The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  4. The Know Nothings had been particularly strong in Oregon, which the Ku Klux Klan considered its “blue ribbon” state. Charles Easton Rothwell, “The Ku Klux Klan in the State of Oregon” (BA thesis, Reed College, 1924), 86.

  5. Carol Medlicott, “Constructing Territory, Constructing Citizenship: The Daughters of the American Revolution and ‘Americanisation’ in the 1920s,” Geopolitics 10, no. 1 (2005): 99–120.

  6. The oath can be found at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5351/.

  7. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 55; “Immigrants Pouring In,” Searchlight (KKK newspaper), March 25, 1922, 4.

  8. I often call the Klan bigoted rather than racist because most readers today would not consider Catholics or Jews a “race.” But Jews had long been both a religion and an ethnicity, and in the 1920s “race” was an unusually pliable term, often applied to an identity we would today consider an ethnicity, such as “the Irish race.” The “race” label has been shaped and reshaped to serve the interests of those who deploy it.

  9. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 137.

  10. Thomas R. Pegram, “Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 1 (January 2008): 91; Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 191; FBI, The Ku Klux Klan, Section I: 1915–1944 (Washington, DC: US DOJ, FBI, July 1957), 21. For one example, top Klan organizer Edward Young Clarke had been a fund-raiser for the Anti-Saloon League.

  11. Pegram, “Hoodwinked,” 91.

  12. Noel Gist, “Secret Societies: A Cultural Study of Fraternalism in the United States,” University of Missouri Studies 15, no. 4 (October 1940): 42. My interpretation of fraternalism is primarily indebted to Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

  13. Quoted in Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 122.

  14. Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 121.

  15. Kristofer Allerfeldt, “Jayhawker Fraternities: Masons, Klansmen and Kansas in the 1920s,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 4 (2012): 1035–53.

  16. Bringhurst, “The Ku Klux Klan in a Central California Community,” 376. See also Kathleen Blee and Amy McDowell, “The Duality of Spectacle and Secrecy: A Case Study of Fraternalism in the 1920s US Ku Klux Klan,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 2 (2013): 249–65,

  17. Quoted in Robert A. Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison, 1922–1927,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 58, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 33.

  18. Shawn Lay, “Imperial Outpost on the Border: El Paso’s Frontier Klan No. 100,” in The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, ed. Shawn Lay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 74.

  19. The Know Nothings were one such fraternal order, secret, just like the KKK. Gist, Secret Societies.

  20. Mark Paul Richard, “ ‘This Is Not a Catholic Nation’: The KKK Confronts Franco-Americans in Maine,” New England Quarterly 82, no. 2 (June 2009): 289.

  21. Bringhurst, “The Ku Klux Klan in a Central California Community,” 373.

  22. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 48; Hiram Wesley Evans and Israel Zangwill, Is the Ku Klux Klan Constructive or Destructive? (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1924).

  23. John Scopes had violated a Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution; although he was convicted, defense attorney Darrow embarrassed prosecutor Bryan by exposing the absurdity of some of his beliefs in the literal truth of the Bible.

  24. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  25. David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 193.

  Chapter 3. STRUCTURES OF FEELING

  1. Raymond Williams, a great British social and cultural critic, first used this phrase in his 1954 A Preface to Film, then elaborated it in his later books The Long Revolution and Marxism and Literature. He uses “structure of feeling” as a concept that argues for the material reality of culture and employs the term “feeling” in order to “emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world view’ or ‘ideology.’. . . We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific, internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.” Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

  2. Arlie Russell Hoshschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

  3. Judge John J. Jeffery, “The Klan and the Law,” Watcher on the Tower (a Washington State Klan paper), October 29, 1923, 2, quoted at http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_wot.htm.

  4. “The Negro—His Relation to America,” Kourier Magazine (a KKK publication), January 1926, 17–19.

  5. “Quotations from ‘White America,’ ” Kourier Magazine, August 1927, 31, quoted in Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 483.

  6. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 483. I have no reason to think these figures were accurate.

  7. R. H. Sawyer, The Truth About the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Portland, OR: Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 1922); Allen Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” Indiana Magazine of History 95, no. 3 (1999): 203–31.

  8. Quoted in Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross, 5.

  9. Shotwell, “Crystallizing Public Hatred,” 41–42.

  10. Maine Klansman, December 6, 1923, 3, quoted in Richard, “ ‘This Is Not a Catholic Nation,’ ” 292.

  11. Evans and Zangwill, Is the Ku Klux Klan Constructive or Destructive?, 10.

  12. Alma White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy (Zarephath, NJ: Good Citizen, 1925), chapter 4.

  13. Robert J. Neymeyer, “In the Full Light of Day: The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Iowa,” Palimpsest 76, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 61.

  14. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 39.

  15. Quoted in Rob Kroes, “Signs of Fascism Rising: A European-Americanist Looks at Recent Political Trends,” unpublished manuscript, courtesy of Marilyn B. Young.

