The KKK in the 1920s

Many allusions to Trump rallies as modern versions of Klan gatherings have been made by commentators in recent weeks. Let's look at what the Klan was really like during its last big appearance on the American political scene.

While the immigration restriction movement drew on the apprehension that America might be transformed ethnically by an invasion of alien elements from without, the Ku Klux Klan preyed on the feeling that the country was already in peril from elements within. The KKK was organized on Stone Mountain in Georgia on Thanksgiving night, 1915, in the light of a blazing cross, by William J. Simmons, a former Methodist circuit rider and organizer of fraternal associations. Modeled on the hooded order of Reconstruction days that murdered blacks, the Klan admitted "native born, white, gentile Americans" who believed in white supremacy; by implication, they could not be Catholics. Although it took the name of an old Southern society, the Klan owed more to the nativist tradition of Know-Nothingism, having its greatest appeal not to the deep South but to the Midwest, Southwest, and Far West, where people were worried less by blacks than by the encroachment of "foreigners," especially if they were papists.

The Klan attracted its chief support from the sense of desperation experienced by old stock Protestants who felt themselves being eclipsed by the rise of the city with its polyglot masses. Though the Klan had a following in some cities, especially ones undergoing rapid growth, two-thirds of its members lived in places with a population of less than 100,000, and the KKK found metropolises with large proportions of the foreign-born hostile territory. In cities such as Boston and San Francisco, the Klan got nowhere, and in New York it did not dare show its face at a public gathering.

"The reason there is a Klan in America today," said Colorado's grand dragon, "is to make America safe for Americans." Those attracted to the KKK thought themselves engaged in a battle which their falling birth rates doomed them to lose. "The dangers," Simmons explained, "were in the tremendous influx of foreign immigration, tutored in alien dogmas and alien creeds, slowly pushing the native-born white American population into the center of the country, there to be ultimately overwhelmed and smothered." In its elaborate ritual, its stark pageantry, its white hooded sheets, its titles of "Exalted Cyclops," "Klaliff," "Klokard," "Kligrapp," and "Klabee," the KKK appealed to the lodge vogue of blue collar and middle-class America. When the Klansmen sang "klodes" with his neighbor and klasped his hand in a secret grip, he felt reassured.

In the early years of the 1920s, the Klan, which had less than 5,000 members as late as 1920, experienced a phenomenal growth, and, with probably a few million adherents at one time or other during this period, made its weight felt in politics. In Youngstown, Ohio, the KKK elected the mayor and the entire city government, and in Texas, where it ousted a four-term U.S. Senator, the Klan dominated the legislature and the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Wichita Falls. Candidates running with KKK backing were elected to the United States Senate in six states, and the Klan controlled municipal governments in cities such as Denver and El Paso. In Oklahoma, the governor called all the citizens of the state into military service and declared martial law in an effort to put down the organization; the Klan-controlled legislature retaliated by impeaching him and removing him from office in November, 1923. In staunchly Republican Oregon, a state settled by Eastern and Midwestern Protestants, the Klan helped elect a Democratic governor, Walter Pierce, by the largest majority in state history and supported a law that wiped out parochial schools by requiring parents to send all children between eight and sixteen to public schools. (In 1925, the Supreme Court {Pierce v. Society of sisters} declared the law unconstitutional.) For the most part, though, the Klan did not know, once it had power, what to do with it, for it was more a vehicle to express resentment than a movement with coherent policy aims.

Where the Klan entered, in its wake too often came floggings, kidnappings, branding with acid, mutilations, church burnings, and even murders. In the South, the Klan sometimes used terror to preserve a social system that was swiftly changing. Yet even in the South, intimidation, although it was used against blacks (a bellhop in Texas was branded on the forehead with the initials "KKK," and black homes were burned in Florida to discourage voting), was employed more often against Catholics or political enemies or bootleggers or, most important, against individuals deemed immoral. In Birmingham, a Klansman murdered a Catholic priest in cold blood and was acquitted; in Naperville, Illinois, two hours after a monster Klan ceremony, a Roman Catholic church was torched. When the mayor of Columbus, Georgia, ignored demands of the KKK that he remove the city manager, his home was dynamited. After the triumph of the Klan ticket in Alabama in 1927, a black woman was flogged and left to die; a white divorcee was punched into unconsciousness; a naturalized citizen was lashed for marrying a native-born woman; and a black was beaten until he sold his land to a white man for less than it was worth.

