“Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Catholics hate the Protestants;
The Hindus hate the Muslims … and everybody hates the Jews.”
—from the Tom Lehrer song, “National Brotherhood Week”
ack in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was at the peak of its popularity in the United States. Estimates of dues-paying members ranged anywhere from 5 million to 8 million in a country of only about 60 million adults at the time. At one point in that decade, 75 members of Congress were either open members or clear supporters of the Klan. Several cities had Klan mayors and Oklahoma and Oregon had Klan governors.
Nowadays, we think of the Klan as the dimwitted rednecks in Django Unchained.
But back in the 1920s, the Klan was attempting to be a national force, using a regional approach with an overarching racist policy.
The Klan appealed to regional biases—singling out Asians and Catholics in the far West, Jews and southern Europeans (mostly Italians) in the East, and Catholics and Jews in the Midwest—with a profound hatred of blacks everywhere to tie things together. Like in the aforementioned song.
In Oregon, the state legislature came within a couple of votes of outlawing Catholic schools in the state and Catholics were banned from serving on school boards. However, in relative terms, Oregon was rather tame. The really Krazy Klan Kut-ups were in Indiana, which boasted the highest Klan membership per capita of all the states, including those in the South.
The Hoosier Klan folks were led by a man named David Stephenson, a junior-high dropout with a body of flab and a gift for gab. He had his minions believing that recently deceased President Warren G. Harding had been poisoned by Catholics. (Harding’s death was exquisitely well-timed, considering that the Teapot Dome scandal was just breaking. There has always been speculation as to the real cause of his death; the fact that his wife would never allow an autopsy to be held helps explain why we still are uncertain 90 years later. However, I’m betting that he wasn’t poisoned by Catholics.)
Stephenson then whipped his large band of Midwestern deep thinkers into a frenzy by claiming that the priests at the University of Notre Dame were stockpiling weapons for a planned Catholic takeover of Indiana. That was just the first part of a larger plan, as rumor had it, that the pope was planning on leaving St. Peter’s and the Vatican behind and establishing his new headquarters and base of operations in—you guessed it!—Indiana.
Stephenson actually had national political aspirations (he’s best known for coining the phrase that a politician can survive anything “so long as he doesn’t get caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl”). However, like a lot of right-wing (and more than a few left-wing) creeps, he couldn’t control his baser urges. A staunch Prohibitionist in the light of day, Stephenson was apparently a sloppy and violent drunk by night. He took a young teacher, Madge Oberholtzer, out for a date. He got drunk, took her across state lines to a hotel in Chicago, and repeatedly raped her. He told her that he wouldn’t let her go until she agreed to marry him. She persuaded him to let her go to a drugstore, where she purchased and consumed a fatal dose of mercuric chloride, which, at first, just made her violently ill. When he finally returned her to her parents, skin had been torn off her breasts and genitals, and she had so many bite marks on her body that the doctor thought that she had been attacked by cannibals.
It took her two horribly painful weeks to die. At the trial, the doctors weren’t sure whether it was the poison or staph infections caused by the bites that had killed her. Either way, it didn’t matter to Stephenson, who was convinced that there was no way that a jury of his “peers” would convict him.
He was only a whole lot wrong. He was convicted of rape, kidnapping and second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Like the bitch that he was, he became angry when the governor of Indiana refused to grant him clemency and/or commute his sentence. Stephenson released a slew of documents that implicated politicians across the state in bribery schemes. The mayor of Indianapolis and the head of the state Republican Party were convicted and sent to jail. Every member of the Indianapolis City Council was kicked out of office and fined. The governor should have been convicted as well, but he escaped on a technicality.
The episode was so sordid that the Klan all but completely disappeared in Indiana and was never again a national force. It quickly receded back into the racist South from whence it had come.
I told you that story so that I could tell you another one. Unfortunately, I’m out of space, so it will have to wait until next week. But as a teaser, let me tell you that I just found out, based on a flier placed on my windshield in a Costco parking lot, that John F. Kennedy was killed not by Lee Harvey Oswald but by the same people who killed Warren G. Harding. Well, not the exact same people. That would be weird.
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2014.
The Klan has had three incarnations that were related in name only. An interesting aspect of the Klan of ’20’s, not mentioned in this article, was how cozy they were with the Methodists. My grandfather was a Methodist minister in the ’20’s and had lots of interesting Klan stories. What they had in common extreme nativism (opposition to immigration from Catholic and wine-swilling countries like Italy) and their common support for passage of the 21st amendment (prohibition). Sure they were “racist,” but so was every white person in America in those days. The ’20’s Klan was mainly a nativist phenomenon.
We can look forward to Tom blasting a bunch of right wing conspiracy nuts, and letting the lefties get off unscathed. Bet we don’t hear anything about building 7 that Bush ordered demolished, or the FDR conspiracy to allow Pearl Harbor.
The Weekly considers submissions. Why don’t you write your thoughts about liberal conspiracy theorists and submit them for publication? You really do yourself a disservice by limiting your reach to the comments section and the Costco parking lot.
