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Foreign
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this episode is brought to you
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by Claude by Anthropic Now, Tom, you and I, when we're together, we always argue about one thing, don't we? It's the existence or otherwise of the Loch Ness Monster. But you foolishly are skeptical and you don't think that there is a monster beneath the freezing waters of that Scottish lock.
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Because as I know from AI, a plesiosaur would not be able to survive in Scottish waters because they'd just be too cold for it.
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Well, Tom, this back and forth is what makes studying history so fun. And actually, Claude was made for this kind of thinking.
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The deep research feature can pull from dozens of sources at once. It can surface contradictions between them and it can give you a full breakdown with citations so that you can trace the evidence yourself. It's like having a research partner who's read literally everything and wants to chat about what it actually means. So very like Dominic.
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Actually. Try Claude for free at Claude A.I. restishory pet owner Save this TikTok has free training guides and behavior tips, potty training tricks, healthy diet ideas. No expensive classes needed. Just scroll and learn. Download TikTok now.
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The Kokomo on which the sun rose on July 4th was not the same Kokomo on which the orb of day set at the close of America's 147th birthday, Kokomo had had an awakening, a spiritual awakening. It had witnessed the spectacle of 200,000 men and women filled with patriotism and love of country. One fifth of a million men and women who by their attendance signified their belief in a living Christ and an open Bible, journey from points afar to be present at a vast meeting wherein there were to be no carnival, features, sporting events, circus stunts or spectacular events. It saw staunch American farmers with their wives, merchants of repute, bankers of integrity, honest and hard working, mechanics, doctors and men of all professions, leaders in their communities, ministers and devout church workers, in fact, men and women from every walk of life. Today, Kokomo may well boast that she has royally entertained the biggest crowd of 100% red blooded Americans that ever assembled at any one place, at any one time in the history of America to do homage to God, the flag and the home. So stirring stuff there in the newspaper the Fiery Cross, which was published in Indianapolis on 13 July 1923, and it's describing an enormous Independence Day picnic and I'm guessing Dominic from the name of that newspaper, the Fiery Cross, that the Ku Klux Klan may have something to do with this.
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Yeah, you're not wrong, Tom. So this picnic was one of many bizarre and extraordinary episodes in the history of the second Ku Klux Klan, which we'll be talking about today. So last time, to give people a bit of a reminder, we talked about how the Klan was reborn thanks to Thomas Dixon's book and play, the Klansmen, the film the Birth of a Nation, and the vision of a man called William J. Simmons, who wanted to basically make money by inventing his own fraternal order.
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Dominic, I just asked, did Thomas Dixon join the Klan?
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No.
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He just sat there, enjoyed his money.
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No. Thomas Dixon had made all this money from the book and the play, but he didn't approve of the second clan. He condemned it.
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B
How interesting. That's a twist.
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Yeah. I think basically because he'd been shut out was part of it, but also he condemned it as peddling hatred, which for the man who'd written the book, the Klansmen, it's a bit rich. Seemed a bit rich. But he didn't like the attacks on Catholics and Jews. Interesting. He thought that was poor from the clan, anyway. So it was transformed. Simmons's attempt to basically make money by setting up a rival to the Masons were transformed by two PR and marketing experts, Edward Young Clark and Elizabeth Tyler, who we talked about last time, who launched this massive sales operation and a message of 100% Americanism, basically a defense of white Protestant America against African Americans, but more importantly, Jews and above all, Catholics. It was a huge hit. Exploited the mood of anxiety at the end of the First World War, anxiety about immigration, about immorality, the big debate about Prohibition. And it attracts, at its peak, maybe 4 million people, 5 million people. And we ended last time with the Klan making big gains in the 1922 elections, sort of endorsing and campaigning for candidates for governor and winning lots of seats in state legislatures and sending the first Klan sort of open clan senator to the United States Congress from the state of Texas. So we have now moved on six months. The Kokomo picnic takes place in Indiana, and Indiana is a state that will play a big part in today's episode, because in the mid-1920s, this is the supreme Klan stronghold. And the story of the Klan in Indiana is absolutely bizarre. And it ends with a really lurid and strange murder scandal, which we'll come to in the second half. But just on this picnic, the article in the fiery cross says 200,000 people. This is maybe an exaggeration, but even the lowest estimates reckon that there are at least 50,000 people there. There were Special trains chartered by the Klan to bring people from neighboring states. The lines of picnic tables were longer than entire street blocks. And the report is actually disingenuous. The report said people were not drawn by carnival features, sporting events or circus stunts. This is not true. There was a kids area, a special kids area of the picnic.
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Well, the clan loved dressing up as clowns, don't they?
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Yeah, kids would love that. There was a boxing ring, there were choirs, there were circus performers. They had a big screen and they screened talkies, you know, films. There was a plane circling overhead with a great flashing white cross. And get this, an acrobat standing on the plane, doing stunts on the wing of the plane.
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B
God, who wouldn't want to see that?
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Of course you'd want to go and see that. Now here's the mad thing. This was very, very typical of Klan events in the mid-1920s. So they would hold hundreds of similar events all over America. They'd have barbecues, they'd have parades, they'd have baseball tournaments, and they'd have these great picnics. They'll be advertised in the newspapers. They'd be heavily promoted by Methodist ministers in their sermons. They'd say, you know, go to the Kokomo picnic. Lots of God fearing Americans will be there. And tens of thousands of people would go to these things.
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B
So it's weirdly, it's a kind of prefiguring of woodstock in the 60s, really. I mean, that kind of idea of people turning up, you know, to have huge kind of festivals, large crowds. I mean, obviously the vibe is very different.
