CONCLUSION |
“Guardians of Privilege”: |
In most of the United States the Klan served as an ordinarily peaceful defender of white Protestant morality and power.
—STANLEY COHEN (1994)1
The Ku Klux Klan believes in keeping America true to the ideals of those noble patriots who gave their lives that this republic might be founded upon liberty, justice and freedom. The Klan believes in America being run by genuine Americans at heart, cost what it may.
—REV. I. M. HARGRETT (1923)2
In 1925 the end of the ku klux klan, much like its fabled beginning, emerged because of the death of a white women. In 1913 the death of little Mary Phagan mobilized the Knights of Mary Phagan to claim retribution through the lynching of Leo Frank, and the second Ku Klux Klan sought to be a white men’s order tasked not only with the protection of vulnerable white womanhood but also of nation, faith, and race. Twelve years later, the death of Madge Oberholtzer at the hands of a former Klan officer made the order and its members seem more dangerous and terrible. In the wake of another young white woman’s death, the ideals of the hooded order appeared disingenuous at best. For some, the Klan, its secrecy, and its reach for political power enabled Oberholtzer’s death. Thus, little Mary and Madge became the bookends of the Klan’s American saga, idealistic strivings countered by tarnished realities. William Simmons was responsible for the creation of the white Protestant men’s order, and David Curtis “Steve” Stephenson, the Indiana Grand Dragon convicted of the murder, was one force behind the Klan's decline in the mid-1920s.
In November 1925 Stephenson was convicted of the second-degree murder of Madge Oberholtzer. Before the trial and subsequent conviction, Stephenson had made a name for himself as the leader of the Indiana realm, among others, having recruited 25,000 Klansmen in Indiana in only six months.3 Stephenson appeared a model Klansman who gave speeches on the importance of Protestantism and nationalism, reinvented the Fiery Cross (an Indiana Klan newspaper), and hosted large Klan rallies with parades and picnics. He was a charismatic charmer, and he became one of the public faces for the 1920s Klan. Yet Stephenson was also an alcoholic and a womanizer with a questionable past whose relationships with women showcased abuse and abandonment. For the Indiana Klan, however, Stephenson integrated the order into statewide politics by helping to elect several Indiana politicians supportive of the general Klan platform of 100 percent Americanism and Protestantism, in addition to Stephenson’s personal legislative agendas. In particular, Ed Jackson, the Indiana governor elected in 1924, owed his victory to Stephenson’s influence. Stephenson sought to pass legislation, including the prohibition of religious garb (aimed at Catholics), the adoption of Bible reading in the public schools, the public display of the flag, and the disbandment of the parochial schools. The Indiana legislature of 1925 became known as the “Klan legislature” because of the dominant Klan presence.4
The so-called Klan bills by and large failed in the legislature, though a bill on flag display in public schools passed. Historian M. William Lutholtz noted that the Klan’s inability to impact the political culture perhaps led members to be “disenchanted” with the order.5 His public persona and sensational trial made Stephenson a ready symbol of the 1920s Klan, which naturally brought about criticism of the larger order due to his personal behavior. In recounting Stephenson’s rise and fall, journalistic accounts and histories conflate Stephenson’s personal history with the history of the national order. His downfall becomes the fall of the Klan.
Stephenson’s rapid rise in the Klan ranks was ultimately derailed by his fascination with Madge Oberholtzer. In January 1925, Stephenson met Oberholtzer at a dinner party at the governor’s mansion. Her job at the Indiana Young People’s Reading Circle in the statehouse helped support her family. Journalist Richard Tucker described her as “not a femme fatale, but rather a plain brunette who wore her hair in the careless upswept style of the times.”6 Her friends described her as ambitious and intelligent. Oberholtzer was an Indiana native who attended Butler College but did not finish her degree. She was the manager of the state library program for teachers. Historian William Lutholtz described her as “an attractive and ambitious young woman, though not, as some reporters would later portray her, either particularly striking or beautiful . . . quick-witted and intelligent, according to her friends, and she knew how to hold up her end of a conversation. In a word, she was interesting.”7
Whatever her virtues or faults, Stephenson found Oberholtzer attractive and compelling. In character with his previous treatment of women, his pursuit of this librarian culminated in her kidnapping, rape, and slow death. On March 15, 1925, Stephenson’s secretary, Fred Butler, called Oberholtzer with a request to see Stephenson immediately. Because she was away from home for the evening, she did not receive the message until late evening, and she decided to see Stephenson because his message seemed urgent. The events that follow appear more fitting as a plot for a soap opera rather than historical narrative. Stephenson forced Oberholtzer to drink alcohol and board a train bound for Chicago. Stephenson essentially kidnapped and then raped her. Her body bore his bites and marks, and he refused to let her go home after the brutal evening.
