FREE ARTICLE: The ‘Invisible Empire’

(A collection of douchebags wizards and dragons)

We’re back to Americana today. Because I have been edumacating myself about some really horrible people. Namely the hierarchy of the KKK. Stick with me, because they are grim, but you will feel better by the time I’m done. And if you’re from Indiana, do me a favour and read to the end. Don’t come at me…

I think if it’s fair to sum up what I think I know about the Ku Klux Klan as hillbillies in stupid hoods, in the south, lynchings, burning crosses. All of those those things are true, but from then on, I just got more and more angry as I went through this in detail and learned about the extent of their nonsense.

It’s not just the south.

Which is why today’s state is Indiana, because it ended up being referred to as “North Dixie,” or “the Alabama of the North” and kicked off a chain reaction north of the Mason-Dixon Line that you would not expect in those states. During the second incarnation of the Klan, it was a stronghold. By 1923, it had more Klansmen than any other state in America. All of the massive growth that had taken this nationwide gang to three million members was coming from the north. As well as Indiana; Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania were all rabid with it, as well as California, Oregon and Colorado in the west. 

Yes, there were two versions.

The first came straight after the Civil War. In 1866 some p*ssed off Confederates got together and started it. These people weren’t stupid. They were lawyers, former officers, brokers or newspaper editors. They literally couldn’t handle seeing free black people walking about their Tennessee town. They drove them out of schools, jobs. In two years, they had half a million buddies throughout the south and were beating and threatening people left, right and centre. Then Ulysses Grant became President and put his foot down. In 1880, half of the black men in America used they vote they had been given. Then along came Rutherford B Hayes and everything went backwards. By 1920, the number of black men voting was less than 1%.

Because the height of the second wave comes after WW1. This is by far the more insidious for me. It started in 1915. You can blame a lot of it on a film, Birth of a Nation, which rewrote the history of the Civil War and featured a white actor in blackface getup (Klan, obviously) being lynched for harassing a white woman. I won’t watch it. But I sh*t you not, apparently there are scenes with black legislators sitting barefoot at their desks, drinking on the job and throwing chicken bones about. 

And so coinciding with this travesty of a film, half a century after the Civil War sixteen men in Georgia reignited the KKK. Within a decade, this wasn’t just localised clownery, bigotry and violence. They did all of this, but during this time, these idiots made an attempt to take over America from the top down. By 1923, there were millions kitted out in their comical costumes, and they were enthusiastically projecting 20 million by the end of the decade.

It’s a worldwide trend in the 20s & 30s that people felt like the world was overtaking them. Part of what hooked so many normal Americans was fear of change, and this lot were promising to turn the clock back. Warren Harding, perhaps one of the most useless presents America has ever had, was actually elected in 1920 promising people that he would make everything go back to normal after the war. 

What are they?

It’s easy to laugh at this lot. On the one hand, they are complete bellends.  Their name comes from kuklos, yep - the swarthy-European-hating morons used a Greek word. They band around titles likes Grand Dragon and Imperial Wizard. They went about in daft pointed masks to look taller, misspelled everything with a K, formed a female branch all about making women independent which in a year, had 250,000 members. There was even a Ku Klux Kiddies setup. They were into all that skull fondling eugenics crap, their white outfits were apparently supposed to represent the ghosts of slaveowners returned, kind of like the zombie souls of bewigged douchebags bent on setting things ‘right.’ 

It’s when you start thinking about what this all means, what they did to people: murder, harassment, assault and kidnap just for starters, and how close they came to actually imprinting themselves on a nationwide basis in the corridors of power that you stop laughing. 

At least one President shared some of their beliefs. Woodrow Wilson was an unrepentant white supremacist. When their dumb film came out (which one in four people in America saw) they were able to find a quote to stick up on the screen that suggested an endorsement from him: ‘The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation…. Until at last there sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the south, to protect the southern country.’ 

