The Klan Comes to Tipton

The Klan Comes to Tipton Allen Safianow * “Klan Speaker Is Coming” proclaimed the headline of a brief article on the back page of the September 22,1922, Tipton Daily Tri- bune. Dr. Lester Brown, “a speaker of force . not radical in his views,” would deliver a free lecture from the public square band- stand, and all residents were invited. “Much has been heard of this order by our people,” the article noted, “but locally they have not come in contact with it.” The next evening Brown, who described himself as an ordained minister from Atlanta, Georgia, addressed an assemblage of townspeople the Tribune called “not large, but attentive” and distributed cards for interested persons to sign, with about one hundred reportedly responding. He portrayed the Klan as an American Christian organization, consisting of “native born, white Gentile, Protestant” citizens, that stood for charity, the Constitution, pure womanhood, the Bible, public schools, and racial purity. In con- junction with Brown’s address, copies of the Klan weekly, The Fiery Cross, were distributed throughout the town that weekend, con- taining articles that denied that the Klan was anti-Catholic, anti- Semitic, or “anti-negro,”yet raised fears about miscegenation, Catholic intrusion in American politics, and Jewish business practices.’ Within a relatively short period of time, the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan would attain a very visible pres- ence in Tipton, a small town located some thirty miles north of Indi- anapolis. In 1925 the Tipton County Klan would claim 1,622 members among the county’s 16,000 residents, making the Tipton Klan one of the strongest in Indiana, where the organization came to enjoy its greatest influence, claiming over 165,000 Hoosier members in 1925.’ Although considerable attention has been given to the Klan movement of the 1920s, the circumstances and meaning of the rise of the Invisible Empire continue to be disputed. “Nearly seventy years *Allen Safianow is professor of history at Indiana University, Kokomo. The author would like to express his gratitude to the residents of Tipton County who assisted his research or agreed to be interviewed and to the staff of the Tipton Pub- lic Library, particularly Donna Ekstrom. He also wishes to thank IUK colleagues Rick Aniskiewicz and Jon Kofas for their help. 1 Tipton Daily Tribune, September 22,25, 1922. ‘“Local Officers ofthe Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1925,”typescript, 34 (Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis). INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, XCV (September, 1999).0 1999, Trustees of Indiana University. 204 Indiana Magazine of History after it spread across the nation like a prairie wildfire,” one writer has observed, “the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s largely remains a historical enigma.”3Over the past eight decades analysts of the movement have offered widely varying assessments and explanations. Early studies tended to portray the Klan as a reactionary movement based on ignorance and fear, centered in rural or small-town Amer- ica, and pursuing a nativist or racist agenda aimed against blacks, Catholics, Jews, and foreigners. Similar views continued to prevail in the 1950s; such historians as John Higham, Richard Hofstadter, and William Leuchtenburg stressed the Klan’s violence and vigilantism, aimed at white Protestant moral slackers as well as minori- ties, and depicted its members as economically marginal.4 By the 1960s, however, one could discern a shift from this ortho- dox position. Kenneth Jackson’s 1967 study, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, pointed to the Klan’s substantial urban following. Although his account acknowledged some Klan vigilantism, he contended that the “most distinguishing characteristic of urban Klansmen was a preoccupation with politics.” During the 1970s and 1980s there appeared a substantial number of works that so challenged previ- ous portrayals of the Klan that one could begin to speak of a revisionist school of thought. Although their conclusions were not uniform, revisionists generally stressed that there were significant variations in the Klan movement depending on locality and that the focus of study should be on regional or local Klans. They questioned traditional assertions that Klan members came primarily from marginal economic groups and that they were especially prone to violence or irrational behavior. Instead, they argued, klansmen fell mostly within the economic and social mainstream. Revisionists concluded that genuine local problems such as political corruption, vice, and the vio- lation of Prohibition played more of a role in generating local Klan movements than did ethnic, racial, or religious prejudice, although often such prejudice was interwoven with these other concern^.