The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  William R. Pattangall of Maine also argued for explicitly denouncing the Klan. “I say to you,” Pattangall told the delegates, “that there is need to be sent over the whole wide United States a message…that our party hates bigotry, hates intolerance; opposes bigotry and opposes intolerance; and because it hates them and hates hypocrisy and opposes them, it therefore calls bigotry and intolerance and hypocrisy by their right names when it speaks of them.”

  Pattangall then yielded to Mrs. Carroll Miller of Pennsylvania. “What would you, my friends, think of a home in America where the little children shuddered nightly in terrorizing fear of the hooded Ku Klux Klan?” she asked. “Oh, there are such places, hundreds of them…where a foreign-born is discriminated against by the shopkeeper, places where the wife waiting for her husband to return from the mine, the field or the factory never feels sure that he will not be mobbed or beaten to death before he returns to her and his family.”

  She called on her fellow newly enfranchised women to join her in opposing the Klan. “If the men are afraid to face this issue, I beg you women to cast aside your trepidation and deceit,” Miller said. “We who are accustomed to suffer the pains of childbirth that the race may go on should not be afraid to uphold a great principle that our children may live in happiness and security. We who are accustomed to wait and fight in the lonely watches of the night for the life of the child when death is hovering over the crib should not be the ones to flinch now.”

  Rising in opposition, Governor Cameron Morrison of North Carolina urged the delegates to drop the reference to the Klan. “Are we, without trial and without evidence…to try, condemn, and execute more than a million men who are professed followers of the Lord Jesus Christ?” To attack the Klan directly, Morrison said, “will make half a million Ku Klux in the next ten days, in my judgment.” Jared Y. Sanders of Louisiana was subtler, trying to cast the Klan as a victim of the proposed platform language. “And remember one thing more,” Sanders said. “You cannot fight intolerance with intolerance. You cannot fight the devil with fire. He is an expert in that line.”

  Finally, William Jennings Bryan, the grand old man of the party, rose. To name the Klan specifically in the platform, he said, was not worth the political cost. It would divide the party, and for Bryan there were larger battles to be waged. “I call you back in the name of our God; I call you back in the name of our party; I call you back in the name of the Son of God and Savior of the world,” Bryan told the delegates. “Christians, stop fighting, and let us get together and save the world from the materialism that robs life of its spiritual values.”

  In a victory for the Klan, the plank was defeated, but only by the narrowest of margins. And while the Klan helped deny Al Smith the nomination, it also failed to carry its frontrunner, former secretary of the treasury (and Woodrow Wilson son-in-law) William G. McAdoo, to victory. At Madison Square Garden, Smith supporters, who opposed Prohibition, which the Klan favored, attacked with the cry of “Ku, Ku, McAdoo!” McAdoo’s backers replied with: “Booze! Booze! Booze!” The convention was left with a compromise nominee in John W. Davis, a former congressman, solicitor general, and ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

  After the 103rd ballot, a California delegate turned to a colleague on the floor and asked, “Is it really over?”

  “Yes,” his colleague said.

  “Amen!”

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  In August 1925, on a day of occasional rain showers, thirty thousand Klansmen (some estimates say fifty thousand) converged on Washington for a huge march on the National Mall. “The parade was grander and gaudier, by far, than anything the wizards had prophesied,” the journalist H. L. Mencken wrote. “It was longer, it was thicker, it was higher in tone. I stood in front of the Treasury for two hours watching the legions pass. They marched in lines of eighteen or twenty, solidly shoulder to shoulder. I retired for refreshment and was gone an hour.” Returning, Mencken was struck by the continuity of the scene. “When I got back Pennsylvania Avenue was still a mass of white from the Treasury down to the foot of Capitol Hill—a full mile of Klansmen and their ladies.”

  The demonstration—in full regalia—took place at a time when long-standing cultural buoys seemed in danger of being swept away by a hostile modernity. The Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925 was emblematic of the struggles of the day. Bible-believing Southerners opposed the teaching of evolution in public schools, prompting a celebrated contest between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow in a rural East Tennessee county. A sign hung outside the courthouse urging people to READ YOUR BIBLE—as if that were the last word on the subject.

  Which, for many believers, it was. Testifying about the literalism of the Bible—whether the whale in fact swallowed Jonah, for example—Bryan grew flustered. “I do not think about things I don’t think about,” he said at one point.

  Darrow pounced. “Do you think about things you do think about?” he asked.

  Eloquent, acerbic, and controversial (as well as, in the views of some of his contemporaries and in diary entries published after his death, anti-Semitic), Mencken came south from Baltimore to cover the trial. “Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist…call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed,” Mencken wrote. “It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone—that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized….But the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history….They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.”

  In August 1925, thirty thousand Ku Klux Klansmen (some estimates put it at fifty thousand) staged a massive demonstration on a day of occasional rain showers in Washington, D.C.

