The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  A writer for the New Republic wrote in 1927 that a politician who went along was promised “sure election if he lined up and took orders.” If you wanted anything done in Indiana, “you went to Stephenson [Grand Dragon of Indiana] first, and afterward or not at all to those who had official power to grant it.” Stephenson boasted, “I am the law.” He planned to run for president in 1928.24 This kind of power led one legal historian to argue that the Klan constituted a “parallel government,”25 but this is misleading, because it worked within existing governmental lines: unlike classic “dual power” situations, where a nonstate organization such as a labor union gains a legitimacy equivalent to that of the state, the Klan actually took over state and municipal governments. It did this entirely legally, through the ballot. Its members not only ran candidates but also got out the vote. “There was not a Catholic elected,” a victorious Klan candidate for a judgeship gloated.26

  Most of these voters either respected or feared antagonizing the Klan. Many others, no doubt, simply had no objection to Klan power.

  IN THE KLAN’S POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS, its rank-and-file members were required only to vote right. But it also conducted economic campaigns that called on members to shop right, by refusing to patronize “alien” businesses.27 Most of us would call these campaigns boycotts. The Klan, however, denied that it was boycotting, apparently considering the term pejorative: “The Klansmen do not boycott, as a matter of principle, but they are concentrating patronage with their friends.”28 Local chapters, such as that in the small town of Noblesville, Indiana, chose to list the “right” enterprises rather than the targets of their boycotts.29 At least one Klavern leader read aloud an updated list of “right” and “alien” stores at every meeting.30 Given the patriotic status of the colonists’ Tea Party boycott, this fear of the term is surprising, but it may be that 1920s Klansmen associated it with labor unions. Leery for whatever reason about using the term “boycott,” Klavern leaders instructed members to recommend Klan businesses to the general public but not to explain the bases for their recommendations.31 In a secondary economic tactic, the Klan attempted to remove “aliens” from jobs, especially professional and government jobs, wherever it had influence over employers.32 Often a direct demand was unnecessary; a straightforward question to an employer, such as “Where does Mr. Smith go to church?,” would deliver the message.

  Two motives underlay these economic strategies: disadvantaging Klan enemies—people of color, Catholics, Jews, and those of Orthodox faith—and securing customers and jobs for its members. The Klan had long functioned like a Rotary Club, as a site of networking and mutual aid among businesspeople, but also as a site of tips about jobs. Labeling their economic warfare program “vocational Klanishness,” Klan leaders named it one of the four duties of members. This duty called for “constant and earnest exercise . . . in the realm of one’s business or professional life,” and it was expounded at greater length and with greater emphasis than were the other three duties.33

  The national Klan set up an “intelligence bureau,” under the personal authority of Evans, to gather and report information on boycott targets.34 It announced a plan to publish a directory of Klan businesses, to be printed by the TWK (Klanspeak for Trade with Klansmen) Publishing Company in Washington. Each copy was to come with a TWK placard to be placed in a window and thereby identify the store.35 This national directory never materialized; only a few local and state Klans actually managed to produce one, including one in Oregon. Word of mouth seems to have been the most common way to identify businesses to avoid, although many could be identified as Catholic or, especially, Jewish by their names.

  “Right” shops identified themselves through a variety of signals: displaying American flags in designated spots or posting signs with patriotic slogans such as “100% American,” just “100%,” or “TWK.” Klanspeople pressured businesses to advertise in Klan papers. Many businesses complied, thereby announcing that one’s business was “right”: for example, “Liberty Bell Coffee is a 100% American brew.”36 Thirteen of the thirty-nine pages in a program booklet produced for a July 4 Klonvocation in Elmira, New York, were devoted to small-business advertisements.37 Many stores announced their Klannishness by changing the spelling of their names: Kountry Kitchen, Kwik Kar Wash, etc. Smaller locations often lacked enough “Gentile” stores, so Klan publications advertised to attract them. Lawton, Oklahoma, for example, appealed for a “right” clothing store and bookstore; Fredericksburg, Missouri, for a “cleaning and pressing establishment.”38

