The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

33. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman & Smith, 1835), https://archive.org/details/pleaforwest00beec.

  34. Quoted in Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 151.

  35. I suspect that, like ALEC today, Klan leaders drafted legislation that friendly state legislators could introduce.

  36. Rory McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 125.

  37. Allerfeldt, “Jayhawker Fraternities,” 1051; “bagful of bolshevism” quoted in Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 61; Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, “The Obligation of American Citizens to Free Public Schools,” n.d., author’s possession. The conservative condemnation confirms that the national Klan in this period did not focus on a threat from Communism.

  38. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 122–23; Rod Farmer, “Power to the People: The Progressive Movement for the Recall, 1890s–1920,” New England Journal of History 57, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 59–83. U’ren was also successful in making Oregon the first state to conduct a presidential primary and to institute proportional representation.

  39. The federation, originally established during World War I, declared itself “an instrument to counteract the strength of corporate power in Oregon,” thus recalling the anti-elitist stream in this movement. Exalted Cyclops Frederick L. Gifford was elected its director. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 85.

  40. Some leading Oregon Masons claimed that the schools bill was “foisted” upon them by the Klan. Tyack, “The Perils of Pluralism,” 77; Valenti, “The Portland Press, the Ku Klux Klan”; Holsinger, “The Oregon School Bill Controversy,” 329–30; Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 205; Saalfield, Forces of Prejudice, 74.

  41. Edward Clarke, quoted in Holsinger, “The Oregon School Bill Controversy,” 329.

  42. Quoted in ibid., 330; Saalfield, Forces of Prejudice, 72.

  43. Testimony of a “Klan Victim” from North Judson, Indiana, http://www.iub.edu/~imaghist/for_teachers/mdrnprd/Klan/klanvictimmemory.html.

  44. Quoted in Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 205. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan, 92–95; Eckard V. Toy, “Robe and Gown: The Ku Klux Klan in Eugene, Oregon, During the 1920s,” in Lay, The Invisible Empire in the West, pp. 160ff.

  45. The following summary of Oregon elections and legislative action is from Holsinger, “The Oregon School Bill Controversy.”

  46. Loomis, “A Narrative Interpretation of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Oregon,” 16.

  47. Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon,” 277.

  48. Emily Pellegrini, “The Fool of the Family: Nativism and the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon’s 1922 Election” (BA thesis, University of Oregon, 2014), 45–46.

  49. Robert R. McCoy, “The Paradox of Oregon’s Progressive Politics: The Political Career of Walter Pierce,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 110, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 399.

  50. Quoted in Pellegrini, “The Fool of the Family,” 55, 57, from Oregon Voter, April 22, 1922, 8.

  51. Oregon Voter, June 17, 1922; Saalfield, Forces of Prejudice, 27.

  52. Quoted in Saalfield, Forces of Prejudice, 27. Banker Robert E. Smith of Lumberman’s Trust was also an ardent supporter of the schools bill; ibid., 67.

  53. Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon,” 280–81.

  54. Pellegrini, “The Fool of the Family,” 62, 65.

  55. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 207; Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 231–33.

  56. New York Times, April 1, 1924.

  57. Holsinger, “The Oregon School Bill Controversy,” 338–39.

  58. Ibid., 336; Saalfield, Forces of Prejudice, 72; Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 36.

  59. Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 165–67; Hatle and Vaillancourt, “One Flag, One School, One Language,” 367.

  60. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 248–49; Tyack, “The Perils of Pluralism,” 91.

  61. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 25, 27, 80; Toy, “Robe and Gown,” 170ff. No data on firings are available, but we know, for example, that from April to July 1924, the Anaheim, California, city council was systematically dismissing its non-Klan city employees and replacing them with Klanspeople, and in Madison Klanspeople tried to intimidate public school teachers by calling and asking their religion. Cocoltchos, “The Invisible Empire,” 111; Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 37.

  62. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 248–49; Tyack, “The Perils of Pluralism,” 91.

  63. Western American, quoted in Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 25, 32.

  64. Blee, Women of the Klan, 25.

  65. Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 40–44.

  66. Besides LOTIE, these included Kamelia, Queens of the Golden Mask, League of Protestant Women, Puritan Daughters of America, and American Women.

