Frank Tannenbaum covers similar points in the first chapter of “Darker Phases of the South,” where he deals with the Klan. He holds, first, that
[78]The Klan is an attempt to maintain static what has become dynamic. [79]The war left a common mood upon the world ... the hate is generated as a means of justifying the thrill to be derived from abusing the people hated. The Klan is a reaction to boredom; it is a means of fulfilling the millennial hopes frustrated by the outcome of the war; it gives vent to a type of war hysteria. [80]The idealization of the white women in the South is partly the unconscious self-protection on the part of the white men from their own bad habits, notions, beliefs, attitudes and practises, a matter of over-compensation.
To his keen psychoanalytic study I must add a few words from an article by Frank Bohn in the American Journal of Sociology. [81]Mr. Bohn points out that the Klan, once organized, had to find something to do, that its violence was a natural outcome of disguise, organization and aimlessness. He attributes its origin chiefly to the disillusionment of the American people over the break-down of their simple, democratic ideals when applied to a huge nation of complex population; and to the changing character of the racial and social composition of the people, with the revolt of the older stocks. He concludes:
The civilization of the United States is suffering rapid changes, not only as regards its basic institutions, but also in the nature and quality of its human composition. The hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan are an expression of pain, of sorrow and of solemn warning. Its methods arise from anger and fear, not from knowledge and forethought.
3.
A word may be needed especially on our narrower topic, the relation of the Ku Klux Klan to the Jew. Its preliminary questions to the candidate for “naturalization” include two that exclude the Catholic, two the Jew, one the alien and one the negro. The most inclusive is number 2: “Are you a native born, white, Gentile American citizen?” Number 4 is: “Do you believe in the tenets of the Christian religion?” Imperial Wizard H. W. Evans gave out an interview in Indianapolis early in 1924 when he made the following statement, repeated several time later in other connections:
By deliberate election he (the Jew) is unassimilable. He rejects intermarriage. His religious and social rites and customs are inflexibly segregative. Law-abiding, healthy, moral, mentally alert, energetic, loyal and reverent in his home life, the Jew is yet by primal instinct a Jew, indelibly marked by persecution, with no deep national attachment, a stranger to the emotion of patriotism as the Anglo-Saxon feels it. Klansmen have no quarrel with him, no hatred of him, no thought of persecuting him. As Protestants are unavailable for membership in all-Jewish societies, so Jews are unavailable for membership in an all-Protestant society like the Klan. Moreover, their jealously guarded separatism unfits them for co-operation in a movement dedicated to the thorough unification of the dominant strains in American life.
Here are the same themes of racial superiority, like-mindedness of America, identification of Americanism and Protestantism. But elsewhere we meet with direct attacks on the Jew, as on the Catholic, negro and foreigner—not merely the assertion of their inferiority. Speaking at Dallas, Texas, December 7, 1922, Mr. Evans said:
The Jew produces nothing anywhere on the face of the earth. He does not till the soil. He does not create or manufacture anything for common use. He adds nothing to the sum of human welfare. Everywhere he stands between the producer and the consumer and sweats the toil of the one and the necessity of the other for his gains.
This sounds like an economic motive, but it may be merely repetition of stock charges of traditional anti-Semitism. Mr. Bohn hints at such an economic purpose when he remarks: