A Fever in the Heartland, page 15
“I was expecting that he would make, at least, an inquiry or two about the state of mind and condition of the twelve million Negro citizens of the United States,” Johnson wrote, “but it was clear that Mr. Coolidge knew absolutely nothing about the colored people.”
Johnson had been trying, without success, to get Congress to make lynching a federal crime. The NAACP had compiled a grim record of these executions. They found that Black citizens had been hanged for “talking back to whites,” and “not driving out of the road” to let white motorists pass. Among the victims over a thirty-year span were more than fifty Black women. The nation was at a hinge moment, he felt. “At no time since the days following the Civil War had the Negro been in a position where he stood to make greater gain or sustain greater loss in status.” For more than fifty years, Black voters had been the most reliable Republicans. It was time for a Republican president to do something in return—even if all it amounted to was a statement of disgust over the reach of the Ku Klux Klan.
“Colored people throughout the United States, but especially in the North, are waiting for an unequivocal statement from you as head of the Republican Party on the Ku Klux Klan,” Johnson wrote Coolidge. The president ignored his plea. Still, Johnson would not give up. With each passing day that Coolidge remained silent, Johnson alerted the press, keeping pressure on the White House. If Coolidge continued to shun him, Johnson was ready to make the larger move—using the leverage of the Black vote to show politicians at the highest level that they could not take African Americans for granted.
In Muncie, George Dale would not give up his part of the fight. After his time in prison, after getting assaulted twice by Klan thugs, his family threatened, he continued to tangle with the mighty octopus controlling Indiana. Dale was nearly bankrupt, his credit no longer good at the grocery store, his paper running on fumes. He’d been forced to sell his home to stay afloat. In Muncie, the “Constitution had ceased to function,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, after the Klan had established a “super-government” not based on the rule of law. But so long as Dale still had an ounce of ink to spill, he spilled it on the Kluxers, as he called them. His latest target was Daisy Barr. Mother was unassailable going into 1924, just like her mentor Stephenson. Women of the Ku Klux Klan had grown to more than a million members nationwide.
Taking a page from Steve’s book, she had cut a side deal with Imperial Wizard Evans that paid her $4 for every initiation fee from a new member of the women’s Klan. That, plus a big part of the female robe sales. Word of her windfall got out after she was sued by a rival Klanswoman and investigated before a grand jury for embezzlement. Dale broke the news: Mother’s morality campaign was a big grift—like the Klan itself. The Muncie editor blasted out a series of headlines on how Daisy Barr had fleeced women in the Midwest. She became a millionaire, he wrote, as “an imperial nighty peddler.” He made fun of her in a front-page poem:
Perhaps you think that Daisy’s flighty
But she got it all at ten per nighty
A million bucks she got, ’tis said
And gave to the wizard nary a red.
At the same time, Rabbi Morris Feuerlicht, who’d been rallying the small community of Indiana Jews to fight back, went after Barr and other anti-Semites. He was fed up with attempts by the Klan to make life unbearable for Jews—from petty shaming to “brazen terrorist tactics,” as he called the burning crosses of intimidation. The Klan led a successful boycott of a hit film playing in Indianapolis theaters, Potash and Perlmutter, because the leading characters were Jews. Worst of all were the continued campaigns to force Jewish-owned retailers out of business. In Muncie, the rabbi and the editor joined forces, backing a leading lawyer to take on the Klan judge in an upcoming election. But that judge, Dale’s enemy Clarence Dearth, made a direct appeal to Indiana’s worst instincts in the campaign:
“Do you want a miserable Jew to sit in judgment upon you?” he said. The answer was no—the Klan judge won easily.
Feuerlicht was more successful against Barr. The state had proposed building a hospital in Indianapolis for exclusive use by white Protestants; it would be named the Daisy Barr Home and guided by a board of directors appointed by Women of the Ku Klux Klan. As the first Jewish member of the Board of State Charities, Rabbi Feuerlicht led a public campaign to prevent it from going ahead. The furor he generated was strong enough to stop the Daisy Barr Home before a single brick was laid. That defeat, Dale’s constant ridicule, and revelations about how much Mother made from every woman she ushered into the Klan sent Barr into retreat in 1924. She left the state the next year and never returned.
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The Klan resistance missed one of the biggest stories during the Empire’s rule over Indiana. Stephenson and his dutiful secretary of state, Ed Jackson, had been plotting a move on the governor, Warren T. McCray, ever since the party on the yacht in the summer of 1923. McCray was a wealthy farmer and cattle breeder, but by 1923 he was broke and deep in debt after the farm recession. He used his leverage as governor to borrow money and dig himself a deeper hole, one a grand jury would soon be looking into. Jackson was the odds-on favorite to replace McCray in 1924. But why not get something from the wounded incumbent before he left? With his nose for exploiting human weakness, Steve cooked up a scheme to bribe the governor with $10,000 in cash. What he wanted was simple: a Klan district attorney in Marion County, the state’s most populous.
“Ten grand is a lot of money,” said one insider after the Grand Dragon outlined the plan.
“I know what I’m talking about,” Steve replied. “I have an organization in this state so complete that I can tell you today what any man you can name does tomorrow.”
