Women’s KKK funeral, Muncie, Indiana, 1923. (Ball State University Archives & Special Collections)

 

Chapter 7

KKK FEMINISM

ALTHOUGH KLANSMEN OUTNUMBERED KLANSWOMEN by six to one, at least half a million women (some claimed as many as three million) joined the movement, and that doesn’t count the many who participated in its public events and supported its ideas. In fact, women clamored to participate from the moment the second Klan reappeared. They contributed a new argument for the cause: that women’s emergence as active citizens would help purify the country. That claim may well have emerged only after the woman suffrage amendment was ratified, in 1920; before that, many Klanspeople of both sexes probably had doubts about the righteousness of women entering politics. Nevertheless, the claim that women might bring “family values” back into the nation’s governance—a claim made at the time in movements of all political hues—created a contradiction within conservative movements: despite an ideological commitment to Victorian gender norms, including women’s domesticity, many conservative women enjoyed participating in politics. In fact, some Klanswomen interpreted political activism as a female responsibility. Then, once active, they often came to resent men’s attempts to control them and even challenged men’s power. Thus we meet a phenomenon that many progressive feminists found and still find anomalous—the existence not only of conservative feminism but even of bigoted feminism.1 Readers who have not already done so must rid themselves of notions that women’s politics are always kinder, gentler, and less racist than men’s.

Women who became active in the Klan were continuing a populist tradition of the 1880s and 1890s. Even without voting rights, women had constituted a significant force in the Farmers Alliance and then in the Populist and Socialist Parties. Women activists spoke at meetings, edited newspapers, lobbied legislatures, published novels, wrote political tracts, ran for local offices, and got elected to leadership in the Alliance—in short, they engaged in every form of political activity allowed them. When the Populist Party emerged, women were increasingly shut out of official roles, not only because of their disenfranchisement but also because increasing Populist power made male leaders less open to sharing influence. (It was often the case that women had more space to lead in social movements than in formal political parties.) There were exceptions, though. Kansas feminist Mary Elizabeth Lease, to cite just one example, was a major Populist traveling speaker, in demand throughout the Midwest. She gave the opening address at the 1892 Kansas Populist convention and was an at-large delegate at the national convention. Many Populist women were also stalwarts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. They brought these experiences into the Ku Klux Klan. They did not assume that politics was a male activity.

Moreover, women had won at least partial suffrage in 27 states and the Alaska Territory prior to the national amendment, and these states included those where the Klan was strong, such as Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oregon. But the 1920s political world into which Klanswomen entered was rapidly changing. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the most visible women’s rights organizations waned in strength. As a result, the narrative of women’s struggle for equality has often characterized the 1920s as a period of inaction or even retreat.² But that conclusion, while accurate with respect to electoral engagement, does not hold up with respect to social and cultural developments. For example, rates of women’s college education mushroomed. Between 1910 and 1920 the number of women in college doubled, reaching almost three hundred thousand, or nearly half of all students in higher education. That increase continued during the Klan’s heyday, growing by 84 percent over the 1920s. Similarly with women’s employment: by 1920 women constituted 21 percent of all those employed outside their homes, a rate much higher among poor women and women of color, of course. Both changes—education and employment—drew more women into the public sphere; even those with husbands who could support a whole family were spending more time outside their homes. Progressive Era women activists had obtained a base for promoting women’s and children’s health and welfare in the US Children’s Bureau. At the same time, divorce rates were growing, which meant that more women were not only leaving husbands but also fighting for child custody, always the right about which women cared most.

Meanwhile, commercial culture was responding to these changes. The stereotype of the new culture has been the flapper, but this was a small group compared to the millions captivated by new forms of leisure and social adventure, many of them entirely secular. Prohibition was flouted openly in big cities and discreetly in smaller locations. Advertising morphed from information about where particular commodities could be purchased to imagery that persuaded people that they needed new products. Nightclubs, records, and above all radios brought jazz out of Harlem into white communities. Radio broadcasting began in 1920; by 1930, 60 percent of Americans owned a radio, and as a result radically expanded the acquaintance of small-town and urban Americans with big-city culture. By 1927 fifty million Ford cars were on the roads—many with women drivers—offering greater mobility and privacy. Well into the 1960s, most young people had their first sexual experience in a car. For the young and unmarried, unchaperoned commercial leisure such as dance halls, soda fountains, and the movies—where couples could sit in the dark!—became a magnetic attraction. Images of beauty changed rapidly: women cut off and “bobbed” their hair (using, significantly, a male name to describe the new haircuts), and wore makeup, shorter skirts and brighter colors.

Together these cultural developments transformed social life and, of course, created a backlash. Conservatives railed at the decline of morals, and by this they meant mainly women’s morals. Walter Lippmann’s phrase “the acids of modernity” captured Klannish fears that the very ground of Protestant morality was being eroded.3 The Klan blamed Jews and, to a lesser extent, Catholics for subverting what would later be called the gender order; nevertheless, Klanspeople fretted about immodesty precisely because this freer social and sexual culture appealed to Protestants as well. Because anxiety about immodesty focused on women, Klanswomen were both repelled and enticed by these developments, and this shows in the contradictions within their program and activism.

Klanswomen were often wives of Klansmen, but many joined on their own, and others led their husbands into the organization. In fact, some husbands resented their wives’ Klan activities and absences from home, and some opponents taunted Klansmen with the charge that they were not man enough to keep their wives at home.⁴ It seems likely, though, that Klanswomen often spent more hours on Klan work than did rank-and-file Klansmen because they had more disposable time.

