Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928

by Leonard J. Moore

Indiana had the largest and most politically significant state organization in the massive national Ku Klux Klan movement of the 1920s. Using a unique set of Klan membership documents, quantitative analysis, and a variety of other sources, Leonard Moore provides the first comprehensive analysis of the social characteristics and activities of the Indiana Klan membership and thereby reveals the nature of the group's political support.Challenging traditional assumptions about the Klan, Moore argues that in Indiana the organization represented an extraordinarily wide cross section of white Protestant society. More than 25 percent of native-born men in the state became official members. Indeed, the Klan was many times larger than any of the veterans' organizations that flourished in Indiana at the same time and was even larger than the Methodist church, the state's leading Protestant denomination.The Klan's enormous popularity, says Moore, cannot be explained solely by the group's appeal to nativist sentiment and its antagonism toward ethnic minorities. Rather, the Klan gained wide-spread support in large part because of its response to popular discontent with changing community relations and values, problems of Prohibition enforcement, and growing social and political domination by elites. Moreover, Moore shows that the Klan was seen as an organization that could promote traditional community values through social, civic, and political activities.It was, he argues, a movement primarily concerned not simply with persecuting ethnic minorities but with promoting the ability of average citizens to influence the workings of society and government. Thus, Moore concludes, the Klan of the 1920s may not have been as much a backward-looking aberration as it was an important example of one of the powerful popular responses to social conditions in twentieth-century America.

Genres: History

276 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 1991

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the 1920s five million Americans joined national Ku Klux Klan organizations created separately for men and women. Although the men’s appeared first and was much larger than the women’s, taken together they comprised a large segment of the population and represented one of the largest social movements in modern history.

Leonard J. Moor’s book examines the Klan of Indiana – the largest and politically most powerful state Klan organization of the era. The author effectively analyses the social bases of the movement, the characteristics of the Klan members, their motives for joining, and the influence they had over local and state politics.

Albeit for a short time, the Indiana Klan was extremely powerful. However, Moor argues that racial and religious bigotry and venal leadership were only an outer layer, which hardly distinguished the Ku-Klux from America of the 20s in general. What really made the Invisible Empire’s ideology so widespread were the populists’ wide spectrum of concerns. The Klan represented the interests of the average white Protestant who believed that his values should be dominant in the community and the state. By joining, the members of the KKK strived to resist the new social and economical order, to stop the destruction of traditional values and the isolation of the average citizens.

Moor states that treating the KKK movement simply as a conflict between Protestant and urban-immigrant America is a flawed way of understanding it. Although the Afro-Americans and the ethnic minorities were convenient contemporary targets, the real source of Protestant discontent was more deeply rooted.
In Indiana, ethnic conflict played only a minor role in the Klan’s success. Patterns in Ku-Klux membership didn’t depend on the geographic distribution of the state’s minorities. Klaverns were as likely to be established in the large cities as in the small communities, which almost completely lacked minorities.

Moor’s study shows that the main aim of KKK was the corruption of the sense of order, cohesion and shared power in the community. Thus, the Klan’s membership was the highest in the regions with active economic growth that threatened the traditional values of the local community.
The most popular Klan activities were the ones that drew together disparate social groups – massive demonstrations, parades, political campaigns.

Other catalysts for the extension of the Invisible Empire were, of course, the end of WWI and the Noble Experiment of the 20s. By feeding the notion of a besieged America, leftover nationalist passions, the anxiety about new immigration waves form Europe, and the fear of postwar economic difficulties all contributed to the power of the KKK. The ban on alcohol provided a great stimulus for the movement in it’s own right. During the early 1920s, the Klansmen became ardent advocates of Prohibition, thus turning the Klan into the most popular mean of expressing support for it.

Leonard J. Moor’s “Citizen Klansmen” is impressively insightful and detailed. It is a valuable contribution to anyone’s knowledge of the sinister Ku-Klux movement of the 20s (which, as Moor shows, is nothing like the clan of the 1860s). Five stars.


*note: The book primarily deals with the Klansmen, not the Klanswomen. I highly recommend Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s to everyone interested in the Klan’s ladies.

[Charles Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The invisible empire
“Conservatives have struggled to uphold traditional patterns of authority and ethnocentric cultural values.” That was the Klan.

Membership ranged from 3 to 6 million members in the nineteen twenties. It endorsed racism, white Americanism, defense of morals, family values, law and order, the Volstead Act, Protestantism and keeping it that way. 1922-1925, Indiana was the Klan’s U.S. epicenter.
Actually, at that time, the percentage of African Americans and Jews was low in Indiana, but there were plenty of Catholics to hate.
In Indiana, religious and ethnic hatred has always been and still is a big political hay maker. Denying entrance to immigrants with diseased minds and bodies was also a big hit. (Does that sound like the 45th President, or am I hallucinating?) Yet, the Klan meant to pull the U.S. back from the brink of moral bankruptcy (p. 39.). This included the mother in the home and no petting parties for the teenagers. The Klan identified with the Republican Party although it had serious hooks in the Democrats. Just as now it is difficult to be elected without the fundamentalist vote, then it was difficult to get elected without the Klan vote.
D.C. Stephenson was the most known political Klan figure in Indiana. He was said to have beaten his wives, lived a life of drunkenness, womanizing, and embezzling from Klan funds. But, in 1925, he was convicted of rape, and the second-degree murder of a young woman whose body he had also severely bitten. (Death by teeth?) Unable to secure a pardon, he ratted out state officials in the Klan’s pay. Membership dropped and the Klan’s power waned.
The Klan had advocated “moral values” and “law enforcement.” Such “values” still run deep in the Hoosier state. The black vote (and other minorities) has pretty well been gerrymandered out. Folks who, in the past, would have been Klan members now wear Men’s Warehouse suits in the state chambers and jeans on the campaign trail.
The state attorney general does not want history taught in public schools because it is Critical Race Theory (which is actually only taught in college level courses) and it might hurt some white kid’s sensibilities.
As late as the sixties, African American travelers in Indiana were forced to use the “Green Book” to find a place that would be safe for them to stay overnight.
But, amazingly, Indiana senators and congressmen stood tall for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Only Congressman Wilson of the 9th District voted to keep African Americans in their place.
However, nothing changes like nothing.
Moral of the story: Scary now, scary then.

