There would be no literature, no art, no music, no statesmanship if we relied on the prohibitionist for works of genius. – Clarence Darrow
I’ve written on a number of occasions about the origins of modern prohibitionist rhetoric in the second half of the 19th century, and explained how the “white slavery” panic (as “human trafficking” was called then) arose from a combination of racism, xenophobic fears of immigration and the urge to impose Protestant Christian ideas of morality (including alcohol prohibition) on everyone. As I wrote in “Rooted in Racism”, “The First World War gave Europeans something real to worry about, but the panic continued in the United States until the Great Depression served the same function.” I thought it might be instructive to take a look at one of the larger prohibitionist organizations of the period, which at its height in the early ‘20s boasted over 4 million members, but fell to 30,000 by 1930. Its story not only demonstrates the mentality of prohibitionists, but presents cause for optimism in the way that this once-powerful movement fell rapidly into disrepute and eventually became nothing more than a marginalized group of social pariahs no reasonable person would want to be associated with.
The organization was founded in 1915, drawing its inspiration from a similar (but long defunct) one which operated for a while in the 1860s. Its members were overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Scandinavian Protestants who felt great anxiety over increasing immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose inhabitants they viewed as lazy and sexually depraved; they therefore wanted tighter immigration controls in general, but were especially concerned with protecting women and girls from rape and “white slavery”. Indeed, most of the original founders were members of a group dedicated to demanding “justice” for Mary Phagan, a young woman who had been raped and murdered (allegedly by a Jewish businessman named Leo Frank). The group advertised itself as protector of the home and womanhood, and grew at an astonishing pace in the next five years, driven by sensationalized media coverage and reports that it had been endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson. Though chapters sprang up all over the US (and to a lesser extent Canada), it was primarily an urban movement which had its greatest political power in Indiana and its most rapid growth in Detroit, Dayton, Dallas and Atlanta.
All prohibitionist groups attempt to exercise social control by lobbying politicians to make more repressive laws and encouraging more aggressive enforcement of existing laws. This one was no exception; it backed sympathetic politicians, assisted police in enforcing morality laws (just as the Hunt Alternatives Fund does today), and spied on violators of alcohol prohibition, then bullied cops into arresting them and courts into prosecuting them (just as “Big Sister” does to Icelandic punters). It released propaganda to support its causes, and found a number of allies in the media who were willing to disseminate it via newspapers and radio. Many people joined the crusade due to this hype, and though a large proportion of them soon left when they discovered it wasn’t to their liking, there were enough new recruits to replace those lost to attrition.
Eventually, though, the moral panic which energized the organization faded as all moral panics must; its members became increasingly desperate for attention and hungry for the power they felt slipping through their fingers. In 1927 some chapters began stepping outside the law to enforce their agenda, and the media rapidly turned against them. Newspaper editor Grover C. Hall wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of editorials attacking the once-popular mass movement for what he called its “racial and religious intolerance”; other papers followed suit, and by 1930 it was all but gone. Not completely, though; in fact, it’s managed to hold on to the present day, and still has about 6000 members. I’m sure most of you have even heard of it; its name is taken from the Greek word for “circle”, kuklos. It’s called the Ku Klux Klan.
One Year Ago Today
“Man’s Inhumanity To Whores” presents examples of stigmatization of prostitutes to demonstrate how our mistreatment harms all women.
As soon as I saw the phrase “white anglo saxon” “1915” and “jew” I thought…….yep, that sounds like the KKK.
Though on the funny side:
Even though I’m a honky myself, I’ve never been into the whole white power thing. But what the hell, here’s some honki power no dash.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xpFW87gg88&fmt=18
I’m not real proud of this but, a lot of the men on my mother’s side of the family were Klansmen. We lived in Southern Mississippi, though – and the part of her family involved in the Klan were exclusively residing in North Central, Mississippi – exactly in the same county that the three civil rights workers were killed in the 60’s. So I was only exposed to these people when we took trips up there to visit some family – and this wasn’t often.
When we did drive up there for a family reunion or whatnot – it took hours and my mother would explain the whole way up there for me to be quiet and not to volunteer too much conversation to them. She said “these people are different”. She told me not to question anything they said and that if I said something they didn’t like – they were liable to “cut your tongue out”.
I don’t know wtf we went up there, maybe for my Grandmother and Grandfather’s benefit – they would travel with us up there and those guys were “family”.
All I remember is that all the men I saw at these gatherings were huge broad shouldered brutes and, I guess that’s where I get my stature from. These were the remnants of the Scot Highlanders of my family that moved to the colonies before the revolution. LOL – the ones that were “torries”.
And – they weren’t very smart either – but they were “wealthy” in a uniquely red neck sort of way. The scam was this – they always had one of the relatives serving as a Sheriff. They’d terrorize voters and stuff ballot boxes to get him into office and, at the end of his term he’d come out as a wealthy man from all the crooked dealings – then the next one would roll in. Most all of them were either lawmen or, a few were lawyers. LOL – ever seen a rock-dumb lawyer? I saw plenty growing up.
I remember one of the guys bragging about how they had taken a huge chicken farm from some farmer. Not sure what his race was – but, they didn’t speak kindly of him. They terrorized the poor guy until he agreed to sell the farm to them for pennies on the dollar. I guess in return, he got to keep his life.
And – I never heard of a single one of these men serving time in jail for anything, in spite of all the dirty things they did. Oh, I’m sure some got arrested and jailed when the whip came down during the civil rights era … I’m probably related to a few of them that went to jail for a long time. I don’t really feel the inclination to check on that though.
Ku Klux Klan wasn’t just about terrorizing blacks – it was about terrorizing anyone who thought or behaved differently.