  Boycotting also served to recruit new members, because a merchant could not display that he was “right” without Klan approval. An Oregon Klavern created a “solicitation committee” with a list of 125 local businessmen “eligible” to join. When it urged members to patronize a barber who was a member, a second barber asked to join immediately afterward.39 “Right” storeowners in turn coerced their employees to join. Many of these entrepreneurs were not so much ardent Klan supporters but rather people under pressure, or just playing it safe. Many non-Klan members honored these boycotts, whether from agreement or anxiety about retribution. This was one of many ways in which Klan strength rested on the passive acquiescence of nonmembers.

  Boycotters occasionally threatened stores that did not comply. Some left “calling cards” at “alien” shops, in the form of dead animals. The owners of one dry goods store were invited to join the Klan on the condition that they fire their one black employee.40 When the head of the Fuller Brush Company denounced the KKK, a Klan boycott forced him to recant a month later.41

  Klanswomen were the foot soldiers of the boycott campaigns. WKKK leader Daisy Barr emphasized repeatedly that her members should shop only at “right” stores. Because this form of activism appeared to many women as housewifery and neighborliness, akin to telling a friend about a sale, many of those who boycotted did not recognize it as political activism. Kathleen Blee remarked that “no one I interviewed saw the economic power of the Klan as a political act. None saw it as an act of violence.”42

  The Indiana WKKK, possibly the country’s strongest, set up an ambitious boycott machine. It selected point people in each county who then organized groups beneath them, forming a ladder that pushed information rapidly through the state. Republican Committeewoman Vivian Wheatcraft of the WKKK labeled these groups “poison squads of whispering women” because of their ability to spread negative opinions about “alien” businesspeople and “mischievous” stories about Klan enemies. She bragged that her “skirted lieutenants” formed a network through which she could communicate any “gossip” beneficial to the Klan—don’t shop here, do shop there—throughout the state within twelve hours.43 These networks also functioned to bring women together, thereby extending intra-Klan connections and building organizational loyalty. “Poison squads” soon appeared in other states as well.44

  In locations where small enterprises dominated, the boycotts succeeded in driving some—there is no way to estimate how many—out of business. No doubt greater harm occurred in smaller towns, where shopping habits were more visible and community pressure greater. The most common and effective campaigns focused on Jewish-owned establishments, in keeping with one of the Klan’s key premises about Jews, that they cheated their customers. Like much of the Klan’s racial ideology, this anti-Semitic slur was taken on faith among many non-Klan Christians.

  Former Klanswomen interviewed by Kathleen Blee told of Jewish professionals and merchants, people who had experienced cordial relations with their community for decades, who lost businesses, went into bankruptcy, and fled.45 As one woman told her, “The one Jew . . . he became part of the community. He went to church dinners and everything. . . . [But then] people didn’t go to his store.” Simon Rosenthal of Tipton, Indiana, a former fire chief who had personally raised the funds to build a city park, had to close his clothing store. An organization to defend Greek Americans, the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), arose in 1922 in
response to Klan campaigns against Greek-owned enterprises, notably confectioneries and restaurants. It reported that Greek-owned stores that had once taken in $500–$1,000 a day were earning as little as $25 after the boycott began.46 One Klavern boycotted a Catholic-owned grocery even though both its men’s and women’s Klan meetings were held in a room above the store.47 Anti-Klan newspapers were particularly vulnerable because the Klan could force advertisers to withdraw; the Portland Telegram was forced out of business due to the Klan-spread “news” that it had been purchased by the archbishop.48

