Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan / Edition 3

by David J. Chalmers

Overview

"The only work that treats Ku Kluxism for the entire period of it's existence . . . the authoritative work on the period. Hooded Americanism is exhaustive in its rich detail and its use of primary materials to paint the picture of a century of terror. It is comprehensive, since it treats the entire period, and enjoys the perspective that the long view provides. It is timely, since it emphasizes the undeniable persistence of terrorism in American life."-John Hope Franklin

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822307723
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/09/1987
Edition description:	Third Edition
Pages:	510
Sales rank:	370,734
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.03(d)

Read an Excerpt

Hooded Americanism

The History of the Ku Klux Klan

---

By David M. Chalmers

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1981 David M. Chalmers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-0772-3

---

CHAPTER 1

A QUICK LOOK BEHIND THE MASK

In 1923, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, the recognized high priests of criticism of the American scene, described the Ku Klux Klan for Smart Set, their journal of satirical sophistication. In what none of their avid followers would have mistaken for praise, they flayed every organizational aspect of the national life. Sparing no one, majority or minority, they connected the newly reborn Invisible Empire with all that was ludicrous and unwarranted in a society which they felt represented the bumptious mediocracy.

Not a single solitary sound reason has yet been advanced for putting the Ku Klux Klan out of business. If the Klan is against the Jews, so are half of the good hotels of the Republic and three-quarters of the good clubs. If the Klan is against the foreign-born or the hyphenated citizen, so is the National Institute of Arts and Letters. If the Klan is against the Negro, so are all of the States south of the Mason-Dixon line. If the Klan is for damnation and persecution, so is the Methodist Church. If the Klan is bent upon political control, so are the American Legion and Tammany Hall. If the Klan wears grotesque uniforms, so do the Knights of Pythias and the Mystic Shriners. If the Klan holds its meetings in the dead of night, so do the Elks. If the Klan conducts its business in secret, so do all college Greek letter fraternities and the Department of State. If the Klan holds idiotic parades in the public streets, so do the police, the letter-carriers and firemen. If the Klan's officers bear ridiculous names, so do the officers of the Lambs' Club. If the Klan uses the mails for shaking down suckers, so does the Red Cross. If the Klan constitutes itself a censor of private morals, so does the Congress of the United States. If the Klan lynches a Moor for raping someone's daughter, so would you or I.

The Klan, in approvingly reprinting the piece in one of its own journals, Dawn, recognized itself, even though it missed the barbed touch which the description contained. Except for the first nights of playful pranks and mystic initiations in Pulaski, Tennessee, during the early days of Reconstruction, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan have not been noted for their sense of humor. The grim defense of a society under attack in the twentieth century, has been a highly serious affair for the wearers of the hood and mask.

The Klan was born during the restless days after the Civil War, when time was out of joint in the South and the social order was battered and turned upside down. As a secret, nocturnal organization, operating during lawless times, the Klan soon turned into a vigilante force. To restore order meant returning the Negro to the field–just as long as he didn't do too well there–and the prewar leaders to their former seats of power. Those who felt differently would have to go. And so the masked Klansmen rode out across the land. Where intimidation was not sufficient, violence was used. The Klan raided solitary cabins and invaded towns, preferably at night, but in the daytime where necessary. Although Klansmen were occasionally hurt, the death toll of Negroes and Republicans probably ran close to a thousand.

Although soberer leaders set up a centralized, hierarchical organization for the purposes of better co-ordination and control, their success was limited. The local dens proved uncontrollable and continued to operate for private as well as political ends, even after Imperial Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest formally disbanded the Klans in 1869. Changing conditions and martial law finally combined to bring the Invisible Empire to an end by 1871, but the memory of the Ku Klux Klan remained as one of the treasured folk myths of the South.

