by Mel Freilicher
WOMEN in the KLAN: Racism and Gender in the 1920s Kathleen M. Blee (University of California Press, 1991, 2008)
I began writing about Klan activities in “Sentimental Education” to illustrate the virulent racism, and most especially anti-Catholicism, going on in Indiana which its favorite son, Booth Tarkington, simply ignored in his elitist and “nostalgic” novels of the period. I wanted to learn more about the WKKK, especially becoming fascinated by Daisy Douglas Barr, the Quaker Ministress turned Klucktress, Vice Chair of the state’s Republican Party, and a major organizer and fundraiser for the Women’s Klan throughout the Midwest—earning 4 of the $5 dollar initiation fee for everyone she recruited.
In her fascinating study, Kathleen Blee lays out some methodological issues entailed in looking at a phenomenon of the 1920s. As membership rolls were always secret, Ms. Blee seems to have done thorough research in archives, and newspapers (obituaries often listed Klan affiliations), including the Fiery Cross and other Klan publications. She did manage to interview some women who’d been part of the Klan then—most remembered it fondly.
Perhaps half a million or more white Protestant women in the 1920s joined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (briefly at first, an auxiliary organization). In some states, women consisted of nearly half of Klan membership, and were a significant minority in many others. Blee focuses on Indiana, the epicenter of Klan resurgence.
The exact size of the women’s Klan there is impossible to assess, but historians estimate the total membership at a quarter-million, or 32% of the entire native-born white female population of the state. A somewhat deceiving figure, the author adds, since many WKKK memberships were short-lived, making estimates at any one time lower than cumulative totals.
Writing in 1967, historian Kenneth Jackson “disproved the small-town-hick thesis” by highlighting the Klan’s great strength in the cities. Jackson’s study of nine cities between 1915 and 1930 indicated 50% of active Klansmen were urbanites, Linda Gordon points out in her valuable, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, and 32% lived in the country’s larger cities (including thirty-eight thousand in Indianapolis, which one national magazine called “Klanopolis”).
Although impossible to generalize from a small number of cases, Blee believes most Klanswomen, like Klansmen, probably were middle or working class—“not marginal members of society.” For 24 identified Klanswomen, 33% had husbands with professional or business jobs, including fire chief, physician, and town mayor. Two were farm owners, two in the military, three were salesmen, two had skilled occupations, and 6 more were unskilled workers.
Virtually all WKKK members with recorded religious affiliations were “active churchwomen,” mainly Methodist, Baptist, and Methodist Episcopal. Many had already belonged to women’s auxiliaries of male fraternal organizations, like the Masons, an order that had long been anti-Catholic.
Before being folded into the Klan in 1923, some had been organized in secret nativist groups, with names such as Kamelias, Queens of the Golden Mask, Ladies of the invisible Empire, Ladies of the Golden Den, Order of American Women, Hooded Ladies of the Mystic Den, and Puritan Daughters of America. Existing women’s political organizations, like Dixie Protestant Women’s League joined, too.
Groups significantly overlapped, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Daughters of the American Revolution. But while the DAR was intensely racist toward African Americans, it didn’t agitate against Jews or Catholics. Focusing instead on creating a blacklist of “seditious” individuals and organizations, ranging from labor unions to the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom.
“’The father and mother of the Ku Klux Klan is the Anti-Saloon League,’” declared Clarence Darrow: “an assertion which few would dispute,” adds Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan in his recent elegant and lucid book, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. No lobby in America held more power over Congress. “They were a moral force that became a political force behind a single issue,” Egan asserts, “preached to millions in a nation of dutiful churchgoers.”
The Klan and temperance crusaders “formed a perfect team,” he adds. The Anti-Saloon League was Daisy Douglas Barr’s “gateway” to the KKK, and her chief calling card in recruiting women members. And Grand Wizard D.C. Stephenson, whose debauched lifestyle eventually led to the organization’s collapse, modeled the Klan on “the well-oiled Anti-Saloon League using the same Protestant churches” as his organizing base.
