1920 by Eric Burns Read Free Book Online

“Wobblies.” All listened to Galleani’s speeches, all read his writings, saw the truth of his vision.
    It might have been anarchists who set off the bomb.
    LOWER ON THE LIST OF suspects, but important to an understanding of the unrest that plagued the United States in 1920 as it struggled to maintain its growth spurt and newly earned position of world prominence, was the Ku Klux Klan. Although founded in the post–Civil War era, a resurgence of the group, or, more properly, its third incarnation, was already engaging in its own perverse brand of vigilantism in 1920.
    The KKK seemed on the surface a comical lot, as some of its original members, in the immediate post–Civil War era, went to bizarre lengths to seek a distinctive look for themselves. They raided a “Mrs. Martin’s linen closet, draped themselves with sheets, pulled pillow cases over their heads and went out riding and caterwauling through the town [Pulaski, Tennessee] to the immense satisfaction of themselves and to the considerable curiosity of the locals.” Like children at play, they had passwords, secret handshakes, and nightmarish rumors swirling about them, whichthey delightedly encouraged. The Klan meetings were supposedly held “in caves in the bowels of the earth, where they were surrounded by … rows of skulls, coffins and their furniture, human skeletons, ominous pictures copied from the darkest passages of the
Inferno
or
Paradise Lost
.”
    The group’s ruling elite, over the years, included such absurdly alliterative titles as Klokard, Kleagle, King Kleagle, Grand Dragon, Grand Goblin, Grand Cyclops, and Exalted Cyclops. In local units, the Klaliff might be the vice president, the Klokard the lecturer, the Kligrapp the secretary, the Klabee the treasurer, and the Kludd the chaplain. It is hard to imagine a young divinity student wanting to grow up to one day become a Kludd, but such apparently was the case.
    When several of the local groups met, or when they joined one another in a national assembly, the gathering was, naturally, a Konklave.
    In reality, though, the Klan was not in the least comical. Its various reigns of terror, spaced widely in time and place, may be loosely compared to latter-day outbreaks of the Inquisition—with one of the differences being that Klansmen hated more widely than did the religious zealots who began their reign of torment in the twelfth century. The Inquisition’s target was heretical Roman Catholics. The Klan, meanwhile, hated not only Catholics, but Jews, Asians, African-Americans, and Europeans who were not from the non-Nordic countries of the north.
    But like Bolshies and anarchists, they believed in the propaganda of the deed. They would ride across the countryside in the middle of the night and, stopping at the home of someone who had angered them, perhaps by nothing more than his very existence, perform the demonic act that had become their trademark, the burning of a cross on the lawn. Perhaps they would do no more for the time being; perhaps, though, they would go further, entering the house and shooting their foes or dragging them into the woods for lynching or the administering of other forms of torture that would have made Torquemada proud. Perhaps the torture would precede or be combined with the shooting or lynching. The Klan was an assortment of genocidal maniacs operating on a scale almost too small to be noticed and certainly too small to be effective in its grand aims. But it was large enough, in some parts of the country, to qualify as an association of mass murderers.
    The Klan were considered possible suspects in the Wall Street eruption because, by 1920, they thought the United States had opened its doors too wide and indiscriminately to immigrants. They wanted the doors closed, bolted, chained, and were angry when legislators did not heed their demands. The explosion, then, according to this theory, was a message from Klansmen to the