In the twentieth century, Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith lit a candle to its memory with their epic The Birth of a Nation, and an Alabama fraternalist, Col. William J. Simmons, fanned the flame into a major brush fire after World War I. The reborn Klan's internal adhesive was fraternalism. Its greatest selling point was the protection of traditional American values. These were to be found in the bosoms and communities of white, native-born, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, whether in the small towns or transplanted into a newly minted urban America. The changing world of the 1920s, which saw postwar restlessness and new waves of immigration combined with the Prohibition-accented erosion of both the small town and fundamentalist morality, brought the Klan millions of recruits. The Invisible Empire was soon a factor to be considered in the communal and political life of the nation from Maine to California.

Although it first caught on in the Southeast, where Georgia was its citadel and Atlanta its holy city, the Klan was a national phenomenon. It picked up its first genuine Klan senator in Texas and almost got the governorship. It whipped and elected throughout the state, but its particular center was Dallas where the appearance of Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, a local dentist made good, drew 75,000 of his brothers-beneath-the-robe to Klan Day at the state fair. In Oklahoma a brash and bumptious governor who used martial law after literally hundreds of incidents of violence, was impeached and dropped from office. InArkansas the Klan was so politically powerful that it held its own primaries to decide which brother to support in the regular Democratic ones. Klan violence in California was as brutal as anywhere in the South, and in the town of Taft, in Kern County, the police and best citizens turned out to watch an evening of torture in the local ball park. When an anti-Klan candidate won the Republican primary in Oregon, the Klan jumped to the Democratic party and helped capture the governorship and enough of the legislature to outlaw all Parochial schools. In Colorado, the Klan, with business support, elected two U. S. Senators and swept the state. When the Grand Dragon, a Denver doctor, was accused of having forced a high school boy into marriage by threatening him with castration, the governor appointed the Klan leader aide-de-camp, as a show of confidence.

Under D. C. Stephenson, Indiana Klansmen elected a senator, the governor and the legislature, and in one small town went down to lynch the Pope when the rumor got abroad that he was coming on the train from Chicago. In Wisconsin the Socialist rank and file responded to its lodge appeal and its Anti-Catholicism. The quarter-of-a-million-man Ohio Klan did battle with alien invaders in the Mahoning Valley and the Pennsylvania Klans had some impressive riots in Lilly and Carnegie. The Klan was organized in every county of New Jersey, although it felt most at home among the Methodists of Asbury Park, while in New York the Klan's anti-booze crusaders patrolled the Merrick Road on Long Island and met mightily from Poughkeepsie to Binghamton and Buffalo. Part of the Klannish National Guard had to be disarmed in Rhode Island. Klansmen and Irishmen spent their summer nights rioting in central Massachusetts and in Maine the Invisible Empire helped boost Owen Brewster into the governorship.

The national organization of the Invisible Empire was still authoritarian and hierarchical, but the Klan of the 1920s, like that of Reconstruction, was marked in practice by anarchic local autonomy. Although Imperial Emperors, Wizards, Kligrapps, Giants, and Kludds dreamed, paraded, klonvokated, and clashed over power at the center of the hooded Empire, it was at the rim in thousands of communities across the nation that the Klan lived and mattered–as a mystery and a presence, and as a disruptive and eventually self-destructive force. It was here, at the rim, that the real saga of the Klan unfolded. It took place among the black lakes and bayous of Louisiana's Morehouse Parish and the yellow clay hills of Illinois' "Bloody Williamson" county. The white robes of the Ku Klux Klan trailed through Ben Lindsey's juvenile court in Denver, LeRoy Percy's Greenville in the Mississippi Delta and the fairgrounds of New York State from Chemung to Suffolk County, and across the editorial pages and headlines of William Allen White's Emporia Gazette and Julian Harris' Columbus Enquirer-Sun.

At the 1924 Democratic National Convention the Klan was almost as much of an issue as picking the presidential candidate, and a year later, the Klan paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue over forty thousand strong in the nation's capital.

And yet, by the beginning of the great Depression, the Klan's power and glory were almost gone, its strength spilled out like water on a bottomless sand road. It was not the Klan's principles which had been responsible, for had it selected its members more carefully and grown more slowly it might have found a permanent place in the lodge world of America. Rather it was the combination of Violence, politics, and exploitive leadership which destroyed the power of the Invisible Empire. The leaders of the Klan were out for money and ruled irrationally and dictatorially in its pursuit. The fight over the spoils wrecked the organization in nearly every state and practically every community.

