by Linda Gordon
Far western states saw many Klan assaults, notably against Mexican Americans and Asian Americans. In California’s great agricultural valleys, the Klan murdered Mexican American farmworkers and tried to force the “wetbacks” out.47 In 1927 and 1928 vigilantes forced all the Filipino farmworkers out of Wapato, Topenish, and Wenatchee in Washington state; this kind of violence continued into the 1930s, when they bombed and set fire to several Japanese-owned farms.48
Because vigilantes needed anonymity, they sometimes formed subgroups with different names. In Oklahoma, for example, the Klan created whipping squads, sometimes called Vigilance Committees or Citizens Committees. One such group was named, paradoxically, the Sanhedrin, after the ancient Jewish council of judges; its charge was “to take care of these little matters in our neighborhood.”49
The KKK typically justified vigilantism by charging that the police were not doing their jobs. This was a tricky claim to make, because it might antagonize police officers, so Imperial Wizard Evans promoted another strategy: not ending vigilantism but legalizing it through official cooperation with lawmen. It was already the case that law officers were often Klan members. Uniformed law officers, who frequently paraded with Klansmen, often allowed Klan vigilantes to serve as formal or informal deputies. The Portland, Oregon, Klan announced that 150 members of the police department had become “citizens” of the KKK. Portland’s mayor formed a hundred-man vigilante force to augment the police force: they received guns, badges, and the power to make arrests, but their names would remain secret—while the Klan would “advise him” in selecting them.50 In Anaheim, California, a city government controlled by the Klan allowed on-duty police officers to patrol in Klan robes and symbols.51 In Dayton, the Catholic university president did not bother to call the police because he knew they would not act against the Klan.52 In Madison, Wisconsin, a former police chief recalled that “pretty near all” of his men were members. They joined other Klansmen to form the Klavaliers, which they described as a “military unit trained to fight crime, fires, floods, riots, and strikes”; its members, deputized under the police department, helped “clean up” the neighborhood known as Little Italy, arresting its “most noted characters.” (The local WCTU expressed its approval.)53
True, sometimes the Klan did not initiate but only revivified vigilantism, or responded to previous violence with more violence. A Klan organizer came to Duluth, Minnesota, sensing fertile ground after three black circus workers were lynched by a white mob who believed, falsely, that the workers had raped a white girl.54 Indiana had a particularly long tradition of legal vigilantism: an 1865 law allowed residents to form armed associations to “defend their communities.” In the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, these white groups had driven out the entire black population in one county; ambushed thirty African American miners; formed “Night Riders” who destroyed the barns, farm equipment, and crops of their enemies; and organized the infamous “White Caps” who roamed the state forcing “undesirables” off their farms.55 In the 1920s, Klansmen resurrected the nineteenth-century Horse Thief Detective Association, which claimed forty thousand members in 1924; between 1922 and 1926, the peak of Klan influence, HTDA “constables” were appointed by the county commissioners. Ohio Klansmen also adopted Horse Thief Detective Association as their vigilante moniker; members made “contributions” to state policemen in return for deputy status.56 In Oakland even federal agents incorporated a group of Klansmen into raids on Prohibition violators.57 In short, Klan vigilante actions were often legal.
Targets of Klan aggression were not always passive or nonviolent themselves, and anti-Klan forces sometimes initiated violence, directed at cross-burnings and Klan parades. In 1923 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a crowd tore the robes off some parading Klansmen; in Perth Amboy a mob of six thousand allegedly broke up a Klan meeting; in New Castle, Delaware, a thousand men forced the Klan off a field and destroyed the cross.58 In response to the cross-burnings against the University of Dayton, its football coach recalled, “[I] called out all my big football players” and encouraged them to “take off after them” and “tear their shirts off” or “anything else.”59 In South Bend, Indiana, a “raucous band” of Notre Dame University students forced a Klan march to retreat, then threw potatoes through the windows of Klan headquarters.60 In Maine, lumbermen responded to Klan threats by marching into Greenville to demonstrate their refusal to knuckle under.61 In Auburn, Oregon, a fistfight during a Klan meeting—no doubt provoked by anti-Klan disrupters—required police to stop it.62
Anti-Klan violence sometimes became lethal, especially when its perpetrators were industrial workers. In Lilly, Pennsylvania, members of the United Mine Workers turned a fire hose on Klansmen, who responded by killing two union men.63 A major battle took place in Carnegie, Pennsylvania: located near Pittsburgh, which had one of the largest Klans in the state, it was also home to miners of whom about half were Catholic or Orthodox. When twenty-five thousand Klansmen paraded in Carnegie in August 1923, no doubt choosing the location precisely because of its large population of non-Protestants, a roadblock stopped them as they crossed a small bridge. Some two thousand protestors had gathered, and they ripped the electric KKK cross off the leading car, threw bricks and rocks, and shouted, “Get a rope, lynch them, kill them,” according to the Klan newspaper. Then “from an alley near a Catholic church . . . Paddy McDermott, an Irish undertaker, . . . emptied the magazine of an automatic pistol into the ranks of the white clad Klansmen,” killing Klansman Thomas R. Abbott. (Mrs. Abbott declared, said the Klan newspaper, that her husband’s life “had been given to a noble and just cause.”) Carnegie and Pittsburgh police arrested McDermott with a few other armed protestors, while the Klansmen “busied themselves in an attempt to find his murderer.”64 Thus in some cases the Klan could honestly complain of victimization.
