[News] When the Klan Came to Town

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://bostonreview.net/race/michael-mccanne-when-klan-came-town?fbclid=IwAR04As6NJwJTc8r93ZgPEF_ZksDDu-poKYHaxnOBfZGv4dRLS8VnUajqHow#.W9DPQaDox9g.facebook 



  When the Klan Came to Town

Michael McCanne
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Oct 23, 2018

“The Great Army for Truth and Americanism Makes Rome Tremble” (1928); 
Image: Wikimedia 
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Great_Army_for_Truth_and_Americanism_Makes_Rome_Tremble.jpg> 


History reminds us that firm and sometimes violent opposition to racists 
is a time-honored American tradition.

In Perth Amboy, New Jersey, members of the Ku Klux Klan assembled to 
hear a xenophobic celebrity speak. An angry crowd gathered outside the 
building and as the lecture began inside, protestors interrupted the 
speaker and tried to shout him down. Eventually the crowd outside forced 
its way in. Scuffles broke out and several Klansmen were attacked. 
Later, the Klansmen complained that their constitutional rights had been 
violated and promised to return in larger numbers, ready to fight it out 
with their enemies.

It is worth remembering that Americans have a proud tradition of 
confronting and exposing racist and xenophobic movements.

The confrontation could have taken place during the last year in 
Berkeley or Portland or any number of cities where racists and 
anti-racists have clashed. But the Perth Amboy riot was one of numerous 
confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan that occurred during the early 
1920s. The Klan was in a second ascendency, riding a wave of anxiety 
about crime, immigration, and economic unrest, and like the alt-right 
today, the Klan sought out confrontations by rallying in unfriendly cities.

In response to white supremacist organizing in our own time, radical 
voices on the left, notably Antifa, have drawn on the tradition of 
European resistance to fascists to declare that the appropriate response 
to racist organizing is physical opposition, doxing (publicly “outing” 
racists), and violent retaliation. Liberal critics, on the other hand, 
have argued that Antifa tactics break with U.S. traditions of free 
speech, open debate, and civility. For the most part, both sides of the 
debate fail to note that the United States has a long history of 
homegrown militant resistance to racist organizing. In the 1920s, when 
the Klan sought to secure a place in the U.S. political mainstream by 
organizing large public demonstrations and mounting electoral campaigns, 
anti-Klan organizers confronted the KKK using a range of techniques that 
included open ridicule and violence. Their goals were similar to 
anti-racists of today: expose the bigots and deny them the ability to 
march or rally in public. This all-but-forgotten story serves to remind 
that as long as racist and xenophobic movements have mobilized in this 
country, Americans have struggled to confront and expose them using 
every option at hand.

The Klan did return to Perth Amboy three months after the failed 
lecture, determined to show they would not be intimidated. They rented 
an Odd Fellows hall downtown and publicized their meeting. Perth Amboy 
was a multiracial, working-class city but Klan membership was strong in 
the surrounding countryside and 500 Klansmen, in robes and masks, 
marched into the building, believing their numbers, and the police, 
would protect them.

In response, 6,000 protestors surrounded the Odd Fellows building 
carrying bricks. The police called in the fire department to push them 
back with water but the crowd slashed the fire hoses with knives and 
axes. The police fired tear gas bombs, which did nothing to deter the 
demonstrators, and the Klansmen had to flee out the back door and fight 
their way through the streets. Most were badly beaten and some had their 
cars overturned.

What seemed at first like organic anti-racist violence was actually the 
fruit of organized resistance. In the 1920s, several groups formed to 
prevent the Klan from gathering publically and to undermine the secrecy 
behind which they hid. This resistance comprised disparate 
communities—Catholics, Jews, African Americans, bootleggers, union 
organizers—unified against the KKK’s vision for the United States. Some 
organizations, such as the American Unity League, used public shaming 
and boycotts to counter the Klan’s influence, while a shadowy group 
known as the Knights of the Flaming Circle confronted the Klan more 
directly, blocking their marches and attacking their rallies.

By the middle of the 1920s, the KKK was politically mainstream. In some 
states, as many as a third of white men paid dues.

The original Ku Klux Klan, formed by ex-Confederate soldiers after the 
Civil War, all but died out by the end of Reconstruction. Then, in 1915, 
inspired by D. W. Griffith’s film /Birth of Nation/, a veteran of the 
Spanish–American War named William J. Simmons recreated the Klan as a 
fraternal society dedicated to white supremacy/./ To inaugurate the new 
organization, Simmons and some friends climbed to the top of Stone 
Mountain, Georgia, and burned a cross—something they had seen in 
Griffith’s film but which had not been done by the original KKK.

