Protestant preachers formed the early leadership of the Klan and cloaked it in religious propaganda that provided a moral justification for its actions. Politically, the Klan supported Prohibition and attracted support from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and similar groups. The first head of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan was a former WCTU president in Arkansas.12 While today the Klan is taboo, in the early 1920s, most whites saw the Klan as a conservative Christian patriotic group fighting against immorality and the dilution of white Protestant society. The Klan played on white fears by making protection of white women its highest, and most noble, priority. By cloaking themselves in chivalry, religion, patriotism, and anonymity, they hoped to put a positive face on vigilantism.13
The national Republican party found southern lynchings revolting, and if local law enforcement would not prosecute the mobs, they wanted the federal government to do it. In 1921, President Woodrow Wilson fought for an antilynching bill, which all Texas congressmen opposed. One of them called the bill a political payoff for blacks:
During the discussion yesterday afternoon, Finis J. Garrett, Democratic leader, denounced the bill as a further effort to destroy the constitution, ‘The bill ought to be labeled “A bill to encourage rape,”’ he declared.
Garrett said that its passage is a “Republican pretense to pay political debts” and that the Republicans are compelled to vote for the bill “by their Republican overlords.”
Garrett charged the negroes were responsible for the Republican victory “and now they demand payment of political debt.”14
THE KLAN IN DALLAS
The Klan claimed 100,000 members in Texas by 1921 and ethnic violence was on the rise, with attacks on blacks, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and allegedly immoral whites. To announce their presence in Dallas, Klansmen invited a Dallas Times Herald reporter to accompany them for the April 1 kidnapping of a black elevator operator who worked at the downtown Adolphus Hotel. The Klansmen took the man, whom they accused of having sex with a white woman, beat him, and used acid to brand the initials KKK into his forehead. They took him to the Adolphus and ordered him to walk half-naked and bleeding into the hotel.15 The Times Herald carried a front-page story the next day, but both the Dallas police and Dallas County sheriff Don Harston refused to investigate. Both the sheriff and the police commissioner were Klan members. “The Negro was guilty of doing something which he had no right to do,” Harston said.16
Six weeks later, on May 21, hundreds of men wearing Klan robes marched behind an American flag and a burning cross through downtown Dallas. They carried placards that read GAMBLERS GO; GRAFTERS GO; WE STAND FOR WHITE SUPREMACY; FOR OUR MOTHERS; FOR OUR DAUGHTERS; and THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE THERE TODAY, HERE YESTERDAY AND HERE FOREVER. The group timed their march for 9:00 P.M. on a Saturday night, when downtown theaters and department stores emptied out and traffic snarled. The march lasted an hour and thousands watched as the Klan passed without saying a word. A story ran on the front page of the Times Herald, along with a proclamation from the group:
That this organization is composed of native born Americans and none others.
That it proposes to uphold the dignity and authority of the law.
That no innocent person of any color, creed or lineage has just cause to fear or condemn this body of men.
That our creed is opposed to violence, lynchings, etc. but that we are even more strongly opposed to things that cause lynching and mob rule.
That this organization stands for the enforcement of all laws without fear or favor. It recognizes, however, that situations frequently arise where no existing law offers a remedy. It hopes to see such conditions remedied by the power of public opinion and the enactment and enforcement of proper laws.
That this organization does not countenance and it will not stand for the co-habitation of blacks and whites of either sex. It does not countenance and it will not stand for social parasites remaining in this city. It is equally opposed to the gambler, the trickster, the moral degenerate and the man who lives by his wits and is without visible means of support.
