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Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #37, Summer 1993
ESSAYS
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Rank-and-File Radicalism within the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s
By John Zerzan
In the following article are presented some unusual features of
the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the only period in which the KKK was
a mass movement. In no way should this essay be interpreted as an
endorsement of any aspect of this version of the Klan or of any
other parts of Klan activity. Nonetheless, the loathsome nature of
the KKK of today should not blind us to what took place within the
Klan 70 years ago, in various places and against the wishes and
ideology of the Klan itself.
In the U.S. at least, racism is certainly one of the most crudely
reified phenomena. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s is one of the two
or three most important - and most ignored - social movements of
20th century America. These two data are the essential preface to
this essay.
Writing at the beginning of 1924, Stanley Frost accurately
surveyed the Klan at the crest of its power: ``The Ku Klux Klan has
become the most vigorous, active and effective organization in
American life outside business.''(1) Depending on one's choice of
sources, KKK membership in 1924 can be estimated at anywhere
between two and eight million.(2)
And yet, the nature of this movement has been largely unexplored
or misunderstood. In the fairly thin literature on the subject, the
Klan phenomenon is usually described simply as `nativism'. A
favorite in the lexicon of orthodox historians, the term refers to
an irrationality, racism, and backwardness supposedly endemic to
the poorer and less-educated classes, and tending to break out in
episodic bouts of violently-expressed prejudice. Emerson Loucks'
The Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania: A Study of Nativism is a typical
example. Its preface begins with, ``The revived KKK and its stormy
career is but one chapter in the history of American nativism,''
the first chapter is entitled, ``Some Beginnings of Nativism,'' and
in the book's concluding paragraph we learn that ``Nativism has
shown itself to be a perennial.''(3)
Kenneth Jackson, with his The Ku Klux Klan in the City, has been
one of a very few commentators to go beyond the amorphous
`nativism' thesis and also challenge several of the prevailing ste-
reotypes of the Klan. He argues forcefully that ``the Invisible
Empire of the 1920s was neither predominantly southern, nor rural,
nor white supremacist, nor violent.''(4) Carl Degler's succinct
comments corroborate the non-southern characterization quite ably:
``Significantly, the single piece of indisputable Klan legislation
enacted anywhere was the school law in Oregon; the state most
thoroughly controlled by the Klan was Indiana; and the largest Klan
membership in any state was that in Ohio. On the other hand,
several southern states like Mississippi, Virginia, and South
Carolina hardly saw the Klan or felt its influence.''(5) Jackson's
statistics show clearly the Klan's northern base, with only one
southern state, Texas, among the eight states with the largest mem-
bership.(6) It would be difficult to even begin to cite Jackson's
evidence in favor of terming the Klan an urban phenomenon, inasmuch
as his whole book testifies to this characterization. It may be
interesting to note, however, the ten urban areas with the most
Klansmen. Principally industrial and all but one of them outside
the South, they are, in descending order: Chicago, Indianapolis,
Philadelphia-Camden, Detroit, Denver, Portland, Atlanta, Los
Angeles-Long Beach, Youngstown-Warren, and Pittsburgh-Carnegie.(7)
The notion of the KKK as an essentially racist organization is
similarly challenged by Jackson. As Robert Moats Miller put it,
``in great areas of the country where the Klan was powerful the
Negro population was insignificant, and in fact, it is probable
that had not a single Negro lived in the United States, a Klan-type
order would have emerged.''(8) And Robert Duffus, writing for the
June 1923 World's Week, conceded: ``while the racial situation
contributed to a state of mind favorable to Ku Kluxism, curiously
it did not figure prominently in the Klan's career.''(9) The Klan
in fact tried to organize ``colored divisions'' in Indiana and
other states, to the amazement of historian Kathleen Blee.(10) Deg-
ler, who wrongly considered vigilantism to be the core trait of the
Klan, admitted that such violence as there was ``was directed
against white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants rather than against the
minorities.''(11)
Which brings us to the fourth and last point of Jackson's thesis,
that the KKK was not predominantly violent. Again, his conclusions
seem valid despite the widespread image of a lynch-mad, terroristic
Klan. The post-war race riots of 1919 in Washington, Chicago, and
East St. Louis, for example, occurred before there were any
Klansmen in those cities,(12) and in the 1920s, when the Klan grew
to its great strength, the number of lynchings in the U.S. dropped
to less than half the annual average of pre-war years(13) and a far
smaller fraction than that by comparison with the immediately
post-war years. In the words of Preston Slosson, ``By a curious
anomaly, in spite of...the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the old
American custom of lynch law fell into almost complete
disuse.''(14)
A survey of Literary Digest (conservative) and The Nation
(liberal) for 1922-1923 reveals several reported instances in which
the Klan was blamed for violence it did not perpetrate and unfairly
deprived of its rights.(15) Its enemies frequently included local
or state establishments, and were generally far from being meek and
powerless victims.
