The outstanding phenomenon of the post-war period was the Ku Klux Klan. Other events which accompanied it were the new laws for the limitation of immigration and the general suppression of civil liberties of many kinds. The Klan had something to do with both of these as cause and as effect. Moreover, all three—Klan, anti-alien movement, anti-radical movement—were largely anti-Semitic in sentiment; in addition to which there was a separate movement of anti-Semitism based on the imported anti-Semitism from Europe. Therefore in any study of anti-Semitism as a group reaction we must also study these three group reactions of the post-war period, all of them partially anti-Semitic, and all of them associated with the same group-ideas and the same group-will as anti-Semitism itself.

1.

The Ku Klux Klan of the present is not the one of the Reconstruction period in any sense. It has taken over the name, the garb and much of the high-sounding ritual. But it has a new motive and a new psychology. The old Klan was sectional; the new is national. The old was anti-Northern and anti-negro; the new is anti-alien, anti-negro, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. The old met a certain emergency and was then disbanded by compulsion of the Federal government and the action of its own leaders; the new has expanded from the character of a fraternal society to that of a nation-wide propaganda movement, has entered politics, and become one of the leading political issues of the campaign of 1924. In other words, its real ancestors are: not the Ku Klux Klan of the south in 1866–71, but the Know-Nothing Party of the 50’s and the A. P. A. of the 90’s.

The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915 in Atlanta, Ga., by William J. Simmons, a former Protestant minister of strong convictions, intense if narrow intellect, and great interest in the organization and spreading of fraternal orders. For five years it grew slowly and inconspicuously, during the period of the war and for two years thereafter; in June 1920 it had about five thousand members and was in financial straits. At this juncture it was taken up by Mr. Edward Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who had had experience in the new technique of propaganda. Under their skilled hands the Klan at once grew with astounding rapidity; paid organizers entered state after state, organized “Klaverns,” and reaped great profits for themselves and for the heads of the organization. But the commercial motive, while probably strong in a few persons, was in no sense important in the actual membership of the Klan and their acts. “Its official documents indicate that the Klan originally was a purely fraternal and patriotic organization, one of the hundreds of similar secret societies throughout the country.”72 The New York World investigated the Klan in 1921, and a Congressional investigation followed in October of that year, but both served rather to advertise than to harm the organization. It spread rapidly throughout the Union, claiming at one time as many as four million members, elected senators and governors in a few instances, and in several became the outstanding issue of state elections, sponsored or was accused of innumerable acts of mob violence, ranging from warnings to certain persons to discontinue their bootlegging or immorality, up to beatings, tar-and-feather parties, and the notorious Mer Rouge murders of 1922 in Louisiana.

We have already discussed the expansion of propaganda, so that its enormous utilization by the Klan is quite comprehensible. But even the constant reiteration of laudable motives and grandiloquent phrases about Americanism cannot account for this sudden rise to power; two other elements must be included—group prejudice and secrecy. The Klan capitalized every prejudice of its group, which was predominantly a small-town one, of American birth, Protestant religion, and Anglo-Saxon either in race or in their opinion of their race. And the Klan met in utter secrecy, did not divulge the names of its members, paraded the streets in the disguise of robes and masks, and carried out its deeds of violence in the same awe-inspiring anonymity.

Clearly, the Klan is typical of the tendencies we have found in the American mind after the war. It represents a subgroup revolting against its voluntary sacrifices for the nation during the war. It represents the anti-alien, anti-Catholic and now also anti-Jewish sentiment, the reaction against the enormous wave of immigration just at an end. It includes also the fear and hatred of the negro, strongest in the old South but spreading to the North with the northern migration of many negroes during and after the war. On the Pacific coast the fear of the Japanese immigration enters into the complex of hatreds. In other words, the Klan is the third wave of Nativism. It is the great reaction of the subgroup to the intense sacrifice for the nation during the war.

2.

Various other motives are implicated in this general complex. The South furnished the original soil of the Klan; its second center was the middle west, the old home of the A. P. A. It was weakest on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (except Oregon) where the various immigrant groups actually live. It was weak in the heterogeneous masses of the cities with their aliens, Catholics and Jews; strongest in the small town, where men may talk of the Papal menace without actually knowing many Catholics, of the Elders of Zion without seeing personally more than one or two Jews a year. The attitude of Nativism, the reaction to the immigration of huge masses of foreigners, is still strongest where these foreigners themselves are not in evidence.