Such episodes did not characterize the everyday routine of the KKK, but they were symptomatic. Most Klansmen never participated in violence, and not a few viewed the organization as an interest group for white Protestants or a fraternal association that sometimes carried on benevolent activities. When the Klan did resort to flogging or social ostracism, it was less likely to do so against ethnic minorities than to people thought to have broken some moral code--by trafficking in liquor, or gambling, or carrying on an extramarital affair. (One of its avowed aims was to "break up roadside parking.") Yet, as an organization exclusively of white Protestants, there was no mistaking its hostility to Catholics and Jews and to anyone it defined as "alien." The Klansmen, who thought white Protestants were being victimized, had no comprehension of the fact that it was not they but Catholics and Jews who faced blatant discrimination in employment, and blacks who, when they were not at the mercy of lynch mobs, were denied the most fundamental Constitutional rights. Furthermore, as Don Kirschner has pointed out, while there were any number of fraternal associations that promised conviviality and solace, "the one thing that the Klan offered that was uniquely its own was extra-legal or even illegal action."

Opponents of the KKK fought fire with fire. Especially in northern cities, the order encountered resistance not only from Catholics, Jews, and liberals, but also from bootleggers and other elements of organized crime. When in Chicago a Klan organizer boasted that his group would soon be strong enough to drive out the bootleggers and maintain law and order, the bullet-ridden body of an outspoken Protestant clergyman was discovered in Cicero, headquarters of the gangland boss, Al Capone. After the Imperial Wizard spoke in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, thousands of armed foes of the KKK massed at a bridge, and when Klan marchers pushed on, several fell dead. Elsewhere, KKK halls from Texas to Indiana were bombed or set ablaze.

The Klan reached the heights in Indiana, and in Indiana it toppled to its death. Hundreds of thousands of white-sheeted Klansmen took over the state. Many of them sauntered brazenly through town with their hoods flung back, not even bothering to conceal their identity. On parade nights in Kokomo, the police force vanished and white sheeted figures, bearing a striking resemblance to the absent patrolmen, directed traffic. The Grand Dragon of the Indiana KKK, David Stephenson, extended his influence in the Klan beyond the borders of the state and into the Republican Party, especially through his association with the governor of Indiana, Ed Jackson. A gross, corrupt man, who was a boozer, a womanizer, and a violent brawler, Stephenson made himself a political power and a multimillionaire overnight through his Klan activities. Finally, he overreached himself: he forced a twenty-eight-year-old State House secretary onto a Chicago-bound train and brutally assaulted her. When she took poison, his henchmen spirited her to a hotel and held her for several days without medical aid; a month later she died. In November, 1925, Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. When his crony, Governor Jackson, refused to pardon him, Stephenson opened a "little black box" which sent a congressman, the mayor of Indianapolis, and other officials to jail; Jackson was indicted for bribery but escaped because of the statute of limitations.

As early as 1924, the Klan had been put on the run in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, and the conviction of Stephenson sealed its doom. It brought into bold relief both the hypocrisy of the Klan (Stephenson had denounced petting parties and had warred on vice) and the corruption that threaded the history of the order. Many of the KKK leaders had joined the organization primarily for personal profit; many who preached righteousness were corrupt. Feeding on a millennial lust for rule by a league of the pure, the Klan, once in power, sometimes licensed the very evils it said it would exterminate. Its ugly side lay in the fact that it appealed to many who were frustrated by the rigid moral code of the small town. Klansmen often felt tempted by that which they were condemning--sexual freedom, modernity--and their frustration sometimes took a sadistic turn, as when they stripped "fallen" women naked and whipped them. The Stephenson episode revealed everything that was seamy about the organization. The KKK never recovered.