Women did not always wait to get Klansmen’s permission to join the movement but organized themselves independently through churches, clubs, sororities, and Klan picnics. Male leaders, alarmed by these initiatives outside their control, formed competing women’s groups,⁵ producing a variety of organizations with names such as Kamelias, Queens of the Golden Mask, and Ladies of the Invisible Empire. In 1923 Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, seeing that women could not be kept out of the Klan movement, managed to merge these groups forcibly into the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). Some preexisting women’s groups resisted this merger, and then, after acceding, refused to accept a subordinate status. An Oregon group proclaimed that “the women’s organization is an exact counterpart of the Klan itself, with no difference whatever except that of gender. They will use the same constitution, ritual, regalia and methods.”6 In another assertion of its independence the WKKK set up its headquarters in Little Rock, hundreds of miles from Atlanta, home of the Klan headquarters. By November 1923, the WKKK claimed chapters in all forty-eight states. In Indiana, the state of greatest Klan strength, where the population was 97 percent white and Protestant, the WKKK boasted of 250,000 members; if true (not likely), this would have meant that 32 percent of the state’s native-born white Protestant women belonged.⁷

BRIEF PROFILES OF THREE WKKK LEADERS illustrate their combination of conservatism with assertiveness, a combination that many might find surprising. We have already met Elizabeth Tyler, cohead of the Klan’s PR firm, who defied almost all the gender norms of the time and displayed a business acumen that might befit a CEO today. Her extraordinary career grew from both nativist and fraternal traditions. Born in 1881, married at fourteen, either abandoned or widowed at fifteen, she made several further brief marriages, becoming a multiple divorcée. In Atlanta in the 1910s she was a member of a sororal order, Daughters of America, an anti-immigration organization associated with the American Protective Association and many fraternal orders.⁸ Tyler participated in the eugenics cause as a volunteer “hygiene” worker, managing publicity and organizing parades for a “Better Babies” campaign. Through that activity she met Edward Clarke. Together they sensed the profitable opportunities that could arise from professionalizing and commercializing their efforts and set up the Southern Publicity Association, selling their services to groups like the Red Cross and the Anti-Saloon League. In their first fifteen months of work for the Klan, they claimed to have netted upward of $200,000 ($2.7 million in 2016); this is probably an exaggeration, but they were doing well. Tyler personally owned and profited from the Searchlight, a Klan newspaper, and built herself a large Classical Revival house on fourteen acres in downtown Atlanta. It was she and Clarke who turned Colonel Simmons’s feeble attempt to revive a southern organization into a mass national movement and a profitable business. When she turned her energies to creating an early women’s division of the Klan, she took advantage of Simmons’s temporary absence to put Clarke in titular control of the entire Invisible Empire.9

In 1919 their position became precarious when Atlanta police literally rousted them out of bed and arrested them for disorderly conduct; the “disorder” was the fact that they were sexual partners while married to other people. When the arrest was discovered two years later, newspaper coverage revealed not only the illicit sex but also that they had used false names and had been in possession of whiskey. The scandal was big news, covered even in the New York Times when the New Jersey Klan demanded firing Clarke and Tyler.¹⁰ Learning of the arrest some Klansmen were doubly dismayed—by the alleged immorality but also by the discovery that a woman was a key organizer of the KKK. One vilified her, adding that her experience “in catering to [men’s] appetites and vices had given her an insight into their frailties.”¹¹

Meanwhile, Klan opponents forced congressional hearings on the Klan in 1921. Fearing further exposure, since he was guilty of other improprieties, Clarke immediately announced his resignation. This made Tyler furious. She publicly denounced him, saying he was “weak-kneed and won’t stand by his guns.” She refused to resign.¹² She even survived an attempt on her life when unknown assailants shot up her home. The congressional report treated her with both respect and misogyny, as the éminence grise behind the Klan. Instead of backing down, she skillfully turned the negative publicity from the hearings into a successful membership drive that grew the Klan exponentially.13

Tyler was finally forced to resign by accusations, almost certainly true, of embezzling Klan money.¹⁴ But she had been a gift to the national Klan. The organization might well have grown without this driven, bold, corrupt, and precociously entrepreneurial woman, but it would likely have been smaller.

While Tyler’s audacity might seem surprising in a woman of the 1920s, the career of Daisy Douglas Barr undoes today’s assumptions even more, because she was a Quaker. In the late twentieth century Quakers became associated with liberal theology, anti-racism, and other progressive attitudes. But a century ago the Friends church included plenty of racists and conservatives and was moving rapidly toward evangelicalism. Barr was by no means the only Quaker in the Klan; in the town of Richmond, Indiana, for example, some 7 percent of Klansmen were Quaker.¹⁵

A native Hoosier, Daisy Douglas Brushwiller was born in 1875 into a devout Quaker family. She was a prodigy: she was only four, she later said, when she first felt inspired to testify to her spiritual commitment, and at eight and again at twelve she felt “the personal call from God” to preach and spread the word. At sixteen—her autobio-graphical narrative placed these experiences, conveniently, every four years—she reportedly preached her first public sermon, after which she was “saved” at a United Brethren service conducted by a woman evangelist. (“Girl evangelists” were in vogue at the time.) At eighteen she married schoolteacher Thomas Barr, who joined the Klan at her urging and began leading tent revivals around the state. In 1910 she became pastor of the Muncie, Indiana, Quaker meeting. (Female ministers were uncommon in mainstream white Protestantism but by no means entirely absent.) Soon she too was preaching at revivals, causing many of her listeners to be “saved” and at least one sick man to be cured. She was prolific on paper as well as out loud, writing a great deal of poetry like this:

I am clothed with wisdom’s mantle . . . 

I am strong beyond my years;

My hand typifies strength,

And although untrained in cunning

Its movements mark the quaking

Of the enemies of my country.

My eye, though covered, is all-seeing;*

It penetrates the dark recesses of law violation,

Treason, political corruption and injustice,

Causing these cowardly culprits to bare their unholy faces . . . 

My feet are swift to carry the strength of my hand

And the penetrations of my all-seeing eye.

My nature is serious, righteous and just,

And tempered with the love of Christ.

My purpose is noble, far-reaching and age-lasting . . .

I am the Spirit of Righteousness.

They call me the Ku Klux Klan.

I am more than the uncouth robe and hood

With which I am clothed.

YEA, I AM THE SOUL OF AMERICA.¹⁶

Daisy Barr thus fused religiosity and Klannishness with extraordinary confidence and without a touch of feminine meekness.