“’Any list of Prohibition violators reads like a page from the directories of Greece and Italy’”: Egan cites Billy Sunday, a former pro baseball player and the most popular preacher in America. The state’s leading dry newspaper, the Patriot Phalanx, wrote: “The strongest argument in favor of Prohibition is keeping whiskey out of the reckless colored element.” Another paper commented, “The Negro, fairly docile and industrious, becomes, when filled with liquor, turbulent and dangerous and a menace to life, property and the repose of the community.”
Since Indiana was one of the most racially, culturally and religiously homogeneous states, Blee comments, their bigotry may seem odd. The state abolished slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation, but pro-slavery and overt racism were “common among whites throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” when blacks constituted less than 5 percent of the Indiana population. In the counties where the 1920s Klan became strongest, the nonwhite population was negligible (except in Marion County which includes Indianapolis).
Indiana, the most southern of northern states—North Dixie, it was often called—was settled by people from Tennessee, Kentucky and the Carolinas, Egan notes. Near the close of the nineteenth century, their treatment of African Americans was “as inhumane as ever characterized the cotton fields of Georgia or the rice swamps of the Carolinas,” declared James M. Townsend who served one term in the statehouse.
Much of this racist sentiment was codified in Indiana law. In 1831, for example, blacks moving to the state were required to post a bond against being a public charge, also to sign a pledge of good behavior. The 1851 Indiana Constitution prohibited blacks and mulattoes from coming into the state and penalized those who encouraged them to do so. “Neither statue was enforced,” Blee adds, “but both indicate the climate of hostility toward blacks.”
Klan leaders joined forces with, and frequently cited, influential academic “experts” who issued studies on the dire threat to a race of diminishing thoroughbreds. A chief argument for “scientific racism” came from a Yale-educated, New York sociologist, Madison Grant. Hitler later called Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, “my bible.”
With the passage of the world’s first eugenic sterilization law in 1907, Indiana was some sixteen years ahead of the nation in its efforts to cull undesirables—the “demonstrably stupid, sickly, disabled, or those prone to criminality, vice or drink,” as Egan summarizes it—from ever having children of their own. By the dawn of the 1920s, about 25,000 people in the state had been sterilized against their will.
Klan leaders enthusiastically quoted from the work of Dr. Harry Laughlin, an Iowan who’d immersed himself in the mechanics of breeding livestock. The human sterilization law he created, building on Indiana legislation, was drafted by more than 30 states. Ultimately, about 70,000 people across the nation would be involuntarily sterilized. To extend eligibility to homosexuals, a special category of “degenerates” was added in many of these states. Laughlin would praise Hitler for understanding that “the central wisdom of all politics is race hygiene.”
From the very top, President Harding endorsed The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy by Harvard Ph.D., Lothrop Stoddard, a Klansman in high standing. Egan also points out Harding’s vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, penned a piece in Good Housekeeping stating “biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.” The article was titled, “Whose Country Is This?”
In 1924, “the hooded order got everything it wanted,” Egan writes. Led by a eugenics committee, “The National Origins Act, a Klan-blessed master plan for the future of America, passed in the House by an overwhelming majority and sailed through the Senate with only six dissenting votes.” (The New York Times banner headline read: AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO AN END.)
The new quota system was based on the Census of 1890, before most southern European, Polish Catholics and Jewish refugees from pogroms crossed the Atlantic. The already harsh ban on the Chinese was tightened; Japanese and Africans were excluded entirely.
In no ways does Blee minimize or exonerate the WKKK’s participation in such world views: “Women of the Klan drew on familial and community ties—traditions of church suppers, kin reunions, and social celebrations—to circulate the Klan’s message of racial, religious and national bigotry. They spread hatred through neighborhoods, family networks, and elusive webs of private relationships. The Klan’s power was devastating precisely because it was so well integrated into the normal everyday life of white Protestants.”
