The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  14. Bohn, “The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted,” 399.

  15. Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting,” passim.

  16. Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism,” 21.

  17. Carlos M. Larralde and Richard Griswold del Castillo, “San Diego’s Ku Klux Klan, 1920–1980,” San Diego Historical Society Quarterly 46, nos. 2–3 (2000), http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/2000/april/klan/; Mark Paul Richard, “ ‘Why Don’t You Be a Klansman?’ Anglo-Canadian Support for the Ku Klux Klan Movement in 1920s New England,” American Review of Canadian Studies 40, no. 4 (December 2010): 509, 513; McClymer, “Passing from Light into Dark.”

  18. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 181, 237, 281; Conroy, “The Ku Klux Klan and the American Clergy,” 50.

  19. Shepherd, “Ku Klux Koin.”

  20. The following description is from Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Handbook, author’s possession, n.d.; McClanahan, “Klan of the Grandmother.”

  21. Elaine Frantz Parsons, “Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of American History 92, no. 3 (December 2005): 811–36.

  22. KKK, Klan Building, 11; Robert Neymeyer, “The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s in the Midwest and West: A Review Essay,” Annuals of Iowa 51, no. 6 (Fall 1992): 625–33.

  23. My interpretation of secrecy was influenced by Allen Hunter, who explained and led me to Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” American Journal of Sociology 11, no. 4 (January 1906): 441–98.

  24. The following description is from the Kloran.

  25. For whatever reason, different Klan documents gave different sets of names; Chester L. Quarles, The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations: History and Analysis (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 65–66.

  26. I assume that using the term “naturalization” was a deliberate appropriation of, and inversion of, the name for the legal process of acquiring citizenship which the Klan, of course, opposed for non-WASP immigrants.

  27. Blee, Women of the Klan, 38.

  28. The songs included “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the patriotic side and “Whiter than Snow,” “In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” and “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” on the religious side; WKKK, Musiklan (Little Rock, AR, n.d.).

  29. This is but an abbreviated summary of a much more detailed set of instructions given in the Kloran.

  Chapter 5. SPECTACLES AND EVANGELICALS

  1. Neymeyer, “In the Full Light of Day,” 56–63.

  2. Rice, “ ‘The True Story of the Ku Klux Klan,’ ” 481.

  3. This description is a composite, based on descriptions in Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 157–58; Guy B. Johnson, “A Sociological Interpretation of the New Ku Klux Movement,” Journal of Social Forces 1, no. 4 (May 1923): 440–45; Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 76ff; Blee, Women of the Klan, 128, 135, 166; Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross, 50; Robert Coughlan, “Konklave in Kokomo,” in The Aspirin Age, 1919–1941, ed. Isabel Leighton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949); combined with descriptions of other similar Klan mass picnics.

  4. Elizabeth Dorsey Hatle and Nancy M. Vaillancourt, “One Flag, One School, One Language: Minnesota’s KKK in the 1920s,” Minnesota History 61, no. 8 (Winter 2009–10): 365.

  5. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska,” 236.

  6. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 97; William Vance Trollinger Jr., “The University of Dayton, the Ku Klux Klan, and Catholic Universities and Colleges in the 1920s,” American Catholic Studies 124, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 7–8; Chris Rhomberg, “White Nativism and Urban Politics: The 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Oakland, California,” Journal of American Ethnic History 17, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 46; Matawan Journal, August 31, 1923, https://pediaview.com/openpedia/History_of_the_Ku_Klux_Klan_in_New_Jersey#cite_note-10.

  7. Linton Weeks, “When the KKK Was Mainstream,” History Dept., March 19, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/03/19/390711598/when -the-ku-klux-klan-was-mainstream.

  8. Quoted in Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 195; Trollinger, “The University of Dayton, the Ku Klux Klan,” 8.

  9. In honor of his journey, Chicago renamed Seventh Street as Balbo Drive. In an additional gesture of generosity, Mussolini plundered a Roman column, dating from the second century AD, from a portico near the Porta Marina of Ostica Antica, the ancient port city of Rome, and shipped it to Chicago, where it was erected in front of the Italian pavilion of the Century of Progress fair in 1934.