This organization further believes that the certainty of perpetuating American liberties lies in the solid support of our public school system, adding thereto love of country and veneration for the Deity. With this in view, it wants to see an American flag raised each day with appropriate ceremonies over every public school house in the state and each pupil in those schools instructed in the principles of morality. We believe in the enactment of a statute to that effect.17
The Dallas Morning News immediately opposed the Klan. The day after the march, editorial-page editor Alonzo Wasson wrote a piece entitled “Dallas Slandered,” in which he did not hesitate to mock the city’s newest fraternal organization:
The spectacle of eight-hundred masked and white-gowned men parading the streets of Dallas under banners proclaiming them Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and self-appointed guardians of the community’s political, social and moral welfare has its ridiculous aspect. To this none can be blind, unless it be the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Their sense of superior righteousness may have had the effect of dulling their sense of humor. But also it has a serious significance which will not be lost on the minds of men who cherish the community’s good name and have the intelligence to understand how well-designed that exhibition was to bring it under reproach.
It was a slander on Dallas, because the only conditions which could be given to excuse the organization of such a body do not exist. This exhibition bore false witness against Dallas to everyone who has heard of it. White supremacy is not imperiled. Vice is not rampant. The constituted agencies of government are still regnant. And if freedom is endangered, it is by the redivivus of the mob spirit in the disguising garb of the Ku Klux Klan.18
Wasson wrote the editorial on a Sunday, and he did not ask permission before running it. The paper’s publisher, English immigrant George Dealey, paid a visit to Wasson the day the piece ran to discuss his paper’s new editorial position. Dealey was angry with Wasson for not conferring with him, but he congratulated him on a job well done. The editorial set off an almost decade-long battle between the Dallas Morning News and the Klan. Wasson’s swift and eloquent response to the Klan is yet another sign that the old excuse we southerners use for our ancestors—that they didn’t know any better—doesn’t hold water.19
In September 1921, the Morning News and the New York World News combined forces to run a lengthy investigative series on the Klan. The reporters dug into the Klan’s finances to see how it was spending the millions of four-dollar membership fees it collected. Simmons had built a $1.5 million Imperial Palace in Atlanta, taken over a defunct university, and bought expensive homes for the group’s officers. The newspapers also exposed how the Klan was recruiting members of the military. In Marlin, Kennedy ran the story in the Democrat:
The Klan organizers go out instructed by headquarters to make their first drive to secure city, town and village authorities as members, and to center their efforts also on judges of local and circuit courts and the police forces. In the weekly news letters sent out from Atlanta by Imperial Kleagle [Edward] Clarke [the chief recruiter] for circulation among Klansmen, the success achieved along these lines is boasted as the reason why in so many places the Klan has ventured to work openly without fear of interference, and as an incentive for pushing forward the work of setting up an invisible, Klan-controlled super-government throughout the country.20
No one could call the stories about the Klan balanced. The papers relentlessly attacked the organization as violent, subversive, and anti-American. The papers compiled a detailed list of the invisible empire’s illegal activities since its founding on Stone Mountain in 1916. The reporters gathered many secret Klan documents, outlined its rituals, and interviewed Klansmen. Most of all, the reporters showed the Klan’s hypocrisy, noting that the group’s actions differed dramatically from the leaders’ words. But it did little to change the Klan’s popularity, and the Klan continued to grow
, a phenomenon that gave more and more political business leaders reason to consider the organization a threat to democracy and their authority. Martin McNulty Crane, the former lieutenant governor, organized many of Dallas’s top business leaders in 1922 to form the Dallas County Citizens League, primarily to oppose the Klan.21
