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by
Timothy Egan
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April 11 - May 28, 2025
Charm oozed from him like grease from a sizzling sausage.
It had been barely four years since the reborn Klan moved across the Ohio River and spread north. But now crosses burned all over the state.
private police force, some 30,000 men legally deputized to harass violators
One in three native-born white males wore the sheets.
He promised to fire all Jewish and Catholic professors at the state’s flagship public university.
“No one can deny that the United States is a white Protestant country,” wrote the Fiery Cross, the weekly newspaper of the Indiana Klan.
the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.
Their wives belonged to the Klan women’s auxiliary, and their masked children marched in parades under the banner of the Ku Klux Kiddies.
He had a ninety-eight-foot yacht docked at Lake Erie and a private plane with the Klan logo painted underneath, to go with the fleet of luxury cars,
hooded horsemen were part of the unmoored mass of defeated Confederate soldiers,
“The work does not end with the abolition of slavery,” he said, not long after Lincoln was shot in the head, “but only begins.”
“We seek to create, as never before, one grand, glorious America,” Simmons wrote in a booklet. “A White Man’s nation.”
Jews were not even Americans,
In barely a year’s time, the number of Klansmen went from 3,000 to 100,000.
The way to win over the Heartland was with a wholesome Klan, a Klan of family and faith and Midwestern values.
he paid off a dozen or so ministers to evangelize on behalf of the Klan,
“Not against Jews, but against only the Jews who are trying to gain control of the world;
hood and robes made especially for members, sold only through the Klan for $6.
he was unfit for monogamy. Wasn’t it true of all great men?
The Klan that spread to the North was steeped in homegrown Christianity practiced by everyday folks.
the Klan’s morality police, the might to make right. Their targets were adulterers and young lovers, bootleggers and speakeasies, truants, vagrants, and petty thieves.
They posted gun-toting sentries outside polling places on Election Day, checking voters
Locke wanted to package the resentments of the age into a political force. And he recruited heavily among the Denver police.
Indiana was the most Southern of Northern states—North Dixie, it was often called—settled by people from Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. In its early constitution, Article XIII specifically prohibited free Blacks or “mulattos” from residing in the state.
men with badges and no uniforms took to the field as the eyes and ears of a very ambitious Klansman.
He understood people’s fears and their need to blame others for their failures.
if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it.
The key to telling a big lie was to do it w...
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majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order—proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had “changed its bed sheets for a policeman’s uniform.”
When a local Klan den proclaimed that Jesus was a white Protestant, Dale pointed out that Jesus would have been banned from the Klan—as a Jew and an olive-skinned alien.
Even sauerkraut was suspect because it contained 0.051 percent alcohol.
“This is a struggle for the rebirth of the White Race and the preservation of civilization.” Within a generation or two, she warned, white Protestants would be replaced by an inferior breed. The Jews were behind this plot.
Klanswomen were given fashion tips: light on the facial rouge, never show too much ankle below the dress.
Among Jews, there were individual acts of defiance. Louis and Rose Shapiro changed the name of their American Grocery in Indianapolis to Shapiro’s Kosher Foods.
The Ku Klux Kiddies were issued small-sized robes and masks, recited pledges and songs at regular den meetings, and marched in parades.
By the close of 1923, Indiana would have more Klansmen than any other state—north or south.
The streets were packed with white-sheeted Klansmen from all over eastern Indiana and just across the state line in Dayton, Ohio.
Richmond Klan gave out Bibles to every public school
if they are not exposed and driven from Indiana, they, the Ku Klux Klan, will corrupt your juries, dominate your elections, elect their puppets to power and place, undermine your laws, and violate the principles of your Constitution.”
Howard Cadle, whose Indianapolis Tabernacle was said to be the largest building in America devoted to religious services at the time.
then, upon further reflection, he elaborated on an earlier answer. “I am the embodiment of Napoleon.” He gave no sign he was kidding.
revealed to him at a young age that he could get away with things as others could not—simply because he dared to cross a line.
They envisioned a commencement where degrees were awarded in “Jew-hating” and “fanaticism,” and classes in whipping, lynching, tar-and-feathering.
with a faculty made up exclusively of Kluxers,”
ethnicity was fate: millions of people were doomed in utero to become degenerates or castoffs.
By the dawn of the 1920s, about 2,500 people in the state had been sterilized against their will.
Ultimately, about 70,000 people across the United States would be forcibly sterilized.
category of “degenerates” was added in many of these states in order to sterilize homosexuals.
His Rhapsody in Blue was created in 1924, the year Congress was finalizing legislation that would prevent millions of Jews from fleeing a Europe soon to be tyrannized by the Nazi Holocaust.
President Harding endorsed The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against White World-Supremacy
