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KU KLUX KLAN
SECRETS EXPOSED
Attitude toward Jews, Catholics, Foreigners
and Masons. Fraudulent
Methods Used. Atrocities
Committed in Name
of Order.
EZRA A. COOK, Publisher
(Incorporated)
26 E. Van Buren St. CHICAGO
COPYRIGHT APPLIED
FOR 1922
CONTENTS
Page
The Old Ku Klux Klan 5
The New Ku Klux Klan 21
How the Modern Ku Klux Klan Was Organized 25
How the Ku Klux Klan Gets Members 29
Oath of the Ku Klux Klan 32
The Old Pledge of Loyalty 38
Modern Kleagles Pledge of Loyalty 39
How the Dollars Roll In 40
The Ku Klux Klan and the Jews 43
The Ku Klux Klan and the Catholics 46
The Ku Klux Klan and the Masons 55
The Ku Klux Klan and the Negroes 58
The Ku Klux Klan and Women 60
Atrocities Committed in the Name of the Order 62
KU KLUX KLAN SECRETS EXPOSED
CHAPTER I
THE OLD KU KLUX KLAN
To the old Ku-Klux Klan which rode through the south in the days
following the civil war the new Ku-Klux Klan is a relative only in
name.
It is not tied by blood. It holds the same position to its southern
aristocratic forbear as an imposter in social life does to some
illustrious gentleman of the same name of whom he claims to be a
descendant.
The old Ku-Klux Klan was a historical development. The new is a man's
contrivance. The old Ku-Klux Klan movement was an outcome of
conditions that prevailed in the southern states after the war. The
present Klan, apparently, is an outcome of a group of men's desire to
make money.
Widespread, spontaneous, popular, the movement of 1866 grew out of a
disordered society, not as a "movement" at all at first, but as a
scheme for having fun, a source of amusement among a group of young,
full-blooded southern men to puzzle outsiders. Its use as a weapon
against the stranger in the old south came later.
The "stranger" was the northern carpetbagger. To the south he was the
pestilence that follows war. He was the blunderer who entered the land
whose social customs were unknown to him, in a year when the fabric by
those social customs was in need of mending.
NO RELIGIOUS TEST
When southern society seized the Ku-Klux Klan as an instrument with
which to resist there were only two classes, carpet-bagger and unruly
negro, against which it operated. To join the ranks of the white-robed
horsemen, there were no qualifications of religion. The Klan made no
mention of Jew or Catholic. Its purpose was to restore order, not to
fan prejudice, and therein lies the difference between the old Klan
and the present Klan which makes the latter a maverick.
The first unit of the horseback riding knights was founded in the
village of Pulaski, Tenn., with the same motive for its organization
as the old-time college hazing society. Its members were young men who
had come back from the war, poor, exhausted, discouraged, and bored
with the tameness of a country town.
HOW IT STARTED
According to the story which has lived south of the Mason and Dixon
line since those post-bellum days, a group of youths cooling their
heels in a law office one May evening in 1866 organized a society for
a good time. If anyone had suggested to them at that time that five
years later a committee of congress would devote thirteen volumes to a
history of their "movement" and pass a law to suppress it, or that
before the child of their wits was fully grown it would have developed
into a terrorizing "hobgoblin" sheeted for lawlessness, they would
have thought it a jest.
When their mere joke had become a grim joke, neighbors who feared it
found in its name "Ku-Klux" the suggestion of a clicking rifle. But
the name itself was proposed by its charter members in Tennessee as a
derivative of the Greek word "Kuklos," meaning a circle. From "Kuklos"
to "Ku-Klux" was an easy transition. The "Klan" followed because these
youthful students of Greek had an ear for the alliterative.
From the Pulaski law office the society migrated to a haunted house on
the outskirts of the village. Its members found their first source of
amusement in initiation rites. They named their chief officer a Grand
Cyclops and their vice president a Grand Magi. Other officers were the
Grand Turk, or marshal; a Grand Exchequer or treasurer, and two
Lictors.
WORE WHITE MASKS
The only germ in their constitution from which the "Imperial Wizard"
Simmons of the twentieth century Klan could breed his present
organization was the promise of absolute secrecy. For his copying
years later, the first Klan also contrived a disguise. It consisted of
a white mask, a tall cardboard hat, a gown or robe, and for the night
riding excursions, a cover for the horses' bodies and mufflers for
their feet.
Only after the Pulaski organization had entertained itself for many
nights did the phenomenon present itself which was to make the Klan a
weapon in the progress of post-war reconstruction. It was the
discovery that the African negro was twice as fearful of mysticism and
mystery as the white man. It taught the white men of Tennessee and
neighboring states that they had a means of their own of preventing
what they considered political mismanagement and social insolence in
the control by northerners and freedmen of the state government.