In her dying declaration, Oberholtzer explained that she devised a dangerous plan for escape. She convinced Stephenson that she needed a new hat for their trip, and he allowed her to go to a pharmacy with one of his employees in tow. At the pharmacy, Oberholtzer bought a new hat as well as mercury bichloride tablets. To escape Stephenson, Oberholtzer willfully poisoned herself. However, Stephenson, upon learning of the poisoning, refused to take her to a hospital unless she married him. Oberholtzer did not acquiesce to his demands, and eventually one of Stephenson’s friends returned her home. Absent medical treatment until her late return home, Oberholtzer eventually died due to infections of her wounds and the impact of the poison.
Stephenson’s trial revolved around his responsibility for Oberholtzer’s death, with his attorneys claiming Oberholtzer committed suicide. However, Oberholtzer’s family secured lawyers who had the foresight to record a dying declaration from their daughter and her accusations against the Klan leader. Prominent newspapers, including the New York Times, covered the sensational trial and its Klan connection. A young woman dead by the hands of a Klan official made prominent headlines and enabled journalists to air their opinions of not only Stephenson but the larger order.
Not surprisingly, this distasteful tale proved interesting to journalists, the general public, and historians alike. Stephenson’s brutal attack on Oberholtzer, her ingestion of mercury bichloride tablets, his refusal to take her to a hospital, and then her prolonged death from both the poison and the injuries from her rape made rich fodder for headlines. Stephenson’s violent actions and blatant disregard for Oberholtzer’s health suggested the brutality of the larger Ku Klux Klan as well. A model Klansman, Stephenson demonstrated to the nation the inherent corruption and violence of the order, and his downfall wrote the closing chapter in many popular newspapers and Klan histories of not only the Indiana klavern but also the national Klan.
The New York Times declared in February 1926 that “the Ku Klux Klan is definitely on the wane.”8 The Times conducted a survey of entrenched Klan states illustrating the decline in membership in Klan strongholds in the South, Midwest, and urban North. It was a fitting end to an order that once was lauded by the national press as a much-needed addition to American society before later emerging as a threat to national conscience.9 The fears about the Klan were realized in Stephenson’s criminal behavior and trial. Stephenson not only abused women and murdered Madge Oberholtzer; he also manipulated elections, produced a Klan legislature, and created his own separate Klan organization when his power was threatened by the national order. This one Klansman illuminated the danger of the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet, the Klan did not disappear from the American cultural scene in 1925 or 1926. In 1928, the Ku Klux Klan appeared in opposition to Governor Albert “Al” Smith of New York, the Democratic presidential nominee. Smith, a longtime target of Klan ire, had lost the Democratic nomination in 1924 due to the chaos created by the Klan at the Democratic National Convention. Catholic historian Mark Massa notes that Smith would have likely been defeated without the Klan’s opposition, but the Klan helped convince other voters of the danger of the Catholic Smith as the president of the United States. Both Republican and Democratic opponents of Smith exploited the Klan in their campaigns against him.10 If the Klan appeared to be an important force in the 1928 election, why is the end of the Klan so often dated in 1925 with the Stephenson trial?
Stephenson’s decline provides an apt and tidy narrative for the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan supposedly emerged in 1915 in response to the brutal murder of Mary Phagan, and other burgeoning social ills, and ended in 1925 with the equally brutal rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer. D. C. Stephenson’s actions and trial appear to make a mockery of the Klan’s supposed commitment to the virtue of white womanhood, Christianity, and civic virtue. Historian Wyn Craig Wade makes this sentiment about the Klan clear: “It championed morality and sanctity of womanhood, while its most successful Grand Dragon was convicted of the most sordid rape-murder of the decade. It revered the teachings of Jesus, while its hopes and endeavors may be called the least Christian and certainly the least charitable of any American popular movement.”11
The order’s long suspected vices become apparent not only in this moment but in the entirety of the second revival of the Klan. Stephenson becomes synonymous with the order. While it is tempting to assume that Stephenson was representative of the whole Klan membership, it is a misstep to do so. Imperial Wizard Evans had even banned Stephenson from the national order in 1924. Stephenson attempted to craft his own Klan organization to counter Evans, and his reputation with women and alcohol caused the national leadership pause. The story of the 1920s Klan ends with Stephenson as proof of the nefarious intentions and actions of the order. Stephenson’s violation of the order’s ideals somehow proves that Klansmen were never actually virtuous, but rather collectively deceitful and dangerous hypocrites like the Indiana Grand Dragon.