  10. Klan Komment, 1923, quoted in American Social History Project and Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, Who Built America? From the Great War of 1914 to the Dawn of the Atomic Age in 1946, CD-ROM (New York: Worth, 2000).

  11. Citizens League of Dallas, “The Klan and Its Propaganda Methods,” 1922, http://americainclass.org/sources/becomingmodern/divisions/text1/colcommentaryklan.pdf, 7–8.

  12. Newspaper accounts quoted in Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 179.

  13. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska,” 238.

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

  15. Donna Troppoli, “The Invisible Boardwalk Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Monmouth County During the 1920s,” GardenStateLegacy.com, June 2015, http://gardenstatelegacy.com/files/The_Invisible_Boardwalk_Empire_Troppoli _GSL28.pdf.

  16. Felix Harcourt, “Invisible Umpires: The Ku Klux Klan and Baseball in the 1920s,” Journal of Baseball History and Culture 23, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 3–6.

  17. Baseball commissioner Herrmann seemed willing, but that date was already taken. Cottrell, Two Pioneers, 7–8.

  18. Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 32–33, 38.

  19. A Wisconsin King Kleagle began his work in 1920 with a private meeting on a Coast Guard cutter in the Milwaukee River, able to do this, no doubt, because of one or more Klan supporters in the Coast Guard. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 191; quotations from Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 34, 38. Image from yearbook in Timothy Messer-Kruse, “Memories of the Ku Klux Klan Honorary Society at the University of Wisconsin,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 23 (Spring 1999): 83; Melching, “The Activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim, California”; Timothy Messer-Kruse, “The Campus Klan of the University of Wisconsin: Tacit and Active Support for the Ku Klux Klan in a Culture of Intolerance,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 77 (Autumn 1993): 2.

  20. Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting,” 124–25.

  21. Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 165–69.

  22. Ibid., 168–74; Neill interview, http://vermonthistory.org/research/research -resources-online/green-mountain-chronicles/the-k-k-k-in-vermont-1924.

  23. Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting,” 125; Neill interview, http://vermonthistory.org/research/research-resources-online/green-mountain-chroniclesthe-k-k-k-in -vermont-1924.

  24. Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The Ku Klux Klan’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011); Wade, The Fiery Cross, 178.

  25. White, The Klan in Prophecy, 25.

  26. Quoted in Richard, “ ‘This Is Not a Catholic Nation,’ ” 291.

  27. These included, for example, the Assemblies of God, Southern Baptists, Independent Baptists, Black Protestants, African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Church of Christ, Churches of God in Christ, Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, National Baptist Church, National Progressive Baptist Church, Nondenominational, Pentecostal denominations, and the Presbyterian Church in America; some conservative members and reform movements within such mainline denominations as the Episcopal Church in the USA, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church also consider themselves evangelicals.

  28. Charles C. Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 85; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 178. I should note that some historians confuse “fundamentalist” with “evangelical.”

  29. Robert Moats Miller, “A Note on
the Relationships Between the Protestant Churches and the Revived Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of Southern History 33, no. 3 (August 1956): 355–68; Shawn Lay, “Hooded Populism: New Assessments of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s,” Reviews in American History 22, no. 4 (December 1994): 670.

  30. Lay, “Hooded Populism, 670.

  31. Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest, 85; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 176–77.

  32. Robert Alan Goldberg, Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); “The Ku Klux Klan,” http://bio.suny orange.edu/updated2/creationism/CREATIONISM/evolution/2_klan.htm; Susie Cunningham Stanley, Feminist Pillar of Fire: The Life of Alma White (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1993), 88; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 171.

  33. Melching, “The Activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim, California,” 176, 181.

  34. Edward Clarke, letters of March 23, April 7, and April 9, 1921, reproduced in Randel, The Ku Klux Klan, 198–99.

  35. Sessions, “The K.K.K. in Vermont Through 1927.”

  36. Blee and McDowell, “The Duality of Spectacle and Secrecy.”

  37. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska,” 239.

  38. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 176–77.

  39. Daniel Cady, “A Battle Transplanted: Southern California’s White Churches, Black Press, and the 1920s Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of the West 48, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 50–57; Richard Allen Loomis, “A Narrative Interpretation of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Oregon” (PhD diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, 2000), 276ff.; Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting,” 127; LaLande, “ ‘Beneath the Hooded Robe,’ ” 19.

