THE KU KLUX KLAN

Waipa Post, Volume 36, Issue 2147, 21 April 1928, Page 6

THE KU KLUX KLAN

A POWERFUL SECRET SOCIETY. DREADED BY COLOURED RACES. Dr Hiram Wesley Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, is alleged in" a receint news message to have superintended the torture of a man who was flogged, tarred, and feathered by his Klansmen. According to Dr Evans' own publised statements, he doesn't believe in violence, however. The doctor, now about fifty years old, is a native of Texas, a dentist by proession, an active member of the Christian or Disciples' Church, and a thirty-second degree Mason. He is of middle height and tending to put on flesh, smooth-shaven, round-headed, and rather round-faced. He is a natural orator of a type that goes down better with the crowd than with an intellectual audience, and he calls himself " the most average man in America."

The modern Klan was not, of course, started by Dr Evans, for it was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1915 by Colonel W. J. Simmons, a preacher, dreamer, and a warped kind of idealist. The colonel believed in a hundred per cent Americanism, and thought a good way to kill foreign influences would be reviving the old Ku Klux Klan that was founded in 1866 after the Civil War, and which many people assert saved the Southern States from the negroes and carpet-bag politicians. An initiation fee of 10 dollars a head was charged, and there was a further 5 dollars for the official rig of sheet and hood. Initiates came in very slowly, so Colonel Simmons made a contract with Mr E. Y. Clark, organiser of many war-time " drives," to run a membership campaign, on the basis of 8 dollars commission out of every 10 dollars initiation fee. Mr Clark had considerable success, and is said to have netted as much as 40,000 dollars a month on this generous commission basis.

Great rows in the Klan about graft and corruption followed on the heels of Mr Clark's easy-money days, and Texas, being the star Klan State, took charge, and put in Dr Evans as Imperial Wizard in place of Colonel Simmons. The new Wizard set to work with a will, and by 1924 the Klan had about 4,500,000 members. This, at any rate, was the estimate then made by Mr Stanley Frost, in a lengthy series of articles in the New York Outlook analysing the Klan's activities. The Klan in politics is out for " native white Protestant supremacy," and what its 1924 strength amounted to may be judged from the fact that a turnover of about 1,800,000 votes is enough to swing a presidential election on an average.

This year the Klan is out solidly to beat Governor Smith's campaign for the presidency. It is said not to be nearly as strong as it was in 1924, and Mr Frost, in a recent review of its position, says the membership to-day is probably only about a third of what it was in 1924. The membership, being secret, politicians have only vague ideas as°to how strong the Klan is in their districts, and this makes them nervy and rattled about it, and much inclined to propitiate it. The fed-up feeling seems to have come over quite a lot of Klansmen. For instance, in Alabama only last November the State Attorney-Gen-eral, Mr McCall, himself formerly a Klansman, was busy indicting over a a hundred of the hooded brethren and denouncing the rule of the mask and the lash. Things became so hot that the Klan's Exalted Cyclops fled the State. Mr McCall, in his letter of resignation, declared that the Klan's principles were right but its leadership bad.

Only in February last the Imperial Wizard made a decree that in future

no mask or vizor is to be worn as part of the regalia of any Klansman, and that every Klansman must also forthwith pay another dollar and become a member of the Knights of the Great Forest, u new degree just instituted inside the Klan. This new move was expected by some to bring in additional strength to the Klan and help keep things going during the presidential campaign. Dr Evans, according to all reports, has been running a campaign against violence as a Klan method, but this does not always appeal to members. For instance, here is the view of one Klansman on this point: " I shall be surprised if the Southern faction agrees with Evans in the matter of violence. Those methods are the great attraction, the basis of confidence, a manner of exciting justice that renders the greatest personal satisfaction." " Personal satisfaction" in executing "justice" makes a wide appeal in the United States.

Besides taking an interest in politics and propagating high ideals about the supremacy of Protestant whites, the Klan does all sorts of little things for its members. "I joined just to see that they got after —," remarked one Klansman, naming a notorious cheat. Another said, "My sister's husband is raising hell in Indiana, and don't send Her enough to live on. They've passed word to the Klan out there." The Grand Dragon of a State will get several scores of such requests for action in a week. These little affairs appear frequently to be fixed up by night-raiding parties. But a lot is said to be done by " peaceful persuasion." Mr Forest quotes an instance of a hard-working and fairly trustworthy young man in one town who was living with a notoroiusly vicious woman. He was called on the telephone one evening and advised to leave her. The speaker argued at length, said the example was bad, made the upbringing of children harder, and so on. A week was allowed for action. At the end of the week the man got a second brief warning*, with three days' grace. He kept the woman. On the fourth day he lost his job for a plausible reason. On the next day the landlord demanded an exorbitant increase in rent, for a plausible reason. Supplies were cut off; the milkman disappeared, the butcher failed to call, and when the man went to the shop he could not get attention. By the end of the week only one grocer would sell him food, and the next week this grocer was brought into line by the loss of 70 per cent of his trade. The fight was over inside two weeks, at the end of which time, the young man, still out of work, was living on his friends' charity in a hovel some miles out in the country. The Klan is said to have a very efficient intelligence system, and. in 1924 it was stated that " the word " on any particular line of action could be sent and a half million members in two hours after the machinery was set in motion. To make this possible 5000 offices were kept open night and day. As the Klan never names its candidates in politics the opposition never knows whom it is fighting. rT " gets to know a lot of things also, for nobody in a society or on a Government body knows but what some member or other is a Klansman passing along word of all that is done. Politicians all over the country have got grey hair's thinking out whether it is safest to be pro-Klan, anti-Klan, or neutral.