  Mencken’s brilliant, if ungenerous, caricature of Bryan, the former politician, captured the essence of a great man in decline. During a powerful speech by Darrow, Mencken wrote that Bryan “sat tight-lipped and unmoved. There is, of course, no reason why it should have shaken him. He has those hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it….These are his people. They understand him when he speaks in tongues. The same dark face that is in his own eyes is in theirs, too. They feel with him, and they relish him.”

  And they exulted in his victory for their cause: The jury sided with Bryan, convicting Scopes of violating the Tennessee statute against the teaching of evolution. (Scopes was fined $100.) At the conclusion of the trial, Darrow predicted, rightly, that the events at Dayton would endure. “I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft,” Darrow said. “We have done our best to turn the tide…of testing every fact of science by a religious doctrine.” One legacy of Dayton was that religion and science had joined race and ethnicity as a theater of war in the fight within the American soul.

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  What of the Klan? “No arguments you may use, no facts you may present, no logic you may array will in the slightest affect these people,” the Kansas editor William Allen White, who opposed the Klan in an unsuccessful race for governor, wrote. “They have no capacity for receiving arguments, no minds for retaining or sifting facts and no mental processes that will hold logic. If they had any of these they would not be Kluxers.”

  Fortunately, White was being hyperbolic. The story of the Klan in the 1920s suggests that arguments, facts, and logic, steadily presented, can help shed light when darkness threatens to prevail. By 1928 or so, the Klan, like its Reconstruction predecessor in the early 1870s, was ebbing. And just in time: A Klan with substantial strength in the tumult of the 1930s might have increased the chances of America falling into the totalitari
anism that consumed some European nations in the same years. “The Ku Klux Klan,” the Reverend Charles Jefferson, the pro-Klan author of Roman Catholicism and the Ku Klux Klan, said, “is the Mussolini of America.”

  Despite the Klan’s political power, American institutions designed to check and balance popular passion struck blows against the Invisible Empire. The courts, the press, and two presidents (Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge) took stands, however limited, against the politics of fear.

  In 1928, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a New York law requiring the Klan to file membership lists with state authorities on the grounds that, as the appellate court in the case wrote, “It is a matter of common knowledge that the association or organization”—the Klan—“exercises activities tending to the prejudice and intimidation of sundry classes of our citizens.”

  In the opinion of the court, authored by Justice Willis Van Devanter, an appointee of President Taft’s, the Klan “was conducting a crusade against Catholics, Jews, and negroes, and stimulating hurtful religious and race prejudices….It was striving for political power, and assuming a sort of guardianship over the administration of local, state, and national affairs; and…at times it was taking into its own hands the punishment of what some of its members conceived to be crimes.” Three years earlier, in 1925, a unanimous Supreme Court had declared a Klan-supported Oregon law targeted at Roman Catholic schools unconstitutional. The Klan and its allies had passed a statute to force all children to attend public schools, thus shuttering Catholic institutions; the court was unimpressed and struck it down.

  Voices of reason in the popular press did what they could. Like William Allen White—and like the justices of the Supreme Court—many editors saw the Klan as potentially fatal to the yet-unrealized but nevertheless real promise of the country. The New York World had led the way, publishing a landmark investigative series on the Klan in 1921; its reporting on the organization’s violence was particularly vivid. In the short run, though, the press’s opposition had the perverse effect of boosting the Klan rather than undercutting it. In a dynamic that’s familiar in our own time, hostility from the journalists of the East convinced a number of middle Americans that a cause under such assault must have something to recommend it.

  “It wasn’t until the newspapers began to attack the Klan that it really grew,” William Simmons recalled. When the House Rules Committee, prodded by the World series, held brief hearings into the Klan, it, too, inadvertently fed the flames, at least for a time. “Certain newspapers also aided us by inducing Congress to investigate us,” Simmons recalled. “The result was that Congress gave us the best advertising we ever got.”

  The work of combatting broadly held views like those of the Klansmen of the 1920s is almost never easy or quick. It requires years of persistent witness and of standing firm in protest when it would be more convenient to give in and move on. In the case of the Klan, journalists had to repeat the same points over and over at the risk of boring readers—and, truth be told, themselves, for one reason many people go into journalism is a love of novelty, of shifting narratives, changing scenes, new characters, and fresh contests. The case against the Klan, though (like the case against segregation, and, later, the case against Senator Joe McCarthy), required a willingness to return again and again to the argument that decency and the Klan could not coexist. “Wearing masks, practicing sacrilege in burning fiery crosses, appealing to race and religious hatreds is so thoroughly un-American and so contemptible that we are surprised that any intelligent person would engage in such perfidy for even one performance,” The Dalton Citizen, a newspaper in North Georgia, wrote in 1925.

