A Fever in the Heartland, page 3
The national Klan had sent a recruiter, Joe Huffington, to Indiana in 1921. The goal was to establish a base in the North. As one of his first hires, Stephenson made $12 a week on the Empire’s payroll, but that arrangement wouldn’t last for long. He joined the Klan because he saw it as a ticket to the top. Small thinking was for losers. Steve wanted the Klan of the North to rise up and come out of the shadows, to show its face and bask in the daylight. The Knights of the Invisible Empire had nothing to hide and much to share.
Stephenson set up a base of operations in the velvety interior of the Vendome Hotel, his residence in Evansville, with its wood-paneled walls, arched entrance, gold-plated spittoons beside black leather chairs. The Vendome was just a few blocks one way from the dockside traffic of the Ohio River, a few steps the other way from the seat of power at the Vanderburgh County Courthouse, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece. Most of the town was white, native born, and Protestant, like Indiana itself. That was the first thing that got Steve’s attention not long after he dropped off his suitcases at the Vendome. The other thing was how wide-open the old riverfront burg was for the right kind of people, the ideal setup for Mr. D. C. Stephenson. The fresh-hatched local Klan pledged to clean up all the rot in Evansville even as Steve reveled in it. For those who liked their hypocrisy cut with pleasure, the forbidden vices of a Midwest under moral lockdown were gifts he could bestow.
Sitting flat on a wide bend of the waterway that flows from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi, Evansville was the most segregated city in Indiana, and the third largest, with 85,000 people. Window signs in the business district proclaimed “We Cater to White Trade Only.” The Ohio was thick with industrial sludge and the air was heavy with foul-smelling pollutants. On summer days when the sky was hot and wet, when all of Evansville seemed to sweat, Kentucky, just across the river, was barely visible through the haze.
A mob with clubs had chased a group of immigrant miners out of town in 1921. The whiff of socialism was enough to inflame the attackers. Irish laborers had helped to build the city; refugees of the Great Famine dug the ditch that would become the Wabash and Erie Canal, largest in the United States, connecting Evansville to Lake Erie, 460 miles to the north. But because of their religion, they were second-class citizens in the caste system that the Klan exploited in Evansville.
The 6,000 or so Black residents were forced into tenements and shacks in Baptisttown, a shank of the city without electricity or indoor plumbing. They were constantly harassed. Memories of a 1903 slaughter—twelve Blacks murdered and four saloons burned to the ground by a white mob—still haunted. The Carnegie Library, supposedly open to all as a springboard to the world’s possibilities, was for whites only. When a white college student working at a gas station during his summer break offered to clean the windshields of Black motorists, he was scolded by the owner. Black people in southern Indiana were not to be served, nor seen in mixed company—an attitude certainly not limited to Evansville.
“The Negro is among us and the race should be encouraged to progress, but that path should never lead to social mingling,” warned the Indianapolis Star in 1921.
Black innovators were the force behind a burst of cultural creativity, from the poetry of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance to the crossover dance craze of the Charleston to jazz, the soundtrack of the age—“the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” as Hughes called it. But daily life for millions was a reminder that the American promise was not for them. This was even harder to accept for 200,000 Black soldiers who had returned from military service in France and felt entitled to be full citizens. “The great war in Europe, its recoil on America, the ferment in the United States, all conspired to break up the stereotyped conception of the Negro’s place,” wrote James Weldon Johnson, the literary polymath, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Cities erupted in violent attacks on Black property and life. And as vigilante executions by a hangman’s noose continued without sanction in the South, Congress could not muster enough votes to pass an anti-lynching law.
Evansville was ripe for the Klan, the perfect place to plant the flag in the North for the second coming of the Invisible Empire. And D. C. Stephenson was the ideal missionary. He had magnetism, unbridled energy, and a talent for bundling a set of grievances against immigrants, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Blacks into a simple unified pitch that made sense of a fast-changing America still dazed by the Great War. Not long after Stephenson joined the hooded order in early 1921, he would eclipse the man who hired him.
