"Prohibition Is Here to Stay": The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America

6. Dangerous Friends

113| 6 Dangerous Friends As the mid-1920s began, supporters of the dry cause found themselves needing to mount a more vigorous defense of Prohibition than they had originally expected. Even as drys prepared for battle, an organization arose that pledged to come to their aid. With Protestant churches providing ideas and issues and the ASL serving as a model, the Ku Klux Klan wove together a message of defending God, country, and the nation’s laws from those who might oppose them.1 The Klan offered drys a means of escalating the conflict from the arena of abstract laws and rhetoric to a direct strike at their enemies. For many drys the Klan appeared to be an answer to their prayers, an organization that could preserve both their lifestyle and the orderly society that Prohibition was creating. However, this new ally ultimately both disappointed and betrayed the dry cause. The mainstream nature of the Klan has been difficult for some to fathom. Early studies, such as John Moffatt Mecklin’s, assured readers that the Klan was a Fundamentalist institution fueled by rural anger and ignorance. Klansmen, according to John Higham, had “experienced especially intense frustrations. To relieve their own feelings of inadequacy, humiliation and anxiety, they develop resentments against someone else. By suspecting and attacking an 114 | “Prohibition Is Here to Stay” unpopular­ ­minority, they can bolster their psychic defenses.” Frank Bohn echoed these sentiments by describing the Klan as “an expression of pain, sorrow,” and its founder, William Simmons, as “an excellent representative of our well-known type of rural, Protestant clergyman.” H.L. Mencken, the widely read newspaper columnist, lumped Protestants, the Anti Saloon League, and the Klan together, while The Nation’s Louis Francis Budenz blamed the rise of the Klan in Indiana on the “largely crude and ingrown” Hoosier populace who were too devoted to reforms such as Prohibition for their own good.2 As later historians discovered, far from being a rural reaction to modernity, the Klan was a copy of moral-reform organizations with an activist orientation that was key to its attraction to urban and rural members from both middle- and working-class America. This approach helped the secretive group to overcome Northerners’ memory of the Reconstruction Klan, which the region’s churches and press had attacked. The new Klan thrived in areas where evangelical Protestants were strong and where there was a perceived laxity in the enforcement of Prohibition and vice laws. Its hooded members became the “civilian arm of law enforcement,” and Protestant ministers found the group a potent ally in their attempt to achieve full compliance with the Volstead Act.3 The Klan, reborn in an age of ultrapatriotism, was able to capitalize on the “considerable confusion between religion and patriotism” that took place as a result of the World War. As one historian of Indiana Methodism noted, “in many places . . . the American flag . . . threatened to take the place of the cross of Christ.” Churches stressed the idea of loyalty to country coming after only devotion to God and cast doubt on anyone who could muster only “fifty-fifty loyalty” to either. Patriotic Hoosiers were called upon to “stamp out treason, discover disloyalty, and aid in time of common disaster.” These sentiments were fundamental to the Klan’s success.4 The Klan, moreover, represented the hopes (and fears) of white Protestant Americans. It offered the majority of citizens an opportunity to visibly demonstrate against the forces of wet immigrant culture. It is not surprising that such a message was popular among Hoosiers. The Klan was open to any white, native-born Protestant, Dangerous Friends | 115 which meant it was perfect for Indiana, whose population in 1920 was 95 percent native born (only nine out of ninety-two counties had any significant foreign-born residents), 97 percent white (prior to the Great Migration), and 75 percent Protestant. Historian Leonard Moore has argued that the Klan thrived in Indiana because it was seen as defending institutions and ideas that Hoosiers cared deeply about. Chief among them was Prohibition.5 The ambitious man who led the Klan in the state tailored this message to Hoosier audiences. D.C. Stephenson, according to his­ biographer, M. William Lutholtz, combined political skill and a salesman’s tactics with the ability to condemn in public those things he enjoyed in private. Stephenson’s pitch to Protestants was genius. Opting for Prohibition and Americanism, not...