Ku-Klux by Elaine Frantz Parsons

Author:Elaine Frantz Parsons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Library of Congress identifies the men pictured here as members of the Watertown, New York, Division 289 of the Ku-Klux Klan, c. 1870. Marian S. Carson Collection, Library of Congress.

With Ku-Klux deliberately introducing comic elements into their acts of violence and the widespread practice of reducing the Ku-Klux to a comic parody, readers may well have approached reports of Ku-Klux violence with an expectation of comic exaggeration.75 For instance, when the Little Rock Morning Republican quoted the (Republican) Memphis Post’s claim that Ku-Klux “have evidently learned their language in the school of the Black Crook,” a contemporary hit burlesque production, neither paper may have desired to trivialize violence against freedpeople.76 Yet when a Savannah Democratic paper, the Daily News and Herald, similarly analogized the Ku-Klux to the Black Crook a few days later, it easily took the logic further, calling the Klan as a whole “a capital joke—a ‘sell.’ ”77 Similarly, when a piece of seemingly incontrovertible evidence of the existence of the Ku-Klux emerged, it could be neutralized by translation into farce. Days after the Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.) reported that a costumed Ku-Klux had been killed by his would-be victim, it clarified it had all been a tragic misunderstanding. According to this follow-up story, a young white man, probably inspired by his belief in “the universal terror of blacks” (that is, black people’s “constitutional timidity”), had decided to scare a black man by donning a mask and sheet, approaching his house at night, and threatening to kill everyone in it. Unfortunately for the prankster, the freedman he targeted had not known that this was a joke.78 Similarly, when three congressmen claimed to have received Ku-Klux threats during the impeachment hearings, Democrats dismissed it as a “hoax” or even an April Fools’ Day joke.79 Southern humorist Brick Pomeroy published a book in 1871 in which a worthless northern man headed south, acted obnoxious there (“Plowin’, are ye?” Why ain’t ye in a grocery, hurrahin’ for Grant? Is this the way you spit upon your benefactors!”), and then accused those who gave him a quite reasonable “bouncing” of being Ku-Klux.80 It was common for newspapers to write about racial violence using sensationalist or minstrelesque tropes (the bullet “passed near the head of a ‘school marm’ present, who is said to have jumped over three benches at one jump in her excitement”).81 It was difficult for contemporaries to locate the “solid reality” beneath the Klan’s “stuff and nonsense.”82

Framing Ku-Klux violence in a sensationalist mode worked in much the same way as framing it in the comic mode. Like comedy, sensationalism worked by presenting accounts of Ku-Klux violence so grotesque and exaggerated that it was impossible to take them seriously. Sensationalist writing was intended to evoke horror or fear rather than laughter, yet the two were often so entangled as to be indistinguishable from one another. The Tribune article “Horrible Disclosures” was a comic parody of sensationalist writing: it lampooned Stalwart accusations against Greeley during the campaign, confessing that Greeley “committed Ku-klux outrages in nearly all the southern States.

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