Like many other clubwomen of the time, Barr was a joiner, never limiting herself to a single affiliation. A woman of formidable energy, she also threw herself into an array of reform causes: president of the Indiana Humane Society, active in the campaign for Prohibition, creator of the Muncie YWCA (the Y’s were then fierce temperance and revivalist organizations), and founder of a “refuge,” the Friendly Inn, for former prostitutes. (Like many such reformers, she was baffled that the “fallen women” were not interested in being “rescued” by evangelicals.) When the Barrs moved to Indianapolis in 1917, Daisy became president of Indiana War Mothers. Soon after the woman suffrage amendment passed, she became the vice chair of the Republican State Committee, the first woman to hold such a position; the male co-chair joined the Klan, quite possibly, considering her charisma, at her urging. Meanwhile, her husband became Indiana’s deputy state bank commissioner. This was a power couple.

Barr soon became Imperial Empress of a women’s Klan affiliate, Queens of the Golden Mask. She wielded considerable bargaining power with Klansmen, a power enlarged when she established the “poison squad,” a statewide women’s network (of which more below). The squad practiced black psywar, spreading rumors, allegedly from Catholics or Jews, designed to make the alleged sources appear immoral and thus to build support for Klan political candidates. By 1923 she was head of the Indiana WKKK and a traveling speaker for the Klan itself. A whirlwind of energy, in July of that year she led a naturalization ceremony with two hundred women and claimed that one thousand would-be members were present but lacked the proper regalia required for admission. Three months later she led Indiana’s most spectacular Klan parade yet. So influential was the Indiana WKKK under her leadership that she almost succeeded in moving its national headquarters to Indianapolis.

As WKKK spokeswoman, Barr frequently broadcast feminist messages. Her reform work had long been oriented toward women, and she campaigned to have a woman added to the Indianapolis police force—a typical Progressive Era cause, motivated by the belief that women were less corrupt and harder on moral offenses than men. She once publicly reprimanded a police officer for uncouth remarks. Her speeches honored woman suffrage and urged women to make active use of their new political citizenship. Her temperance arguments featured stories of drunken male brutality, as befitted a member of the WCTU. She hurled vitriol against gamblers, adulterers, and men who patronized prostitutes and despoiled young girls. She called on women to support female candidates, to step up and exert power in their churches.

Her affiliations arose, no doubt, from firm principle, but they were also lucrative. She contracted with the Klan to be chief WKKK recruiter for Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, and Minnesota. The agreement guaranteed her a dollar for each woman initiated and four dollars for each recruit within Indiana. Moreover, she became the conduit for puchases of robes, from which she likely received a percentage of sales.17 (No wonder she refused to “naturalize” women who lacked the regalia.) But like Tyler, Barr was apparently not satisfied with these profits, and Klan leaders complained that she did not deliver the required sums to national headquarters. Numerous male Klan leaders did the same; the flow of money, combined with lack of accountability, presented irresistible temptations to corruption.

Klan feminism also appeared prominently in the work and words of the Rev. Alma Bridwell White. (See figure 20.) Although never an official of a Klan group, she was easily as influential as Barr in spreading its message. As evangelist, minister, and bishop, she founded the Pillar of Fire “holiness” congregations¹⁸ and gained a national fame through multitudinous lectures and wrote thirty-five religious books and some two hundred hymns.¹⁹ Her Pillar of Fire religious movement ultimately established fifty-two churches, not counting a few abroad, seven divinity schools, two radio stations, ten magazines and newsletters, and two colleges.²⁰ Like Tyler and Barr, she displayed extraordinary entrepreneurial skills, but her bigotry surpassed theirs and rivaled that of any Klansman in its intensity.

Born in 1862 in Kentucky, one of seven sisters, White was also a girl evangelist. She found rebirth at age sixteen at a Wesleyan Methodist revival where, she later wrote, “some were so convicted that they left the room and threw up their suppers, and staggered back into the house as pale as death.”21 She enrolled in Millersburg Female College, then at age nineteen traveled on her own to Montana and Utah, where she taught school—clearly an adventurous teenager. She married Kent White, a seminarian, and the couple started an unsanctioned Methodist Pentecostal church in Denver.²² They soon broke with Pentacostalism and moved their church into the holiness movement, christening it Pillar of Fire. Already impatient with her husband, Alma White took over and soon became its recognized leader.

Defying protests from the Methodist hierarchy, White remained committed to arousing Pentecostal-style “enthusiastic” worship, with singing, shouting, dancing, and fits. Time magazine wrote that she generated “fundamentalist ecstasy and hallelujah-shouting.”²³ Never particularly modest, she claimed the power to bring people to their knees, sobbing in an agony of contrition, or to “make them skip about the aisles, singing and shouting with joy.”²⁴ As she described her method, she never prepared a sermon but chose a text and then waited for the “heavenly dynamite” to explode. Many Klan lecturers worked to induce a religious commitment among listeners, and many claimed biblical authorization for the Ku Klux Klan, but none as diligently as White. In writing and performing, she not only surpassed the fervor of Klan lecturers but even claimed that many biblical heroes were actually Klansmen. One of her many books, The Klan in Prophecy, reported that the KKK had been divinely ordained.

