Right in Michigan's Grassroots: From the KKK to the Michigan Militia

2. Americans We: People of the KKK

2 • AMERICANS WE People of the KKK We shall ever be devoted to the sublime principles of a pure Americanism. —Women of the Ku Klux Klan Kreed The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had little to recommend it to Michigan people when it was ‹rst revived on Stone Mountain near Atlanta in 1915 by a small group of sixteen men. Alabama-born William Joseph Simmons, founder and Imperial Wizard, was ful‹lling a dream to restore the Southern Klan his father rode with during Reconstruction . As he explained it, the Invisible Empire’s mysterious name represented brotherhood: Ku Klux came from a division of the Greek word for circle, kuklos, and Klan from the Scottish word clan. From his alliterative imagination, Simmons spun enticing titles for functionaries and new rituals for followers. Like the ‹rst Klan, Simmons’s brotherhood aimed to assert the rightful place of white Protestant sons of the American-born, these legitimate guardians of bedrock American values. In the bargain Simmons anticipated the Klan fraternity would be a source of clients for his insurance business plus offering untold new business opportunities. As surely as it was anchored in the excesses of American patriotism, the Klan was one more entrepreneurial scheme to emerge in the era. For the ‹rst ‹ve years following its revival, the Klan was only a few thousand members strong, just one among a multitude of small fraternal societies in the South. Simmons, with dreams still intact, signed on Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler in June 1920 to be recruiters-forpro ‹t. As partners in the Southern Publicity Association the pair had successfully mingled propaganda and advertising while recruiting for the Red Cross, Anti-Saloon League, Salvation Army, and War Work Council. They 42 promptly reshaped the Klan’s message to ‹t the postwar national climate: Patriotic 100 percent Americans should regard the Klan fraternity as a means to check blacks, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, Bolsheviks, and assorted radicals. Recruiting for this multiheaded cause now became a big business based on fee splitting. Clarke and Tyler trained Klan representatives , “kleagles,” who began carrying the message north, supplemented along the way by a cadre of sympathetic northern ministers who joined the speakers’circuit. Racism, religion, politics, and economics entwined in this energized Klan. Interested Americans could choose their own emphasis . Once that became clear, northerners became more attentive to the words, robes, hoods, and crosses. Between 1923 and 1924, the Klan would enroll tens of thousands of members in Michigan. Although the state had only 83 counties, it ultimately had 97 chartered Klans and an unknown number of others that attained provisional status. Almost every county in the Lower Peninsula would have a klavern, and in the more remote Upper Peninsula, at least two-thirds of the counties soon had some sort of Klan presence.1 Atlantabased Klan of‹cials recorded more members in Michigan than any state in the South and put it variously in seventh or eighth place nationally.2 Estimates of actual membership vary between a low of 70,000 up to a high of 265,000.3 If women and junior Klan members are to be considered, 80,000 understates the number; if fellow travelers and sympathizers are to be taken into account—as is sometimes the case in estimates of Communist and Socialist strength—265,000 might not be unrealistic. The neighboring states of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois had more Klan members, but these states also had a larger pool of potential members—native-born men born to native-born parents. In Michigan, 10 percent of the total population consisted of American-born white males 21 and older whose parents were also born in America.By contrast,in Indiana nearly 24 percent fell into that category and in Ohio, about 20 percent.4 Given also that nearly a quarter of Michigan’s residents were Roman Catholic, many of them native born to parents born in this country, the Ku Klux Klan won over a signi‹cant share of its most likely supporters, probably at least two or three in ten.5 Blazing through Michigan Detroit was the ‹rst base in the state for Kleagle C. H. Norton, who arrived in the summer of 1921 to test the waters. His efforts got a boost when a Americans We • 43 three-week series of articles published in the New York World and syndicated newspapers gave the Ku Klux...