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Rule by Terror in the 'Twenties

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Rule by Terror in the 'Twenties The hooded knights revive Rule by Terror in the ‘twenties David Chalmers Those interested in reading further on the invisible Empire should consult Professor David Chalmers’ Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (1965). Chalmers is professor of history at the University of Florida D.W. Griffith’s 1915 melodrama, The Birth of a Nation, was a blockbuster of a motion picture, and it helped revive the Ku Klux Klan. The Kentucky-born Griffith created his pioneering film from a novel written by a North Carolinian named Thomas Dixon. Dixon’s life was built on eloquence and passion. A fellow-student and friend of Woodrow Wilson at Johns Hopkins graduate school, Dixon had been a legislator, Baptist preacher, lecturer, novelist, playwright, and actor, always reaching out to a larger audience. Griffith gave him his biggest one. Dixon’s 1905 book, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, was one of the three that he wrote on the Invisible Empire which his uncle had helped lead in the Carolina piedmont. The story revolved around two star-crossed families, the Camerons and the Stonemans, one from the South and the other from the North. Their sons and daughters fell in love, but the War Between the States separated them and Reconstruction brought them disaster. Congressman Stoneman, copied from life after Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stephens, was presented as a crippled, hate-filled villain, urged on by his mulatto mistress to degrade the captured South. With the murder of “The Great Soul,” Abraham Lincoln, there was nothing to stop him. Black tyranny ruled the South, black corruption stained its legislative halls, and brutish black lust stalked its womanhood. However, at this darkest moment, the hooded knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by young Ben Cameron, Civil War hero and beloved of Stoneman’s daughter, rode forth to save the South and its downtrodden people. The Klan rides. Scene from D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” 1915 D.W. Griffith took Dixon’s story and made it into the movie’s first colossal spectacular. In place of the usual fifteen-minute flicker, Griffith created a three hour epic dramatically restaging the war’s battles, Sherman’s March to the Sea, and Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater. Congressman Stoneman comes to the Southern town of Piedmont to oversee his Sister,” as he called her, and her mother. Mrs. Lenoir, leap from a cliff to their deaths after ravishment by a black renegade soldier. Cameron is arrested and sentenced to death for murder; Stoneman’s son, in love with Cameron’s sister, takes his place. Just in time, the Klan arrives to save the living, avenge the fallen, and reunite the lovers. Breaking former static role of the camera, using angels, movement, and changing focus, expanding irises, reaching in and out of the close-ups, juxtaposing, and paralleling, Griffith created his masterpiece. As the bugle call rang out and the Klan rode to the rescue, theater orchestras pounded out themes from Wagner and “The Hall of the Mountain King.” Audiences rose cheering in the South, and crowds demonstrated in protest in the North. The picture was seen by President Woodrow Wilson, members of Congress and the Supreme Court, and millions of spectators at $2 apiece, while William J. Simmons, a fraternal organizer, colonel in the Woodmen of the World, and failed Methodist minister, dreamed of a revival of the Klan itself. “Colonel” Simmons’ plan for the Klan was revealed in the words of the advertisement which he inserted in the December 7, 1915, Atlanta Journal. The “Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” was “A High Class Order for Men of Intelligence and Character.” It was to be “The World’s Greatest Secret, Social, Patriotic, Fraternal, Beneficiary Order.” In other words, it was to be a lodge, a fraternity. The fact that it was so exclude all who were not white, native-born, or Protestant did not make it substantially different from others such organizations and most college fraternities. It was the chance factor of its Southern origin that provided the dynamic element – the name and legend of the Ku Klux Klan. In The Birth of a Nation, whose Atlanta advertisement shared the page with Simmons’ hand-drawn announcement of the Klan, Thomas Dixon and D.W. Griffith had engraved an image of the flowing robes and mystic, masked, night-riding, patriotic violence on the national imagination. While most fraternities guarded their lodge hall secrets against outsiders and aliens, the vigilante heritage of the Klan took it out into the cow-pastures and city streets to protect its version of American Values. Simmons’ initial plans had been less extravagant. His specialty was lodge ritual. He had hoped for a mildly successful organization in the Southeast to which he could sell memberships, regalia, and