Steel Valley Klan

The Ku Klux Klan in Ohio's Mahoning Valley

William D. Jenkins

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612777962
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Jenkins argues that the Klan drew from all social strata in Youngstown, Ohio, in the 1920s, contrary to previous theories that predominately lower middle-class WASPs joined the Klan because of economic competition with immigrants. Threatened by immigrant movement into their neighborhoods, these members supposedly represented a fringe element with few accomplishments and little hope of advancement.

Jenkins suggests instead that members admired the Klan commitment to a conservative protestant moral code. Besieged, they believed, by an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants who did not accept blue laws and prohibition, members of the piestistic churches flocked to Klan meetings as an indication of their support for reform. This groundswell peaked in 1923 when the Klan gained political control of major cities in the South and Midwest. Newly enfranchised women who supported a politics of moralism played a major role in assisting Klan growth and making Ohio one of the more successful Klan realms in the North.

The decline of the Klan was almost as rapid. Revelations regarding sexual escapades of leaders and suspicions regarding irregularities in Klan financing led members to question the Klan commitment to moral reform. Ethnic opposition also contributed to Klan decline. Irish citizens stole and published the Klan membership list, while Italians in Niles, Ohio, violently crushed efforts of the Klan to parade in that city.

Jenkins concludes that the Steel Valley Klan represented a posturing between cultures mixed together too rapidly by the process of industrialization.

1

The Klan’s Resurrection

Any order or organization that stands for … the upholding of the Constitution and the religion of Jesus Christ, ought not to be kicked in the face … but ought to be investigated and the ranks swelled.

—The Reverend Richard R. Yocum,
St. Paul’s Reformed Church

Fifty thousand Klansmen and Kamelias were milling around the field at Dead Man’s Curve on 10 November 1923. Seven kites held an American flag some five hundred feet above hastily constructed booths and tents: serviced by representatives of local Protestant churches. The crowd anxiously awaited a parade from the field through the south side in celebration of Klan victories in the mayoral, city council, and school board races.

A few years before, such a parade would have seemed impossible in a city like Youngstown, Ohio, remote from southern influences and a hotbed of abolitionist activity prior to the Civil War. In fact, at the first rumors of the Klan’s appearance in September 1921, the city council had angrily passed a resolution denouncing the Klan as “un-American, lawless, and a menace to the peace and security of the United States.” Mayor Fred Warnock promised black citizens that his administration would not allow the Klan to take the law into its own hands.¹

By November 1923, however, the Klan had changed Warnock’s mind. He became not only a member but eventually a grand titan (district official). Warnock and many other local residents had assumed that the Klan would duplicate the violent and disruptive activities of the earlier organization. Gradually they came to view the Klan as a protector, rather than a violator, of the moral and legal order, an organization worthy of northern Protestant Christians’ support. In their minds the Klan of Reconstruction was dead. A new Klan had arisen.

The Klan of Reconstruction had sought the control of race relations in the South after the Civil War. The granting of political rights to freed blacks posed a threat to white supremacy and might lead, the Klan feared, to social equality. The beatings, whippings, tar and featherings, and lynchings used to intimidate blacks politically and socially eventually caused the federal government to outlaw the Klan in 1871. Members then joined similar organizations, such as the Knights of the White Camelia. By the 1890s the North had grown weary of intervention, thereby permitting southern states to pass laws disfranchising blacks and segregating them from white society.

Refounded in 1915 by Colonel William J. Simmons, the new Ku Klux Klan also emphasized white supremacy but differed from the earlier Klan in its emphases on fraternalism, nativism, and moralism. After failing as a clergyman and salesman, Simmons had found some professional success as a district organizer for the Woodmen of the World, one of the many fraternal societies joined by Americans of that era. Realizing the popularity of a secret society with elaborate rituals and passwords, Simmons fashioned a Klan that would appeal to the fraternal sentiments of American society—a Klan with acronyms functioning as a secret language, strange-sounding titles like kleagle, grand goblin, and imperial wizard, and a system of rituals known only to members. Simmons’s charter, obtained from the state of Georgia, described the organization as a “patriotic, military, benevolent, ritualistic, social and fraternal order.” Once a month local meetings, complemented by family picnics and parades, created a sense of camaraderie that appealed to native-born, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men.²

Unlike the earlier Klan, which focused primarily on southern whites, the new charter limited membership to a “white male Gentile person, a native-born citizen of the United States of America,” and “a believer in the tenets of the Christian religion.” The provision that members could not owe any allegiance “of any nature or degree whatsoever to any foreign government, nation, institution, sect, ruler, prince, potentate, people or person” served as a bar to Catholics, who owed allegiance to the pope. Although the charter did not expressly endorse nativism, the continuous use of “100% Americans” as an official slogan in Klan pamphlets and newspapers suggested a connection between the ethnic and religious backgrounds of Klan members and the principles upon which the United States was founded. Nativist underpinnings were readily apparent in the charter’s call “to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles, traditions and ideals of pure Americanism.”³

