The Modern Ku Klux Klan

by Henry P. Fry

It is a part of the tragedy of war that its termination is followed by a period of painful reconstruction. Every war ever fought in the world’s history has had its inevitable aftermath of readjustment—the return from the abnormal to the normal. In some instances this has been so imperceptible as to entail but little hardship upon the people who have suffered the terrible effects of armed conflict; in others, the harshness of the conqueror to the conquered and the brutality of the victor toward the vanquished have left traces of hatred and lust for vengeance that have survived for generations.

In the study of the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, there are two reconstruction periods that stand out in marked contrast. One was the reconstruction of the Southern States following the Civil War, and the other was the reconstruction of South Africa by the British government immediately after the Boer War. The former was handled in a stupid, ignorant, and insane manner, and based upon the lust of spoils and upon the most wretched of partisan politics. The latter was disposed of in a wise, sane, and statesmanly fashion, with impartial consideration for the welfare of the British Empire and the peace and good will of the Boers.

The reconstruction of the Southern States following the Civil War was utterly stupid, and Americans of our generation—regardless of Northern or Southern birth—so consider it, and know that the manner in which the situation was handed was a political mistake.

The activities of the “carpetbaggers” and their negro allies after the Civil War were not confined merely to the looting of the public treasuries. Vicious white men organized the negroes into societies and stirred up their hatred against the white people, with the result that unspeakable crimes were committed in all parts of the South. Perhaps the most notorious of these organizations was that known as the “Loyal League,” which operated in all parts of the South, and which was composed of negroes and low white men.

I quote from Mr. Wilson’s work, the following clear and well-worded summary:

“The price of the policy to which it gave the final touch of permanence was the temporary disintegration of Southern society and the utter, apparently the irretrievable alienation of the South from the political party whose mastery it had been Mr. Stevens’ chief aim to perpetuate. The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: governments whose incredible debts were incurred that thieves might be enriched, whose increasing loans and taxes went to no public use but into the pockets of party managers and corrupt contractors. There was no place of open action or of constitutional agitation, under the terms of reconstruction, for the men who were the real leaders of the Southern communities. The restrictions shut white men of the older order out from the suffrage even. They could act only by private combination, by private means, as a force outside the government, hostile to it, prescribed by it, of whom opposition and bitter resistance was expected, and expected with defiance.... But there were men to whom counsels of prudence seemed as ineffectual as they were unpalatable, men who could not sit still and suffer what was now put upon them.... They took the law into their own hands and began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot or by any course of public action.”

The agency by which the South was saved from the devilish scheme of Thaddeus Stevens to Africanize it and convert it into a mongrel, half-bred section was the original Ku Klux Klan! Brought into being by chance, and used as an agency to meet the exigency of the hour, it served its purpose as many similar systems have served theirs, including the Western vigilantes, whose work has been commended by Theodore Roosevelt on the ground of public necessity. Then having restored the South to the control of its better element, it passed away, to occupy a cherished place in the history of the Southern States, from which it can never be resurrected.

The reign of Ku Kluxism existed in the Southern States from the year 1866 until President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the Federal troops from the South, during which period a number of its phases present themselves for study and investigation. In some of these, if one accepts the opinions of radical members of Congress from the Northern States, the whole system was nothing but evil; while if the extremely radical Southern viewpoint is accepted, the Ku Klux movement was as spotless as a lily and was responsible for no acts of lawlessness whatever. Somewhere between the extreme Northern condemnation and the extreme Southern justification lies the truth. In any case the Ku Klux movement was the exercise of extra-legal force for the purpose of meeting a revolutionary condition of society in a revolutionary manner. In the sense that it had no standing in law and took upon itself to enforce what its leaders saw fit to declare was the law, it was an outlaw organization. Taken by itself, in the light of our present system of government and law enforcement, it has nothing on which to stand; but, studied in the light of the reconstruction period, it is shown to have been the last desperate resort of the Anglo-Saxon to resist and overthrow the attempt to Africanize his country.

The movement was a revolution to meet a situation unparalled in this country’s history, and the history of revolutions has never at any time manifested the character of pink teas or church socials. Personally I prefer to adopt the point of view that in a chaotic and despotic condition of society like the one forced upon the Southern people, the end justified the means, and would place the entire responsibility of what happened in the South upon the shoulders of Thaddeus Stevens and other radical leaders of Congress.

A careful investigation of the history of the original movement shows that it was divided into three separate and distinct periods. It was first organized as a secret society for the amusement of its members, without any serious attempt to act as a “regulator” of social and political affairs; it was then transformed into a great political-military movement, enforced law and order, drove the negro and the carpetbagger out of politics, and was then ordered disbanded; and lastly it attempted in unorganized fashion, without the authority of its former leaders, to rule many communities, and an enormous number of acts of violence were committed either by it or in its name.