IN THE FALL OF 1915, A STRANGE SPECTACLE UNFOLDED NEAR Atlanta when William Joseph Simmons led a dozen men up a rocky trail on the imposing granite crest of Stone Mountain. As the night wind whipped the American flag that the men carried, Simmons ignited a pine cross that lit up the Georgia sky. Against this theatrical backdrop and with Bibles in hand, the men then vowed their allegiance to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
That dramatic ceremony expanded, during the next decade, into a nationwide organization that inflamed America’s social and political landscape, providing a mooring to the thousands of frightened Americans who’d been uprooted by the rapid changes that were erupting during the 1920s. The KKK offered them a sense of fraternity, a commitment to self-defined traditional American values, and a list of people to blame for the social upheaval—Catholics, Jews, blacks, and recent immigrants.
The Invisible Empire became a force to be reckoned with. Texas Klansmen elected one of their own to the US Senate. In Oregon, the KKK captured the governorship and enough of the legislature to ban parochial schools. The Klan also elected both senators in Colorado as well as both senators and the governor in Indiana. In 1925, the KKK invaded the nation’s capital when 40,000 robed figures paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Then the tide turned.
By the end of the decade, the Klan’s power had faded into history—at least for the time being. The Invisible Empire’s decline can be attributed partly to its failure to produce the results its followers had been promised. But as during other chapters of American history, another key element was the Fourth Estate. For while much of the press either supported the Ku Klux Klan or remained silent, a handful of newspapers crusaded against the powerful organization.
Three valiant journalistic voices, in particular, waged successful campaigns against the most powerful nativist organization in American history. The seminal anti-Klan campaign began in 1921 with a blockbuster exposé in the New York World. The series documented the KKK’s immorality and violence in riveting detail. Another assault evolved two years later when the Commercial Appeal in Memphis combined compelling front-page cartoons with relentless reporting in a courageous effort to defy the Klan in that Tennessee city. Even deeper in the South, Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser concentrated its blistering attack on the editorial page. These three papers’ anti-Klan efforts earned them national acclaim as well as Pulitzer Prizes, American journalism’s highest honor.
US Representative Peter Tague, speaking to a congressional hearing called to investigate the Klan, said, “It has only been through the searching investigation of the great newspapers of the country that the evidence has been brought to the surface.” Ku Klux Klan scholar Kenneth T. Jackson expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “Opposition from the newspapers severely damaged the Klan.”1
Sweeping the Nation
Confederate veterans had organized the original Ku Klux Klan in 1866 in hopes of preventing former slaves from exercising their recently acquired rights. Within three years, they felt they’d completed their work, and the KKK ceased to exist.
After Simmons revived the Klan in 1915, his followers remained minuscule until 1920, when two enterprising promoters recognized that the Klan was a financial gold mine. Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler persuaded Simmons to pay them one-fourth of the $10 each member paid, an arrangement that yielded the recruiters the handsome sum of $30,000 a week. Propelled by Clarke’s ambition and Tyler’s creativity, Klan membership soared to 4 million by 1924. In addition, the Invisible Empire mushroomed into a national phenomenon, exploding in numbers and influence throughout the West, Midwest, and Northeast while continuing to grow in the South.
Clarke and Tyler urged recruiters to fill their rhetoric with such loaded phrases as “100 percent Americans” and “the tenets of the Christian religion”—crafted to communicate that the country was being overrun by enemies from within. KKK recruiters promised to provide better schools, improve law enforcement, and hold fast to the traditional values being threatened by the socially permissive Roaring Twenties.
Klan growth was aided by the prevailing mood among many Americans. President Woodrow Wilson’s pledge that World War I would make the world safe for democracy had produced a palpable idealism among the American people, but the armistice had failed to deliver. When the US Senate repudiated the League of Nations and Europe was again reduced to a gaggle of squabbling nations, Americans became disillusioned. In addition, the all-out war effort wasn’t easily put aside, as wartime hatred for the Germans was transformed into a peacetime suspicion of everything foreign—which the KKK eagerly capitalized on.