Bueno article. Kinda’ reminds me of the modern day Repugnant Party of racist. Micky Smythe.
Don`t know about the Klan per se but of course they were virtually all Democrats just as all those who supported Douglas in the Lincoln Douglas debates were Democrarts. Douglas, a Democrat Senator from Illinois, argued in the debates for giving the voters in the territories a choice to extend slavery to states coming into the Union whereas Republican Lincoln knew in his bones that slavery was so inimical to our national values that its spread would be ruinous to our democratic future as a country.
Party affiliations are meaningless in this discussion. It’s true that most klansmen did come from the south and some border states, which were Democratic turf at the time (but are now Republican). Both parties stood for very different principles back then, so you’re really comparing apples to oranges.
“Repugnant Party of racist” Whatever that means. Left-wing civility on display.
I love it when I get dislikes. Proves to me that I’m a master at annoying the left. However, if you’re going to hit dislike, at least have the stones to leave a comment. You guys are too easy.
Tom, it is true that millions belonged to the Klan, and many who were not members supported the Klan. The Klan was so accepted that Klan meetings were announced in church. “Next Sunday after church there will be a Klan meeting and covered dish lunch in Farmer Johnson’s pasture.” And so on. My grandfather kept a scrapbook of Klan activities. He was a member, as were almost all the other business owners, doctors, bankers, newspaper owners and other community leaders. When I was a child I would read his old scrapbook. I remember one newspaper article had the headline, “And The Way Shall Be Paved With Nails.” It was a story about an apparent anti-Klan activist who had poured a keg of nails on the dirt road leading to the pasture where the Klan covered dish social was to be held. After church, all the Klan members and their families driving on the dirt road to the Klan meeting in the pasture were getting flat tires from the nails. My grandfather owned one of the three tire stores in town, and he and the other two tire store owners were kidded about had they spread the nails on the road to drum up business. All three tires store owners were Klan members.
Back then, the Klan assisted law enforcement when asked to do so. The Klan guarded ballot boxes when there were rumors of trouble to be expected. The Klan took up collections for widows and orphans, they helped the community in many ways. That is why the Klan had so many members and supporters. I asked my grandfather if the Klan harassed blacks. He was surprised and said, “There weren’t any blacks within 100 miles of here. Why would we want to harass blacks anyway?”
Because anyone with a white sheet could say they were Klan members, criminals began to pose as Klansmen. They committed crimes and it was blamed on the Klan. This got so bad, the Klan had a national day of disbanding, never to be formed again under the name KKK, and if law enforcement every needed help, if a new citizen’s group was needed to restore order, it would have to have a different name. The people who call themselves KKK members, if there are any now, have nothing to do with the original KKK that was disbanded decades ago.
The ‘king’ of civility passes judgement – as well as a lot of hot air. The right has no new ideas – so just pissing off the left is seen as ‘winning’.
I notice I got your attention. So tell me stooge, just what is an AtticStattic ? One too many hits on the bong would be my guess. 8:30 on a Friday night and this all you have to do. Sad. Very,very sad. “Tis better to be the king than the queen.
In discussing family history with elders who were born in the 1920s and came to maturity in WWII, I was often shocked by the overt racism, religious prejudice, and hatred/fear of immigrants/foreigners expressed by people in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. I was even more shocked to hear my grandparents’ generation were proud marchers in Klan rallies in the 20s in those same states, supposedly fighting to “keep America pure.” Lots of talk about “mongrels” resulting from mixed marriages and “inter-breeding.” Remember this is not the deep south, these are border states to Canada or close to them, supposedly integrated, more literate and clear thinking than those of the deep south. Even as a child, I was appalled and dismayed by the rampant racism expressed by my parents and elders. Has the world changed? In my lifetime, yes it has but the change is not as widespread as it should be. King’s work is not over. I have hopes that the younger generations will make things better, and that the continuing increase in interracial relationships will help to “breed out” the racism. The religious hatred is beyond my comprehension. The xenophobia I just don’t understand in a country of immigrants, and yet it has existed for the entire 200+ years. Will makind ever learn?
Huh. Maybe Harding’s *wife* poisoned him.
gcb1, for some reason I am sadly not entirely surprised by your comments.
I realize what I said was ambiguous and might have sounded snotty, so I wanted to clarify that, having met people from the Great Lakes States, I am not entirely shocked by the attitudes you are referring to.
There is a subplot in the book “A Prairie Home Companion” where a disgruntled resident of Lake Wobegon submits a vast rant entitled “95 Theses 95” detailing everything he hated about his upbringing. Included were ugly moments of bigotry on his parents’ part. “You wouldn’t say it,” the character writes, “but you thought that blacks were shiftless.” When it comes to Catholics, things get even worse. “We believed they poisoned the pets of Protestants. We believed there was a secret tunnel between rectory and nunnery. Whatever they believed, it wasn’t right.”
The subplot overall is humorous, but very revealing.
Aaaigh. “A Prairie Home Companion” was the radio show. I meant the book, “Lake Wobegon Days”.