The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

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

  63. Tucker, Notre Dame vs. the Klan, 152–55, 131–34; Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” 62; “The Anti-Klan Fighters of the 1920s.”

  64. Imperial Night-Hawk, August 29, 1923; Tucker, Notre Dame vs. the Klan.

  65. Jenkins, Steel Valley Klan.

  66. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska,” 245; Trevor Griffey, “The Ku Klux Klan in Washington State, 1920s,” Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_intro.htm.

  67. Canadians also joined the Ku Klux Klan bandwagon in the 1920s, even in Francophone Canada. A Montreal Klan group burned Catholic buildings in Quebec in 1922. Other groups formed in Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, but the movement was particularly strong in the west. There the Klan targeted Catholic immigrants and French Canadians. Five provinces enacted legislation prohibiting bilingual instruction in the schools. At the same time, expatriate Protestant Canadians in New England were admitted to a Klan auxiliary, the Royal Riders of the Red Robe. Richard, “ ‘Why Don’t You Be a Klansman?’ ”; Richard, “ ‘This Is Not a Catholic Nation.’ ”

  68. Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism,” 8, 12–13, 17, 19; Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 38.

  69. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 19; Horowitz, “Order, Solidarity,” 195–96; Zerzan, “Rank-and-File Radicalism Within the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.”

  70. Virginia Durr, quoted in Zerzan, “Rank-and-File Radicalism Within the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.”

  71. Franklin Folsom, Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story of Collective Action of the Unemployed, 1808–1942 (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1991), 267.

  72. Bringhurst, “The Ku Klux Klan in a Central California Community,” 390.

  73. My interpretation of vigilantism is influenced by my earlier study, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  74. As they did in the action documented in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction.

  Chapter 7. KKK FEMINISM

  1. My interpretation of women’s Klans is deeply indebted to Kathleen Blee and Nancy MacLean. For examples from other countries, see Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, eds., Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists Around the World (New York: Routledge, 2002).

  2. Leila J. Rupp and Verta A. Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Maureen Honey, “Gotham’s Daughters: Feminism in the 1920s,” American Studies 31, no. 1 (1990): 25–40.

  3. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929), chapter 4.

  4. Blee, Women of the Klan, 65ff.

  5. Groups included the White American Protestants, Grand League of Protestant Women, Ladies of the Cu Clux Clan, Ladies of the Golden Den, Hooded Ladies of the Mystic Den, Puritan Daughters of America, and Ladies of the Invisible Empire (of which more below). Blee, Women of the Klan, 28.

  6. Quoted in Wendy Rielly Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen of the 1920s: A Study of Tribalism, Gender, and Women’s Power” (MA thesis, Oregon State University, 1997), 68.

  7. Blee, Women of the Klan, 125.

  8. Founded in 1891, this was originally an auxiliary to the male Order of United American Mechanics.

  9. Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting,” 17.

  10. New York Times, September 21, 1921.

  11. Quoted in Blee, Women of the Klan, 22.

  12. Quoted in Wade, The Fiery Cross, 162.

  13. Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting,” 17.

  14. A right-wing anti-feminist screed on the web today accuses Tyler of seizing power in the Klan by falsely accusing Grand Dragon Simmons of “improprieties” and replacing him with her “paramour.” David R. Usher, “Feminism: Today’s Women’s Ku Klux Klan,” World Net Daily, October 31, 2014, http://www.wnd.com/2014/10/feminism-todays-womens-ku-klux-klan/.

  15. My discussion of Barr is primarily from Dwight W. Hoover, “From Quaker to Klan ‘Kluckeress,’ ” Indiana Magazine of History 87, no. 2 (June 1991): 171–95, data on 187; and Steven J. Taylor, “Misc Monday: A Ku Klux Quaker?” Historic Indianapolis, September 28, 2015, http://historicindianapolis.com/misc-monday-a-ku-klux-quaker/.

  16. Quoted in Hoover, “From Quaker to Klan ‘Kluckeress,’ ” 171–72, from Papers Read at the Meeting of Grand Dragons, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, at Their First Annual Meeting Held at Asheville, North Carolina, July 1923, 135.