For the most part, American journalism didn’t stand in the way, as most newspapers feared the Klan’s burgeoning power. Unwilling to challenge the organization’s network of support, many editors covered the public events and official announcements of the KKK as they did those of any group. Others maintained a stoic silence regarding this secret society that was growing larger and more powerful each day.
The New York World Hurls a Hand Grenade
The first and most comprehensive journalistic crusade in defiance of the Klan was a no-holds-barred exposé in the paper that Joseph Pulitzer had built. The New York World promoted its September 1921 blockbuster with full-page ads that screamed, in three-inch letters “Ku Klux Klan Exposed!”2
What the ads promised, the series delivered. The opening article characterized the Klan’s growth as a financial scam that had bilked members out of $40 million in initiation fees and charges for Klan regalia. “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc.,” the story read, “has become a vast enterprise, doing a thriving business in the systematic sale of race hatred, religious bigotry, and ‘100 percent’ anti-Americanism.”3
The series continued full throttle day after day for three weeks, boldly and relentlessly answering tantalizing questions about the mysterious organization, much as Ida Tarbell had told the public about Standard Oil two decades earlier—but with considerably more flash.
Although the exposé was written in a sensational style, the World was as committed to destroying the Klan as it was to building its own circulation. To ensure the series had maximum impact, the paper syndicated it to eighteen dailies around the country. With such major voices as the Boston Globe and Pittsburgh Sun in the East, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Cleveland Plain-Dealer in the Midwest, the Seattle Times and Oklahoma City Oklahoman in the West, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Dallas Morning News in the South reprinting the articles, the series held more than 2 million readers spellbound each day.
The series missed nothing. One article reported the Klan advocated a return to chattel slavery, and another quoted lawyers saying the organization was illegal because it required members to obey the Imperial Wizard even when his orders conflicted with the Constitution. Still another story meticulously recorded the names and addresses of 214 recruiters—from E. Y. Clarke, Imperial Kleagle, Suite 501 Flatiron Building, Atlanta, to W. S. Coburn, Grand Goblin, 519 Haas Building, Los Angeles—much as a paper might report the names on an FBI most-wanted list.4
To guarantee that the series held the public’s attention, editors packaged each installment with compelling artwork. Accompanying one article was a facsimile of the application that each member completed—with questions reading “Were your parents born in the United States?” and “Are you a Jew?” Other images were created by reproducing some of the letters the World received from anonymous Klansmen. One hand-scrawled letter reprinted on the front page read, “You will seal your death warrant. Watch out—you nigger lovers.”5
One of the most explosive articles revealed the immorality of the organization’s two master recruiters. The World reported that during a 1919 raid on a house of prostitution, Atlanta police had identified the drunken occupants of one bed as Tyler, who was widowed, and Clarke, who was married—but not to Tyler.6
The World also went beyond reporting. In one proactive effort, the paper contacted New York public officials and forced them to go on the record as either opposing or supporting the Klan. Because their comments would become part of the World’s exposé, the officials had little choice but to criticize the Klan, thereby providing the paper with public statements it could revive if the Invisible Empire tried to make inroads into New York City. In response to the paper’s inquiry, the president of the borough of Brooklyn said, “The Ku Klux Klan is an un-American movement,” and New York City’s police commissioner railed, “There is no room in America for an organization of religious and racial bigots.”7
The World climaxed its campaign with a withering summary of KKK violence. The article began with impassioned rhetoric, saying of the Klan, “For the forces of the law it substitutes terrorism, replacing trial and punishment of offenders with anonymous threats and masked infliction of vengeance.” Next to the dramatic prose ran a tabulated list of outrages attributed to the Invisible Empire—including 4 murders, 27 tar and featherings, 41 floggings—that totaled 152 violent acts.8
Despite the World’s extraordinary efforts, a surprise development followed on the heels of the final installment of the series. In one of the more ironic twists in the history of American journalism, the World soon discovered that its bold campaign had backfired. The New York editors gradually came to learn the painful lesson that legions of news people of every generation have been forced to accept: editors often are out of touch with their readers.