Other Presidents were just culpable in being weak and looking the other way. Calvin Coolidge, I’m looking at you. At one point the Klan claimed fifteen senators and 75 members of Congress. They actually had the power to help implement terrifying policy, and then enough control of law enforcement, judges, local infrastructure to beat people into line, or ensure that the authorities overlooked every crime in the book. 

In Indiana, they had poison squads who were the equivalent of Twitter trolls. Their job was to spread heinous fake news in their communities, driving people into bankruptcy and ruin. One wit nicknamed Indiana Klanopolis. 

These were scary times - Indiana actually passed a law ordering mandatory sterilisation for ‘idiots, imbeciles and confirmed criminals.’ By 1920ish, they had inflicted this on 2,500 people. (A fraction of the 70,000 across THIRTY states, some of which added homosexuals to the list) This madness was finally kicked out by the State supreme court in 1921. But various Indiana bigots had been agitating to expand the list of candidates to cover homeless people, alcoholics, sex workers and epileptics; and of course, black people. Their friendly eugenicists warned that if ‘darker pigmentation’ got into American blood, Americans would get ‘smaller… more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.’

What I love about their music equals depravity obsession is that despite their costly efforts, at the exact time all this was going on, Louis Armstrong managed cut a record in Indiana, that would help make him very famous. And despite a concerted effort to set fire to an Italian community in Pennsylvania, little Dino Paul Crocetti got away from them and eventually took the stage name Dean Martin. Take that. Gits.

Because they don’t just hate black people.

Nope. If there’s one thing you can say about these muppets in their second incarnation, they are abundantly generous with their bigotry. You’re about to meet enemies of theirs that include Jews, Italians, Catholics, basically anyone who doesn’t look Nordic. Sound familiar? Anyone who isn’t “pure American,” whatever that means in a nation of immigrants. Whichever minority dominated in an area, be it Mexicans in the southwest, Asians in California, Black people anywhere, Jews on the east coast, they had it in for all of them.

The hypocrisy was literally stunning. They hated immigrants. Which is hugely ironic because every single one of them was at least in part a descendant of immigrants. ‘We receive at our ports,’ one of them whinged in their little newspaper, an ignorant and disreputable omnium-gatherum of scorbutic and vicious spawn, people who possess neither blood not brain, unclean and uncomprehending foes of American ideals.’ 

By 1925 the Klan had a friend in the Indiana Governor’s office and had all sorts of plans: banning people with ‘degenerate hereditary qualities' from having kids, criminalising sex outside marriage, no baseball on a Sunday, state censorship in cinemas, mandatory bible readings in school, including banning the teaching of evolution and instead covering the seven days of creation in science lessons.

(Indiana Historical Society)

We’ll just refer to this one as Dickhead #1, or DH#1. He doesn’t deserve any better. A gifted orator, charmer and evidently very good at rallying people to his disturbed cause, which was essentially to make himself very rich using his position within the Klan. For the purposes of our tale, all you need to know is that he was also a drunk (prohibition, remember) a liar, a conman, a rapist and a wife beater, a thug, and all of this before you even get to his ideology. Oh and he abandoned his child. He wanted a Klan President in the oval office. Him. 

As for this one, evidently he thought being a dentist didn’t make him unpopular enough, so he left Texas on his own warped white supremacy mission. He can be DH#2. These two hated each other.

Indiana Heroes

Enough. Though parts of Indiana and most other states had clearly lost their minds, at the same time this was going on, many, many Hoosiers were not okay with this f*ckery. Let’s talk about some heroes as far as this state goes. I think they deserve extra credit for standing up to this lot on account of the sheer power that DH#1 managed to build in their state.  

Warren McCray: Governor of Indiana

Broke, ruined, and about to be exposed over some dubious borrowing, was surprised when a Klan representative showed up with a briefcase full of money at his office. He was likely going to prison, he said, but he would never be that desperate. 

Dr. Joseph Fink: Rabbi

(Jewish Buffalo History)

Fink was not even 30 and working in his first post in Terre Haute when he stood up to the Klan. They sent him a letter instructing him to resign from a community position. He was summoned to a cemetery one night to meet them. All of 5’2”, he came alone, told them there were cowards hiding their faces, that he would not be resigning and he would remain openly Jewish and proud. Then he walked away. 