Finally, Simmons’s Klan differed from the earlier Klan in its commitment to respect for established law and morality. The charter called on Klan members to defend the Constitution and “to aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws.” Prospective Klan members were only those men “whose reputations and vocations are respectable” and “whose habits are exemplary.” In an effort to extend moral obligations beyond the personal, the charter called on Klan members “to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal.”⁴

In spite of the charter’s delineation of the principles of fraternalism, nativism, and law and order, it was inevitable that the leadership would shape the delivery of the Klan message to new members. The Klan’s founder and imperial wizard, Colonel Simmons, emphasized the fraternal aspects while he was in control. Though he was an effective one-on-one salesman, he lacked the organizational skills to spread his organization beyond the South. Subordinates, such as a trusted organizer in Alabama who absconded with several thousand dollars from initiation fees, often duped the colonel. By the end of the war, Simmons had attracted only 5,000 to 6,000 members, primarily from Georgia and Alabama; he was searching for a way to expand his operation. In the summer of 1920, he discovered the Southern Publicity Association, a small advertising firm located in Atlanta and operated by Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler. Simmons hired this organization to provide a sense of direction to the faltering fraternity.⁵

Clarke and Tyler were hustlers who had founded the Southern Publicity Association as a fund-raiser for such prominent organizations as the Anti-Saloon League, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army. It is unclear how Simmons met them, but he impressed Mrs. Tyler as “a minister and a clean living man.”⁶ Eventually Simmons relinquished control of recruitment to the association. Once established as the Propagation Department of the Klan, Clarke and Tyler recruited 1,100 kleagles or salesmen—and an unidentified number of speakers—to scour the country for members.⁷ These men carried with them a statement of the Klan platform that included the following principles:

Tenets of the Christian Religion

White Supremacy

Our Free Public Schools

Just Laws and Liberty

Protection of Pure Womanhood

Separation of Church and State

Limitation of Foreign Immigration

Upholding the Constitution of the United States

Freedom of Speech and Press

Suppression of Vice and Lawlessness

Preventing the Cause of Mob Violence and Lynching

Law and Order⁸

Clarke and Tyler were enormously successful: they added more than 90,000 members in a little more than a year to an organization only five to six thousand strong in 1920. Newspaper editors from all over the country pressed Clarke and Tyler for information. Ironically, one photographer who was refused a picture hired some blacks to pose in Klan costumes lest he lose the immediacy of the story.⁹

As the Klan organization expanded precipitously, the Propagation Department made few checks on newly found members or kleagles. Little is known of the type of men enrolled as kleagles—their backgrounds, personalities, or status—but it is evident that the commission of four dollars for every new member was an attraction to recruiters that might easily prove more powerful than any principles the Klan might espouse. Henry Fry, one of the early kleagle recruits and eventually an informant for the New York World, admitted in his book about Klan operations in Tennessee that he received very little indoctrination relative to the goals of the Klan. He joined “partly because I was a joiner” (he belonged to the Masons, Knights of Pythias, Odd Fellows, Junior Order of United American Mechanics, the Elks, Eagles, and Owls) but also because he “could see no reason why a fraternal order commemorating the deeds of the original Klansmen should not fill a need in the country today.” Fry characterized the information he received as “meager” and suggested that his decision to join was a matter of faith in the similarity of the Klan to other fraternal orders.¹⁰

That faith soon proved to be misplaced. The day after his naturalization into the Klan, the kleagle asked Fry—to his amazement—to serve as the kleagle’s assistant in eastern Tennessee; three weeks later he became the kleagle. In his efforts to recruit, Fry confronted questions for which he had no answer. Worse yet, the king kleagle (Klan-appointed state organizer) could not provide them either. Fry “at once saw that any movement built along such a line was dangerous, regardless of its intentions, because secrecy of this sort places upon the organization the vital necessity of receiving as members only men of the highest character whose positions and reputations in the community would be an absolute safeguard against mischief.” “It made me very careful,” Fry asserted, “of the class of people whom I permitted to become members.” With the king kleagle advising Klan members to “clean up their towns,” Fry foresaw mob rule as the eventual outcome of indiscriminate Klan recruiting. In disgust he quit the Klan, labeling it as a moneymaking scheme built upon base appeals to religious and racial prejudices.¹¹

Fry was correct in his observation about the potential for the spread of indiscriminate Klan violence. Throughout Texas local chapters heeded the advice of the Propagation Division to “clean up the town” by intimidating moral slackards and degenerates; Dallas witnessed innumerable floggings. In Mer Rouge, Louisiana, two anti-Klansmen, Watt Daniel and Thomas Richards, were kidnapped and killed, allegedly by the Klan.¹²

