But the violence was not the attraction for most members of the Klan. Indeed, most would likely have disavowed their support for such activities, and many surely did not consider themselves to be mean-spirited racists at all.
The Klan owed its popularity less to its endorsement of raw hatred directed toward nonwhites and the supposedly immoral than to how it allowed for the expression of white supremacy and moral conservatism in culturally acceptable and even ostensibly laudatory ways.
Like many organizations that presented themselves as fraternal orders, the Klan gave members the sense that they belonged to something special, complete with secret rituals; handshakes; mystical-sounding titles, like Imperial Wizard and Exalted Cyclops; code words; and uniforms.
The Klan sponsored parades and picnics, baseball teams and beautiful-baby contests. Klansmen had musical troupes that performed public concerts and bands that played at state fairs. Klan members showed up in churches on Sunday mornings to donate money and they ran charity drives. They threw Christmas parties for orphans and raised money to build Protestant-only hospitals.
They made efforts to fight supposed Catholic influence in public schools by donating American flags and Bibles. They created special Klan rites for wedding ceremonies, christenings, and funerals.
They ran candidates for hundreds of state and local offices, and Americans elected countless Klan members as mayors, school-board and city-council members, sheriffs, and state legislators. Klan officeholders in particularly prominent and powerful positions included Governors Edward Jackson of Indiana and Clifford Walker of Georgia, as well as U.
For every Klansmen who joined for the opportunity to bully, threaten, and beat blacks, immigrants, and adulterers, there were dozens attracted by these sorts of avenues for communal and civic engagement, for forging business and political connections to other middle-class white people, and for the chance to be publicly proud of being white, Protestant, and a native-born American.
None of which is to suggest that the ideology of intolerance or the racist violence was separable from the forging of community, the charity work, the pride, or the political activism. On the contrary, it was all of a piece, and even Klan members who came to the organization mostly because friends and neighbors encouraged them to do so saw the appeal of white supremacy and understood full well how the appearance of Klansmen in regalia struck fear into large numbers of their fellow Americans.
One factor that helped bring down the Klan was a growing recognition that that fear was legitimate. At a state-wide meeting of the Klan at a farm on the outskirts of Montpelier in August , a crowd of spectators and nearly automobiles congregated for festivities which included a fireworks display. The Vermont Klan promoted themselves as one-hundred percent American and in support of traditional morality.
At a meeting in Windsor, on October 17, , approximately men listened to remarks explaining the Klan movement. It was reported that after asking all who were not white Protestants to leave, the main speaker tried to persuade his audience that negroes had a lower standard of morality than white men, that Jews were only interested in business success, and that in predominately Catholic populations, outsiders did not get a square deal.
In Bethel, in August , a divorced woman and a male boarder she had taken in received Klan letters accusing them of living immorally and warning the boarder to move out or be punished with tar and feathers. Catholics in Montpelier were the targets of cross burnings at their cemetery and on the steps of the Catholic church. The town of Rutland passed an ordinance outlawing parades or meetings in the streets by hooded or masked individuals or organizations.
In Burlington, aldermen passed an ordinance prohibiting the wearing of masks in public. Several newspapers denounced Klan activities. The Bellows Falls Times criticized local Klan organizing efforts, warning that economic prosperity in town could not thrive on a foundation of community distrust.
Many Klan members were respected by other whites and were religiously-inclined citizens. Similar to the South, bible reading, prayer, and hymn singing were staples of Vermont Klan meetings, and for some members, it replaced Sunday church services. Others apparently saw the Klan as primarily a social and fraternal organization. The original Klan had been specifically formed to combat freedoms for freed slaves, and the new Klan continued that trend.
The Klan also opposed and disparaged Jews, painting them alternately as predatory capitalists and dangerous radicals. Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, eastern Europe, French Canada, and southern Germany had poured into the country by the millions in the previous decades, competing with native-born American workers for jobs and driving down wages. The Klan also associated immigrants with drunkenness and saloons in an era of Prohibition , as well as with being un-American because of their languages, foods, and customs.
The great majority of Klan members were Protestants who feared Catholics because they were convinced the average Catholic was completely under the thumb of his or her parish priest or worse a foreign, authoritarian Church hierarchy led by the pope.
Senator J. Although not every Klansman was violent, far too many were. Members perpetrated lynchings, arson, beatings, and whippings. Ku Kluxism as conceived, incorporated, propagated, and practiced has become a menace to the peace and security of every section of the United States. Its evil and vicious possibilities are boundless. It is nothing more or less than a throwback to the centuries when terror, instead of law and justice, regulated the lives of men.
At first the Klan grew slowly after its rebirth, but the early s witnessed spectacular growth. On July 4, , an estimated , Klansmen, women, and children gathered in Kokomo, Indiana, to hold mass rallies.
Some said Klan membership reached 8 million by the mids, but the actual number was somewhere between 2. Still, that was enough to make the Klan an organization to be feared not only when it physically threatened blacks, Catholics, Jews, bootleggers, or local adulterers but also when it burned fiery crosses on deserted hillsides or on the front lawns of its opponents including future radio demagogue Father Charles A.
During the decade, it even exercised great power at the ballot box, helping to elect governors in Alabama, California, Oregon, and Indiana. An estimated 75 House members took their seats with KKK assistance in the s.
They included Earl Mayfield, as U. Just as quickly as the Klan rose in membership and influence, however, it collapsed. There were many reasons. Others were repulsed by its violence or its hypocrisy. From to the earlys the Klan terrorized recently freed blacks and white Republicans with goals of maintaining white supremacy and overthrowing local pro-Federal governments but were suppressed.
The KKK saw a massive resurgence in the s and by claimed 5 million members. This incarnation of the Klan operated as a nation-wide fraternal organization opposed to African Americans and the influx of European immigrants, notably Jews and Catholics, but this organization faded away during the s and s.
During the s and s numerous local radical groups opposed to the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation adopted the name Ku Klux Klan. True to their adopted label, these scattered groups perpetuated the use of violence and intimidation to counter government policy. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, many of these Klan chapters operated without threat of arrest or prosecution since they occasionally operated with the approval of local government officials.
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