Stephenson sent the secretary of state to the governor’s office with a suitcase stuffed with cash. But McCray, soon to be indicted for embezzlement, showed surprising steel.
“You can take your money back to your office, Ed,” he told Jackson. He’d lost everything, he said. He was a ruined man, destitute, likely bound for prison. “But I will never surrender my integrity. Take your money and get out.”
Instead of naming a Klan prosecutor, the governor appointed William H. Remy, a graduate of DePauw University and Indiana Law School, a war veteran. Remy had planned to be a book editor. But after his discharge from the army, he visited the centers of publishing in the East and didn’t like what he saw. “On Christmas Eve I went to Boston,” he wrote in his account of the times, “and hardly a word of English was spoken.” He said Slavs, Jews from Hungary and Russia, Poles, Italians, and “many Irish” were pouring into the country after the war. He struggled with his own feelings. Back home in Indiana, people who were “predominantly Protestant, white, gentile and native born” had developed “a great resentment” against the aspiring new Americans. He understood why they joined the Ku Klux Klan—they were deeply afraid of change. But after seeing the world beyond Indiana, Remy had resolved to live with it. He was thirty-two when appointed prosecutor. The Klan quickly tried to co-opt him. Stephenson sent the party chairman to visit Remy, a fellow Republican, with a list of Klan-approved lawyers to appoint as deputy prosecutors. Remy wouldn’t even look at the list.
“I am going to drive you out of politics in Marion County,” Remy told the Klan emissary. Well then, this upstart wouldn’t last long in office, the chairman replied. Remy was no longer welcome at party headquarters or party meetings, and certainly not at any of the lavish parties at the mansion in Irvington. He had no future in Indiana. Stephenson would see to that.
14.
The Klan on Top
1924
By mid-1924, seemingly nothing could slow the march of the Invisible Empire across the United States. In cities big and small, North and South, the blazing cross had become as much a part of life as the soda fountain and the barbershop pole. More than 10,000 turned out for a Klan picnic in Colorado. The Klan terrorized Jewish, Italian, Black, and Latino neighborhoods in Denver, and could count on brothers under the sheets in law enforcement to avoid arrest. “They paid ten dollars to hate someone,” said a Denver judge, “and they were determined to get their money’s worth.” Thousands flocked to a Klan rally in Washington state, where a speaker said the order was now “the biggest, best and strongest movement in American life.” In Kansas, two years after the governor had warned of “the curse that rises out of unrestricted passions of men governed by religious intolerance and racial hatred,” Klan membership hit an all-time high of 60,000 people. There, the Klan vandalized Catholic cemeteries, threatened to attack Black families who moved into white neighborhoods, and got a high school instructor fired for teaching a class in jazz dancing.
For Indiana, Stephenson wanted to prove that the Klan could win an election without masking its intent. Thanks to his horse thief brigade, the Grand Dragon now had files on nearly every voter and politician. These dossiers were given to the Klan’s county leaders, who made house visits pushing the hate slate. The first big test of the Machine’s ability to control the state was in the May primary. For governor, of course, the Klan’s man was the Klansman—Ed Jackson. But another Republican, Indianapolis mayor Lew Shank, was rallying what remained of the anti-Klan forces in his party.
The Klansman won the primary in a rout. There was no subterfuge, no hidden message; it was all out in the open—a straight choice, “for or against the Klan,” as the Indianapolis Times wrote.
“It seems the people want Klan rule,” said Shank, the defeated Republican. “So we’ll give it to them.”
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Nationwide, when members of the secretive society opened their daily newspapers they found that their prayers to a discriminatory God had been answered. The last of the big three issues that had driven membership to unprecedented heights was resolved in the Klan’s favor. Congress passed an immigration measure that slammed the door on those who could never meet the Klan’s definition of one hundred percent American. Strict quotas on shunned countries slashed new arrivals from eastern and southern Europe to a bare trickle, shutting out Jews and olive-skinned Catholics. The new law made it impossible for someone from Japan to come to America legally, and tightened the already harsh ban on Chinese. Africa was shut out as well. After all the speeches and essays about eugenics and human imperfections, after the crusades against the criminality of the mongrel hordes, the hooded order got everything it wanted. The National Origins Act of 1924, a Klan-blessed master design for the future of America, passed in the House by an overwhelming margin and sailed through the Senate with only six dissenting votes. Though historic moments often slip by without notice at the time, this huge plot point in the national narrative was marked by a banner headline in the New York Times:
AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO AN END
The law’s quota system was based on the census of 1890, before most southern European and Polish Catholics, and Jewish refugees from pogroms in the East, had crossed the Atlantic. As it happened, the best way to build a wall was to turn back the clock. America would be replenished with people who looked like the ethnic face of Indiana—a blueprint for a bloodstream. The effect was immediate and dramatic. In 1921, nearly a quarter million Italians had fled their country for the United States. By 1925, that number fell by 90 percent. About 200,000 Russian Jews arrived on American shores in 1921. A year after passage of the Immigration Act, only 7,000 were let into the country. Greeks went from 46,000 in one year to a few hundred. Left behind in Poland were 3.5 million Jews who would be targeted with mass execution in little more than a decade. Also among those denied entry because of restrictions on Jews was the family of Anne Frank.
