The Terminology of The Klan
Diligent inquiries have been made into the peculiar terminology
used by the Klan to designate its purposes and mission. Why is the
word "Imperial" employed to characterize the chief officers of the
organization? Why is the organization designated as an "Invisible
Empire"? Does the Klan contemplate, perhaps, a nation-wide organization
that at the height of its strength means revolution and the overthrow
of our present republican form of government? These and other similar
questions--some intelligent, others less so--are being asked by both
the enemies and the friends of the Klan.
The words "Imperial" and "Empire" find no friendly place in the
vocabulary of a democracy. Whenever used they are connected with
autocratic government and centralized power. These terms, as usually
employed, are in sharp contrast to the principles of our great American
democracy. We have everywhere and always held that imperialism is
a despicable thing, a survival of despotic power that came up from
the caveman and was exercised always by force. Germany and Russia
were the last great exponents in Europe of this imperialistic idea
of forcible conquest. Nothing has been more revolting in America
than the suggestion of centralized power by which a nation was to be
governed and directed. Even the temporary expedient of taking the
Philippine Islands into our keeping, as a necessary sequence to the
war with Spain, and holding them under military rule until the people
could be developed into approximate democracy and govern themselves,
found strenuous opponents. During all the twenty years that we have
maintained the mandate, it has caused dissatisfaction among the nations.
[Illustration: The Imperial Symbol of the Klan]
We of the South know only too well what the reign of the bayonet
means. The tragedy of American history was the untimely death of
Lincoln. Had he lived the story of the Reconstruction would have been
different, very different. Following the "deep damnation of his taking
off," the white race of the South was subjected to the supremest test
to which Anglo-Saxon worth was ever put in the history of the world.
The test did not result from the defeat of the Confederacy, or in the
devastation of the states over which the armies fought, or in the
appalling loss of life during the four sanguinary years. It was in the
Reconstruction period, when the armed forces of the victorious North
occupied the entire Southland and secured to the Negro a lordship over
Anglo-Saxon democracy, refinement and civilization. The mute anguish of
those years can not be put into any form of speech. But let me speak
no word of blame. My people of the South hate every form of coercive
government as they love the freedom of our great democracy. There is to
us one symbol expressing the deepest loyalty of the Klan, elevated even
above the Fiery Cross. It is the American flag. To the Klan it is the
emblem of human liberty and security, guaranteed to every citizen of
the land and signalled to all the world beyond our borders. So jealous
is the Klan of the American flag that it is unwilling to share its
place with the flag of any other nation. We are unwilling even that the
colors of the nations to whom we are bound by ties of both blood and
gratitude shall in this country mingle their colors with the American
flag. We desire no confusion in the minds of American people as they
look upon the emblematic flags of different nations as to that place
of supremacy in our loyal devotion which we hold for the American flag
alone.
But at the same time the Klan renounces no obligations or
responsibilities to the rest of the world. We believe that the world
is moving toward "That one far-off divine event," "the Parliament
of man, the Federation of the world," but even when this greater
fraternalism of the world is consummated, we should not be willing for
our colors to be commingled with those of other nations. The emblem
that symbolizes our sacrifices and our victories, our failures and our
triumphs, and out of which our common democracy has come, must have in
our hearts no lesser place, or even an equal place, with those of other
nations. With us the place of our flag is not below, or along-side, the
flags of other peoples. It must be kept apart and above.
We are ready to interpose our will and our strength to prevent the
strong from oppressing the weak anywhere. We are ready out of our
abundance to distribute charity to the unfortunate to the uttermost
ends of the earth, without respect to race, color or clime. We are
quite prepared to promote a great democratic evangelism to the
oppressed and downtrodden peoples of all the earth, that they too
may become conscious, through democracy, of human worth, and achieve
something of the freedom which we enjoy. Yet everywhere we shall serve
under our own colors. All the nations of the earth shall continue their
separate existence and work out their destiny under the emblems into
which have been spun and woven the distinctive characteristics of their
race and their country. All this has been relentlessly brought home to
us through the resurgence of the nations during and after the Great
War. Nothing but absolute independence would satisfy the Poles. Ireland
must be free or perish in revolutionary effort. The smaller the people,
the greater its effort to prove its right to national independence, its
capacity for a separate government. With these facts in mind it would
seem superfluous for native-born Americans to explain or defend our
spirit of patriotism and nationalism.
The phrase "Invisible Empire" means that the Ku Klux Klan undertakes
to establish and maintain a nation-wide organization in the thought of
our people. It plans a conquest only in the realm of the invisible
where men do their thinking. The mentality of the American people is
to be awakened, stimulated, and directed. It means the sovereignty
of Americanism, of the democratic idea, in every American mind. We
plan no system of coercion or outside pressure by which the American
people are to be forced into this "Invisible Empire." I may modestly,
and not irreverently, say that the idea underlying the establishment
of the Klan and its principles in America was taken from one of the
leaders in the early Christian Church, who said that the propagation
of Christianity was without force, noise, or violence, without army
or treasury, but that the Great Leader had established an everlasting
kingdom by taking captive the thoughts of men. So the Klan holds that
anything constructed by force may be destroyed by a superior force.
Anything impressed upon unwilling subjects by outside effort may be
rejected and thrown off in the springtime of returning power. Anything
and everything that is established by such exercise of force is
marked and destined for decay and return to the dust. But that which
is once established in the deeper thought, from the spiritual need, of
mankind is indestructible because there is no manner of force that can
lay hold of it. Alexander said, "Philip, my father, gave me life, but
Aristotle taught me to think." It is not the blood of Philip, through
Alexander, that pulses in the arteries of the world's civilization
of to-day; but it is rather the thought of Aristotle, which, despite
all the Alexanders of history, runs through the story of the world's
civilization in all the lands and all the centuries. It is the idea
possessing the spirit which vitalizes all our basic institutions and
movements toward human freedom which animate the noblest endeavors of
human life. It is in the thought of the American people that the Ku
Klux Klan undertakes to establish its "Invisible Empire," mighty in its
ultimate consummations, indestructible and glorious forever.