BECOMES MILITARY ORGANIZATION
The Pulaski riders made themselves popular. Young men of neighboring
towns organized brother Klans. When southern society found itself a
Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall, it grasped the Pulaski idea as the
means for pulling itself up again. The Klan became a military
organization, with the purpose of keeping order among the negroes by
intimidating them. Mysticism in the order grew. Humor grew with it,
and by the time the states of the north discovered that the south had
an organization which was in purpose a society of regulators, the
young southern war veterans were donning their white robes and
cardboard hats with a human skull and two thigh bones as the symbols
of allegiance.
The oath which the grand cyclops administered has been preserved in
southern diaries and documents. It was taken in a solemn manner as the
knights were grouped amid the bones. The oath follows.
"We (or I, as the case might be) do solemnly swear before
Almighty God and these witnesses, and looking upon these human
bones, that I will obey and carry into effect every order made
by any cyclops or assistant cyclops, and if I fail strictly to
conform and execute every order made, as above required of me,
unless I am prevented from some cause which shall be no fault of
mine, or if I shall give any information to any person or
persons except members of this order, that the doom of all
traitors shall be meted out to me, and that my bones may become
as naked and dry as the bones I am looking upon. And I take this
oath voluntarily, without any mental reservation or evasion
whatever, for the causes set out in said order, so help me God."
Ku-Klux horsemen who rode white-sheeted through the south in the
nights of 1866 regarded themselves as upholders of sectional
patriotism.
They considered themselves the spiritual descendants of the New
Englanders who threw the English tea overboard into Boston harbor
nearly 100 years before. Their protests, and the acts of intimidation
by which they enforced their protests were against the white
"carpetbagger" from the north, the negro freedman to whom liberty
meant arrogant office-holding, and the "scalawag," by which terms they
designated those deserters from the southern aristocracy who had
joined the ranks of the northern stranger.
The second stage came within a year after the secret body had its
birth, when the band of burlesquers became a band of regulators.
To the south, the reconstruction acts which congress passed in 1867
were pernicious. The one-time white confederate soldier believed that
the congressional legislation made official mismanagement permanent.
He saw negroes organized into the militia. He saw his former slaves
voting twice and thrice at elections where he himself had to pass,
literally, under bayonets to reach the polls. He disliked the
freedman's bureau, which substituted northern alien machinery for the
old patriarchal relation between white employer and black employe. He
heard drunken negroes at his gates in the night. He saw the
"carpetbagger" urging upon the freedman civic rights which he knew the
latter was not educated enough to perform.
FIRST OBJECTS POLITICAL
These were the prejudices against which the original Ku-Klux Klan
threw itself. They were surface indications of an historical
development. They had nothing to do with the racial and religious
biases which the present Klan attempted to propagate. To the present
Klan, the old Klan, in its first stage, was unrelated. In its second
stage it was related only in its methods of terrorism and its removal
of justice from the courts to the masques until its own leaders were
powerless to check it.
The Klan early fell a victim to the abuses inseparable from secrecy.
It happened that Tennessee, the birthplace of the hooded institution,
was also the first southern state to find itself turned upside down in
reconstruction. "Dem Ku-Kluxes," as the negro called the mysterious
union, became a band of regulators. Their first official convention
was held in Nashville early in 1867.
The Klan, which, until then, had been bound together only by the
deference which priority rights gave to the grand cyclops of the
parental Pulaski "den," was organized into the "Invisible Empire of
the South." It was ruled by a grand wizard of the whole empire, a
grand dragon of each realm, or state, a grand titan of each dominion,
or county, a grand cyclops of each den, and staff officers with names
as equally suggestive of Arabian Nights.
LAWS DEFINE OBJECTS
For the first time its laws defined serious objects. First was the
duty of protecting people, presumably white southerners, from
indignities and wrongs; second was the duty of succoring the
suffering, particularly among the families of dead confederate
soldiers; finally was the oath to defend "the constitution of the
United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto," and of the
states also, to aid in executing all constitutional laws, and to
protect the people from unlawful seizures and from trial otherwise
than by jury.
It is these purposes which Imperial Wizard Simmons of the modern clan
pretends to perpetuate, plus persecutions of Jews, Catholics and
negroes, while denying charges of terrorizing outbreaks.
The Nashville convention chose Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, the confederate
cavalry leader, as its supreme ruler. He is known to have increased
the membership of the hooded horsemen in the old south to 550,000.