In this instance, the World editors eventually had to acknowledge that their sensational crusade ultimately hadn’t destroyed the Klan but—quite the opposite—had given it a tremendous boost. For by reporting the KKK’s acts of bigotry and violence, the series described in great detail the exact elements of the Klan that potential members found so appealing. The widely printed series, in fact, gave the Klan its first national publicity—free of charge. Before these masses of frustrated Americans read the series, many of them had never heard of this secret society that offered members a way to fight change while hiding under the anonymity of hoods. By the end of the series, KKK recruiters were finding thousands of worried citizens who weren’t outraged by what they’d read but instead were eager to join the Klan. Hundreds of zealots even clipped the application form straight from the World, filled it in, and mailed it to Atlanta with their membership fee. Historians have stated that while the series increased the World’s circulation by 100,000, it also boosted Klan membership by thousands of new admirers.9
So as the World basked in the glory of winning the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for its series, the paper couldn’t ignore the fact that its reporting had spurred the growth of the organization. The Invisible Empire clearly was a formidable force that wouldn’t be defeated merely by one series of articles.10
The Commercial Appeal in Hand-to-Hand Combat
The next major battlefield in the press war against the Klan unfolded in 1923 in Memphis. The city’s major paper, the Commercial Appeal, criticized the KKK by characterizing it as a profit-making scam. The editorial page also condemned the Klan’s use of vigilante violence as a means of terrorizing the city’s African Americans, Catholics, and Jews. “The law is the soul of the nation,” the paper stated. “No aggregation of individuals has a right to take unto themselves the duties of judges and juries.”11
Even more effective than the editorials were the front-page cartoons that portrayed Klansmen as cowardly fiends hiding under bedsheets as they preyed on the powerless. The first frame of one cartoon showed a hooded Klan member being ordered to unmask, with the second frame revealing the face to be grotesquely ugly; the caption read “No wonder he puts a sack over that mug!” Another memorable drawing juxtaposed a man draped in a white bedsheet and wearing the label “100% American” against a uniformed World War I veteran whose military duty had cost him one of his legs; the soldier smirked, angled his thumb toward the robed figure, and said sarcastically, “I’m unworthy—my religion ain’t right!”12
The war between the Klan and the Commercial Appeal intensified when the Invisible Empire became the key issue in the 1923 city election. After Mayor Rowlett Paine rejected invitations to join the Klan, the hooded society nominated W. Joe Wood for mayor and four other Klansmen for the Memphis City Commission. In a blatant act of intimidation, the Klan placed its campaign headquarters directly across the street from the Commercial Appeal Building.
The KKK, with nightly meetings, raised the campaign to a fever pitch. At these events, Wood and his fellow candidates stood on either side of a white floral cross, while 2,000 Klansmen crowded together to hear speakers decry the pope and international Jewish bankers. During the rowdy meetings, every mention of the Klan brought applause, but any reference to Mayor Paine or the Commercial Appeal drew boos and curses.
As the election neared and tension built, national Klan leaders descended on the city. Intimidation tactics then mounted, with the Klan’s Tri-State American newspaper warning voters, “If you fail to fulfill the duty you owe to your family, the Ku Klux Klan will banish you and report your negligence to the duly constituted authorities.”13
The Commercial Appeal stated somberly, “The eyes of the nation are on Memphis,” and then gave prominent play to negative stories about the KKK. When Louisiana law officials investigated Klan involvement in the deaths of two men in that state, the accusations covered page one. And when the Invisible Empire’s top publicity agent shot the organization’s chief counsel, the Commercial Appeal made the incident its lead story three days in a row.14
On election day, a powerful cartoon appeared on the front page. The eloquently simple drawing showed a man’s hand covered in a white glove, rendered so the thumb and each finger looked like a Klansman wearing a pointed white hood: the middle finger was labeled “Mayor” and each of the other four was marked “Commissioner.” On the shirtsleeve were written the words “Imperial Wizard of Atlanta.” The cartoon’s message was clear: if local Klan candidates were elected, they’d be mere puppets of the KKK’s campaign to make hatred America’s driving value. The caption read “The Sinister Hand. ‘HALT, MEMPHIS!’”15
Despite the rousing political rallies and intimidating tactics, the Klan was soundly defeated and Paine and his commissioners were reelected. When the mayor led his followers in a jubilant victory parade, he stopped in front of the Commercial Appeal Building and directed the band to serenade the newspaper in honor of its decisive role in the election.16
In fact, when the results were announced, the entire nation seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. The New York Times hailed the election as “the biggest black eye the klan has yet received” and showered the credit on the Commercial Appeal. The most substantial praise, though, came from another New York institution when the School of Journalism at Columbia University awarded the Memphis paper the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for public service. The citation lauded the paper’s “courageous attitude in the publication of cartoons and the handling of news in reference to the Ku Klux Klan.”17
The Montgomery Advertiser Wages War
Though the anti-Klan crusades of the World and Commercial Appeal were courageous, a third paper deserves even more praise. For this journalistic voice waged its battles in what, during the 1920s when the KKK was at its peak, can be described as the belly of the beast: the Deep South.
