The 1920s Ku Klux Klan
Growing up in the second half of the 20th century, we repeatedly saw on television news that bigotry often has been tolerated, and at times has even flourished, in America. It bloomed after the Civil War, in the shape of the original Ku Klux Klan, which survived only briefly. Long after the KKK's demise, memories of it lingered in some quarters, and in 1915, aggrandized by time, those memories led to the creation of a second Klan. In it, bigotry found a new life behind a façade painted with religion, fraternity, and patriotism. The old pageantry was revived, augmented by something new to help incite the masses: tall crosses, flaming like beacons in the unlighted rural nights of the 1920s.
At the time, many of our grandparents on Long Island (or in Queens, or in New Jersey, or anywhere else in the North) had never heard of the first Klan. Thus, they were not on their guard when they started hearing about the second one. Whatever they heard from their acquaintances, neighbors, clergy, or even from the press was uncertain - no one yet knew much for sure. The new Klan used disinformation in order to appear mainstream, and it marketed itself directly to individuals, tailoring its message to their perceived needs.
Town by town, the Klan gained new toe-holds. How? One day, a Kleagle (a trained, paid organizer, and ideally a county resident) moved into a community, and started to blend in. As he met the townsfolk, he assessed each one, trying to identify susceptible people whom he could recruit for the Klan. There likely would be a few who thought that low-paid blacks or immigrants had cost them their jobs. There might be a merchant who faced competition from a business run by a Catholic or Jewish owner. A supporter of Prohibition might be outraged that her Italian neighbors were making wine to drink with their meals. A sincere Christian might think that local churches were not doing enough to support people who were in need.
Whatever potential vulnerability he found, a Kleagle would exploit, using people and groups he identified according to the contacts he had made. On behalf of the KKK, he would send a donation to, say, a widow with young children, who then would gratefully tell everyone she knew about the unexpected help. He would persuade businessmen that the Klan was a new and superior fraternal order, a better way of networking with others in the community to support good causes. He would donate flags to schools or veterans' organizations. The Kleagle would seek a local minister who might preach to his congregation about the KKK's support for Protestantism; if he found one, he would ask that Klan members be invited to come to the minister's church, and present it with a Bible or U.S. flag as the congregants watched.
When interest was high enough, the Kleagle would establish a new klavern (i.e., a Klan chapter) in the town, and induct his protégés into it at a night-time rally, its location visible at a good distance because of its 15-foot oil-soaked flaming cross. The ceremony would feature rousing speakers from other klaverns, a band that played patriotic music, and perhaps the christening of a baby who was dressed in Klan garb. The Kleagle would be seen on the dais, recognizable only because his hood bore a large silhouette of an eagle, with the letters "KL" above it. With luck, the rally would result in additional memberships and donations.
One should not mistake the Kleagle for a missionary, or for a clergyman founding a new church; he was a salesperson who worked on commission. To him, recruiting meant money. From him, his recruits bought their robes, hoods, Bibles, pamphlets, and other paraphernalia; he kept half the profits from all sales. When a town no longer profited him, he moved on to start a new klavern elsewhere.
It does seem likely that some people naïvely joined the Klan for benign purposes, only to later regret doing so, but there is no way of knowing to what extent that was true. For that matter, one cannot really know the total number of people in any given community who joined the second KKK. Member rolls were kept secret; later interviews with former officers yielded inconsistent figures. Crowd estimates at public Klan rites were only guesses - the large rallies usually happened at night in open fields, and once the crowd reached a certain size, there was no reliable way to estimate how big it was.
Even if one allows for such imprecision, it is disturbing to read the report in the Times of June 22, 1923 that 25,000 people had gathered in East Islip to attend the initiation of 1,400 men and women into the Klan. As for the percentage of Americans who became members, an estimate which has been accepted (with grains of salt) by some local writers is that at the mid-1920s peak, one Long Island adult in seven was a Klan member.
Context
From our perspective, the notion that anyone would rush to join such a group without fully understanding it seems incredible - after all, from the very beginning there were two obvious red flags. First were the membership restrictions: immigrants were unwelcome; Catholics were unwelcome; Jews were unwelcome; blacks were unwelcome. Second, at ceremonies in or near their home towns, members wore hoods or no Klan garb at all - they did not want their neighbors to know they were members. Putting these two red flags together, not much imagination was needed to foresee where things were likely headed.
I reiterate that I am not trying to excuse what happened, but rather to probe how things came to pass. To Long Islanders in the 1920s, perhaps - only perhaps - a mitigating factor was the everyday acceptance of many things which we find objectionable today. Could people truly not have known any better? They lived in a time when ethnic, religious, racial, and gender discrimination influenced hiring practices, and determined people's admissibility to unions, schools, professions, and fraternal organizations. At first glance, the KKK may have seemed just one more part of the status quo.
1920s Hicksville was not isolated from this world, and it could not have been immune. The village was not completely white. Censuses list a small number of African-American residents; some were domestic servants residing in their employers' homes, and others simply people with jobs who lived on their own. Hicksville also had its immigrants, its Catholics, and its Jews. As was true of other locales, black people named in news stories about Hicksville were always identified as "Negroes" (as if their race was automatically relevant to whatever they did, or whatever happened to them). As in any other American town, white people in Hicksville wore blackface when appearing in Minstrel Show fundraisers. Old newspapers tell us that at least eight groups - half of them consisting of children - staged such performances: the Masons, Firemen, Athletic Club, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Boy Scouts, children of St. John's Protectory, elementary grades of the School at Nicholai Street, and Junior Class of the High School.
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