But, much to her surprise, Ms. Blee discovered Klanswomen’s views of gender roles were “neither uniformly reactionary nor progressive.” Women’s suffrage had succeeded in 1920, and many WKKK members were supporters. Some interviewees, expressing “few regrets” viewed their former Klan “campaign against the reactionary forces of Catholicism, Judaism and rural black culture,” as fully compatible with the push to extend Social Security benefits or equal pay for men and women. In later years, some were active in progressive politics, favoring peace and women’s equality.
The key to allaying KKK fears about newly granted enfranchisement of their chaste and pure Women Folk, secure in their rightful place—the idealized “Home”—was “acquiescence of Klanswomen to the political agenda” of the men. Including full scale support for white Protestantism, the English language, public schools, the Bible, and immigration restrictions. So women could exercise their right to vote without relying on “masculine” traits of political judgment and strategizing.
Klansmen “invoked women to justify nearly every action they took against vice and corruption,” including campaigns for Prohibition, and against bootleggers and moonshiners who failed to pay them for protection. Nonwhite and foreign men “involved with” white women faced the fiercest reprisals: whipping, beating, kidnapping and lynching—as did white women who consorted with Jewish, immigrant or black men.
The complex attitude of Klansmen toward white women, “a mixture of paternalism and misogyny,” often led to bizarre results: Blee relates a 1927 incident in rural Alabama. A Klan group, led by a Baptist minister, flogged a divorced mother who’d married a divorced man. Then they took up a collection, giving their victim money and salve for her wounds. She had not been punished in anger, the minister informed her, but rather “in a spirit of kindness and correction, to set your feet aright.”
WKKK chapters often described their mission self-righteously, as safeguarding public virtue and keeping “the moral standards of a community at a high plane.” Across the country, Klanswomen marched under banners proclaiming We Stand for True Godliness, Purity and Loyalty; We are the Foe of Vice, the Friends of the Innocent; Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself but Leave His Wife Alone; and Wife Beaters Beware.
These women “placed a higher priority on disciplining immorality than their brothers did,” according to Linda Gordon. Some succeeded in convincing towns and counties to ban or censor not only liquor but also dance halls, films, magazines, and books. “Classics like The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Dreiser’s American Tragedy, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Voltaire’s Candide…anything by D.H. Lawrence or Upton Sinclair could not pass Klanswomen’s test.”
“In the design for a family-friendly Klan,” Timothy Egan writes, Daisy Douglas Barr and Stephenson “oversaw another element: a children’s brigade.” The Jr. KKK for teenage boys was established first, followed by Tri-K Klubs for girls. “Hooded teens soon had their place in yearbooks in Indiana,” Egan elucidates. Klan Klubs were “featured along with the Glee Club or the Debate Society among the accepted extracurricular activities.”
Ku Klux Kiddies were issued small-sized robes and masks, recited pledges and songs at regular den meetings and marched in parades. (“Cradle clubs” for infants were also part of the design.) “This is a godsend to us,” Egan quotes one parent writing into the Fiery Cross. “We have a son who is too young to join the Klan and with this new order he will be able to gratify his wishes to become affiliated with a strictly American organization.”
WKKK activities were “often indistinguishable from those of other middle-class white Protestant women,” Blee asserts: for example, Indiana WKKK locals chartered trains to take their families to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. Virtually every WKKK group held weekly social events for women only, ranging from readings and lectures to sewing circles, cooking demonstrations, entertainment and movies. The Marion County chapter even produced their own film using local Klanswomen as actresses.
Women’s use of the boycott was particularly effective in blocking the election of non-Klan supported candidates, also on consumer issues. The impact of the “poison squad of whispering women” was profound; WKKK organizer, Vivian Wheatcraft, claimed it as the invisible weapon of Indiana politics. Within 24 hours, women’s “poison squads” could spread information throughout the state about who owned what and who sympathized with what.
Shopkeepers who joined the KKK or WKKK received placards for their store windows, TWK—Trade with a Klansman. Businesses with Jewish owners, ranging from large department stores to small shops and professional services, went bankrupt. “Jewish professionals and business owners fled communities in which they had lived for decades.”
