Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [71]
A cross would be burned on a hillside to signal the Klan’s arrival to the local population. Then a group of masked, robed men would appear at church services, bearing flowers and singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and offering money to church charities. One of the Klansmen might be invited to preach. New members would be initiated in the glow of a ring of car headlights, kissing the American flag and swearing loyalty to the order. Meaningless generalities about “much needed local reform,” “just laws” and “pure Americanism” were spouted.
Apparently innocuous Klan-organized barbecues, picnics, spelling-bees, concerts and rallies drew the local population in. Financial contributions would be made to local hospitals and schools. On Klan Day at the Texas State Fair in 1923 rodeo riders competed in full Klan regalia, a Klan-sponsored orphanage was declared open and, later on, fireworks blazed in the night sky above seven thousand masked marchers.
To demonstrate what they liked to think of as their paternalistic benevolence, the Klan even donated money to black causes. In 1921 a chapter in Memphis gave $500 to the black victims of an explosion. “Be it known and hereby proclaimed,” read a Klan advertisement in a Dallas newspaper in 1921, “that no innocent person of any color, creed or lienage [sic] has just cause to fear or condemn this body of men. That our creed is opposed to violence, lynchings, etc., but that we are even more strongly opposed to the things that cause lynchings and mob rule . . . Your sins will find you out. Be not deceived. You cannot deceive us and we will not be mocked. This warning will not be repeated.” The blues singer Bessie Smith was forcibly bundled into a car, driven off and horse-whipped in Dallas. She refused ever to go back to Texas.
Marcus Garvey, leader of the separatist United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), went to Atlanta in the summer of 1922 to discuss possible Klan support for his “Back to Africa” movement with Edward Clarke, although nothing came of their meeting. According to his widow, Garvey believed that most white Americans were only prevented from demonstrating the racism that the Klan made explicit by hypocritical “culture and refinement.” From his point of view, at least the Klan was honest.
Kleagles haunted showings of The Birth of a Nation and deliberately pandered to local fears and prejudices about illegal drinking, immoral behavior, striking workers or influxes of blacks and immigrants to the area. Advised by the weekly newsletters Bessie Tyler produced, Kleagles scapegoated local “enemies.” In California they played on hatred of the Japanese; in New York, on anti-Semitism; in Texas, on fear of Mexicans.
Once a local chapter had been established, Klansmen began targeting immigrants, blacks and political radicals. Cowed newspaper editors feared losing advertisers and readers if they spoke out against the Klan. Elections might be monitored and potential voters warned to stay away from the polls if they were not going to vote for a candidate sympathetic to the Klan; local businesses were bribed to boycott Jews, blacks and Catholics; non-Klan homes and shops were burned; bootleggers, immigrants, blacks, or even people sympathetic to them were flogged, acid-burned or occasionally killed. The Klan’s victims were just as often whites who had transgressed as blacks or immigrants, like the two young men who had criticized the Klan in Louisiana and were kidnapped and murdered by being run over again and again by a large road-grading tractor before being dumped in a lake, or the white divorcee beaten to unconsciousness in her own home.
The revived Klan was by definition racist and anti-black but its activities were far from limited to the persecution of blacks. As the black-owned Savannah Tribune commented in July 1922, no lyncher felt he needed to put on a hood to kill a black man: “They do not think it necessary to join a secret society, pay initiation fees and buy regalia when Negroes are the quarry.” Southern chapters of