In many instances the violence was related to what the Klan perceived as examples of a postwar moral decline. Most often attacked were bootleggers, gamblers, wife-beaters, adulterers, and deserters. In the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, the Klan tried to reimpose a moral code that it felt the local officials could not enforce. A residue of vigilante justice from the less settled days of that region contributed to the extralegal atmosphere.¹³

The escalating violence did not seem to concern Clarke and Tyler; they were having enough trouble controlling their own behavior. In 1919 Atlanta police arrested them in a house of assignation not fully clothed and under the influence of alcohol. They were charged with disorderly conduct. Mysteriously, the incriminating page from the police docket disappeared.¹⁴

Both violence and the shenanigans of Clarke and Tyler came to public attention in September 1921 when the New York World published a three-week series on Klan outrages. Carried in eighteen leading dailies, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the series culminated in a list of 152 murders, floggings, and tar and featherings. Public concern resulted in congressional hearings conducted by the House Committee on Rules. Simmons, however, countered the charges in a masterful performance before the committee. Ill with tonsilitis and bronchitis, he suggested that a few criminals or troublemakers hiding behind Klan robes had committed the violence. Protesting that such actions violated Klan principles and that it was primarily a fraternal and benevolent society, Simmons swore that he would disband the Klan if it was guilty of even a small measure of the charges. He then collapsed in a faint.¹⁵ Simmons’s dramatic appearance was effective; Congress took no more action. Ironically, the congressional hearing and national newspaper exposure, both of which were calculated to undermine the Klan by revealing its part in violent incidents around the country, had served only to make the Klan more popular.

Internally, though, the Klan still suffered from divisions within and a lack of leadership. Some northern grand goblins (regional directors) put pressure on Simmons to fire Clarke. Heady from the rapid expansion, Simmons did not take any action; instead, for the last six months of 1922, he took a vacation and left Clarke in charge of a national office that allowed local chapters to spin out of control.¹⁶

Simmons’s lack of supervision created a void that other men began to fill. One of those men was Hiram Wesley Evans. Born in Ashland, Alabama, in 1881, he had come to Dallas before the war to set up a dental practice. A charter member of the Dallas Klan, he became the exalted cyclops (an elected position to replace the appointed kleagle) of that organization once Atlanta gave it a self-ruling charter. Under Evans, Dallas Klan No. 66 was a stronghold of vigilante activity. According to congressional testimony, Evans led his Klan in the abduction of black bellhop Alex Johnson for pandering. The Klan flogged Johnson, branded the letters KKK on his forehead with acid, and left him in front of his hotel.¹⁷ Ironically, after Evans had gained the attention of national headquarters and assumed the position of imperial kligrapp (national secretary), he returned to Dallas in early 1922 to discourage the floggings and other forms of violence that were attracting so much national attention and condemnation.¹⁸

It was Evans’s Atlanta experience that enabled him to see that what worked in Texas might not work nationally. Congressional investigation of the violence, along with the concern of goblins and dragons about Clarke’s handling of funds, convinced Evans that national headquarters needed a cleanup. He also had dreams of making the Klan a political power—a focus not shared by the fraternally oriented Simmons. To realize those dreams, he had to replace Simmons and undermine Clarke.¹⁹ Thus, Evans devised a scheme with Fred Savage and D. C. Stephenson to trick Simmons into stepping aside.

Colonel Simmons was used to being in charge, but it was now 3:00 A.M., the morning of 27 November 1922, and he had been out drinking with some of the conventioneers. Tomorrow they would elect him as imperial wizard at the first Klonvocation, or Klan convention. At least, that was the plan until David Stephenson and Fred Savage knocked on the door of Klan Krest, Simmons’s Klan-financed home at 1840 Peachtree Street in Atlanta. Fred Savage was a former New York detective, who had risen to a key administrative position, imperial night hawk, in the Atlanta headquarters. David C. Stephenson, a native Texan transplanted to Indiana, was a coal dealer and a very successful organizer of the Evansville Klan. Simmons admitted to these men that he was not a politician and had not organized the formal presentation of his name to the Klonvocation. Like many nineteenth-century candidates, Simmons expected others to speak on his behalf; obviously, he would accept the nomination if offered.

Stephenson and Savage responded with feigned concern. Were someone to present Simmons’s name on the floor, trouble would result, they warned him. Numerous men were ready to attack Simmons, and, according to Stephenson, “the moment your character is attacked, there is going to be somebody killed. I have got men placed and have given them orders to shoot and kill any damn man that attacks the character of Colonel Simmons.” Simmons was bewildered. His nomination might mean violence and negative press coverage for his beloved Klan.

Before Simmons could respond, both men suggested that he relinquish the office of imperial wizard and create a new position of emperor for himself as a kind of general overseer. They recommended Hiram Evans, former Dallas dentist and current imperial kligrapp, to fill the post of imperial wizard, at least on a temporary basis. According to the Klan Konstitution, Simmons possessed the power to create the new offi...