Among his aides were Generals John B. Gordon, A.H. Colquitt, G.T.
Anderson, A.B. Lawton, W.J. Hardee, John C. Brown, George W. Gordon
and Albert Pike. The latter became one of the foremost authorities of
Masonry.
Terrorism spread, until during the political campaign which preceded
the 1868 presidential election, 2,000 persons were killed and injured
in Louisiana by Ku-Klux Klansmen, who rode at night, disguised as
freebooters, and according to James G. Blaine, defeated candidate for
the presidency at a later date, hesitated at no cruelty.
In the north, in the years immediately after the civil war, the
original Ku-Klux Klan was called a conspiracy.
In the south, where society was being ground in the mills of
reconstruction, the Klan started its midnight rovings as an instrument
of moral force. But within three years its period of usefulness, as
the white southerner saw it useful, was over.
Its founders had played with it as with an exciting bonfire. During
the months, however, when former confederate soldiers used it to
frighten away northern officeholders with oppressive tactics, it had
leaped in size until when the moment came for smothering it out its
leaders discovered it beyond control.
Not until the full fire department of federal and state law had been
called out did the Invisible Empire cease to operate.
TENNESSEE ACTS AGAINST IT
By 1872 the white-robed knights of midnight, whose purpose to enforce
law had in itself yielded to lawlessness, were for the most part
disappeared. But so, in one state after another, had the northern
carpetbagger and the southern scalawag.
Tennessee, where the Klan was founded, was the first to take
legislative action against it. In September, 1868, its legislature
passed a statute making membership in the Klan punishable by a fine of
$500 and imprisonment for not less than five years.
As a result, in February, 1869, Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, former cavalry
officer of the confederate army, who was grand wizard of the order,
officially proclaimed the Ku-Klux Klan and Invisible Empire dissolved
and disbanded forever.
But members of the adventurous law-assuming organization were
reluctant to yield their mysterious power.
The wizard's order went into effect. Klan property was burned.
NEW BANDS SPRING UP
But immediately in southern states, as far west as Arkansas, there
sprang up disguised bands, some of them neighborhood groups only,
some of them bands of ruffians who traveled in the night to win
personal ends, still others new orders founded in imitation of the
Ku-Klux and using similar methods.
Of the last, the Knights of the White Camellia was the largest. In
some private notebooks of the south its membership was said to be even
larger than the parent Klan.
From New Orleans early in 1868, it spread across to Texas and back to
the Carolinas. Racial supremacy was its purpose.
Only white men 18 years or older were invited to the secrets of its
initiation, and in their oath they promised not only to be obedient
and secret, but to "maintain and defend the social and political
superiority of the white race on this continent."
Initiates were enjoined, notwithstanding, to show fairness to the
negroes and to concede to them in the fullest measure "those rights
which we recognize as theirs."
"PALE FACES" AND OTHERS
Other bands of nightriders responded to the names of "Pale Faces,"
"White Leaguers," the "White Brotherhood" and the "Constitutional
Union Guards."
Surviving members are hazy as to their aims and methods, the character
of their membership, their members, and the connection between them.
Federal recognition that the Invisible Empire, whether it was the
original Klan or not, was everywhere a real empire came in the spring
of 1871, when a senate committee presented majority and minority
reports on the result of its investigations of the white man's will to
rule against the freedmen's militia in the south.
The majority report found that the Ku-Klux Klan was a criminal
conspiracy of a distinctly political nature against the laws and
against the colored citizens.
The minority found that Ku-Klux disorder and violence was due to
misgovernment and an exploitation of the states below the Mason and
Dixon line by radicals.
CONGRESS ACTS AGAINST KLAN
The first Ku-Klux bill was passed in April, 1871, "to enforce the
fourteenth amendment." Power of the president to use troops to put
down the white-hooded riders was hinted at.
In the next month the second Ku-Klux bill was passed to enforce "the
right of citizens in the United States to vote."
In 1872 federal troops were sent into the south to back up his
anti-Ku-Klux proclamation. By the end of 1872 the "conspiracy" was
thought to be overthrown.
At various times individuals in the south and elsewhere have tried to
put breath into the Klan's dead body.
It was left for "Grand Wizard" Simmons of Atlanta to accomplish it.
His new organization, he explains, is imbued with the Ku-Klux
"spirit."
"That this spirit may live always to warm the hearts of many men," he
says, "is the paramount ideal of the Knights of the Ku-Klux Klan."
President Grant answered: "Thou shalt not" to the Ku-Klux Klan in
1871. He backed up his word with armed troops.
During the whole of one session of congress senators and
representatives serving in Washington in the years just after the
civil war occupied themselves in stripping the masques off the
southern night-riders.
