THE KU KLUX KLAN AND OTHER GROUP REACTIONS
The outstanding phenomenon of the post-war period was the Ku Klux Klan.
Other events which accompanied it were the new laws for the limitation
of immigration and the general suppression of civil liberties of many
kinds. The Klan had something to do with both of these as cause and as
effect. Moreover, all three—Klan, anti-alien movement, anti-radical
movement—were largely anti-Semitic in sentiment; in addition to which
there was a separate movement of anti-Semitism based on the imported
anti-Semitism from Europe. Therefore in any study of anti-Semitism as
a group reaction we must also study these three group reactions of
the post-war period, all of them partially anti-Semitic, and all of
them associated with the same group-ideas and the same group-will as
anti-Semitism itself.
1.
The Ku Klux Klan of the present is not the one of the Reconstruction
period in any sense. It has taken over the name, the garb and much
of the high-sounding ritual. But it has a new motive and a new
psychology. The old Klan was sectional; the new is national. The old
was anti-Northern and anti-negro; the new is anti-alien, anti-negro,
anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. The old met a certain emergency and
was then disbanded by compulsion of the Federal government and the
action of its own leaders; the new has expanded from the character of
a fraternal society to that of a nation-wide propaganda movement, has
entered politics, and become one of the leading political issues of the
campaign of 1924. In other words, its real ancestors are: not the Ku
Klux Klan of the south in 1866–71, but the Know-Nothing Party of the
50’s and the A. P. A. of the 90’s.
The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915 in Atlanta, Ga., by William J.
Simmons, a former Protestant minister of strong convictions, intense
if narrow intellect, and great interest in the organization and
spreading of fraternal orders. For five years it grew slowly and
inconspicuously, during the period of the war and for two years
thereafter; in June 1920 it had about five thousand members and was
in financial straits. At this juncture it was taken up by Mr. Edward
Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who had had experience in the
new technique of propaganda. Under their skilled hands the Klan at once
grew with astounding rapidity; paid organizers entered state after
state, organized “Klaverns,” and reaped great profits for themselves
and for the heads of the organization. But the commercial motive,
while probably strong in a few persons, was in no sense important
in the actual membership of the Klan and their acts. “Its official
documents indicate that the Klan originally was a purely fraternal
and patriotic organization, one of the hundreds of similar secret
societies throughout the country.”[72] The New York World investigated
the Klan in 1921, and a Congressional investigation followed in October
of that year, but both served rather to advertise than to harm the
organization. It spread rapidly throughout the Union, claiming at one
time as many as four million members, elected senators and governors
in a few instances, and in several became the outstanding issue of
state elections, sponsored or was accused of innumerable acts of mob
violence, ranging from warnings to certain persons to discontinue their
bootlegging or immorality, up to beatings, tar-and-feather parties, and
the notorious Mer Rouge murders of 1922 in Louisiana.
We have already discussed the expansion of propaganda, so that its
enormous utilization by the Klan is quite comprehensible. But even the
constant reiteration of laudable motives and grandiloquent phrases
about Americanism cannot account for this sudden rise to power; two
other elements must be included—group prejudice and secrecy. The Klan
capitalized every prejudice of its group, which was predominantly a
small-town one, of American birth, Protestant religion, and Anglo-Saxon
either in race or in their opinion of their race. And the Klan met in
utter secrecy, did not divulge the names of its members, paraded
the streets in the disguise of robes and masks, and carried out its
deeds of violence in the same awe-inspiring anonymity.
Clearly, the Klan is typical of the tendencies we have found in the
American mind after the war. It represents a subgroup revolting against
its voluntary sacrifices for the nation during the war. It represents
the anti-alien, anti-Catholic and now also anti-Jewish sentiment, the
reaction against the enormous wave of immigration just at an end. It
includes also the fear and hatred of the negro, strongest in the old
South but spreading to the North with the northern migration of many
negroes during and after the war. On the Pacific coast the fear of
the Japanese immigration enters into the complex of hatreds. In other
words, the Klan is the third wave of Nativism. It is the great reaction
of the subgroup to the intense sacrifice for the nation during the war.