  16. Radio stations included WTRC in Brooklyn, New York, later moved to Virginia as WTFF and WJSV (initials standing for The Fellowship Forum, a Klan stealth publication, and then for James S. Vance, its publisher). See James Snyder, “WJSV History,” http://dcmemories.com/wjsv/WJSVHistory.html.

  17. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 49.

  18. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 483–84.

  19. Alma White, Guardians of Liberty, 3 vols. (Zarephath, NJ: Pillar of Fire, 1943), 1:72.

  20. James Martin, SJ, “The Last Acceptable Prejudice?” quoted in Andrew Greeley, An Ugly Little Secret: Anti-Catholicism in North America (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977), and at http://www.americamagazine.org/issue/281/article/last-acceptable-prejudice; Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman & Smith, 1835), https://archive.org/details/pleaforwest 00beec; Mark S. Massa, SJ, “Anti-Catholicism in the United States,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-316.

  21. Thomas M. Conroy, “The Ku Klux Klan and the American Clergy,” Ecclesiastical Review 70 (1924): 53.

  22. White, Guardians of Liberty 2:112.

  23. Elsie Thornton in Alabama Ku Klux Klan Newsletter, June 1926, quoted in ibid.

  24. Robert V. Hunt Jr., “The Fundamentalist–Ku Klux Klan Alliance: A Colorado Study (1921–1926),” Journal of the West 38, no. 4 (October 1999): 87.

  25. Quoted in Blee, Women of the Klan, 87.

  26
. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 482.

  27. Helen Jackson, Convent Cruelties; or, My Life in a Convent (Detroit: Helen Jackson, 1919); White, Guardians of Liberty 2:97–98; also circulating were copies of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, originally published in 1836 in Montreal.

  28. White, Guardians of Liberty 2:102.

  29. Quoted in Maudean Neill, Fiery Crosses in the Green Mountains: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan in Vermont (Randolph Center, VT: Greenhills Books, 1989), 25.

  30. A Pseudo ‘Ex-nun’ Thwarted: The Case of Helen Jackson vs. ‘Ypsilanti Press’ (St. Louis, MO: Central Bureau, Central Verein, 1921); Jackson, Convent Cruelties; David. B. Tyack, “The Perils of Pluralism: The Background of the Pierce Case,” American Historical Review 74, no. 1 (October 1968): 85; Norman Fredric Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1954), 160; interview with Maudine Neill by Mark Greenberg, 1988, for Green Mountain Chronicles, Vermont Historical Society, at http://vermonthistory.org/research/research-resources-online/green-mountain-chronicles/the-k-k-k-in-vermont-1924; Blee, Women of the Klan, 89–91; Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 57; John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 147; Hunt, “The Fundamentalist–Ku Klux Klan Alliance,” 88.

  31. Jeff LaLande, “ ‘Beneath the Hooded Robe’: Local Politics, Opportunism, and the Ku Klux Klan in Jackson County, Oregon, 1921–23” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1992), 21.

  32. Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton.”

  33. Imperial Night-Hawk, August 29, 1923.

  34. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 46–47.

  35. George Estes, The Roman Katholic Kingdom and the Ku Klux Klan (Troutdale, OR: Geo. Estes, 1923), 6–8.

  36. White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, chapter 12, pp. 89–91.

  37. Sawyer, The Truth About the Invisible Empire.

  38. White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 52.

  39. Sarah Elizabeth Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting: Women of the KKK in Suburban Chicago, 1870–1930” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2012), 87.

  40. Hiram Evans, quoted in George S. Clason, Catholic, Jew, Ku Klux Klan: What They Believe, Where They Conflict (Chicago: Nutshell Publishing, 1924), 31.

  41. Quoted in Tom Rice, “Protecting Protestantism: The Ku Klux Klan vs. the Motion Picture Industry,” Film History 20, no. 4 (2008): 370–71, 374. Also Tom Rice, “ ‘The True Story of the Ku Klux Klan’: Defining the Klan Through Film,” Journal of American Studies 42, no. 3 (December 2008): 475; Melissa Ooten, Race, Gender and Film Censorship in Virginia, 1922–1965 (Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2015), 90; Alma White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross (Zarephath, NJ: The Good Citizen, 1928), 10.

  42. Bohn, “The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted,” 388.

  43. Quoted in Shotwell, “Crystallizing Public Hatred,” 48.

  44. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

  45. Minutes, December 5, 1955, in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 34.

  46. Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan, 101.

  47. The Klan liked this quote and used it often: Michael W. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska, 1920–1930,” Nebraska History 66 (1985): 250; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 248; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 483.

  48. Quoted by John F. McClymer in “Passing from Light into Dark,” Journal for Multimedia History 4 (2003), http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol4/passing/passing1.html.

  49. White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, chapter 6.

  50. Clason, Catholic, Jew, Ku Klux Klan, 30.

  51. Hiram Evans, quoted in ibid., 30–31.

  52. White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 33; White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 53.