The most sinister sign of the Klan in this region was in secluded spots on country roads. In response to what Alabama Klansmen perceived as the moral decay of the 1920s, they imposed a self-defined code of personal behavior that they enforced through acts of physical violence. Specifically, Klansmen meted out their vigilante justice through floggings. Exactly how many men and women were kidnapped and lashed with bullwhips isn’t known, but the figure was in the thousands. Many victims were beaten because the Klan objected to their gambling or drinking habits, with others suffering because of their color or religion.
In 1927, the lone journalistic voice raised in opposition to flogging was that of Grover Cleveland Hall, editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. His editorials recounted the appalling details of specific incidents, such as a mob of masked Klansmen descending on Arthur Hitt, a respected African-American farmer, and “beating him unmercifully” until he sold them his farm for $80, though the land was worth ten times that amount. Hall wrote, “It is perfectly outrageous that a negro or any other person should be bullied and frightened into sacrificing the fruits of a lifetime of toil in order to save his life.”18
The violence could be stopped, Hall argued, if a state law were passed to prohibit people from wearing masks or bedsheets. “The flogging evil cannot be effectively grappled with until it is made unlawful in Alabama to wear disguises in public places, and made a felony for men thus disguised to attack citizens of this state.”19
Hall didn’t, however, speak for all of Alabama journalism. Many papers supported flogging, commending the Klan for taking the moral leadership that, the papers argued, public officials were failing to provide. The Alabama Christian Advocate, for example, argued that flogging victims deserved the treatment they received, saying, “They are menaces to their communities.” Papers that refused to criticize flogging didn’t hesitate to attack the Advertiser. Calling Hall’s editorial crusade a “hysterical paroxysm,” the Monroe Journal wrote, “Just what good purpose the Advertiser imagines might be served by unrestrained denunciation of this particular form of criminality we fail to fathom.” The Evergreen Courant made the same point, asking, “Why raise such a howl?”20
Instead of backing off, Hall adopted the additional tactic of reprinting the statements of outrage that began to appear in the northern press as word of the floggings spread. An item that initially appeared in the New York Herald Tribune screamed, “When a mob of masked men invades a citizen’s home at night, renders him helpless and then takes his wife out of bed, ties her to a barrel in the front yard and flogs her, is there any punishment within the law too drastic for the crime? We doubt it.” One that first appeared in the Milwaukee Journal asked of Alabama, “Aren’t there enough men down there to say that there must be an end to this bigotry and intolerance and brutality? Isn’t there someone strong enough to lead a successful movement to blot out this new monstrosity?” Hall reproduced each negative characterization of Alabama along with his own comments about how the Klan was damaging the state’s reputation.21
Hall succeeded in stirring public sentiment to the point that the state legislature could no longer ignore the KKK’s violence. And so, progressive representatives introduced tough anti-mask bills calling for exactly what Hall advocated: to outlaw masks and robes such as those worn by KKKers. Hall threw his editorial weight behind the proposals, saying, “The bills are an honest effort to go to the heart of the evils that have grown out of the use of hood and robe. They are designed to end terrorism in Alabama.”22
Klansmen in the legislature, however, responded to the proposals by mounting a formidable defense. When the governor, who was a member of the Klan, sided with the pro-mask legislators, the fate of the anti-mask proposals was sealed. They were soundly defeated.
