by Linda Gordon
MY ATTEMPT TO MAKE ORDER within Klan emotion and ideology does not ultimately succeed, because Klan beliefs were riddled with contradiction. But the contradictions were themselves often effective mobilizers. Consider, for example, Klan rhetoric of strength and weakness. Both “right” Americans and their enemies were characterized sometimes as weak, other times as strong. Klanspeople were victims but also unvanquishable knights destined to overcome the forces of evil. African Americans were plotting to depose white rule but also incapable of conspiratorial strategies. Jews were servile and unmanly but had already taken over the economy and the media. Catholics were obsequious in their willingness to subordinate themselves but already controlled big-city politics and law enforcement. Inconsistencies like these worked to marshal both insecurity and confidence, a combination that drew recruits to the Klan.
Inconsistency also enabled the Klan to express grievances flexibly and in some instances to avoid deeper inquiry about the sources of those grievances. Jews functioned in Klan discourse to resolve contradictory attitudes toward capitalism and commercialism: by projecting lust for money onto “the Jew,” Klansmen could adjudge their own profit-seeking as honorable, as we will see in the next chapter. Catholics’ alleged authoritarianism suppressed questions about Klanspeople’s own submissiveness to their unaccountable leaders. Similarly, the Klan worldview blocked inquiry into the actual causes of small entrepreneurs’ and family farmers’ declining fortunes. Blaming immigrants for “stealing” “American” jobs ignored employers’ search for cheap labor. Blaming Jews and Catholics for introducing vice ignored the profit motive behind the entertainment and advertising industries’ exploitation of sexual desire and the liquor industry’s profits. This inconsistency and blindness served to make Klannish ideas fungible and capacious, adaptable to local contexts, and acceptable to those with great economic power.
KKK initiation ceremony near Richmond, Indiana, 1922. (Ball State University Archives & Special Collections)
Chapter 4
RECRUITMENT, RITUAL, AND PROFIT
IN MANY RESPECTS THE KLAN MIGHT APPEAR ANTI-MODERNIST, as in its romance about “old-time religion” and its campaign to “restore” “true Americanism.” Yet in its organizing, it was not only modern but innovative. What made the Ku Klux Klan so wildly successful in the early 1920s was an aggressive, state-of-the-art sales approach to recruitment. One study labeled the Klan “a hybrid of a social club and a multi-level marketing firm.”1 Far from rejecting commercialization and the technology it brought, such as radio, the Klan’s system was entirely up-to-date, even pioneering, in its methods of selling. From its start, the second Klan used what might be called the social media of its time. These methods—a professional PR firm, financial incentives to recruit, advertisements in the mass media, and high-tech spectacular pageants—produced phenomenal growth for several years. This was distinctly not a project of uneducated rubes.
Enlarging the Klan was the number one priority because Simmons, Clarke, and Tyler saw it as a business—not a social movement. Simmons literally owned the Klan, and when he was deposed, his successors had to buy it from him. This is not to say that they didn’t believe in the cause; as with all Klan leaders, it would be difficult to disentangle principle from profit motives, in part because they considered their profits honorably earned. They were champions of the business ethic, another respect in which the Klan was entirely mainstream.
Clarke and Tyler, following Simmons’s original conception of his project, first sought to grow the new Klan by bringing in southern elites who could pay substantial dues, and they sent invitations to many upscale southern citizens. They apparently envisaged it as a private elite club with expensive entry fees. In one of many contradictory statements, they praised the first Klan in openly racial terms—“its valiant services in behalf of white supremacy insure it a place in the heart of every true American”—implying that the new club would be dedicated to the same cause. But they also described it as a “standard fraternal order.” They promised that the new Klan would enlarge “the scope of its work” but also offered reassurance that it would retain “all of the protective features of the old Klan” and referred, ominously, to the “fourteen million people of the colored race” who were “organizing.” Exploiting the anti-radical hysteria of the years after World War I, they also trumpeted the threat by “the Anarchist and Bolshevik forces . . . encroaching daily upon the basic principles of Americanism.”2
Before long, receiving a tepid response, Clarke and Tyler realized the limits of this southern recruiting strategy and decided to take their project national. They divided the country into nine domains, each headed by a Grand Dragon (sometimes called a Grand Goblin); under these were head recruiters in each state or groups of states, called King Kleagles; and under each of them were local salesmen, or Kleagles.3 (The Klan tried to make every possible label start with a K, typically followed by an L. A glossary of the most common Klan titles appears in appendix 1.) In essence they were setting up a decentralized system of franchises, in which local recruiters sent much of their revenue to the men above them and kept some themselves.
