiracies that the Klan favored. So its most common denunciations of Catholicism’s sexual and gendered depravity focused on priests and nuns. Nuns upended the proper gender order, by agreeing to serve as slaves, even sex slaves, to priests and to do without motherhood. As for the priests, it went without saying that they were unmanly, accepting as they did a life ostensibly without sex, wives, or offspring—even as they indulged their perverse desires with nuns or with one another.

  Klanswomen expressed their purity through their maternalist orientation, but in this the Klan differed hardly at all from hegemonic American beliefs. Motherhood was a woman’s primary and highest calling, but she could also assert a social motherhood that took her into the public sphere. Women’s roles in this maternalist imagination were multiple: they mothered their families, served the movement, and exerted influence on their men. This “republican motherhood,” a modern translation of a discourse from the American revolutionary era, gave women political voice indirectly, through the male heads of families who represented them.75 As one might expect, 1920s Klan leaders had once opposed woman suffrage, but never vehemently, and once it became law, they welcomed it, assuming that more WASP voters could only advance their cause. Like almost all contemporary observers, including feminists, Klanspeople assumed that women would use the vote in a uniquely womanly and motherly way, to uphold morals and to fortify men to resist sin.

  This confidence that women were innately more nurturing, self-sacrificing, and moral than men would continue to characterize much of women’s political activity for decades. Progressive-era women reformers of all ethnic and religious groups used maternalist premises, for example, to campaign for social welfare provision and against war. Klanswomen did not usually disagree with these priorities; unlike today’s neo-conservatives, Klanspeople did not oppose government welfare programs and did no
t support a large military. They did, however, prioritize campaigns against sexual vice more than Progressive Era reformers and, of course, called for greater enforcement of Prohibition. Still, most Klanswomen’s participation was behind-the-scenes support work, such as organizing and publicizing Klan events and providing food and entertainment.

  As with gender, the Klan was entirely mainstream in its enthusiastic support of eugenics. Like many prestigious scholars and statesmen, it worried that people of “inferior stock” were reproducing at a higher rate than those of “superior” groups. President Theodore Roosevelt himself had made this danger, labeled “race suicide,” into a national political alarm. That first generation of race-suicide alarmists blamed upscale women who were restricting childbirths or even forgoing marriage altogether. The Klan, by contrast, blamed only its racial and religious enemies.76 One Klan tract provided numbers: 288,000,000 Catholics worldwide as compared to 161,000,000 Protestants. (That the rest of the world’s population far outnumbered all the Christians evoked no comment.) True, the author admitted, in the United States Catholics constituted only 17 percent of the population, but members of the Knights of Columbus outnumbered members of the US Army by five to one.77 The Klan even worried over the “enormous birth rate of the Negro population” that would “submerge” whites.78 The accuracy or inaccuracy of these figures is beside the point; they functioned not to inform but to steer anxiety into Klan channels.

  It is striking that the Klan never impugned women for low birth rates or urged “100% American” women to produce more children. Other conservatives of the time did denounce birth control, although it was not then a subject of particular concern to evangelicals. A group of New Jersey Klanswomen even invited Margaret Sanger to address them about birth control.79 The Klan remained silent about the increasing availability of contraception and who was using it.