The “News-letter” of May 27 reveals their claim that Ku Kluxism is making strong headway outside of the Southern States. I quote at length from it as follows:
“Additional proof that the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is being welcomed with enthusiasm by the rank and file of one hundred per cent American citizens wherever our representatives go is found in the report of Hugh B. Cobb, one of the Imperial Officers, who has just returned from a trip to Missouri and other States in that territory.
“Mr. Cobb went to Joplin, Mo., especially to deliver an address by invitation of the Joplin Klan. He says he found interest in Klankraft running high and the members of the organization there are among the highest type of citizens. On his return to Atlanta, Mr. Cobb spent one day with Grand Goblin Crippen in St. Louis. He was greatly pleased with Klansman Crippen and the work he is doing for the organization.
“‘It is an inspiration to see the class of citizens who are knocking at the outer door and applying for citizenship in the Invisible Empire,’ said Mr. Cobb. ‘The best publicity or propaganda our organization can have is the criticism of its enemies. No real American citizen is deceived for long, if at all, by these critics, because when he finds out who they are the first question he naturally asks is: Why are they criticizing? And if he has any brains at all it doesn’t take him long to find out.’
“Mr. Cobb’s report is indeed very encouraging since it deals with the progress we are making in territory outside of the South. The red-blooded American men of the North and West are accepting the Ku Klux Klan as an American institution, because it is such, and because it is the only one hundred per cent American organization in the whole United States. Think it over.
“Another convincing proof that the Klan is taking hold is found in the fact that our enemies are so rapidly attacking us. We mean something to them apparently, although they scoffed at us in the beginning. There is very little scoffing going on at the present time, but there is considerable gnashing of teeth. We are glad to say, however, that the bulk of the opposition with which we are meeting now comes from those from whom we naturally would expect opposition and with whom it is impossible for the Ku Klux Klan ever to have anything in common.
“At the outset we were opposed by many newspapers who had no idea of our real aims and purposes. They accepted the word of negro associations and Catholics, Jews and other foreigners that we were a lawless gang and criticized us accordingly.”
There is considerable food for thought in the above extract. In the first place I have never heard, in an experience of nearly twenty years, of a fraternal order sending out a communication in which it designated the outside public or any part of it as “enemies.”
It will be noted in several of the “News-letters” that one of the points I am trying to bring out in my argument is confirmed. It is the classification of the white Catholic and the white Jew with the negro, a classification that can have but one inevitable effect—the creating of discord and dissension among members of the white race.
The last “News-letter” I have read was the one dated June 25. It was read at a meeting I attended in Chattanooga, and was descriptive principally of the work being done on the Pacific Coast by Grand Goblin Coburn, who has charge of that Domain. The report indicated that a vigorous propagation campaign was going on in California and that people were eagerly joining the Ku Klux Klan in response to its appeal for membership on the ground of “white supremacy” over the Japanese. I fully believe that the Pacific Coast will become one of the strongholds of Ku Kluxism, and would not be surprised at any time to read in the newspapers of some surface manifestations of the agitation of the race question. That a movement managed in Atlanta, Ga., has no business meddling in the international affairs of this country is so obvious that it is quite unnecessary to comment further upon it.