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The vibe is different, but it's so
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often things that seem distinctive about the 60s are being prefigured in kind of unsettling ways.
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I guess so, yeah. I think what it takes inspiration from a lot is sort of state fairs. Have you ever been to one of these state fairs? No. I went to the Minnesota State Fair once.
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Is it fun?
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I probably wouldn't go again, deep down. I mean, mainly a lot of it seems to be eating these horrendous snacks, kind of corn dogs or whatever.
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But the idea of turning up in an enormous field and having a great fest.
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Yeah, Americans love that.
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That's. That's the thing, isn't it?
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Yeah, totally, it is. But this, I mean, this did not happen at Woodstock. The Kokomo picnic. Like most of these picnics, they will end with a cross burning on a hilltop and there would be searchlights and flares. Sometimes there'd be fireworks. And these are great spectacles. I mean, they're Very expensive. But they pay for themselves because they're great for recruitment. So there will be hundreds, if not thousands of people who will join the clan en masse on these occasions. And your point about, you know, Woodstock and festivals and whatnot, this is a side of the clan that I think would surprise listeners who think of, well, the Klan is obviously a hateful paramilitary organization. This is the Klan as family fun, as a fun day out. So actually, if you live in Oregon or you live in Indiana or somewhere, and you have kids and you're white and you're Protestant, going to one of these Klan picnics, you know, it's an. It's a fun way to spend the day. And it's part of this huge social calendar. So the historian, social historian Kathleen Blee says with the myriad of weddings, baby christenings, family picnics, athletic contests, parades, spelling bees, beauty contests, rodeos and circuses, the Klan basically became, and I quote, an ordinary normal, taken for granted, part of the life of the white Protestant majority. And when historians later did interviews with Klan members, the thing that the Klan members from the 20s, and we're talking about millions of people often said was it was just. It was good fun. It was a laugh. We went along and people dressed up and there were circus stunts and there was sizzling burgers.
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B
I mean, this is wholesome fun, rather than the castrating people and throwing them into the lake.
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Well, there's always that element, of course, to life in the clan, and I don't want to undersell that element at all. But I think it is important to emphasize that it's not just about vigilante violence. So another aspect of this which will surprise people is how many women are involved. So there's a historian called Linda Gordon who's written a lot about this. She reckons about half a million women join the Klan.
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Do they get costumes?
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They do get costumes, yeah. Now, this is not really surprising because women have always been very prominent in activist groups in American history. So some of the groups that basically fed into the Klan, so anti immigration, eugenics, temperance, the anti saloon league, these kinds of groups, women were always a huge element of those groups. And at first. Here's the amazing thing. At first, women weren't allowed to join the clan, so they set up their own kind of unofficial groups. And then the men were like, oh, well, we can't have the ladies setting up their own unofficial groups. We'll have to set up our proper ones. So they set up the Queens of the Golden Mask and the Ladies of the Invisible Empire. And then they merged them all eventually into the women of the Ku Klux Klan. The women generally, as it's so often the way the women did most of the work. So they basically did the party planning, they organized the picnics, they did all the transport, they did all the, you know, the catering and all of that kind of thing. But it wasn't just a kind of women's places in the home organization. The Klan supported women's right to vote and to work. And actually it's the modernity of Klans women that's so striking. So Linda Gordon gives us an example of this woman called Daisy Barr, who was from Indiana and she was in her mid-40s, in the early 1920s. She came from a Quaker family. She'd actually been a Quaker pastor before the First World War, so that was not unknown. And she was a colossal do gooder. She was the president of the Indiana Humane Society, a campaigner for Prohibition. She founded the Muncie Indiana ywca. She founded a home for fallen women. She was the president of the Indiana War Mothers. She was the first female vice chair of the Republican State Committee. So she's one of those women, we all know, people like this who does everything first to volunteer, you know, high minded Home for Fallen Women, you know, ywca, all of that.
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And does she, does she get awarded a brilliant title as a reward?
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She was the Imperial Empress of the Queens of the Golden Mask.
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So you don't get that with the Quakers.
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Yeah. And she became the chief clan recruiter for eight Midwestern and border states. So she's also making a bit of money on the side from the recruiting and the thing, you look at someone like that and you say, well, is she far right because the clan, we perceive the clan as being far right. Or is she a progressive person with her interest in, you know, saving foreign women and setting up, you know, Christian groups and all of this kind of thing. And the truth of course, is that she's both and neither that neither of these labels is enough to encompass her. They're both inadequate ways to capture the complexity of the politics of some of these people who joined the Klan in the 1920s. That said, there is probably a danger of over emphasizing the family friendly normality of the clan. So Thomas Peagram, another historian, gives an example of another kind of fair appearance, which is the Texas State Fair in October 1923. And at the Texas State Fair, a whole day was designated as Clan Day, and it was organized by clan number 66 of Dallas. And the flyer I found the Flyer online gives it sets a very jolly tone. Meet your friends. Ku Klux Klan Day. Witness initiation of the largest class in the history of Klandom. Spectacular fireworks display, masked band concert, competitive drills by the women of the Ku Klux Klan drill team. You and your friends are invited to attend this, the most wonderful day of your life.
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B
I mean, imagine if it was.
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Yeah, that can't be accused of underselling it. No, 150,000 people went to this. 150,000 people. And there were clan themed rodeos and bands and all of this. Hot dogs, you name it. But the clan that had organized it, clan number 66, was one of the most violent in the country. It had a reputation for kidnapping and flogging people.
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Is this the one with the flogging field?