  67. The following summary of this episode is from Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” chapter 4, taken in turn from Lem Dever, Confessions of an Imperial Klansman (Portland, OR: n.p., 1924); but since Dever was not present, we know that he was repeating, or embellishing, what the women told him.

  68. Today we do not think of organizations such as LOTIE as commodities, but the fact that Davis did is entirely consistent with the Klan’s understanding of the whole enterprise as a business and not necessarily more egregious than Evans’s insistence on merger, because both plans were intended to increase Klan leaders’ profits.

  69. Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 68, 72.

  70. Ibid., 26–27.

  71. “Tales from the Grubby End: The Ku Klux Klan in Newburg,” Portland Tribune, July 16, 2014, http://portlandtribune.com/pt/11-features/227348-90225-tales-from-the-grubby-end-the-ku-klux-klan-in-newberg.

  72. In the 1920s, however, as I argued in earlier work, progressive women operated within the same contradiction: leaders were the exception, and domesticity remained the standard for the majority of women. Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994).

  Chapter 9. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC WARFARE

  1. Goldberg, “The KKK in Madison,” 38; White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, 121–22; Rory McVeigh, “Structural Incentives for Conservative Mobilization: Power Devaluation and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, 1915–1925,” Social Forces 77, no. 4 (June 1999): 1461–96; Katz, The Invisible Empire, 99.

  2. Mae N. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 48, 288n97.

  3. Imperial Night-Hawk, August 29, 1923. The proposal represented the Klan’s assumption that it could be as influential as those of the US Congress Immigration Commission of 1911, also known as the Dillingham Commission, whose report formed one of the first official governmental arguments for immigration restriction.

  4. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 196–97; Feldman, Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 24.

  5. Tucker, The Dragon and The Cross, 54; Allerfeldt, “Jayhawker Fraternities,” 1042.

  6. MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 18.

  7. Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 308–11; Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross, 103, 116.

  8. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 27.

  9. G. W. Price to “esteemed Klansman,” September 10, 1922, in Monteval, The Klan Inside-Out, 202.

  10. Quoted in Rhomberg, “White Nativism and Urban Politics,” 44.

  11. The following description of the convention is taken from Robert K. Murray, The 103rd Ballot (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

  12. In another sign of the Klan’s mainstream character, the Republican platform shared with the Democratic support for immigration restriction.

  13. Quoted in Garland S. Tucker III, “Lessons from the Ultimate Contested Convention,” National Review, April 9, 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433875/contested-convention-historical-precedent-good-and-bad.

  14. Quoted in Jack Shafer, “1924: The Wildest Convention in U.S. History,” Politico, March 7, 2016, http://www.politico.com/magaz
ine/story/2016/03/1924 -the-craziest-convention-in-us-history-213708.

  15. Peter Carlson, “The Battle Brawl of 1924,” Washington Post, March 4, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/03/AR 2008030303277.html.

  16. Murray, The 103rd Ballot; Garland S. Tucker III, “The Ultimate ‘Messy’ Convention: The 1924 Democratic Convention,” Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation blog, July 22, 2016, https://coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-ultimate-messy-convention-the-1924-democratic-convention/.

  17. Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska,” 252.

  18. Price, “The Oregon Ku Klux Klan”; Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Tillamook, Oregon,” 63.

  19. Quoted in Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross, 89.

  20. Toll, “Progress and Piety,” 79; McLain, “Unmasking the Oregon Klansman”; Schuyler, “The Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska,” 252.

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

  22. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Shape of Fear,” North American Review, June 1926.

  23. Toll, “Progress and Piety.” Kansas was another location of great Klan power; see Charles William Sloan Jr., “Kansas Battles the Invisible Empire,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 40, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): 393–409, https://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-historical-quarterly-kansas-battles-the-invisible-empire/13247.

  24. Charles O. Jackson, “William J. Simmons: A Career in Ku Kluxism,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1966): 331; Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross, 2.

  25. Brophy, “Norms, Law, and Reparations,” 25.

  26. Quoted in Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism,” 19; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 165, 196; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 185; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 210; Fryer and Levitt, “Hatred and Profits,” 27; Richard, “ ‘Why Don’t You Be a Klansman?’ ”; Pegram, “Hoodwinked,” 96, 115; Rhomberg, “White Nativism and Urban Politics,” 39–55.