Few rumors seemed too far-fetched, Gordon remarks. One, spread by the women’s Klan in North Manchester, spoke to “the immediacy of fears about a papal assault on Indiana.” The Pope, allegedly coming to take over the country, would arrive on a specific train. Stopped by about 1000 people, it had only one passenger car, and one passenger—a carpet salesman who finally convinced the crowd he wasn’t the Pope.
Protestants in Indiana commonly believed Catholics were arming themselves for a massacre, Gordon continues, stockpiling guns and ammunitions in basements of their churches. (Typically, Klan propaganda insisted The Knights of Columbus was the secret military of the Pope.) Each time a Catholic boy was born, rumors circulated, a rifle was buried under the local church for his later use to defend the coming papal empire [nu?].
Designed to initiate and cement members into the “Invisible Empire,” secret Klan rituals were quite intense and specific—with militaristic hierarchies, elaborate costume requirements, bizarre nomenclature—at funerals, initiation ceremonies, open air baptisms of Klan babies, “cradle rolls,” and even within regular local klavern meetings.
Highly choreographed marches and rallies—whose routes were often publicized in advance in local papers—were given “100 percent cooperation” in some communities. All stores, banks, shops and businesses were ordered to close at noon. In one instance, Gordon writes, “street lights were turned off to highlight burning and electrically lit crosses, and an airplane soared overhead dropping paper bombs that exploded to disgorge American flags suspended by tiny parachutes.”
Although robed participants were usually masked, many times while parading through a town, they actually removed their masks. Gordon adds, “It is also possible that many Klansmen adopted a playful, even kitsch attitude toward the occult rituals in which they indulged.” [Rather dubious, n’est-ce pas?]
Klan monster pageants were “wildly popular,” featuring amusements typically associated with state or county fairs, offering “an enticing break from the monotony of small town life.” Open to everyone, and attended in the thousands, sometimes the tens of thousands, these “Klonvocations” were located in fairgrounds, public parks and donated private fields: announced in newspapers, handbills, posters, and promoted well in advance by ministers.
Pageants were “carnivals, but never carnivalesque, offering respectable entertainment”—music provided by Jr. KKK bands—and participatory activities for people of all ages: rides, ball games and other team sports, races, contests with prizes (beauty, baby, fiddling, pie eating), food and speeches galore, hot air balloon rides, popular sing-alongs, as well as minstrel shows, with whites singing and dancing in blackface. (One WKKK klavern sponsored a women’s minstrel show and an Aunt Jemima Glee Club at a county fairground.)
At large Klan gatherings, WKKK members played traditional roles, naturally, often requiring massive amounts of labor. At a mammoth summer event in Kokomo, in 1923, the WKKK staffed a first aid station and food tables for an estimated 50 to 200-thousand women, men and children. The mountain of food included 6 tons of beef, hundreds of pounds of hamburger and hot dogs, 5000 cases of pop and near-beer, 250 pounds of coffee, and thousands of pies.
From all over the state, 800 men and women arrived in a single reserved train, wearing purple hats and Klan robes. A Jr. KKK boys’ band traveled 300 miles to perform, giving concerts along the way to publicize the event. The parade of masked Klan members was headed by a contingent of marching girls carrying huge American flags, a fife and drum corps, bands from other cities, and Klansmen on 12 foot-high stilts.
En route, the Kokomo spectacle provoked hearty applause: featuring 300 women in full Klan regalia, a male drum corps and a section of Klansmen on foot and horseback, a large fiery electric cross, fireworks, and many floats representing the ship of state and goddess of liberty. “A unique touch was given by a formation of Klanswomen who paraded in the shape of a cross…carrying red flashlights pointed heavenward and thus forming a fiery cross in the sky.”