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The flocking field in Dallas? The flocking meadow. Exactly. And one of its alumni was a guy called Hiram Evans, who we'll be talking about later. He had led some of these beatings. He is now the Imperial wizard. And he gives a blood curdling speech at this occasion. He describes African Americans as savage. He describes Jews as alien and money mad. And above all, he says Catholics pose the greatest danger to our institutions because they belong to a corrupt church that thrives upon ignorance. And he is saying this to these 150,000 people who are eating their hot dogs and enjoying the rodeos and whatnot. In other words, the racist bigotry and the threat of violence is never that far away. Even at the most, apparently anodyne, you know, wholesome, family friendly outing and this issue of violence. I mean, American historians have kind of really got stuck into each other about just how violent the Klan was and how important to it. Basically, it depends on what state you look at. So historians who've looked at Southern states which were already very violent often really emphasize how important violence was. So Nancy MacLean writing about Georgia, or Glenn Feldman writing about Alabama. But then there are other historians who say, are you not maybe over exaggerating this? For example, it's an odd thing. People associate the Klan with lynching. Do you not think, Tom, when people think about the Klan, they think about lynching?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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But lynching actually peaked in the 20th century before the Klan ever grew. It peaked in 1919 and then declined at precisely the point when the Klan is rising.
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Is that because they're all off having their hot dogs and things?
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I think it's because lynching and the Klan are two different things. Most Klan violence is nocturnal. It's vigilante violence late at night. Lynchings. I mean, as shocking as it will seem to most of our listeners are open, public occasions carried out in broad daylight. Nobody wears masks. The openness is part of the point. It's a sort of public, collective ritual, a lynching, as horrific as it may be. Now, that doesn't mean that we should downplay Klan violence completely. And let's get into some of this violence. So by the mid-1920s, especially in the Northern states, it is becoming a really serious issue because there's a lot of violence, violence against Catholic groups. So there's a rival to the clan among the Catholics called the Knights of Columbus. The Knights of Columbus have been founded in 1882, so it's older than the clan, but it fought back quite vigorously. I mean, they have a similar, you know, like all these fraternal orders. They have secret passwords and handshakes and signs and stuff, but they fight back. And there are brawls in a lot of Midwestern states, open brawls, even gunfights. So, Lilly, Pennsylvania, in 1924, fighting between hundreds of Klansmen and locals and Knights of Columbus and whatnot ends with this kind of street battle in which there's gunfire across the street, three people end up being shot in the crossfire, and so on. And in some places, the paramilitary dimension definitely gets out of control. And this brings me to the state of Illinois, Midwestern state. So the Klan was established in Illinois in 1921. It got lots of members in Chicago, but it did really well in downstate, in southern Illinois, in the rural counties. It had hundreds of individual lodges or clavons downstate, and it had these enormous outdoor rallies. And in one county in particular, if you listened last week, we were talking about York County, South Carolina, where the first Klan became entrenched. And one of its equivalents in the 1920s is a place called Williamson county in Illinois. So Williamson county, that's at the very southern tip of Illinois, Illinois so far down, you might as well be in Kentucky or Tennessee. And it's coal mining country. It's already an unhappy place because there's been lots of strikes and labor unrest, violence between unions and strikebreakers. And the other thing about Williamson county that's so interesting is loads of European immigrants have moved in. So a fifth of the population is now Catholic. And these tend to be Italians from Lombardy, they're Lombards. And there's lots of local anxiety about Catholicism and saloons and prostitution and all of this kind of thing. So it's perfect territory for the clan. And the clan arrived in the absolutely typical style. They marched in, in their robes to the First Christian Church of Marion. And they handed over three fresh ten dollar bills to the minister. And the minister held up the dollar bills to his flock and he said, that tells you they stand for something good. And so everybody joined the clam, or at least a lot of people did. And the Klan held these big open air meetings with burning crosses. And they said, we have come here to clean up the county and to purge vice and whatnot. But the bloke they got to lead their crusade was a very violent man. He was called S. Glenn Young, and he'd formerly worked for the Justice Department, but he'd been kicked out of his prohibition units for basically excessive zeal. And he forms paramilitary squads of Klansmen and they basically launch raids across Williamson county and they take hundreds of people prisoner because they're working in cahoots with the kind of local cops. He and his Klansmen take hundreds of prisoners and herd them back in kind of chain gangs to the town jails. He starts to wear a military uniform. He carries two handguns. He sometimes carries a machine gun. They will beat up their prisoners, they will attack immigrants. They attacked so many French and Italian people in their homes that the local consuls of both countries launched formal protests to the US government about the way their citizens were being treated. Eventually, the Illinois state authorities sent in the National Guard to restore order. Young was arrested for assault and battery, but he and his bodyguards, when they went to court, they went to court with their machine guns, like holding their machine guns. And they were promptly acquitted.
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B
I mean, that is one way to
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get off the charge. So at this point, the state authorities flooded the county with National Guardsmen to try to basically clamp down on the Klan. As David Chalmers puts it, before the whole episode was over, practically every prominent man in the county, judges, policemen, sheriffs, mayors, county supervisors and state attorneys came under indictment for conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, malfeasance, riot or murder. Guardsmen with fixed bayonets and emplaced machine guns. Guns became a part of everyday life. This is an insane thing to happen in this county in the middle of nowhere. By the spring of 1924, it's basically become a complete war zone. This guy Young and his men are utterly out of control. They're like, it's like a CDO in South America traveling around with hordes of machine gun toting bodyguards.
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B
So it's, it's quite like that county in the first episode.
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Yeah, York County, South Carolina.
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B
Yeah, the one where I went in and cleaned it up.
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Oh, Major Merrill. Major Lewis Merrill. Yeah.
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B
Presumably they can't. The federal government cannot bring order to everywhere where the Klan are running riot.