Kleagles, or recruiters, worked on commission: new members would pay an initiation fee, labeled a Klecktoken, of $10 (worth $122 in 2016). Of this, the individual salesman would keep $4; the remaining $6 would be forwarded up through higher officers, each one keeping a percentage, to the Atlanta head office. Veterans of the nineteenth-century Klan—obviously declining in numbers—were exempt from paying the Klecktoken. But all members paid dues, ranging from 8-1/3 to 15 cents a month, and Kleagles and higher officers took commissions from these as well. The Atlanta team also instituted a ladder that members could climb, the rungs called “degrees” as in Masonic groups: you started out at K-Uno, then could advance to K-Duo, K-Trio, and K-Quad; each degree required another initial payment and higher dues. Members joined chapters, known as Klaverns, and each chapter had to pay an Imperial Tax to the national headquarters and a Realm Tax to the region, the amount based on the intake of monthly dues.
With such financial incentives, it is not surprising that within a year, Clarke and Tyler had 1,100 active Kleagles in the field. And each new member could in theory become a Kleagle himself, thereby keeping 40 percent of the Klecktokens. Through amalgamating financial, patriotic, and racist interests, the Klan spread like a prairie fire.
Recruitment was everywhere the priority: in fact, in these first years, it seemed that the only thing the Klan did was recruit more Klansmen. National leaders instructed each local Klan group to “solve the problem of mobilization [which] means the procurement of qualified aliens.”4 An “alien,” in Klanspeak, was anyone outside the organization; nonmembers were thus equated with foreigners. Members of the Klan were by contrast “citizens,” and membership constituted “citizenship.”
This was a pyramid scheme. Before long members began to bump against the ceiling imbedded in all pyramid schemes—that eventually the most recent joiners could not recover their expenditures, let alone earn. Resentment grew as a result, but it did not reflect opposition to the system. For rank-and-file Kleagles, as for the Klan’s leaders, there was no conflict between the Klan’s mission and their profits; on the contrary, the monetary incentive may have increased their commitment to Klan principles.
The Klan also profited from sales of goods. Clarke established and owned a company that manufactured Klan costumes for $4 each, later only $2 each, and sold them for $6.50.5 Not coincidentally, the costumes were designed so that wives could not hand-sew them. The headgear and Klan insignia had to be just so, which made the members want the real, manufactured object. Klan leaders ran many side businesses as well—notably a recording company and a realty enterprise that bought lots in bulk and sold them singly. Klan-friendly merchants began marketing all sorts of other Klan-marked trinkets and memorabilia. A “Kluxer’s Knifty Knife,” a “real 100% knife for 100%% Americans,” could be bought for $1.25. A member could buy a brooch for his wife: a “zi
rcon-studded Fiery Cross.” A larger cross that a man could wear on the watch chain he displayed across his chest cost $2.90. For only $5 you could get, allegedly, a 14-karat gold-filled ring with a 10-karat solid gold Klan emblem on a fiery red stone. Also for sale were phonograph records and player-piano rolls with Klan songs. (See figure 19.) Advertisements for this merchandise appeared in newspapers across the country and in flyers at large Klonvocations.6 The Klan’s for-profit life insurance plan claimed $3 million worth of policies in 1924—a dubious figure. It claimed to provide burial insurance as well, but this service never actually materialized.7
Accepting these numbers as approximately accurate, joining the Klan cost $23.30 for the first year (worth $318 in 2016)—a $10 initiation fee, $6.50 for the costume, annual dues of about $5, and a yearly $1.80 tax to the national headquarters. In addition members were dunned for insurance, contributions to political candidates, gifts to churches, and special projects, such as an $80,000 auditorium with four thousand seats in Fort Worth. According to one recent estimate, the Klan took in at least $25 million ($342 million in 2016 dollars) annually.8 This is likely an exaggeration, since as much as one-third of the members were in arrears, never paid, or soon quit paying dues.9 Still, even allowing for exaggeration, Klan profiteers did very well by soaking their members.