  17. These profits came to light from a suit against Barr by the WKKK.

  18. Holiness is a sectarian movement rooted in Wesleyan Methodism. Its central tenet is the call for a second work of grace, aka entire sanctification, following a first salvation. This second salvation cleanses the sanctified person of even the temptation to sin and therefore allows a fully holy life. The holiness churches thereby deny the doctrine of original sin.

  19. New York Times obituary, “Bishop Alma White, Preacher, Author; Founder of Pillar of Fire Dies at 84—Established Several Schools and Colleges,” June 27, 1946.

  20. Blee, Women of the Klan, 75. White herself claimed that she had created sixty-one churches. Some one-third to one-half of Methodists followed holiness beliefs in the 1890s. Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman Publishers, 1971).

  21. Biographical information and this quotation are from Alma Bridwell White, The Story of My Life and the Pillar of Fire (Zarephath, NJ: Pillar of Fire, 1935), Vol. I, quotation 223–24.

  22. Pentacostalism is a Protestant renewal movement that places special emphasis on a direct personal experience of God through baptism with the Holy Spirit.

  23. “Fundamentalist Pillar,” Time, July 8, 1946.

  24. Quoted in Merrit Cross, “Alma Bridwell White,” in Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 3:581–83.

  25. “Bishop v. Drink,” Time, December 18, 1939; “The Pillar of Fire Mission,” Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 1920, quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_of_Fire_International#cite_note-17.

  26. Cross, “Alma Bridwell White.”

  27. Lately Thomas, Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson (New York: William Morrow, 1970), 32.

  28. White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 187; White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 187.

  29. Alma Bridwell White, “America—the White Man’s Heritage,” Good Citizen, August 1929.

  30. The books are The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy; Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty; and Heroes of the Fiery Cross. She republished them as a three-volume set as late as 1943 under the title Guardians of Liberty.

  31. White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy; White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross.

  32. Alma Bridwell White, Woman’s Chains (Zarephath, NJ: Good Citizen, 1943). She also produced a periodical with the same name. Stanley, Feminist Pillar of Fire, 111–14.

  33. White, Guardians of Liberty, I, 121; White, Heroes of the Fiery Cross, 173.

  34. The Colorado Federation of Women’s Clubs, Colorado State Federation of Garden Clubs, and Women’s Club of Denver.

  35. Blee, Women of the Klan, 26, 167.

  36. Its list included Bishop William F. Anderson, Judge George W. Anderson, Bishop Benjamin Brewster, Professor Irving Fisher, Doctor David Starr Jordan, Rabbi Henry Levi, Bishop Francis J. McConnell, William A. Neilson, Dean Roscoe Pound, Rev. Harold E. B. Speight, and William Allen White. In forming the list, it implicitly signed on to the New York State Lusk Committee’s report, published as Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It. The Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities, popularly known as the Lusk Committee, was formed in 1919 by the New York state legislature to investigate individuals and org
anizations in the state suspected of sedition.

  37. Helen Tufts Bailie, “Our Threatened Heritage: A Letter to the DAR by a Member,” April 5, 1928, http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/milit/doc20.htm.

  38. New York Times, September 13, 1921, quoted in Jackie Hill, “Progressive Values in the WKKK,” Constructing the Past 9, no. 1, article 6 (2008): 24, http://digital commons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=constructing.

  39. Richard, “ ‘Why Don’t You Be a Klansman?’ ” 513.

  40. Blee, Women of the Klan, 140.

  41. Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 4.

  42. Richard, “ ‘Why Don’t You Be a Klansman?’ ” 513.

  43. Blee, Women of the Klan, 31, 59ff.; Richard, “ ‘Why Don’t You Be a Klansman?’ ”

  44. Quoted in MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 114–15.

  45. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 59.

  46. Western American, quoted in Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 38.

  47. McClanahan, “Klan of the Grandmother.” We don’t know if she was ever admitted.

  48. WKKK Constitution; WKKK Kloran; quotation from Kelli R. Kerbawy, “Knights in White Satin: Women of the Ku Klux Klan” (MA thesis, Marshall University, 2007), 66.