The “coup de theatre,” as Blee puts it, was the Grand Dragon of Indiana, D.C. Stephenson, draped in a purple robe, disembarking from an airplane marked with the legend “Evansville KKK No. 1”—his fiery orations greeted by cheering supporters throwing money and jewelry on the stage. Both Gordon and Blee emphasize the KKKs canny and hair-raising use of spectacle in their “pageants,” such as a man leaping from a hundred-foot tower into a net, parachutists jumping out of airplanes, balloonists soaring overhead in huge decorated balloons.
Signifying power in unity—prefiguring, as Gordon puts it, “the kind of political entertainment which became popular in both the USSR and Nazi Germany in the 1930s: mass calisthenics and military parades”; she also mentions Busby Berkeley movies. [n.b. Guy Debord!]
Of course, hate-filled speeches were always in abundance. In Whitley County, for example, “the crowd applauded wildly as a Klan speaker harangued, ‘I want to put all the Catholics, Jews, and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft.’” Like any other public event, such speeches would be covered by local newspapers, typically terming them “eloquent.” A North Manchester newspaper, Blee notes, made only one comment on a local cross burning: it hoped future burnings wouldn’t be marred by excessive wind.
So what’s a BAD section without some portraits of the Wicked Ones?
HELEN JACKSON: “The Klan’s genius at self-promotion,” Kathleen Blee asserts, “was evident in Indiana lecture tours.” Klan newspapers described the “torture and abuse of Protestant girls in Roman Catholic hell holes.” Billed as an “escaped nun,” Helen Jackson was one of the most successful Klan emissaries, regaling sex-segregated audiences with salacious tales of her first-hand knowledge of infanticides and abortions forced on nuns by priests who’d fathered their babies. Appended to her tome were affidavits from other “escaped nuns.”
Jackson’s putative autobiography, Convent Cruelties, was sold at Klan rallies and advertised in their publications: filled with epithets like “moral leprosy” and “vendors of filth,” it offered a suggestive cartoon of a girl being whipped by nuns. Jackson allegedly witnessed the torture and imprisonment of other girls, and endured her own imprisonment by sadistic Catholic officials in convents in Michigan and Kentucky. Forbidden any contact with the outside world, subjected to torture by immersion in cold water, forced to drink vile substances, and ordered to work unceasingly at ironing and embroidery.
Helen Jackson frequently toured with L.J. King who’d already been making a living for years on the lecture circuit, billing himself as an “ex-Romanist.” Expanding on Jackson’s personal account (also for sex-segregated audiences), King featured highly detailed stories of debauchery, and grotesque tortures of nuns “poisoned, deluded, outraged, raped and murdered…to feed the lust of the adulterous bachelor, overfed, drunken priesthood of the Romish fake.” In one tale, nuns were confined in coffins filled with human excrement.
King described convent dungeons with bolted doors, iron-barred widows, and high massive walls, from which there was no escape except suicide. Even girls who avoided the terror of convent life weren’t safe. Priests, gambling, “drunk, stupid, or intolerant” supposedly attacked them in school dormitories, and in church sanctuaries.
James H. Madison in his The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland discusses opposition to these phony tales chiefly by the Indiana Catholic and Record, a statewide weekly, run by a “sharp-minded newspaper veteran,” the Irish-born editor, Joseph Patrick O’Mahony, teamed up with the Catholic Information Bureau. The paper also denounced Klan-Republican political candidates, castigating Democrats for their spinelessness, and perhaps opportunism. “Are they looking for support of the KKK?” he asked.
Another challenge came from the American Unity League newspaper, Tolerance: its pages replete with harsh criticism and satire mocking those it labeled “Koo Koos.” When thieves broke into Indianapolis Klan offices on April Fool’s Day 1923, departing with the names of 12,208 local Klan members, Tolerance began printing those names, business affiliations and addresses under headings such as “Who’s Who in Nightgowns.” Later the organization sold a separate printing of the roster for twenty-five cents, also naming Protestant ministers who’d become Klansmen.
An editor of Tolerance put a reporter on Helen Jackson’s case. “The first thing he learned,” Egan writes, was “Jackson was not an ex-nun, but a former prostitute. Nor was Helen Jackson her name.” However, publishing Klan membership lists backfired, he claims. “People looked to see who didn’t belong, and felt left out.”