Politics helped do the job of destruction. The Klan's ambitions as well as its promise to lead the defense against the changes taking place in a twentieth-century America, propelled it into the political arena. There not only could it not deliver, but it found its unity split asunder on the sharp rocks of existing party factionalism and alignment.

The very dynamics of Klan organization dictated violence, which initially brought respect and members, but eventually created revulsion. The godly came to realize that the Klan was not. Terror went too far, the extremists ranted too loudly and the leaders were too immoral. The affluent and civic-minded came to realize what a divisive force it actually was in a community. When a young woman whom the Klan's most dynamic northern leader, Indiana's D. C. Stephenson, had kidnaped and assaulted gave a full deathbed testimony, it cost the Klan thousands of members.

By the time of the Depression, the Klan, numbering no more than one hundred thousand members, was held together by mystic fraternalism and concentrated primarily, though not wholly, in the South. Where in the 1920s Klansmen had banded together against Catholic and alien, now in the thirties they discovered Communism and, soon afterwards, the New Deal. Anti-Semitism was also on the rise. Then, in the mid-thirties, organized Labor pushed its way to the fore among the enemies of one-hundred-per-cent Americanism. Klan organizers were told to lay off Roman Catholics, Jews, and Negroes and concentrate on the invasion of the South by communism in the form of the CIO's Steel and Textile Workers Organizing Committees.

Nothing, however, revived the grandeur and power of the 1920s. While the Klan was an active force in numerous communities in the southeastern part of the country and often had high-placed friends, not even the flurries of national interest aroused by the Shoemaker flogging murder in Tampa, Florida, and the appointment of former Klansman Hugo Black to the Supreme Court, revived its power.

In the late thirties, Hiram Evans, the one-time roly-poly cut-rate dentist who had seized the Klan from its founder almost twenty years before, retired. The Imperial Wizardship passed into the hands of Jimmy Colescott, a former veterinarian from Terre Haute, Indiana, and a veteran of the Klan wars. A major recruiting drive plus violence in the industrializing southern piedmont failed to change things much. This, combined with bad publicity over joint meeting with the German-American Bund, World War II, and a federal tax suit retired Colescott and the Klan.

At the end of World War n, the Klan was revived in the hands of its last great leader, Atlanta obstetrician Dr. Samuel Green. The Klan had its usual officeholding friends in Georgia, but it was increasingly parochial. Although it emphasized Klannishness, which it defined as mixing with those who have the same ideas, its dynamics of speech, heritage, and organization led it into violence. However, despite its parades and cross burnings, its mystic initiations on Stone Mountain, its warnings, night raids, and floggings, it failed to gain any of the respectability and, outside of Georgia, the power it had held in the past. And it was beset by opposition as never before. The national and state attorney generals, the FBI, and the Bureau of Internal Revenue kept their eyes upon the shrunken Invisible Empire which was forced to close down its few remaining non-Southern branches. Below the Mason-Dixon line, state officials and local communities pressed it further with denunciations, antimask laws, and grand jury investigations, even though trial juries were still reluctant to convict.

With the sudden death of Samuel Green in 1949, the movement splintered badly. Independent Klans proliferated. No leader emerged as sufficiently strong to either unify or restrain them. They engaged in endemic violence and many Klan leaders and followers ended up in jail.

The 1954 decision of the Supreme Court striking down public school segregation gave the Klans a new spur to action. Although it brought neither unity nor social approval in the South–where resistance took the more respectable channels such as the staunchly middle-class White Citizens Councils–the resulting turmoil did create an environment in which the Klans could operate. New names such as those of Asa Carter, the pistol-packing ex-radio announcer; John Kasper, the Ivy League segregationist; and the Rev. Jimmy "Catfish" Cole, who tangled with North Carolina's Lumbee Indians, flashed like comets across the Klan skies. Anti-Semitism became increasingly important as the professionals such as Common Sense's Conde Mc-Ginley peddled their wares among the wearers of the white robes. The Jews and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren's "communist conspiracy" offered useful answers for the otherwise inexplicably growing Negro-rights movement. Dynamite was becoming an increasingly popular instrument of protest. Even so, the Klan tended to be less of a resistance than a status movement for some of those left insecure or unrecognized by society.