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I guess so. I mean, in this case, it's National Guard that are sent in. And they do eventually do it, but it takes years. The American system, you're so dependent on local authorities.
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B
Yeah. That if they get corrupted, it's a kind of.
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That they get corrupted. What can you do? And this is the story of the American south in the first half of the 20th century. Yeah. What, you know, what can you do? I mean, the showdown is beyond parody. Basically, Young had a gunfight in this mining town with a bootlegger called Charlie Berger. They had a final sort of, you know, once upon a time in the west style confrontation in a soft drinks parlor. Of course, it's Prohibition.
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B
Even though this guy's a bootlegger.
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A
Yeah. I don't know. What's he doing in the soft drinks parlor? Maybe he's just having a milkshake. A soda, sir, Step away from the beverage fountain.
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B
Yum.
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A
Well, anyway, this bootlegger and Young, the paramilitary, they opened fire at each other at the same point. The bootlegger was shot but survived. But Young was shot and killed. His funeral in the county was a huge Klan occasion. 40,000 people went to his funeral and he was interred in a special mausoleum with a Klan honor guard. Initially, at first, men with machine guns stood by his tomb sort of day and night. I mean, do you think they're still there? Surely not. I don't know. Anyway, all of this is very bad publicity for the clan, but actually, what's going on inside the higher echelons of the clan is equally terrible publicity. So to recap, Tom, you will recall that after the summer of 1920, the Klan was effectively led by three people.
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B
So there's this guy who looks like the Northamptonshire lawyer.
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A
Yeah. Garter salesman.
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B
Garter salesman.
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William J. Simmons. The guy who basically hired the bus and taken his friends up the mountain and set some planks on fire.
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B
And then there's the couple who were found in bed with a bottle of whiskey.
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Yeah. Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tylor.
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B
And Elizabeth Tylor looks like Queen Victoria.
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Yes. They'd bonded over a publicity campaign for eugenics and now are running the Southern Publicity Association.
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B
They sound a fun couple.
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So these three people between them had made loads of money from the Klan, but by 1921, the regional leaders of the Klan were plotting against them.
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B
Are these the goblins?
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Goblins, Exactly. Goblins.
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B
So you can never trust a goblin. They'll always get you in the end.
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A
So basically the Goblins gripes are as follows. First of all, they say these three people have made a ton of money from the clan and. And it's not right and we should have some of their money. They are very displeased about these two people being caught in bed with a bottle of whiskey. And they've lost confidence in the Imperial Wizard. That's a terrible thing to have happened.
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B
Yeah, again, it's this whole wizard of Oz thing.
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Well, like the wizard of Oz, he's too old. It's old fashioned. The more. Go ahead. Members of the clan think he looks like a relic in his frock coat and he's got a pounce neigh glasses. Worse, he's been known to hang around at horse races drinking. And given the clan's commitment to prohibition, this is very poor from William Simmons. So the end of 1921, four grand goblins went to Atlanta. Four.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Imagine going into a railway carriage and finding this four grand goblin. Four Grand Goblins have gone to Atlanta and they have a showdown with Simmons. And they say you got to fire these people. Clark and Tyler, they're cooking the books, the hands in their till, which is almost certainly true. They're skimming off loads of money. Get rid. After a lot of pressure, Mrs. Tyler is the first to go. She says she's exhausted, she needs some spend time with her daughter. Actually she's almost only been embezzling money. And then what happens? At the end of May 1922, William J. Simmons, the original founder of the Second Clan, says he's going to take a sabbatical from the Klan. He's been ill and he needs a rest actually. He's been drinking and he needs to dry out. So he's going to take a break. And in his absence, the sole surviving member of the PR partnership, who's Edward Young, Clark will be the acting Imperial Wizard. Now, what follows is a bit tangled, so prepare yourselves. And it makes Stalin's court seem, you know, friendly and easy going. Clark, the PR man is now the acting Imperial Wizard. But he needs allies to run the clan. And his chief ally is the head of the clan secretariat who is called Hiram Wesley Evans.
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B
So we've met him before, haven't we? He's popping up all over the place, giving rants.
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A
Mad rants, racist rants. I mentioned Stalin and I said he was the head of the Klan's secretariat. And people who know about the rise of Stalin and how he was the basically in charge of all the membership lists will maybe guess what's coming. Hiram Evans was from Texas. He was the son of a judge. Unusually for a leading figure in the clan, he actually was well educated. But he ended up becoming a dentist and apparently a very mediocre dentist. His dental rivals dismissed him as a me, a tooth puller. So his remedy for everything was just to pull out your teeth. But he didn't mind that. The fact that he was mediocre, he leaned into it. He called himself the most average man in America, and this was part of his populist message. I'm an ordinary person. I will appeal to ordinary Klansmen. So he's an everyman. He looks. He's medium height, he's chubby, he's soft spoken. Like a lot of Klansmen, he's joined loads of different societies and lodges and stuff. But as so often in this story, there is a dark side. He is the guy who was the head of the Dallas Lodge.
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B
Oh, so the whipping Meadow, the whipping.
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A
The kidnappings. He'd been the bloke who'd been in charge of branding a man, which happened in the last episode in Acid On His Head. So he is actually Stalin. Anyway, this dentist, Evans, Mrs. Tyler and Clark, had basically recognized his ambition and they'd brought him to run membership recruitment and they paid him a lot of money and he used this to entrench his power and to win over a lot of the regional managers.
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B
Yeah, so very Stalin.
