The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  The crime that led to his conviction was not only violent but bizarre. Madge Oberholtzer met Stephenson at a party for Indiana governor and Klansman Edward L. Jackson. They dated. On March 15, 1925, he telephoned, well after 10:00 p.m., to say that he simply must see her and sent his chauffeur to pick her up. He then forced her to accompany him to Chicago and, once in a closed compartment on the train, attacked her. She was literally chewed all over her body, bleeding from several wounds. Then he dragged her into a hotel, refusing to get her medical help. Like so many other women at the time, she felt permanently ruined by what had happened to her; among other traumas, she would have been unmarriageable. Stephenson allowed her to go to a drugstore when she said she needed rouge, but instead she purchased tablets of bichloride of mercury, then used to treat syphilis despite its extreme toxicity, and swallowed six of them. She became deathly ill. Again refusing to get medical treatment for her, he delivered her to her mother’s house in Indianapolis, where she died, slowly and in agony. Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder. His conviction, despite the fact that she voluntarily poisoned herself, reflected a bitter truth of the time: that a jury assumed that her violation made her permanently “ruined” and thus caused her suicide.

  The Stephenson scandal was a last straw for many Klanspeople. Members found it hard to ignore their leaders’ corruption and sinful hypocrisy. For some, the hocus-pocus rituals may have lost their initial thrill. Many deserted, or simply did not pay dues. Politicians who once complied with the Klan’s every wish now abandoned it; Stephenson had counted on a pardon from the governor he had worked to elect, and was no doubt outraged that the governor ran for cover, so he had to serve out his full sentence. With some regional variation, by 1927 the Klan was but a small fraction of its peak size.

  Some scholars and contemporary observers have seen the 1920s northern Klan as a failure because it was short-lived and because its campaigns against Catholics and Jews did not manage to confine them to second-class citizenship. But transience is common to most social movements. Moreover, the Klan declined in part because it had triumphed in several respects. State eugenics laws, providing for forcible sterilization of those of “defective stock,” spread to thirty states, and those labeled defective were typically the poor and people of color. The biggest Klan victory was immigration restriction, and Imperial Wizard Evans repeatedly claimed credit for its passage.8 The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, named for Washington Klansman Albert Johnson in the House and Pennsylvania’s David Reed in the Senate, ensconced into law the Klan’s hierarchy of desirable and undesirable “races” by assigning quotas for immigrants in proportion to the ethnicity of those already in the United States in 1890. (This meant that the immigrant quota for the UK, Ireland, and Germany constituted 70 percent of the total allowed.9) The quotas radically restricted the inmigration of some of the world’s most desperate people, including notably Jews in eastern Europe and Russia. The act also turned the previous exclusions of Chinese and Japanese into an across-the-board exclusion of all Asians, including South Asians.10 This racial discrimination in immigration continued until 1965. Certainly Klanspeople were not alone responsible, but Klan propaganda surely strengthened racialized anti-immigrant sentiment both in Congress and among the voters. Its anti-immigrant influence shows today in opposition to the admission of refugees, in the deportation even of long-term residents, and in calls to end birthright citizenship, despite the fact that it was, ironically, almost uniquely American.11

  The biggest Klan victory was equally consequential but less tangible: it influenced the public conversation, the universe of tolerable discourse. It increased the intensity and spread of bigoted speech and, occasionally, action. True, the Klan did not invent bigotry. Sometimes ebbing, sometimes flowing, white racism had appeared as soon as Europeans arrived on this continent. But the Klan spread, strengthened, and radicalized preexisting nativist and racist sentiments among the white population. In reactivating these older animosities it also relegitimated them. However reprehensible hidden bigotry might be, making its open expression acceptable has significant additional impact. Stigmatizing bigoted talk conveys the message that it is shameful. Moreover, silent bigotry exerts less influence on others. Similarly, vigilantism works to legitimate not only violence but also justifications for it, especially the claim that threats from people of the wrong religion or race require the action of private citizens. Then, when courts acquit vigilantes, as they did so often in the 1920s—and virtually always in the South—the vigilantes’ self-justifications become yet more acceptable.

  The influence of the Klan’s mandatory patriotism, defining righteous Americanism ideologically and repressively, also reappeared in later decades. True, Klan ideology never made anti-Communism as important a cause as its bigotry, although Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans explicitly conflated “Liberalism” with “the Bolshevist platform.” The Klan consistently branded dissent as dangerous, even treasonous. Its anti-immigrant discourse included attacks on “foreign ideas,” a “steady flood” of which was being spread—“always carefully disguised as American.”12 Its major tool for suppressing dissent, however, was its unqualified, ever-reiterated boasting of American superiority. This obligatory patriotism was expressed symbolically, visually, in the mass pageants with their extravagant displays, and literally in speeches and texts asserting that “right” Americans were the chosen people, that the American governmental system was the most perfect on earth, that profit-seeking was the grounds of American greatness.