In 1907 one of the Whites’ converts, a rich widow, gifted them a large farm property in central New Jersey. The Whites moved there, naming it Zarephath, after the biblical village where the prophet Elijah raised the son of a widow from the dead. In 1918 White arranged for the evangelist who had converted her to consecrate her as Pillar of Fire’s bishop—the first woman bishop in the United States. She traveled the country speaking at revivals and camp meetings and established a mission in London, preaching against liquor and “present tendencies in women’s dress.”25 Her stamina and ambition outdid even the most committed Klan speakers; she claimed to have crossed the Atlantic fifty-eight times and traveled fifty thousand miles in one year.²⁶

Zarephath flourished and expanded. Alma White was part of a trend: the 1920s produced numerous female preachers, particularly Pentacostal preachers, many of whom could arouse zealous followers through their tent revivals. Even a few more mainstream religious groups, such as Reform Jews, Northern Baptists, and Presbyterians, were giving women larger roles, and the Methodist Episcopals decided in 1920 to allow women deacons. (African American churches had female ministers much earlier.) In starting a new church, Alma White was following the example of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, although she labeled Eddy satanic. White compared herself favorably to Aimee Semple McPherson, the most popular evangelist of the time, who advertised her ten-thousand-member congregation as the largest in the world. White emulated McPherson in establishing a radio station, WAWZ, the letters standing for Alma White Zarephath. (In 1961 Pillar of Fire established station WAKW in Cincinnati, the letters referring to her son, Arthur Kent White.)²⁷

Pillar of Fire distinguished itself from other holiness groups through its explicit and intensive support of the Ku Klux Klan. White’s writings and speeches focused on four pillars of Klan ideology: white supremacy, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and temperance. Perhaps because of her base in New Jersey, home of 117,000 African Americans in 1920, she emphasized racism against African Americans, while Klanspeople in locations with smaller black populations emphasized immigrants, Catholics, and Jews: “Social and political equality would plunge the world into an Inferno as black as the regions of night.” Noah cursed Ham, the black man, she reported, and ordered that he must be the servant of Japheth. “Whatever wrong may have been perpetrated against the Negro race by bringing black men to this country . . . the argument will not hold that they should share equal social or political rights with the white men—the sons of Japheth.” She advocated, therefore, repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. “America is a white man’s country and should be governed by white men. Yet the Klan is not anti-negro . . . [but] is eternally opposed to the mixing of the white and colored races. . . . God drew the color line and man should so let it remain.”28 “Red men” were equally doomed because God had given the land to the sons of Japheth.²⁹

Her camp meetings and revivals began to feature cross-burnings and Klan lecturers. She published three books of praise for the Klan and a periodical devoted exclusively to the Klan, the Good Citizen, and offered positive appraisals of the Klan in her many other sermons, books, and hymnals.³⁰ The Klan funded her purchase of Westminster College (later renamed Belleview College) in Westminster, Colorado, a dilapidated former Presbyterian school; located high on a hill, it proved a perfect location for cross-burnings that were visible for miles. She established there another Christian radio station, KPOF, known as AM91: The Point of Faith. Three years later the Klan provided the funds to establish Alma White College in Zarephath, used frequently for Klan meetings and large spectacles. In 1926 the Klan joined White in establishing a 396-acre summer resort for its members in Zarephath.

Alma White anointed the Klan as the country’s savior: “Now come the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in this crucial hour to contend for the faith of our fathers. . . . There is no longer any excuse for those who, like Elisha’s servant, have been blinded by the falsehoods propagated by the enemies of the Klan. . . . The Klan is a tree of God’s own planting.” She also situated the Klan in a historical patriotism: “Our heroes in the white robes are the perpetuators of the work so nobly begun by the colonists and the Revolutionary fathers.” She supported the Klan’s electoral activism: “They must name candidates who can be safely trusted, those who will not betray the public on questions of such vital importance as prohibition, restricted immigration, white supremacy and other issues.” She also called for “the prevention of unwarranted strikes by foreign labor agitators.”31

At the same time, White made no attempt to soft-pedal her feminism. She reprinted the 1848 “Declaration of Sentiments” from the famous Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in one of her books. She condemned women’s lack of legal rights vis-à-vis their husbands, calling for action against wife-beating and for women’s right to their own property and legal domicile. (In many states a husband could still control his wife’s property and require her to move with him anywhere he desired.) She called for sex equality in inheritance rights. Defying evangelical opposition to divorce, she argued for a woman’s entitlement to divorce in case of infidelity or threat to her personal safety. She denounced the practice of granting child custody to men in divorce—important because the risk of losing children was by far the most important factor keeping women in abusive marriages. And she supported the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923 (and, of course, still not ratified).³²

This passionate feminism likely arose, in part, from her own ambition and a bitterness about the obstacles and insults she had encountered. But her brand of feminism also supported her religious bigotry. The Catholic Church rested on the subjugation of women, she charged. This accounted for its opposition to Prohibition: liquor was for Catholic men a tool for keeping women subordinated. Convents were “paper prisons” that served to keep women uneducated, in ignorance of cultural and political affairs; they continued the “Old Roman law which made women the chattels or the slaves of men.” The church “hates any movement that tends to the uplifting and enlightenment of the tender sex.”³³

Each in her own way, Elizabeth Tyler, Daisy Barr, and Alma White rupture some commonsense expectations about the 1920s Klan and other conservative movements. Perhaps most striking was their entrepreneurship, which involved both ambition and skill, both principle and profit. In this respect, they probably differed from rank-and-file Klanswomen. Experienced at organizing large events, state-of-the-art in managing money, unafraid to attract publicity, they were thoroughly modern women. Nor did they disguise their work in sentimental, Victorian versions of femininity. Tyler’s life itself challenged the sexual double standard; Barr and White, while properly married, rejected female domesticity. But their outlook on the world may not have differed so much from that of their followers and of hundreds of thousands, at least, of other Klanswomen. In this movement, as in liberal and leftist movements, women found themselves enjoying not only the sociability and prestige of club membership but also the opportunity to weigh in on political matters. The clubby solidarity of the WKKK, like that of the Klan itself, grew more attractive, more interesting, when it involved collective action.

Barr and White were also women’s rights advocates, as was Tyler, implicitly, through her achievements. Their activism requires a more capacious understanding of feminism. Their combination of feminism and bigotry may be disturbing to today’s feminists, but it is important to feminism’s history. There is nothing about a generic commitment to sex equality that inevitably includes commitment to equalities across racial, ethnic, religious, or class lines. In fact, espousing sex equality and enacting female leadership have often been easier for conservative women, because their whole ideological package does not threaten those who benefit from other inequalities. (Leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin may serve as illustrations.)