  It was much harder, of course, to make a dent in big businesses. The Klan tried boycotts directed at large department stores, which were mostly Jewish owned. The strong Oregon Klan tried to get its supporters not to shop at the Meier & Frank department store, but it faced a formidable opponent: founded in 1857, Meier & Frank also owned a prominent and popular radio station, and in the 1920s its department stores made it the largest retailer west of the Mississippi. The Klan even tried, also in vain, to eject Julius Meier from the board of the planned 1925 State Expo.49 (In 1930 he was elected governor as an independent.) Nor did the boycotts have much effect on other corporate business, such as the A&P, condemned by the Klan.50 The Klan was ambitious—and deluded—enough to try mounting a boycott of Mormon businesses and publishing a directory of pro-Klan enterprises in Salt Lake City, but neither succeeded—the LDS Church was too powerful.51

  Hollywood, of course, was a doubly important target for a major boycott, as it was both Jewish and immoral. The Klan had long denounced “filthy fiction” that “submerged” young people “in a sea of sensuality and sewage.”52 But the movies were more seductive by orders of magnitude. Naturally the Klan opposed showing films on Sunday, but as movies grew more popular, it took on the whole film industry. Using conspiracy allegations, as usual, the Klan alleged that Hollywood’s Jews operated a deliberate plot to destroy American morals. Klanspeople understood that the movies both reflected and legitimated erotic license—to indulge in petting, parking in cars, wearing suggestive clothing. Members were instructed to boycott not only Charlie Chaplin’s films but scores of other silent movies, including the 1923 Bella Donna (in which a white woman falls in love with an Egyptian—“a disgrace to the white race”), the 1924 Manhandled with Gloria Swanson, and Samuel Goldwyn’s 1925 A Thief in Paradise. The 1930s Klan, though a small remnant of its predecessor, sued Warner Bros. over Humphrey Bogart’s 1937 Black Legion, demanding $100,000 in damages and an additional $500 for every time the film showed. (Its plot: a hardworking machinist loses a promotion to a Polish-born worker and is seduced into joining the secretive Black Legion, which intimidates foreigners through violence. And one of its screenwriters was Jewish.) It lost the case but gained publicity.53

  Perhaps needless to say, these film boycotts got little traction, so the Klan developed its own film production company, Cavalier Moving Picture Company. Under Charles Lewis Fowler, who had headed the Klan’s failed Lanier University, it produced two films: The Toll of Justice and The Traitor Within. Both offered defensive plots, positioning the Klan as the innocent target of evildoers who falsely blamed its members for their own crimes (in line with its consistent rhetorical assumption of a victim position). The Toll appropriated the plot of a popular 1919 Mary Pickford film, Heart o’ the Hills, in which the star herself donned Klan robes and became a night rider who outed the real villain; but in the Klan film this gender-bending was corrected and a male night rider became the hero. Klan films only infrequently gained showings in movie theaters and were more often shown in public school auditoriums, churches, and large Klan meetings, free to the public.54 After being fired by Hiram Evans, Edward Clarke launched in 1924 a more ambitious film company that, he hoped, would contest the big studios for market share; it failed, but only after he allegedly embezzled $200,000 from it.55 Neither of these businesses lasted; filmmaking was extremely costly, requiring significant investments in production, and could not do without paying customers. Besides, Klan films could not even begin to compete with Hollywood’s—in part because what the Klan considered immoral was a major part of Hollywood’s attraction.

  The Klan was equally unsuccessful in its attacks on jazz, blues, and other “immoral” music. The story of the Gennett recording company illustrates. Founded in Indiana in 1917, Gennett was one of the first studios to put out both black and white music, in what was then a segregated production and distribution system. While Okeh Records dominated in producing black music in the East, Gennett ruled in the West. It produced recordings of some of the greatest jazz stars of the era, including the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Hoagy Carmichael, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbecke. But Gennett also had a cash business, making recordings to order. The Klan was its customer. Ignoring the fact that the owners were Italian Catholics, Hiram Evans used Gennett to record inspirational speeches, and Klan groups recorded hymns and patriotic songs at Gennett studios. Contrariwise, the engineer who worked with recordings of Louis Armstrong was a Klansman.56 (In the 1950s and 1960s, a revived Klan, then more confined to the South, condemned rock ’n’ roll and black music, again to no avail.)

