by Linda Gordon
The culminating events at these mass occasions usually featured choreography for hundreds or even thousands of participants. (See figures 11 and 12.) In creating these compositions, the Klan was participating in a form of political entertainment that became popular in both the USSR and Nazi Germany in the 1930s: mass calisthenics and military parades. This kind of spatial sculpture, patterns created with organized, unison-moving bodies, became an international modernist political style. Although the United States did not showcase many military parades at the time, choreography that used human bodies to create moving shapes could be seen in the Busby Berkeley films. Attentive Klanspeople might have condemned Busby Berkeley dance numbers for the immodest, provocative dress of the female performers but might also approve of the choreographic collectivism, which they understood to signal power in unity.
The Klan’s outdoor spectacles used lines of people to articulate the space in large fields and, frequently, to define a “stage.” Sometimes Klan VIPs would enter in slowly driven open cars, followed by Klansmen on horses. Rank-and-file Klansmen and Klanswomen would enter walking in slow, coordinated processions, all in white robes, each carrying a torch. They moved in unison so as to form shapes. The shapes delineated insiders and outsiders, but not necessarily in simple binaries. There might be outer rings or squares of Klansmen, within which were smaller shapes within which were groups of officers and podiums for speakers. If the event was a naturalization, the initiates were lined up so as to enter dramatically; in one case they formed a cross in the center of a circle of Klansmen; in others they knelt in rows. Klanswomen might form their own shapes inside or outside the Klansmen’s perimeter. Farther outside, Klan family members clustered; “aliens” tended to stay back. For particularly dramatic effect, the Klansmen sometimes used their cars to define and sculpt the space. At a 1924 evening rally in Holton, Michigan, they arranged seven hundred cars (quite possibly an exaggerated number) in a circle with their lights focused on the center, producing what one journalist called a “picturesque diffusion of rays.”12 The lights distinguished inner from outer space, those illuminated from those in darkness.
Not all was frolicsome. Ministers almost always spoke and, like official Klan speakers, outlined the threats facing Americans. Frequently introduced by city or state officials, they emphasized local concerns—law and order, women’s immodesty, high taxes, even “the insidious trend” of Protestant church involvement in the peace movement.13 Elected officials often spoke at Klan happenings, a practice with multiple implications: they were lending legitimacy to the Klan, which in turn provided an audience for electioneering and communicated Klan approval of these politicians.
There were always evening cross-burnings, held when possible on hilltops to maximize their visibility. In an Oklahoma event, the fiery crosses were accompanied by “flares of natural gas” and a “powerful searchlight erected on a high tower.”14 These were not necessarily direct threats, as threats are usually understood today. The first Klan and the third Klan (that which re-formed to combat the civil rights movement) typically burned crosses on or next to the homes or gathering places of African Americans. These burnings delivered messages to those who violated the economic or political racial order, or even contemplated doing so, warnings of worse to come. In these large Klonvocations, the cross-burnings were instead awesome symbols—of the Klan as the army of the cross, and of an awakened and mobilized Protestantism. Many spectators saw them only as Fourth of July fireworks. They elicited the thrills and the magnetic attraction of fire. Klaverns competed to produce the largest crosses, some reported as fifty feet high.15 If live fire was used they were wooden, wrapped with burlap, soaked with kerosene; but often they were electrical, studded with yellow or red light bulbs.
Still, even if the burning crosses did not target particular individuals or institutions, they functioned as generalized threats. They worked to create anxiety that not joining the Klan could leave one in a vulnerable position—deprived at least, discriminated against at worst—and in this way they encouraged membership. For those unable to join the Klan, members of despised groups, the burnings must have produced discomfort at a minimum. They reinforced, simultaneously, unbelonging and vulnerability.