If the Ku Klux Klan, then, was not predominantly southern, rural,
racist, or violent, just what was the nature of this strange force
which grew to such power so rapidly and spontaneously in the
early-middle '20s - and declined at least as quickly by 1925? The
orthodox `nativism' answer asserts that it was just another of the
periodic, unthinking and reactionary efforts of the ignorant to
turn back the clock, and therefore futile and short-lived. A
post-Jackson, `neo-nativist' position might even concede the points
about racism and violence not being determinant, and still
essentially maintain this point of view, of recurrent, blind
efforts to restore an inchoate but rightist version of the past.
But a very strong pattern regarding the Klan introduces doubts
about this outlook, namely, that militantly progressive or radical
activities have often closely preceded, coincided with, or closely
followed strong KKK efforts, and have involved the same
participants. Oklahoma, for example, experienced in a mere ten
years the growth and decline of the largest state branch of the
Socialist Party, and the rise of one of the strongest Klan
movements.(16) In Williamson County, Illinois, an interracial crowd
of union coal miners stormed a mine being worked by strike-breakers
and killed twenty of them. The community supported the miners'
action and refused to convict any of the participants in this
so-called Herrin Massacre of 1922, which had captured the nation's
attention. Within two years, Herrin and the rest of Williamson
County backed one of the very strongest local Klan organizations in
the country.(17) The violently suppressed strikes of the southern
Appalachian Piedmont textile workers in 1929, among the most
bitterly fought in twentieth century labor history,(18) took place
at the time of or immediately following great Klan strength in many
of the same mill towns. The rubber workers of the huge
tire-building plants of Akron, the first to widely employ the
effective sit-down strike weapon in the early 1930s, formed a large
part of that city's very sizeable Klan membership,(19) or had come
from Appalachian regions where the KKK was also strong. In 1934,
the very militant and interracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union was
formed, and would face the flight of its leaders, the indifference
of organized labor, and the machine-guns of the large landholders.
Many of its active members were former Klansmen.(20) And observers
of the United Auto Workers have claimed that some of the most
militant activists in auto were former Klansmen.(21)
The key to all these examples of apparently disparate loyalties
is a simple one. As I will show, not only did some Klansmen hold
relatively radical opinions while members of the Invisible Order,
but in fact used the Klan, on occasion, as a vehicle for radical
social change. The record in this area, though not inaccessible,
has remained completely undeveloped.
The rise of the Klan began with the sharp economic depression that
struck in the fall of 1920. In the South, desperate farmers
organized under the Klan banner in an effort to force up the price
of cotton by restricting its sale. ``All throughout the fall and
winter of 1920-22 masked bands roamed the countryside warning
ginneries and warehouses to close until prices advanced. Sometimes
they set fire to establishments that defied their edict.''(22) It
was from this start that the Klan really began to grow and to
spread to the North, crossing the Mason-Dixon line in the winter of
1920-21.(23)
The KKK leadership ``disavowed and apparently disapproved of''(24)
this aggressive economic activism, and it is important to note that
more often than not there was tension or opposition between
officials and members, a point I will return to later. In a
southern union hall in 1933, Sherwood Anderson queried a local
reporter about the use of the Klan for economic struggles: ``This
particular hall had formerly been used by a Ku Klux Klan
organization and I asked the newspaper man, `How many of these
people [textile workers] were in on that?' `A good many,' he said.
