Aside from showing up the records of a precious pair of “uplifters,” the Clarke-Tyler episode has no great bearing upon the menace of Ku Kluxism. But the aftermath of the story’s publication developed two sinister things that make necessary its introduction into this narrative. One of these was the printing in the Searchlight of a violent article which was practically a call to arms against the Catholics and others who were attacking the Klan. The other was the theft of the police records in the city of Atlanta, covering the cases against Clarke and Mrs. Tyler, obviously an inside job and showing the extent to which Ku Kluxism had control of the public officials of that city.
The incendiary article in the Searchlight from the pen of one Carl F. Hutcheson was headed “American Patriots, Hark!”
“American patriots! The womanhood of this country has been criminally assaulted in the most diabolical and satanic manner known to the human race—an attempt has been made to ruin the character of a good woman by the most dastardly methods of current times. That dastardly, cowardly and infamous instrument of murder comprises certain daily and powerful newspapers of this country!
“Murder! Yes, murder of the worst type! Those murderers who wield the pen, and strew infamy throughout every nook and corner of this nation by their millions of papers with their thunder-bolts of publicity against fair woman! Every word written in opposition to a great patriotic woman of Atlanta reeks with the blood of a grand innocent lady of Southern birth and standing. A woman’s character destroyed (only temporarily), but that arch enemy of Americanism, the New York World, and its string of subsidized, patronizing, fawning and syncophantic sheets through America, commonly called ‘newspapers,’ but which are nothing more than organs, and specialists as character assassins of the most despicable, contemptible and depraved sort!
“The unwarranted murderous attack sprung from the brain of Pulitzer, who disgraces the name of his great father. His paper is located in a city and community where woman’s virtue is played with, and her fair name is no higher regarded than a mere chattel lying upon a crockery-shop shelf for sale at a few pence. Had the so-called editor above referred to, and his blasphemous sheet, had any measure of fairness, justice, and just common canine decency, an effort to materialize effort in its opposition to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he and his corps would never have focused their salacious and foul guns upon a lone, defenseless woman! I said alone? Defenseless? Not yet. By the eternal gods of justice, she is not alone and defenseless, as every mother’s son of true Southern manhood and those of every other section of this country is aroused! We issue the bugle call to all of you to buckle on your armor, and defend this good lady, even with your lives!
“To you American patriots, we address ourselves! Unleash your dogs of war and make these hounds of convict stripe pay penalty for the great injury done. To you we appeal! Southern womanhood has been slaughtered! No woman’s good name is safe from the glaring spotlight of a pernicious newspaper and its set of hirelings. Your mothers, sisters and daughters are unsafe from the millionaire newspaper owners, who prostitute their columns by crushing to death the fair name of a woman. They hesitate at no methods, regardless of how low in order, to carry out their designs as a means to their ends!
“Who is back of the damnable juggernaut which extinguishes a woman’s life, character and reputation, in order to carry on the fight against the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan?
“Who is back of William Randolph Hearst’s local paper, the Atlanta Georgian, which lifts from the World the false charges against our beloved woman, and defames her in her home?
“Whose tremendous influences, with their serpentine poison, inflames the negro of the North and East against the whites?
“Whose hands are seen beneath the cover of this murderous and slanderous propaganda?