This disappointment was common to many of us who had allowed our hopes to run beyond our knowledge.
Another cause of this unusual strength of group hatreds was the very repression of the war period. Individuals and sub-groups had sacrificed their prejudices for the common purpose, but they had done so without pleasure and as a sacrifice. Now they resumed their group intolerance with redoubled zest due to long repression, whether that had been voluntary or forced. The “white, gentile, Protestant American” may have resented fighting on an equality with the negro, or under the orders of a foreigner—now that resentment had its vent. Never has group feeling run higher in America than in this reaction from the sudden, violent and partially artificial unity during our participation in the World War.
One notable result of this sudden relaxation of unity, this sudden predominance of the subgroups, appeared in the phenomena of displacement. Displacement is a common matter among paranoiacs, where one object is substituted for another with the same meaning and the same feeling-tone of resentment or of pleasure. It is also a common characteristic of mobs, which may be called for this and other reasons, a sort of social paranoiacs; the lynching mob will turn from its intended victim to hang instead a public official or a bystander who objects even mildly to its program.[71] In this way the hatreds of war-time were displaced. The hatred for the German was displaced to the alien as a whole. The hatred and suspicion of Russia, aroused when that nation drew out of the war, and intensified when it adopted the radical economic program of the Bolsheviki and the novel political rule of the Soviets, was displaced and applied to all economic radicals, whether Russian or American. Finally, the Jew was identified as a foreigner (even though he might be American-born and a veteran of the war); and as a radical (even though he might be an ultra-conservative capitalist). The ancient, lingering anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism of ages past appeared again; the Jew was not only a Christ-killer or a boor or a Semite,—for no accusation was ever entirely dropped—he was also an alien and a radical, an international banker and an enemy of gentile civilization.
CHAPTER VI.
THE KU KLUX KLAN AND OTHER GROUP REACTIONS
The outstanding phenomenon of the post-war period was the Ku Klux Klan. Other events which accompanied it were the new laws for the limitation of immigration and the general suppression of civil liberties of many kinds. The Klan had something to do with both of these as cause and as effect. Moreover, all three—Klan, anti-alien movement, anti-radical movement—were largely anti-Semitic in sentiment; in addition to which there was a separate movement of anti-Semitism based on the imported anti-Semitism from Europe. Therefore in any study of anti-Semitism as a group reaction we must also study these three group reactions of the post-war period, all of them partially anti-Semitic, and all of them associated with the same group-ideas and the same group-will as anti-Semitism itself.
1.
The Ku Klux Klan of the present is not the one of the Reconstruction period in any sense. It has taken over the name, the garb and much of the high-sounding ritual. But it has a new motive and a new psychology. The old Klan was sectional; the new is national. The old was anti-Northern and anti-negro; the new is anti-alien, anti-negro, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. The old met a certain emergency and was then disbanded by compulsion of the Federal government and the action of its own leaders; the new has expanded from the character of a fraternal society to that of a nation-wide propaganda movement, has entered politics, and become one of the leading political issues of the campaign of 1924. In other words, its real ancestors are: not the Ku Klux Klan of the south in 1866–71, but the Know-Nothing Party of the 50’s and the A. P. A. of the 90’s.
The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915 in Atlanta, Ga., by William J. Simmons, a former Protestant minister of strong convictions, intense if narrow intellect, and great interest in the organization and spreading of fraternal orders. For five years it grew slowly and inconspicuously, during the period of the war and for two years thereafter; in June 1920 it had about five thousand members and was in financial straits. At this juncture it was taken up by Mr. Edward Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who had had experience in the new technique of propaganda. Under their skilled hands the Klan at once grew with astounding rapidity; paid organizers entered state after state, organized “Klaverns,” and reaped great profits for themselves and for the heads of the organization. But the commercial motive, while probably strong in a few persons, was in no sense important in the actual membership of the Klan and their acts. “Its official documents indicate that the Klan originally was a purely fraternal and patriotic organization, one of the hundreds of similar secret societies throughout the country.”[72] The New York World investigated the Klan in 1921, and a Congressional investigation followed in October of that year, but both served rather to advertise than to harm the organization. It spread rapidly throughout the Union, claiming at one time as many as four million members, elected senators and governors in a few instances, and in several became the outstanding issue of state elections, sponsored or was accused of innumerable acts of mob violence, ranging from warnings to certain persons to discontinue their bootlegging or immorality, up to beatings, tar-and-feather parties, and the notorious Mer Rouge murders of 1922 in Louisiana.
We have already discussed the expansion of propaganda, so that its enormous utilization by the Klan is quite comprehensible. But even the constant reiteration of laudable motives and grandiloquent phrases about Americanism cannot account for this sudden rise to power; two other elements must be included—group prejudice and secrecy. The Klan capitalized every prejudice of its group, which was predominantly a small-town one, of American birth, Protestant religion, and Anglo-Saxon either in race or in their opinion of their race. And the Klan met in utter secrecy, did not divulge the names of its members, paraded the streets in the disguise of robes and masks, and carried out its deeds of violence in the same awe-inspiring anonymity.
Clearly, the Klan is typical of the tendencies we have found in the American mind after the war. It represents a subgroup revolting against its voluntary sacrifices for the nation during the war. It represents the anti-alien, anti-Catholic and now also anti-Jewish sentiment, the reaction against the enormous wave of immigration just at an end. It includes also the fear and hatred of the negro, strongest in the old South but spreading to the North with the northern migration of many negroes during and after the war. On the Pacific coast the fear of the Japanese immigration enters into the complex of hatreds. In other words, the Klan is the third wave of Nativism. It is the great reaction of the subgroup to the intense sacrifice for the nation during the war.