He thought the Ku Klux Klan had been rather an outlet for the
workers when America was outwardly so prosperous. `The boom market
never got down to these,' he said, making a sweeping movement with
his arm.''(25) Klan officials never spoke in favor of such uses of
the Klan, but it was the economic and social needs that often drew
people to the Klan, rather than religious, patriotic, or strictly
fraternal ones.(26)
This is not to say that there wasn't a multiplicity of
contributing factors usually present as the new Klan rose to
prominence. There was a widespread feeling that the ``Glorious
Crusade'' of World War I had been a swindle. There was the
desperate boredom and monotony of regimented work-lives. To this
latter frustration, a KKK newspaper appealed for new members with
the banner, ``JUST TO PEP UP THE GAME. THIS SLOW LIFE IS KILLING
ME.''(27) And with these feelings, too, it is quite easy to imagine
a form of progressive social or political activism being the
result. As Stanley Frost commented in 1924, ``the Klan movement
seems to be another expression of the general unrest and
dissatisfaction with both local and national conditions - the high
cost of living, social injustice, inequality....''(28) Or, as
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. offhandedly revealed in a comment about
Huey Long, ``despite his poor white sympathies, he did not, like
Hugo Black in Alabama, join the Klan.''(29)
The activities of the Klan have very commonly been referred to as
``moral reform,'' and certainly this kind of effort was common.
Articles such as, ``Behind the White Hoods: The Regeneration of
Oklahoma,'' and ``Night-Riding Reformers,'' from Fall 1923 issues
of The Outlook bespeak this side of Klan motivation.(30) They tell
how the Klan cleaned up gangs of organized crime and combated vice
and political corruption in Oklahoma and Indiana, apparently with
a minimum of violence or vigilantism. Also widespread were Klan
attempts to put bootleggers out of business, though we might recall
here that prohibition has frequently been endorsed by labor parti-
sans, from the opinion that the often high alcohol consumption
rates among workers weakened the labor movement. In fact, the Klan
not infrequently attacked liquor and saloon interests explicitly as
forces that kept working people down.
It is on the plane of `moral' issues, furthermore, that another
stereotype regarding the KKK - that of its total moral intolerance
- dissolves at least somewhat under scrutiny. Charles Bowles, the
almost successful write-in Klan candidate in the 1924 Detroit may-
oralty race, was a divorce lawyer (as well as being pro-public
works).It cannot be denied that anti-Catholicism was a major plank
of Klan appeal in many places, such as Oregon. But at least part of
this attitude stemmed from a ``belief that the Catholic Church was
a major obstacle in the struggle for women's suffrage and
equality.''(31)
Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, gave a lecture to
Klanswomen in Silver Lake, New Jersey, a speaking engagement she
accepted with no little trepidation. She feared that if she ``ut-
tered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of
these women they would go off into hysteria.'' Actually, a real
rapport was established and the evening was a great success. ``A
dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were profferred. The
conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it
was too late to return to New York.''(32)
At any rate, a connection can be argued between `moral' reform and
more fundamental reform attempts. ``I wonder if anybody could ever
find any connection between this town's evident immoralities and
some of the plant's evident dissatisfaction?''(33) pondered Whiting
Williams in 1921. He decided in the affirmative, that vice in the
community is the result of anger in the mill or factory. And Klan
members often showed an interest in also combating what they saw as
the causes of `immoralities' rather than simply their
manifestations.