Civil War Veterans:

Nearly 120,000 men from Indiana had fought for the Union during the civil war. 25,000 died, and so even if they were ancient by this point, those veterans still living were furious with the advent of this nonsense. William Stern was one of them. 19 when he joined the 39th Indiana, the only time he had ever left Hamilton County was to fight against slavery for Abe Lincoln, who he still adored. Despite being in his 80s at this point, he would tell anyone who would listen how disgusted he was by Indiana’s direction. In an open letter he wrote: ‘The black man that sympathised, worked and fought for this great country of ours during its threatened destruction is a thousand times better than the white man that sympathised, worked, plotted about fought against it.’ 

Runaway Slave George Knox had fought for both sides. Settling in Indiana he began a successful career opening barber shops. Now with his own newspaper, he decided at 84 he was not having this either. After the secretary of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of

Coloured People) remarked that America would use the might of the US Navy to enforce the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) but would not lift a finger to protect the 15th, namely a black man’s right to vote, Knox published a declaration urging black men to use their vote, ‘the only weapon of a civilised people’ to defeat the Klan. 

Dr. Lucien Meriwether had become a dentist after fighting in the Civil War, and he had done well. He bought a lovely big house in Indianapolis, whereupon his neighbours said they only wanted white people living among them. When he refused to go anywhere, they had the audacity to build a ten foot wall around his property. He sued and actually won, but his neighbours responded by making the fence bigger. Even when they started posting leaflets through doors asking people if they wanted ‘a n—- for a neighbour?’ He still refused to move.

Notre Dame: College Students

Part of the mythology behind the “fighting Irish” nickname is owed to an incident in 1924. Being dicks, the Klan leaders decided to have a massive rally in South Bend, where the famous Catholic university was based. The chief of police couldn’t stop them coming, but he could deny them permission to stage a march. The college confined all of their young men to the campus. The Klan ignored the need for a permit and nothing could stop these victimised young men from venturing out to kick seven shades of sh*t out of them. In the most hilarious of outcomes, the students pelted the Klan with potatoes, one of which whacked their illuminated cross in a direct hit, then stole their outfits and paraded about the town in them, taking the p*ss. 

Patrick O’Donnell: Newspaper Owner and Lawyer

(Chicago History Museum)

A criminal lawyer from Chicago, O’Donnell was not standing for any of this when the nonsense arrived in his city in the early 20s. He rallied black clergy, Jews, everyone the Klan was out to get, and founded the American Unity League. They had a newspaper, called Tolerance, and this is where he raised the bar for messing with DH#1 and his acolytes. This is exactly my kind of vindictive… The AUL had 50,000 members in its first year, and their one aim was to annihilate the Klan. It irked O’Donnell that they wore hoods, and so he hit them where it hurt. Even now, out a bigot and take away their anonymity on the internet and they will have a fit. O’Donnell worked his way in with contacts, got lists of names and published them. His lists were titled “Who’s Who In Nightgowns.” By 1923 he had taken his fight to his home state of Indiana too. When he publicly declared: ‘If they are not exposed and driven from Indiana, they, the [KKK] will corrupt your juries, dominate your elections, elect their puppets to power… undermine your laws, and violate the principle of your constitution.’ Everything he said was right. 

Of course, they fought back. They published lists of “suspect Americans” and actually, the concept of “no such thing as bad publicity” applied and their numbers carried on growing. In the end, the Klan ruined him. They planted a document revealing William Wrigley (as in the chewing gum) as a klansman. He wasn’t one, and he sued. O’Donnell lost everything.

