When some horrific act of hatred, intolerance, prejudice, exploitation, or violence occurs in this country, someone almost always says that the atrocity is “not American”; it’s not “who we are.” A friend of mine who has read deeply in American history rejoins that the Panglossians have a limited understanding of America and its history, for Americans have done atrocious things regularly throughout our history. My friend, however, is not truly surprised by the glib comments. He knows that standard American mythology seldom incorporates the bad from our history. For example, few of us were aware of the events depicted in David Grann’s riveting 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which has now been made into a powerful film by Martin Scorsese. I won’t be a spoiler and go into many details of what happened for those who may see the movie or read the book (now back on the bestseller lists), but both the book and movie recount how Oklahoma Osage Indians in the 1920s became rich from oil discovered under their lands. However, a sickening conspiracy of murders (at least, twenty and perhaps hundreds) arose so that whites could control the wealth.
Reviewers praised the book as a compelling narrative of forgotten American history, but that is misleading. If the history was forgotten, it was forgotten by few of us because few of us had ever learned of these acts in the first place. We don’t teach the bad things in our history much.
At almost the same time as the Osage murders (which, of course, were meant to be hidden), a mass movement based on bigotry, fueled by greed and egotism, and inviting violence was also burgeoning in the country. Even though it was public, few know of it today.
The movement was the middle incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Most of us are aware that the Klan arose after Reconstruction to suppress the constitutional rights and other freedoms of Blacks. And we know that KKK resurfaced in the Civil Rights Era after World War II. Fewer of us know, however, of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.
The early twentieth century KKK was different from the post-Civil-War incarnation. It was not limited to the South, and it expanded its hate. The nineteenth century KKK acted primarily against Blacks, but the early twentieth-century Klan targeted Catholics, Jews, Asians on the Pacific Coast, Mexicans in the Southwest, and immigrants everywhere in addition to Blacks. With this expansiveness, the Klan, professing Americanism, pronounced hatred for one in three Americans. They loved America, as some today also proclaim, but only a segment of it. (Of course, even without a Klan behind them, Americans have often acted violently against minorities and immigrants. For example, in1891 eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans.)
This 1920s Klan entered the political arena, and it had both state and nationwide power and influence. It opposed the teaching of evolution because that science implies that all people have a common origin. This KKK movement supported eugenics and mandatory sterilizations that became law in many places. (The eugenics movement in the U.S. was widespread and influential, but it had some trouble reconciling religious faith and American heroes with eugenics. Daniel Okrent in The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generation of Jew, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America reports my favorite mental gymnastics from these supposedly principled people: A eugenicist concluded that Jesus was not Jewish, and that Columbus was Nordic.) The Klan sought to prevent immigration from “non-Nordic” countries, and it blessed the National Origins Act of 1924 which restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The law, with its Klan support, passed overwhelmingly in the House and garnered only six dissenting votes in the Senate. The Klan’s national power was perhaps most visible on August 8, 1925, when the KKK held a parade in Washington with 50,000 marchers. An estimated 250,000 spectators watched.
This new Klan’s power was most evident not in the South but in the midwestern state of Indiana, as documented in Timothy Egan’s excellent book, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. (The 1920s Klan also controlled Oregon, whose legislature passed laws to outlaw Catholic schools, a measure that was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Eighty years earlier, when still a territory, Oregon forbade all Blacks within its lands.) Every level of the Indiana government was run by Klan members, and that history, although it may not be widely known, seems familiar.
The movement was encouraged and often led by evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant clergy. It should not surprise anyone that American religion and hate can go together.
The KKK members were wedded to guns and other weapons. An observer of Klan meetings reported “weapons were passed among Klansman as freely as illegal hooch. I have never met a Klan member who didn’t have a gun, a knife, or often a blackjack.”
The leader of the evangelically blessed, gun-loving, America-first Indiana KKK was D.C. Stephenson. Perhaps Stephenson truly believed in the causes he espoused, but he also saw a way to make money — and lots of it — from the Klan. He got a cut of each $10 fee that state Klan members paid, and he was the supplier of the sheets and conical (comical?) hats each Klan member bought. In a few years, Stephenson was rich, owning fabulous homes, cars, and boats.
What is most striking today is not just the grifting — that, of course, has modern parallels — but the methods he used to expand the Klan. Egan writes that D.C. Stephenson “had the touch and the charm, the dexterity with words and the drive. He understood people’s fear and their need to blame others for their failures. He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with a conviction.” Stephenson could tell lies, lies, and more lies, and through the lies he attracted crowds, admirers, and followers thereby gaining power. In short order, the Klan under Stephenson controlled town after town and the Indiana state government.
Moreover, Stephenson expected that he, not the Klan, would control Indiana. Stephenson took credit for every KKK member who was elected and concluded that those officials owed him a personal loyalty that outweighed governmental duties, an oath to the Constitution, or even Klan “principles.” As a prosecutor later said, “Stephenson forced a super oath on public officials. This super oath was greater than the oath of constitutional authority.” Loyalty to an individual that supersedes fealty to sworn duties then as now is always a great threat to democracy. Egan states that Stephenson’s Indiana experience reveals that a truly representative government of the people and for the people cannot be taken for granted. Instead, it demonstrated that “democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.”
Stephenson’s downfall came from a criminal conviction, not one for corrupting government or unconstitutionally trying to retain power. Instead, he was convicted for murder and rape coming out of his sexual perversities, which were well known to many. Even so, in what also sounds familiar today, Stephenson’s followers “believed the trial was a hoax and witch hunt.” However, the heroes of the day, the twelve average men of the jury, knew otherwise, and Stephenson was sentenced to life in prison.
Stephenson may have been a charismatic person, but he could not have created a Klan that controlled a midwestern state unless he was tapping into a wellspring that already existed. Timothy Egan asks, “What if the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode it? A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s still there, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland.”
There was a strain of hatred then as there is now, but there have also been other American traits fueling dangerous mass movements. One is a search for a scapegoat. Although conservative groups may pronounce a belief in personal responsibility, that is often a personal responsibility for people other than themselves. Instead, as Dara Horn writes in People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, “People will do absolutely anything to blame their problems on others.” Somehow blaming Blacks and immigrants, Jews and Mexicans makes many people feel able to explain the shortcomings in their own lives.
These conservative movements tap into hatred and scapegoats, but they also ride on a particular fear, a fear of change. John M. Barry also writing about the 1920s in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America says that the KKK’s target was not so much Blacks—no politician at the time was arguing for equality—but change. Barry points out that American populism has always had an “us” and “them”—not only an enemy above but also below. That dynamic remains.
Interwoven with the fear of change is the myth that some earlier time was idyllic, and we must return to that period by eliminating aspects of present America. These Americans often deride global influences, but it’s ironic that they fit into an international conservative trend. As Peter Hessler writes in The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, such a movement “is like the modern Islamists, whose revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt always envisioned a return to some distant, purer past.” Make America Great Again seeks a similar mythical path.
Almost anything bad that happens in this country out of hate, envy, insecurity, or greed has had too many precedents in our history. We may say that they are as American as apple pie. We could also say they are as American as bigoted violence.