ALMA BRIDWELL WHITE: Asking “How did white Protestant women come to identify their interests as women with the Klan’s racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic agenda?” Blee exemplifies this process with Bishop Alma Bridwell White: “an evangelical preacher, women’s suffragist, and influential Klan spokesperson.” White’s transformation from minister to Klan propagandist is detailed in voluminous autobiographical and political writings, two hundred hymns, and six edited periodicals.
At the age of sixteen, eager to escape her family in rural Kentucky, White tried to join the ministry. Since few Protestant denominations accepted female ministers, her pastor suggested she marry a minister and function as his wife. Her own preaching, though—described as “heavenly dynamite” by many followers—was so successful she soon began holding revival meetings in gold mining camps and rural areas throughout the West.
Reactions against Alma’s attacks on official Protestantism as “hopelessly apostate” led to leaving the Methodist church and organizing her own Pentecostal Union church (renamed the Pillar of Fire in 1917). Intensely involved in every detail of the POF, Alma traveled extensively, conducted missions, daily revival and afternoon prayer meetings. Preaching the literal accuracy of the Bible, she “declared war on ‘immoral modernism,’” including Protestant ministers who used their positions to conceal a lust for women, money, and tobacco.
The 1920s produced many female Pentecostal preachers “who could arouse zealous followers through their tent revivals.” In starting a new church, White was following the example of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, Linda Gordon notes, “although she labeled Eddy satanic.” White did compare herself favorably to Aimee Semple McPherson, the most popular evangelist of the time, who advertised her ten-thousand member congregation as the largest in the world; like McPherson, White established a radio station.
Remaining committed to Pentecostal style worship, White received considerable fame as the first female bishop of a Christian church in the U.S.—generating “fundamentalist ecstasy and hallelujah-shouting,” according to Time magazine. The POF “never grew to be a very large movement,” Blee writes, “but it eventually established seven divinity schools, two radio stations, a liberal arts college,” a printing press and two preparatory schools.
In the midst of her spectacular success, Alma’s marriage collapsed. Rather than treat this as a private situation, White publicized her marital troubles in a lengthy book of verse. In rhymed couplets [no less!] she painted a picture of a man, threated by the preaching success of his wife, turning to a cult to humiliate her. Discrimination between the sexes was utterly in opposition to the principles of the New Testament, she proclaimed.
“By the early 1910s Alma’s desire to promote women’s rights turned her efforts to a viciously anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic direction,” Blee writes. She viewed the Catholic Church as the major world force opposing women’s suffrage and gender equality. The only hope for pathetic victims of Romanist debauchery was the sympathy of other women using their newly won vote to “liberate” them.
White charged Jews with secretly financing the Catholic empire [see Spanish Inquisition] making immoral films, keeping theaters and other “vile places of amusement” open on Sunday, and procuring young Protestant women to work in movies, dance halls, sweatshops, department stores, and white slave dens.
Although never publicly announcing her membership in the Invisible Empire, White lectured across the country on their behalf, and published three books and a periodical, The Good Citizen, exclusively devoted to heralding the Klan’s contributions to Americanism. Embracing white supremacy as a way to fight racial integration and miscegenation, she also called for “the prevention of unwarranted strikes by foreign labor agitators.” She provoked white men’s fears of losing both racial and male superiority. Black men, White warned, were organizing societies in which all members pledged to marry white women.
At the same time, Linda Gordon points out, White continued to push for women’s equality. Reprinting the 1848 “Declaration of Sentiments” from the famous 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, and supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. Insisting women should be able to own their own property and legal domicile. Arguing for a woman’s entitlement to divorce in case of infidelity or a threat to personal safety, White denounced the practice of granting child custody to men in divorce cases.