With the convicted Grand Dragon, Klan virtues imploded under the weight of hypocrisy, shameless politicking, corruption, and desperate power grabbing. His conviction illuminates the dangerous nature of the Klan, from its celluloid portrayal and its new start on top of Stone Mountain to Stephenson’s prison sentence, which becomes the fitting, theatrical end to the spectacle-filled order. The historical message appears clear: movements that perpetuate intolerance, hate, and racism often end as quickly as they begin.
Yet the order did not end after the Stephenson trial. The Kourier was published by the national order until 1936, and its final issues still trumpeted the dangers of immigration as well as the materializing threat of Communism. Klansmen mobilized against the candidacy of Al Smith for president in 1928, and a much smaller Klan existed until the early 1930s with Imperial Wizard H. W. Evans still at the reins. Furthermore, not all the members of the order were cut from the same cloth as the disgraced Stephenson. Instead of making Stephenson the metric to judge the order’s actions and members, perhaps the Grand Dragon is more a cautionary tale about the danger of manipulating political power and believing one’s self to be above the law, both locally and nationally, and hiding behind a veil of secrecy.
The order was indicative of the common prejudice and privilege of whiteness in the 1910s to 1930s. Historians are correct that membership did decline in the late 1920s. Local klaverns shut down, and many Klan members distanced themselves from the hooded order. Relying solely on membership numbers leads to the conclusion that the order effectively ended in the 1920s. Indeed, the 1920s Klan was the last unified order, and its other twentieth- and twenty-first-century manifestations are fractured and many.
However, the ranks of membership are not the only evidence of the Klan’s presence. I would argue that the 1920s Klan organization ended with the end of the Kourier, and that this end was affected by Stephenson’s trial and the national press coverage. Yet, this is simply the end of the unified Klan. The order’s lasting legacy, instead, is its combination of Protestant Christianity, nationalism, and intolerance in its rhetoric and printed materials. Furthermore, obsession over the various Klan revivals obscures the longevity of a particular Klan-inspired brand of political and religious language and action. Political scientist Allan Lichtman argues convincingly that the end of the Klan did not result from Stephenson’s trial and conviction, declining membership, or lack of interest. He asserts that instead the order became too successful. While the Klan lost members and faced scandals, “America restricted immigration, unions declined, and white Protestant Republicans and southern Democrats ran the nation.” The Klan’s campaigns succeeded in protecting a certain vision of the American nation, and the nation aligned with the Klan’s larger vision of white Protestant dominance. Yet Lichtman writes: “By framing its appeal in overtly religious, ethnic, and racial terms the Klan limited its potential for expansion and sparked a backlash. . . . Yet the Klan survived, more as a brand than as a movement. As generations of promoters on the fringes of the right proved, there was money and fame to be made in marketing hate, no less than other mass-produced goods.”12
The unified order ceased to exist, but Lichtman argues that the Klan’s brand of religious nationalism, prejudice, and intolerance outlived the 1920s order. Yet Lichtman’s analysis can be pushed further than its applicability to the “fringes of the right,” as the Klan’s antipluralist, Christian, and intolerant rhetoric emerged as a crucial component of American political and public culture. The order’s prejudice, nationalism, and faith were part of the dominant white Protestant culture in the United States; the Klan in all of its vice and perhaps virtue was indicative of national political and religious culture. In the 1920s, the Klan was not a movement of the right-wing fringe but a movement of white Protestant citizens who wanted to protect their dominance and their culture.