  40. Tom Sitton, “The ‘Boss’ Without a Machine: Kent K. Parrot and Los Angeles Politics in the 1920s,” Southern California Quarterly 65, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 381.

  41. Matthew Avery Sutton, “Uncovering Aimee Semple McPherson’s Demons in 21st Century Evangelicalism,” History News Network, May 27, 2007, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/38391.

  42. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 176–77.

  43. Glenn Feldman, Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).

  Chapter 6. VIGILANTISM AND MANLINESS

  1. Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), chapter 1.

  2. David A. Horowitz, “Order, Solidarity, and Vigilance: The Ku Klux Klan in La Grande, Oregon,” in Lay, The Invisible Empire in the West, p. 190.

  3. Quoted in Lawrence J. Saalfeld, Forces of Prejudice in Oregon, 1920–1925 (Portland, OR: Archdiocesan Historical Commission, 1984), 23; LaLande, “ ‘Beneath the Hooded Robe,’ ” 30.

  4. Messer-Kruse, “The Campus Klan of the University of Wisconsin,” 4; Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 31–44.

  5. Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 161.

  6. Jenkins, Steel Valley Klan, 26; Jerry Wallace, “The Ku Klux Klan Comes to Kowley Kounty, Kansas: Its Public Face, 1921–22,” in Celebrate Winfield History 2012 (Winfield, KS: Cowley County Historical Society, 2012), 11.

  7. The New Jersey Klan Recorder did so throughout 1925, 1926, and 1927. Tyreen A. Reuter, “African-Americans and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Metuchen,” http://www.jhalpin.com/anonymous/mehs/MetuchenKlan.pdf.

  8. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska,” 244.

  9. B. Johnson, “John Barleycorn Must Die! The War Against Drink in Arkansas, 1920–1950,” Little Rock, Arkansas, Old State House Museum exhibit, formerly available at http://www.oldstatehouse.com/exhibits/archive/john-barleycorn/1920-1950.asp.

  10. Clason, Catholic, Jew, Ku Klux Klan, 58.

  11. Hunt, “The Fundamentalist–Ku Klux Klan Alliance,” 87.

  12. David J. Hanson, “KKK and WCTU: Partners in Prohibition,” Alcohol Problems and Solutions, https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/ku-klux-klan-kkk-wctu-partners-prohibition; Pegram, “Hoodwinked,” 98–104.

  13. Fiery Cross, June 20, 1924, quoted in Pegram, “Hoodwinked,” 97.

  14. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 53, 88.

  15. Chris Gavaler, “The Ku Klux Klan and the Birth of the Superhero,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 4, no. 2 (2013): 191–208.

  16. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 18; Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 38.

  17. Norberg, “Ku Klux Klan in the Valley.”

  18. Outlook, January 30, 1924, 184, quoted in Rothwell, “The Ku Klux Klan in the State of Oregon,” 56.

  19. Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man! (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974).

  20. Quoted in Marion Monteval (believed to be a pseudonym), The Klan Inside-Out (Claremore, OK: Monarch Publishing, 1924), 122–23.

  21. Bohn, “The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted,” 398.

  22. Ibid., 399.

  23. Shawn Lay, Hooded Knights on the Niagara: The KKK in Buffalo, New York (New York: NYU Press, 1995), 71, 74; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 213; Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism,” 6; John Zerzan, “Rank-and-File Radicalism Within the KKK of the 1920s,” Anarchy 37 (Summer 1993): 48–53, and at http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-rank-and-file-radicalism-within -the-ku-klux-klan-of-the-1920s.pdf.

  24. Reuter, “African Americans and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Metuchen.”

  25. Booth, The Mad Mullah, 37.

  26. Brooks R. Blevins, “The Strike and the Still: Anti-Radical Violence and the Ku Klux Klan in the Ozarks,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 410.

  27. Christopher Cocoltchos, “The Invisible Empire and the Search for Orderly Community: The Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim, California,” in Lay, The Invisible Empire in the West, 114; Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross, 83.