In 1922 Hiram Evans abolished the commission arrangement, although not all local Klans complied. Another road to profit remained, however—becoming a Klokard, lecturer, or Kleagle, recruiter. These positions brought in wages or fees per lecture or per recruit, often $25 a lecture ($342 in 2016). Accomplished speakers such as ministers could do well for themselves and their congregations, and many nonministers could draw big groups with sensationalist rhetoric.
Even enthusiasts began to notice that bringing in new members seemed to be the only Klan activity.10 One reason was high turnover. A study of the Indiana Klan showed that few other than leaders stayed for long. In one town, of 1,067 listed as Klavern members, 61.5 percent had been suspended at least once for not paying dues.11 Whether because of the relatively high costs, disillusionment with the profiteering, or the fact that the rituals lost their thrill, many rank-and-file members left. Moreover, since many joined due to social and economic pressure, or because they sought to be part of an in-group, they may have lacked a steadfast commitment to Klan principles. One Indiana man later recalled his thinking at the time: “Maybe you’d better belong to it, if you weren’t a Catholic or a Jew or a black man. Maybe you’d best get in there. It got pretty prestigious just in that respect.”12
Clarke and Tyler also employed a second strategy in growing the Klan: autonomy for the local Klaverns. This was shrewd. Decentralization attracted initiates by exploiting local grievances and/or by catering to local elites. A few symbolic operations were centralized: the Imperial Wizard and his Empress, who held their positions for life according to the Klan constitution, had absolute authority regarding rituals, codes, signs and countersigns, and robes and insignia, but not over local campaigns. A Klan Manual of Leadership insisted that “the first and most essential duty of every leader is to KNOW COMPLETELY the situation in which he is to act [and] what is wrong with the community. . . . The situation will be different in each.”13 Klaverns could focus on whatever enemy or alleged threat would work in their locality (for example, Catholics, sexual immorality, bootleggers). In some areas the Klan was, in the words of a contemporary, “a club thrust into the hand of the prohibition minority”;14 in others the Klan avoided the temperance issue. The Oak Creek, Illinois, Women’s Ku Klux Klan focused almost exclusively on temperance and soft-pedaled nativism; five years’ worth of meeting minutes revealed no reference to blacks or Jews (although its condemnations of films, dance halls, and other sinful entertainment represented lightly coded attacks on Jews.)15 In Evansville, Indiana, a Klan-controlled municipal government actually appointed African Americans to city offices—though only because they functioned, allegedly, as “puppets directed by the Klan.”16 In Southern California, the Klan cooperated with the Irish-dominated Catholic Church in its struggle for ascendancy over Mexican American Catholics. In Maine and Massachusetts, Klan groups admitted foreign-born Protestants (in order to bring them into alliance against Catholics), and in many locations the Klan established an auxiliary, the Royal Riders of the Red Robe, to bring in the “right” foreign-born members.17 The Klan was a chameleon, changing colors to blend into the environment.
Klan decentralization and finances combined to produce a somewhat feudal or tribal structure. In return for autonomous control over their fiefs, local leaders paid taxes, which we might call tribute, upward and recompensed themselves by taxing their vassals. So despite the formally autocratic power of the Imperial Wizard, officials beneath them could amass considerable financial and political power, which they could use to challenge the top leadership. Rivalry at the top then undermined Klan stability. Even when recruitment-by-commission was in theory abolished, rank-and-file resentment grew. Local Klansmen took offense at the lack of accountability regarding where their payments went.
These two organizational strategies—financial incentives and local autonomy—reinforced each other. Opportunities for earning meant that Klan leadership prioritized expanding the dues-paying membership. Accomplishing that meant allowing local Klaverns to set their own action agendas, which in turn made the Klan more attractive locally.