  27. Scholars have not been able to examine this activism closely, likely because it happened so diffusely and was therefore not visible enough to be reported in newspapers. Another reason for this omission in studies of the Klan may be underestimating women’s activism, for they were certainly the main shoppers in most families. Leonard Moore, in his Citizen Klansman (92), concludes that the boycotting was mainly ineffective, and he may be right, but we lack evidence.

  28. Quoted in Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 22; Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 61.

  29. Saalfield, Forces of Prejudice, 26; Safianow, “ ‘You Can’t Burn History,” ’ 122.

  30. David A. Horowitz, “The Klansman as Outsider: Ethnocultural Solidarity and Antielitism in the Oregon KKK,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 80, no. 1 (January 1989): 14.

  31. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, “The Practice of Klanishness,” Imperial Instructions Document No. 1, 1924, author’s possession.

  32. Examples in Tyack, “The Perils of Pluralism,” 86, 91.

  33. The others were physical Klanishness (helping to maintain the health and well-being of Klansmen), social Klanishness (equality among members), and moral Klanishness. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, “The Practice of Klanishness”; Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 33.

  34. McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, 160.

  35. Jewish Telegraphic Agency release, October 27, 1924, http://www.jta.org/1924/10/27/archive/klan-starts-nation-wide-boycott-against-jews.

  36. Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 231ff., offers an example from Columbus, Ohio.

  37. Knights and Women of the Ku Klux Klan, “Klorero,” Elmira, New York, 1925.

  38. Imperial Night-Hawk, June 20 and August 15, 1923, quoted in Shotwell, “Crystallizing Public Hatred,” 46.

  39. Horowitz, “The Klansman as Outsider,” 14.

  40. Safianow, “ ‘You Can’t Burn History,’ ” 123.

  41. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 193.

  42. Blee, Women of the Klan, 150.

  43. Ibid., 115; Allerfeldt, “Jayhawker Fraternities,” 1048.

  44. The practice of reclaiming and revaluing a derogatory term has been characteristic of movements of outsiders and people discriminated against.

  45. Her interviews with former Klanswomen yielded stories not only painful but bewildering, revealing an economic violence akin in its suddenness to the ethnic hatreds that broke out in the destruction of Yugoslavia. Blee, Women of the Klan, 147ff.

  46. Steven Gerontakis, “AHEPA vs. the Ku Klux Klan: Greek Americans on the Path to Whiteness” (senior thesis, University of North Carolina–Asheville, 2012).

  47. Blee, Women of the Klan, 150; Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton”; Gregory Pappas, “Forgotten History: The Klan vs. Americans of Greek Heritage in an Era of Hate and the Birth of the Ahepa” (senior thesis, University of North Carolina–Asheville, 2012), 19, http://www.pappaspost.com/forgotten-history-the-klan-vs-americans-of-greek-heritage-in-an-era-of-hate-and-the-birth-of-the-ahepa/.

  48. Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 22; Saalfield, Forces of Prejudice, 72.

  49. Oregon Voter, January 21, 1922, 12; March 4, 1922, 4.

  50. Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan, 168; Brenner, “The Colorado Women of the Ku Klux Klan,” 64; Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 5.

  51. Larry R. Gerlach, “A Battle of Empires: The Klan in Salt Lake City,” in Lay, The Invisible Empire in the West, 131.

  52. Quoted in MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 113.

  53. Tom Rice, “How the Ku Klux Klan Seized Cinema to Become a Force in America,” The Conversation, December 8, 2015, https://theconversation.com/how-the-ku-klux-klan-seized-cinema-to-become-a-force-in-america-52030; Rice, “ ‘The True Story of the Ku Klux Klan.’ ”

  54. Melissa Ooten, Race, Gender, and Film Censorship in Virginia, 1922–1965 (Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2015), 91; Rice, “Protecting Protestantism,” 371; Rice, “ ‘The True Story of the Ku Klux Klan.’ ”

  55. Rice, “ ‘The True Story of the Ku Klux Klan,’ ” 488.

  56. Scott Bomboy, “The Klan’s Indirect Role in Fostering the Jazz Age,” Constitution Daily, November 28, 2012, http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/11/the-klans-indirect-role-in-fostering-the-jazz-age/.