“All my friends, a crowd of fine young men, belonged,” he recalled, portraying himself as an innocent tugged along by social pressure. “They kept after me, and explained to me that the Klan was not an organization which took Negroes out, cut off their noses and threw them into the fire.”
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Alex Johnson was a bellhop and elevator operator at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. It was a swanky place with an elite clientele. He was quick with a compliment. Too quick for some concerned citizens, who spread word that the young Black man was in love with a white woman. On the first day of April in 1921, about the same time that Stephenson swore his oath to the Klan and got his robe and hood, Johnson was kidnapped from his home, gagged, bound, blindfolded, and dragged to the Trinity River bottoms. A noose was tied around his neck. He was whipped, twenty-five lashes. The letters KKK were branded onto his forehead with acid. Half naked, bloodied, and semiconscious, he was dumped at the doorstep of the Adolphus.
The attack on the bellhop was led by a Klan leader from Dallas, Hiram W. Evans, a blank-faced dentist with dark eyes that looked like those of a snowman’s ovals of coal. A native of Alabama, Evans studied at Vanderbilt, then set up a practice in Texas, married, and had three children. But the settled life of a family man pulling teeth for profit was not enough for him. Evans smoldered with rage at the changing face of the United States. To Evans, Nordic whites were the only true Americans and the most advanced humans on earth. All others—“Dagoes, Hunkies, Micks, Slavs, Slopes, Kikes,” in his vernacular shorthand—were filth and scum. The Nordic race, by which he meant British of Anglo-Saxon blood, Teutonic Germans, and descendants of Vikings from the north, was responsible for civilization. He hated immigrants. He hated Catholics. He hated the sexual freedom of the Jazz Age, in film and in smoky clubs. Above all, he hated race-mixing; physical love, in particular, was abhorrent to him. He urged every state in the nation to “make sex between a white and a black person a crime” punishable by lengthy prison sentences.
Under Evans, the Dallas Klan took off, quickly becoming a national force. These hooded Texans practiced violence and politics in equal measure. A Black doctor who’d been seen with a white woman was castrated. A Jewish tailor was beaten and told to leave town. One month after the attack on the bellhop, the Klan held a large parade in downtown Dallas, marching with banners that read “Pure Womanhood, Our Little Girls Must Be Protected” and “One Hundred Percent American.” But the biggest breakthrough was the election of the first open Klansman as a United States senator, Earl B. Mayfield, in the fall of 1922. With considerable help from Evans, he swept the state.
And the abduction and near killing of Alex Johnson? “As I understand the case, the Negro was guilty of doing something which he had no right to do,” said Sheriff Dan Harston. “There will be no investigation by my department. He no doubt deserved it.” Harston was not only the top lawman of Dallas County, he was a Klansman in good standing. A local judge weighed in as well. “If enough people hear of this it may do some good,” said Judge T. A. York. That was the Klan’s intent—to publicize its own violent crimes. Evans had even invited a reporter from the Dallas Times-Herald to witness a felony in action. The headline of his story was: bellhop accused of insult to woman.
Evans could oversee an atrocity of that magnitude, boast about it in the papers, and never go to jail, because the Klan of the early 1920s felt invincible—an extraordinary change of fortune from a half century earlier.
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The presidential election of 1876 brought the end of Grant’s control over renegade elements of the South. The Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote but fell short in the Electoral College because three states were in dispute. The courts handed the mess off to Congress, which appointed a commission to decide the outcome. As a bargaining chip to get him over the line, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from obstructionist Southern states. In return, he won the highest office in the land by a single electoral vote. His presidency marked the close of Reconstruction and ushered in nearly ninety years of disenfranchisement and segregation for millions of American citizens. Shortly thereafter, Tennessee passed the nation’s first Jim Crow law, separating passengers on rail cars by skin color. Starting with Mississippi, ten of the eleven states of the former Confederacy rewrote their constitutions. They made no secret of their intention.