ORGANIZED CLUBS AND ACTIVITIES for families added to the benefits of belonging. They fostered a community spirit that might otherwise have been inhibited by a closed fraternity. In fact, the Klan always presented both open and hidden faces: fetishizing secrecy in the Klaverns, yet organizing a range of participatory and wholesome projects indistinguishable from those run by a YMCA, a labor union, or even—on a smaller scale—the Communist and Socialist Parties. Klanspeople sponsored thousands of small clubs and outings, of astonishing variety: singing groups, bands, Bible study groups, gun and rifle clubs, fishing and boating expeditions, dances, camps for children, musical performances, drama clubs, and the ubiquitous tag sales. Many were sex-segregated, as was customary, although Klans-women did most of the work involved in activities not specifically limited to adult men. A Klan family could spend all its leisure time immersed in Klan community and culture.
Klansmen organized sports teams wherever their communities were large enough. Teams were integrated into school and college competitions, as for example when the Patchogue, Long Island, New York high school basketball team celebrated its victory over the Ku Klux Klan basketball team from East Moriches. That sport, however, was rare among Klansfolk; baseball dominated. It was the American game and, of course, the white, Protestant, rural game, one that required access to large open spaces. Baseball represented the small-town, homogeneous society that the Klan idealized. Teams involved Klanspeople in competitions with “aliens,” which stimulated publicity, which in turn drew in new Klan members.
Klansmen played baseball in three contexts. In large gatherings, Klansmen and boys mostly played against each other, nonmembers joining in occasionally. They played propaganda games against “aliens,” and these were purposely designed to attract audiences and publicity; for instance, the Youngstown Klan team challenged the Knights of Columbus, and the Klan played Wichita’s “crack colored team,” the Monrovians (the Klan lost). Finally, in areas of Klan strength, it operated sandlot teams that played in recognized leagues, sometimes semipro teams. Indiana, a Klan stronghold, fielded a dozen such teams. These leagues might play in stadiums, and the newspaper coverage might list all team members—no secrecy here. In Los Angeles the Klan team played a three-game charity series against a B’nai B’rith team, and in 1927 in Washington, DC, the Klan played against the Hebrew All-Stars (whose team included Abe Povich, brother of sports journalist Shirley Povich). Newspaper coverage typically treated the Klan teams like all others, with no particular attention to Klan politics.16
Thus baseball functioned to normalize the Klan, so that it could appear as a benign club, akin to the Elks or, again, a labor union. More, the KKK’s love of baseball became another route to community clout—even audacity. A Cincinnati minister, writing in 1924 “at the request of Imperial Officials” of the KKK to August Hermann, commissioner of what would become Major League Baseball, asked him to designate July 20, when the Cincinnati Reds would play the New York Giants, as Klan Day. To support the request, minister Orval W. Baylor pointed out that the KKK had a hundred thousand members in the Cincinnati area.17
Normalization within communities sometimes resulted from stealth. Recruiters frequently invited men into a new fraternal group, without naming it. In Windsor, Vermont, for example, at a public meeting, the speaker first spoke in favor of “100% Americanism” and traditional morality, but then asked all who were not white Protestants to leave and only afterward began to condemn Negroes, Jews, and Catholics. The Klan began its Madison, Wisconsin, career in that way: in 1921 the Kleagle advertised in Madison’s main newspaper, “Wanted: Fraternal Organizers, men of ability between the ages of 25 and 40. Must be 100% Americans. Masons Preferred.” By 1922 the Madison Klan was calling itself “the Loyal Businessmen’s Society.” On the
University of Wisconsin campus it established a fraternity called Kappa Beta Lambda, its initials standing for “Klansmen Be Loyal”; its members hoped to “make the university a center for the Promotion of Christianity, Americanism, and Klansmenship.”18 But stealth was only a veneer, or was soon dropped, because recruiters soon established an official campus Ku Klux Klan society. This was a supra-fraternity, allegedly including only the “most accomplished” members of the other fraternities. The 1921 Badger yearbook featured a group portrait of twenty-nine members of the Ku Klux Klan “Honorary Junior Society.”19
Klanspeople also celebrated community rites—christenings, weddings, and funerals—in Klan style. (See figure 21.) Sometimes nonmembers attended these ceremonies, and in those cases they again served to legitimate the Klan and present it as nonthreatening. Klan ministers, known as Kludds, conducted the ceremonies, surrounded by Klan officers and sacred symbols, in turn surrounded by Klanspeople in full regalia. Klan weddings might bring in attendees who were complete strangers to the marrying couples. Brides and grooms eagerly scheduled their rites through Klan auspices, because these events were more likely than private weddings to capture press coverage that showed off the bride’s beauty and her gown to a large audience, and surrounded the couple with lavish decorations, pageantry—and gifts. Attendees were encouraged to understand these rites, and the gifts they brought, as fostering a new Klan family. Such a wedding magnified the blessedness of the bonds being promised, because bride and groom were marrying not only each other but also the Klan and through it Americanism, Protestant strength, the purity of married love, and the larger family of Klansfolk.