After a tapering off in the late fifties, the Klans sprang into action again with the campaign of Negro lunch-counter demonstrations, freedom rides, sit-ins, and, later, protest marches of the 1960s. The increasing pressure of Integration, the growth of the equal-rights movements and the shift of its focus to the city streets of the South, fueled a growing interest in the Klan. Nocturnal cross burnings and mass meetings began to draw larger turnouts in Alabama and Georgia than had been seen for a decade. The Klans found a new leader in Robert Shelton, a Tuscaloosa rubber worker. Although Alabama's United Klans outstripped the loosely formed Georgia federation, it did not bring unity or come up with a definite program. However, the Klans were becoming more truly the resistance movement they had always claimed to be.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Hooded Americanism by David M. Chalmers. Copyright © 1981 David M. Chalmers. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface: Media Hype and Poor-Boy Politics,
1: A Quick Look Behind the Mask,
2: The Klan Rides, 1865-71,
3: The Birth of a Nation,
4: The Klan Revival, 1915-21,
5: The Eyes of Texas,
6: Mayhem and Martial Law in Oklahoma,
7: The Razorback Klan,
8: Louisiana: Black Sheets among the Bayous,
9: Mississippi: Fiery Crosses on the Levee,
10: Georgia: The Klan Tabernacle,
11: The Heart of Dixie,
12: Oregon: Puritanism Repotted,
13: Success and Schism in the Tarheel State,
14: Klansmen in the Carolina Piedmont,
15: The Price of Success,
16: The Ten-Dollar Special,
17: Gold-Rush Days in California,
18: Pikes Peak or Bust,
19: Indefense of Inland America,
20: Twisting the Klan's Shirttail in Kansas,
21: Bad Luck in Minneapolis,
22: Border-State Klans,
23: Klan Castles in Indiana,
24: Mighty Ohio,
25: The Fighting Illini,
26: Badger Games in Wisconsin,
27: White Robes on Woodward Avenue,
28: National Politics,
29: The Championship Fight in Madison Square Garden,
30: Anticlimax: The Nineteen Twenty-Four Election,
31: From Canada to the Rio Grande,
32: Every Man for Himself in Florida,
33: Attempted Dominion in Virginia,
34: Riotous Doings in Penn's Woods,
35: Methodists and Madness in the Garden State,
36: The E-RI-E was A-Rising, and the Gin was Getting Low,
37: Defending the Puritan Fathers,
38: The Klan International,
39: Marching on Washington,
40: Decline,
41: Nineteen Twenty-Eight, A Year of Perils and Promises,
42: The Depression Decade, 1929-39,
43: All Dressed up but not Going Anywhere: The Colescott Era,
44: The Hooded World of Dr. Green,
45: The Death of the Dragon,
46: Laissez Faire, Violence, and Confusion in the Late Fifties,
47: The New Frontiers of the Nineteen Sixties,
48: The Long Hot Summer,
49: Declining Power,
50: Bad Times in the 1970s,
51: Confrontation, Poor-Boy Politics, and Revival,
52: Death in Greensboro,
53: The Enduring Klan,
Acknowledgments,
Bibliography,
Index,
About the Author,

Editorial Reviews

"Chalmers has steeped himself in the details of the KKK organization, personalities, and intrigue, and particularly their relation to the entire nation. . . . Chalmers has not only read widely; he has pondered the meaning and destiny of the Klan."-- "American Historical Review"

"Significant scholarship; a crucial work."--William E. Leuchtenberg "New York Times"

From the Publisher

"Chalmers has steeped himself in the details of the KKK organization, personalities, and intrigue, and particularly their relation to the entire nation. . . . Chalmers has not only read widely; he has pondered the meaning and destiny of the Klan."

American Historical Review

"Significant scholarship; a crucial work."

New York Times - William E. Leuchtenberg