The present Klan is a memorial to the original organization, the story of whose valor has never been told, and the value of whose activities to the American nation has never been appreciated. In a sense it is the reincarnation among the sons of the spirit of the fathers. It is a flaming torch of the genius and mission of the Anglo-Saxon committed to the hands of the children which the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are again holding aloft.
The name of the old Klan has been taken by the new as a heritage. The regalia and insignia of the old have been adopted by the new as a mantle of one worthy generation might fall upon the shoulders of its successor. Beyond this point the connection and similarity between the two organizations do not extend. The ritual is not identical. The purpose of each organization, while having a common impulsion, is not the same in extent. The old Klan never intended to reach beyond the horizon of the Southland. The present Klan has purposed the supremacy of our heritage of ideals throughout the nation. There is no intention on the part of the present Klan to intimidate or overawe by spectral, ghostly garb, or to accomplish its aim by demonstrations of force or acts of violence, or by a supergovernment under disguise, or by moving in the darkness of the night. But there is a purpose underlying the entire organization and pulsing in every fiber of its being, to maintain Anglo-Saxon civilization on the American continent from submergence due to the encroachment and invasion of alien people of whatever clime or color. There was not in the old organization a solitary motive except to save the civilization of the white man that had been wrung out of the thousands of years of his struggle upward. There is not a single motive actuating the new Klan except to save the heritage which the fathers have left for us in the present to transmit to the generation yet to come.
A moment's reflection will indicate how natural it is to see the new Klan take form first in the South. With us the issue and the conflict is an old one. Instinctively we scent dangers which our brethren in other sections of the country are apt, as yet, to ignore. For centuries we have been forced to deal, in one form or another, with a problem which always seemed to us and still appears to some of us to be insoluble. I mean the race problem. Yet in this, as in all else, our kinship with our fellow citizens of the North was made evident by an outstanding fact of Reconstruction days. The original Ku Klux Klan was almost as strong in the Union army, maintaining martial law in the defeated states, as among the men who wore the gray and went down to glorious defeat. Had it not been for the active and sympathetic co-operation of large numbers of the Union forces, the achievements of the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction period could not have been accomplished. The time has now come, once more, to bring to our whole country a sense of this great issue. And this issue, the causes of this crisis, has broadened and deepened to a degree which threatens the complete destruction of our civilization.
We Americans—A Vanishing People
We Americans are nothing if not humanitarian. We have in the United States many varieties of organization for the assistance of the various foreign racial and national groups upon our soil. We have also done not a little for the succor of the peoples of the old world who are now in such great distress. The larger humanitarian motive is as a guiding star to millions of Americans. It leads them and lights their way. To many such it may seem unnecessary, to some preposterous, for the organization of which I have the honor to be chief to be founded and developed. But a sober second thought is required here. Let us grant that a people which, in its weakness, faces permanent injury, requires help that it may survive and grow. Then indeed, it follows that we Americans, as a people, need to help ourselves first of all. As a people and a nation we are face to face with dissolution. In the Ku Klux Klan we have an institution designed to help in the stupendous task of saving ourselves from failing and falling.
We Americans as a peculiar people face extinction upon our own soil. Let me be fully understood. I do not wish in the least to appear sensational. I wish only to state a few simple facts which should be apparent to any American who investigates, ever so briefly, the true condition of his country. So often, during the past twenty-two years, I have been oppressed in heart as I have seen how little public interest this crucial matter has aroused. If my tendency has, at times, been somewhat pessimistic and fearful, I claim that there is cause enough for fear and pessimism. Surely there is great need that intensest sadness and sorrow strike deep into the hearts of Americans, if we are now to help ourselves and live.
We Americans are a perishing people. From the point of view of history we are being wiped from the face of the earth with a rapidity which almost staggers hope. First let me clearly define what I mean by the phase, "We American People." I mean by that phrase those white, native-born citizens of this country whose ancestry, birth and training has been such as to give them to-day a full share in the basic principles, the ideals and the practice of our American civilization. I do not mean that a foreign-born citizen can not be a good citizen. On the contrary, many of our foreign-born are excellent citizens. Yet I most positively mean what the title at the head of this chapter distinctly suggests. We, the American people, we whose breed fought through the Revolutionary War and the War Between the States, the people by whose courage the great American wilderness was penetrated, and by whose painstaking industry that wilderness was subjugated and made fruitful—that this people, who gave to the world Washington and Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton, Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln—this people, our people, is on the downward way to the early ending of its remarkable history. The mighty length and breadth of the soil made sacred by our struggles and our victories is now being given over, with ever greater rapidity, to various peoples of a totally different mold. I am not saying that these other peoples are bad in character or in any way unworthy. May Heaven witness for my colleagues and myself of the Ku Klux Klan that we bear them no ill will whatsoever. I hope that none of us as individuals or as an organization may do them aught but good. We wish, above all, to be moved in all things by that Christian spirit upon which our organization is founded, and which, I trust, moves its humblest member. But we have come to sound a warning throughout the length and breadth of the land—a warning which everyone of our own people from Newfoundland to California and from Florida to Alaska must hear and heed. We are perishing as a people and the land of our fathers shall presently know us no more. Emerson once said, "What you do speaks so loud I can not hear what you say." Let me here change the words but not the meaning. The facts cry out so loud that we can not hear the vain and wordy opinions of the theorists and the sentimentalists. The prattle of these sentimentalists, be it ever so noisy, can not prevent us from both seeing and hearing the real drama. We are witnessing the greatest tragedy of the ages.