Klan vigilantism sometimes expressly targeted labor unions, especially in cases where workers were not “Nordic.” Klan leaders sometimes articulated a general antagonism toward industrial workers but at other times kept silent, perhaps because industrial workers put up the greatest resistance. In the Youngstown, Ohio, area, where the industrial workers were also largely immigrants and non-Protestants, a virtual army of working-class people successfully drove out the Klan.65 The KKK particularly went after the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka Wobblies), which had considerable strength in the Pacific Northwest and in logging and agriculture in other parts of the country. But in these battles, the Klan often won. It helped suppress the Agricultural Workers Organization, a union of wheat harvesters in Nebraska and an auxiliary of the IWW. It drove Wobblies out of several locations in the Pacific Northwest.66 In Maine in 1923 the Klan threatened to force out IWW loggers, who were mainly Catholic Franco-Canadian Americans. Maine Klansmen were joined by expat Canadian Klansmen in attacking the labor unions through threats, cross-burnings, and bombings. Massing at a boardinghouse where many were staying, Klansmen threatened “to remove the Wobblies by force if they would not leave town voluntarily.” When the workers would not budge, the Klan threw its support behind the lumber companies, who in turn persuaded the state to file conspiracy charges against the workers. The combination of criminal indictments, corporate blacklists, and community hostility brought victory to the Klan and helped set back unionization efforts for decades.67 This episode was one of several that started with vigilantism and then brought in the law to achieve Klan goals.
Still, it was not uncommon for union workers to support the Klan, especially when they feared competition from immigrants. In southern Indiana, after the big 1919 coal strike, mine owners began importing eastern European immigrant workers. Some eight hundred native-born miners rallied to demand that the “undesirables” be driven out. The United Mine Workers union tried to maintain its nondiscriminatory policy, even threatening to expel any member who joined the Klan. But when a mine boss hired some Slavic workers, UMW members chased them out of town. As the foreign workers became more numero
us, the Klan conducted a vitriolic propaganda campaign against them, on the grounds that they struck at “the heart-blood of the nation.” On June 11, 1923, some thousand men, faces concealed, attacked immigrant workers, beating some of them badly, and in forty-eight hours had evicted 150 miners. As a result, native-born miners deserted the previously strong United Mine Workers and the Socialist Party—creating thereby a major shift in local politics.68
Very occasionally Klansmen supported labor struggles; these inconsistencies reflected both their ambivalent relation to corporate power and varying local sympathies. Klan rhetoric favored small over large business, and members at times backed union workers where they were “right,” that is, native-born white Protestants. The powerful Oregon Klan supported the national railway workers strike of 1922, and in return many strikers joined the Klan. The La Grande, Oregon, Klavern voted to investigate four Klan strikebreakers, but its motive was also racist: the Klansmen were allegedly “teaching Negroes and Japs to take places of strikers.”69 When a Birmingham, Alabama, strike was broken by the owners, workers made the Klan their “underground union.”70 The Communist Party’s southern newspaper, the Southern Worker, was printed by a shop co-owned by a Georgia Kleagle.71 But the Klan more often allied with corporate owners, especially if workers were not “right,” which was increasingly the case. In California, the Klan aligned itself with the big growers against the farmworkers, not only those of Mexican descent but also the perfectly “Nordic” “Okies.”72 In the 1930s the Klan openly aided the thugs used by the Associated Farmers and the California Citizens Association against farmworker unionization.
Vigilantism strengthened the Klan, even though it sometimes created enemies. Vigilante attacks not only cemented Klan solidarity but also strengthened Klansmen’s pride. This pride came not only from good feelings about manliness but also from the conviction that they were performing responsibilities of democratic citizenship.73 If democracy meant that the demos, the “people,” should exercise majority rule through voting, why should not that principle apply also to meting out justice? This somewhat populist understanding should not be dismissed lightly. Critics of vigilantism need to bear in mind that its perpetrators believed themselves righteous and, in the Klan’s case, obedient to the laws of God and country—to the true America, that is. Vigilantes moved from one manly position of protector—of women and the family—to another: protecting the American people. And while vigilantism was a manly art, we can be sure that many Klans-women cheered it.74 When Klanspeople believed social order to be threatened by untrustworthy populations, then true Americans had to act in defense to reinstate control.