This suggests that other motives must enter in, that something else in the small-town American must have made the Klan congenial. That something else is monotony, standardization (the “Main Street” attitude), and the appeal of the Klan to these people lay largely in its glamor of mystery, secrecy and hidden power. The rise of fraternal orders is one of the note-worthy movements in American life; there are now over six hundred of these societies in the United States, of which four hundred ninety were organized between 1880 and 1895. Over seven per cent. of our population is affiliated with these orders, and their greatest strength is precisely in the small town, where they are a bright spot in the dull social life, and give a factitious importance to their “nobles” and “exalted rulers,” as well as to the many who are permitted to enter into their secrets and to parade in their regalia. Professor Mecklin73 classifies secret societies in three groups: the beneficial societies, with whom secrecy is merely protective; the social organizations, devised to give “variety and interest to our poverty-stricken American life”; and finally, militant societies with a general program which affects the entire nation, like the old Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia, and the Fenians. He concludes that the present Klan, while undoubtedly furnishing for many of its members the release from monotony, the sense of power, the revolt against repression, that is characteristic of the second class of organizations, has also the characteristics of the third type and is therefore a public problem. As he points out elsewhere in his book, the disguise of the mask is a further danger, as it may be adopted by members to persecute non-members in nameless ways, and even presents an opportunity for non-Klansmen to indulge in violence practically without fear of detection.

Professor Mecklin’s analysis of Klan psychology in Chapter IV of his book presents several suggestive points. He says:

The Klan insists on like-mindedness, in the sense of adopting the Anglo-Saxon ideals as the norm for America. Finally,

Father John A. Ryan contributes an additional motive,

Frank Tannenbaum covers similar points in the first chapter of “Darker Phases of the South,” where he deals with the Klan. He holds, first, that

To his keen psychoanalytic study I must add a few words from an article by Frank Bohn in the American Journal of Sociology. 81Mr. Bohn points out that the Klan, once organized, had to find something to do, that its violence was a natural outcome of disguise, organization and aimlessness. He attributes its origin chiefly to the disillusionment of the American people over the break-down of their simple, democratic ideals when applied to a huge nation of complex population; and to the changing character of the racial and social composition of the people, with the revolt of the older stocks. He concludes:

3.

A word may be needed especially on our narrower topic, the relation of the Ku Klux Klan to the Jew. Its preliminary questions to the candidate for “naturalization” include two that exclude the Catholic, two the Jew, one the alien and one the negro. The most inclusive is number 2: “Are you a native born, white, Gentile American citizen?” Number 4 is: “Do you believe in the tenets of the Christian religion?” Imperial Wizard H. W. Evans gave out an interview in Indianapolis early in 1924 when he made the following statement, repeated several time later in other connections:

Here are the same themes of racial superiority, like-mindedness of America, identification of Americanism and Protestantism. But elsewhere we meet with direct attacks on the Jew, as on the Catholic, negro and foreigner—not merely the assertion of their inferiority. Speaking at Dallas, Texas, December 7, 1922, Mr. Evans said:

This sounds like an economic motive, but it may be merely repetition of stock charges of traditional anti-Semitism. Mr. Bohn hints at such an economic purpose when he remarks:

These facts seem to me erroneous; there have always been Jewish merchants and peddlers throughout the country, and they have always had Christian competitors; probably they have merely been a point of vantage for the aroused prejudices of the group. Dr. Mecklin says:

4.

The Klan has now passed the zenith of its aggressiveness and its influence. The campaign of exposure, while it made thousands of members, also made thousands of enemies and robbed the Klan of the secrecy which was so essential an element of its strength. Many of its members lost interest, others were positively estranged by certain methods and ideals of the organization. The trials for murder at Mer Rouge, La., brought the Klan into bad odor generally. Most important of all, the Klan went into politics, and in this followed exactly the cycle of the Know-Nothings and A. P. A.’s—secrecy, growth, propaganda, politics, enemies, decline. In 1924 the Klan was an element in the national conventions of the two major parties. The Republicans considered planks opposing and favoring the organization and finally took no action. The Democrats had to take up the issue because of the movement to nominate as their presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York, and a professing Catholic. While Mr. Smith had political supporters in his own state of every religious denomination, still the entire strength of the Klan was thrown against him. At the same time, the many Irish Catholics belonging to the Democratic party resented the attempt of the Klan to dictate the nomination and introduced a resolution attacking the Klan by name. The conflict of that convention is now historic, and resulted in thoroughly disorganizing the Democratic party for the ensuing campaign.