Barr’s and White’s fusion of religion and politics also suggests another way that Klanswomen fit into the American political tradition. That tradition may have been weakening among urban elites, but it remained strong in the Midwest and West and in smaller cities. Bringing religious passion to politics was not only an instrumental combination, though it was that. The women’s mastery of public speaking, derived from church experience, not only benefited the Klan but also brought them personal rewards—fame, prosperity, and the pleasure of doing something so well and so highly valued. We should not assume that the late-twentieth-century rise of the Christian Right was unprecedented.

WHETHER INFLUENCED BY THESE THREE spokeswomen or by local campaigners, women’s Klan groups sprang up across the nation. They often drew in women who were already members of other women’s organizations, particularly elite societies. Some preexisting patriotic groups, such as the Dixie Protestant Women’s Political League and the Grand League of Protestant Women, actually folded into the WKKK. The leader of the Colorado WKKK, Laurena Senter, was also the president of an array of Colorado women’s clubs.34 The first national WKKK leader, Lulu Markwell, was the former president of the Arkansas WCTU. An Indiana WKKK joined with the Colonial Dames to stage a pageant at which “Klanswomen dressed as Columbia, Uncle Sam, liberty and justice.”³⁵

There was particularly great overlap between the WKKK and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), but their difference in priorities was significant. While the DAR was intensely racist toward African Americans, it did not agitate against Catholics or Jews; in fact, it acknowledged that some of them were eligible for membership, because they had ancestors who contributed to the American Revolution. And unlike the Klan, the 1920s DAR concentrated on reviling “subversives”—that is, liberals and radicals—continuing the postwar anticommunist hysteria. It created a blacklist of “seditious” organizations, ranging from labor unions to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.³⁶ It worked not only to protest “disloyal” speakers and deny them access to lecture halls but also threatened to expel any members who attended lectures by these “Liberals, Radicals, Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists,” as the committee wrote.³⁷ True, the Klan was isolationist and opposed US membership in the League of Nations, expressing views that were strong precisely in the midwestern, plains, southern, and western states where it flourished. But it identified its enemies by race, religion and place of birth rather than ideology. For example, its anti-Semitism did not much identify Jews with radicalism. That the WKKK avoided ideological and foreign policy concerns may also reflect the dominant assumption that women should not be concerned with international relations, a sign that it accepted some and challenged other aspects of the conventional gender order.

The first groups to appear called themselves Klan auxiliaries. They announced themselves boldly: Elizabeth Tyler announced that “we plan that all women who join us shall have equal rights with that of the men.”38 Many male leaders rejected this claim, because it implied a sex-integrated Klan. To admit women represented a major sacrifice to many Klansmen who valued their entitlement to a unique men’s club and the male camaraderie they so enjoyed. But the evidence suggests that Tyler’s claim was correct. In Maine, the Klan head explained, “women came to me in groups . . . and requested that a branch [my emphasis] for women be started.” They then worked out plans for “such an auxiliary.”³⁹ The Oregon chapter, for example, began as the Ladies of the Invisible Empire (LOTIE), organized through an ad in the Klan newspaper, the Western American—a typical way to reach recruits. And LOTIE’s Supreme Grand Council included four male Klan leaders, who filed the articles of incorporation for the women’s group.

But even the Klansmen most resistant to allowing women the use of the KKK name reversed themselves when they recognized their material interest: by making the women’s organization official, the Klan could seize a significant share of women’s Klecktokens (priced initially at five dollars but later raised to ten) and other payments. At least one Indiana WKKK Klavern had to send 66 percent of its revenue to Klan headquarters.⁴⁰ In Pennsylvania another dollar per woman member went to the state Klan, and this practice may also have prevailed elsewhere. Anti-Klan journalists pointed out that women’s groups were “profitable enterprises” for the Klan.41 Unsurprisingly, there was rebellion. For example, the Maine WKKK no sooner formed than it challenged the Maine King Kleagle’s demand for half of its dues; the challenge contributed to a coup that forced his resignation.⁴² Because the women’s Klaverns were often quite flush—the Arkansas WKKK took in $322,000 in 1925, for example—conflicts over money soon weakened male-female unity in the Klan.⁴³

Official Klan publications typically communicated conservative, even Victorian messages about what women should do: “God intended that every man should possess insofar as possible, his own home and rule his own household”; or “We pity the man who permits the loss of manhood through fear of wife.”⁴⁴ The most important female virtue was chastity, and it was men’s duty to protect and enforce that virtue. Klansmen imagined “their” women as supporting the men, who would monopolize the serious work. Typical of male expectations was a comment that the women “are going to play an important role in regard to upholding the morals of our young women. Let us give them our full support . . . and see that they grow in grace and numbers.”⁴⁵ A Klan newspaper assigned women to conventional, traditional domesticity:

The charm of the home depends upon the woman, because the Woman is the Home. It matters not so much about the size of the roof nor the elegance nor plainness of the furnishings beneath, as about the woman who dwells therein. If . . . each night sees her a better housekeeper, a better seamstress, a better cook, a better wife, a better mother, a better woman—which means a better citizen.⁴⁶

WKKKers not only rejected that definition of their work but soon rejected even the label “auxiliary” and began to identify as full-fledged Klanspeople, full partners in the Invisible Empire.

Many of these new Klanswomen, already a part of the world of sororal orders, joined in search of female bonding. Writer Rebecca McClanahan recalled that her grandmother, envious that her husband had been admitted to the Improved Order of Red Men—which, of course, did not admit American Indians—yearned to be accepted by its little sister, the Order of Pocahontas, as she was “tired of being a paleface.” She longed for connections to other women. Though Klanswomen did not typically engage in physical violence, the psychological violence of being excluded from a prestigious group could be painful indeed. Those admitted, McClanahan’s grandmother knew, indulged in titillating rituals: initiates were “tied to a stake and then rescued by a warrior or warrioress, were given access to secret signs and passwords. . . . A complicated right-hand gesture signified, ‘Who are you?’ A left-hand response signified, ‘A friend.’ ”47 It was not only men who enjoyed these performances.

