By Scott Pohl, WKAR News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkar/local-wkar-960985.mp3
EAST LANSING, MI –
British historian Craig Fox has written a new Michigan State University Press book on the peak years of Ku Klux Klan activity in Michigan.
In Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan, Fox fleshes out Klan influence during that time.
Klan documents are often destroyed or sold at auction, making research difficult. Fox pored over what remains of records from a variety of sources, notably those found in a Newaygo County attic.
He recently spoke about the book with WKAR's Scott Pohl, who asked about the photo of a Klan gathering on the cover.
AUDIO:
CRAIG FOX: [It's] the 4th of July celebration at Jackson, Michigan in 1924. It's the biggest Klan celebration of any kind in the '20s in Michigan.
SCOTT POHL: Well, you know, from reading your book, I have the impression that if you were able to take membership statistics for the Ku Klux Klan, from its founding to today, and graph it out, there would be an enormous spike in the '20s, and it fell off almost as quickly as it exploded, didn't it?
FOX: Yeah, that's exactly right. We're talking about numbers, I think there were early Klan records when they started recruiting there of about 80,000 in the state, and then towards the end of the '20s, there was a court case against the Michigan Klan by an ex-employee, and they claimed a number of 265,000 across the state in the early '20s. The largest estimate I've seen was, it came from the Washington Post in 1930. They were looking back on the '20s Klan, that claimed a national estimate of about 9 million people in 1924 and 1925, with Michigan having 875,000 of them. That figure's been disputed quite a lot.
I think what that does show is that even if the figures are slightly off, that Michigan was at least a significant state, a leading Klan state.
POHL: One of the things I found interesting in your book has to do with not just the well-known racial and religious component of Klan membership, but the social component. It almost is painted, or the Klan perhaps painted itself, as a place for friends to get together, and festivals, and parties and that sort of thing. We don't think of the Klan in those terms very often.
FOX: No, not at all, and that's for me the most interesting part of it, the sociability aspect, really. I think the Klan tried very, very hard to paint itself as a popular way of spending your time in this period. Fraternal lodges were a large part that. A large part of the Klan membership came from fraternities, things like the Masons, the Oddfellows, the Elk, the plethora of fraternal lodges that would put on exactly this kind of entertainment. Sort of patriotic parades and picnics, and all this kind of stuff that was organized by other institutions in community life.
Things like churches, lodges, sewing circles, community groups. The Klan hijacked that and sort of took these kind of ways of spending time, put them under the Klan banner, and used it as a way to bring in sociability to the equation, really. If you look at any of these posters for Klan parades, there's always a mention of, 'bring the family, bring your Protestant friends,' there are picnics, lots to eat, lots to drink. These are things that people would do normally under other banners. The Klan would bring it under its own banner, try to control it.
POHL: So why did its popularity and membership plummet the way it did?
FOX: Everything that was a factor in the Klan's success was also a factor in its failure, really. There was little of substance to keep people interested. The Klan doesn't actually do much. Once it's established and once people begin paying dues, the national office pretty much leaves the local units to their own devices. So, pretty soon, it's run out of steam.
The big failure of the Klan, really, was that it set itself up as sort of a bastion of morality, and as soon as anything happened that could be connected to the Klan that had any sort of moral questionable sort of element to it, then people dropped the Klan like a stone, and I'm thinking in particular of the moral scandals which came out of Indiana in 1925. The most powerful man in the Klan in the north was a guy called D.C. Stephenson who in 1925 was involved in a deviant sexual assault and a rape case, and the papers really went to town on that, linking the Klan with his crimes, and the bottom fell out of the Klan at that point, certainly in Indiana and also by the looks of the figures, in Michigan.
In a way, that says something about the people who would maybe join the Klan with the idea of this, the way that it tried to sell itself as a moral movement could no longer reconcile the idea of this moral movement with the connection to these immoral crimes that had happened in Indiana. And so, around about 1925, the bottom just fell out, this sort of negative reaction to moral scandal.