Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [76]
One misapprehension about Klan membership in the 1920s is that it attracted principally poor, downtrodden Americans who felt marginalized by the forces of modernity and urbanization sweeping through the country and eradicating the steady, modest rural lives they valued. These people, it is argued, joined the Klan because it offered them a sense of belonging. As the saying went, “a nobody in the world became somebody in the Klan.” “You think the influential men belong [to the Klan] here?” asked a non-Klan member in Indiana. “Then look at their shoes when they march in parade.”
However, new studies have shown that although these men did join the Klan, just as often Klansmen were middle-class middle Americans, members (like Simmons) of other, respectable clubs like the Kiwanis. The typical Klan member in Athens, Georgia (where, unusually, membership records survive), was married and probably a father, and lived in his own home. There were a few local grandees—men who sat on committees or participated in local government—and a few more unskilled laborers, but most were owner-managers of small businesses.
That the Klan was an exclusively rural, Southern organization was another popular misconception. In fact, during the early 1920s when recruitment was at its peak, Southern and Southwestern membership leveled off while membership in the North Central states (Indiana, Ohio and Illinois) went up by five times. Kleagles even had real success in pockets of the traditionally tolerant, progressive North Atlantic states, for example around Portland, Maine, and in Worcester, Massachusetts, and on the West Coast.
In the spring of 1921 Doc Simmons paid a private visit to Denver, Colorado, where he initiated the area’s first few Klansmen. A few months later, the Klan officially announced its arrival there. Denver was a city of just over 250,000 people, predominantly white and Protestant, with few blacks and hardly any immigrants. The one worrying section of the population—or encouraging, from the Klan’s point of view—was the rising proportion of Catholics who by the mid-1920s constituted nearly 15 percent of Denver’s population.
Initially, against the national background of the New York World exposé and the Congressional investigation into Klan activities, local opposition to the Klan was strong. The regional tax office began looking into the Klan’s failure to pay taxes on its initiation fees; Denver’s liberal newspaper published revelations of Klan secrets. The Klan seemed to fade away.
But in January 1922 it resurfaced, this time using more aggressive tactics. It donated to the Young Men’s Christian Association; it gave an impoverished widow $200; it made visits and contributed to Denver’s churches. At the same time a warning was sent to the president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a black janitor was accused of having had “intimate relations with white women” and told to leave town (which he did, before the charges against him were proved).
The unwillingness of the local government to condemn these acts, and the passivity of the majority of the population, meant that almost by default the Klan survived and began to regain strength. Denver was a prosperous city, but it had a high crime rate. Violent crime, trafficking in illegal drugs and alcohol, and prostitution were relatively commonplace. The Klan seized on this as a way to appeal to Denver’s citizenry, promising that it would succeed in cleaning up Denver where its own leaders had failed.
Chicago was another major city where the Klan made surprising inroads. Unlike Denver, Chicago’s population was richly diverse, made up of immigrants, Catholics, Jews and blacks