George Dale: Newspaper Man

A scruffy, very ordinary man with his own newspaper in Muncie, Indiana, he found the Klan’s local reach repulsive and in print, he was anything but ordinary. In a town where the press generally did the Klan’s bidding, he battered them in the Post-Democrat. He accused them of riding about in their wife’s nighties. Even those in authority who were supporters of the Klan felt the wrath of his pen. My favourite Shakespearen style insult is when he called a Klan-loving judge nearby ‘the most contemptible chunk of human carrion that ever disgraced the circuit bench in the state of Indiana.’ 

The price of his opposition was high. That judge had him thrown in jail with no court proceedings, he was hospitalised after being severely beaten on the street in front of his sons (one of whom was also pistol whipped) He served time on a penal farm, they stole his ink, sabotaged his printing equipment, organised boycotts of his newspaper. And still he carried on bashing them. Dale received death threats, they vandalised his house, the Klan issued a mandate that led women to spitting on him in the street and his seven kids were bullied mercilessly. One of these idiots even fired a gun into the family home, and still, he wouldn’t stop. He lost his house, was almost bankrupt, but Dale still intended to go down swinging. 

In the end, it was a woman who brought down DH#1, which I think is just, given how he treated the opposite sex, but not before he caused her death.

A Heroine Beyond the Grave

I don’t want to dwell on what DH#1 did to Madge Oberholtzer. In short he and two associates kidnapped a 28-year-old woman, then he raped her, assaulted her, and basically chewed her to pieces. When she told him he’d surely be arrested, he said “I am the law in Indiana.’ By the time they dumped her back at her house, claiming she’d been in a car accident, Madge was unrecognisable. That and she had taken a lethal dose of bichloride of mercury, because she was in agony and she wanted to die. Her kidnappers knew what she had ingested, and denied her medical assistance when she then asked for it. 

I’d rather talk about what she did to them. For that, I need to add even more heroes. 

Asa Smith: Lawyer

Smith was known to Madge’s family and despised the Klan. To the extent that he had walked away from his church after those who ran it started spouting rhetoric about Americanism. First he went out to look for her, then after she was dumped back at her home, he sat with her. Over the course of the 29 days it took Madge to die in agony as the bichloride of mercury burnt her from the inside out, he transcribed her lengthy account of what DH#1 did to her. It would be read out in court.

William Remy: Lawyer 

(Famous-Trials.Com)

Remy knew Smith. A deeply scarred war veteran, he was appointed by Governor McCray. When the Klan sent him a list of approved lawyers to appoint as his deputies, he ignored it. There is a story that at a fancy dinner in 1924, one by one all of the guests got up from their seats to pledge some kind of a** kissing allegiance to DH#1 and the Klan. When it came to Remy, he got up and said thanks for a lovely meal and then walked out. He was particularly infuriated by DH#1 telling everyone war tales from Belleau Wood when he’d been nowhere near the place. Remy had suffered the horrors of being gassed at Belleau during the First World War,

Jesse McMurty: Detective

An experienced detective with the IPD, he had the balls to arrest the man who thought he was invincible in Indiana. 

Charles E Cox: Formerly on the Indiana Supreme Court 

(Indiana Supreme Court Library)

Cox volunteered his services for free. Remy was young and boyish looking, and Cox added considerable weight to the image of the prosecution. 

John Lewis Niblack:  Reporter

The future judge who covered the trial for the Indianapolis Times. He not only told Klansmen to shove the $100 bribe he was offered to skew his coverage in favour of the defendant, but also described him as ‘haggard, for a well-fed fat man,’ which had DH#1 lunging at him across the courtroom trying to punch him in the face. Legend.

Then there was a slew of other women who had been assaulted by DH#1, who were inspired to go to the police and contributed to him being cancelled. When the inevitable make the victim look like a whore defence started, women from Madgés college, Butler, were vocal in their disdain for these lies.

Remember George Dale? Who just wouldn’t give up reporting on the insidious nature of DH#1 and his disciples? As he sat in the courtroom watching his enemy go down in flames, he could see a light at the end of the tunnel. He wrote a note and had It passed through to his nemesis by a bailiff:

Though the mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind.’ 