  28. Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism,” 16.

  29. Alfred L. Brophy, “Norms, Law, and Reparations: The Case of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Oklahoma,” Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal 20 (2004): 37.

  30. Quoted in Malcolm Clark Jr., “The Bigot Disclosed: 90 Years of Nativism,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 75, no. 2 (June 1974): 155.

  31. Quoted in Neill, Fiery Crosses in the Green Mountains, 30.

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

  33. Blee, Women of the Klan, offers an example on 87.

  34. Richard, “ ‘This Is Not a Catholic Nation,’ ” 301.

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

  36. Wallace, “The Ku Klux Klan Comes to Kowley Kounty, Kansas,” 13.

  37. The last is an example of the notion of vagrancy, and the use of vagrancy law, widely employed in the South to control the movements of people of color; in the southern world of segregation, vagrancy law gave police wide discretion to charge a person of color on the streets.

  38. Wallace, “The Ku Klux Klan Comes to Kowley Kounty, Kansas,” 13–14; LaLande, “ ‘Beneath the Hooded Robe,’ ” 3, 24–26; Eckard Vance Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon: Its Character and Program” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1959), 70–73; Max Price, “The Oregon Ku Klux Klan: A Failed Attempt at Creating a Homogeneous State” (unpublished paper, Pacific University, 2011), 25.

  39. Larry O’Dell, “Ku Klux Klan,” in Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=KU001; Allerfeldt, “Jayhawker Fraternities,” 1049.

  40. National Humanities Center, “Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s,” http://americainclass.org/sources/becomingmodern/divisions/text1/colcommentaryklan.pdf.

  41. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 88.

  42. Trolinger, “The University of Dayton, the Ku Klux Klan,” 2, from the Dayton Daily News.

  43. Ibid., 1–2.

  44. Tucker, Notre Dame vs. the Klan, 103–4. Tucker believes that the killings were instigated by Evans in his feud with Stephenson.

  45. Hunt, “The Fundamentalist–Ku Klux Klan Alliance,” 85, 87.

  46. Sam Guerre, “The 1922 Ku
Klux Klan Inglewood Raid,” South Bay History, March 15, 2014, at http://blogs.dailybreeze.com/history/2014/03/15/the-1922-ku -klux-klan-inglewood-raid/; Monteval, The Klan Inside-Out, 97.

  47. Benjamin Herzl Avin, “The Ku Klux Klan, 1915–1925: A Study in Religious Intolerance” (PhD. diss., Georgetown University, 1952), 226–27; Bringhurst, “The Ku Klux Klan in a Central California Community,” 369; interview with V. Wayne Kenaston Jr., quoted in Larralde and Griswold del Castillo, “San Diego’s Ku Klux Klan”; William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 148, 150.

  48. Thomas H. Heuterman, The Burning Horse: The Japanese-American Experience in the Yakima Valley, 1920–1942 (Cheney: Eastern Washington University Press, 1995), 95–108.

  49. Quoted in Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest, 60.

  50. Clark, “The Bigot Disclosed,” 154–58.

  51. Cocoltchos, “The Invisible Empire,” 112.

  52. Trollinger, “The University of Dayton, the Ku Klux Klan,” quotations on 7.

  53. Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 34, 36, 40–41.

  54. Hatle and Vaillancourt, “One Flag, One School, One Language,” 361.

  55. Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism.”

  56. Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 123; Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 260; Allen Safianow, “ ‘You Can’t Burn History’: Getting Right with the Klan in Noblesville, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 2 (June 2004): 124; Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism,” 11, 16.

  57. Rhomberg, “White Nativism and Urban Politics,” 44.

  58. “The Anti-Klan Fighters of the 1920s,” Daily Kos, January 21, 2015, formerly available at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1/21/1358986/-The-anti-Klan -fighters-of-the-1920-s. New Jersey was not fertile ground for the Klan, but because Alma White’s headquarters were there, the Klan could not stay away.

  59. Harry Baujan, quoted in Trollinger, “The University of Dayton, the Ku Klux Klan,” 7.

  60. Tucker, Notre Dame vs. the Klan.

  61. Richard, “ ‘This Is Not a Catholic Nation,’ ” 297.