Kindle Notes & Highlights
Klansmen could not discuss issues of race, class, or state power apart from their understanding of manhood, womanhood, and sexual decorum.
Klan was all of these things. It was at once mainstream and extreme, hostile to big business and antagonistic to industrial unions, anti-élitist and hateful of blacks and immigrants, pro–law and order and prone to extralegal violence. If scholars have viewed these attributes as incompatible, Klansmen themselves did not.
reactionary populism. In it, the anti-élitism characteristic of populism joined with the commitment to enforce the subordination of whole groups of people.
site of the study is Clarke County, Georgia, home of the University of Georgia and, in the 1920s, of Athens Klan Number 5. Once described by W. E. B. Du Bois as the "Invisible Empire State," Georgia was the birthplace and national headquarters of the second Klan.
until well after the Armistice did the Klan reappear in Athens. Then, following a much-touted return engagement of Birth of a Nation in January of 1921, the Klan renewed its efforts to win local men.
fraternal orders and Protestant churches.
Throughout the country, evangelical Protestants in particular flocked to the Klan, primarily Baptists, Methodists, and members of the Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and the United Brethren.
élite or liberal denominations, in contrast, such as Unitarians, Congregationalists, Lutherans, or Episcopalians, appeared less likely to join. In
many clergymen cooperated with the Klan. Of the thirty-nine national lecturers working for the Klan at one point, two-thirds were said to be Protestant ministers.
1924, the Klan boasted that it had enrolled 30,000 ministers.
the Reverend B. Postell Read of Young Harris Memorial Methodist Church
the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, created in 1923, and the Junior Klan, created in 1924.
Klan routinely exploited showings of Birth of a Nation to enlist new members, for it sent the message the Klan wanted delivered.
the NAACP sought—in vain—to have the film removed from circulation.
When Wiley Doolittle, former mayor of Athens and future Klansman, proclaimed at a flag-kissing ceremony in June of 1918 that "hereafter disloyalists might expect to be branded on the forehead and on either cheek, and the rope would be the end of traitors, in legal process of law or otherwise," other civic leaders were not scandalized.
dragnet against radicals named for the Attorney General under whose direction they proceeded.
Just as the Klan used burning crosses to sanctify its message, so it used ministers to sanctify its methods.
Thus intimidated, even the few faculty members who despised the Klan hesitated to speak out. "The trouble with us," reflected English professor John Wade, "is that we have as little courage as we have voice. But with things as they are now in Georgia, more courage would likely mean martyrdom, not of the effective variety."
Athens press was no exception. On the contrary, its editor denounced Julian Harris, the anti-Klan editor of the Enquirer-Sun, for giving comfort to "the South-haters" with his coverage of the movement. "Nothing unpleasant must ever be printed" seemed to be the operating principle of most newspapers,
another later recalled, "they put only nice things in the Banner-Herald."48
As black Americans stood their ground and fought back, undaunted, against their white assailants in the nationwide race riots of that year, white supremacy appeared vulnerable. As the woman suffrage movement won its seventy-year-long battle for the right to vote, male prerogative no longer seemed assured. As one in every five American workers walked off their jobs to go on strike, the rights of property seemed less clear. And, finally, as Wilson set out to build a global League of Nations, the levers of power moved farther from the hands of non-élite white men than ever before. A middle-class
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Athens grew after 1880, its internal divisions also became plainer. The wealthiest residents congregated along Milledge and Prince Avenues in the white-columned antebellum mansions that earned Athens the name "Classic City."
By 1920, wages in Georgia hit an all-time high, inflation notwithstanding. Athens' black workers made particularly spectacular gains; wages in the main occupations open to them generally doubled and in some cases tripled. Employers felt keenly the slippage of their power in this labor-scarce market.
In 1917, the same year the NAACP came to Georgia, thirty-one Athens residents chartered a branch in their community. The following
growth in feminist agitation by middle- and upper-class women in the 1910s. The Athens Women's Club joined with society women's groups across the state to demand the admission of women to the University of Georgia in Athens. The Clarke County Equal Suffrage Association, established in 1912, held public rallies and debates to promote woman's rights.
In Athens, beginning in 1913, an élite reform coalition involving upper-class residents
members of the university faculty repeatedly sought to shift the city government away from the mayor-council form inherited from the 1870s to a city commission or city-manager system.
they also looked to it to dilute the voting power of working-class and lower-middle-class wards and to ease out politic...
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the use of collective violence as a tool to readjust relations of power. "Violence flows from politics,"
One can expect outbreaks, he suggests, at "those historical moments when the structure of power is changing decisively."91 Clearly, the postwar years constituted such a moment.
Local Klan lecturers on "Americanism," for their part, blamed Jews and Catholics for the chain-store peril. One speaker dared his listeners to "find out who owns stock" in companies like the "A & P Grocery stores." Jews and Catholics, it seems, hid behind the initials. He further complained that "department stores, all of which are principally owned by Jews or foreigners," were pushing out "American" businesses. He raved against the inroads made into Georgia by Sears & Roebuck, which he insisted was owned by "JEWS. JEWS. JEWS."