2.
Various other motives are implicated in this general complex. The
South furnished the original soil of the Klan; its second center was
the middle west, the old home of the A. P. A. It was weakest on the
Atlantic and Pacific coasts (except Oregon) where the various immigrant
groups actually live. It was weak in the heterogeneous masses of the
cities with their aliens, Catholics and Jews; strongest in the small
town, where men may talk of the Papal menace without actually knowing
many Catholics, of the Elders of Zion without seeing personally more
than one or two Jews a year. The attitude of Nativism, the reaction to
the immigration of huge masses of foreigners, is still strongest where
these foreigners themselves are not in evidence.
This suggests that other motives must enter in, that something else
in the small-town American must have made the Klan congenial. That
something else is monotony, standardization (the “Main Street”
attitude), and the appeal of the Klan to these people lay largely in
its glamor of mystery, secrecy and hidden power. The rise of fraternal
orders is one of the note-worthy movements in American life; there are
now over six hundred of these societies in the United States, of which
four hundred ninety were organized between 1880 and 1895. Over
seven per cent. of our population is affiliated with these orders, and
their greatest strength is precisely in the small town, where they are
a bright spot in the dull social life, and give a factitious importance
to their “nobles” and “exalted rulers,” as well as to the many who are
permitted to enter into their secrets and to parade in their regalia.
Professor Mecklin[73] classifies secret societies in three groups:
the beneficial societies, with whom secrecy is merely protective; the
social organizations, devised to give “variety and interest to our
poverty-stricken American life”; and finally, militant societies with
a general program which affects the entire nation, like the old Ku
Klux Klan, the Mafia, and the Fenians. He concludes that the present
Klan, while undoubtedly furnishing for many of its members the release
from monotony, the sense of power, the revolt against repression, that
is characteristic of the second class of organizations, has also the
characteristics of the third type and is therefore a public problem.
As he points out elsewhere in his book, the disguise of the mask
is a further danger, as it may be adopted by members to persecute
non-members in nameless ways, and even presents an opportunity for
non-Klansmen to indulge in violence practically without fear of
detection.
Professor Mecklin’s analysis of Klan psychology in Chapter IV of his
book presents several suggestive points. He says:
[74]The strength of the Klan lies in that large, well-meaning, but
more or less ignorant and unthinking middle class, whose inflexible
loyalty has preserved with uncritical fidelity the traditions of the
original American stock.
[75]Membership in a vast mysterious Empire means a sort of mystic
glorification of his petty self.
The Klan insists on like-mindedness, in the sense of adopting the
Anglo-Saxon ideals as the norm for America. Finally,
[76]The Klan has literally battened upon the irrational fear
psychology that followed on the heels of the war.
Father John A. Ryan contributes an additional motive,
[77]There is a particular manifestation of public opinion which
deserves emphasis as a cause of the recent intolerance. This is the
conviction which seized large and numerous groups of individuals
that they were justified in becoming extra legal agents for law
enforcement.... Either the spirit or the letter of the law is violated
in the name of the law itself.
Frank Tannenbaum covers similar points in the first chapter of “Darker
Phases of the South,” where he deals with the Klan. He holds, first,
that
[78]The Klan is an attempt to maintain static what has become
dynamic. [79]The war left a common mood upon the world ... the hate
is generated as a means of justifying the thrill to be derived
from abusing the people hated. The Klan is a reaction to boredom;
it is a means of fulfilling the millennial hopes frustrated by
the outcome of the war; it gives vent to a type of war hysteria.
[80]The idealization of the white women in the South is partly the
unconscious self-protection on the part of the white men from their
own bad habits, notions, beliefs, attitudes and practises, a matter of
over-compensation.
