Historians usually consider the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s to have been consistently opposed to labor unions and the aspirations of working-class people. The official outlook of the national Klan organization fits this characterization, but the interaction between grassroots Klan groups and pockets of white Protestant working-class Americans was more complex. Some left-wing critics of capitalism singled out the Klan as a legitimate if flawed platform on which to build white working-class unity at a time when unions were weak and other institutions demonstrated indifference to working-class interests. In industrial communities scattered across the Midwest, South, and West, white Protestant workers joined the Klan. In Akron, Ohio, the Klan helped to sustain white working-class community cohesion among alienated rubber workers. In Birmingham, Alabama, the Klan violently repressed mixed-race unions but joined with white Protestant workers in a political movement that enacted reforms beneficial to the white working class. But Klan attention to working-class interests was circumstantial and rigidly restricted by race, religion, and ethnicity. Ku Klux definitions of whiteness excluded from fellowship many immigrant and Catholic workers. Local Klans supported striking white Protestant workers when Catholic, immigrant, or black rivals were present, but acted, sometimes violently, against strikes that destabilized white Protestant communities. Ku Klux sympathies complicated urban socialist politics in the Midwest and disrupted the effectiveness and unity of the United Mine Workers. Lingering Klan sympathies among union workers document the power of reactionary popular movements to undermine working-class identity in favor of restrictive loyalties based on race, religion, and ethnicity.
Type Articles Information The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 373 - 396 Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)
1 I am indebted to Allen Safianow and Robert Chiles for advice and encouragement. Robert Woodrum and Mark Paul Richard pointed me to sources. Two anonymous readers provided expert editorial guidance. Keyssar , Alexander , Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts ( New York : Cambridge University Press , 1986 ), 225 –37Google Scholar (quotations 227, 232). For Swift's settlement-house activity, see Davis , Allen F. , Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1967 ), 9, 40Google Scholar .
2 “A Klansman's Creed,” Imperial Night-Hawk, May 2, 1923, 7; Orbison , Charles J. , “ The Origin and Operation of the Constitution of the United States of America ,” Papers Read at the Meeting of Grand Dragons, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan at their First Annual Meeting held at Asheville, North Carolina, July 1923 (reprint ed., New York : Arno Press , 1977 ), 29 Google Scholar ; “‘Wobblies’ Want Negro Members from South,” Dawn, Dec. 8, 1923, 13.
3 New York Herald, Oct. 3, 1923, clipping in American Civil Liberties Union Records, subgroup 1, The Roger Baldwin Years, Reel 31, Volume 228 [hereafter ACLU].
4 An Exalted Cyclops of the Order, “Principles and Purposes of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” Papers Read, 29. Reichert , William O. , “ The Melancholy Political Thought of Morrison I. Swift ,” New England Quarterly 49 (Dec. 1976 ): 557 –58CrossRefGoogle Scholar identifies Swift's authoritarian and anti-Semitic sentiments.
5 Virginia Durr interview, Hardy T. Frye Oral History Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Auburn University, 14, 18 (quotation).
6 Scott Nearing, “Who Is Joining the Klan and Why,” Advance, Feb. 11, 1924, ACLU, Reel 31, Volume 228.
7 W. D. Robinson report, May 3, 1922, W. D. Robinson Papers, Series 1, Folder 2, Southern History Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Robinson also stated that “75 per cent of the yellow pine saw mill owners” also worked through the Klan “to keep out bootleggers and I.W.W. agitators.”
8 For opposing positions on the impact of class on progressive reform, contrast Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “the People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism ( Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2006 )Google Scholar ; and Johnston , Robert D. , The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2003 )Google Scholar . Stromquist contends that progressives, fearing the disruptive potential of working-class consciousness, “banished the language of class from the vocabulary of reform” (4), thus hampering modern liberalism. Johnston, on the other hand, asserts that class consciousness on the part of the middle class was a vital element of progressive activism. One need not accept Stromquist's claims of a unified progressive movement or agree that progressives rejected class considerations to recognize the preference many progressives expressed for a harmonious civic ideal rather than class consciousness as a primary working-class identification.
9 Mink , Gwendolyn , Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 ( Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press , 1986 ), 195 –97Google Scholar . While acknowledging the AFL's stance on immigration restriction, Julie Greene believes Mink overstates its centrality in Federation politics. See Greene , Julie , Plain and Simple Politics: The AF of L, 1881–1915 ( New York : Cambridge University Press , 1997 ), 9 – 10 Google Scholar . On progressives and immigration restriction, see Stromquist, Reinventing “the People,” 144–48; Keller , Morton , Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933 ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 1994 ), 221 –35Google Scholar .
10 The leading revisionist studies of the 1920s Klan include Goldberg , Robert Alan , Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado ( Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 1981 )Google Scholar ; Moore , Leonard J. , Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 ( Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 1991 )Google Scholar ; and Lay , Shawn , ed., The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s ( Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 1992 )Google Scholar .
11 Goldberg, Hooded Empire, 46, Moore, Citizen Klansmen, 66, 117.