Simmons maintained that already, in the cities of the North and East, ethnic lines had become class lines. The urban working class was split between skilled tradesmen from Britain, Germany and Scandinavia, whom he respected as the modern heirs of artisans, and unskilled workers from Southern and Eastern Europe, whom he detested. The new immigrants lacked the capacity to appreciate republican institutions. "Rebellion against tyrants to them," said Simmons, "means acceptance of Anarchism or Bolshevism, or at least German state Socialism."
In 1922, the Athens Klan applauded the Mayor's "War on Idlers," in which police combed the city to arrest those without jobs.
Klansmen much preferred the older tradition of charity, in which only the "worthy" poor received aid, and the act of giving boosted the status of the providers.
going in their robes to do "charity work," among poor widows and children in particular. Klan chapters also collected alms in meetings for the "deserving poor."
Klansmen sought to compensate for that loss by practicing what they called "vocational Klannishness." It entailed "trading, dealing with and patronizing Klansmen in preference to all others," even if that meant sacrifice of time, money, or former friendships. At least ninety-one local Klansmen had co-workers in the order, a number in businesses owned or supervised by Klansmen. Some perhaps hoped that membership would secure their employment or promotion. Combining commitment to the order with a bid for the trade of members, many Klan employers instituted—and advertised—"100% American"
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proposals for appointed city managers and commission governments attempts to constrict popular control over the state so that it could better serve business interests.
To thwart the Columbus plan, Klansmen beat up the new city manager and bombed the mayor's home.29
Elite civic and business leaders, many future Klan opponents among them, continued to push municipal reform proposals in the face of a stiff popular resistance. Some future Klansmen, for their part, rallied opposition to the measures. Thus, while mayor in 1914, Wiley Doolittle spoke out against a plan for commission government. Klan alderman W. R. Tindall took the offensive in 1924, putting forward a proposal to make the Civil Service Commission elective rather than appointive so that the body would "belong to the people." O. M. Martin, an elected official and Klan leader, likewise condemned a
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One such occasion occurred in 1926, when the Clarke County Democratic Executive Committee ruled Klansman James Willie Arnold, a local lawyer, off the primary ticket as a candidate for a judgeship. In addition to having served as the Great Titan of the regional Klan in Georgia, Arnold belonged to the Elks and the Woodmen of the World, and had served as treasurer of the Century Club. He took part in the men's Sunday school at First Methodist Church, where his wife belonged
the town's "exclusive patrician aristocracy" and called upon "the good citizens of Athens" to overthrow the regnant "corrupt political ring" and "take over the reins of power that are justly theirs." Yet, thus used, the "ring" seemed to refer to the modicum of electoral influence wielded by Catholics and Jews. One of the main problems restoration of so-called popular control was designed to solve, moreover, was "the Semitic influence in Athens"—in particular, the "unfortunate" fact that three Jews sat on the Board of Education.
singled out for attack, not for their ethnicity and wealth alone, but also for their liberal records. One of the three, at any rate, Moses G. Michael, had led the fight to abolish corporal punishment in local schools—in so doing winning unmatched affection from the city's children—and had worked to promote tolerance and cooperation among residents of different faiths.32 A similar spirit of
Klan's hostility to the League of Nations and the World Court. In Athens, as elsewh...
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Capital's "love of money," the Klan alleged, had led it to import people of "inferior races" to the United States. A meeting of Grand Dragons denounced opposition to immigration restriction by "the big employers of pauper labor" reliant on this "European 'riff-raff' . . . the very scum of the earth." Employers used this imported "cheap labor," according to the Klan, to lower the living standards of white, Protestant Americans.38
Klansmen looked to evangelical Protestantism in general, and
to fundamentalism in particular. The Klan overlapped with, and helped feed the larger upsurge of, fundamentalism in the 'twenties; indeed, the very term "fundamentalist" only came into use in 1920. The 1920s "marked a crucial transition in American religious history," according to one of its leading interpreters. The evangelical Protestant establishment found itself on the defensive in the face of unprecedented competition from Judaism and Catholicism, as well as from advocates of the social gospel and higher biblical criticism. Belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, the truth of the
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"Christianity" was the natural "foe of Bolshevism." A revival of old-time Christianity, said the national leader of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), was "the only thing that will save our nation in these days of unrest and disturbance."
America's triumph in the world of nations came from its founding faith, for "only men and women who dared to speak to their God face to face could have had the courage and self-reliance necessary to the mighty work of the pioneer." Evans thus interpreted Protestantism as, at root, a "protest against human authority over the souls, the bodies, the rights and the earnings of men."
Seen through Klan eyes, the social gospel acted as the entering wedge of communism. The "wider ramifications" of the social gospel, according to the Klan, included "pacifism, Bolshevism, attacks on the government, bitter arraignments of the churches, anti-capitalism, [and] sympathy with Russia."
They "should be deported or placed behind prison bars." The national office instructed local Klans to fight "any kind of propaganda that belittles this government . . . or that calls into question constituted authority from any source." Critics "must either shut up or get out."49