Linda Gordon’s discussion of Alma Bridwell White concludes with: “There is nothing about a generic commitment to sex equality that inevitably includes commitment to equalities across racial, ethnic, religious or class lines.” Espousing gender equality, she speculates, may have “often been easier for conservative women, because their whole ideological package does not threaten those who benefit from other inequalities.” (Not surprisingly, she cites such [horrific] modern examples as Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin.)
Kathleen Blee presents a number of instructive, shorter vignettes, describing how various female leaders in Indiana were attracted to and participated in the WKKK:
ELLEN CURTIS: Ellen attended college, having been raised in a pioneer family in southern Indiana belonging to the Friends’ church which taught its children the value of education and culture. Increasingly isolated after marrying a farmer who’d been forced to drop out of school, when a WKKK klavern was organized in her rural county, its immediate appeal to Ellen was social, her daughter recalled. But “the seeds for Curtis’ attraction” were already in place. Her mother-in-law, an early and active suffragist, was rabidly anti-Catholic, referring to them as “bead rattlers.” Although her husband was a precinct committeeman, it was Klan activities which awoke Ellen’s interest and involvement in politics. After the Klan collapsed in the late 1920s, she seldom read political magazines or held positions differing from her husband.
ANN CARROLL: An outspoken racist leader in Indianapolis for years prior to the advent of the Klan, at one level, the model of respectable civic involvement: a charter member of the Indianapolis chapter of the League of Women Voters, a member of the Methodist church, Center Civic League, Rebekah Lodge and other associations. Carroll was the force behind, and president of, Indianapolis’ White Supremacy League. As leader of the powerful Muncie County klavern, when the state’s WKKK collapsed, she ran unsuccessfully for the Indiana state House of Representatives as an unaffiliated right-wing candidate.
LILLIAN SEDWICK: A much less prominent figure than Daisy Barr, Sedwick paralleled Barr’s entrance into the Klan through the temperance movement. Receiving her political education in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for which she served as state superintendent, country director of the young people’s branch, and local president of its northeastern union, Sedwick was also involved in the Methodist church and in multiple civic organizations [names too tedious to repeat by now, except for a new one to me—the Betsy Ross Federation] Throughout her involvement with the Klan, she maintained a simultaneous career in electoral politics.
Before being elected president of the Marion County WKKK, Sedwick had attained a seat on the Indianapolis board of school commissioners, running on the United Protestant ticket, a slate openly supported by the local Klan. In the majority faction and the only female member of the school board, Sedwick gained control of the board’s instruction committee, allowing her great influence over the appointment of county schoolteachers.
Three years earlier, the school board had voted to establish separate high schools for black and white students, and had redrawn district boundaries. Sedwick, the Klan and its affiliated racist groups, like the White Supremacy League [good thing we didn’t step in it!] and Indianapolis Federation of Community Clubs, intensified racial segregation of public schools: demanding they all be completely segregated by race, and instruction in the New Testament be made mandatory in public schools.
NANCY TAYLOR: A Quaker minister, Taylor freely acknowledged she was motivated by the money offered to become a lecture-minister for the WKKK. Little in Taylor’s background, Blee comments, would suggest this path for the first social worker in her small town. A successful local businessman, her husband paid her expenses to travel around the country on behalf of parentless children. Appointed to the state board of charities for her work with orphaned and deserted children, Taylor was an advocate of women’s suffrage and temperance. For several years, she combined social welfare and Klan activities. When the KKK collapsed, she continued her work for charities.
[tinker, tailor, soldier, spy—racist, bigot, opportunist, isolate…naif?...proto-fascists, oy vey]
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In the late 1920s, uber-powerful Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, the ultimate demagogue, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the abduction, grisly rape and murder of 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer, a popular social worker and state election official. Invited to his mansion, she was drugged and forced to accompany Stephenson to Chicago.
On the train, he ripped off Madge’s clothing, raped and brutalized her, chewing and biting her tongue, breasts, back, legs and ankles. Linda Gordon comments, “His biting was not only spooky but a repeated behavior, suggesting serious derangement.”