Hiram Evans, a head of the Klan, admitted in a rare interview in
1923 that ``There has been a widespread feeling among Klansmen that
in the last few years the operation of the National Government has
shown weakness indicating a possible need of rather fundamental
reform.''(34) A 1923 letter to the editor of The New Republic
details this awareness of the need for deep-seated changes. Written
by an opponent of the Klan, the passage expresses ``The Why of the
Klan'':
``First: Throughout all classes there is a growing skepticism of
democracy, especially of the current American brand. Many Americans
believe there is little even-handed justice administered in the
courts; that a poor man has little chance against a rich one; that
many judges practically buy their places on the bench or are put
there by powerful interests. The strong, able young man comes out
of college ready to do his part in politics, but with the settled
conviction that unless he can give full time there is no use
`bucking up against the machine.' Furthermore he believes the
machines to be equally corrupt. The miner in West Virginia sees the
power of the state enlisted on the side of the mine owner.''(35)
Throughout the literature there is a strongly prevailing tendency
to deal with the social composition of Klan membership by ignoring
it altogether, or, more commonly, by referring to it in passing as
``middle class.'' This approach enabled John Mecklin, whose The Ku
Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind (1924) is regarded as a
classic, to say that ``The average Klansman is far more in sympathy
with capital than with labor.''(36) In large part this stems from
looking at the top Klan officials, rather than at the rank and file
members. William Simmons, D.C. Stephenson, and Hiram Evans, the men
who presided over the Klan in the '20s had been, respectively, a
minister, a coal dealer, and a dentist. But the membership defi-
nitely did not share this wholly ``middle class'' makeup.
Kenneth Jackson only partially avoids the error by terming the
Klan a ``lower middle-class movement,''(37) a vague appellation
which he corrects shortly thereafter: ``The greatest source of Klan
support came from rank and file non-union, blue-collar employees of
large businesses and factories.''(38)
Returning to the subject of socio-political attitudes of Klan
members, available evidence strikingly confirms my contention of a
sometimes quite radical frame of mind. In the spring of 1924, The
Outlook magazine conducted a ``Platform of the People'' poll by
mail. When it was found that an organizational request for ten
thousand ballots came from the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Ku Klux
Klan, pink ballots were supplied so that they could be separately
tabulated. To quote the article, ``Pink Ballots for the Ku Klux
Klan'': ``The ballots returned all came from towns and small cities
in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Of the total of 1,139 voters, 490
listed themselves as Republicans, only 97 as Democrats, and 552 as
Independents. Among them are 243 women.''(39) Approximately
two-thirds (over 700) responded regarding their occupations. ``The
largest single group (209) is that of skilled workmen; the next
(115) is of laborers.'' The rest includes workers (e.g. ``railway
men'') and farmers, plus a scattering of professionals and
merchants. The women who listed their occupations were mainly
housewives.
Despite the generally high percentages of abstention on most of
the issues, the results on the following selected topics show
clearly radical leanings:(40)
==============================================================
Percent Approved: Ignored: Condemned:
"Compulsory freight reduction" 30 77 3
"Nationalization of the railroads
with cooperative administration
by workers, shippers, and public" 24 72 4
"Federal Aid for Farmers'
Co-operatives" 30 68 2
"Federal purchase of wheat" 20 68 2
"Price fixing of staple farm
products" 23 75 5
"Further extension of farm credit" 32 67 1
"Equal social, legal, and
industrial rights for women" 41 56 3
"Amendment enabling Congress
to prevent exploitation of
children in industry" 45 54 1
"Federal Anti-Lynching Law" 38 60 2
"Establish Federal Employment
Bureau" 37 60 3
"Extension of principle of
Federal aid for education" 91 9 0
"Abolition of injunctions
in labor disputes" 20 73 7
"Nationalization, and democratic
administration by technicians,
workers, and consumers, of
coal mines" 23 72 5
"Government control and
distribution of high-power
transmission" 33 64 3
=================================================================
Also favored were immigration restriction and prohibition. The
Outlook, obviously displeased with the response, categorized the
Klan participants as ``more inclined to accept panaceas at face
value, willing to go farther. In general,'' they concluded,
``this
leads to greater radicalism, or `progressivism.'''(41) The Klan
movement declined rapidly within a year of the poll, and research
substantiates the enduring validity of The Outlook editors' claim
that ``The present table provides the only analysis that has ever
been made of the political views of members of the Ku Klux
Klan.''(42)
With this kind of data, it is less surprising to find, for
example, that the Socialist Party and the Klan formed a 1924
electoral alliance in Milwaukee to elect John Kleist, a Socialist
and a Klansman, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.(43) Robert O.
