Ku Klux Kulture Read online

  The modernist poet and Fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound declared that “any sort of understanding of civilization needs comprehension of incompatibles.” Histories of the 1920s have often lacked that comprehension. As Roderick Nash has repeatedly pointed out, we have constructed enduring screen memories of the 1920s that continue to obscure and obfuscate the complex realities of the period. Even as scholars have pointed us toward more nuanced interpretations of the interwar period, away from the reliance on the language of cultural war or the exaggerated rural-urban dichotomies that marred earlier work, it is still difficult to dispel popular images of the “Roaring Twenties” and “Jazz Age.” Scholars from the 1940s onward have focused on the idea that one of the reasons for the Klan’s decline was competition from new cultural pursuits. Recent studies have continued to echo these arguments. What is too often missing in this equation is an understanding that Klan members and supporters were having a good time in the 1920s too—an understanding that the histories of parties and of prejudice are not parallel but intersectional.20

  The central paradox in American history, Lawrence Levine has argued, is “a belief in progress coupled with a dread of change.” That duality, Levine noted, was central to the post–World War I era. The 1920s saw the clash of the “urge towards the inevitable future” with alienation from modernity. This tension, though, was “not merely present in the antithetical reactions of different groups but within the responses of the same groups and individuals.” Even as many Americans turned to the past in rhetoric and ideology, they met modernity in their actions and their lived reality.21

  The fetishization of affiliation detracts from this understanding, prioritizing a Manichaean interpretation of the 1920s in which we draw a stark divide between those who were members of the Klan and those who were not. In this, scholars have echoed novelist Willa Cather, who declared that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” Thereafter, there were only “the forward-goers” and “the backward”—or members and nonmembers. In this interpretation, we elide the internal dualities both of the Klan itself and of the wider cultural 1920s. Instead, we see the tendency to draw an artificially absolute delineation between a modern age marked by Fitzgeraldian fantasies of uproarious fun and a conservative Victorianism embodied in the Klan—“a bulwark against modernism,” in the words of Kenneth T. Jackson.22

  We cannot simply divide the 1920s into modernism and Victorianism, into Prohibitionists and bootleggers, into bohemians and puritans. We cannot understand the Jazz Age without recognizing that the pairing of modernism with prejudice was not at all incompatible. And we cannot understand these cultural tensions unless we escape our fixation on the question of membership. The Ku Klux Klan is one of the most striking examples of the duality of the 1920s, both in the Klan’s ambivalent consumption of modern culture and in modern culture’s ambivalent consumption of the Klan. In recognizing that ambivalence, we recognize that Klan members both struggled against and participated in an emergent pluralist mass culture—a culture that they simultaneously resisted and helped to create.

  Without a doubt, cultural endeavors and leisure time took on new importance in the 1920s. In many ways, American culture was “remade” in the postwar era, forming the clearly identifiable base of our culture today. Spending on recreation in the United States increased by 300 percent over the course of the decade. The 1920s saw the emergence of a modern mass media, of best-seller lists and radio charts, tabloid journalism and jazz, film stars and sports heroes. Sound recording revolutionized the consumption of music. With wireless broadcasting came free domestic mass entertainment. By the end of the decade, nearly a third of Americans owned a radio and a record player. Three-quarters of the country went to the movies at least once a week, their habit supplied by the emergent Hollywood studio system and the narrative feature film. Poet Archibald MacLeish supposedly declared the 1920s to be “the greatest period of painting and music, literary and artistic innovation since the Renaissance.”23

  If we focus on the “great works” that MacLeish was championing, though, we obscure much of the cultural consumption of the time. Levine reminds us that it is important to differentiate between mass culture and popular culture—while much of what was popular was mass-produced by the end of the 1920s, not everything that was mass-produced was popular. At the same time, we must remember that not everything that was popular was particularly good or particularly memorable. The 1920s may have seen great cultural innovation, but the decade also saw, as Joan Shelley Rubin notes, the emergence and consolidation of an often forgettable middlebrow culture.24

  The popularity of “popular” art, as Russel Nye argues, often lies in a consumer consensus, a common approval most easily won by reflecting the experience of the majority. Great works, significant cultural artifacts, tend to gain their power by anticipating a change in that consensus. They provide an aspirational focus, formalizing, in critic Frederick Hoffman’s words, “the moral and social positions that we ultimately hope to assume ourselves.” As such, these new cultural forms tend to tell us more about where the nation is going than about where it is. Popular art provides a far more accurate reflection of an era’s current values and ideas—not to provide a new experience, but to validate the existing one.25

  The “overall tendencies of the culture industries,” per Denning, is “to make what sold, to build on popular taste.” What sold in the 1920s, more often than not, was the Ku Klux Klan. Rather than a “bulwark against modernism,” it is more profitable to consider the men and women of the Invisible Empire as thoroughly modern Americans. An ambivalent combination of accommodation and protest, they were immersed in the growing consumer culture of therapeutic self-fulfillment and in the turn-of-the-century antimodernist impulse identified by Jackson Lears. Ensuring the “bad” and forgettable are present in our conceptions of the cultural 1920s reminds us how tightly intertwined modernism, nativism, and a wider Anglo-Saxon Protestant chauvinism were—and how deeply embedded in American cultural life the Ku Klux Klan was.26