To his keen psychoanalytic study I must add a few words from an article
by Frank Bohn in the American Journal of Sociology. [81]Mr. Bohn
points out that the Klan, once organized, had to find something to do,
that its violence was a natural outcome of disguise, organization and
aimlessness. He attributes its origin chiefly to the disillusionment
of the American people over the break-down of their simple, democratic
ideals when applied to a huge nation of complex population; and to the
changing character of the racial and social composition of the people,
with the revolt of the older stocks. He concludes:
The civilization of the United States is suffering rapid changes, not
only as regards its basic institutions, but also in the nature and
quality of its human composition. The hooded figures of the Ku Klux
Klan are an expression of pain, of sorrow and of solemn warning. Its
methods arise from anger and fear, not from knowledge and forethought.
3.
A word may be needed especially on our narrower topic, the relation of
the Ku Klux Klan to the Jew. Its preliminary questions to the candidate
for “naturalization” include two that exclude the Catholic, two the
Jew, one the alien and one the negro. The most inclusive is number
2: “Are you a native born, white, Gentile American citizen?” Number 4
is: “Do you believe in the tenets of the Christian religion?” Imperial
Wizard H. W. Evans gave out an interview in Indianapolis early in 1924
when he made the following statement, repeated several time later in
other connections:
By deliberate election he (the Jew) is unassimilable. He rejects
intermarriage. His religious and social rites and customs are
inflexibly segregative. Law-abiding, healthy, moral, mentally alert,
energetic, loyal and reverent in his home life, the Jew is yet by
primal instinct a Jew, indelibly marked by persecution, with no deep
national attachment, a stranger to the emotion of patriotism as the
Anglo-Saxon feels it. Klansmen have no quarrel with him, no hatred of
him, no thought of persecuting him. As Protestants are unavailable
for membership in all-Jewish societies, so Jews are unavailable for
membership in an all-Protestant society like the Klan. Moreover,
their jealously guarded separatism unfits them for co-operation in a
movement dedicated to the thorough unification of the dominant strains
in American life.
Here are the same themes of racial superiority, like-mindedness of
America, identification of Americanism and Protestantism. But elsewhere
we meet with direct attacks on the Jew, as on the Catholic, negro and
foreigner—not merely the assertion of their inferiority. Speaking at
Dallas, Texas, December 7, 1922, Mr. Evans said:
The Jew produces nothing anywhere on the face of the earth. He does
not till the soil. He does not create or manufacture anything for
common use. He adds nothing to the sum of human welfare. Everywhere he
stands between the producer and the consumer and sweats the toil of
the one and the necessity of the other for his gains.
This sounds like an economic motive, but it may be merely repetition of
stock charges of traditional anti-Semitism. Mr. Bohn hints at such an
economic purpose when he remarks:
One factor has been the recent invasion of the smaller western and
southern towns by Jewish retail merchants. These are disliked and
opposed by their native American competitors for purely commercial
reasons.
These facts seem to me erroneous; there have always been Jewish
merchants and peddlers throughout the country, and they have always had
Christian competitors; probably they have merely been a point of
vantage for the aroused prejudices of the group. Dr. Mecklin says:
[82]The Klan insists, in the published statements of its ideals, upon
complete religious toleration while in actual practise it encourages
boycotts of Catholic and Jew in business and social relations. [83]The
eternal quarrel of the Klan with the Jew and the Negro is that mental
and physical differences seem to have conspired to place them in
groups entirely to themselves.... The Negro is granted a place in
American society only upon his willingness to accept a subordinate
position. The Jew is tolerated largely because native Americanism
cannot help itself. The Jew is disliked because of the amazing
tenacity with which he resists absolute Americanization, a dislike
that is not unmingled with fear; the Negro is disliked, because he is
considered essentially an alien and unassimilable element in society.
4.