[Matthew Bieniek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed review of a dark period in Indiana politics, when Klan-supported candidates took over many of the state and local offices, only to be voted out shortly after. I found the descriptions of the times and the people involved to be interesting, but I just skimmed over some of the numerical analyses of just how many people were involved in the Klan and where they lived. That part was not that interesting to me.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than twenty years after its publication, this book remains a groundbreaking contribution to studies of the American Ku Klux Klan. Moore and his cohort of “klan revisionists” changed the way scholars discuss this important (if today unpopular) organization, even if some of their findings have been challenged (see for instance Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, where Nancy MacLean re-revises their position). Prior to this study, the KKK was often perceived as a single institution, with no distinctions between its post-Civil War, 1920s, and Civil-Rights-Era manifestations. It was seen as a terrorist organization which chiefly targeted African Americans, as geographically limited to the American South, as largely a rural phenomenon, and as an organization which appealed primarily to the uneducated and poor, especially among evangelical Christians.

Moore’s study helped to challenge all of these simplifications. Indiana serves as his counter-example, not least because the numerically largest state-wide Klan grew up there during the 1920s. This already serves to counter the perception that the KKK was a “rural southern” organization, but also helps to distinguish the 1920s Klan as something quite different to the guerillas of the 1860s or the church-bombers of the 1960s. Furthermore, through statistical analysis of membership rosters and other data, Moore attempts to demonstrate that the Klan was represented in urban and suburban areas as well as the countryside, and that middle class and educated protestants of all faiths were participants. Finally, although African Americans were among its concerns (he covers a residential segregation campaign centered in Indianapolis), they were peripheral to the Klan’s other enemies at the time: especially corrupt politicians, alcohol and prohibition violators, immigrants and Catholics.

The Indiana Klan follows a pattern now familiar across many states, only on a larger scale: a rapid rise in membership and political power, peaking around 1923-25 followed by an equally rapid decline into obscurity, marked by scandals and political disagreements. In the case of Indiana, Moore documents the number of Klan-endorsed candidates to gain political office, and their control over educational councils, and also the flamboyant activities of DC Stephenson, who served as Grand Dragon during its rise. Stephenson, along with other important leaders, seems to have regarded its message of white protestant nativism as a convenient way to appeal for support in a political career which he regarded as a means for personal aggrandizement, not as an opportunity serve the public. As such, his days at the head of any large-scale reform movement were numbered.

Nevertheless, the picture that emerges of the 1920s Klan is largely that of a reform movement, and this explains the large-scale participation of Indianans who wanted to see prohibition enforced, schools teaching morality to children, and honest politicians in power. Relatively little attention is given to the ritualized aspects of the organization, or its parallels to other fraternal societies, such as Freemasonry, which were still popular at the time. Moore has been accused, I think unfairly, of trying to “rehabilitate” the Klan, of ignoring its racism and propensity toward violence. He does not deny these aspects, but rather points out that during the time of Klan political ascendency and mass appeal, these extremist elements were necessarily downplayed or suppressed. Their re-emergence plays a role in the Klan’s decline and return to terrorist tactics, but that story is not covered here.

This is not to say that Moore’s argument is conclusive or definitive. Some of his statistical analysis is based on relatively fuzzy numbers, and some samples are rather small for the conclusions he draws. Furthermore, in focusing his study entirely on the mid-west, he ignores what was simultaneously taking place in other parts of the country, where the KKK’s traditional activities, such as intimidation and lynching, were far more prevalent. Finally, although he rightly identifies Indianapolis as a Klan stronghold, thus justifying his argument that it could appeal to urbanites, it is very clear from his map that the counties near Fort Wayne and Chicago tended to have weaker Klan support, suggesting that this was not always the case. Despite these provisos, however, this book remains an important point of departure for later studies of right wing politics in the United States.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1915 edition was a franchise operation run out of a Georgia pharmacy. It was marketed to the bible belt Know Nothings as a response to America's growing populations of Catholics and Jews who threatened to pollute America's anglo-saxon and celtic purity. The Indiana Klan was politically powerful, electing a governor and sympathetic legislature in 1924, but then it bellied up after the Grand Dragon DC Stephenson was convicted of various nefariosities--kidnapping, rape, and 2d degree murder--in 1926. Leonard Moore analyzes and contextualizes membership records for the 1920s Indian Klan: Methodist, Episcopal, (gasp) Quaker, and predominantly middle class. (Membership was $10 at a time and place where $100 would buy a new wood frame house or Ford car.)

Sometimes the analysis slows down the story, but this is a good read.