The Second Coming of the KKK Read online

  In memory of my friend, collaborator, and radical guru,

  the late Ros Baxandall

  And to my beloved partner, Allen Hunter

  CONTENTS

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Introduction: “100% AMERICANISM”

  1.REBIRTH

  2.ANCESTORS

  3.STRUCTURES OF FEELING

  4.RECRUITMENT, RITUAL, AND PROFIT

  5.SPECTACLES AND EVANGELICALS

  6.VIGILANTISM AND MANLINESS

  7.KKK FEMINISM

  8.OREGON AND THE ATTACK ON PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

  9.POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC WARFARE

  10.CONSTITUENTS

  11.LEGACY: DOWN BUT NOT OUT

  Appendix 1: A Glossary of Some Klan Titles

  Appendix 2: Klan Evaluation of US Senators, 1923

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In writing this book I was able to stand on the sturdy shoulders of many other scholars. Not only rigorous, they are also scholars who cared enough about freedom, justice, and our nation of immigrants to spend time studying something as unpleasant as the Ku Klux Klan. They understood that we Americans need a full and honest accounting of all our past, especially when it continues to shape our present. (But then, when doesn’t it?)

  The work of these scholars is cited repeatedly in the endnotes, but I want to offer here particular thanks to Kathleen Blee, David A. Horowitz, Allen Hunter, and Nancy MacLean. I am grateful also that I could rely on work by Charles Alexander, Kelly Baker, Betty Brenner, Newell Bringhurst, Dana Caldemeyer, David Chalmers, John Craig, Sarah Doherty, Glenn Feldman, Craig Fox, David J. Goldberg, Robert Alan Goldberg, Elizabeth Hatle, Thomas Heuterman, Kenneth Jackson, William Jenkins, Robert Johnston, Kelli Kerbawy, John T. Kneebone, Jeff LaLande, Elinor Langer, Shawn Lay, Rory McVeigh, Richard Melching, Tim Messer-Kruse, Leonard Moore, Thomas Pegram, Tom Rice, Mark Richard, Chris Rhomberg, Allen Safianow, Michael Schuyler, Wendy Thorson, Eckard Toy, William Trollinger Jr., Todd Tucker, Frances Valenti, and Wyn Wade. These people did the hard work and hard thinking that guided me. I hope I have done them justice.

  I want also to thank the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the NYU Graduate School for giving me time that helped me write this book, and the NYU History Department for providing such a stimulating and supportive place to work.

  Several scholar friends also did me the favor of reading parts of this text. Much gratitude to Kathleen Blee, Allen Hunter, Rosie Hunter, Michael Kazin, Nancy MacLean, and Charles Postel. Whatever mistakes remain, despite their best efforts, are mine alone.

  I am appreciative of the many colleagues, friends, and acquaintances with whom I have discussed right-wing populism, social movements, democracy, and feminism. I am particularly indebted to the late Ros Baxandall, as well as to Suzanne Desan, Sara Evans, Susan Stanford Friedman, Michael Kazin, Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, Elinor Langer, Judith Walzer Leavitt, Elaine Tyler May, Michele Mitchell, Maria Montoya, Erika Munk, Andrew Needham, Molly Nolan, Guy Ortolano, Ros Petchesky, Frances Fox Piven, Katha Pollitt, Charles Postel, Liz Schneider, Barbara Weinstein, Judith Vichniac, and Marilyn Young. Please do not blame any of them for whatever errors can be found here.

  I continue to admire and be daunted by the energy, skill, and indomitable spirit of my longtime agent, Charlotte Sheedy. She took me on as a client in the 1970s, a time when publishers were leery of feminist books. Her sharp intelligence, ethical commitment, and passion for good books are inspiring. Her friendship over these many decades has been a blessing.

