Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan

Ch. 2. The Knights in Image and Idea: Popular Klannish Fantasy, Self-Portrayal, and Political Demonology

33 2 The Knights in Image and Idea Popular Klannish Fantasy, Self-Portrayal, and Political Demonology The 1920s version of the Ku Klux Klan was highly conscious of its place in the popular imagination, seeking above all else to convince the American public of its good intentions, and in doing so gain the wider social acceptance that would allow it to thrive. Klan promoters took particular care to create positive associations for the order, which, in essence, meant a public alignment with the traditional values of conservative white America, and an emphasis upon wholesome morality, pious Protestantism, and dutiful patriotic service. As a background to this, the phenomenal popularity of D. W. Griffith’s epic 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation had already done much to crystallize the popular image of the Invisible Empire as a force for good, or at least for “Americanism.” Not only did it depict the historical Klansmen of the Reconstruction days as heroes, but as the very saviors of a threatened white American nation. The influential film, by all accounts “the most widely seen single cultural document of the industrial age,” was well received by millions nationwide.1 Often credited as the direct inspiration for the formation of the new Klan, Birth certainly became a staple of KKK recruitment drives, and its heroic Klansmen a template for the modern organization’s self-projections. The modern Klan movement, too, would find other ways of engaging mass popular audiences, producing its own movies, plays, and romance novels, as well as participating forcefully in the forum of public debate. All of these avenues provided accessible, and in many respects entertaining, vehicles by which the Klan could promote not only its heroic notions of self but also its corresponding portrayals of sinister and demonic “enemies.” In 34| Chapter 2 1920s Michigan, as in much of the northern United States at this time, the hooded order’s agenda was religious rather than racial in focus, and its ire directed much more politically than physically. Reveling in its self-appointed position as “defender of Americanism” (or, at least, its own conception of Americanism), the Klan took mainstream and legitimate concerns and populated them with worrisome, if caricatured, specters of foreign villainy. Propelling its fantasies of ungodly international conspiracy into the public domain, the Klan unleashed its sinister and, crucially, “un-American” creations to wreak havoc in the political shadows of a nation already wrestling anxiously with the notion of the “melting pot.” GUARDIANS OF LIBERTY: POPULAR IMAGES OF A HEROIC KLAN In January 1924, a front-page headline in Newaygo County’s Fremont TimesIndicator heralded the imminent arrival of an “epoch-making spectacle” at the town’s Ideal Theatre. Describing “D. W. Griffith’s Masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation,” the writer added rather grandly that there was “no explanation necessary for this picture,” and insisted that it should be shown to everybody in and near Fremont. Griffith’s film, read the Fremont weekly, though now a decade old, “has excited keener curiosity than any other offering” in cinema, and arrived in Newaygo County on the crest of an enthusiastic nationwide revival, the highlight of which had seen 150,000 people attend showings during a recent two-week “record-breaking return to New York.” Depicting the traumatic Reconstruction days that had followed the American Civil War, the movie not only claimed a thorough historical accuracy, but also credited the KKK with a key role in the nation’s reunification. As the Times-Indicator noted, the crowning glory of the script revolved around lavish scenes detailing a heroic “uprising of the Ku Klux Klan and the overthrow of the carpetbagger regime.” Compounding this rosy portrayal, meanwhile, was a love interest, featuring “Ben Cameron, the gallant Clansman . . . in the role of romantic hero”—the Southerner’s affection for a northern maiden eventually overcoming regional conflict, uniting feuding families on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, and symbolically restoring national harmony.2 It was certainly no coincidence that such a positive representation of Klan heroism should be put on public display in Fremont at this time. The 1920s version of the Invisible Empire had made its entrance into Newaygo County less than six months before, and had very recently begun to recruit heavily The Knights in Image and Idea| 35 in Fremont itself. In such an atmosphere, the local response to The Birth of a Nation’s return to the...