Lichtman further includes the second Ku Klux Klan as a manifestation of American conservatism, but he characterizes the order as more extremist than others in the fledgling movement of the American Right. The Klan could be a manifestation of conservatism, but it was not indicative of the larger history of American conservatism because of the order’s methods and strategies for accomplishing their vision. White robes and burning crosses signaled the Klan’s difference from the patriotism of the American Legion or the Daughters of the American Revolution. While Lichtman’s work attempts to historicize the emergence of the Klan in this larger history of American politics, he still relies on a conception of the order as outside the mainstream. For Lichtman, the modern Right emerged
out of a widespread concern that pluralistic, cosmopolitan forces threatened America’s national identity. Those Americans most inclined to protect what they perceived as embattled traditional values came from all parts of the nation. They lived in every type of community, worked in numerous occupations, attended many different churches, or even lacked formal affiliation with a church. The vanguard of American conservatism in the 1920s, however, shared a common ethnic identity: they were white and Protestant and they had to fight to retain a once uncontested domination of American life.13
If this is indeed the ethos of modern American conservatism, then the Klan fits the bill. The order sought to protect an embattled nation, to preserve white Protestant dominance, and to maintain racial supremacy. For Lichtman and for me, the Klan is a part of the lineage of the American Right. I would also argue that the trajectory of the American Right becomes more full-fledged and complicated with the Klan’s inclusion. The 1920s Klan is the lynchpin between the nativistic political movements of the nineteenth century (the Know-Nothings, American Protective Association) and the emergence of full-fledged American conservatism after World War II. If the Klan is included in this legacy, then, we can see how movements concerned with white Protestant dominance evolved in their tactics, concerns, and political strategies from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Its short life not withstanding, the Klan represented one of many organizations tasked with battling “un-American radicalism” after World War I. For Michael Kazin, these movements relied on public outrage, patriotism, discipline, and religious faith in their skirmish over the nature and character of America.14 Leonard Moore writes that the “Klan movement and the 1920s generally” are the “starting point” for the history of the American Right. For Moore, the elevation of “white Protestant cultural hegemony and an inflamed populist opposition to the growing power of political, economic, and culture elites” were essential to the second Klan, much in the same way that they are essential to conservative and other movements of the Right in the contemporary period.15
The 1920s, then, marked the beginning of the mythical culture wars, and the Klan’s lament about the decline of a white Protestant nation echoed throughout the twentieth century to the twenty-first. Declension, family values, nationalism, Protestant faith, affirmation of traditional gender roles, racial supremacy, and intolerance appeared prominently in the Klan’s print culture. The order’s reclamation of the nation for the white Protestant faithful added to a brand of politics that conservatives still embrace, one which seeks to return and restore an America in which white Protestants and other moral arbiters are the cultural guardians. The fragmentation of American culture that the Klan feared was apparent, and the order’s lament continued despite its organizational end. Scholars of American conservatism do not usually include the Klan as the beginning of this political movement, but the Klan’s legacy, its brand, appears plainly in conservative political and religious movements.
Nancy MacLean argues that the lasting legacy of conservatism is the defense and promotion of white privilege. These “guardians of privilege” strove to negate the reforms of the New Deal, return “America to the business domination of the Gilded Age and the 1920s,” and defend imperiled white supremacy.16 After World War II, conservative thinkers, politicians, and promoters all emphasized myriad threats to the larger nation, from abortion to civil rights to environmental protection and welfare. Upholding white privilege became more important than consensus. Conservative religious faith impacted conservative political ideology, and American families and women’s bodies became the battlegrounds for an ideological war. The 1920s Klan imagined themselves as guardians, or Knights, of an endangered culture, and this vision of imperiled defenders protecting tradition, faith, and family appears again and again, from the so-called Christian Right to neoconservatives to the Fox News Network.
The question, then, is why the order is excluded from the larger history of American conservatism and what is at stake in the Klan’s inclusion as a legitimate part of the American Right. While Moore, Kazin, and Lichtman readily admit that the Klan might be not only a conservative movement but also one of the forbearers of contemporary American conservative thought, this is not the common historiographical praxis. Klan historian Wyn Craig Wade argued that the Klan “mentality” could be found in the Christian Right, specifically the Christian Coalition of the 1980s, because of their use of “slander and backhanded methods” and “endeavors to elect candidates who support its right-wing views.”17 Historian David Bennett asserts that the Klan is part of not just the Right but also the Far Right. The Klan was just one of the many permutations of the Far Right, beginning with nineteenth-century nativists to the militia and white supremacist movements of today. These self-proclaimed guardians sought to preserve an older, moral, and political order and to save an imperiled America from alien immigrants, foreign ideological systems, and interlopers in our midst.18 Bennett’s work is indicative of how the Klan’s inclusion with the American Right usually includes labeling the order as fringe. The Klan becomes not a movement of the Right but the Far Right, which signals its unusual intolerance when compared to the whole of American history. By shifting the Klan to the far instead of the near, the order and its members are represented as a one of many short-lived movements of intolerance and bigotry, strands of American culture but not representative of our culture as a whole. By labeling the Klan as a movement of the Far Right, its unsavory nature does not taint narratives of the Right. Thus, we scratch our heads and ponder how such a movement gained momentum in our clearly tolerant culture.
Yet John Corrigan and Lynn Neal, in their documentary history of intolerance in America, showcase how banal and present intolerance is in American culture from the colonial period to the twentieth century.19 Intolerance is as American as ideals of tolerance and freedom, and the Klan is a clear case of the presence of intolerance in not just the Far Right but also the Right and our larger political and public culture. Just like the tidy narrative of the Klan’s rise and fall, placing the Klan in the margins protects equally tidy narratives that laud America’s long history of tolerance and inclusion. If the Klan is part and parcel of American conservatism, what does this show about our current political moment and the history of our recent past? The 1920s Klan and its brand of religious nationalism and intolerance emerges in our contemporary guardians of privilege—religious, racial, and otherwise. This showcases that while our national virtues might be noble, our common practice is still not. Klan historian Kenneth Jackson was correct in his assertion that “to examine the Klan is to examine ourselves.”20 Analyzing the Klan as a legitimate component of the American conservative movement illuminates the continued presence of intolerance and exclusion in American nationalism and how Protestantism still provides the moral compass to cultural guardians. Understanding the Klan’s significant place in American history and American religious history helps explain the permanent presence of religious intolerance in our national culture. By learning from the Klan’s lessons, we can move beyond our collective history and recognize the danger of the Klan’s brand in our current moment.