Nesbitt perceived, in Wisconsin, a ``tendency for German
Socialists, whose most conspicuous opponents were Catholic
clergy,
to join the Klan.''(44) The economic populist Walter Pierce was
elected governor in Oregon in 1922 by a strong agricultural
protest
vote, including the endorsement of the Klan and the Socialist
Party. Klan candidates promised to cut taxes in half, reduce
phone
rates, and give aid to distressed farmers.(45) A recent study of
the Klan in LaGrande, Oregon revealed that it ``played a
substantial role in supporting the strikers'' during the
nationwide
railworkers' strike of 1922.(46)
In fact, the KKK appealed not infrequently to militant workers,
despite the persistent stereotype of the Klan's anti-labor bent.
An
August 1923 World's Work article described strong worker support
for the Klan in Kansas; during the state-wide railroad strike
there
in 1922, the strikers ``actually did flock into the Klan in what
seems to have been large numbers.''(47)
Charles Alexander, who wrote the highly regarded The Ku Klux
Klan
in the Southwest, though generally subscribing to the anti-labor
Klan reputation, confessed his own inability to confirm this
image.
Referring to himself, he said, ``the writer has come across only
two instances of direct conflict between southwestern Klansmen
and
union organizers, one in Arkansas and one in Louisiana.''(48)
Writing of Oklahoma, Carter Blue Clark judged that ``violence
against the International (sic) Workers of the World and radical
farm and labor groups was rare...''(49) He found sixty-eight
incidents of Klan-related violence between 1921 and 1925, only
two
of which belonged to the ``Unionization/Radicalism''
category.(50)
Goldberg's study of the KKK in Colorado found that ``despite
coal
strikes in 1921, 1922, and 1927, which primarily involved
foreign--
born miners, the Klan never resorted to the language of the Red
Scare.'' During the Wobbly-led strike of 1927, in fact, the Canon
City Klan formed an alliance with the IWW against their common
enemy, the ruling elite.(51)
Virginia Durr, who was Henry Wallace's Progressive Party running
mate in 1948, gives us a picture of the Klan of the '20s and
labor
in the Birmingham area:
``The unions were broken...So, the Ku Klux Klan was formed at
that
point as a kind of underground union and unless you were there
and
knew it, nobody will believe it. They will say, `Oh, but the Klan
was against the unions.' Well, it wasn't.''(52)
Gerald Dunne found that ``ninety percent of Birmingham's union
members were also involved with the Klan,''(53) and that the Klan
in the state at large attacked the Alabama Power Company and the
influence of the ruling Bankhead family while campaigning for
pub-
lic control of the Muscle Shoals dam project and government
medical
insurance.(54)
In the '20s the corrupt and inert officialdom of the United Mine
Workers was presided over by the autocratic John L. Lewis. Ku
Kluxers in the union, though they had been officially barred from
membership in 1921, formed a coalition with leftists at the 1924
convention in a fight for union democracy: ``Then the radical-
s...combined with the sympathizers of the hooded order to strip
Mr.
Lewis of the power to appoint organizers.''(55) Though this
combination was narrowly defeated, ``Lewis was outvoted in a
first
test of the question as to whether local executives and
organizers
should be appointed by the national officials or by the rank and
file. The insurgents, headed by the deposed Alexander Howat and
spurred on by the members of the Ku Klux Klan, who exerted a
lobbying influence from the convention doorways, combined to
carry
the first vote.''(56) Though officially denied membership,
strongly
pro-UMW sources have admitted that, in fact, a great many union
members were Klansmen. McDonald and Lynch, for example, estimated
that in 1924 eighty percent of UMW District 11 (Indiana) members
were enrolled in the KKK. An examination of the Proceedings of
the
1924 union convention supports this point; areas of Klan
strength,
such as Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania voted very decisively
against Lewis, in favor of the election of organizers by the rank
and file.(58)
A New Republic article in March, 1924 told of the strength of
the
Klan in Williamson County, Illinois, scene of the ``Herrin
Massacre'' referred to above. The anti-Klan piece sadly shook its
head at this turn of events in an area of ``one hundred percent
unionism.''(59) Buried in the middle of the account is the key to
the situation, an accurate if grudging concession that ``the
inaction of their local labor leaders gave to the Ku Klux Klan a
following among the miners.''(60)
The following oral history account by Aaron Barkham, a West
Virginia miner, is a perfect illustration of the Klan as a
vehicle
of class struggle - and of the reason for its official
denunciation
by the UMW. It is worth quoting at length:
``About that time 1929, in Logan County, West Virginia, a bunch
of strike-breakers come in with shotguns and axe handles. Tried
to
break up union meetings. The UMW deteriorated and went back to
almost no existence. It didn't particularly get full strength
till
about 1949. And it don't much today in West Virginia. So most
people ganged up and formed the Ku Kluck Klan.''