  The Klan’s frequent hectoring and threatening to penalize members who did not comply with the commercial boycott suggests that embargoing “alien” enterprises was never totally successful. Klavern minutes included denunciations of members who were un-Klannish in their shopping habits. For example, “Klansman Tull was seen buying meat at the Dutchman’s shop. . . . Klansman Kenneth McCormick still eats at Herman’s lunch counter.”57 Klan leaders issued dire warnings: “Any Klansman, or Klanswoman, who in any way patronizes an enemy of our righteous cause will have to answer for it.”58 Klaverns promised to publish the names of the disloyal shoppers. Such threats against Klanspeople do not seem to have been carried out, however, and many continued to patronize stores they liked regardless of ownership.59 Moreover, many Klanswomen resisted boycott instructions coming from male Klan leaders, perhaps out of loyalty to a store they had long patronized or whose prices were lowest. Thus the Imperial Night-Hawk published accusations such as “That suit of clothes you are wearing, did you buy it from a Klansman?”60

  Some boycott targets fought back. In Maine a counterboycott of Klan businesses emerged. In Marion City, Ohio, the Knights of Columbus retaliated by constructing a market building that housed a variety of shops. But there the Klan emerged victorious: a boycott forced it to close, and the Klan then purchased the building, allowing in only Protestant shops.61

  The second front in the economic war, aiming to get Catholics, Jews, and blacks fired and replaced with “right” employees, was only sporadically successful. Large enterprises typically would not, or could not afford to, comply. When the La Grande, Oregon, Klavern tried to oust the Catholic CFO of a local bank, for example, it was told that his departure would mean a loss of $50,000 to the bank, no doubt anticipating a withdrawal of “alien” funds, and claimed that this would sink the bank. The Klavern backed off this demand, though it continued to ask members to move their money to another bank.62

  The Klan’s economic warfare probably had mixed and limited results. But the boycott also had indirect consequences, because it sent the message that opposing the Klan was unsafe. So too threats against workers and employees who were not “right” must have created anxiety and caution. The economic boycott thus supplemented the mass pageants, the cross-burnings, and the political campaigns in communicating the Klan’s strength and discouraging opposition. A message of this kind had the muscle to preclude resistance, particularly among those who preferred the safety of conformity, like Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, or who wished to remain neutral and to stay out of politics. The Ku Klux Klan practiced a two-sided strategy: working not only to attract members and followers but also to quiet others who might have objected to its goals.

  Petition for citizenship in the Klan. (Ian Brabner/Rare Americana.com)

  Chapter 10

  CONSTITUENTS

  IN THE
LAST FEW DECADES, HISTORIANS HAVE PROVIDED somewhat more precision about the class position and occupations of Klansmen. (Much less is known about Klanswomen.) They have compared Klan membership lists to census information about occupations, and thereby estimated the class composition of the movement. The consensus among these scholars is that small businessmen, lower middle-class employees, and skilled workers constituted the majority of members in most locations. Robert Johnston, who studied Portland, Oregon’s Klan members, elaborated that finding by using the category “middling” people, those at the intersection of the middle and the working class.1 That finding points to a more dynamic view of Klansmen’s class position: considering how it was constructed.

  Doing that requires thinking of Klanspeople’s social class as a process, just as we have come to understand racial categories as a process. The category “white” changed over time, especially in the period between the mass migration starting in the 1880s and the 1920s. In the Northeast, for example, the Irish, Italian, and eastern European Jewish immigrants were not typically considered white by earlier immigrants; by the 1920s these newer immigrants had become white. (The Klan could be seen as an oppositional reaction to this expansion of whiteness, by its efforts to limit “right” citizenship to a narrower group.)

  Class identity is also a process. Occupations, standards of living, and social standing were in flux in 1920s America, with some people moving downward and others upward. Admittedly, evidence of Klanspeople’s mobility in either direction would require information we do not have. It would be useful to know not only members’ occupations but how long they had held them, how they defined their class position, and what class aspirations they held. Evidence of that kind is unlikely to be found.