Neither villains nor noble souls.
In his groundbreaking study of old Christian Right, Leo Ribuffo examines Christian fascists who created ministries based on fear and anti-Semitism in the Great Depression and through the Cold War. The ministers he analyzes take part in the Klan’s brand, and Ribuffo showcases how even those on the Far Right can overlap with the so-called mainstream. Most important, Ribuffo notes that most scholars studying conflict in American history “share a signal flaw with consensus scholars whom they criticize.” Both types of historians are hesitant “to take seriously groups that retard ‘progress.’”21 For Ribuffo, the past contains heroes, heroines, and villains, and our histories are not complete with the inclusion of all of these groups. While I share Ribuffo’s sentiment, my approach to another set of villains, the 1920s Klansmen and Klanswomen, is quite different. While I will readily admit that the Klan encapsulated and promulgated the malevolent, proclamations of historical actors as heroes and villains make me uneasy. My approach was to “see with” the Klan and its approach to religion, nation, gender, and race. Villainy surfaces in my narrative, but this is not a tale of villains and/or heroes.
Rather, this is the story of the 1920s Klan as the men and women of the order understood and personified themselves in print, for better or worse, and the Klan’s story shows more ambivalence than good or evil. Contemporaries of the Klan also sought to understand the order as dangerous, benign, or something else. In 1921 the Evening News characterized the men and women who joined the Ku Klux Klan:
Already you hear large numbers of people declaring that the K.K.K. is an organization made up of villains and smaller numbers of people declaring that members of the organization are noble souls who are determined to elevate the morals of society. Members of the K.K.K. are of course neither villains nor noble souls. In this they all resemble other members of the human race; for villains and noble souls belong in fairy books, along with griffins with three heads and fairies who give you an enchanted ring.22
Members of the Klan were ordinary people who joined the order because it proved useful in their daily lives and confirmed their vision of nationalism, race, and religion. After all, the planks of the 1920s Klan asserted the centrality of white supremacy, Protestant Christianity, the purity of white womanhood, and clean politics, among others, and its message appealed to white Protestant men and women who feared immigration, women’s equality, foreign ideas and religions, as well as changes to the social order of American society. The Klan’s well-crafted message of white Protestant dominance and the possible ruin of said dominance resonated among those citizens. The order’s language and presentation of those threats convinced white men and women to read Klan newspapers, attend rallies, and even burn crosses. They joined the order because of spectacular displays and the order’s coherent and familiar worldview. Men became Knights—defenders of the nation, religion, and women—and women became helpmeets in the cause rather than just passive supporters.
To examine Klansmen and Klanswomen in their banality reflects more accurately their understandings of themselves and their membership in the order. In Women of the Klan, one of Kathleen Blee’s infor mants argued that the “better people” joined the Klan to defend the nation, the schools, and their families.23 Those who did not join the Klan, then, lacked either the initiative or the foresight to see that the nation was in peril. Most of the women she interviewed did not report their hatred of Catholics, Jews, or African Americans but rather focused on the value of their membership, the social gatherings, and their work in the order, which these women believed improved the nation in the face of the foreign. They did not see the detriment of their actions. Some even longed for the camaraderie of membership and the sense of belonging the order instilled. Her conversants understood their work for the order as necessary and crucial for the protection of the nation, faith, and white women. They were defenders, not perpetrators, of violence and maliciousness. Even when confronted by the history of the order’s more violent offspring, members still imagined themselves as part of a righteous cause rather than a harmful movement.