The Ku Klux was the real controllin' factor in the community. It
was the law. It was in power to about 1932. My dad was one of the
leaders til he died. The company called in the army to get the Ku
Klux out, but it didn't work. The union and the Ku Klux was about
the same thing.''
The superintendent of the mine got the big idea of makin' it
rougher than it was. They hauled him off in a meat wagon, and
about
ten more of the company officials. Had the mine shut down. They
didn't kill 'em, but they didn't come back. They whipped one of
the
foremen and got him out of the county. They gave him twelve hours
to get out, get his family out.''
The UMW had a field representative, he was a lawyer. They tarred
and feathered 'im for tryin' to edge in with the company. He come
around, got mad, tryin' to tell us we were wrong, when we called
a
wildcat. He was takin' the side of the company. I used a stick to
help tar 'im. And it wasn't the first time.''
The Ku Klux was formed on behalf of people that wanted a decent
living, both black and white. Half the coal camp was colored. It
wasn't anti-colored. The black people had the same
responsibilities
as the white. Their lawn was just as green as the white man's.
They
got the same rate of pay. There was two colored who belonged to
it.
I remember those two niggers comin' around my father and askin'
questions about it. They joined. The pastor of our community
church
was a colored man. He was Ku Klux. It was the only protection the
workin' man had.''
Sure, the company tried to play one agin' the other. But it
didn't
work. The colored and the whites lived side by side. It was
somethin' like a checkerboard. There'd be a white family and a
colored family. No sir, there was no racial problem. Yeah, they
had
a certain feelin' about the colored. They sure did. And they had
a
certain feelin' about the white, too. Anyone come into the com-
munity had unsatisfactory dealin's, if it was colored or white,
he
didn't stay.''(61)
Why have the few, standard accounts of the Klan been seemingly
so
far off? Principally because they have failed to look at the Klan
phenomenon ``from the bottom up,'' to see KKK participants as
historical subjects. One result of this is to have overlooked
much
material altogether. As most labor attention focuses on the
unions
at the expense of the individual workers, so has the Klan been
ig-
nored as a movement relevant to the history of working people.
The
Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933, by
Irving
Bernstein, is widely regarded as the best treatment of labor in
the
1920s. It does not mention the Ku Klux Klan. Similarly, the
Lynds'
Middletown, that premier sociological study of Muncie, Indiana in
the '20s, barely mentions the Klan(62) and then only in terms of
a
most marginal area, religious preference.(63)
Certainly no one would seriously maintain that the KKK of the
'20s
was free from bigotry or injustice. There is truth in the charac-
terization of the Klan as a moment of soured populism, fermented
of
post-war disillusion. But it is also true that when large numbers
of people, feeling ``a sense of defeat''(64) in an increasingly
urban South, or their northern counterparts, ``conscious of their
growing inferiority,''(65) turned to the Klan, they did not
necessarily enact some kind of sick, racist savagery. On
occasion,
they even turned, as we have seen, to a fairly radical activism -
to the chagrin of their corrupt and conservative leadership.