Near Chicago, Madge was taken off the train and moved to a hotel where she received no medical treatment. Managing to leave briefly, she purchased and swallowed bichloride of mercury tablets, then used to treat syphilis, despite its extreme toxicity. Finally released to her parents from Stephenson’s mansion where she also received no medical attention, Madge recited the story that caused him to be charged with mayhem, rape, kidnapping and conspiracy.
Timothy Egan’s book thoroughly describes both the lurid details--the late night parties and orgies at Stephenson’s mansion, “bacchanals of bad taste”--and the laborious judicial proceedings of this case. “The evenings started out classy. White-gloved servants handed out drinks of all kinds and finger foods.” Troupers from musical reviews and small orchestras played in the highly ornate ballroom to an elite group of bankers, judges, politicians, ministers.
As the night wore on, “Middle-aged men of privilege could be seen on corner couches in the embrace of somebody not their wives.” Nude women would pop out of a cake, carried in by “four buff looking men.” A circulating photographer took pictures, to be used later. [J Edgar Hoover, move over!]
Egan describes one session when Stephenson dressed up as a “mythic satyr—his chest and sizable white belly bare, an animal’s tale pinned to his behind…Naked women designated as wood nymphs pranced around” in a circle, as Stephenson “whipped them with a light lash.” This went on until a single nude was still standing; “she would be the prize for the night.”
After the Madge Oberholtzer trial began, a charge of second-degree murder was added. Two weeks after her death, five hundred women rallied outside the courthouse, demanding Stephenson not be released on bail. His legal team “had insinuated through their press contacts that Madge was no paragon of virtue,” Egan comments. But her dying declaration in 1925 swayed the jury, and Stephenson was sentenced to life imprisonment.
One of the creators of The Fiery Cross, Stephenson had become a fan of Benito Mussolini. Even though he regularly disparaged “dagoes,” Egan notes, Stephenson considered Il Duce somewhat of a mentor. This Grand Dragon was frequently heard to assert: “I am the law in Indiana.”
So he was expecting a pardon from the governor, who Stephenson helped elect. When it never materialized, he began to incriminate fellow Klan-affiliated officials: including the governor, Edward Jackson, the state’s attorney general, the chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, Indianapolis mayor and six members of the city council.
Stephenson employed “the state’s finest defense attorneys,” for his trial, as James H. Madison enumerates in his The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland. Initially, finding a judge and jury proved difficult. Only after 260 citizens were called did the court seat 12 jurors, all men. Several judges refused to serve, but eventually one agreed: a Republican, Mason and Methodist, but known as unfavorable to the Klan.
The prosecution presented testimony that Oberholtzer had died not from poison but from infections on her breast caused by the biting. Apparently, the Grand Dragon’s drunkenness, sadism, and reputation for harassing and attacking women “was legendary in Klan circles.” Earlier, he’d pled guilty to indecent exposure when caught with his pants down in his Cadillac with a young woman.
Another young woman had told police he’d locked her in a room during a party at his house, knocked her down, and attempted to rape her. The Evansville KKK, Stephenson’s home klavern, had secretly found him guilty of “gross dereliction”—banishing him officially, though not in fact, from Klan membership.
Pardoned in 1956, on condition he leave the state, Stephenson was again arrested, and re-incarcerated five years later in Indiana, for trying to force a sixteen-year-old girl into his car. He was 70.
By trial’s end, the Indiana Klan, once the strongest in the Invisible Empire, precipitously collapsed (and the Indiana Times won a Pulitzer for its investigative reporting). By 1928, only 4000 in the state claimed membership, down from a high of almost half a million. Nationally, the KKK went into sharp decline.
But the Epilogue of Timothy Egan’s book also posits: “It’s entirely possible that the Klan fell apart not just because of scandals and high-level hypocrisy, but also because it had achieved all of its major goals—Prohibition, disenfranchisement of African Americans, slamming the door on immigrants whose religion or skin color didn’t match that of the majority.” Long after Stephenson’s demise, he adds, “the ideas that his followers promoted while marching in masks behind a flaming cross prevailed as the law of the land.”