  Charlotte also brought me the gift of a superb and learned editor, Robert Weil of Norton. He is an intellectual of great perspicacity and integrity. His enormous capacity for work and superb skills as a reader and editor have made several of my books much better. He pushed me to finish this manuscript quickly, for very good reason, and then worked overtime to read every word of it; an editor of a sort that is rare these days, he offered me not only textual editing but substantive historical suggestions. I could not fulfill all his hopes, but the book is vastly better than it would have been without him. I am deeply grateful, Bob.

  Several others helped me greatly, reconfirming why I like working with W. W. Norton. It takes a team to publish a book. Because I hurried to produce this one, and finished it while teaching, Norton staff had to put up with my occasional inattentiveness and muddled queries. Particular thanks to Marie Pantojan, who patiently and efficiently answered questions, fielded requests, and shepherded the manuscript with care. My masterful assistant in gathering photographs, Elyse Rieder, not only coped with my disorganized record-keeping and indecisiveness but also offered sage advice. I benefited from the work of a fine copy editor, India Cooper. Not content merely to catch my errors and omissions, she found substantive mistakes and then did the research necessary to correct them. Her rephrasings often made my text more graceful. I am sure they will all be relieved when this book is finally in print. I am very grateful to everyone at Norton, and hope that they will be able to take some pride in the final product.

  This book began as a chapter of a larger work in progress on twentieth-century American social movements. Expanding that chapter into a book shortly before and just after the 2016 election reconfirmed my sense of the importance of understanding movements like the Klan. Readers may find here similarities with some contemporary political movements, and may note the continuing influence of Klannish impulses and ideology.

  Kathleen Blee wrote that scholars should not use right-wing groups as a “foil” against which we can define ourselves as more virtuous. I have tried, no doubt imperfectly, to live up to that admonition.

  Linda Gordon

  April 2017

  THE SECOND COMING OF THE KKK

  Introduction

  “100% AMERICANISM”

  A JULY 4 PICNIC IN KOKOMO, INDIANA, HELD IN 1923, was the town’s event of the decade, a lollapalooza of a carnival: some said fifty thousand came, while others said two hundred thousand—no doubt a wild exaggeration but one that reflected the celebratory mood. Reserved train cars brought in people from throughout Indiana and nearby states. This giant gathering made its participants feel part of something vast, patriotic, and noble—a celebration of Americanism. The food was so plentiful it required several rows of tables, each extending the distance of a block. In addition to the heaps of casseroles and desserts that women brought, the organizers provided five thousand cases of pop and near beer, fifty-five thousand buns, and six tons of beef, not to mention the two hundred and fifty pounds of coffee and twenty-five hundred pies. To entertain the kids, organizers had set up a children’s area with games and sports. Grown-ups could watch a six-round boxing match, a boys’ singing quartet, circus performers, and an evening film, then known as a talkie. An airplane circled overhead with a huge white cross flashing from the bottom of the fuselage while an acrobat performed daredevil feats on its wings.1

  Another Indiana mass pow-wow advertised like this:

  BIG BARBECUE 20 BRASS BANDS

  High Tight Wire Walking, 100 Feet in the Air

  Wild Bronco Busting — Outlaw Horses — Imported Texas Cowboys

  National Speakers — 200 Horsemen — Evening Fire Works

  Illustrated Parades — Visit Valparaiso University2

  The Sand Dunes — See the Calumet Region3

  These quintessentially American celebrations were Ku Klux Klan affairs, held frequently during the peak of its power in the 1920s. If we are to understand this second coming of the Klan, we must surrender some of our preconceptions about it. Those come mainly from the first Ku Klux Klan, established after the Civil War as a secret fraternity with the aim of reimposing
servitude on African Americans after the end of slavery. Its tools were lynchings, torture, and other forms of terrorism designed to inhibit any challenge to white supremacy. It had never entirely disappeared, but faded somewhat after achieving its goal: electoral disfranchisement and economic subjugation of black people.