  53. Rice, “Protecting Protestantism,” 371.

  54. Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

  55. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 60; Robert Singerman, “The Jew as Racial Alien: The Genetic Component of American Anti-Semitism,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 118. The Khazars were a Turkic, not Mongolian, group who had established a powerful state (a khanate) that dominated the area from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus in the years 650–965 and were reputed to have converted to Judaism.

  56. White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 27.

  57. White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 186 and chapter 2; quotation from Rev. C. C. Curtis of Vancouver, Washington, speaking in Auburn, Oregon, in David Norberg, “Ku Klux Klan in the Valley: A 1920s Phenomena [sic],” White River Valley Museum, White River Journal, January 2004, http://www.wrvmuseum.org/journal/journal_0104.htm.

  58. Quoted in Paul L. Murphy, “Sources and Nature of Intolerance in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 51, no. 1 (June 1964): 72n35.

  59. The illustration, an etching, is by Rev. Branford Clarke, a prolific Klan artist, and appears in White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 74. Clarke immigrated from England and became minister of a Brooklyn Klan church in 1921; Lynn S. Neal, “Christianizing the Klan: Alma White, Branford Clarke, and the Art of Religious Intolerance,” Church History 78, no. 2 (June 2009): 358.

  60. Herbert Kaufman, “Scum o’ the Melting-Pot,” McClure’s Magazine, March/April 1920, 7.

  61. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 40.

  62. Alberto Brandolini, an Italian computer programmer, developed this “law,” also known as the BAP, bullshit asymmetry principle, based on Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Random House, 2011).

  63. Jack Z. Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 98–100; Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 25–27.

  64. White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 116–18, 144.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Evans quoted in McClymer, “Passing from Light into Dark.”

  67. Hunt, “The Fundamentalist–Ku Klux Klan Alliance,” 86.

  68. Conroy, “The Ku Klux Klan and the American Clergy,” 55.

  69. These fears and longings provide rich material for psychoanalytic interpretation.

  70. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 176–77. The same idea appears in White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 14.

  71. White, Guardians of Liberty 2:96–97.

  72. White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 74; Neal, “Christianizing the Klan,” 352.

  73. White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, chapter 7.

  74. Kenneth Burke, quoted in M. Elizabeth Weiser, Burke, War, Words (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 58. The Klan also used the Babel reference to condemn immigration; for example, Imperial Night-Hawk, August 29, 1923.

  75. Republican motherhood is a historians’ label for the belief, in the American revolutionary era, that mothers should instill republican ideals in their children. Mothers should thus be custodians of civic virtue responsible for upholding the morality of their husbands and children. Linda K. Kerber originally argued this in her Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), introduction.

  76. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 39.

  77. Estes, The Roman Katholic Kingdom and the Ku Klux Klan, 6.

  78. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics, 20.

  79. I would love to know how the fertility rates of Klanswomen compared with those of other women in the same locations.

  Chapter 4. RECRUITMENT, RITUAL, AND PROFIT

  1. Ronald G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt, “Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan,” working paper 13417, National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2007, 9.
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  2. Clarke to E. C. Mickey of Charleston, South Carolina, August 23, 1920, in Du Bois Papers, series 1A, General Correspondence, at University of Massachusetts–Amherst Special Collections. The travels of this letter gave me some perverse pleasure: it ended up in the archives of W. E. B. Du Bois, likely because Mr. Mickey was indeed an elite of Charleston but, unbeknownst to the Klan, an African American and a regular correspondent of Du Bois’s.

  3. Jones, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 112.

  4. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Department of Realms, Klan Building: An Outline of Proven Klan Methods for Successfully Applying the Art of Klankraft in Building and Operating Local Klans (Atlanta, 1925), 4.

  5. Randel, The Ku Klux Klan, 193; Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 17.

  6. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics, 18–19; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 193; Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, chapter 1.

  7. Alexander, “Kleagles and Cash,” 361. This article details many other profitable Klan schemes.

  8. Ibid., 360; Fryer and Levitt, “Hatred and Profits,” 11.

  9. Conroy, “The Ku Klux Klan and the American Clergy,” 50; Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 212.

  10. Neill interview, http://vermonthistory.org/research/research-resources-online/green-mountain-chronicles/the-k-k-k-in-vermont-1924.

  11. Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 6–7, 44–45; Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton.”

  12. Quoted in Dana M. Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism: Evansville, Indiana’s Embrace of the Ku Klux Klan,” Ohio Valley History 11, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 18.

  13. California Knights of the KKK, “The Klan in Action: A Manual of Leadership and Organization for Officers of Local Klan Committees,” mimeo, author’s possession, n.d.; KKK, Klan Building, 4. This research assignment was not wholly different from one used by the Nazis in developing local groups. William Allen describes how the Nazis in Northeim charged admission fees to speeches and then tracked attendance on different topics so as to fine-tune their appeal to match local response; The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1965), 29. I am grateful to Judith Vichniac for alerting me to this practice.