  49. Aware that he was losing power, Simmons had set up the Kamelia as a rival to the WKKK, but it failed to gain momentum.

  50. Quoted in Kerbawy, “Knights in White Satin,” 57–58.

  51. Ibid, 57; Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” image on 42.

  52. Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 32.

  53. Blee, Women of the Klan, 32.

  54. Quoted in ibid., 50–51. I am indebted to India Cooper for finding the original source of this line; the Klan writer seems to have taken this phrase from a book touting patriotism, Francis Trevelyan Miller’s America, the Land We Love (New York: W. T. Blaine, 1916), 468.

  55. Western American, quoted in Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 21.

  56. Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting,” 103; Blee, Women of the Klan, 120.

  57. Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 96.

  58. Western American, quoted in Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 5.

  59. Mary Beth Slusar, “Multi-Framing in Progressive Era Women’s Movements: A Comparative Analysis of the Birth Control, Temperance, and Women’s KKK Movements” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2010), 117.

  60. McClanahan, “Klan of the Grandmother.”

  61. Betty Jo Brenner, “The Colorado Women of the Ku Klux Klan,” Denver Inside and Out: Colorado History 16 (2011): 64; Blee, Women of the Klan, 140.

  62. Blee, Women of the Klan, 31, 34.

  63. Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 20, 23.

  64. New York Times, April 1, 1925.

  65. A photograph of Sanger with Klanspeople—men as well as women—circulates widely, especially online, but it is a fake that pastes a well-known image of Sanger onto an image of Klanspeople. Opponents of reproductive rights frequently put out “fake news” about Sanger, birth control, and Planned Parenthood, the successor organization to Sanger’s Birth Control League.

  66. Quoted in Blee, Women of the Klan, 24.

  67. McClanahan, “Klan of the Grandmother.”

  68. Quoted in Kerbawy, “Knights in White Satin,” 721.

  69. Association of Georgia Klans, “The Charitable Works of the Ku Klux Klan,” http://associationofklanskkkk.weebly.com/activities-from-1915-1944.html.

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

  71. Blee, Women of the Klan, 140–44; Brenner, “The Colorado Women of the Ku Klux Klan,” 65; Doherty, “Aliens Found in Waiting,” 136.

  72. Blee, Women of the Klan, 158–59; Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 23.

  73. Blee, Women of the Klan, 161, 166–67.

  74. New York Times, May 11, 1925, quoted in Hill, “Progressive Values in the WKKK,” 25.

  75. Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 36.

  76. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 90.

  77. Letters to the Athens, Georgia, Klan that Nancy MacLean uncovered showed that white women looked to the Klan as a paragovernmental force that could discipline these violent and irresponsible men. MacLean, “White Women and Klan Violence in the 1920s: Agency, Complicity and the Politics of Women’s History,” Gender and History 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 285–303; Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction; Katz, The Invisible Empire.

  78. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 37–38.

  79. Knights of the KKK, “The Obligation of American Citizens to Free Public Schools,” author’s possession, n.d.

  80. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 258–59.

  81. Blee, Women of the Klan, 128.

  82. Kerbawy, “Knights in White Satin,” 721; Hill, “Progressive Values in the WKKK,” 27.

  Chapter 8. OREGON AND THE ATTACK ON PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

  1. See Matt Novak, “Oregon Was Founded as a Racist Utopia,” American Renaissance, January 21, 2015, http://www.amren.com/news/2015/01/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia/; and “Kali Ma Beer and the Oregon Ku Klux Klan,” Hindu Human Rights, May 11, 2012, http://www.hinduhumanrights.info/kali-ma-beer-and-the-oregon-klu-klux-klan/.

  2. Oregon Voter: Magazine of Citizenship for Busy Men and Women, March 4, 1922, 4; Frances Paul Valenti, “The Portland Press, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Oregon Compulsory Education Bill: Editorial Treatment of Klan Themes in the Portland Press in 1922” (MA thesis, University of Washington, 1993), 65–67, 88; Clark, “The Bigot Disclosed,” 168; Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 203.