Into the country south of the Mason and Dixon line they dispatched
congressional investigators, whose duty it was to enter the "portals
of the invisible empire" and discover what was hiding behind them.
When they reported that the Ku-Klux Klan, decked out in the uniform of
ghosts, was waging midnight warfare on the negro and carpet-bagger
congress passed legislation which suppressed the order.
PUTS ROBES OUT OF FASHION
Action was quick. Almost before the government printing presses had
finished turning out ten volumes in which the committee recorded the
results of their investigation the white robes and hoods of the
Ku-Kluxes had gone out of fashion in the old south.
President Grant in 1871 was without precedent. His law enforcers, just
getting acquainted with the amendment which freed the slaves, were
without a statute to deal with the armed clique which proposed to keep
the negro down in the day by frightening him in the night. The
emergency bill which congress passed at that period empowers the
regular army or the navy to put down any unlawful combination which is
doing domestic violence.
When congress met for its forty-second session in 1871, the cross
bones and skull and coffin with which the Ku-Klux were marking their
threats had become the symbols of terrorism in the south. So grave was
the situation that speakers on the floor of the house, when the
session opened, classed the conspiracy of the Klan "less formidable,
but not less dangerous to American liberty" than the just-ended war of
the rebellion. They charged that as well as binding its members to
execute crimes against its opponents in the social-political life of
the south, it protected them against conviction and punishment by
perjury on the witness stand and in the jury box. Representatives
asked why, of all offenders, not one had been convicted.
PRESIDENT URGES ACTION
On March 23, 1871, President Grant sent a message to both houses in
which he recommended that all other business be postponed until the
Klan was made subservient to the flag.
"A condition of affairs now exists in some of the states of the Union
rendering life and property insecure and the carrying of the mails and
the collection of revenue dangerous," his message said. "The proof
that such a condition of affairs exists in some localities is now
before the senate. That the power to correct these evils is beyond the
control of the senate authorities I do not doubt; that the power of
the executive of the United States, acting within the limits of
existing laws is sufficient for present emergencies, is not clear.
Therefore, I urgently recommend such legislation as in the judgment of
congress shall effectually secure, life, liberty and property and the
enforcement of law in all parts of the United States. It may be
expedient to provide that such law as shall be passed in pursuance of
this recommendation shall expire at the end of the next session of
congress. There is no other subject on which I would recommend
legislation during the present session."
"FORCE BILL AT DISPOSAL"
The law which was at the disposal of President Harding was popularly
known as "the Force bill." Under congressional passage it was entitled
"An act to enforce the Fourteenth amendment of the constitution of the
United States and for other purposes." President Grant approved it
April 20, 1871.
It is aimed at two or more persons who conspire to use force and
intimidation "outside the law." It forbids them to go in disguise
along a public highway or upon the premises of another person for the
purpose, either directly or indirectly, of depriving that person of
equal privileges under the law. Punishment for the offense may be
imprisonment from six months to six years, a fine not less than $500,
nor more than $5,000, or both.
The act took particular action against the practice of the Klanists of
protecting each other in court. It provides that every man called for
service on a jury in a Klan case shall take oath in open court that he
is not a member of nor has ever aided or advised any such "unlawful,
combination or conspiracy."
DISGUISE IS BARRED
That individual was declared a violator of the law who shall "go in
disguise upon the public highway or upon the premises of another for
the purpose, either directly or indirectly, of depriving any person or
class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal
privileges or immunities under the laws, or by force, intimidation or
threat to prevent any citizen lawfully entitled to vote from giving
his support or advocacy in a lawful manner toward the election of any
lawfully qualified person for office."
The act states further: "That in all cases where insurrection,
domestic violence, unlawful combinations or conspiracies in any state
shall so obstruct or hinder the execution of the laws thereof, and of
the United States, as to deprive any portion or class of the people of
any rights, privileges or immunities or protection, and the
constituted authorities of such state shall either be unable to
protect, or shall fail in or refuse protection, it shall be unlawful
for the president, and it shall be his duty, to take such measures by
the employment of the militia or the land and naval forces of the
United States for the suppression of such insurrection."
"KU-KLUX" FILLS RECORDS
Pages of the Congressional Globe, as the present Congressional Record
was then called, were filled during the months before the passage of
this act with the word "Ku-Klux."
The verb "Kukluxed" became in the mouths of senators and
representatives arguing over the bill a synonym for "intimidated."
Friends of the nightriders termed them "modern knights of the Round
Table," and "conservators of law and order." Opponents on the floor of
the house advocated a policy of "amnesty for every rebel, hanging for
every Ku-Klux."