So the WKKK unified its many locals through rituals similar to men’s, but just different enough to exhibit some creativity. (See figure 22.) It used the Klan’s secret symbols, acronyms, gestures, and new names for days of the week and months, but created its own constitution, ritual books, and manifestos, including a women’s Kloran. New initiates received congratulations for their womanly sacrifice and their decision to join the “delectable” Invisible Empire. They established their own internal judicial system, arguing that women could discipline and punish each other more effectively than men could. Crimes subject to WKKK discipline included disrespecting or disgracing women’s honor, miscegenation, profanity, and failure to follow the rules of the constitution. The women’s ritual used water differently than the men’s: replicating a christening, they wet their fingers, then touched shoulders, foreheads, and the air, signifying body, mind, and spirit. The women’s Kloran explained that the copper penny, used in many of their rituals, served as a reminder to keep church and state separate. The hourglass, another WKKK ritual object, symbolized women’s patriotism: “So long as the sands of time run through the American hourglass, whenever Patriotism calls, we Women of the Ku Klux Klan will respond.”48

The women’s robes were similar, but they offered a discriminatory choice: an ordinary “Klan cloth” robe was five dollars, but you could order a satin robe for twenty-five. Men, of course, did not wear satin, a feminine fabric, but the availability of upscale regalia may have signaled something more: that women’s interest in attractive clothing led to greater class differentiation within the movement, in contrast to the much-touted simulation of leveling among the men.

The WKKK adopted a heroine first exalted by an earlier Klan women’s group, the Kamelia: Joan of Arc—yes, that Catholic heroine—as “Joan, the Militant Kamelia.”⁴⁹ It did not seem to bother Klanswomen that they apparently could not find a Protestant heroine to honor in the same way, but the appropriation of Joan signals their desire to identify with someone powerful; her warlike militance did not seem to them unladylike. They identified with St. Joan because they, like her, were responding to the voice of God and defending their country against “foreign” invaders. There is a long tradition of ambitious and eloquent women defending their right to public leadership on the grounds that God called upon them. American feminists Maria Stewart and Angelina Grimké, leading spokeswomen for the campaign against slavery, used that justification for their public speaking. Its continued use in the 1920s suggests that some Klanswomen felt some anxiety about women’s public activism. But they would not surrender. A Kamelia pamphlet about Joan of Arc insisted that Klanswomen’s voices must “challenge and command.”⁵⁰ Oregon Klanswomen created their own Joan image and used it on their publications: a woman dressed in Klan robes, riding a charging horse similarly robed, carrying a sword, the initials LOTIE (Ladies of the Invisible Empire) emblazoned on her headscarf.⁵¹

For the majority of Klanswomen, organizing social events and pageants was their biggest contribution to the cause. These events required massive amounts of labor, much of it done by women: finding a site, generating publicity, arranging for parking, preparing or ordering food and drink, designing and executing decorations, advertising, mimeographing programs, keeping children occupied and well behaved, ushering visiting dignitaries in and out, collecting items for tag sales and bake sales, handling the inevitable logistical breakdowns. Like churchwomen and clubwomen everywhere, they were party planners. This work was doubly traditional: an extension of their personal domestic labor and a service to Klansmen. (Indeed, one of the WKKK’s most prominent lecturers was pressed into service as a secretary for a male Klan speaker.52) Without these hours of labor the Klan could not have become such a mass movement. At the same time, this work brought women together, and that togetherness both strengthened the Klan and, at times, challenged its male hierarchy.

Still, some Klanswomen enunciated ideas that did not comport with conventional domesticity. It may be an indication of women’s influence that once the suffrage amendment passed, the whole northern Klan supported it enthusiastically—though, of course, only for white women. Support for woman suffrage also reflected the Klan’s opportunism in their desire for white women’s votes to counteract “alien” votes. Whatever the motives, WKKK members strenuously encouraged women’s political participation, and understood that maintaining that right required vigilance. One recruitment leaflet declared that men should no longer hold “exclusive dominion” in the world of politics and chastised women for their political passivity.⁵³

Klanswomen similarly supported women’s employment and even called for women’s economic independence. “Women’s economic freedom, which has slumbered for ages, awakes.”⁵⁴ Oregon Klanswomen urged members to patronize female proprietors.⁵⁵ Local studies report that about 20 percent of WKKK members were employed, and Kathleen Blee thought this an underestimate.56 In one Klavern, 25 percent of the members were schoolteachers and one-third held middle-class jobs.⁵⁷ Surprisingly, and rather opportunistically, Oregon Klanswomen condemned the Meier & Frank department store for paying “slave wages” to the women and girls it employed; they knew, of course, that Meier & Frank was Jewish-owned.⁵⁸ The WKKK Imperial Commander’s insistence that wives should be called “helpmeets” rather than “helpmates” suggests that many husbands could not single-handedly support their families.⁵⁹ Major Kleagle Leah H. Bell of Indiana told an audience of eight thousand that “the mothers of America” should “begin campaigning for an eight-hour workday.”⁶⁰ Larger groups paid salaries to their staffers: Denver’s WKKK Kligrapp (secretary) earned $150 per year ($4,387 in 2016), and at least one Indiana Klavern also paid salaries⁶¹—indicating that not enough volunteer labor was available, that some members needed the money, that women expected to be paid, or all of the above.

