Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [73]
Although people recognized that the Klan was “commercializing” prejudice, in general its appeal to “their patriotism and their moral idealism” was more potent than its appeal to “their hates.” Membership promised not just mystery and excitement, but valuable opportunities for networking and a sense of community. For many, joining the Klan was a positive decision, not a negative one.
Promoting this Babbittish idea of Americanism—small town, Protestant, white, clean, sober, hard-working, family-minded—meant promoting cultural conformity, a humorless cult of “oneness.” In Middletown, observed Robert and Helen Lynd, “being ‘different’ is rare, even among the young.” Middletown high-school students overwhelmingly agreed with statements such as “The white race is the best race on earth” and “The United States is unquestionably the best country in the world.”
The Lynds described the Klan coming “upon Middletown like a tornado,” spreading tales of Catholic, Jewish and black plots to take over the world, and recruiting 3,500 (or one in ten) locals by 1923. Most Middletown Klansmen were more anti-Catholic than anti-black, probably because only about 6 percent of Middletown’s population was black. They blamed immigrants for violating Prohibition, sexual license, for introducing worrying new political trends and challenging their own prosperity and control of their area, and saw the Klan as a way of eradicating these evils from their society.
“The true story of the 1920s Klan,” writes Kathleen Blee, “is the ease with which racism and intolerance appealed to ordinary people in ordinary places . . . These citizens, comfortable in daily lives in which racial, ethnic and religious privilege were so omnipresent as to be invisible to their possessors, found in the Klan a collective means to perpetuate their advantages.” It might be argued that they also found there other forces than themselves to blame for the changes that were transforming American society.
Not every American was seduced by the Ku Klux Klan. The journalist William Allen White described the Klan to a colleague as “a self-constituted body of moral idiots.” The trouble with the Klan, he said, “is that it is based upon such deep foolishness that it is bound to be a menace to good government in any community.” In a similar vein, a professor of sociology asserted that “the most dangerous weakness in a democracy is the uninformed and unthinking average man.” Even Thomas Dixon, author of the novel that had inspired D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, spoke out against the revived Klan (albeit from the perspective of a paternalistic racist): “If the white race is superior—as I believe it is—it is our duty as citizens of a democracy to lift up and help the weaker race.”
Steps were taken in some places to combat the Klan’s rising popularity, often using vigilante techniques that reflected those of the Klan. Klan meeting houses were torched and Klan parades met with mobs wielding rocks and bottles. Catholics organized themselves into groups like the Red Knights or the Knights of the Flaming Circle, intending to defend themselves and their homes from Klan aggression. A bomb destroyed the offices of Dawn, the Chicago Klan’s newspaper. Spies infiltrated Klan meetings and exposed Klan members’ identities to the press.
Local politicians might also resist the Klan’s appropriation of their area, for example by banning the wearing of hoods or masks in public, but in many cases resistance was futile. When the governor of Oklahoma instituted martial law to remove the Klan from his state, the Klan-dominated state legislature impeached him and removed him from office. In Dallas the Citizens’ League, while in agreement with the Klan about white supremacy, questioned its religious intolerance and restrictions on freedom of conscience. Seeking to restore peace to the community, the mayor asked the Klan to disband. This it refused to do. In 1922 Klan membership