This belief, however, does not abdicate Klansmen and Klanswomen of the damage they inflicted, but it does illustrate that members did not willingly recognize their roles in an organization known for terror and violence. The women Blee interviewed did not join the order specifically to cause harm or because of their own evil tendencies. They joined alongside their neighbors, relatives, and loved ones. Joiners took up the cause of the Klan because of the familiarity of the order’s politics and pointed laments about the fall of American society. They were not villains. As the case study of the Klan illuminates, ordinary people can do what most would feel is extraordinary without realizing the magnitude or danger of their actions. Ordinary people commit physical and rhetorical acts of violence for movements that claim benevolent and righteous intentions, whether or not their intentions prove to be malicious. Klan members embraced the order’s anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and racism as necessary defenses of national character and complexion. They donned hoods and masks to show their allegiance to the order’s ideals and values and to intimidate their supposed enemies. The case study of the 1920s Klan shows that ordinary people commit heinous acts without evil intentions and that they can promote a worldview founded on intolerance even as they describe its tolerance.24
To recognize that humans commit atrocities against other humans without being willfully malevolent means that we cannot condemn members of movements like the Klan as wholly evil, deranged, or abnormal. If we label the order as evil, we run the risk of ignoring the wide appeal of the order and the various reasons people chose to join. Such labeling leads to simplistic and useless renderings of complex movements. Wicked people were not the only ones who joined the Klan. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and grandparents embraced the Klan, and we need to understand their motivations (benevolent, malevolent, or ambiguous) to harvest an accurate portrait of how that hate movement gained such popularity in a particular time period. Condemnatory accounts gain nothing because they obscure why millions joined the Klan in the 1920s. Moreover, blatant judgment hides how the Klan was representative of 1920s America in its white supremacy, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and other vices. Historian David Bennett characterized the Klan’s popularity as appealing in a time of change: “It was the Roaring Twenties, and as mores changed, as traditional social arrangements were overturned, as skirts went up and speakeasies flourished, as the movies and radio made their mark with Tin Pan Alley songs . . . , the Klan found a way of identifying these disturbing developments . . . [by] standing up for America by assailing yet another band of un-Americans.”25
The order and its members were products of American society, and they showcased the seamier side of that culture through robes, fiery crosses, and inflammatory pamphlets. The order voiced the fears of a nation by employing dramaturgical methods and illuminated the fragmentation of the white Protestant rendering of America.
If condemnation is not an analytical option for approaching the Klan, then historians must find other ways to assess Klan members and leaders in the second revival of the order. This study of the Klan demonstrates the complexity of the order’s ideology and its white Protestant nationalism. The place of historical judgment in this narrative becomes paramount.26 One could easily label Klansmen and Klanswomen as morally bankrupt for perpetuating prejudice, racism, and strife in their writings and in the public square. Alternatively, one could rely upon stereotypes of Klan members as rural, uneducated racists who burned crosses to inspire fear and dread. The order obviously contributed to a divisive atmosphere that questioned the loyalty of Catholics to the nation, degraded the intelligence and worth of African Americans, and reified traditional gender roles in an attempt to limit women’s participation in larger society. Unlike their neighbors who might have embraced similar positions, Klan members publicly campaigned against such groups and causes, and they employed white costumes to protect their identities.
Such a theatrical style brought much criticism from the mainstream press and much attention to the order’s actions and politics. The supposedly secret order attempted to maintain the supposed white Protestant dominance of American society while the nation became more diverse and heterogeneous. Yet judging these historical actors as harmful and immoral is too easy and dismissive. By focusing on the Klan’s depraved nature, we assert the order’s otherness and unfamiliarity to other historical movements and actors. Klansmen and Klanswomen become anomalies who drifted away from the morality and good standing of other American citizens.
That conclusion, however, obscures the Klan’s similarity to the mainstream. Other Americans recognized the same dangers and threats that the order purported. They campaigned against immigration, women’s rights, and the removal of the Bible from schools. Are these actors not depraved and prejudiced as well? By judging the Klan, we can distance Klan members from the general public, and we can heap disdain upon their actions while overlooking the fact that non-Klan members also acted in such despicable ways. The Klan envisioned a moral nation, and its Knights were not the only ones defending such a vision. The order showcased its own version of morality in which maintaining the religious and racial caste of the nation justified prejudice and hateful rhetoric. The ends, for the order, justified the means. To protect the nation and the faith required unsavory action and words. What might be immorality to the historian can be the paramount example of morality to the actor. Religious and racial hatred might be clear to the historian, but the actors found divine justification and legitimation for both.
The worlds of historians and actors do collide, but time and space can separate judgments from perspectives. It is easy for me to condemn the Klan, but it is more important for me to place the order in the context of its historical time and place. My own history colors my judgment, and the Klan’s judgments contain the same historical weight. What is at stake is context of the order’s actions and what that says about America in the 1920s. By understanding how the Klan envisioned morality, we can see how the order fit into mainstream America and how the order is more indicative of the development of American nationalism than we might be comfortable with. We can “see with” them even if the Klan’s moral universe is offensive to us. Seeing with the Klan does not mean that we have to like its rhetoric, agendas, or politics, nor does it mean that we need to avoid criticism and analysis.