To a lesser extent the WKKK expressed opinions about national issues, supporting child welfare provisions. A 1926 Klonvocation called for uniform marriage statutes across the states so as to regularize domestic law in women’s favor. As Blee pointed out, Klanswomen saw anti-miscegenation laws differently from Klansmen, as defense against white men who betrayed white women by consorting with women of color.⁶² Oregon Klanswomen expressed outrage that you could, they claimed, get a divorce by mail in that state, and demanded that men be made to pay child support.⁶³

In one small but much-cited indication of WKKK feminism, in 1926 the Silver Lake, New Jersey, Klavern invited Margaret Sanger to speak about birth control. A former Socialist Party member and feminist, and a nurse who had seen firsthand the economic and health costs of large families, she was the most prominent national leader in the campaign to legalize contraception. Sanger’s background, anathema to Klan values, included cosmopolitanism, avant-garde arts, radical politics, even free love. Conservatives vilified her. Moreover, she had defied laws against obscenity—birth control was still legally obscene at the time—served some time in jail, and fled to Europe to escape further prosecutions. But by the mid-1920s she had brought the birth control movement into alliance with eugenics. She announced that her Birth Control League “was ready to unite with the eugenics movement whenever the eugenists were able to present a definite program of standards for parenthood on a eugenic basis,” according to the New York Times.64 Sanger was by no means a bigot. She accepted some eugenical categories, such as “feeble-minded,” but never the Klan’s racial and religious hierarchy. (She herself was of Catholic descent, although her father was a freethinker.) She did, however, see eugenists as allies in her campaign for reproduction control, and in that connection her interests coincided with those of the Klan. Sanger agreed to speak to the Klanswomen, although with considerable unease because she disliked the Klan’s racism. They received her enthusiastically, and she reported receiving a dozen further speaking invitations from the WKKK.⁶⁵

The fact that Sanger crossed paths with the WKKK says little about her politics; her policy was to speak to any group that would have her. Inviting her says rather more about the New Jersey Klanswomen. Because open endorsement of birth control was still a radical act at the time, and Sanger herself was controversial, inviting her suggests that these Klans-women may have been interested in reproduction control. Notably, the WKKK never joined in the “race suicide” rhetoric that denounced upscale white women who limited births. The invitation also suggests Klanswomen’s autonomy from the male leadership. Although we cannot assume that this New Jersey Klavern, located near Philadelphia, typified the WKKK, nevertheless birth control was then often in the news, and it seems likely that the power to control when and how often to be pregnant would have stirred many Klanswomen’s interest.

Some Klanswomen even challenged one of the Klan’s core premises—secrecy. All the Klan groups waffled on this principle, sometimes benefiting from the mystique of concealment, at other times from their public presence. Klanswomen, however, directly contested one kind of secrecy, that within marriage. They argued in the terms of modern, even companionate marriage that good spouses should have no secrets from each other. And they tied this complaint onto demands for economic equality. One woman complained to a Klan newspaper, “I help earn that money. I have a right to know where it goes. Yet my husband says he dares not tell me.”66

Still, other evidence shows WKKK conformity to established gender rules. Women’s sections in the Klan publication the Kluxer featured housewifely advice. “Style Tips” in one issue prescribed a dress code: no satin (despite the availability of satin robes), no fur; not too much rouge; never apply makeup in public; be attractive but conservatively so. The “Kook’s Kitchen Kabinet” column provided recipes. Amid warnings of threats to America, the Klanswoman could find “answers to everyday questions like ‘In making quick breads, how much baking powder is needed for each cup of flour?’ or . . . ‘What would you suggest as a nice plate lunch for home recruitment meeting?’ ”⁶⁷ But the magazine encouraged women’s activism on matters regarding the campaign to keep Protestant prayer and “100% American” teachers in the schools. It emphasized that women could be both activists for the cause and exemplary housewives, even though “we are women and hence are not expected to be interested in certain problems of community welfare to the same extent that men should be interested.”⁶⁸

Women’s Klaverns emphasized charitable work—raising money for orphanages, schools, and individual needy families or, occasionally, their members. They gave small amounts of cash, assembled gift baskets of food, and announced the names of sick members who needed visits. Southern Klans’ charitable expenditures derived not only from pity but also from political strategy: $100 to the widow of a Richmond, Virginia, policeman killed by a criminal; $1,000 to the University of Virginia endowment; $100 to enable Confederate veterans to travel to a reunion.69 The WKKK in eastern Oregon announced that it had sent fifty-four Christmas packages to “our disabled veterans.”⁷⁰ Nevertheless, WKKK monetary contributions were, on the whole, negligible. Blee computed that one Klavern, by no means atypical, directed 0.7 percent of its expenditures to charity and concluded that boasts of charitable work were largely fund-raising propaganda. Moreover, much of the WKKK’s giving amounted to placing Protestant Bibles in public schools. Few of the WKKK’s or KKK’s larger projects—orphanage, school, university—ever materialized.⁷¹

Family and charity remained Klanswomen’s dominant conception of women’s duties and contributions. The exceptions, their more modern and individual-rights assertions, may simply indicate different orientations among the various chapters. But they also point to a contradiction long embedded in feminist principles: some feminisms challenge the gender order and the practice of identifying women primarily or even exclusively as mothers and wives; others, equally feminist, accept that gender order and promote women’s rights within it. (The latter perspective has been called both maternalist and essentialist, because it rests on the assumption that women are naturally nurturing and self-sacrificing, the key qualities associated with motherhood.) Both types see women as victimized by male dominance, but in different ways. Klan feminists belonged to the latter stream. Not all Klanswomen were feminists by any means, but those who were argued that women’s responsibility for raising children and protecting morals required political activism to change laws and social customs. Some Klanswomen called their charitable activism “social work,” a label then meaning reform work, in a usage common among progressive women reformers up through the 1930s.

Women often led in the youth divisions of the Klan. They visited churches to recruit young people and to persuade parents of their duty to see that their children were imbued with the “right” values. The national Klan, possibly responding to women’s pressure, established the Junior Ku Klux Klan, for boys only, in 1923, and gave it a publication of its own, the Junior Klansmen Weekly. An adult Klavern was to supervise each Junior chapter. Soon more youth groups sprang up, and by 1924 fifteen states had chapters. The membership fee was only three dollars. The WKKK created the Tri-K Klub for girls, with its own robes, rituals, codes, and symbols. Its “katechism” (the Klan loved turning C words into K words) resembled that of the Scouts—“loyalty, obedience, selflessness, and Christian patriotism.” Girls sang a Klan song to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne:”