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A
Yeah, very Stalin. He is Stalin. Basically, it's the American Stalin. And he, as time goes on, 1921, 1922, he says to the grand goblins, these PR people are corrupt. I should be running the Klan. And he'd launched his coup very Stalin style. Stalin would have launched his coup at the sort of congress of some party Congress. This is what Hiram Evans does. It is the first annual convocation of the clan in Atlanta in November 1922. So Simmons, the founder, has just got back from sabbatical and resumed his position as Imperial Wizard. The night before the conference begins, Evans calls a meeting in his Atlanta hotel. And one of the people in the meeting is the rising star of the Northern Clan, who is the boss in Indiana, who is called David C Stevenson. Remember this man, David C Stevenson. He will play a big part in the second half. They get together, the Grand Goblins, these people, and they say, yeah, we're going to launch a coup against Simmons. And they go over to Simmons's house, which, as you record, is called Clan crest. And at 3am they persuade Simmons to accept a promotion to Emperor from Imperial Wizard. But what Simmons doesn't realize is the title of emperor is utterly meaningless. He has secretly been stripped of his power.
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B
So, Dominic, a pre figuring there of the series that we'll be doing after this, which is about 12th century Japan, right.
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A
And since what happens to the emperors of Japan?
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B
The emperors become ciphers. Yes.
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Yeah. Well, there you go. So basically, Simmons is kicked upstairs to become emperor and Evans will become the new imperial wizard and his ally, this guy Stevenson from the north, who we'll talk about in the second half. He becomes the sort of supremo in the North. He gets a free hand in the North. The one person they still need to get rid of, though, is the other PR man, Edward Young Clark. He unfortunately has blotted his copy book further. First of all, he went to a prohibition event, gave a speech about the
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B
evils of drink, got absolutely hammered, and
- [29:46]
A
then he got hammered afterwards and was arrested for drunk drunkenness. And secondly, he's just been indicted for violating the Man Act. What he has done, he's been accused of smuggling women across state lines for immoral purposes because he had arranged for a young girl who was the sister of a bank robber to travel and I quote, to travel from Houston to New Orleans to assuage his loneliness, right? As imperial wizard Hiram Evans terminates this guy's contract. And then there's a year of demented legal infighting where Simmons and Clark, so the founders try to set up their own rifle to the Klan. There's a lot of fighting about copyright. And then in February 1924, Hiram Evans, the Stalin, the Texas Stalin dentist, he offers them a deal. He basically buys Simmons off, pays him $146,000. So this is the end of the founders of the clan. They basically fade from the scene. Simmons, the guy who had originally tried to relaunch the second clan, he retires. He tries to set up a new group called inevitably, the Knights of the Flaming Sword. That's a failure, and he dies. So this leaves the dentist, Hiram Evans, in charge of the clan. This has been terrible publicity for them. I mean, the revelations of corruption and immorality in the newspapers. A lot of ordinary members are left very disillusioned. But Evans thinks he can take the clan to even greater heights. He's got big plans. He wants to clean up corruption. To do that, he puts the Kleagles, the recruiters, on salary, not on commission, so they'll behave better. He wants to clamp down on drinking in the Klan. He says, come on, if we're the shock troops of Prohibition, we shouldn't Be getting arrested all the time for drunkenness. He says the vigilante violence needs to be brought back under control. Klansmen should swear an oath to obey the law. But what he wants to do above all is to move into mainstream politics. He starts hiring Washington speechwriters and consultants. He starts in Klan propaganda, starts to say that the Klan has a longer tradition in American politics than is generally thought. And they say their great hero is somebody who's been on the rest is history before. He's Uncle Jumbo. Big Steve. He's Grover Cleveland.
- [32:06]
B
Oh, it's great to have him back on the show.
- [32:08]
A
It's great to have him back on the show. So the Klan hold him up, and they say he's the kind of president we want to.
- [32:13]
B
Why? What do they admire about him?
- [32:15]
A
I think there's various elements. So Cleveland was. He was a Protestant. He liked German. Remember, he was hanging out in German beer halls and eating a lot of sausages.
- [32:25]
B
Yeah. So they're like that.
- [32:27]
A
He'd cut a good figure at a clam picnic. Also, gravely, Cleveland does kind of tick a Klan box. 1920s clan box, in that there are enormous suspicions about shady behavior with women who are much younger than himself.
- [32:38]
B
Yes, of course, because he married his wife ward, didn't he?
- [32:40]
A
He married his ward. And of course, there was the whole incident with Ma. Ma. Where's my pa? Gone to the White House. Ha ha ha. Yeah. So he kind of. Although he had nothing to do with any clan, you can kind of see why they might hold him up as an inspirational figure and a role model that they would want to follow. The maddest thing that Evans does, though, is he says we should move our headquarters to Washington so that we will be big kingmakers in national politics. And in order to fund the move, he sells the Imperial palace in Atlanta to the Catholic Church. No.
- [33:19]
B
What a bombshell. What a twist.
- [33:22]
A
It is a twist. Now, the reason he's done that is because presidential elections are coming in 1924, and Evans wants to play the kingmaker. However, there is a problem. There is a ticking time bomb at the heart of the clan, and this is his northern ally, the man I mentioned earlier. And I said to listeners, keep him in your heads. We'll come to him. Second half, he is the grand dragon of Indiana, David C. Stevenson, and he is about to become engulfed in the scandal to end all scandals. One of the weirdest and most shocking murders that we've ever done on the Rest is History.
- [33:58]
B
Well, let's take a break, and when we return, it will be with the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic.
- [34:15]
A
Now, Tom, you and I, when we're together, we always argue about one thing, don't we? It's the existence or otherwise of the Loch Ness Monster. But you foolishly are skeptical and you don't think that there is a monster beneath the freezing waters of that Scottish
- [34:30]
B
loch because as I know from. From AI, a plesiosaur would not be able to survive in Scottish waters because they'd just be too cold for it.