  This “second Klan,” as it has been called, took pride in its namesake and its commitment to white supremacy. But it differed significantly from its parent. It was stronger in the North than in the South. It spread above the Mason-Dixon Line by adding Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and bootleggers to its list of enemies and pariahs, in part because African Americans were less numerous in the North. Its leaders tried to prohibit violence, though they could not always enforce the ban. Unlike the first Klan, which operated mainly at night, meeting in hard-to-find locations, the second operated in daylight and organized mass public events. Never a secret organization, it published recruiting ads in newspapers, its members boasted their affiliation, and it elected hundreds of its members to public office. It was vastly bigger than the first Klan, claiming, in what was almost certainly an exaggeration, four million to six million members.4 It owned or controlled about 150 magazines or newspapers, two colleges, and the Cavalier Motion Picture Company, dedicated to countering Hollywood’s immoral influence.5

  Most important, the 1920s Klan’s program was embraced by millions who were not members, possibly even a majority of Americans. Far from appearing disreputable or extreme in its ideology, the 1920s Klan seemed ordinary and respectable to its contemporaries. At many of its events, elected officials spoke. Its members included both the well and the poorly educated, professionals, businesspeople, farmers, and wage workers, but lower-middle-class and skilled working-class people formed its core constituency. In addition to providing fraternalism and sisterhood, it conferred prestige on its members and delivered business networking opportunities; for these reasons, many joined in the hopes of raising their social and economic status or identity. Thus membership in the Klan could appear to offer a route into the middle class. Although it claimed to represent the soul of America, its prestige rose from its exclusiveness. During its relatively brief period of strength, its members were proud to belong.

  The Klan built a politics of resentment, reflecting but also fomenting antipathy toward those who it defined as threatening Americanism. To understand its strength we need to notice which groups it identified as enemies. By blaming immigrants and non-Protestants for stealing jobs and government from “true” Americans, it stayed away from criticism of those who wielded economic power. Devoted to a business ethic, revering the pursuit of profit as confirmation of individual independence and manliness, the Klan respected men of great wealth and considered their social position earned and deserved. Instead it blamed “elites,” typically presented as big-city liberal professionals, secular urbanites who promoted cosmopolitanism (and were thus insufficiently patriotic) and looked down on Klanspeople as stupid and/or irrational and/or out of step with modernity. This disrespect for the Klan only intensified its hostility and sense of righteousness. Simultaneously the Klan denounced corruption, which it considered a uniquely big-city and non-Protestant phenomenon, and complained especially that big-city governments and police were venal and lazy.

  These Klan targets were always racialized. Its anti-elitism focused on Jews, all of whom appeared in Klan talk either as snobbish, overeducated, effete professionals or money-grubbing merchants out to fleece innocent consumers. Thus large populations of urban poor and working-class Jews did not exist in Klan social analysis. Political corruption it blamed on Catholics, the Irish and Italians especially, and here too the Klan did not acknowledge the masses of non-Protestant working-class people who were as much fleeced by corruption as were Klan members.

  In the last few decades, that understanding of elites, albeit with less anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism, has once again become common in political rhetoric. Today’s anti-elitism provides insight into the popularity of the Klan, and illustrates particularly the difficulty of placing it on a conventional left-right spectrum. True, Klanspeople typically preached distinctly right-wing principles, such as anti-Communism, though concern about political radicals played only a minor part in its diatribes. Of course, bigotry has long been characteristic of the Right. But Klan anger was also directed at what it considered immorality. This resentment did not always coincide with actual economic insecurity: some Klansmen felt their economic position slipping, but others were upwardly mobile. Racial and religious bigotry may have been provoked by economic anxiety but also arose from independent, long-standing American traditions. Goading members into racial and religious anger might not have worked without preexisting prejudices. Also challenging a neat left-right distinction is the fact that most traditional conservatives denounced the Klan, out of fear that mass social movements could lead to dangerous mob rule. Many ministers in mainstream Protestant denominations similarly denounced Klanspeople’s evangelical and occasionally fundamentalist theology as the symptom of a primitive, ignorant mindset. Further blurring the left-right distinction was the Klan’s endorsement of some progressive causes; however opportunist these endorsements, the Klan argued for more aid to public schools and welcomed the woman suffrage amendment.