Some of the old women are still around and I still see them occasionally. One in particular was a beautiful red head I remember – and she’s in her late 70’s now and still beautiful. I enjoy talking to her now and I don’t worry that she’ll cut my tongue out! 😛
And of course – those attitudes have all changed with the new generation. 🙂
It is quite fascinating to note the similarity between the Klan and our own Protestant fundamentalists here in Europe. Although the Netherlands is a very secular society, fundamentalists are in control of the small town of Urk, and prostitution is illegal there – so much for “legalization” which makes it very easy to ban.
Being hostile to outsiders and opposed to television, theater, movies, “the great evil” of dancing, drink, drugs etc. they have one of the highest rates of alcoholism and drug use (along with other Protestant areas like Volendam and Staphorst).
“Forbidden fruits will always be enjoyed”.
Fascinating story — not at all what I understood the KKK were up to. And I thought that KKK came from the noise of cocking a gun; an urban myth, I guess.
I don’t know about other sources for the claim that the name came from the cocking of a gun, but it does appear in the Sherlock Holmes story the Five Orange Pips. Considering Conan Doyle’s rather interesting view on many things American, such as the origin of the Mormon Church, my guess is he just made it up.
Yes, now I remember; that must be where I got the idea from.
They’re best known for lynching black people, and certainly the 1920s Klan did some of that. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that the Klan became noticeably more anti-black and anti-communist than anti-immigration.
Maggie,
And if you really want to make your blood boil, take a look at this link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Phagan#.281982.E2.80.931986.29_Alonzo_Mann.27s_affidavit.2C_pardon
It appears that the prosecution’s lead witness was actually the real murderer thus proving that the evil and corruption of prosecutors goes back at least 95 years.
I’m also watching Stossell’s link on The Agitator about the sundry nastiness that is embedded in the prosecutorial culture in the US.
It calls to mind, but not very clearly, unfortunately, as I can’t remember the two people involved, the following interchange.
One fellow was bragging about how they had implemented policies that absolved gov’t actors of all responsibility and accountability. He ends by stating that “we have enacted a revolutionary govt policy.”
His interlocutor responds, “No, what you’ve done is enacted a pre-revolutionary policy…”
How appropriate is it to their legacy that they started their organization by supporting a murderer and capped that by lynching an innocent man. And people wonder why it took the Deep South a century to recover economically from the Civil War.
The KKK didn’t have much to do with that; though modern people tend to associate it with the rural South, as pointed out in this column it was actually strongest in the urban Midwest. The largest concentration of hate groups (considering all together) in the modern US lies in a band stretching from New Jersey to Ohio, and intersecting no part of the South.
Fascinating article Maggie. As a non-American, the impression you get from TV and film is of the KKK as a bunch of nutcases who hate non-whites. It is amusing that their original target were European immigrants. The sad part is that many of the early members were probably genuinely concerned with crime and other social problems, and saw nothing wrong with promoting old fashioned religious values.
The original Klan in the 1870s was all about suppressing black people, but for the second incarnation described herein, that was only part of a much larger mission. When the Klan revived in the 1950s it was strongest in the South (though still never very powerful) and was opposed chiefly to blacks and communists. So the European view of the KKK isn’t really wrong, it’s just historically shortsighted.
BTB, The “sensationalized media” I spoke of in the second paragraph was D.W. Griffith’s 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, which depicted the original Klan basically as “white knights” fighting for the rights of their people. Compare that with the rhetoric of the “rescue industry” and that of nanny states; when large groups of men get it into their heads that they’re going to “protect” others, violence, abrogation of individual rights and tyranny inevitably follow.
What did for the KKK in the twentieth century, as much as anything else, was the revelations that kept emerging about how its leaders didn’t live up to the standards they loudly preached. In particular, there was a horrible case in Indiana, where the state’s very popular and politically powerful Grand Dragon (state-level leader) abducted and raped a young woman, driving her to poison herself to get free of him. When she died, he was charged with murder, and a lot of Klansmen in that state resigned from the organization in disgust. A lot of other stuff about the Dragon’s private life came out at his trial.
The sad, ironic thing is that I’d bet that 99% of the Klansmen in Indiana, who had joined believing that the Klan really stood for the things it preached, would have cheerfully died to save that poor young woman. She was _everything_ the Klan was supposed to be about defending…white, (Protestant) Christian, a spotless moral character, hard-working, an exemplary citizen in all ways.
The Dragon was in prison for many years (convicted of second-degree murder). His name was D.C. Stephenson, and they had a TV movie about him some years back that’s now out on DVD, called _The Fiery Cross._
It’s a long time since I’d heard the Klan described as “white knights.” And I was a child of the Sixties, too young to pay much heed to the Civil Rights movement of the day.
I find a certain delicious “irony supplement” in the way that we’re using that “white knight” label for men who work to empower the neofeminists’ agenda. If the sheet fits, wear it …
There’s a really great book on the murder of Mary Phagan and the lynching of Frank — The Dead Shall Rise. The people who killed Frank were some of the most prominent citizens of the day. And while the people who defended Frank and tried to save the situation (like Governor Slaton) were ruined, the people who agitated for his killing and carried it out went on to successful lives.
You will, of course, find such power-plays in almost all moral crusades.
Growing up in a large Jewish family in Atlanta, the Frank case was the one subject my grandparents would never talk about.
PS – Something must have changed, because I can no longer log in as MikeS without using wordpress’s login (which I can’t remember). So I’ll have to revert to Twitter, I guess.
Krulac and my husband had the same problem, Hal. Sometimes WordPress changes things for the worse; I suspect it’ll be back to normal soon.
I had some trouble too. Well, at least it isn’t just me.