The law would shape the face of America for much of the twentieth century. Though the Klan took credit for “wielding a mighty influence” in Congress, they had plenty of help from people who never took the secret oath. Voting with the Klan was the easy thing to do, for the backlash against immigration had reached a point where a majority in office was ready to close the gates.
Now it was on to the presidential election. The Invisible Empire would be anything but hidden as the two major parties nominated their candidates. A Klansman in the White House was perhaps out of reach for now. Stephenson’s personal timeline called for him to run in 1928. But a Klan insider for vice president was possible. Steve invited a few of his favorite politicians to join him on the Reomar II, sailing from Toledo to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. They were met by a delegation of nearly sixty members of the hooded order, headed by Imperial Wizard Evans. He was flying high just before Time magazine put him on the cover, dubbing the Republican national gathering the “Kleveland Konvention.” Steve’s pick for veep was his loyal supplicant, Senator James Watson of Indiana. But when Jewish, Catholic, and Black delegates got wind of this plan, they threatened to upset the quiet coronation of Coolidge for a second term. The nomination of Sunny Jim was tabled.
Both parties needed the millions of voters who veiled themselves under pointed hoods. But should the Klan’s enemies—chief among them, Republican Black voters—peel away, that could upset the electoral balance. Johnson’s threat was real. Once again, the head of the NAACP demanded a condemnation of the mass of swollen malignancy that was the Ku Klux Klan of 1924, something Stephenson and Evans would never stand for. The party leaders stood with the hooded order, killing an attempt to pass an anti-Klan plank in the Republican platform before it ever got to a vote. This move, and whispered pledges that Coolidge would not attack the Klan, was assurance enough. Steve sailed back to his yacht’s safe harbor in mid-June feeling satisfied, despite his ever-mounting tensions with Evans. They were no longer speaking to each other. Stephenson would try to win every major office in Indiana. Then he would plot his own path around Evans, to the Senate and beyond.
The Democrats were another story. The Klan nearly brought down the national convention, held in the smelly, airless torpor of New York City’s Madison Square Garden in early summer. The Invisible Empire arrived with the most powerful single bloc in the party—nearly a third of all delegates. And they were not a confederation of Southerners. The fastest-growing faction, comprising 40 percent of all Klan members, came from just three states—Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, Stephenson’s turf.
In New York, which Evans had called “the most un-American city in the United States,” the Imperial Wizard set up shop on the fifteenth floor of the McAlpin Hotel, in a five-room suite. The Klan’s preferred Democratic ticket was William McAdoo, the former Treasury secretary and Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, paired with Senator Ralston from Indiana. But Ralston, who weighed more than three hundred pounds, was clearly not well. The Klan was united against New York governor Al Smith, a Catholic who fought Prohibition and was favored by many Northern Democrats. Under no circumstances would the Empire allow Smith, “from Jew York City,” in the Klan’s taunt, to be the nominee.
Before the actual balloting, the Klan had to contend with Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama, a moderate man of the South whose father had fought for the Union in the Civil War. Underwood put forth a plank in the party platform, similar to the one that never came to a vote in Cleveland, condemning the Klan’s philosophy. The language was simple: the Democratic Party would pledge to oppose efforts by any organization to “interfere with the religious liberty or political freedom of any citizen or . . . body of citizens because of religion, birthplace or racial origin.” Yet affirming this basic statement of American principles turned the convention upside down.
Nearly all the delegates were white, in keeping with party rules that prohibited Black Democrats from attending the national convention in an official capacity until this year. But there was no brotherhood of race at the 1924 gathering. The anti-Klan faction chanted, “Ku-Ku McAdoo!” Fistfights broke out. Small rockets were lit and aimed at rivals. The cops were called to break up brawls, and firemen rushed inside to keep Madison Square Garden from going up in flames. As a show of support, 20,000 Klansmen in full white regalia marched with torches one night in New Jersey. They strung up a straw effigy of Al Smith and beat it to a pulp before setting it afire.
For one long day that went into the early dawn hours, Democrats debated the merits of the Klan on the muggy floor of the Garden. William Jennings Bryan, the populist and three-time presidential nominee of the party, spoke out against the resolution. When a vote was finally taken, the Klan prevailed by a single digit, getting 542 against the resolution condemning Klan values to 541 for it. That was a day, said Will Rogers, “when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced.”
The convention was a broken mess. Nobody could agree on a candidate. Half the delegates loathed the other half. McAdoo led in the early voting, but without the needed majority. Other candidates rose and fell, among them Senator Ralston, the Klan toady. At one point he got 196 votes for the nomination. Some delegates went home, unable to pay their hotel bills. It took 103 ballots and sixteen days—the longest political convention by a major party in American history—to arrive at a candidate. At last, an unassuming former ambassador to the United Kingdom, John W. Davis of West Virginia, was named the standard-bearer. He would be crushed in November. It didn’t matter to the Klan. Its members left New York feeling smug and victorious. They were on a roll. They’d shown they could nearly bring down one of the two major political parties.
