Not a Catholic Nation

The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s

Mark Paul Richard

• Verlag: University of Massachusetts Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781613764343
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Storia mondiale

During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan experienced a remarkable resurgence, drawing millions of American men and women into its ranks. In Not a Catholic Nation, Mark Paul Richard examines the KKK's largely ignored growth in the six states of New England—Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont—and details the reactions of the region's Catholic population, the Klan's primary targets.Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped sources—French-language newspapers in the New England–Canadian borderlands; KKK documents scattered in local, university, and Catholic repositories; and previously undiscovered copies of the Maine Klansmen —Richard demonstrates that the Klan was far more active in the Northeast than previously thought. He also challenges the increasingly prevalent view that the Ku Klux Klan became a mass movement during this period largely because it functioned as a social, fraternal, or civic organization for many Protestants. While Richard concedes that some Protestants in New England may have joined the KKK for those reasons, he shows that the politics of ethnicity and labor played a more significant role in the Klan's growth in the region.The most comprehensive analysis of the Ku Klux Klan's antagonism toward Catholics in the 1920s, this book is also distinctive in its consideration of the history of the Canada–U.S. borderlands, particularly the role of Canadian immigrants as both proponents and victims of the Klan movement in the United States.

1

Arrival in New England

IN 1865 six former Confederate soldiers formed a club in Pulaski, Tennessee, that they named after the Greek word kuklos, or “circle.” The men at some point modified the name to kuklux and, reflecting their Scottish-Irish ancestry, added the word klan. Draping their bodies with sheets, the club’s members traveled by night around their community, frightening African Americans with their pranks. The concept of the Ku Klux Klan spread to other communities after the Civil War and before long became diffused throughout the southern United States.¹

During the Reconstruction of the South after the war, the Ku Klux Klan promoted the interests of the Democratic Party, which centered on white supremacy. The KKK functioned as a vigilante movement to prevent blacks from exercising their newly acquired rights, including the right of black men to vote, and they also worked against the northern “carpetbaggers” who had migrated to southern communities to challenge the authority and power that whites had held prior to the Civil War. As Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate lieutenant general and the first Grand Wizard of the KKK, put it, “There was a great deal of insecurity felt by the southern people. There were a great many northern men coming down there, forming Leagues all over the country. The negroes were holding night meetings; were going about; were becoming very insolent; and the southern people … were very much alarmed.”² Consequently, southern Caucasians utilized the Ku Klux Klan as a means of regaining racial supremacy during Reconstruction. Through the KKK they unleashed a lethal wave of violence against both black and white Republicans, effectively destroying Republican organizations so that the Democratic Party could regain power in the South.

In 1869, as a result of declining membership, negative public opinion, and unspecified concerns that some of the local Klan organizations were out of control, Forrest disbanded the society, but it continued to survive. After Congress investigated the group in 1870–1871, it passed anti-Klan legislation, and the resulting arrest and conviction of over one thousand Klansmen, as well as the imposition of martial law, effectively brought the Ku Klux Klan to an end in 1871, just six years after its founding.³

Within a few decades, however, the United States witnessed a resurgence of the Klan. In 1905 Thomas Dixon Jr. published a novel titled The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. The film director D. W. Griffith adapted the content of this publication to produce a motion picture called The Clansman, which premiered in Los Angeles in 1915 and received an enthusiastic reception. Renamed The Birth of a Nation, it was shown twice daily in Boston from April to September 1915, and nearly one hundred thousand people watched it. Viewed by millions across the United States, The Birth of a Nation extolled the Ku Klux Klan and played a central role in reviving the organization.⁴

William J. Simmons, an itinerant preacher and fraternal organizer whose father had been a member of the post–Civil War Klan, capitalized on the success of The Birth of a Nation to reestablish the KKK. Simmons gathered a group of thirty-four friends, several of whom had been members of the Reconstruction Klan, to file a petition in October 1915 for a Ku Klux Klan charter in Georgia. The next month, on Thanksgiving evening, fifteen of them pledged atop Stone Mountain their oath of allegiance to the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Individuals who joined the KKK purchased their memberships as well as life insurance from Simmons, who viewed the organization as a moneymaking venture. By June 1920 the secret society numbered from four thousand to five thousand men.⁵

Not until Simmons hired Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler of the Southern Publicity Association in June 1920 did the Klan’s membership begin to increase dramatically. So did the Klan’s profits. As the owners of an early public relations firm, Clarke and Tyler developed a marketing scheme that expanded the KKK from a southern organization to a national one, a development that enlarged scope of the 1920s Klan and distinguished it from the Reconstruction-era society. The pair split the country into regions called domains that were headed by Grand Goblins and then divided the domains into state realms, each headed by a King Kleagle during the realms’ provisional stage and then by a Grand Dragon after they became chartered. Clarke and Tyler also had Klan organizers, called Kleagles, working at the local level to draw members into the national organization. Recruitment was a money-making venture for everyone involved in the Klan hierarchy. Of the $10.00 initiation fee every new member paid out, $4.00 went to the Kleagle, $1.00 to the King Kleagle, $0.50 to the Grand Goblin, $2.50 to Clarke and Tyler, and the remaining $2.00 to Simmons. In part as a result of this scheme, the Klan expanded to about one hundred thousand members nationwide by October 1921. Besides membership fees, the national organization earned revenue from the sale of robes at $6.50 apiece and from the imposition of an imperial tax of $1.80 on each member after their local branch reached one hundred members and received a charter. William Peirce Randel contends that the Ku Klux Klan became a big business during the 1920s, with up to six million people paying $10.00 each to join the organization and many of them purchasing Klan regalia, possibly bringing up to $75 million to the Klan’s coffers. Edgar Fuller, who served as Clarke’s executive secretary and later left the Klan because he no longer supported its goals and methods, wrote that “money, easily and quickly to be had, is the sole objective” of the organization. Fuller noted that people from all stations in life joined the KKK, and he lamented that “great numbers of wage-earners denied themselves and deprived their families of necessities in order to pay the initiation fee.”⁶

