HOODED EMPIRE THE KU KLUX KLAN IN COLORADO ROBERT ALAN GOLDBERG U n i v e r s i t y of Il l i n o i s P ress Urbana Chicago London © i g81 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Goldberg, Robert Alan, 1949- Hooded Empire. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Ku Klux Klan (1915- ) — Colorado, Case studies. I. T itle. HS2330.K63G57 322.4'2'09788 81-7625 ISBN 0-252-00848-0 AACR2 CONTENTS Preface vii Glossary of Klan Titles and Terms xvii o n e The Kluxing of Colorado 3 t w o Queen City of the Colorado Realm 12 t h r e e Thrust toward the South 49 f o u r Triumph at the Polls 68 five Under Invisible Rule 84 s 1 x Twilight on the Eastern Slope 96 s e v e n Hooded Progressivism: Canon City’s Imprint upon Colorado Klanism 118 eight Grand Junction and the Western Slope 149 nine The Ku Klux Klan as a Social Movement 163 Appendix A: Classification of Occupations by Status Group 183 Appendix B: On the Relationship between the Colorado Klan and the Protestant Churches 187 Notes 189 Bibliography 219 Index 245 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1. Occupational Distribution of the Leaders of the Denver Klan, 1924—26, Compared with the Occupational Distribution of Denver’s Male Population in 1920 37 2. Age Distribution of Denver Klansmen, 1921-25, Compared with the Age Distribution of Denver’s Native White Male Population in 1920 (Twenty Years and Older), by Percent 39 3. Distribution of Birthplaces of Denver Klansmen, 1921—25, Compared with the Distribution of Birthplaces of Denver’s Native Population in 1920, by Percent 40 4. Length of Residence of Denver Klansmen, 1921—25 (Prior to Joining) 42 , , 5. Occupational Distribution of Denver Klansmen, 19 2 1—25, Compared with the Occupational Distribution of Denver’s Male Population in 1920 46 , 6. Length of Residence of Fremont County Klansmen, 1924—28 (Prior to Joining) 134 7. Occupational Distribution of Fremont County Klansmen, 1924-28 135 8. Occupational Distribution o f Selected Klaverns by Percent 176 Figure 1. Colorado’s Counties, Principal Cities, and Rivers 6 2. Distribution o f Denver Klan Sample in 1924 44 3. The Ku Klux Klan Mobilization Process 173 ' - ■ • ■ ■ ' f ' ' ■ ' • ’ J . , ■ J ‘ • ■ ., ' ’ ;. ^ •'' ’ - ' • ■' ' : ' V ! ''" *-£*' . V %■ PREFACE The decade of the 1920s conjures up a unique cluster of im­ ages. A few broad, organizing conceptions dominate as people and events are filtered through a screen of memories, books, and films. This was the era of “normalcy,” prohibition, “flaming youth,” and the “golden glow.” George Babbitt, Al Capone, and Charles Lind­ bergh reign unchallenged in America’s mind. Looking backward, Middletown seemed to have revolved around the acquisition of au­ tomobiles, radios, and washing machines. Beneath this perceptual facade, poorly focused, were ordinary Americans who lived and worked much the same as their ancestors and descendents. The needs, fears, and resulting activities of some of these men and women are the subjects of this study. Alongside the flapper and the bootlegger stands the hooded figure of the Ku Klux Klansman as one of the enduring symbols of the decade. The images of these Klanspeople are faint, for the Invisible Empire of the twenties has been lost in the wakes of America’s two more publicized Klan movements. The first Ku Klux Klan arose in the South during Reconstruction in response to black emancipation and Republican rule. The third movement appeared after World War II and grew steadily in reaction to black assaults upon the racial status quo. Only recently has it moved north and west to capitalize upon racial tensions. Violence was characteristic of both movements. Unlike these Klans, the movement in the 1920s was not pri­ marily southern, terrorist, or white supremacist. Preaching a multi­ faceted program based upon “ 100 Per Cent Americanism” and mili­ tant Protestantism, it enlisted recruits in every section of the nation. Perhaps as many as six million Americans heeded its call to resist Catholics, Jews, lawbreakers, blacks, and immigrants. Despite the size and importance of this social movement, its character remains shrouded in mystery. Sixty years after its rise to power students of the Ku Klux Klan are still uncertain of its causes, rural or urban na­ ture, and the socioeconomic disposition of the membership. HOODED EMPIRE Building upon the work of sociologist John Mecklin, scholars such as David Chalmers, John Higham, Richard Hofstadter, William Leuchtenburg, and Seymour Lipset maintain that the Klan was in message and membership a movement of the villages and small towns of America. Kleagles recruited those Protestants who had had the least contact with minority groups and who were left relatively unscathed by the emergent mass-production and mass-consump- tion urban culture. The Klansman living in a large city was merely a recent migrant who “brought his heartland values and his defen­ siveness with him to the metropolis.” 