“The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be—with the Anglo-Saxon race,” said the president of Alabama’s constitutional convention. Among the tools of suppression were tests that asked such questions as how many windows were in the White House.
With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people. In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right. Restaurants and grocery stores, drinking fountains and swimming pools, theaters and bars, buses and trains, playgrounds and schoolhouses, even phone booths—all were segregated by race. The Supreme Court backed the electoral disenfranchisement and the lower-class citizenship of millions, finding novel ways around the civil rights amendments to the Constitution. And the federal government walked away, with the tacit approval of the North, allowing two Americas to form.
The Klan was gone but never forgotten, lost but alive in spirit, its mythology braided thick with new narrative threads. Stories were handed down and told over brandies in parlor rooms, stories of honorable men who rose up to restore their rightful place in society. The most skillful promoter of those stories was a playwright and Baptist minister, Thomas Dixon Jr., born in 1864 in North Carolina. In college, he was a classmate of fellow Southerner and future president Woodrow Wilson at Johns Hopkins University. One night, Dixon went to see a stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To him, it was a libel on the South, one that he would correct. In 1905, he published The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. The book was a sensation. His Black caricatures were lecherous, slovenly, and criminal. His whites were knights in bedsheets.
The filmmaker D. W. Griffith, son of a Confederate colonel, was obsessed with the novel and decided to adapt it for the screen. In Hollywood, he’d been experimenting with different techniques—longer tracking shots, close-ups and fadeouts, multiple storylines. The filmmaker hired 18,000 extras and used 25,000 yards of white muslin cloth to outfit his cast of Klansmen. His nearly three-hour version of Dixon’s book premiered in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915. Later that same year, the twelve-reel epic lit up the East Room of Woodrow Wilson’s White House. Wilson had overseen the segregation of the federal workforce in Washington, establishing separate toilets and lunchrooms, with partitions to keep Blacks and whites apart in the governing agencies. Dixon told the president that the film was more powerful than any book or speech—it was “the mightiest engine for molding public opinion in the history of the world.” He said the real purpose was not entertainment, but “to revolutionize Northern sentiment.”
That it did. Renamed The Birth of a Nation, the film played to packed houses, north and south; twenty-five million Americans—one in four—saw it in the first two years of release, the most ever for any picture without sound. The basic storyline was about a young white woman harassed to death by a conniving former slave (played by a white actor in blackface), only to have her honor restored by chivalrous men who lynched the predator. But the larger narrative was an epic fictional rewrite of the first years after the Civil War. The film portrayed Reconstruction-era African Americans as subhuman savages. Black legislators were shown barefoot at their desks, tossing chicken bones into aisles and swigging bottles of liquor. At election time, ballots were stuffed and whites denied the vote. And no alabaster-skinned young lady was safe from oversexed and liquored-up Black men. The Klan saved the day, riding to the rescue on steeds draped in white. To these fabrications was added one more: the ritual of the cross burning, something the original Klan never did.
Dixon’s prediction to Woodrow Wilson was not far off the mark: the film was the most effective and long-lasting source of racial propaganda in American history. And in Wilson, the first Southerner elected to the presidency since 1848, he had his most powerful fan. As a boy of eight, Wilson had seen Jefferson Davis paraded through the streets of Virginia in chains at the close of the Civil War. As a college president at Princeton, he projected intelligence and idealism—traits that carried over into a White House reign that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize. He envisioned a world without war, with a League of Nations to end disputes peacefully. But his was a loathsome soul about race, like much of the country he nudged into the global American Century. Wilson never saw the Black citizens he governed as anything less than inferior. Words from a five-volume history authored by Wilson were used as a title card in Griffith’s film, lending presidential authority to this rewrite of a nation. It was music to Lost Cause ears:
“The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
Among those who sat through The Birth of a Nation over and over was an itinerant Methodist minister and dough-faced alcoholic, William J. Simmons. Alabama-born, he’d been peddling fire-and-brimstone Christianity in the rural South for more than a decade, never anchored to any one place. In addition to liquor, he had a weakness for pornography and prostitutes. He’d joined the Masons, the Knights Templar, and the Woodmen of the World, and gave himself an honorific—colonel, which he insisted everyone use. The film made him weep, made his heart race, and helped to shape the biggest idea of his troubled life: the reborn Ku Klux Klan. His father had been a Klansman in Alabama during Reconstruction. He grew up on tales of how the original terror group “used to frighten the darkies,” as he said in a history of the founding. One day Simmons had a religious vision of a uniquely American hate society guided by God.
