Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore

Author:Lucy Moore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: United States, 20th century, History, Modern, General
ISBN: 9781590204399
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2011-02-21T10:00:00+00:00

Not every American was seduced by the Ku Klux Klan. The journalist William Allen White described the Klan to a colleague as “a self-constituted body of moral idiots.” The trouble with the Klan, he said, “is that it is based upon such deep foolishness that it is bound to be a menace to good government in any community.” In a similar vein, a professor of sociology asserted that “the most dangerous weakness in a democracy is the uninformed and unthinking average man.” Even Thomas Dixon, author of the novel that had inspired D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, spoke out against the revived Klan (albeit from the perspective of a paternalistic racist): “If the white race is superior—as I believe it is—it is our duty as citizens of a democracy to lift up and help the weaker race.”

Steps were taken in some places to combat the Klan’s rising popularity, often using vigilante techniques that reflected those of the Klan. Klan meeting houses were torched and Klan parades met with mobs wielding rocks and bottles. Catholics organized themselves into groups like the Red Knights or the Knights of the Flaming Circle, intending to defend themselves and their homes from Klan aggression. A bomb destroyed the offices of Dawn, the Chicago Klan’s newspaper. Spies infiltrated Klan meetings and exposed Klan members’ identities to the press.

Local politicians might also resist the Klan’s appropriation of their area, for example by banning the wearing of hoods or masks in public, but in many cases resistance was futile. When the governor of Oklahoma instituted martial law to remove the Klan from his state, the Klan-dominated state legislature impeached him and removed him from office. In Dallas the Citizens’ League, while in agreement with the Klan about white supremacy, questioned its religious intolerance and restrictions on freedom of conscience. Seeking to restore peace to the community, the mayor asked the Klan to disband. This it refused to do. In 1922 Klan membership in Dallas was nudging 10,000.

On tour in North Carolina, the singer Bessie Smith formed her own anti-Klan league. One of her performers went outside during a show and found six Klansmen trying to collapse the tent—in the South, black artists traveled on their own trains and performed in their own tents, rather than in public halls, from which they were banned. Hearing what had happened, Bessie came out and confronted the men, one hand on her hip and shaking the other at them. “What the fuck you think you’re doin’? I’ll get the whole damn tent out here if I have to. You just pick up them sheets and run!” The Klansmen would not move at first, but as Smith continued to scream obscenities at them they faded into the night. She turned back to the watching prop boys: “I ain’t never heard of such shit. And as for you, you ain’t nothing but a bunch of sissies.”

In October 1921 one former Klansman from east Tennessee, Henry Fry, revealed his experiences as a member of the Ku Klux Klan to the New York World.

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