These “News-letters” are valuable as showing the mental attitude of the workers and members of the Ku Klux Klan. They show that wherever it is possible the national organization desires to throw its net around the officers of the law, and enroll them in the system. Under the guise of assisting the authorities to enforce the law this is done, and to my personal knowledge many conscientious and capable officers of the law believe that the idea is a good one. At the same time it is an alarming situation when police officers and sheriffs who have already taken one oath to the States in which they reside, take another—a vicious and illegal obligation—to an “Invisible Empire,” ruled autocratically by one man who has in mind plans he does not reveal to his followers. What is to happen when the chief of police of a city swears to obey “unconditionally” all laws, regulations, decrees and edicts of the Ku Klux Klan “which have been or which may be hereafter enacted.”
Whatever excuse the original Ku Klux Klan may have had for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any situation arising in this country at the present time that calls for any extra-judicial organization, functioning in secret, and composed of men wearing robes and masks to conceal their identities. And along this line, I want to call attention to a historical fact. The original Klan was organized and functioned at a time when the courts and law-enforcing machinery of the South were paralyzed, but, as soon as the courts began to administer justice, General Forrest, the Grand Wizard, of the Ku Klux Klan, issued an order disbanding the organization on the ground that it was no longer needed. Surely, if the original Klan, having functioned as an enormous “vigilance committee” in several States, found that its services were not required, what real excuse can be advanced for the continuance of an extra-judicial organization in these days of ample courts, able officers of the law and the administration of justice? It seems to me that there are more than enough law-enforcement agencies in the United States.
If the system of judicature in the United States is so helpless that a secret, masked, “Invisible Empire” is necessary to enforce the law, then the cold truth is that the Federal and State governments are abject failures. This then, being the case, it should be the duty of the people to devise ways and means to create and maintain a new system. In the face of the fact that this country has grown from a few small colonies to one of the greatest of world powers, and that the Constitution of the United States has been the basic law under which this has been done, and that our system of law enforcement is entirely adequate, the attempt on the part of any organization whatever to take upon itself the enforcement of the law is a piece of presumptuous impudence. All laws are made and enforced by representatives of the whole people. They are not enacted by or for the benefit of a class and they cannot be enforced by a class.
The “News-letters” also indicate that the teachings of Simmons are taking firm root in the minds of the religious element of the country. While I may be disputed on this point, I believe, from my observations in various sections of the country which I have visited, that the people of the South as a whole take their churches and their religions more seriously than do people elsewhere. The whole structure of modern Ku Kluxism is an attempt to clothe its real purposes and intentions in the garb of the backwoods religious revival. Its ritualism is of the camp-meeting order, and all its ceremonies, as I shall show later, tend to awaken the emotions of provincial Protestantism. History has shown in numerous instances that where this religious fervor is aroused, it produces a blind fanaticism that is one of the most dangerous forces in the body politic when it is turned loose. The inability of the fanatic to differentiate between the political activities of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy and the Roman Catholic Church as a great religious institution is one of the greatest menaces of the Ku Klux movement.
The “News-letters” show further that already the fanatical “citizens” of the “Invisible Empire” are catching hold of the idea of autocracy, and that the “subjects” are addressing their rulers as “Your Majesty.”
Were the situation not so serious and of such vital moment to the American people, this “Empire” of Ku Kluxism would be one of the greatest pieces of humor ever perpetrated upon the American public.