Despite their pledge against violence, Dallas Klansmen castrated a light-skinned African-American doctor for allegedly dating a white woman, and hooded men raided the offices of Houston’s Informer and Dallas’s Express, black newspapers. By November 1922, Democrats elected an admitted Klan member to the U.S. Senate, Earle B. Mayfield. Nationally, the Klan claimed more than four million members by 1922, a number that would reach six million in 1924.22
As the Klan’s popularity grew, the leaders made an aggressive effort to recruit the most powerful people in Dallas to join them. One delegation visited Edward Titche, the owner of the successful Titche-Goettinger Department Store and one of the city’s wealthiest citizens. When they asked him to join, he told them that would be impossible because he was Jewish. The Klan delegation politely agreed.23 Nevertheless, Alex Sanger, the Jewish owner of the Sanger-Harris Department Store, agreed to sit on the dais next to Klan leaders when they opened a Klan-sponsored children’s home. Sanger and his family secretly financed the anti-Klan Dallas County Citizens League. This provides an idea of how difficult even wealthy and powerful Dallasites found it to navigate the city’s politics. The Klan boycotted businesses that did not support the group and insisted that some businesses require their employees to join the invisible empire or face a boycott. Yet many Klan members dropped their anti-Semitism stance when their businesses required them to work with Jewish merchants. Ultimately, all sides placed profit making over their feelings about the secret brotherhood.24
A TOMLINSON GOES TO DALLAS
Tommy Tomlinson graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in civil engineering in May 1923 and took a job in Dallas. He didn’t want to return to small-town life and decided to make a name for himself in the Big D. Tommy was tall and thin, with a country accent that left the impression he was not well-educated, but he knew enough about engineering to get a job with the most prestigious residential real estate developer in the city, Flippen-Prather.25 The firm designed and built the toniest subdivisions in Dallas, beginning with Highland Park in 1908. Tommy wanted nothing more than to become wealthy and to live in one of the mansions his new company built. When he first got to Dallas, he made sure to meet the most important people in the city, especially politicians and businesspeople. Tommy was a Mason, like his father, and used that fraternal organization to build connections. He also attended Dallas’s First Baptist Church.26
Tommy spent much of his time on construction sites, supervising white, black, and Mexican laborers. He fit the engineer stereotype, socially awkward and always certain in his calculations. He was unfriendly and aloof on job sites, and he considered anyone who was not a white Protestant like himself inferior. He used racial and ethnic slurs casually against the people who worked for him and harbored a hatred for both Catholics and Jews. There is no direct evidence of Tommy joining the Klan, but his sympathies certainly rested with the group, and he associated with many men who made their Klan affiliation known, including the Dallas police commissioner and the pastors of the largest Protestant churches. His son Bob, my father, thinks Tommy may have joined the Dallas Klan:
This is strictly hindsight, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my father had been a member of the Klan when he came to Dallas, or joined right afterwards, because the Klu [sic] Klux Klan was so entrenched in Dallas in 1923 when he came here. That would have been the quickest way for a guy to get ahead and he certainly had the requirements as far as his attitude was concerned … it would almost be surprising if he weren’t, but he never mentioned it.27
My father didn’t know at the time that Tommy’s father, R.E.L., was almost certainly a Klansman in Marlin, giving Tommy even more reason to join in Dallas. In the mid-1920s, an estimated 40 percent of eligible American white men joined the Klan. In Dallas, nearly 50 percent became Klansmen between 1921 and 1924, the highest per capita Klan membership in the country. Klansmen controlled city hall and most elected county offices.28 The Klan’s strategy to recruit the elite was intended to impress and attract the working class and young professionals like Tommy.29 Tommy probably never physically attacked anyone—the average Klan member didn’t—but as a young man steeped in racism and looking to establish himself in Dallas, he very likely spent at least some time with those who did.