  Propounding an expurgated and often fictional rendition of American history confirmed these values. In their efforts to rewrite textbooks so as to place themselves in the tradition of the founding fathers, and to teach a false and ahistorical notion of what these eighteenth-century liberals thought, Klanspeople taught that “true” Americanness required adherence to an ideology. Similar demands of history textbooks continue today. The Klan’s version of Americanism was recapitulated, in slightly altered form, by McCarthyism, the domestic face of the Cold War; when it tried to define dissent as unAmerican, it was carrying on this part of the Klan’s legacy. That version of ideological patriotism has reappeared periodically, as a value system in which being a loyal American requires conformity to a political ideology. Condemning dissent from this ideology as dangerous prefigured Red-baiting directed against causes as disparate as civil rights and “progressive education.”

  The longest-term force behind the Klan’s decline was, of course, the increasing integration of Catholics and Jews into American politics, culture, and economy.13 The allegedly inassimilable Jews assimilated and influenced the culture, both high-brow and low-brow. The alleged vassals of the pope began to behave like other immigrants, firm in their allegiance to America. This process of Americanization integrated diverse immigrants into the industrial and commercial organization of work and leisure.

  That integration then forced the Klan to search for new allies. One example: in the 1930s, many Klanspeople enthusiastically supported a Catholic radio personality, the racist and virulently anti-Semitic priest Charles Coughlin (known on the air as Father Coughlin). His weekly broadcasts, said to reach thirty million listeners, slandered President Roosevelt and praised Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. Some Klanspeople also supported the German American Bund (Amerikadeutscher Bund), a group organized at the direction of Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. Attempting to maintain a patriotic veneer, the Bund carried American flags and claimed George Washington as the first fascist. Both Coughlin and the Bund were openly anti-Semitic but not anti-Catholic. Ultimately some Klan groups even discarded their traditional anti-Semitism. As with most racisms, the Klan’s bigotry was fungible, and it backed off from targeting groups that gained in political power and social prestige. If the Klan had continued in its early 1920s strength, it might have identified different targets or redefined its categories of “true” and “false” Americans.

  By contrast, the Klan never gave up its hatred for people of color. As African
Americans moved northward and westward, as more Latin American and East Asian immigrants arrived, the latter-day Klan shifted toward a simpler, purer racial system, with two categories: white and not white. In the South the Klan neither modulated its anti-black racism nor allowed it to recede as the group’s primary focus. The twenty-first-century North is by no means free of the Klan’s genuflection to whiteness, as Aryan Nations and other white supremacist groups carry on the Klan’s tradition. Some of these groups even continue to unite white supremacy with the “right” religion, as the Klan did—for example, in groups such as the Christian Defense League, the Posse Comitatus, and the Christian Identity movement. As one leader put it, “Christianity for the Aryan is race—and race is Christianity.”14

  Of the Klan’s six ancestors—the first Ku Klux Klan, nativism, temperance, fraternalism, Christian evangelicalism, populism—only some remain influential today. Only a few Americans would reinstate Prohibition, and support for continued prohibition of marijuana is waning. Membership in fraternal orders declined steeply after 1950. The Klan itself survives, with some five thousand to eight thousand members, but they belong to independent local groups without a disciplining national organization.15 “Ku Klux Klan” is now a term so besmirched that even those who agree with the organization’s principles might hesitate to identify with it; avoiding this stigmatized association was a major motive in the rise of the 1950s White Citizens Councils. But other groups promoting bigotry, nativism, and Christian evangelicalism continue. What is different is that these activists no longer have a single organization to unite them. The lack of unity reflects the fact that fewer people unite all these causes: for example, not all those who fear immigration are evangelicals, not all evangelicals are nativists or racists, not all bigots are hostile to immigration.

  IF UNDERSTANDING THE ORIGINS of the 1920s Klan required looking backward to its progenitors, our understanding of its appeal and its ideology may also benefit from a glance at developments outside the United States and in later decades. I have tried to show the 1920s Klan in its historical context, but I cannot empty my consciousness of later history, notably, the fascisms of Italy and Nazi Germany. Today the fascist label is appearing again, not only in the United States but throughout Europe, as right-wing parties gain power, threatening democratic processes and abolishing civil liberties.

  Several historians have classified the 1920s Klan and today’s right-wing populism as part of a fascist family.16 There are good reasons to avoid the subject of fascism, not only because it is so inflammatory but also because its variants are numerous. Moreover, the label has been applied so loosely, to condemn everything from the US government to feminism, that it often works as a panicky pejorative without specific content. As a result, some scholars have suggested abandoning the term altogether. I find it still useful, however, if only because it requires recognizing that right-wing movements come in many forms and contents. They are different enough to make a generic, universal definition of fascism impossible. Umberto Eco, in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” argues that “fascism had no quintessence.” It was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage . . . a beehive of contradictions. . . . The fascist game can be played in many forms.” Historian Robert Paxton agrees; in his article “The Five Stages of Fascism,” he writes that we cannot identify fascism “by its plumage.”17 For all these reasons, applying that label to the 1920s Ku Klux Klan would be unproductive. Noting the overlap between the KKK and various avatars of fascism can, however, be illuminating.