Women’s KKK funeral, Muncie, Indiana, 1923. (Ball State University Archives & Special Collections)
Chapter 7
KKK FEMINISM
ALTHOUGH KLANSMEN OUTNUMBERED KLANSWOMEN by six to one, at least half a million women (some claimed as many as three million) joined the movement, and that doesn’t count the many who participated in its public events and supported its ideas. In fact, women clamored to participate from the moment the second Klan reappeared. They contributed a new argument for the cause: that women’s emergence as active citizens would help purify the country. That claim may well have emerged only after the woman suffrage amendment was ratified, in 1920; before that, many Klanspeople of both sexes probably had doubts about the righteousness of women entering politics. Nevertheless, the claim that women might bring “family values” back into the nation’s governance—a claim made at the time in movements of all political hues—created a contradiction within conservative movements: despite an ideological commitment to Victorian gender norms, including women’s domesticity, many conservative women enjoyed participating in politics. In fact, some Klanswomen interpreted political activism as a female responsibility. Then, once active, they often came to resent men’s attempts to control them and even challenged men’s power. Thus we meet a phenomenon that many progressive feminists found and still find anomalous—the existence not only of conservative feminism but even of bigoted feminism.1 Readers who have not already done so must rid themselves of notions that women’s politics are always kinder, gentler, and less racist than men’s.
Women who became active in the Klan were continuing a populist tradition of the 1880s and 1890s. Even without voting rights, women had constituted a significant force in the Farmers Alliance and then in the Populist and Socialist Parties. Women activists spoke at meetings, edited newspapers, lobbied legislatures, published novels, wrote political tracts, ran for local offices, and got elected to leadership in the Alliance—in short, they engaged in every form of political activity allowed them. When the Populist Party emerged, women were increasingly shut out of official roles, not only because of their disenfranchisement but also because increasing Populist power made male leaders less open to sharing influence. (It was often the case that women had more space to lead in social movements than in formal political parties.) There were exceptions, though. Kansas feminist Mary Elizabeth Lease, to cite just one example, was a major Populist traveling speaker, in demand throughout the Midwest. She gave the opening address at the 1892 Kansas Populist convention and was an at-large delegate at the national convention. Many Populist women were also stalwarts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. They brought these experiences into the Ku Klux Klan. They did not assume that politics was a male activity.
Moreover, women had won at least partial suffrage in 27 states and the Alaska Territory prior to the national amendment, and these states included those where the Klan was strong, such as Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oregon. But the 1920s political world into which Klanswomen entered was rapidly changing. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the most visible women’s rights organizations waned in strength. As a result, the narrative of women’s struggle for equality has often characterized the 1920s as a period of inaction or even retreat.2 But that conclusion, while accurate with respect to electoral engagement, does not hold up with respect to social and cultural developments. For example, rates of women’s college education mushroomed. Between 1910 and 1920 the number of women in college doubled, reaching almost three hundred thousand, or nearly half of all students in higher education. That increase continued during the Klan’s heyday, growing by 84 percent over the 1920s. Similarly with women’s employment: by 1920 women constituted 21 percent of all those employed outside their homes, a rate much higher among poor women and women of color, of course. Both changes—education and employment—drew more women into the public sphere; even those with husbands who could support a whole family were spending more time outside their homes. Progressive Era women activists had obtained a base for promoting women’s and children’s health and welfare in the US Children’s Bureau. At the same time, divorce rates were growing, which meant that more women were not only leaving husbands but also fighting for child custody, always the right about which women cared most.
Meanwhile, commercial culture was responding to these changes. The stereotype of the new culture has been the flapper, but this was a small group compared to the millions captivated by new forms of leisure and social adventure, many of them entirely secular. Prohibition was flouted openly in big cities and discreetly in smaller locations. Advertising morphed from information about where particular commodities could be purchased to imagery that persuaded people that they needed new products. Nightclubs, records, and above all radios brought jazz out of Harlem into white communities. Radio broadcasting began in 1920; by 1930, 60 percent of Americans owned a radio, and as a result radically expanded the acquaintance of small-town and urban Americans with big-city culture. By 1927 fifty million Ford cars were on the roads—many with women drivers—offering greater mobility and privacy. Well into the 1960s, most young people had their first sexual experience in a car. For the young and unmarried, unchaperoned commercial leisure such as dance halls, soda fountains, and the movies—where couples could sit in the dark!—became a magnetic attraction. Images of beauty changed rapidly: w
omen cut off and “bobbed” their hair (using, significantly, a male name to describe the new haircuts), and wore makeup, shorter skirts and brighter colors.
Together these cultural developments transformed social life and, of course, created a backlash. Conservatives railed at the decline of morals, and by this they meant mainly women’s morals. Walter Lippmann’s phrase “the acids of modernity” captured Klannish fears that the very ground of Protestant morality was being eroded.3 The Klan blamed Jews and, to a lesser extent, Catholics for subverting what would later be called the gender order; nevertheless, Klanspeople fretted about immodesty precisely because this freer social and sexual culture appealed to Protestants as well. Because anxiety about immodesty focused on women, Klanswomen were both repelled and enticed by these developments, and this shows in the contradictions within their program and activism.
Klanswomen were often wives of Klansmen, but many joined on their own, and others led their husbands into the organization. In fact, some husbands resented their wives’ Klan activities and absences from home, and some opponents taunted Klansmen with the charge that they were not man enough to keep their wives at home.4 It seems likely, though, that Klanswomen often spent more hours on Klan work than did rank-and-file Klansmen because they had more disposable time.