The Klan grew rapidly, thanks to a range of factors that included rising 
anti-immigrant sentiment, and the social and economic tumult of the 
early 1920s. Prohibition, universal suffrage, and rising crime caused 
many white Protestants to feel that their country was coming apart. The 
Klan capitalized on these anxieties. Its official newspaper, /The Fiery 
Cross/, detailed lurid crimes committed by foreigners and called for 
restricted immigration. The Klan of the 1920s especially targeted 
Catholics, playing on lingering suspicions from World War I that 
Catholics maintained dual loyalties and were part of a secret plot 
directed from Rome. Klan newspapers derided the “Romans” and “papists” 
in their midst. The Klan vigorously supported Prohibition and saw its 
enforcement as a way to terrorize immigrant communities—many Klansmen 
joined the newly formed Prohibition Unit.

By the middle of the decade, the Klan was on the cusp of integrating 
into the center of U.S. political life. At its peak in 1925, it boasted 
between 2 and 5 million members. In some states, such as Indiana, 
perhaps as many as a third of white men were dues-paying KKK members. 
The organization successfully ran candidates in local and state 
elections and even caused a split between pro- and anti-Klan delegates 
at the 1924 National Democratic Convention. The organization downplayed 
its racism and emphasized patriotism, Christian values, and what it 
called “100 percent Americanism.” When its parades and rallies were 
disrupted, the Klan claimed its constitutional rights were being 
violated. After one anti-Klan riot, the KKK’s Imperial Wizard released a 
statement lamenting that “peaceable Americans banding themselves into a 
patriotic organization are prevented from exercising the same rights as 
Catholics, Jews and negroes.”

The Klan thrived on secrecy so politicians, public officials, 
and anti-racist activists aimed to strip away that veil.

This played well in smaller cities and rural counties where most of the 
residents were native-born, white, and Protestant. But in larger cities 
across the industrial spine of the Midwest, where Catholics and 
immigrants made up large majorities, the response was open hostility. 
The Klan also ran into resistance in the steel and coal regions of 
Appalachia, where organized labor, especially the United Mine Workers 
Union, viewed the Klan as a threat to the multiethnic coalition it had 
built. African American organizations organized boycotts of businesses 
that supported the Klan and turned Emancipation Day celebrations into 
anti-Klan rallies. In New York and New Jersey, African Americans 
organized vigilance committees to defend their communities.

In bigger cities, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders spoke out 
against the Klan, as did the American Legion and the Knights of 
Columbus. Some public officials, especially Irish and Italian 
politicians, took exception to the Klan organizing in their cities and 
used their power to persecute its members. They passed laws requiring 
organizations to make their membership rolls public. They banned 
parading with masks, and in some places banned the Klan outright, 
despite the questionable legality of such a move. New York’s mayor, John 
H. Hylan, dispensed with legal niceties and ordered his police to crush 
the Klan, to break up its meetings, and seize its membership lists. When 
Chicago’s fire commissioner discovered that every man at one firehouse 
had joined the Klan, he had them split up and reassigned separately to 
Catholic and African American neighborhoods.

In Chicago, a combative Irish Catholic lawyer named Patrick O’Donnell 
decided to go on the offensive. O’Donnell had been involved in Irish 
nationalist groups and he used these skills to organize the American 
Unity League (AUL), which was mainly made up of Catholics but included 
African American ministers and rabbis in its leadership. O’Donnell 
reasoned that the Klan thrived on secrecy and, much like anti-racist 
activists today, aimed to strip away that veil. He paid leakers for Klan 
membership rolls and sent informers into the organization. In some 
instances, the AUL broke into Klan offices to get the names. The lists 
were printed in the AUL newspaper, /Tolerance/, and in leaflets—a form 
of proto-doxing. Once exposed, workers lost their jobs and businessmen 
faced boycotts. In one prominent case, the president of a Chicago bank 
had to resign from his position.

The AUL also used mockery to diminish the power of the Klan, whose 
bizarre lingo and silly titles provided easy fodder. Klan meetings were 
“klonklaves,” a local chapter was called a “klavern,” and the 
organization’s book of rules was the Kloran. The head of the Klan was 
called the Imperial Wizard, and local leaders were known as Exalted 
Cyclops. The AUL dubbed the Klansmen “Kluxers” and “Koo Koos.” It also 
published internal scandals of klaverns, tales of graft and adultery, as 
well as testimonies from Klansmen who had quit the organization. The 
tactics caused great distress among Klan leadership. The Klan’s paper 
decried the tactics of the “Un-American Unity League” run by “Mad Pat 
O’Donnell.” The Klan even mounted lawsuits against the AUL for slander 
and defamation, which ultimately crippled /Tolerance /financially.

While the AUL battled the Klan in a publicity war, another, more 
secretive, organization called the Knights of the Flaming Circle emerged 
to confront the Klan. Little is known about this organization, but the 
/New York Times/ reported that around the same time as the second clash 
in Perth Amboy, the Knights of the Flaming Circle was founded at a huge 
meeting in Kane, Pennsylvania, at which participants wore robes and set 
a thirty-foot-high circle on fire. In a letter to the local newspaper, 
the Knights declared their bitter opposition to the Klan and promised to 
“ring the earth with justice to all” regardless of race or religion.