- [34:37]
A
Well, Tom, this back and forth is what makes studying history so fun. And actually Claude was made for this kind of thinking.
- [34:43]
B
The deep research feature can pull from dozens of sources at once. It can surface contradictions between them, and it can give you a full breakdown with citations so that you can trace the evidence yourself. It's like having a research partner who's read literally everything and wants to chat about what it actually means. So very like Dominic, actually try Claude
- [35:04]
A
for free at Claude AI Restishistory.
- [35:17]
B
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Rest Is History. And Dominic, we promised you the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. Crazy and horrible way of death. And we'll be coming to her, won't we?
- [35:30]
A
Yeah. An absolutely bizarre method of death that, I mean, nobody could possibly anticipate. So in the second half of today's episode, we're getting into the state of Indiana. This is the state where the Klan was most embedded, a quintessential middle American state. I'm guessing for loads of our listeners who are not American, they've probably never thought about the state of Indiana. They've never been there. It's just right in the middle of the United States. You don't really think about it, but it became by far the Klan's most faithful heartland. It's very white, it's very Protestant, and for that reason, anti Catholicism had long been a potent force in the state's public life. A lot of the histories of the clan tell this brilliant story. As an example of how anti Catholic Indiana was, there was a place called North Manchester. And the preacher there said to his congregation one day, you know, he was given this sort of incredibly sort of rabble rousing speech. And he said, search everywhere for hidden enemies, vipers at the heart's blood of our sacred republic. Watch the trains. The Pope may even be on the northbound train tomorrow. And according to some of these histories, and this surely must be apocryphal, a lot of people took this literally. And the Next day, there were a thousand people on the stage waiting for the northbound train. The train stopped on its way to Chicago. A bloke got off and people grabbed him and mobbed him. It's the Pope. And actually he was a man selling ladies corsets.
- [36:56]
B
That's what he said.
- [36:57]
A
Is that what the Pope would say if he came in disguise?
- [37:00]
B
If he's undercover, yeah.
- [37:03]
A
The idea that the Pope would go undercover to North Manchester, Indiana, I love it. Anyway, the secret of the Klan's success in Indiana is about individual political leadership and salesmanship. And this brings us to the last of the bizarre characters that have played a part in this story. And this is David C. Stevenson, and he's the Northern leader who allied with the Texas dentist Hiram Evans to take control of the Klan in 1922. And running through this story actually has been sort of weird parallels with the Great Gatsby. And David C. Stevenson is very, very Jay Gatsby. He claimed to be the rich son of a millionaire businessman who'd fought in the First World War and risen to become a major and been decorated for BR livery and then made a fortune selling coal. This was totally untrue. He was the son of a poor sharecropper from Texas. Born in 1891. He dropped out of school. He'd been a printer's apprentice in Oklahoma. He joined the army, but he never even got to Europe. He was a recruiter. He did sell coal, but as a traveling salesman. I mean, a traveling coal salesman, that's a terrible thing to be. Anyway, that's what he was. He really does have a dark side. He's a very ruthless and unscrupulous and shady man. By the early 1920s, Stevenson has been married three times. He has a history of beating and abandoning his wives and of trying to sexually assault rape other women. He's a stout man. He's always perfectly dressed, very conservatively. So he looks a kind of jolly, prosperous, successful man.
- [38:35]
B
So a kind of Uncle Jumbo vibe there, then?
- [38:38]
A
A little bit. But I mean, Grover Cleveland, just a bit. Just to be clear, I think. Did we not quit Grover Cleveland of many of the charges? Yeah, we did.
- [38:46]
B
But he was fat and jolly.
- [38:47]
A
He was, Jeff. Fat and jolly. Yeah, this guy is fat and jolly as well, but in a sort of incredibly seedy, sinister way. He needs to find a vehicle for his talents. He's got. He's really got the gift of the gab. And Stevenson initially makes a misstep. He runs for Congress as an anti prohibition Democrat. Oh, God.
- [39:04]
B
Rookies. Error.
- [39:05]
A
Mad Error. In Indiana, the Republicans absolutely hammer him. And so he switches to a pro Prohibition and he joins the Klan. And in early 1922, he becomes the Klan boss in a place called Evanstown, southern Indiana. And although he's only just turned 30, he's a, he's a sort of master of, of sort of stunts and gimmicks. So one of his gimmicks is he says to his cronies, never address me by my real name. Just call me the Old Man. It's like when Paul Ince, when he played for Manchester United, he insisted that people call him the governor. In this case, Stevenson insists that people called him the Old Man. He's a brilliant speaker at rallies, goes down very well. And he turns the newsletter, the Fiery Cross into this weekly newspaper. And he recruited 9,000 paper boys to sell it across the Midwest.
- [39:57]
B
So is he the guy who's running that big festival that we began this episode with?
- [40:01]
A
Yeah, he makes a dramatic entrance at the Kokomo picnic.
- [40:04]
B
Okay, great.