In fact, it was internal dissension - plus, to a lesser extent,
the return of relative prosperity in 1925(66) - that brought
about
the precipitous decline of the Klan. Donald Crownover's study of
the KKK in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania discussed some of the
abortive efforts to form state and even national organizations
alternative to the vice and autocracy prevailing at the top of
the
Invisible Empire.(67) ``Revolt from within, not criticism from
without, broke the Klan.''(68) More fundamentally, the mid-1920s,
against the background of a decisive deformation provided by
World
War I,(69) saw the real arrival of the consumer society and the
cultural displacement of militancy it represented.(70)
The above research, limited and unsystematic as it is, would
seem
to raise more questions than it answers. Nonetheless, it may be
possible to discern here something of relevance concerning
racism,
spontaneity and popular values in the context of a very important
social movement.(71)
Notes:
1. Stanley Frost, The Challenge of the Klan (New York, 1969),
p.1.
2. Between five and six million is probably the soundest figure.
Morrison and Commager found "garnered in the Northeast and
Midwest
an all-time peak of six million members." The Growth of the
American Republic (New York, 1950), vol. II, p.556. Jonathon
Daniels estimated that "the supposedly Southern organization had
sprawled continentally from beginnings in Atlanta in 1915, up
from
100,000 members in 1921 to 5,000,000 in 1924." The Time Between
the
Wars (Garden City, New York, 1966), p. 108.
3. Emerson Loucks, The Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania: A Study of
Nativism (New York, 1936), pp. vi, 1, 198.
4. Kenneth Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (New
York, 1967), p. xi.
5. Carl Degler, "A Century of the Klans: A Review Article,"
Journal
of Southern History (November 1965), pp. 442-443.
6. Jackson, op.cit., p. 237.
7. Ibid., p. 239.
8. Robert Moats Miller, "The Ku Klux Klan," from The Twenties:
Change and Continuity, John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner and David
Brody, eds. (Columbus, 1968), p. 218.
9. Robert L. Duffus, "How the Ku Klux Klan Sells Hate," World's
Week (June, 1923), p. 179.
10. Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan (Berkeley, 1991), p. 169.
11. Degler, op.cit., p. 437.
12. William Simmons, head of the Klan in 1921, testified -
without
challenge - that the post-war race riots in Washington, East St.
Louis and Chicago took place before there were any Klan members
in
those cities. See Hearings Before the Committee on Rules: House
of
Representatives, Sixty-Seventh Congress (Washington, 1921), p.
75.
13. Daniel Snowman, USA: The Twenties to Viet Nam (London, 1968),
p.37.
14. Preston W. Slosson, The Great Crusade and After (New York,
1930), p. 258.
15. See Literary Digest: "Quaint Customs and Methods of the KKK,"
(August 5, 1922) A Defense of the Ku Klux Klan," (January 20,
1923), esp. pp. 18-19; "The Klan as the Victim of Mob Violence,"
(September 8, 1923), p. 12; The Nation: "Even the Klan Has
Rights,"
(December 13, 1922), p. 654.
16. See Garin Burban's "Agrarian Radicals and Their Opponents:
Political Conflicts in Southern Oklahoma, 1910-1924," Journal of
American History (June 1971). Burbank argues that the Socialist
Party and the Klan had different constituencies in Oklahoma, but
much of his own data contradicts this conclusion. Esp. pp. 20-21.
17. See Paul M. Angle's Bloody Williamson(New York, 1952), esp.
pp.
4, 210 28-29, 137-138.
18. See Irving Bernstein's The Lean Years: A History of the
American Worker, 1920-1933 (Baltimore, 1966), pp. 1-43.
19. Jackson, op.cit, p. 239. Akron had the eighth largest member-
ship of U.S. cities.
20. See Thomas R. Brooks' Toil and Trouble (New York, 1971), p.
368, and Jerold S. Auerbach's Labor and Liberty: The LaFollette
Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis, 1966), p. 38.
21. Irving Howe and B.J. Widick, The UAW and Walter Reuther (New
York, 1949), p. 9.
22. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York, 1968), pp. 289-
290.
23. Donald A. Crownover, "The Ku Klux Klan in Lancaster County,
1923-1924," Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society
(1964, No.2), p. 64.
24. Higham, op.cit, p. 290.
25. Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (New York, 1935), p. 114.