^ 3 Shawn Lay, “Conclusion: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s,” in The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, ed. Shawn Lay (Urbana, Ill., 1992), 217. 4 John Moffatt Mecklin, The Ku Klux man: A Study of the American Mind (New York, 1924),99, 104, 108, 122-25; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925 (New York, 1963), 285-99; Richard Hofstadter, The Age ofReform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), 293-96; William E. Leucht- enburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (Chicago, 1958), 205,209-13,223. For a more detailed discussion of Klan historiography see Leonard J. Moore, “Historical Interpretations of the 1920’s Klan: The Traditional View and the Populist Revision,” Journal of Social History, XXIV (Winter 1990), 341-57. 5Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (New York, 19671, 241, 247; Moore, “Historical Interpretations,” 349-54. Examples of such revisionist work include Larry R. Gerlach, Blazing Crosses in Zion: The Ku KZux Klan in Utah (Logan, Utah, 1982); Robert Alan Goldberg, Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (Urbana, Ill., 1981); William D. Jenkins, Steel Valley Klan: The Ku Klux KZan in Ohio’s Muhoning Valley (Kent, Ohio, 1990); Shawn Lay, War, Revolution and The Klan Comes to Tipton 205 Perhaps the most avowedly revisionist work is Leonard Moore’s Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928. Moore demonstrated that members represented a wide occupational cross section of white Protestants but with few supporters from either the economic elite or the poor. He maintained that in Indiana the Klan movement was “essentially decentralized and community-oriented.” Moore’s thesis was that the Indiana Klan of the 1920s, although nativist in tone, could best be understood as a populist organization that “concerned itself primarily not with persecuting ethnic minori- ties but with promoting the ability of average citizens to influence the workings of society and government.” Disturbed by crime, political corruption, and lax Prohibition enforcement, Klan members “sought to revitalize a sense of social and civic unity in community life and uphold traditional religious and moral values.” He suggest- ed that the extreme rhetoric directed against Catholics and aliens was largely hyperbole; that the Klan’s anti-Catholicism and xeno- phobia were commonly accepted parts of white Protestant culture in Indiana; that boycotts against Catholic and Jewish merchants were generally ineffective; and that there were few if any documented instances of Indiana Klan members using direct physical violence against individuals from minority groups. Instead, the Klan’s pri- mary targets were the political and economic elites who had become locally dominant by the 1920s and whom the Klan saw as hostile or apathetic toward moral and political reform. Moore contended that the Klan movement could be described as a “white Protestant nation- alism” with a “capacity to arouse a sense of solidarity . to unite disparate groups . to assert a powerful populist influence in community life.”6 the Ku Klux Klan: A Study of Intolerance in a Border City (El Paso, Tex., 1985); Lay, The Invisible Empire in the West;Christopher Cocoltchos, “The Invisible Government and the Viable Community: The Ku Klux Klan in Orange County, California during the 1920s”(Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1979); Neil Bet- ten, “Nativism and the Klan in Town and City: Valparaiso and Gary, Indiana,” Stud- ies in History and Society, IV (Spring 1973), 3-16; Kenneth D. Wald, “The Visible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan as an Electoral Movement,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XI (Autumn 19801,217-34; William Toll, “Progress and Piety: The Ku Klux Klan and Social Change in Tillamook, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, WX (April 19781, 75-85. It should be pointed out that not all recent scholars have fully accepted this revisionist point of view. Kathleen Blee emphasizes the violent, racist, nativist, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic dimensions of the movement, and Nancy MacLean regards the Nan as a petit-bourgeois, quasi-fascist movement that sought to maintain hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, Cal., 1991); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1994). 6Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klur Hun in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 9, 11-12,23-31, 52-60, 78-94, 191; Moore, ”Historical Inter- pretations,” 353. Moore’s thesis was foreshadowed by Norman Weaver, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan” (Ph.D. dissertation,

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