Ceremonies centered around babies were smaller, typically conducted by Klanswomen in their own meetings. In an Oak Park, Illinois, chapter, newborns were “dedicated to Klancraft” and received a silver baby spoon engraved with Klan insignia.20 Some baptisms occasioned large public events. In Saginaw, Michigan, in July 1924, a “mammoth” picnic featured simultaneously twelve christenings and one wedding, accompanied by a band concert. Occasionally Klan ministers baptized adults who had experienced rebirth into the Klan.21 The Women’s Klan also sponsored “beautiful baby” competitions.
Klan funerals were more prescribed and more public than christenings or weddings. The Klan published a handbook on funerals, including a script and, as usual, instructions for the spatial choreography. The handbook prescribed specific hymns and texts for sermons or other testimonies. It detailed the required order of the funeral march, where each officer should be placed, and location of the burning cross(es). (Clearly the ministers who officiated had little autonomy.) The flower arrangements had to show the letters KKK, formed either with ribbons or with the flowers themselves. Messages to the deceased were to be placed in sealed envelopes and placed on the coffin. Funerals could be large spectacles, attended by strangers, and they often included parades. Businesses might be closed, street traffic diverted.22 The language merged Christian with Klan theology: invitations announced that the member had passed “to the Klonklave on high”; once there, the departed ones had the pleasure of residing in a paradise populated only by white Protestants. Funerals sometimes “outed” people not previously known as Klan members and thereby increased, posthumously, the prestige of the deceased.23
THE KLAN’S RELIGIOUS RITES might suggest that it functioned as a Protestant denomination. Its scripts resembled Bible readings and prayer, and its meetings resembled church services. Many religions practice prescribed spatial design, in which movement patterns, along with props, take on symbolic meaning. But the Klan was not a denomination; it sought to incorporate existing Protestant churches, not replace them, and to put evangelism at their core. It was in many ways a pan-Protestant evangelical movement, that is, an attempt to unite evangelical Protestants across their separate denominations.24 Klan bishop Alma White, of the Pillar of Fire denomination, described the rise of the second Klan as a second, twentieth-century Reformation. “The heroes of a new Reformation are here, robed in white, emblematic of the purity of the principles for which they stand . . . which our enemies are doing all in their power to destroy.”25 A Klan minister in Maine described it as “the rising of a Protestant people to take back what is their own.”26
Evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal churches constituted the Klan’s recruiting ground.27 Many associate the Klan with fundamentalism,28 but this was not universally accurate. Some of the hardest-line fundamentalists, such as the Church of the Nazarene and the Church of Christ, ignored the Klan, because their theology required that the faithful should not be involved in political or nonchurch organizations.29 In some places the Klan also reached out to nonevangelical, mainline Protestant churchgoers, and it had some success with German American Lutherans.30 In general, however, the mainline denominations, such as Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and United Church of Christ, did not respond enthusiastically. In fact, Klan rhetoric sometimes denounced these liberal beliefs directly, charging that “modernist” theology was nearly as wrong as Catholicism.31
When recruiters came into a new region, they went first to Masons but next to ministers, promising to help them increase church attendance. An estimated forty thousand ministers joined, their congregations serving as “Klan sanctuaries and recruiting camps.” Ministers frequently identified themselves as Klansmen during services. Of the Klan’s thirty-nine Klokards, or traveling lecturers, twenty-six were ministers.32 The Southern California Ku Klux Klan, for example, was organized by the Rev. Leon Myers. He arrived there in 1922 to take over the largest church in town and organized a “Men’s Bible Class” that became Anaheim’s Klavern. (The Ku Klux Klan touted Anaheim as the “model Klan city,” aka “Klanaheim.”)33 Ministers who risked opposing the Klan could become vulnerable to retaliation. Klan officials sometimes asked friendly police to “investigate” allegations, in one case that the Rev. X’s “sister married a reformed Jew . . . who was associated . . . in the work at this Negro school,” or that X was head of an “Inter-Racial Committee, which is branch of Negro association in New York.”34 Shades of McCarthyism.