insurance. World War I enabled the Klan to do a little public marching and patriotic snooping. After the war the Klan with a small membership in Georgia and Alabama, emerged into a time of opportunity. The heightened emotions and restlessness that were not immediately stilled by an end to the fighting, the manly camaraderie of the war and the habit of violence, people going home and not going home, black men who had served in the Army or who had left the farms for the cities and Northern factories – all were unsettling elements. There were race riots in Chicago, Omaha, and Knoxville, in Duluth, Springfield, and Tulsa, in Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, and Florida. Large numbers of immigrants were arriving from the Southern and Eastern European dwelling places of the Roman Catholic, Jew, Slav, and Bolshevik. Life in the cities was confusing; the war to end war had turned sour, and the attempt to make society better by prohibition was either being flouted or downright corrupted. As with the original Ku Klux Klan, the unsettled times and the mysterious name (now potent with the legacy of its vigilante role during Reconstruction) undoubtedly shaped the direction the Klan would take for years to come. Simmons engaged in a pair of fund raisers, Edward Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who were the Southern Publicity Association, to handle recruitment. Simmons was to receive $2 of the $10 initiation fee paid by each new member. The rest was to go to Clarke, Tyler, and their salesmen. The results were phenomenal. The Klan made good copy and the press rushed to spread reports of its doing. Within a year membership was nationwide and soared to almost 100,000. The basic Southern emphasis on patriotism and white supremacy was expanded into the Americanism. The American way of life and moral values were to be guarded not only against the Negroes, but from Roman Catholics, Jews, and Orientals, from aliens and immigrants, from bootleggers and road houses, from crime and corrupt politicians, from marital infidelity and sexual immortality, and from scoffers and unbelievers. Salesmen, or “keagles,” were selected from the Masonic and other lodges, touring lectures from the evangelical ministry, and the country was divided and subdivided into sales districts. Local groups brought the Klan into town to combat bootlegging or corrupt city government, and Atlanta’s usual advice to new chapters was to “clean up the town.” Crosses burned on nearby hillsides, sheeted horsemen paraded down Main Street on Saturday night and the next morning marched down church aisles to make donations while choirs sang. “The Old Rugged Cross” or “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Georgia, the home of Henry Grady’s New South industrialism, old Tom Watson’s snit-Catholic tirades, and the lynching of Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, was the cradle for the reborn Klan. Colonel Simmons’ blazing cross on Stone Mountain had been its first annunciation and Peachtree Street in Atlanta brought the robed faithful to its Imperial Palace. For fifty years Georgians would march in its parades and elect its candidates, as well as fight against its violence and intolerance. Nathan Bedford Forrest Klan No. 1 was the Imperial Empire’s mother lodge, and in 1920 when Simmons triumphantly attended the annual reunion of the United Confederate Veterans in Houston, its Exalted Cyclops Nathan Thomas Dixon’s book about the hooded knights of the Ku Bedford Forrest III rode beside him. Klux Klan inspired D.W. Griffith’s movie “The Birth of a Nation.” The original Klan arose after the chaos of the Civil War, and members dressed in disguises such as these. The Klan spread through the cities and small towns of Georgia. The mighty Robert E. Lee No. 1 of Birmingham was the heart of its strength in Alabama and Sam Houston No. 1 led the way in Texas, although probably outstripped in size and violence by Dallas’ No. 66 and Beaumont’s No. 7. Klan organizers did well in northern Louisiana and throughout Arkansas, but the Imperial Empire’s earliest bastion of terror was in Texas and Oklahoma. Klan salesmen jumped across the continent to California, selling patriotism, fraternity, and moral enforcement. They spread out from Los Angeles, and moved northward across the border to power in Oregon, offering anti-Catholicism to the descendants of the New England and Midwestern Puritans. Its legions grew in Missouri and Kansas, and its salesmen worked their way up the Mississippi Valley, across the Great Plains, and into the mountain states. In 1924 Colorado became even a greater success story of Denver, the governor, and both senators. But in no realm did Klan political power become greater than in Indiana. Its ambitious Grand Dragon, D.C. Stephenson, built his organization on a bloc by bloc basis throughout the state, carrying in tow the governor and both senators, negotiating for the purchase of Valparaiso University, and working his own way toward the White House.
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