On Thanksgiving night in 1915, fifty years after the close of the Civil War, Simmons and fifteen other men clambered up the granite monolith of Stone Mountain in Georgia. They built an altar on which they laid a Bible, an American flag, and a sword. The men set fire to a cross and shouted to the heavens an oath of allegiance to the Invisible Empire of a new age. The Ku Klux Klan had risen, Simmons proclaimed, “awakened from a slumber of a half a century.”
Simmons modeled his newly chartered Klan after the fraternal orders he knew so well, with codes, secret phrases, hand signs, titles, rituals, oaths, and a constitution. The Klan even had its own calendar and language. The guiding principle was the superiority of white, Protestant, native-born Americans over everyone else. On the point of tribal identity, there was no wavering. “We seek to create, as never before, one grand, glorious America,” Simmons wrote in a booklet. “A White Man’s nation.”
With his other life ventures, Simmons had been a failure. And his Klan, too, despite a burst of initial success, looked to be floundering within a few years. What saved it were two masters of promotion, Edward Y. Clarke and Mary Elizabeth “Bessie” Tyler. Clarke was a cigar-chomping former press agent, quick with a story angle and a scheme a minute. Tyler was the organizer, while also projecting motherhood and piety. Their business partnership had served them well in backing eugenic crusades, harvest festivals, state bans on alcohol, and assorted morality campaigns. They certainly shared with Simmons a hatred of the one in three Americans who were Black, Jewish, or Roman Catholic.
This was a new and expanded roster of enemies for the new and expanding Klan. The original hooded order directed most of its venom against Black people. With Jews and immigrants of an old faith based in Rome pouring into the country, the revived Klan would open up fresh categories of undesirables. Hate was tailored to the region—Asians on the Pacific coast, Mexicans in the Southwest, Mormons in the Rocky Mountains, Blacks in the South, Jews on the East Coast, and immigrants and Catholics everywhere. To this list was added sex—that is, all the new cultural expressions of sensuality.
The Klan operatives didn’t need to create resentments—their recruitment pitch fit the times. Bigotry was rarely punished or condemned, even in polite circles in the North. In New York City, wealthy Black residents who owned fine apartments had to take the service elevators in many buildings. At Harvard, Black students were excluded from freshman dormitories. “From the beginning, we have thought it expedient to compel men of different races to reside apart,” explained the school’s longtime president, A. Lawrence Lowell, in defense of the Ivy League racial barrier.
Tyler said Jews were not even Americans, and Roman Catholics were traitors. Clarke called for sterilizing all Black citizens. But what really drove the pair of promoters into the arms of the twentieth-century Klan founder was money. In 1920, Clarke and Tyler cut a deal with Simmons, granting them a significant share of every new membership. The best way to make their fortune, they realized, was to incentivize local recruiters on the ground by giving them a cut as well. They sold the Klan as a Main Street guardian against immorality, immigrants and their foreign faiths, and African Americans who were rebelling against Jim Crow. In barely a year’s time, the number of Klansmen went from 3,000 to 100,000. Texas in particular was such a bright spot that the Dallas dentist, Evans, was brought to Atlanta to join the national leadership and oversee expansion in the North. With all the new money flowing in, Simmons moved into a white-columned mansion on Peachtree Road—Klan Krest, he called it.