  The 1920s Klan was not a uniquely American phenomenon. It was part of a group of movements around the globe that have come to be called right-wing populisms, fascism one of them. It was growing throughout central and eastern Europe just as the second Klan arose, and is reawakening today. Similar movements avoid the fascist label but share its modalities, especially hostility to immigrants.18 These movements often co-opt grievances associated with the Left, notably economic inequality, but typically blame foreigners, racial minorities, and cosmopolitan, liberal elites. These movements also share patterns of thought and rhetoric, such as conspiracy-mongering, apocalyptic narratives, anti-intellectualism, and intense nationalism, often called “patriotism.”19 If generic populism calls on “ordinary people” to struggle against a powerful and undemocratic elite, right-wing populism defines that elite enemy as an alliance between politicians and liberal, professional-class urbanites.

  Luckily the 1920s Klan appeared in a country with long-imbedded electoral procedures. It also strategized that respectability and legality were its most productive route to power; it did not plan a coup. While American federalism helped it gain power in the state, it also impeded its potential as a national force.

  The Klan’s reliance on demagogic speakers to mobilize people and intensify political emotions was characteristically fascist. All populisms find ways to arouse masses of people and to forge them into a political constituency that can challenge elites. But the demagogic orators of the Klan and right-wing populisms used their orators and sloganeers almost exclusively to stimulate anger at minority groups. They used outrageously false and/or exaggerated claims to ratchet up fears that “aliens” were threatening morals, law and order, political control, “family values,” “American values,” and, not least, jobs. Like European fascists, the Klan produced spectacular, choreographed pageants to intensify members’ pride in belonging to the master race and to arouse nonmembers’ desire to become part of it. We might call these events visual demagoguery. In speeches, writings, and performances, the Klan stirred men with metaphors of war and thereby stimulated vigilantism.

  Similarly, like fascism and especially its Nazi version, the Klan promulgated a racialized nationalism: it conflated the “nation” with a master “race,” that is, “Nordics.”20 Sinclair Lewis warned that should fascism come to the United States, it would appear as patriotic and entirely American. In his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, the fictional fascist senator Berzelius Windrip promises “ ‘to make America a proud, rich land again.’ ”21 That concept of national destiny fueled hostilities even toward neighbors, even those who had long been part of Klanspeople’s communities (a process that replicated on a smaller scale the power of tribal nationalisms to transform neighbors into enemies, as in the former Yugoslavia, even into targets of genocide, as in Rwanda).

  Unlike Nazism and Italian fascism, however, the KKK did not bring large-scale capital into supporting its hypernationalism. The Klan also differed from German and Italian fascists, as well as today’s conservative populists, by melding nationalism with religion.22 This gave it several advantages: it intensified self-righteousness among its supporters and turned “aliens” into sinners. Sin was a powerful category for Christians: it not only justified keeping aliens out but also validated the dominance of “right” Americans.

  The Klan’s nationalist arguments rested on appeal to tradition, a glorious tradition, another theme common to right-wing populisms. The “tradition” Klan leaders referenced was largely a fiction, as traditions often are in popular understanding. One example is the Klan’s claim that the early United States was a homogeneously Protestant nation, when in fact non-Protestants had been part of the country since its origin. Traditionalists of all political stripes have often called for a return to a postulated golden age that never existed. But in fascist ideologies, this “tradition” became a destiny; the Klan view of America’s destiny paralleled fascist conceptions of Italian destiny and Nazi conceptions of Germanic destiny. The Klan, however, outdid the European fascists in the authority it cited for this destiny: not only the “founding fathers” but also God himself.

  Like all social movements, the Klan provided to members, at least temporarily, the satisfactions of belonging to a like-minded community, and this was no small part of its temporary success. All social movements generate group loyalty, of course, and all draw a border between members and outsiders, a border especially clearly demarcated in fraternal orders. But not all create intense av
ersion to those outside the group. The Klan tried to divide people between the pure and the impure, the godly and the ungodly, patriots and traitors. Eschewing nuance, these binaries raised a particularly high wall separating the righteous from the wicked. There are resemblances here not only to fascists but also to religious believers for whom individuals outside the faith are infidels, either susceptible to conversion or damned. The Klan’s emphasis on chastity and sobriety demanded more of its members than did most fascists. This moral high-mindedness resembles that of some more recent evangelical leaders; in offering a righteous identity and thereby attracting converts, leaders build not only their organization but also their personal power and wealth. There is a considerable chink in this wall of morality, however: since many cannot or will not conform to these stringent norms of purity, hypocrisy ensues, and when exposed, creates scandals that damage the cause.