The exalted cyclops of Dallas Klan No. 66 was Hiram Wesley Evans, who was also a Thirty-second Degree Mason. Evans orchestrated a Klan coup and overthrew founder William Simmons as the national leader in November 1922 to become the new imperial wizard. While Evans was one of the Klansmen who had branded the Adolphus Hotel elevator operator, he publicly denounced violence in 1922, arguing that it would only bring government attention and distract from his goal of making the Klan a powerful political party.30 Evans blatantly lied about Klan vigilantism to the Dallas Morning News in a 1923 interview: “In no single instance has the Klan been involved in such a proceeding. The greatest mistake the press of the country has made is in assuming that the Klan has had anything to do with those outrages.”31
Evans’s charisma attracted many new members, and he used contemporary scientific theories about racial superiority to justify the Klan’s goal of a permanent white Protestant ruling class in America. The Klan’s leadership included Dallas’s police commissioner, Louis Turley; criminal district judge Felix Robertson; the county’s Democratic party chairman; the county tax assessor; the local superintendent of Ford Motors; four Dallas Power & Light Co. executives, and the Dallas Times Herald’s managing editor, Phillip Fox, who later quit to become the national Klan’s publicity director. Regular members included Dallas County State Bank president and future Dallas mayor Robert L. Thornton, and several top-ranking Dallas police officers. The Klan’s puritanism won support from high-profile clergy, including Dr. C. C. Selectman of the First Methodist Church and the pastors of Westminster Presbyterian and the First Presbyterian churches.32
The Klan’s enforcers turned the Trinity River bottoms, which run through the center of Dallas, into an open-air torture chamber, abducting and bullwhipping suspected sex offenders, bootleggers, African-Americans, supposedly immoral women, and anyone else they felt violated their code. Historians have documented at least sixty-eight victims of Klan floggings along the river.33
To demonstrate how mainstream the Klan was, Evans pushed for a special Klan Day at the Texas State Fair in Dallas, one of the state’s most important events. The monthlong carnival and rodeo included livestock and crop competitions, educational displays, and plenty of rides and food. Certain days were designated for different groups, such as high school or elementary days. In 1923, fair organizers declared Klan Day on October 23, and the Dallas chapter planned a Klan initiation ceremony at the fair that evening, complete with a fireworks display. City and county offices closed and the Union Pacific Railroad booked eight special trains to deliver Klan supporters from across the state and Oklahoma. Thousands of Klansmen marched through downtown in full regalia to Fair Park, marking one of the largest-ever Klan gatherings. That morning, Dallas Klan No. 66 opened a home for abandoned children with a ceremony attended by the mayor, Louis Blaylock, who said, “Now as to the Klan. I have watched the order grow from its infancy to its present period of greatness, and I want to say that so far as I know, the criticisms that have been made of it have been without foundation.”34
More than 151,000 people went to the fair that day. At 1:00 P.M. Evans gave a speech entitled “Immigration Is America’s Big Problem.” He hoped to rally working-class whites by blaming their low pay and unemployment on immigrants from non–northern European countries. In Evans’s world, whiteness was far more limited than we might imagine today. He pronounced that people of Latin, Greek, Balkan, or Slav descent could not follow the rule o
f law like people from western Europe, and therefore the United States should ban them. Jews and Catholics represented a special threat, he warned, because they plotted to control the world. Evans cooked an anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-immigrant stew that he flavored with populism and trade unionism. He denounced industrialists for making people work on Sundays and condemned the wealthy for instituting slavery to ensure a cheap workforce. Now that slavery was banned, he argued, those same capitalists imported inferior workers from overseas because they were cheaper than white men. “Do our overlords of industry realize what they are doing to America?” Evans asked the rapturous crowd.35 The Klan’s national leaders swore in 5,631 new members after the speech, while the drum and bugle corps from Dallas Klan No. 66 performed for 75,000 onlookers in the Fair Park grandstand.36 Evans felt triumphant.
For many Dallas elites, though, the Dallas Morning News’ repeated warnings against the Klan appeared prescient. When Evans took this more populist tack, he revealed to Dallas’s elite that Klansmen were not chivalric, patriotic Protestants protecting antebellum southern values, but urban working-class vigilantes empowered by demagogic leaders. The city’s most powerful residents decided to stop the Klan.
For the next six years, the Klan’s battle with the Morning News continued, with ever-increasing support from businessmen, and editorial writers railed against the Klan’s secrecy and pandering to poor whites. The Klan denied any wrongdoing and pointed to its charity work. The group called on its members to boycott the paper and threatened any business that advertised in it. The paper’s circulation plummeted and the parent company sold the Galveston News to keep the Dallas paper afloat. Dealey later called the paper’s stand against the Klan “perhaps the most courageous thing The News ever did.”37
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