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  The presidency also played a role in suggesting that America should be above Klan-like extremism. In October 1921, President Harding, a Republican, went to the heart of Democratic Dixie for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the founding of Birmingham, Alabama. Harding had supported anti-lynching laws—a strong civil rights position in that time—and took the occasion on this hot Wednesday in Birmingham’s Capitol Park to deliver an unusual speech on race. He spoke of political equality (“I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote”) and of equality of opportunity in terms of economics and education. (“Partnership of the races in developing the highest aims of all humanity there must be if humanity…is to achieve the ends which we have set for it.”)

  Harding, however, approvingly cited the assertions of hereditary inferiority in Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color and insisted that he did not envision social equality or what he called “amalgamation.”

  “There are many who do not agree with [Harding] as to political equality,” The New York Times reported after the speech, “but what he said about the impossibility of ‘social equality’ more than offset anything he said on other lines.” That wasn’t quite the case. “If the President’s theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion,” Senator Pat Harrison, Democrat of Mississippi, remarked, “then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States.”

  William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was a scholar, historian, and activist—as well as an editor and a poet—whose penetrating writings and devotion to the cause of equality made him one of the nation’s most important voices through decades of tumult and progress.

  W.E.B. Du Bois gave Harding limited credit. It was, Du Bois said, “a braver, clearer utterance than Theodore Roosevelt ever dared to make or than William Taft or William McKinley ever dreamed of.”

  That said, Du Bois then eviscerated the president’s Stoddard-inspired white-supremacist views. The “pseudo-science to which the President unhappily referred,” Du Bois wrote, was “vain, wrong and hypocritical.” For Du Bois the right path forward lay with those who shared the view of the Pan-African Congress, which Du Bois had helped found: “The absolute equality of races—physical, political and social—is the founding stone of world peace and human advancement. No one denies great differences of gift, capacity and attainment among individuals of all races, but the voice of science, religion and practical politics is one in denying the God-appointed existence of superior races, or of races naturally and inevitably and eternally inferior.” For Du Bois, “To deny this fact is to throw open the door of the world to a future of hatred, war and murder such as never yet has staggered a bowed and crucified humanity.”

  At Birmingham, Harding obliquely spoke out against the Klan and its extra-legal vigilantism. “The nation which withstood internecine conflict, so heroically fought as was the Civil War, will tolerate the threat of no minority which challenges the supremacy of law or endangers our common welfare,” Harding said. “There will never come the day when the rights of any minority are denied [and]…no minority shall ever challenge the supremacy of the rule of law.”

  The president was more direct on the Klan question in the third week of May 1923 when he dedicated a statue of Alexander Hamilton at the Treasury Department. “We have our factions which seek to promote this or that interest, without regard to the relationship to others, and without regard for the common weal,” Harding said. “We have the factions of hatred and prejudice and violence….Hamilton warned us that ‘however such combinations or associations may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely themselves to usurp the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.’ ” The New York Times’s headline on its story about the event made it clear that no one doubted what Harding was talking about: “Harding Deplores Growth of Factions and Strikes at Klan.” He made the same case to the Imperial Grand Council of the Ancient Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine in June of that year. Of “menacing organizations,” Harding said, “This isn’t fraternity, this is conspiracy.”

  In attempts to hurt Harding with racially minded white voters in the Jim Crow era, his polit
ical opponents had long trafficked in rumors that he had black ancestry. In the 1920 presidential campaign, a professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio, William E. Chancellor, produced inflammatory pamphlets on the subject. “By means of a fake family tree and a number of worthless affidavits,” the historian Robert K. Murray wrote, “Chancellor’s circulars showed that no fewer than four separate and converging lines of Harding ancestors possessed Negro blood.” Harding chose to meet the allegations with a dignified public silence, as did his wife, Florence. “I want you to know I have known about these miserable attacks,” Mrs. Harding wrote a friend, “but more than that, I want you to be assured, and absolutely certain that I am not in the least disturbed by them….We are unafraid, undismayed, and undisturbed.”

  In private, Harding acknowledged that the facts of the matter were a mystery to him. “How do I know, Jim?” Harding privately said to James Faulkner of the Cincinnati Enquirer. “One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.” (In 2015, DNA testing disproved the speculation.)

  There were other rumors, too. After Harding’s death in 1923, the Klan put out the word that Harding had, as president, secretly joined its ranks while in office. “We have 227 in the House of Representatives and 27 in the United States Senate,” Basil E. Newton of the Klan’s Imperial Council exaggeratedly claimed, “and we held one initiation in the dining room of the White House. You know what that means.” The Coolidge administration said the reports were “too ridiculous to discuss.”

  Coolidge, the new president, had been at his boyhood home in Vermont when the news about Harding’s death came, and he took the oath of office in the middle of the night from his father, a notary public. Taciturn and enigmatic, an embodiment of New England rectitude, frugality, and learning, President Coolidge was a more interesting man than either many of his contemporaries or most historians have thought him. Though he, like Harding, refrained from taking the Klan on by name, Coolidge offered the country some glimpses of its better self.