Thinking Like a Historian: Who Joined the Ku Klux Klan?

1. Klan wedding in Washington, D.C., 1925.
   

   Source: Getty Images
2. Poem read at a meeting of KKK Grand Dragons, North Carolina, 1923.

   God Give Us Men! The Invisible Empire demands strong

   Minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands …

   Men who possess opinions and a will;

   Men who have honor; men who will not lie;

   Men who can stand before a demagogue and damn his treacherous flattering without winking! …

   Men of dependable character; men of sterling worth;

   Then wrongs will be redressed, and right will rule the earth.

3. “95% of Bootleggers Jews,” editorial, Dearborn Independent, Michigan, 1922.

   Violation and evasion of the Prohibition laws has had a deep Jewish complexion from the very beginning. … This does not mean, of course, that every bootlegger is a Jew. Unless you live in Chicago, New York or other large cities, an actual meeting with the Jew in this minor capacity will not be frequent. The Jew is the possessor of the wholesale stocks; … But notwithstanding all this carefulness, the bulk of the arrests made in the United States have been among Jews. … The maintenance of the idea of drink in the minds of the people is due to Jewish propaganda. … The idea of drink will be maintained by means of the Jewish stage, Jewish jazz, and the Jewish comics, until somebody comes down hard upon it.

4. Report on a Klan gathering in Birmingham, Alabama, 1923.

   Edgewood Park was crowded by noon. Klansmen and their wives and families enjoyed a great barbecue, went swimming, dancing, and picknicking. There were airplane stunts during the day with band concerts thrown in for good measure. At night there was a wonderful display of fireworks following the initiation and the address of the Imperial Wizard.

5. Klansmen in Buffalo, New York, 1924. Data based on historical research into a Klan membership list of almost 2,000 men in the Buffalo area.

   Klansmen in Buffalo, New York, 1924
   Occupational Group	Percentage of KKK Members	Percentage of Total Native White Male Workers in Buffalo
   Professional (predominantly clergy, doctors, engineers, pharmacists)	6.1	4.7
   Business (small businessmen, managers, inspectors, accountants)	18.5	10.4
   Low nonmanual (salesmen, clerks, foremen)	27.7	22.6
   Skilled (machinists, electricians, railroad engineers, construction trades)	30.6	25.3
   Semiskilled and service (factory and rail workers, deliverymen, policemen, repairmen)	16.4	30.2
   Unskilled (laborers, gardeners)	0.5	14.5

   Table 22.2: TABLE 22.1
6. Interviews conducted in the 1980s with Indiana Klanswomen about Klan life in the 1920s. Seeking truthful accounts, the interviewer allowed the women to remain anonymous.

   Anonymous

   For [the Klan] to say, we want to get rid of the niggers, we want to get rid of the Catholics, it didn’t mean a thing to us. … I can remember quite well the stories that you hear sitting on the porch. … They’d talk about religion, and they’d talk about Catholics. … The Catholics were considered horrible people. …

   Anonymous

   Kelly had a grocery store. Well, it hurt their business terribly because people wouldn’t go in there, because the Klan would tell you not to. … If you had a empty house … , why you were told not to rent it to a Catholic.

   Some Klan leader said that the Pope was coming to take over the country, and he said he might be on the next train that went through North Manchester. You know, just trying to make it specific. So, about a thousand people went out to the train station and stopped the train. It only had … one passenger on it. They took him off, and he finally convinced them that he wasn’t the Pope. He was a carpet salesman. And so they put him on the next train and he went on to Chicago.

7. Editorial by National Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans in the KKK periodical Dawn: A Journal for True American Patriots, November 10, 1923.

   Humanity has become a commodity. For mercenary motives, our importers of it want the most inferior grade. Industry desires cheap labor. Therefore, we have had this recent flood of 5 and 10-cent citizenship. Take any map which shows the concentration of the South and Eastern European type of immigrant and you will see [that] wherever manufacturing and mining and lumbering predominate, there the hordes of unskilled labor have overwhelmingly been assembled. …

   The present and recent flood of inferior foreigners has vastly increased our illiteracy, vitally lowered the health level and visibly menaced America by inheritable mental and moral deficiencies. … [Farms are] the only legitimate and justifiable excuse for cheap labor, yet that class is moving irresistibly cityward to swell the slums and multiply immorality. For example, throughout the south the colored race … is migrating to the North — not to its rural districts, but to its industrial centers.

8. “Program for America,” in the KKK newspaper American Standard, April 15, 1925.

• Laws to require the reading of the Holy Bible in every American public school.
• Recognition of the fact … that Romanism is working here to undermine Americanism. … Since Roman Catholics give first allegiance to an alien political potentate, the pope … their claim to citizenship, to the ballot, and to public office in this Protestant country is illegitimate, and must be forbidden by law. …
• A law to destroy the alien influence of the foreign language press [by] requiring that the English language be used exclusively.
• … Recognition of the tendency toward moral disintegration, resulting from the activities … of the anti-Christian Jews, in our theaters, our motion pictures, and in American business circles; the discontinuance of these anti-Christian activities, and the exclusion of Jews of this character from America.
• The return of the Negroes to their homeland of Africa, under the protection and with the help of the United States Government.
• Strict adherence to the Constitution of the United States, including the Prohibition Amendment, by every citizen.