26. Neill Herring, a veteran progressive and scholar from
Atlanta,
has testified to this kind of utilization of Klan organization as
enabled by a structure that "left a fair measure of local
indepen-
dence of action." Letter to author, March 25, 1975.
27. Miller, op.cit., p. 224.
28. Frost, op.cit., p. 270.
29. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston,
1960), p. 45.
30. Stanley Frost, "Night-Riding Reformers," The Outlook
(November
14, 1923); Frost "Behind the White Hoods; The Regeneration of
Oklahoma," The Outlook (November 21, 1923).
31. Robert Klan Goldberg, Hooded Empire: the Ku Klux Klan in
Colorado (Urbana, 1981), p. 23.
32. Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York, 1938), pp. 366-
367.
33. Frost, op.cit., p. 86.
34. Frost, op.cit., p. 86.
35. Mary H. Herring, "the Why of the Klan," (Correspondence) The
New Republic (February 23, 1923), p. 289.
36. John Moffat Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the
American
Mind (New York, 1924), p. 98.
37. Jackson, op.cit., p. 240.
38. Ibid., p. 241.
39. "Pink Ballots for the Ku Klux Klan," The Outlook (June 25,
1924), pp. 306-307.
40. Ibid., p. 307-308. My percentages involve slight approxima-
tions; they are based on averaging the percentages given for
Republicans, Democrats, and Independents proportionally.
41. Ibid., p. 306.
42. Ibid., p. 308.
43. Jackson, op.cit., p. 162.
44. Robert O. Nesbitt, Wisconsin: A History (Madison, 1973), p.
467.
45. George S. Turnbull, An Oregon Crusader (Portland, 1955), p.
150. "Promises and Lies," (editorial) Capital Journal (Salem,
October 31, 1922).
46. David A. Horowitz, "The Ku Klux Klan in LaGrande, Oregon,"
The
Invisible Empire in the West, ed. Shawn Lay (Urbana, 1992), p.
195.
47. Robert L. Duffus, "The Ku Klux Klan in the Middle West,"
World's Work (August, 1923), p. 365.
48. Charles Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest (Louis-
ville, 1965), p. 25.
49. Carter Blue Clark, A History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma.
Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Oklahoma, 1976), p. 115.
50. Ibid., p. 147.
51. Goldberg, op.cit., pp. 122, 146.
52. Virginia Durr, Interview (conducted by Susan Thrasher and
Jacque Hall, May 13-15, 1975), University of North Carolina Oral
History project.
53. Gerald T. Dunne, Hugo Black and the Judicial Revolution (New
York, 1977), p. 114.
54. Ibid., pp. 116, 118, 121.
55. Cecil Carnes, John L. Lewis (New York, 1936), p. 116.
56. Ibid., p. 114.
57. David J. McDonald and Edward A. Lynch, Coal and Unionism
(Silver Spring, Md, 1939), p. 161.
58. United Mine Workers of America, Proceedings of the
Twenty-Ninth
Consecutive and Sixth Biennial Convention (Indianapolis, 1924),
p.
686.
59. "Ku Kluxing in the Miners' Country," The New Republic (March
26, 1924), p. 123.
60. Ibid., p. 124.
61. Studs Terkel, Hard Times (New York, 1970), pp. 229-230.
62. Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown (New York, 1929). pp. 333,
364-366, 479.
63. George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South (Baton
Rouge, 1967), p. 196: "careful historians have found that neither
the major church bodies and periodicals nor fundamentalist
leaders
ever worked closely with the Klan." There seems to have been even
less of a connection between the churches and the Klan in the
North.
64. Ibid, p. 191.
65. George E. Mowry, The Urban Nation (New York, 1965), p. 34.
66. Degler, op.cit., p. 441.
67. Crownover, op. cit., pp. 69-70.
68. Loucks, op.cit., p. 165.
69. Zerzan, "Origins and Meaning of World War I," Telos 49, esp.
pp. 107-108.
70. Stewart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the
Roots of the Consumer Society (New York, 1977). For example, pp.
189-190, 201.
71. Special thanks to Neill Herring of Atlanta, Susan Thrasher of
New Market, Tennessee, and Bob Hall of chapel Hill, North
Carolina.