Another tactic, this one not entirely deliberate, helped build the Klan: like many other organizations, the Klan exaggerated its size, and doing so made it more desirable to potential recruits. Grand Dragon Stephenson claimed to have a quarter-million members in Indiana; a dubious boast because if true, it would have meant that members constituted more than 30 percent of the state’s white male population. In 1924 the Klan claimed 10,000 members in one Indiana county, but a membership list found later showed that those who paid up numbered about 3,000, and the largest Klan event there drew about 2,000. A Klan organ announced a parade of 50,000 when about 2,700 showed up.18 These exaggerations operated both as draws and as intimidation: people longed to be part of an ascendant movement and could be afraid not to be part of it, especially given its threatening rhetoric. Possibly more important than intimidation was the concern not to be left off of a bandwagon. The exaggerations were self-realizing. Creating the impression of huge size and unstoppable forward progress, the myth of the Klan as destiny contributed as much as any other tactic to the Ku Klux Klan’s great temporary success. French philosopher George Sorel, another notorious anti-Semite, theorized how myth, as opposed to reason—or fact, I might add—built social movements. The core of the Klan myth lay in the notion that it represented the defense and manifestation of America’s true character. Looking at the Klan’s recruitment success from this angle resolves any apparent contradiction between the principled and self-interested motives of joiners. Its appeal lay precisely in the joining of principle with promise of success.
FOLLOWING A DECISION TO JOIN the Ku Klux Klan, the recruit entered a world of arcane ritual—secret rites, oaths, code words, and props. All contributed to the power of the Klan myth. Participation in this insider world not only solidified commitment, not only created a titillating enjoyment perhaps analogous to today’s computer games, but also attracted newcomers who heard about Klan ritual. Contemporary observers saw that the aura of secrecy magnetized the Klan.19 In fact, it benefited from both secrecy and lack of secrecy: it could publish openly, parade its distinguished members openly, invite the public to its grand pageants, but simultaneously offer enough cryptic knowledge to make members feel like performers in clandestine drama. Its esoteric ritual might seem anti-modernist if we accept it at face value. It is also possible, however, that many Klanspeople adopted a playful, even kitsch attitude toward the occult rituals in which they indulged. They were performers in pageants, much like those who engage in historic reenactments today.
In these rituals, the Klan outdid all the other fraternal orders—though only in intensity
, since almost all the fraternals used elaborate rituals. Even Grange meetings, for example, involved “signs, passwords, regalia, and initiation ceremonies,” and its members “progressed through several ‘degrees,’ ” up to the seventh degree, which entitled members to participate in the “secret work” under the supervision of a “high priest.”20
Ritual began with the costume. While the first Klan’s robes served to hide members’ identities and to frighten those it tried to intimidate, they were also the costumes of a performance, enjoyable in itself, as Elaine Frantz Parsons has argued.21 Dressing up served the same functions for the second Klan, but in a more complex way. The costume heightened the intensity of ritual conducted, often, in the dark with faces unseen. It marked a privileged membership and an honorary brotherhood. Klan propaganda maintained that the costume not only symbolized purity but also abolished class and other invidious distinctions and thereby strengthened brotherhood. Some KKK practices make this claim seem suspect, however. Leaders often appeared in richly colored robes, for example; rules instructed that the office of Kligrapp, or administrative officer, “should be filled by a competent business executive,” and that every Klavern must have a minister as Kludd (chaplain), thus following the principle that “big” men must be selected to office.22
The required costume consisted of four pieces: First, a full-length white robe with a red, white, and black insignia over the left breast. The insignias varied slightly, but all contained a cross (typically a Prussian cross) within a circle—sometimes called a crosswheel—with a diamond in the center, which occasionally contained a red mark in the shape of a drop of water (the blood-drop). Second, a sash tied around the waist. Third, a hat, called a helmet, lined with a stiffened material to create and stabilize its cone shape, with a regulation red tassel hanging from the top. And fourth, two “aprons” attached to the helmet. The back apron hung from the bottom of the hat to the shoulders; the front apron was attached to the front of the helmet with eye holes cut out. Child-size robes were also available, and one might imagine children’s pride in wearing them.