  Status anxiety, another diagnosis of the Klan’s appeal, saturated Klan rhetoric, notably in the chorus of fake-news stories about how Catholics and Jews were taking over government. Its claim to be losing status and respect is not easily proved or disproved; we lack both historical evidence for anxiety and parameters for measuring it. Moreover, Klan rhetoric about the threat to American values also suggests a more immediate cause: the skillful demagoguery of leaders. The enthusiasm they engendered did not come exclusively from preexisting grievances. Because enlarging itself was the Klan’s highest priority, it fielded scores of traveling speakers who delivered the message that the country faced a total crisis—of morals, government, and religion. They deployed hyperbole and allegations of terrifying conspiracies to bring in more members and described themselves as part of a team committed to rescuing the country from its internal enemies. Klan speakers, many of whom were ministers skilled in stirring listeners, drew hundreds and occasionally thousands into membership. (Attending lectures was then a standard leisure-time activity.) That speakers stood to profit personally, as we will see below, gave them further motivation to hone their rhetorical skill. We cannot afford to underestimate the power of this rhetoric in building the mass social movement what was the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. As sociologists Kathleen Blee and Alberto Melucci remind us, we should understand those grievances as not only intensified but actually produced by this social movement.6

  Examining the Klan opens a window into a less familiar 1920s. A decade often called the “Roaring Twenties,” it has been represented through the “flapper” who drank, smoked, danced, and wore short skirts, through the hot new consumer culture, the birth of commercial radio, and the decade’s most important new product, automobiles—the number of cars on the road, 7.5 million by 1920, reached 23 million by 1929. And cars were implicated in the alleged immorality, because they provided not only mobility but sexual privacy for so many young Americans. The Klan thrived by exaggerating these stereotypes of cultural license, and its claim that the country was being led to moral depravity expanded its following.

  But these carefree and edgy images sometimes obscure the fact that the vast majority of Americans did not participate in that “roaring” culture. While Jay Gatsby’s crowd was dancing the lindy hop, actual voters supported President Harding’s promised “return to normalcy,” never mind the unprecedented corruption of his administration. His successor, “Silent Cal” Coolidge, combined stodgy respectability with an ideology that “the business of America is business,” leaving predatory capitalism entirely unregulated. And his successor, Herbert Hoover, once a hero of wartime relief, stubbornly opposed government action and as a result found himself presiding helplessly over a disastrous eco
nomic depression. The Ku Klux Klan supported these presidents. Its politics were mainstream.

  It may seem peculiar to label the KKK a social movement, since the better-known movements have been on the political left, such as civil rights and feminism. But almost any of the many scholarly definitions of “social movement” require recognizing it as such.7 True, many social movements lack central organization; many have no top-down leadership; many do not engage in electoral politics. But many do all of these things. I think of “social movement” as a cluster concept, meaning that it may share some but not necessarily all of many characteristics. These include the active participation of large numbers, acting to produce social change through challenges to elites, developing strong solidarity and reshaping identities, and using strategies and tactics beyond the standard state-governed channels such as electioneering and lobbying. Such movements may be built from the top, even operated as businesses, but once they evoke large-scale grassroots identification and participation, they can become social movements—and may even escape the control of their founders.

  The second Klan waned as rapidly as it arose and by 1926 had but a fraction of its peak strength (though it continues today). But many social movements, good and bad, are short-lived. Moreover, although internal rivalries and moral scandals repelled many Klan members, their movement won significant victories. Federal immigration-restriction and anti-miscegenation laws passed by some thirty states institutionalized a significant part of the Klan agenda. Immigration restriction installed the same hierarchy of desirable and undesirable populations that the Klan promoted. The Klan’s greatest achievement may have been its influence on political consciousness: its redefinition of Americanness, and thereby of un-Americanism, would long continue to influence the country’s political culture.