Once they assembled a small core group, Klansmen liked to “invade” a church service, bearing a cash contribution and praise for the piety of the congregation. This tactic, usually prearranged with the minister, not only bought good will but also served to obviate fears that the Klan intended to compete with or poach members away from the church. In fact, there was reason for those fears, since for some members, Klan meetings replaced Sunday church services.35 For these “visitations,” another Klan word for the practice, they would wear their hoods, or at least their robes, and march ostentatiously down the center aisle, typically at an agreed-upon moment in the service, so as to make the whole congregation aware of the donation. Kathleen Blee described an “invasion” into a Lynbrook, New York, church where forty Klansmen presented a silk American flag and a purse of gold, after which the Rev. Paul Hill thanked the Klan for its generosity.36 (Klan donations to churches seem never to have been made privately.) Sums of $25 to $30 were common (the equivalent of $342 to $410 in 2016). When the minister approved, the Klansmen would lead hymn singing, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and prayer; they might even deliver a sermon of their own. One such included a Klan prayer:
Oh God, give us men. . . . Men whom the lust of office does not kill, Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy. Men who possess opinions and a will, Men who have honor, Men who will not lie, Men who serve not for selfish booty, but real Men, courageous, who flinch not at duty, Men of dependable character, Men of strong sterling worth. The wrongs will be redressed, and right will rule the earth. God give us men. Oh God, for Thy glory and our good we humbly ask these things in the name of Him who taught us to serve and sacrifice the right.37
Ministers, often paid very little, struggling to keep their churches in repair, rarely refused to cooperate; those who did might be denounced as modernists or worse.38 Ministerial support for the Klan led some opponents to charge that these preachers had be
en bought. Clearly ministers in some communities faced considerable pressure.
The Klan’s mobilization of evangelical ministers foreshadowed—and probably helped generate—the entry of Christian Right preachers into conservative politics fifty years later. One of the first great radio and tent evangelists, Robert Shuler, based in Los Angeles, frequently lauded the Klan—“as sweet music as my ears have ever heard,” he called Klan rhetoric—in his thunderous sermons denouncing threats to white supremacy. He called the KKK the only hope to save the city from liberals and black people and even joined Klansmen in vigilante actions against speakeasies.39 Anticipating more recent Christian Right leaders, Shuler also became a significant force in Los Angeles politics; in 1929 he chose the winning candidate for mayor.40 Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson similarly endorsed the Klan in her tirades against Japanese Americans—she labeled them Satan’s saboteurs—and depended on its support. In 1926, after she was charged with faking her own kidnapping, presumably to collect a ransom, rumors circulated that she had actually been off on a tryst with her lover. The Klan repaid her loyalty, defending her by smearing her prosecution as a Catholic plot, and she was acquitted.41
The Klan gave one of its largest donations—$1,568 (worth $22,500 in 2016)—to the Rev. Bob Jones, to help him establish his conservative whites-only Bob Jones University.42 (The university grew out of Jones’s distress after his friend William Jennings Bryan was so humiliated in the Scopes trial.) Jones campaigned for Alabama Grand Dragon Bibb Graves in his 1926 winning campaign for the governorship, and Graves delivered the keynote address at the groundbreaking that same year.43 The school grew considerably during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, when pro-segregation White Citizens Council members sought to avoid integrated education. It would not enroll African Americans until 1971, and then only if they were married and would therefore not live in dorms, even as it tightened its rules against interracial dating. Noted Christian Right evangelists and politicians, including Billy Graham, Billy Kim, Tim LaHaye, Terry Haskins, and Asa Hutchinson, have been among its students.