  3. Kimberley Mangun, “ ‘As Citizens of Portland We Must Protest’: Beatrice Morrow Canaday and the African American Response to D. W. Griffith’s ‘Masterpiece,’ ” Oregon Historical Quarterly 107, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 382–91; Eckard V. Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon,” in Experiences in a Promised Land: Essays in Pacific Northwest History, ed. G. Thomas Edwards and Carlos A. Schwantes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 271.

  4. Robert D. Johnston, in his The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), attributed the election upset to “the peculiar form of class alliance between small business owners and skilled workers” (223).

  5. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 86; Tyack, “The Perils of Pluralism,” 85; Rothwell, “The Ku Klux Klan in the State of Oregon.”

  6. Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon,” 271; Valenti, “The Portland Press, the Ku Klux Klan,” 68, 75.

  7. Figures differ. See Eckard Toy, “Ku Klux Klan,” Oregon Encyclopedia, https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/ku_klux_klan/#.V7lwZj4rI6U; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 88; Mangun, “ ‘As Citizens of Portland We Must Protest,’ ” 395; and Eckard V. Toy Jr., “The Ku Klux Klan in Tillamook, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 53, no. 2 (April 1962): 61.

  8. Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon,” 271; Norberg, “Ku Klux Klan in the Valley.”

  9. Quoted in Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 225.

  10. Trevor Griffey, “Luther I. Powell, Northwest Ku Klux Klan Organizer,” chapter 2 in “The Washington State Klan in the 1920s,” Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, 2007, http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_powell.htm.

  11. Oregon Voter, March 4, 1922, 4.

  12. Oregon Voter, March 25, 1922, 5.

  13. Saalfield, Forces of Prejudice, 40; Rothwell, “The Ku Klux Klan in the State of Oregon,” 130ff. Baker claimed his proudest accomplishment was running IWW “subversives” out of town; “Worst Mayors Ever,” Portland Mercury, October 19, 2012, http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/worst-mayors-ever/Content?oid =7320289.

  14. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 245.

  15. Western American, quoted in Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 23; Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 209.

  16. Annie McLain, “Unmasking the Oregon Klansman: The Ku Klux Klan in Astoria, 1921–1925” (unpublished paper, Pacific University, 2003), ht
tps://www.pacificu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Annie%20McLain.pdf.

  17. R. H. Sawyer, “Ku Klux and Jews,” Oregon Voter, April 15, 1922, 16.

  18. Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 22–26.

  19. Quoted in Saalfeld, Forces of Prejudice, 23.

  20. Authorities made immediate use of the new law, arresting Socialist Party members for selling copies of the Western Socialist less than a week after the law took effect.

  21. Linda Tamura, The Hood River Issei: An Oral History of Japanese Settlers in Oregon’s Hood River Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 88ff; William Toll, “Black Families and Migration to a Multiracial Society: Portland, Oregon, 1900–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History 17, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 40, 57.

  22. Finn J. D. John, “Corruption, Hypocrisy Brought Down Ku Klux Klan in 1920s,” Yamhill Valley NewsRegister, June 6, 2013.

  23. Marjorie R. Stearns, “The History of the Japanese People in Oregon” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1937), quoted in Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon,” 281.

  24. Quoted in William Toll, “Progress and Piety: The Ku Klux Klan and Social Change in Tillamook, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 69, no. 2 (April 1978): 39, 77; Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 204.

  25. Thomas H. Heuterman, “Bifurcation: How the Wapato, Washington, Independent Covered Japanese in the Yakima Valley, 1920–1942,” AEJMC Minorities and Communication Division working paper, 1987, 12; John, “Corruption, Hypocrisy Brought Down Ku Klux Klan.”

  26. Quoted in Larralde and Griswold del Castillo, “San Diego’s Ku Klux Klan,” at www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/2000/april/klan.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid., from an interview with Galarza.

  29. McLain, “Unmasking the Oregon Klansman.”

  30. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 198–99.

  31. Ibid., 208–9.

  32. Oregon Journal, June 16, 1922, quoted in Saalfeld, Forces of Prejudice, 66–67; M. Paul Holsinger, “The Oregon School Bill Controversy, 1922–1925,” Pacific Historical Review 37, no. 3 (1968): 330.