In Upon the Altar of Nation, religious historian Harry Stout argues the case for moral history that showcases the distance between what historical actors ought to have done and what they actually did.27 Stout imbues his narrative of the Civil War with moral judgment based on just war theory. Such moral history judges historical actors in their historical milieu and their reactions to the atrocities of war. To craft a moral history of the Klan, one could evaluate ought versus actuality. The Klan ought to not have burned crosses as a method of intimidation. The Klan ought to have organized as public citizens rather than behind the white robes that inspired terror. They ought not to have been prejudiced toward foreign ideas, peoples, and religions. In actuality, Klansmen and Klanswomen adopted such tactics and ideas because of their morality. Religion and ethics inspired them to do all of those things to protect the nation that they loved. Their religious nationalism fostered their morality. The order believed its cause was righteous and acted in ways that bolstered that righteousness.
Moral history, in this instance, becomes the history of the Klan’s morality in a particular time and place. Those historical actors believed they were the moral agents, while the rest of American society embraced immorality and vice. The actor’s vision of morality must be assessed in our narratives. Otherwise, we leave undocumented a vital part of that person’s history. Judging the order and its members as evil neglects the moral and religious worldview of the 1920s Klan. If we are to do moral histories, they must reflect the complexity and particularity of moral systems and recognize that just because we as historians cannot reconcile our own morals with those of our actors does not mean that morality is somehow absent. Klansmen and Klanswomen developed their own form of what they ought to do. To move beyond stereotypes of the order (often based on moral judgment) allows a richer history of the Klan and its place in narratives of American culture and American religious history. To see how morality influenced them gives a clear sense of how religion and nationalism were bound together for the order. It also shows that religious people do not necessarily embrace principles that would better humanity. Rather, religious actors are complicated and contradictory, and they use their religious beliefs and actions for the benevolent as well as the malevolent. The Klan as a case study showcases how religion in the United States has not always been a force for civic good or progress, and adding the Klan to the American religious landscape illuminates the seamier side of American Christianity.
The second revival of the Klan positioned members as defenders of faith, nation, race, and womanhood to guarantee the homogenous complexion of Liberty. To study the worldview of the Klan illuminated the intermingling of race, gender, and faith in the creation of American nationalism. For much of the so-called mainstream in the 1920s and early 1930s, America was white, Protestant, and pure. Hyphenated Americans demonstrated to the order with clarity that various peoples did not fit the mold of the nation. Assimilation was not a virtue but a menace. Those so-called Americans were outsiders in larger culture, and the order hoped that they would remain that way. To explore the Ku Klux Klan’s worldview provided a clear demarcation of Americanness in exclusionary terms. The order’s strenuous dedication to white supremacy, faith, and strict notions of womanhood and manhood allowed one to examine how they constructed national culture. In the seams and fissures, the order’s unflinching commitment to exclusion and dominance prevails alongside its pressing concern about the tenuous nature of white prowess.
To take seriously the Klan’s claims of dominance and victimization presented a complex portrait of the order’s relationship to the larger culture, real and imagined. Much scholarship purported “status anxiety” as the reason for the Klan’s prominent rise in the 1920s, but the reality reflected anxiety and overinflated confidence simultaneously. Members lamented the changes in society in jeremiads ranging from the decline of religious culture to the public schools to new presentations of womanhood to miscegenation. Yet they also proclaimed that their dominance would revive a troubled nation to its original glory. Anxiety and desperation appear in the pages of the Imperial Night-Hawk and Kourier, but so do novel samplings of history and resounding praises of Protestantism and white masculinity. The order’s positioning in the nation proved to be laced with ambiguity rather than forceful declarations of declension. The order configured members as victims, defenders, and winners in the course of American history. To examine the Klan, then, is to examine a group that proclaimed to be the “soul” of nation without much trepidation. Its vision of nation was not as fringe as it first appears. The focus on the hatred, violence, and racism of the 1920s Klan occluded its resonance with American cultural currents.
By placing the Klan in the mainstream, historiographical tides are forced to adapt. The order’s imaginings of faith and nation point to currents in American religious history, including how nationalism was based on Protestantism, masculinity, anti-Catholicism, and whiteness. This study continues Edward Blum’s assertions that nationalism after the Civil War forged whiteness and Protestantism to heal the divisive wounds of white Northerners and Southerners.28 Nationalism unified whites who recently spilled the blood of one another by degrading newly enfranchised African Americans. A common enemy and a commitment to the same religious faith created a vision of a white republic that both North and South could embrace while ignoring the atrocities of the Civil War. For Blum, nationalism, whiteness, and Protestantism were bound together in such a way that a form of “ethnic nationalism” undercut attempts at a more racially inclusive nationalism by 1900.29 The Klan’s combination of faith, nation, race, and gender in its form of nationalism continued an exclusionary approach. The order adopted requirements for legitimate citizenship based on race and religion and thus excluded all who were not white or Protestant. The Klan proved more strident in its rendering of national character than the predecessors Blum documents. The order’s white Protestant nationalism excluded not only African Americans but also Catholics and Jews. The narratives of leaders and members solidified the crafting of nation and citizens in the face of increasing diversity. America was a white Protestant nation, and all others became marginal characters in the stories of American progress and liberty.