The Klan has now passed the zenith of its aggressiveness and its
influence. The campaign of exposure, while it made thousands of
members, also made thousands of enemies and robbed the Klan of the
secrecy which was so essential an element of its strength. Many of its
members lost interest, others were positively estranged by certain
methods and ideals of the organization. The trials for murder at Mer
Rouge, La., brought the Klan into bad odor generally. Most important
of all, the Klan went into politics, and in this followed exactly the
cycle of the Know-Nothings and A. P. A.’s—secrecy, growth, propaganda,
politics, enemies, decline. In 1924 the Klan was an element in the
national conventions of the two major parties. The Republicans
considered planks opposing and favoring the organization and finally
took no action. The Democrats had to take up the issue because of the
movement to nominate as their presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith,
governor of New York, and a professing Catholic. While Mr. Smith had
political supporters in his own state of every religious denomination,
still the entire strength of the Klan was thrown against him. At
the same time, the many Irish Catholics belonging to the Democratic
party resented the attempt of the Klan to dictate the nomination and
introduced a resolution attacking the Klan by name. The conflict
of that convention is now historic, and resulted in thoroughly
disorganizing the Democratic party for the ensuing campaign.
Finally, the passage of the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924 robbed
the Klan of its chief reason for existence, its most potent argument.
Immigration was abruptly cut down. Not only that, but its national
origin was totally altered so as to favor the peoples of northern and
western Europe, and to keep out the Italian Catholics and Russian
Jews. It is no longer possible to stimulate fear or hatred on such a
large scale again, now that immigration is no longer a large factor in
American life, and the group integration is once more proceeding at its
accustomed rate.
5.
The anti-immigration movement must not be regarded as a result of
the Klan but as a parallel phenomenon, with the same motives and
philosophy. The original political theory and economic situation, by
which all immigrants were welcomed into the United States to help build
up the country and to become full Americans has been slowly altering.
The first law of limitation, passed in 1882, and followed up by later
amendments, merely excluded convicts, persons affected with contagious
diseases, persons likely to become public charges, and similar
individuals for individual reasons. Other legislation of economic trend
excluded Chinese and later Japanese laborers, and contract labor. In
1917 the demand to limit the numbers of common labor, voiced by the
American Federation of Labor, met the desire to limit numbers and to
select racial groups, and the literacy test was embodied in the law,
excluding all who could not read or write in any language. But this was
satisfactory to neither the friends nor foes of immigration; it was
merely a temporary device.
In May 1921 a temporary law was passed limiting the number of each
nation to enter the United States annually to 3% of natives of that
nation residing here in 1910. This limited the total immigration at
once from the 1,285,349 of 1907, the peak year, to a total of
357,803. This total is in addition to immigrants from Canada, Mexico,
Newfoundland, Cuba and Central and South America; it does not deduct
the emigrants who often amount to as many or more than those entering
the country. It is simply a means of cutting down numbers and altering
proportions. It is directly a result of Klan preachments, of Nordic
theories, of the reaction of the native, gentile, Protestant American
to the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the nation, and to the
need of revising his mental stereotypes of the United States. He must
grow to think of his nation as a nation of many elements, many beliefs,
many backgrounds, most of them different from his own—to him America is
a Protestant country, a white man’s country, a gentile country, and he
intends that it shall remain so.
Therefore the permanent immigration bill enacted in May, 1924, changed
the percentage from three to two, and the date on which the quota is to
be estimated from 1910 to 1890. The result of this double change is to
alter radically the racial and national composition of the immigration
stream and hence the total character of the United States. As Chairman
Albert Johnson of the House Committee on Immigration, after whom the
bill was named, phrased its double purpose:
[84]The committee took a very important step in recommending a
permanent percentage law and thus recognizing the principle that the
United States should never keep its doors wide open. Second, the
percentage is based on the census of 1890 instead of the census of
1910, as in the present law. The new measure thus aims to change the
character of our future immigration by cutting down the number of
aliens who can come from southern and eastern Europe. In other words,
it is recognized that, on the whole, northern and western Europe
furnish the best material for citizenship.