  If we approach the Klan as movement rather than organization, we better appreciate the cultural politics and aesthetic ideology of Klannishness. The Klan organization was, at its heart, a deeply local structure. The national Klan was a fractured and federalized affair. Yet, across media, the forging of a shared self unified a far-reaching national movement. The Klan appropriated the melodies of popular songs, adopted the format of adventure novels and tabloid newspapers, anticipated the power of film and radio, and was absorbed by the world of sports. The Klan movement was more than capable of both enjoying contemporary mass popular culture and turning it to its own ends. Hoosiers concerned by an impending invasion of papists, Georgians who feared an international rising ride of color, or Illinoisans who reviled a perceived breakdown in public morality—all could unite behind the image of the idealized Klan member that appeared around the country and across media. In the creation of a consumable cultural identity, citizens of the Invisible Empire bound themselves to an imagined cultural community.

  In reexamining the Invisible Empire as cultural movement, we look beyond the Klan’s organizational rhetoric to consider the lived ideology of a wider Klannish community. Here, we see Klannish cultural practices as signifying practices, as the meaning given to cultural forms defined the social reality for the members of this movement. While the Ku Klux Klan as an organization may have positioned itself in opposition to “the modern,” members and supporters of the Invisible Empire were very much both a part and a product of modern American society. The Klan was not competing with contemporary cultural consumption. Rather, this trend proved complementary to efforts to consolidate and promote a Klannish cultural identity that lay largely within the mainstream of American life.

  Even as the Klan shored up its own group identity, that identity was also appropriated for wider popular entertainment. Scholars like Davarian Baldwin, Erin Chapman, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage have noted that the 1920s saw a growing commodification of black cultu
re. While earlier representations of blackness in mass culture—particularly minstrelsy—had served to circumscribe and delimit black artistry and racial identity, the postwar period offered the possibility of creating “black images and institutions” less beholden to the “overwhelming force of white patriarchy.” The new mass culture created openings for African Americans to “participate in the production, distribution, and purchase of their own popular representations.” These carefully constructed “communities of consumption” promised an escape from the degrading marginalization of segregated cultural spaces.27

  A similar (albeit somewhat distorted) process was at work for the men and women of the Invisible Empire as they became both audience and creator, consumer and consumed. While the commodification of black culture was initially driven by white appropriation, the initial commodification of Klannish culture was driven by the Klan movement itself. Cultural production was, whether consciously or unconsciously, an inherently propagandistic exercise by the Klan movement—a means of publicizing the organization and defining the Invisible Empire’s identity, both for the organizational membership and for a broader public. The Klan consolidated and commodified a consumable cultural identity that attempted to brand the organization as an appealing and positive force for white Protestant Americanism. That identity was then not only consumed but co-opted by the broader culture.

  This was most evident in the popular use of cultural signifiers like the hood and cross that had become a synecdoche of Klannish identity. Through the decade, such signifiers were used to sell everything from newspaper exposés and tell-all memoirs to pulp novels and Tin Pan Alley tunes. Even products with little to no connection to the Klan were sold on the back of the Invisible Empire’s commercial draw. C. B. McDonald, in one memorable example, plastered New York with the promise “the KKK is coming”—only to later reveal that it was an advertisement for his vaudeville program, the Keith Komedy Karnival.28

  Whether the portrayals of the organization were positive or negative, this commercial exploitation of the Klan helped root the movement in modern culture. Ironically, just as the New York World series had inadvertently delivered “priceless publicity,” even condemnations of the Klan tended to legitimize the group. Commercial and ideological concerns—inextricably intertwined in the development of the modern consumerist economy of the 1920s—served to neuter critical portrayals of the Klan. In appropriating the Klan’s image for mass entertainments, that image—and, by extension, the organization—was sanitized and normalized for a popular audience. Critics of the Invisible Empire condemned the organization’s secrecy, even as books, films, songs, and plays thrilled at the organization’s melodramatic masculinity, and critics hailed the inclusion of “a dash of Ku Klux Klan to give it spice.” In doing so, popular entertainments propelled the imagined community of the Klannish cultural movement far beyond the paying membership of the organization.29

  Perhaps the most famous—and certainly the most infamous—cultural and social commentator of his day, H. L. Mencken declared that journalists leave behind “a series of long tested and solidly agreeable lies.” The same could be said regarding our collective memory of the Ku Klux Klan and the “Jazz Age.” In misreading and marginalizing the Klan’s cultural power, we limit our understanding not only of the Invisible Empire but of the wider cultural 1920s. Rereading the Klan as cultural movement allows us to better comprehend the tension between the organization’s rhetoric and the lived ideology of its members, the highly visible nature of an Invisible Empire supposedly built on secrecy, and how an organization that was fundamentally fractured and federalized unified around a common aesthetic and cultural identity.30

  Understanding the Klan as cultural movement provides us with a new lens to better appreciate the cultural tensions of the wider 1920s, and how those tensions expressed themselves, both between the “forward-goers” and the “backward” and within those groups. The wide reach of the cultural Klan, and particularly the commercial value of the Klan image, underscore how fluid and porous the boundaries between those groups really were. Cultural Klannishness was not necessarily a dominant culture, and certainly did not represent the entirety of American culture. It did, however, leave its marks on the Klan itself and on the cultural institutions of the country. We better understand the 1920s when we look not just at the story of how Americans moved into the modern age, but also at what they brought with them as they did so—including the Ku Klux Klan.

