Invisible Umpires: The Ku Klux Klan and Baseball in the 1920s

In 1922, the Literary Digest proclaimed the decade to be “a new golden age of sport and outdoor amusements.”¹ By 1923, newspapers devoted nearly 16 percent of their pages to sport, up from less than 1 percent in 1880.² At the forefront of this explosion was baseball. Annual attendance at professional games rose to above 10 million throughout the 1920s, and sandlot games saw a similar surge in popularity.³ Herbert Hoover was moved to proclaim that “next to religion, baseball has furnished a greater impact on American life than any other institution.”⁴ At all levels of society, organizations across the United States—from firemen to churches—formed teams and sponsored games. The second Ku Klux Klan, which resurfaced after World War I and would reach the height of its popularity in 1924, was no exception to this trend.⁵

Although it has received little attention from historians, the Ku Klux Klan’s sporting life provides significant insight into the place of the so-called Invisible Empire in everyday American life in the 1920s and into the organization’s complex relationship with the cultural mainstream. Klan baseball teams also provide another perspective on the use of sport—especially baseball—as a tool of legitimization by groups that perceived themselves as marginalized. The involvement of Klansmen in baseball was a reflection, expression, and consolidation of deeply held Klannish beliefs. It was the product of a genuine enthusiasm for the sport, a prime example of the Klan’s often self-contradictory attitudes toward secrecy and secular culture. It also represented a notable means of outreach and self-promotion for the organization.

Not everyone took the idea of the Klan playing baseball entirely seriously. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, minister of New York’s First Presbyterian Church, declared, “The millennium will come when the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of Columbus play a baseball game with a negro umpire for the benefit of the Jewish employees of Henry Ford at Zion City.”⁶ Walter Dill Scott, president of Northwestern University, was even more optimistic, telling “a story of a friend who said he would not be surprised if some day the Knights of Columbus would play a match ball game with the Ku Klux Klan, with a colored umpire, and the gate receipts going to Jewish charities.”⁷ The African American periodical The Messenger declared that such a game, with the proceeds going to a Jewish orphan asylum, would be the very definition of “good old-fashioned Americanism.”⁸ The joke was repeated so often, with slight variations, that as early as 1923 the Klan’s Imperial Night-Hawk referred to it as an “old chestnut.”⁹

What those who jested about such matters did not seem to realize was that the Ku Klux Klan was heavily involved in both those kinds of novelty games and in regular baseball leagues throughout the 1920s. Baseball allowed Klansmen to come together and prove both to themselves and to the world at large that the Ku Klux Klan was an institution to be celebrated, not feared. Other groups seemingly at the fringe of mainstream American society had adopted a similar approach to great success. The American Hebrew urged Jewish youths to seek success in sports to prove that they could “play on an equal footing” and earn “added respect.”¹⁰ A Utah team, the Salt Lake City Mormons, Elders of Bishops, which played at the turn of the century, had helped the Church of Latter-Day Saints “prove its American character to its nearby states, who recognized in the Mormon’s appreciation of baseball their common character with American ideals.”¹¹ During the Klan’s heyday, the House of David, a Christian Israelite community created “to gather the lost tribes of Israel in preparation for the advent of the Millennium,” fielded one of the most popular and successful barnstorming baseball teams of the 1920s. Baseball became the House of David’s chosen method of altering mainstream perceptions of the organization, an “evangelistic tool” that spread the word of “the religious acceptability of the commune.”¹² Steven...