That American nationalism contains this sordid and exclusive history helps to explain the prevalence of white Protestant narratives of American history, in which other religious and racial peoples enter and exit the narrative without much impact. The Klan’s vision of history resonates with older narratives of white Protestant triumphalism, which chart familiar historical actors marching across the American wilderness while downplaying colonial encounters. The Klan’s attempts at narratives of white Protestant dominance and progress, however, illuminate that those narratives were beginning to face opposition and fracture in the 1920s. The order had to bolster its nationalism with exaggerated stories and blindness to the racial and religious diversity of its historical moment. The Klan already had to respond to diversity while envisioning nationalism, but Klansmen and Klans women did not want to recognize the response. To recognize diversity would highlight the flaws of the order’s vision of America. Instead, the Klan attempted to navigate a position as soul and savior of nation. Defense was needed, but the “soul” of the nation remained white, Protestant, and pure. The presence of religious and racial diversity meant that the Klan claimed a unified vision that no longer reflected reality. Members and leaders struggled to articulate a vision of nation that no longer existed. They constructed a white Protestant dominance despite the fact that such dominance was crumbling. The Klan’s nationalism contained no room for diversity or inclusion. Exclusion was the foundation for nationalism.
Adding Klansmen and Klanswomen to our narratives implores a darker reading of religious nationalism. The Klan focused on the Puritans, Pilgrims, and other white Protestant pioneers ordained by God to find America and create a white Protestant nation. In the creation story of the ideal nation, Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and Native Americans were noticeably absent because the Klan did not recognize those peoples as legitimately American. The Klan’s rendering of history provides an analysis of colonial power and influence that allows insight into a specific version of cultural colonialism from those who perpetuated and disseminated selective history to justify their ideals and their God-ordained place in the nation. The narratives provided members with the historical assurance that the Klan, and by extension white Protestants, were to remain the heirs of American culture and to maintain their favored position of dominance. The Klan’s telling of American religious history resonated with narratives of white Protestant endeavor and influence on our culture. Violence, intolerance, and the impact of white Protestant dominance would rise to the forefront, as would the sometimes-selective grasp of historians who minimized conflict in their narratives. What would it mean if the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or Jonathan Edwards would have been “staunch Klansmen” if given the chance? Relying on the Klan’s historical practice gives insight into how selective American religious history as a field tends to be. Amateur Klan historians were even better at hiding the intolerance and violence in our nation’s past. The additional value of the study of the Klan is that this exploration gives historians insight into how the religiously intolerant imagine themselves.
The print culture of the order allowed for a window into the mind’s eye of editors, leaders, and average Klansmen and Klanswomen. More important, print illuminated how they envisioned their exclusion of others in the language of tolerance and love. Through the study of the second order of the Klan, one can see the complexity of its vision as well as how members believed that they were doing what was best for the nation. In the order’s attempts to restore the white Protestant nation, they strove to protect their beloved nation, their faith, and their families from what appeared to be pressing threats. Klan members judged what the nation and its people needed, and the order appointed its members as Knights to protect and defend exclusive values and principles. Protestantism proved foundational to defenses and presentations of nation. Where previous scholars have documented vituperative hate, the white Knights embraced the rhetoric of love to describe their Protestant heritage, Christian virtue, and motivation.
To see with the Klan is an arduous task, but it demonstrates the humanity of the members, no matter how reprehensible their actions and words. Faith in God and nation guided them, even if we would prefer not to see that. Through the pages of the Night-Hawk and Kourier, Klansmen and Klanswomen crafted their ideal nation, founded on faith and whiteness. The newspapers identified friend and foe, crafted ideal behaviors, lamented persecution and changing gender norms, uplifted paragons of masculinity and femininity, presented theologies, and warned of careless actions. On each page, members read the values and principles of their Klan, and at least attempted to embody those ideals. Through reading and practice, the Night-Hawk and its editors presented the Klan’s envisage of the ideal world populated by white, native-born, Protestant Americans and sought to make it a viable reality. From white robes to fiery crosses and American flags, to expositions on motherhood and Christian Knighthood, to configurations of whiteness, the order’s Protestantism proved foundational in each material and spiritual articulation of its world. The nation they inhabited was a religious one, and the threats to faith, nation, and race were one and the same. Christian patriots populated and led the Invisible Empire, which could not be separated from the Empire Invisible in their hearts and minds.