- [40:05]
A
So he's a, an incredibly successful recruiter and salesman. So in southern Indiana, within a year, he has persuaded, and this is a staggering figure, one third of the entire adult white male population to join the Klan. Thousands of people joining every week, huge parades. And in all of these little towns, Fort Wayne, Crawfordsville, Jeffersonville, Winnemac and Kokomo, and you know, there'll be night parades with drums and all this kind of, he's, he's an expert in all this. Now there is an element of vigilantism. Southern Indiana had a history of vigilantes that been. I didn't actually know this until reading up on this episode. There'd been a thing called the white capping movement in Indiana. Vigilantes who acted as moral police. So they would go around targeting errant wives and lynching people who were suspected criminals and stuff. And Indiana still has a law, you know, that basically legalizes vigilantes. So county commissioners will swear in Klansmen as special constables. They have the right to bear arms and to arrest suspects. They will launch attacks on bootleggers. But they also organize mass boycotts of Jewish owned businesses or Catholic shops and all of these kinds of things. So there's that element to it, but that's not the whole essence of the Klan in Indiana. There's a whole book about the Indiana clan by Leonard Moore called Citizen Clansmen. Leonard Moore says, you know, yes, there is violence, but there's an awful lot of barbecues and bake sales going on as well. That actually as strange as it may seem in sort of 1922, 1923, if you are an ordinary white Protestant, you join the Klan in Indiana. It just becomes the thing that absolutely everybody does. They see it as an expression of their Protestant values and Protestant virtues. And the irony is the man at the top who's organized all this, who's profiting from it, is an absolute shyster and a crook and the complete antithesis of clean living family values. Because this is this guy Stevenson. So Stevenson, he gets more and more successful. And his apotheosis comes at the Kokomo picnic. Because the climax of that picnic is him being inaugurated as the Grand Dragon of Indiana. And it's already been a brilliant day. Remember, there's been all these buns and burgers. There's been a man doing stunts on a plane, right? All of that.
- [42:32]
B
And now you get to see a bloke become a dragon, right?
- [42:35]
A
And this. And another plane comes in from the south and people are all excited. Who is it? Who is it? And the plane circles slowly. Then it lands in the. In the field. Massive excitement. And this bloke Stevenson, gets out and he's dressed in a silken purple robe and he's escorted to the platform. And there's great cheers from the tens of thousands of people. And he raises his hand and then he gives possibly the most shameless speech we've ever had on. The rest is history. He says, my worthy subjects, citizens of the invisible Empire, clansmen all, greetings. It grieves me to be late. The President of the United States kept me unduly long, counseling upon vital matters of state. I mean, how people are listening to this and believing it is mind boggling. And then he says only my plea that this is the time and place of my coronation, obtained for me surcease from his prayers for guidance. So the idea that this guy has been hanging out with who is the President at this point, I guess it's Calvin Coolidge and only managed to get away to attend the picnic at the last minute would strike surely most people as laughable. But I guess a lot of people, the Kokomo picnic like the idea that the Grand Dragon.
- [43:52]
B
Yeah, and he said Grand Dragon.
- [43:54]
A
Yeah. It's not just anybody's Grand Dragon. He's Indiana's Grand Dragon. So he's now Supreme Leader in Indiana and he's making a lot of money and he's enjoying himself. He doesn't care about. I mean, don't forget he was an anti prohibition Democrat initially. He doesn't give a damn about the Politics. He's skimming off millions of dollars. He buys a summer house. He buys a yacht on Lake Erie. He has loads of congressmen around. Very sort of Jay Gatsby behavior. He's drinking all the time. But also, this is the thing that brings him down. He is a demented sexual predator. So the first thing that happens is he's caught in his Cadillac with his secretary with his pants down, to use the American expression. The police let him off, I think, on this occasion. Then he calls a manicurist to his hotel room and sexually assaults her. And in the statement she gave later, she said when she arrived to do his nails, he was already drunk. He said he would give me a hundred dollars if I would allow him to have intercourse with me. Of course, he was more rude than I care to be in expressing it. I told him I was not in the habit of being insulted by anyone like that. And he said, you will or I'll kill you. This gives you a sense of the kind of man. Then, in summer 1924, during another party, another woman went to the police. She said that during the party, he locked her in the room, knocked her down, bit her, and attempted to rape her. And even at the picnic, he disgraces himself. He assaulted another woman afterwards, and she told investigators he is a beast when he is drunk. And again, he had tried to bite her, she said. So this will become a feature. Now, Stevenson, why is he doing all this? Partly because he thinks he can get away with it. He has now built this incredible political organization, which he nicknames the military machine. Every Indiana Claven clan lodge will draw up data on every candidate for political office in the state of Indiana. And the clan will sift through them all. And. And the data includes every opinion these people have ever expressed. The schools their kids go to, their ethnic background, all of these kinds of things, what clubs they've joined. Then the clan makes its choice. The clan will then campaign for these people. They will get Protestant ministers to talk about them in their sermons. They will publish the approved slate in Sunday school newsletters. Klansmen will leave a special copy of the Fiery Cross, telling you how to vote on your porch on election day. They have hundreds of cars ready to take Protestant voters to the polls. Klans, women, will stand ready to mind people's children so women can go and vote. All of this, and it's a brilliant success. It is an object lesson in how political organization in kind of local America works. Because in 1924, almost every single Klan candidate in Indiana is elected to office. Going all the way from mayors, district attorneys, to sheriffs and school boards. And Stevenson thinks to himself, well, if I can do this in Indiana, I can do this anywhere. So in his headquarters in Indianapolis, he has a bust of Napoleon. He has eight phones, including one of them, which he claims is a direct line to the White House, but no one is ever allowed to lift it because it's obviously just a. A complete fake. And he says to his aides, I'm a nobody from nowhere, but I've got the biggest brains, and I'm going to be the biggest man in the United States. And the first step to this is basically seizing control of the national Klan from the dentist. So in the summer of 1924, he declares independence from the national Klan, and he triggers this Klan civil war. So it's basically Indiana is leading a revolt against Atlanta. There's a huge and very bizarre baroque struggle for power in which they sort of suing each other for libel. Stevenson's local lodge is persuaded to kick him out. He accuses Hiram Evans of blowing up his yacht. I'm not sure how true that is. And this struggle in summer of 1924 seems perfectly poised. So let's just pause that here, because we're in the middle of 1924, and don't forget, the Klan is going to try and get involved in national politics and play the part of kingmaker. Now, the Klan has already been very successful. They've elected a senator from Texas. They've won all sorts of public offices in states as diverse as we taught last time, as Oregon and the Northwest and Texas right down by the Mexican border. They have probably got about 16 senators in the US Senate loyal to the Klan and about 75 congressmen in the House of Representatives and probably 11 governors, again loyal to the Klan. These are Linda Gordon's figures. But what they really want to do is to play a part in the presidential election. So the Republican candidate in the presidential election is Calvin Coolidge. He in some ways, would be a suitable candidate for the Klan. He's of Protestant stock, going back to the puritans in the 17th century. He's very clean, living all of this. But Coolidge hates the Klan. He never made a public statement about them, but he is known to dislike them. He never knowingly appoints a Klansman to public office. And Coolidge supports black civil rights. And he goes out of his way to praise the contribution that immigrants have made to American life.