Opposition to the 1920s Klan often made for strange bedfellows.

Although the historical record on the Knights of the Flaming Circle is 
spotty, it seems they were committed to using the Klan’s own methods 
against them. The press dubbed them the “Red Knights” because they 
purportedly wore red robes—although, unlike the Klan, they made a point 
of not wearing masks. They burned circles of hay or tires on Klansmen’s 
lawns. Like the AUL, the Knights also stole membership rolls and 
donation records, which they used to publically shame Klansmen, and 
organize boycotts of Klan-owned businesses. The Knights main function, 
though, was to disrupt Klan events and organize counterprotests. If the 
Klan mounted a surprise parade, the Knights would march the next day to 
voice their opposition. When the Klan announced an event in advance, the 
Knights would strive to block it in any way they could. In Canfield, 
Ohio, the Knights of the Flaming Circle scattered roofing tacks on the 
road to flatten the Klansmen’s tires on the way to a parade.

When the Klan planned a march through Niles, Ohio, in 1924, the Knights 
of the Flaming Circle called a counterdemonstration of thousands. The 
mayor had granted a permit to the Klan—despite pleas from local 
citizens—but refused a permit to the Knights. On the morning of November 
1, the Knights of the Flaming Circle set up roadblocks outside Niles, 
stopping Klansmen’s cars and seizing their regalia. Some of the cars 
were overturned and the occupants beaten up. The ones who made it 
through tried to march but scuffles devolved into a riot, which lasted 
eighteen hours; the Klan parade never took place.

While some of the Knights were motivated by the Klan’s racism and 
xenophobia, others may have had different reasons. The Klan often 
attacked local liquor rackets, which in turn were more than willing to 
defend their businesses and communities with violence, and may well have 
played a significant role in the Knights. It is also possible that the 
Knights of the Flaming Circle was never a formal organization at all, 
but instead a name used to claim victories or rally support by various 
clandestine anti-Klan activists and bootleggers. In an interview many 
years later, a member from Youngstown, Ohio, said that the group was a 
“thrown-together outfit” made up of local ethnic gangs and that the 
newspapers invented the image of an organization. Jonathan Kinser, who 
is completing a book on the Knights of the Flaming Circle, speculates 
that wire services helped spread the group’s legend across the country 
and inspired others to take up the name: “People would read about the 
clashes and say, ‘hey, let’s do it too.’”

In places such as southern Illinois, however, the Knights seemed better 
organized—with meetings and officers—and more prepared to defend 
themselves against the Klan. In Williamson County, in what is known 
locally as the Klan War, the Red Knights—with the backing of miners, 
bootleggers, and the sheriff—battled with Klansmen who enjoyed the 
support of prohibition agents and local police. The tit-for-tat attacks 
left several people dead and forced the governor to bring in the 
National Guard to restore the peace.

For those who joined the Klan for a sense of belonging, the risks 
started to outweigh the benefits.

Opposition to the 1920s Klan often made for strange bedfellows. 
Democrats and Republicans both found themselves battling to keep the 
Klan out of political life. Immigrant communities that were at each 
other’s throats, such as the Irish and Italians, joined forces to smash 
up Klan parades. The Catholic Church found itself on the same side as 
bootleggers. In short, the Klan had grown so large and antagonized so 
many communities that anti-Klan activity represented a diverse swath of 
the country.

The Klan used violence and intimidation to achieve its goals, but seemed 
overwhelmed when it was opposed by the same tactics, particularly in the 
North and Midwest. The violent disturbances tarnished the Klan’s 
reputation as a respectable political organization and in many instances 
forced the Klan to give up trying to rally and organize in cities that 
were not dominated by sympathetic residents. According to Kinser, the 
targeted violence against Klansmen, especially by those with ties to 
bootlegging, caused a precipitous decline in membership in the Midwest. 
For those who joined the Klan for a sense of belonging or were motivated 
by anger over illegal alcohol or immigration, the risks started to 
outweigh the benefits. By 1926 the Klan had lost all but a symbolic 
presence in the North, and by the end of the decade, the second 
iteration of the Ku Klux Klan had collapsed under the weight of public 
scandals, declining membership, and external opposition.

The number of white supremacists organizing today is nowhere near that 
of the 1920s. But their ranks have increased since the 2016 election, 
and they are gaining influence in the government and at the margins of 
electoral politics, riding high on a wave of xenophobia and perceived 
white victimization. Opposition to them is also growing, but so far only 
on the hard left. This history reminds us, though, that firm and 
sometimes violent opposition to racists is a time-honored American 
tradition, one that has in the past enjoyed support from across the 
political spectrum, by citizens who may have agreed on little else.

-- 
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