Beneath this flag that waves above

This cross that lights our way

You’ll always find a sister’s love

In the heart of each Tri-K.72

Like Scouting, Klan youth groups emphasized sports competitions for boys and crafts for girls. Both sexes could serve as flag bearers and could play in drum and bugle corps. Girls specialized in singing and rhythmic chanting. One festival advertised “kute girls, katchy songs, and kunning costumes.” Both Klansmen and Klanswomen adopted a maternalist line regarding the importance of bringing in girls: they would become the mothers who would produce the next generation of Klanspeople. They were to be taught not only true Americanism but also domestic skills and womanly chastity, and teenage girls could compete in beauty and popularity contests to become “Miss 100% America.”⁷³

Still, northern Klanswomen often campaigned differently than their male comrades. They placed a higher priority on disciplining immorality than their brothers did—another priority shared with progressive women. They bragged of this orientation: with a female Klan in action “many of the moral uplift problems of the present could be solved,” one statement claimed.⁷⁴ Some of them succeeded in persuading towns and counties to ban or censor not only liquor but also dance halls, films, books, magazines, and Sunday store openings. Classics like The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Dreiser’s American Tragedy, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (a British novel about lesbians), Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, any of the “pulp” publications, anything by D. H. Lawrence or Upton Sinclair, even Voltaire’s Candide could not pass Klanswomen’s test. They abhorred interracial marriage, of course, for keeping families “pure” was squarely their responsibility. But they gave this cause a feminist twist, arguing that interracial sex and marriage were examples of male lust and its destructive impact on family life.

Klanswomen were usually unsuccessful, however, in getting Klansmen to bear down on immorality that victimized women. The limits of women’s power in the Klan show in how rarely northern Klansmen acted in support of abused Klanswomen. As a Wisconsin Klan leader said, “Sometimes women would want us to go against their husbands for drinking or running around with other women. We refused to do that.”75 The leader of an Oregon Klavern warned, “If you married Klansmen insist on going out with another man’s wife be awful sure she doesn’t belong to a Klansman. You may have an occasion to meet that gentleman in the Klavern and I am sure it would be a very embarrassing position”—in other words, he was concerned more with protecting his Klavern than with upholding morals.⁷⁶ Nancy MacLean found that southern Klansmen sometimes punished men for abuse, nonsupport, and/or infidelity,⁷⁷ but there is little evidence of this in the North. Perhaps northern men were less abusive. More likely, northern Klanswomen were more embarrassed to admit their victimization, or were reluctant to undercut their premise that only immigrants, Catholics, and blacks were abusive. The northern Klan also manifested greater deference to the state—at least on issues involving complaints against men considered otherwise respectable. For example, consider this excerpt from minutes of the La Grande, Oregon, Klavern: “For the third time it has been reported that E. J. Schilling, who resides at . . . , has three children by his first wife who are being neglected most shamefully and several Klansmen have advised that we take this matter up. . . . I found that his particular case should come under the jurisdiction of the county health nurse.”78

The La Grande Klavern’s reference to a county health nurse—a position created by Oregon’s Progressive Era women reformers—suggests a counterintuitive aspect of Ku Klux Klan principles. It was by no means eager to preempt state functions and sometimes sought to encourage them. It urged police to act more aggressively, and its vigilantes were quite willing to be supervised by the police, providing they operated from a Klannish perspective. (In this respect, the northern Klan was not so different from the southern, where police or sheriff collusion was involved in most lynchings.) Moreover, the northern Klan was no enemy of government welfare provision. “Taxes,” one pamphlet argued, “should be looked upon by the taxpayer as the most important bequest he can make to his own children and to humanity.”⁷⁹ In this respect the Klan’s agenda resembled some aspects of women’s progressivism. Woman suffrage added to its optimism that, rather than shrink the state, it could reform state activity so as to align it with Klan values. Moreover, in 1932 Klanspeople generally supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s candidacy, despite his anti-Prohibition stance; this support may reflect the Klan’s traditional—though not consistent—alignment with the Democratic Party, but it might also reflect Klanspeople’s support for emergency relief. It was only later that they attacked FDR with anti-Semitic labels, calling him “Rosenvelt” and the like.⁸⁰ These flexible principles also showed in the sharp decline of anti-Catholic rhetoric in the 1930s.

In much of their agenda, and in the contradictions they expressed regarding women’s place in the polity, Klanswomen were indistinguishable from many other clubwomen, including Catholics, Jews, and African Americans. Women’s Klaverns seemed to spend more energy arranging social occasions for themselves than did the men’s. They organized teas, parties, and card games, and sometimes joint socials with nearby Klaverns. They held receptions for visiting WKKK and Klan VIPs. And of course they did much of the work for the larger Klan events. One such Indiana event involved camping out in the woods for three days81—one can only imagine how much women’s work went into those arrangements.

Still, politics and political education remained a part of WKKK activity. While accepting that they were “not expected to be interested in certain problems of community welfare to the same extent that men should be interested,” as one WKKK local put it, deferring to gender hierarchy, they nevertheless aimed to “assist all Protestant women in the study of practical politics . . . to scrutinize with impartiality the platforms of political parties.”⁸²

Klanswomen were probably divided in their attitude toward participation in conventional politics, which they considered corrupted by immigrant non-Protestants, but united in condemnation of the rebellion against Victorian standards of modesty that was steadily gaining strength. They feared what they saw as libertine behavior and unchaste media though they rarely acknowledged that they arose from commercial enterprises. They were thoroughly, consistently unhappy with unchaste dress, with improper leisure activity, music, and movies, and with sexual and artistic radicalism. In this perspective, despite the fact that the Klan flourished in many cities, its women members considered big-city life destructive. It was undermining the multifaceted purity that was core to Klan ideology.

Where the WKKK differed most radically was not in its bigotry—for many organizations shared in that—but in how the members acted on it. Vigilante violence, of course, remained always men’s work in their world. Still, in promoting the hatreds and fears that gave rise to it, they bear moral, if not legal, responsibility along with the men. Moreover, in the political and economic warfare waged against “aliens,” Klanswomen participated equally with Klansmen.

___________

* This is a reference to the “all-seeing eye” used by Masons as symbol of truth and power.