1 Urban knights were thus a small minority and for all practical purposes indistinguishable from their country cousins.2 Local community tensions did not generate the Klan move­ ment. The Klan was, instead, the last major gasp o f small-town Prot­ estant America in its struggle with the city for cultural hegemony. The Klan impulse, wrote Hofstadter, was not usually a response to direct personal relationship or face to face competition, but rather the result of a growing sense that the code by which rural and small-town Anglo-Saxon America had lived was being ignored and even flouted in the wicked cities, and especially by the “aliens,” and that the old re­ ligion and morality were being snickered at by the intellectuals. The city had at last eclipsed the country in population and above all as the imaginative center of American life. It was the city that enjoyed the best of the new prosperity, the coun­ tryside that lagged behind. But above all, the city was the home of liquor and bootleggers, jazz and Sunday golf, wild parties and divorce. The magazines and newspapers, the movies and radio, brought tidings of all this to the countryside and even lured children of the old American stock away from the old ways.3 Spurred on by the “unspent hatreds” of World War I, the economic depression of the early 1920s, and the appearance of a new wave of foreign immigration, the alienated residents of provincial America rallied around the Klan. Klan-inspired racial and religious bigotry was, therefore, a manifestation of a deeper malaise. The real threats were “status deprivation,” cultural change, and the “acids of moder­ nity.” The struggle against these unassailable specters was, from its inception, hopeless and irrational, a futile attempt to resurrect a past golden age.4 Historian Charles Alexander, while accepting the Klan as a vm Preface small-town phenomenon, has looked beyond such abstractions for an explanation of the order’s rise. His survey of Klan activity in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas revealed that people joined because of widespread, flagrant violations of the law and moral codes. Against a backdrop of war-related tensions and eco­ nomic hard times, southwestern Klansmen organized “to preserve premarital chastity, marital fidelity, and respect for parental author­ ity; to compel obedience o f the state and national prohibition laws; to fight the postwar crime wave; to rid state and local governments of dishonest politicians.” 5 In 1967 Kenneth Jackson issued a provocative challenge to the traditional interpretation. On the basis of detailed research in nine cities, Jackson contended not only that kleagles were extremely suc­ cessful in recruiting members in large cities but that the Klan was predominantly an urban movement. The Klan’s urban complexion was reflected in the lifestyle o f the leadership, the source and char­ acter of the order’s newspapers, the places of residence of the ma­ jority of members, and the influence of city klaverns on state and national decision-making. Jackson’s analysis of urban Klans indicated that the hooded order’s attention was focused upon the immediate concern of neigh­ borhood transition. Klan growth was a result of the clash between the diverse racial, ethnic, and religious groups which formed the ur­ ban environment. Conflict was particularly acute in the “zone of emergence,” the strip of land that separated the crowded ghettoes from the more affluent, outer residential districts. To this zone, peo­ pled primarily with poorer, white, working-class families, turned those who sought to escape their ghetto existence. It was among the white, Protestant residents of this area that the Klan found its great­ est success. “ Not a reaction against the rise of the city to dominance in American life, the Invisible Empire was rather a reaction against the aspirations of certain elements within the city.” 6 The socioeconomic identities of the members of the Invisible Empire have also long been subjects for speculation and debate. Al­ most every scholar agrees with John Mecklin’s observation that the vast majority of Klansmen were “conventional Americans, thor­ oughly human, kind fathers and husbands, hospitable to the strang­ er. .” 7 Consensus, however, ends at this point. Mecklin, an early and perceptive student of the organization, considered the Klan a movement of the “well-meaning but more or less ignorant and un­ thinking middle class. .” It included “ in many instances the best citizens of the community.” 8 Journalist Stanley Frost, also writing in IX HOODED EMPIRE the 1920s, agreed: “They are usually the good, solid, middle-class citizens, the ‘backbone of the nation.” '9 In Oklahoma town merchants and professionals, rather than poor farmers and tenants, joined the secret society.