Black and white victims of the gun-toting ghosts were brought from
Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and other states where the Klan
rode to recount before the congressional committee the details of
their persecutions. Their accounts as the government documents
preserve them might well have been a primer, it has been said, for
the acts of later Lenines and Trotzkys.
REPORT OF OFFENSES VARIES
The report of the congressional committee is a recital varying from
mirth to murder. In one county the victim of the hooded Klan might be
an itinerant minister who had offended by teaching a negro mammy to
pray. Next door a Ku-Klux sign, with a coffin painted in blood, might
be hung over the dead body of a "bad" negro whose freedom had made him
officious.
One negro was whipped for stealing a beef. Another was tarred and
feathered because his daughter ran away from the white man who had
employed her.
Colored cooks were beaten for talking saucily to their southern
mistresses. Northern white women were threatened for hiring colored
cooks.
IGNORES NOTE, DIES
When a negro ignored a note carrying the Ku-Klux skull and cross bones
and voted "republican" instead of "conservative," his body, ornamented
with skull and bones in blood, might be found the next morning in the
middle of the road--lifeless.
The congressional minutes report a bold, public display of the Klan's
official orders. They might appear in a whisk of the wind on the post
office window. They might be pinned on a tree or pole or building. On
one occasion, when a member of the Klan was on trial in a county
court, a band of white masquers, riding through the courtyard on
horse, dropped a note addressed to the court, grand jury and sheriff.
"Go slow," it commanded. At the bottom was a drawing of a coffin and
on each side a rope. The signature was "K.K.K."
Ku-Klux rule in the south half a century ago was an attempt to govern
by masque.
Secret covenants arrived at by a sheeted brotherhood, veiled signs,
orders written in blood and posted at midnight on the victim's
door--by such means did the Klan substitute the masque for the ballot.
Congressional investigating committees who stripped the night-riding
organization of secrecy during the administration of President Grant,
were entertained during a session of congress by tales of lares and
lemures howling at night in fields or on crossroads, bad luck omens
for the negroes.
UNDER MARTIAL LAW
In organization the Klan was military, and its town, county and state
rule, as recorded in the Congressional Globe, operated as under
martial law.
As the revolt of the white southerner to colored and northern
domination reared itself into giant-size, towns under Klan domination
came to take their rule and law from the K.K.K. note, flapping in the
wind on a tree or fencepost, with the coffin on its signature, urging
that it be obeyed.
WARN CARPET BAGGERS
In South Carolina, according to the report of the federal committee,
townsfolk journeyed to the postoffice, not to get their mail, but to
read the daily Ku-Klux bulletin. One such, reprinted in the ten-volume
report of the committee which examined southern outrages, was a
warning against further "carpet bagger" administration. It is as
follows:
Headquarters, Ninth Division, S.C.
Special Orders, No. 3, K.K.K.
Ignorance is the curse of God.
For that reason we are determined that members of the
legislature, the school committee and the county commissioners
of Union county shall no longer officiate.
Fifteen days' notice from this date is given, and if they, and
all, do not at once and forever resign their present inhuman,
disgraceful and outrageous rule, then retributive justice will
as surely be used as night follows day.
By order of the Grand Chief,
A.O., Grand Secretary.
THREATEN NEGROES FOR FIRES
Another "special order," this one warning that the colored race in
general would be punished for all malicious fires in particular, was
made public in the Charleston News, Jan. 31, 1871.
Headquarters, K.K.K.
January 22, 1871.
Resolved: That in all cases of incendiarism, ten of the leading
colored people and two white sympathizers shall be executed.
That if any armed bands of colored people are found hereafter
picketing the roads, the officers of the company to which the pickets
belong shall be executed.
Southern speakers on the floor of the house in the debates which
preceded the passage of the "act to enforce the fourteenth amendment,"
traced the origin of the Ku-Klux to the Union league, an association
in the south composed chiefly of northerners. Charges were also made
by statesmen once in the confederate army that "Tammany Hall" in New
York furnished arms to the Klanists, in order that they might murder
southern republicans.
SUPPRESSED IN 1871
When the act suppressing the Klan was approved by President Grant on
April 20, 1871, it was estimated that the night riders were operating
in eleven states of the south. Six months later, in October, President
Grant issued a proclamation calling on members of illegal
associations in nine counties in South Carolina to disperse and
surrender their arms and disguises in five days.
Five days afterwards, another proclamation was issued suspending the
privileges of the writ of habeas corpus in the counties named. More
than 200 persons were arrested within a few days. It is believed that
the Ku-Klux Klan was practically overthrown by the middle of the
following January.