Publicity generated by newspaper accounts, together with a congressional investigation in 1921, helped the Ku Klux Klan attract members. The New York World wrote a series of articles denouncing the group in 1921, and they were syndicated across the country in eighteen newspapers. “It wasn’t until the newspapers began to attack the Klan that it really grew,” Simmons once stated, going on to boast that “certain newspapers also aided us by inducing Congress to investigate us. The result was that Congress gave us the best advertising we ever got. Congress made us.” Simmons had skillfully defended the KKK before Congress, where he portrayed the organization as “a standard fraternal order” and argued that it had the right to restrict membership in the same way as other fraternal societies, including the Knights of Columbus. Simmons collapsed dramatically—undoubtedly for effect—at the conclusion of his testimony. Congress did not continue the investigation, “and its failure to do so was like a government stamp of approval on the Invisible Empire,” writes Wyn Craig Wade. Unlike the action it took after the investigation of 1870–71, Congress did not follow up with legislation to quash the organization in the early twenties. Wade indicates that Klan membership increased by 20 percent after the hearings and that within a year membership figures had increased from one hundred thousand to over one million. Despite an internal struggle and publicly fought court battles that took place from 1922 to 1924, during which period Hiram W. Evans, a dentist, wrested control of the national leadership of the Ku Klux Klan from Simmons, the KKK’s numbers grew into the millions before peaking in the mid-1920s.⁷ Unlike the post–Civil War society, the Klan of the twenties became a mass movement, one that included women as well as men.

Like the earlier Klan, the new incarnation adopted garments, language, and rituals that cast an air of mystery and intrigue about the organization and lured unsuspecting citizens to become part of a select group. A sociology professor at Dartmouth College, John Moffatt Mecklin, observed in 1924, “The Klan has learned, as its inveterate enemy, the Roman Catholic Church, learned long ago, the power of the appeal to the spectacular and the mysterious.” Wade has similarly noted that the KKK’s practices resembled those of its Catholic targets: “The unity, secrecy and exclusiveness of Klansmen rivaled that of the ‘Romanists’ they detested.” Even their robes were similar to those of Catholic priests, Wade contends, although the Klan’s white, pointed hoods with small eyelets distinguished their garments from those of priests and certainly gave the members a sinister appearance. The outfits also transformed some: “There seems to be a quality of metamorphosis in the hood and the robe of the Ku Klux Klan,” stated A. J. Padon Jr., a Grand Goblin of New England in the early 1920s. “It frequently changes sober business men as the secret chemic potion changed the character of Dr. Jekyl to the sinister Mr. Hyde. While all members are not affected in that manner, only too many are.”⁸

The Klan’s language and nomenclature were also sinister. Local organizations, for example, were expected to have thirteen officers: an Exalted Cyclops (president) “and his twelve Terrors.” Most of the “Terrors” had enigmatic titles beginning with the letter K: Klokard (lecturer), Kludd (chaplain), Kligrapp (secretary), Klabee (treasurer), Kladd (conductor), Klarogo (inner guard), Klexter (outer guard), Night Hawk (supervisor of candidates for admission into the organization), Klokan (investigator and auditor), and the Klokann (three individuals who made up the board of investigators.) The Klan Kalendar was equally enigmatic. It renamed the days of the week using austere, mood-setting adjectives that all began with the letter D: Desperate, Dreadful, Desolate, Doleful, Dismal, Deadly, and Dark. In similar fashion, the Klan’s weeks all began with the letter W: Weird, Wonderful, Wailing, Weeping, and Woeful. While the names of the months utilized more letters of the alphabet, they were no less evocative and grim: Appalling, Frightful, Sorrowful, Mournful, Horrible, Terrible, Alarming, Furious, Fearful, Hideous, Gloomy, and Bloody. To take one example, when the national KKK chartered the Androscoggin Klan no. 46 of the Realm of Maine on October 24, 1925, it represented that date on the charter as “the Desperate day of the Wonderful week of the Alarming Month of the Year of the Klan, LIX.” Beyond their arcane titles and calendar, Klansmen developed secret codes to identify other members of their society, codes that encrypted the first letters of a phrase. For example, “Ayak” posed the question “Are you a klansman?” and the response, “Akia,” acknowledged “A klansman I am.”⁹ This peculiar language added to the mystique of the white-robed organization.

The Klan also had mysterious rituals, some of which were reported in the press. A. J. Gordon, a reporter for the Boston Herald, recorded his observations of the Maine Klan in 1923. Referred to as “aliens,” candidates for membership underwent a “naturalization” ceremony during which they might walk to different stations and take various oaths of obligation, including obedience to the Imperial Wizard and a pledge of secrecy about the society’s inner workings. Candidates had to stand before an altar bearing an open Bible that was placed on top of the U.S. flag. A dagger also lay on the altar, and Gordon reported that candidates learned it signified that they would meet their death if they violated their oaths. Behind the altar were burning candles and a wooden cross. During the naturalization ceremony, each candidate had to answer a series of questions, pl...