  57. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 13, 54, 79.

  58. Western American, quoted in Thorson, “Oregon Klanswomen,” 22.

  59. For example, Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 36.

  60. Imperial Night-Hawk, June 20 and August 15, 1923, quoted in Shotwell, “Crystallizing Public Hatred,” 46.

  61. Richard, “ ‘This Is Not a Catholic Nation,’ ” 293; Bohn, “The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted,” 390.

  62. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 27; Horowitz, “The Klansman as Outsider,” 14.

  Chapter 10. CONSTITUENTS

  1. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 237.

  2. For example, Charles N. Hurd of Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph; Rothwell, “The Ku Klux Klan in the State of Oregon,” 124. Lycurgus Breckenridge Musgrove, coal mining millionaire, was a Klansman and chair of the Anti-Saloon League executive committee, but that was in the South, where conditions were entirely different; Pegram, “Hoodwinked,” 105.

  3. With the expansion of “welfare” programs, that ideology also redefined “independent.” Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State,” Signs 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 309–36.

  4. Arno Mayer, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem,” Journal of Modern History 47, no. 3 (1975): 409–36.

  5. Rhomberg, “White Nativism and Urban Politics,” 45, 47.

  6. Bringhurst, “The Ku Klux Klan in a Central California Community,” 370–71.

  7. Tucker, The Dragon, 6, 131.

  8. LaLande, “ ‘Beneath the Hooded Robe,’ ” 17.

  9. Horowitz, “Order, Solidarity, and Vigilance,” 194–95; Goldberg, Hooded Empire, 183–86. But white-collar men were not overrepresented in Pennsylvania; see Fryer and Levitt, �
�Hatred and Profits.”

  10. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 242.

  11. Goldberg, “Beneath the Hood and Robe,” 195.

  12. Fryer and Levitt, “Hatred and Profits”; Holsinger, “The Oregon School Bill Controversy,” 328.

  13. Toll, “Black Families,” 79.

  14. Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” 99.

  15. Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 121–22.

  16. Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 95.

  17. Fox, Everyday Klansfolk, 125; Rhomberg, “White Nativism and Urban Politics,” 45–46.

  18. Loomis, “A Narrative Interpretation of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan,” 276ff.

  19. Pegram, “Hoodwinked,” 115; Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 72.

  20. Toy, “Robe and Gown,” 154; Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism,” 16.

  21. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 482.

  22. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, table 3.

  23. Quoted in Zerzan, “Rank-and-File Radicalism Within the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s,” 52.

  24. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 191.

  25. Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism,” 12, 17, 19.

  26. LaLande, “ ‘Beneath the Hooded Robe,’ ” 40.

  27. Nelson, “The Ku Klux Klan for Boredom,” 198.

  28. Taylor, “What the Klan Did in Indiana,” 330–32.

  29. US Decennial Census (1890–2000); American Community Survey (2010).

  30. Blee, Women of the Klan, 119–22.

  Chapter 11. LEGACY: DOWN BUT NOT OUT

  1. For example, Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 34, 44, 143, 146.

  2. Safianow, “The Klan Comes to Tipton,” 226; Taylor, “What the Klan Did in Indiana,” 330–32.

  3. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (London: Collier Macmillan, 1987), 140; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 62–63, 105; R. J. Stove, “J. Edgar Hoover and the Ku Klux Klan,” National Observer 41 (Summer 2001), http://www.nationalobserver.net/2001_summer_109.htm.

  4. E.g., attorney Donald G. Hughes to Atlanta Klan headquarters, August 20, 1923, quoted in Monteval, The Klan Inside-Out, 113.

  5. Minutes in Horowitz, Inside the Klavern, 144.

  6. Material about Stephenson comes from Booth, The Mad Mullah; Taylor, “What the Klan Did in Indiana,” 330–32; Lutholtz, Grand Dragon; Doug Linder, “The D. C. Stephenson Trial: An Account,” 2010, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftri als/stephenson/stephensonaccount.html; Abbott, “Murder Wasn’t Very Pretty.”