Don’t Let The Door Hit You…

When the dope at the top of the tree gets cancelled, it has a knock on effect. In the wake of DH#1’s trial, Klan crowds began to drop off dramatically. George Dale wrote: 'It’s like a typhoid fever; it has run its course.’ The numbers of Klansmen in Indiana plummeted. Whatever insidiousness led people to join, now they quickly binned off the Klan and put it behind them. Yay Indiana.

DH#2 flailed about trying to save face, but it was a losing battle. The words of an abused dead woman will do that. Poor lamb, at least he will have had good teeth for all the press coverage of his demise. In Missouri, one newspaper urged Klansmen to turn in their costumes. You may have joined because you thought it was an honourable collection of idealistic Americans, it offered, but now, ‘it’s the greatest source of blight socially, commercially, educationally and religiously upon every community into which it has gone.’

How had it happened?

I kept thinking that not all of the millions who joined this organisation can have been hard line, violent, hateful people. So why? Fear I suppose. We’re back to it being post WW1 and people being terrified of a changing world. If you were born in 1890, you had already seen, by 1920, the advent of cars, flight, a massive, global, industrialised war and a pandemic. Oh and the fall of several real empires, not imaginary ones with silly hats hiding in plain sight. A humble catholic school teacher said ‘These people needed to hate something smaller than themselves as much as they needed to have faith in something greater than themselves.’ Profound.

It’s perhaps understandable how ordinary men were roped in if you see their advertising, because it seems innocent enough, right?

The smarter ones, those that had been duped into thinking there was something honourable about the KKK, did start to figure it out. A lowly ranked Klansmen from Muncie wrote widely to newspapers about how pressured he had been within the commentary to join two years previously: ‘under false pretences that it was a fraternal bond of men of high character.’ Now, he said, he knew the truth, that they were a bunch of fraudulent degenerates and drunks, and he was disgusted.  

After DH#1 was convicted, and his pet governor refused to grant clemency, or give him parole, an investigation was held into politicians tied to the Klan. Men were charged with attempted bribery, others resigned in disgrace and the Mayor of Indianapolis did a month in prison and was slapped with a lengthy ban from public service. Indiana, hats off, you got the b*stards just in time.

The Indianapolis Times won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting when they covered the trial, obviously writing a lot about the Klan’s behind the scenes transgressions.

Madge Oberholtzer and all of these other people who stood up to their formidable attempt to take over democracy through the KKK did not end the organisation, but they certainly ensured that it would not walk the corridors of power of which their Chief Goblins dreamed, and it hastened the Klan’s decline, especially in the Midwest. 

As for DH#1, he was paroled in 1950, promptly ran away, and when he was released in 1956 it was on the condition that he never return to Indiana. He became a bigamist, and was also booted out of Missouri at the age of 70 for trying to sexually assault a sixteen year old girl. Oh, and in later life he denied he’d ever been a Klan leader, so pretty much the kind of shenanigans you’d expect from an irredeemable sh*tbag. He got a decent burial, as a war veteran, but it didn’t sit right. Sex offenders and those who are convicted of serious crimes are no longer allowed to be buried in Veteran’s cemeteries. 

I refuse to end with him

Madge Obertholtzer was a smart, hardworking, vibrant, independent young woman, who spent her prolonged, agonising death making sure that the man responsible for her death could be held to account. Her death devastated her parents and her friends. Only after the indignity of being slut shamed and accused of being a promiscuous party girl was justice done. God speed Madge, you deserved better. 

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I wholly leant on Timothy Egan’s book ‘A Fever in the Heartland.’ There is so much more to the story than what is included here, and even more Indiana heroes who stuck their fingers up at the KKK. I won’t say I enjoyed it, because it made me angry over and over again, but that’s nothing to do with what a good book he’s produced and I’m glad I read it and learned more. There are scary parallels with the Nazis who hit the big time a few years later and with silly declarations, like politicians screeching about building giant walls, but if there’s one thing you learn as historian, it’s that people haven’t changed in thousands of years. We are no better than them, so maybe we should pay a bit more attention to the mistakes they made and take note.