Finally, the passage of the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924 robbed the Klan of its chief reason for existence, its most potent argument. Immigration was abruptly cut down. Not only that, but its national origin was totally altered so as to favor the peoples of northern and western Europe, and to keep out the Italian Catholics and Russian Jews. It is no longer possible to stimulate fear or hatred on such a large scale again, now that immigration is no longer a large factor in American life, and the group integration is once more proceeding at its accustomed rate.

5.

The anti-immigration movement must not be regarded as a result of the Klan but as a parallel phenomenon, with the same motives and philosophy. The original political theory and economic situation, by which all immigrants were welcomed into the United States to help build up the country and to become full Americans has been slowly altering. The first law of limitation, passed in 1882, and followed up by later amendments, merely excluded convicts, persons affected with contagious diseases, persons likely to become public charges, and similar individuals for individual reasons. Other legislation of economic trend excluded Chinese and later Japanese laborers, and contract labor. In 1917 the demand to limit the numbers of common labor, voiced by the American Federation of Labor, met the desire to limit numbers and to select racial groups, and the literacy test was embodied in the law, excluding all who could not read or write in any language. But this was satisfactory to neither the friends nor foes of immigration; it was merely a temporary device.

In May 1921 a temporary law was passed limiting the number of each nation to enter the United States annually to 3% of natives of that nation residing here in 1910. This limited the total immigration at once from the 1,285,349 of 1907, the peak year, to a total of 357,803. This total is in addition to immigrants from Canada, Mexico, Newfoundland, Cuba and Central and South America; it does not deduct the emigrants who often amount to as many or more than those entering the country. It is simply a means of cutting down numbers and altering proportions. It is directly a result of Klan preachments, of Nordic theories, of the reaction of the native, gentile, Protestant American to the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the nation, and to the need of revising his mental stereotypes of the United States. He must grow to think of his nation as a nation of many elements, many beliefs, many backgrounds, most of them different from his own—to him America is a Protestant country, a white man’s country, a gentile country, and he intends that it shall remain so.

Therefore the permanent immigration bill enacted in May, 1924, changed the percentage from three to two, and the date on which the quota is to be estimated from 1910 to 1890. The result of this double change is to alter radically the racial and national composition of the immigration stream and hence the total character of the United States. As Chairman Albert Johnson of the House Committee on Immigration, after whom the bill was named, phrased its double purpose:

The total immigration, therefore, was reduced from 357,000 to 164,667 and the emigrants have to be deducted from this to ascertain the actual annual increase. The Italian quota was reduced from 42,000 to 3,845; the Russian from 24,000 to 2,200; the Polish from 30,000 to 6,000. On the other hand, the German quota was reduced only from 67,000 to 51,000; the Norwegian from 12,000 to 6,400; the British and Irish from 77,000 to 62,500. The bill carried out radically the intentions of its sponsors, to cut down the flood of immigration and to discriminate against the racial and religious groups which they consider inferior because they appear externally to be different. It is a group reaction of the same order and motivation as the Ku Klux Klan.

6.

A concurrent phenomenon, arising from the same group mind but essentially different in manifestation, is the suppression of civil liberties which began during the war and continued afterward, an expression of the same impulse toward compulsory like-mindedness, but taking its criterion from the economic rather than the cultural, religious or racial aspects of the differing groups. As Father Ryan put it:

86Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary, in the same Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, has a fine summary of the “Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States (1918–23).” He enumerates the new Supreme Court interpretation of the free-speech clause of the first amendment to the Constitution, by which a “clear and present danger” justifies its violation; the state laws on syndicalism or sedition or anarchy; the attacks on the right of labor to strike; the use of the Department of Justice of the United States to repress radical economic movements; the mob violence increasingly widespread and regular; and the national organizations engaged in repression, such as the National Civic Federation, the National Security League, and the Better American Federation.

The material is too wide in range and too full of important instances to be even cursorily examined here. The trend, however, was definitely a part of the post-war attitude of the American mind, the breaking up into violently opposing groups, each claiming to assert the true American spirit. The same attitude of repression appears in the churches in the form of heresy trials and an aggressive Fundamentalism. It appears in the form of legislative acts to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the state universities of several Southern states (most of which failed of passage). Dr. Ward feels that the

Attempts were made during the height of the anti-Russian and anti-radical movement to connect Jews with Bolshevism in Russia and with radicalism in the United States, so that this movement also has its anti-Semitic phase. Thus anti-Semitism is bound up with the Ku Klux Klan, with the immigration bills, with the economic repression,—it is an integral part of the group reaction from national unity, and appears in every phase of the post-war group reactions.