All these images, as should be evident, feature and celebrate the Ku Klux Klan, in its second mass incarnation, from the 1920s. Yes, including the anti-immigration wall.
In that decade, the Klan recruited several million members, and became politically powerful for some years in many states, and even took over the state government of Indiana, and ruled in many cities.
But our concern here is less the history of this mass upsurge (fascinating and horrifying as it is!) than some of the movement’s key themes, because they have much current echoes and resonance.
I researched these themes and the images last summer. And a key to their resilience came in an obscure editorial in one of the few Indiana newspapers to challenge the Klan. In 1923 when the order was riding high in the state, an unnamed, beleaguered editor in South Bend, called it out as “Klanism”:
“Klanism”; it’s a clumsy term, but then the Klan specialized in ungainly verbiage. And the editor was right: the Indiana Klan, followed by other Klan groups, collapsed from internal corruption and scandal by the late 1920s. Yet the attitudes evoked in these images and its standard rhetoric not only survived, they have even flourished in other guises.
After all, many Klan sympathizers were prevented from officially joining by work rules or other constraints. But this didn’t prevent them from sharing the Klan’s signature issues — or from sticking with them when the Klan itself receded.
At its height, the 1920s Klan attracted hundreds of thousands of “respectable” folks: professionals, successful business people, prominent matrons, church leaders. (In fact, its leaders made special efforts to recruit ministers and pastors, waiving fees and other requirements, and not shrinking from offering outright bribes.)
One such beneficiary was the famously pugilistic evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935), one of whose mottoes was “fighting the devil & sin.”
Billy Sunday, ready to rumble. One of his more memorable quotes was: “A sinner can always repent, but stupid is forever.” Amen.
Once in 1922, Sunday was about to launch into a sermon in Richmond, Indiana (home of Earlham, a Quaker college, and many Quaker Klan members) when, according to the Indianapolis Times, a dozen Klansmen came marching in, “clad in white robes and attended with much mystery.” They presented Sunday with a fifty dollar, um, contribution and a letter of endorsement. (Sunday did not fight them off.)
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