But Hall’s battle with the Klan had only just begun. In hopes of silencing the editor, Klansmen in the statehouse proposed what became known as the “muzzling” bills. The sponsors said they would protect the state’s national reputation, which the men argued had been severely damaged by the unfavorable publicity that Hall’s crusade had promoted throughout the country. As evidence, the legislators cited the various editorials from papers such as the Milwaukee Journal that Hall had reprinted.
To quiet the Advertiser, the legislators proposed broadening state libel laws to an unprecedented degree. According to the bills, any paper that published information that was deemed to be false and damaging to the state would be fined $25,000. The diabolical element of the legislation concerned who would do the deeming. Specifically, a widely distributed paper such as the Advertiser could be sued in every county where it circulated. That meant the decision about whether a particular statement was libelous could be decided by a jury of Klansmen in any remote county in the state. In addition, the bills stipulated that no higher court could alter the verdict of the original jury. And, finally, the law would be retroactive, meaning the Advertiser could be fined for all the negative statements it had made about the KKK during the anti-mask campaign.
Hall’s criticism of the proposed legislation was ferocious. “These bills are designed to kill freedom of the press in Alabama,” he wrote. “They are a malicious, tyrannical, outrageous scheme to bulldoze and punish a free press.”23
Despite Hall’s attacks, the governor lobbied hard for the muzzling bills, and national Klan leaders swarmed to Montgomery to lobby for the legislation. The bills moved onto the House floor, prompting what the Advertiser labeled “a four-hour battle which transcended in heat and passion legislative battles for a score of years.” The final vote couldn’t have been closer. But with forty-eight in favor and forty-eight opposed, the bills failed.24
Hall was recognized for his courage in defying the Klan when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. The citation read, “Grover Cleveland Hall, Montgomery Advertiser, for his editorials against gangsterism, floggings, and racial and religious intolerance.”25
Turning Back the Ku Klux Klan
Receiving the Pulitzer Prize is journalism’s highest honor, but papers truly dedicated to fulfilling their role in a democratic society find even greater reward in having positive influence on their communities. The New York World, Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Montgomery Advertiser all found themselves in that position, as each journalistic voice ultimately had the satisfaction of knowing that it had delivered a body blow of no small impact.
Although observers have acknowledged that the World’s blockbuster series boosted the Klan’s growth, they have applauded the positive impact it had on New York City. The paper’s proactive effort in getting city officials on the record as opposing the Klan played a pivotal role in stopping the organization from gaining a foothold in America’s largest urban center. The KKK built strong chapters in Albany, Buffalo, Schenectady, Syracuse, and Utica, but recruiters failed utterly in their efforts to attract New York City residents into their membership. The Commercial Appeal enjoyed similar success, as the Klan’s defeat in the 1923 Memphis elections became a model of how a city could halt the Klan—if it was blessed with a courageous newspaper. Likewise, the Advertiser earned praise for its role in slowing the Klan’s rise to power in the state capital; Alabama’s largest city, Birmingham, became a KKK stronghold, but the Invisible Empire failed in its efforts to become a power in Montgomery, the state’s second largest city.26
Scholars who have studied the Ku Klux Klan also have praised the Fourth Estate more broadly, lauding its vital role in keeping the Klan in check. David M. Chalmers wrote in his book, Hooded Americanism, that the papers had more impact on the Klan than any other force, and Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in The Ku Klux Klan in the City that the beginning of the country’s resistance to the 1920s Klan can be dated precisely to the newspaper campaigns.27
American journalism historians have echoed these commendations. John Hohenberg wrote in The Pulitzer Prize Story that the anti-Klan coverage “shows what digging and documenting can do to a seemingly powerful organization.” One of the most effusive tributes to journalism’s offensive against the Klan came in the 1930s, in the immediate wake of the Klan’s decline, when Silas Bent wrote in Newspaper Crusaders: A Neglected Story, “That the klan is widely discredited, and in most places is an object of ridicule, is due to the drubbing administered it by the newspapers.”28