The total immigration, therefore, was reduced from 357,000 to 164,667
and the emigrants have to be deducted from this to ascertain the actual
annual increase. The Italian quota was reduced from 42,000 to 3,845;
the Russian from 24,000 to 2,200; the Polish from 30,000 to 6,000.
On the other hand, the German quota was reduced only from 67,000 to
51,000; the Norwegian from 12,000 to 6,400; the British and Irish
from 77,000 to 62,500. The bill carried out radically the intentions of
its sponsors, to cut down the flood of immigration and to discriminate
against the racial and religious groups which they consider inferior
because they appear externally to be different. It is a group reaction
of the same order and motivation as the Ku Klux Klan.
6.
A concurrent phenomenon, arising from the same group mind but
essentially different in manifestation, is the suppression of civil
liberties which began during the war and continued afterward, an
expression of the same impulse toward compulsory like-mindedness,
but taking its criterion from the economic rather than the cultural,
religious or racial aspects of the differing groups. As Father Ryan put
it:
[85]These deplorable phenomena are three-fourths due to war
legislation and surviving war hysteria and one-fourth due to
industrial factors.... By means of clever, unscrupulous and wholesale
propaganda, nine-tenths of the American people were led to believe
that the steel strike of 1919 was revolutionary, bolshevistic, and
aimed immediately at the overthrow of the government. As a matter
of fact, there was no more bolshevism in that contest than in any
one of a dozen important disputes that have occurred in the last ten
years. Attorney General Palmer asserted that there was an organized
attempt to overthrow the government of the United States sufficiently
widespread to merit the attention of Congress. As a matter of fact,
there was no such danger.
[86]Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary, in the same
Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, has a fine summary
of the “Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States (1918–23).”
He enumerates the new Supreme Court interpretation of the free-speech
clause of the first amendment to the Constitution, by which a “clear
and present danger” justifies its violation; the state laws on
syndicalism or sedition or anarchy; the attacks on the right of labor
to strike; the use of the Department of Justice of the United States
to repress radical economic movements; the mob violence increasingly
widespread and regular; and the national organizations engaged
in repression, such as the National Civic Federation, the National
Security League, and the Better American Federation.
The material is too wide in range and too full of important instances
to be even cursorily examined here. The trend, however, was definitely
a part of the post-war attitude of the American mind, the breaking
up into violently opposing groups, each claiming to assert the true
American spirit. The same attitude of repression appears in the
churches in the form of heresy trials and an aggressive Fundamentalism.
It appears in the form of legislative acts to prohibit the teaching of
evolution in the state universities of several Southern states (most of
which failed of passage). Dr. Ward feels that the
Mob attacks, lynchings and prosecutions involving the use of free
speech reached their peak at the end of 1922, declining rapidly in.
1923. Interference with meetings by public authorities and private
groups reached a peak at the end of 1921, fell sharply in 1922,
and then went up again to a midway point in 1923.... [87]We have a
manifest abatement of post-war repression, but that experience has
left us a heritage of repressive laws and ordinances and a technique
of administrative illegality all ready to be used on due occasion.
It has also strengthened our lynching habit of mind, with its
determination to enforce its type of goodness, and our traditional
demand for conformity already overstimulated by the increasing
standardization of life. The occasions for the use of those qualities
and instruments of repression are increasing rather than diminishing.
Attempts were made during the height of the anti-Russian and
anti-radical movement to connect Jews with Bolshevism in Russia and
with radicalism in the United States, so that this movement also has
its anti-Semitic phase. Thus anti-Semitism is bound up with the Ku Klux
Klan, with the immigration bills, with the economic repression,—it is
an integral part of the group reaction from national unity, and appears
in every phase of the post-war group reactions.