  2

  White and White and Read All Over

  Remember Americans, when you read your daily paper, ask yourself if you are reading facts or propaganda? And whose propaganda?

  Dawn, February 3, 1923

  Nowhere were the shifting cultural tensions at the heart of the 1920s—and the power of the Invisible Empire—more evident than in the nation’s newspapers. It is impossible to understand the cultural milieu of the postwar decade without clear recognition of the symbiotic relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and the press. The Klan organization thrived on publicity. Without that publicity, the ability of the Klan movement to reach a large national audience would have been stemmed significantly. The widely held belief that coverage of the Invisible Empire could boost newspaper sales garnered the complicity of a wide cross section of the American press in this process and provides insight into the development of modern press culture. Yet that relationship has been little examined.

  Benedict Anderson has compellingly described the importance of print culture, and particularly the press, in the creation of “imagined communities.” Within these vast unseen audiences, the average American can be confident of their place—their very averageness—purely through the act of shared cultural consumption. As Roland Marchand and Michele Hilmes have noted, this shared consumption allows for the mediation of common experiences, communalizing certain aspects of everyday life and excluding or marginalizing others. The newspaper culture of the 1920s may not have created a single community of discourse on the Ku Klux Klan, but the plurality of opinion left the organization far from marginalized for millions of American readers.1

  Histories of the 1920s have largely constructed a reassuring myth in which the cherished American institution of the free press stood bravely against the aberrant foe of Klanism. George Jean Nathan declared in 1926 that “outside of the South . . . fully three-quarters of the more important newspapers of the Republic have been and are, either openly or in spirit, against the Grand and Exalted Order of Ku Kluxers.” In 1939, journalist Silas Bent wrote that “in no public issue have the newspapers of this country exhibited sounder editorial sense than in regard to the Ku Klux Klan.” The press of the 1920s, according to Bent, had worked “effectively and boldly for the general good.” In this telling, the country’s journalists administered a sound “drubbing” to the Klan, discrediting and—crucially, for an organization priding itself on representing white Protestant American manhood—“emasculating” the group. Historian Clement Moseley argued that “the attack upon the secret society by the nation’s journalists of the twenties was virtually unanimous.” No standard narrative of the Klan’s rise and fall is complete without at least a mention of the New York World’s role in exposing the organization.2

  Yet Nathan’s statement is telling, and belies the generalizations offered by Bent or Moseley. First, Nathan feels obligated to make a clear geographical distinction—“Southern” newspapers were not subject to this judgment. Second, it is made clear that this applied only to the “more important” newspapers. Leaving aside the question as to how to clearly define a “more important” newspaper, Nathan clearly did not trust in his judgment applying to those newspapers judged less important. Third, Nathan is forced to admit that even among these “important” non-Southern newspapers, there was a definite distinction between those that openly opposed the Klan and those that did so only in spirit. How—if at all—was a newspaper that opposed the Klan only in spirit meant to convey that sentiment to readers?

  H. L. Mencken, Na
than’s editorial partner on Smart Set and the American Mercury, offered a somewhat more convincingly caustic assessment of American journalism. “What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries pretending to culture is not,” he argued, “its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to newspapers everywhere.” What marked the American press specifically was its “fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears.” Study of the nation’s newspapers in the 1920s certainly lends itself to this interpretation. The press could not stop talking about the Klan but rarely dared discuss the ideas that gave the movement its power and appeal. When such considerations did make it into print, it was far more likely as an endorsement of those ideals than a condemnation.3

  In large part, the coverage afforded the Klan was an outgrowth of changes in the newspaper industry in the developing modern consumerist society. In 1920, roughly twenty-seven million Americans regularly read a daily newspaper. By 1930, that number had increased to nearly forty million, or almost a third of the total population. Magazine readership increased even more steeply in a period of “unprecedented growth” as cornerstones of American publishing like Time, Reader’s Digest, and the New Yorker were founded. Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd found in their study of “Middletown” that there was “no family . . . which did not take either a morning or evening paper or both.”4

  Yet even as the number of readers grew, the number of newspapers was in decline as the power of syndicate chains and wire services drove smaller competitors out of the marketplace. At the same time, the modern American tabloid was transforming the nature of that marketplace. Even with the decline in numbers, by the mid-1920s, the United States was home to some two thousand daily newspapers and six thousand weeklies. More than four thousand periodicals were reaching around 108 million people. Competition for readers became ever fiercer. Publications had to find a way to stand out.5