- [49:08]
B
So he thinks basically the Ku Klux Klan are evil.
- [49:10]
A
Yeah, he thinks they're a total scum yeah. So the Klan then turn their attention to the Democrats, and they all go en masse to the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden in New York. Hiram Evans, the dentist, leads the Klan leadership, and they know who they want to be the Democratic candidate, and he's actually the favorite. Here's the son in law of Woodrow Wilson who had praised the birth of a nation. This is a man called William GIBBS Macadoo. And McAdoo is a former. Is the former U.S. treasury Secretary. McAdoo is a huge fan of prohibition. He is the candidate, the champion of rural Protestant America. And standing against him for the Democratic nomination is the Klan's worst enemy, their worst nightmare. Al Smith, the governor of New York, a Catholic. Oh, my God, the horror. And the convention. It's the longest convention nominating process in American history. It took 103 ballots, 103 rounds of voting to get a winner. To the clan's delight, Al Smith does not win. But to their horror, William Gibbs McAdoo doesn't win either. The convention compromises on the. The former ambassador to Great Britain, who's called John W. Davis. No one needs to worry about him. He's completely forgotten. And what's worse for the Klan is there's then a massive row about the Klan itself. Basically the anti Macadoo people. The delegates introduced a resolution to condemn the Klan, and it almost passed. It lost by four votes out of more than a thousand votes. And for the Klan, this is a terrible shock, that actually they're not as influential in importance as they thought.
- [50:48]
B
So they're not kingmakers at all.
- [50:50]
A
They're not kingmakers after all. And as the convention breaks up and we go to the national election, which Coolidge ends up winning, the clan, look at their membership roles. And their membership roles are beginning to fall, shockingly, because all the infighting means that a lot of ordinary clansmen have kind of lost confidence in the organization. You know, they're all squabbling among themselves. They all look like they're really corrupt. There's so many revelations of bad behavior. Then when the people go to the poll, the American people go to the polls in November 1924 in Texas, which had been the. You know, it's been the great state where the Klan had made their breakthrough. They'd got the senator in and whatnot. There is a backlash against the Klan. Their candidate for governor, to their total disbelief, ends up losing. Anti Klan candidates are elected across the board. The new Texas legislature passed a law against wearing masks. Klansmen are stripped of their public offices. They're driven out of the Democratic Party and suddenly membership of the Klan just drops off a cliff in Texas. So by 1926, the Klan lodges in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth, which have been very, very popular, some of the most successful in the country, have fallen. So far, they're in the hands of receivers. And membership in Dallas, a boom city for the clan in the early 20s, is down in just a couple of years from 13,000 people to barely 1,000 people. So the clan seems to be imploding. And then we get the scandal. So this is the story of Madge Oberholtzer, which is, I have to warn listeners, it is a pretty grim story, so prepare yourselves. Madge Oberholtzer enters the story of the clan. On 12th January, 1925, she went to a party for the inauguration of the new Indiana governor, Ed Jackson, who was widely seen as the clan's puppet. And at this party she met David C. Stevenson, the. What is he? The Grand Dragon.
- [52:49]
B
And what is Madge like?
- [52:51]
A
So Madge is 28 years old. She's very shy. She's not an especially socially dazzling person. She lives with her parents, Methodists. She runs the Indiana Young People's Reading Circle. So they start dating, they go, they dance, and they start dating. On 15 March, Stevenson's secretary rang her parents home and she said, the Grand Dragon needs to see Madge at once. So she changed into her best black dress and his bodyguard picked her up and drove off with her into the night. And she arrived at Stevenson's house to find him incredibly drunk. And he and his men then forced her to drink loads of whiskey until she was sick. And then they hustled her into a car and took her off to Union Station, Indianapolis, and they put her onto the train to Chicago with Stevenson in Stevenson's private compartment.
- [53:42]
B
And she presumably is a. Is a virginal, God fearing, upstanding spinster.
- [53:47]
A
Exactly. That's exactly what she is. Methodist home, lives with her parents, likes reading, all of that. The train sets off. And once the train sets off, she is, you know, now absolutely slaughtered because they forced her to drink all this whiskey. And he repeatedly rapes her. She's so drunk that she can't resist. And what is more, he bites her all over her body. So very deep bites. I mean, these are not, you know, these are serious bites. Like, he is literally, it was said afterwards, like he was literally trying to chew her. So from the, from her kind of firm her head all the way down to her feet. They reach the town of Hammond, which is just outside Chicago, just on the Indiana side of the state boundary. And they get out there and check into a hotel. She's sort of being carried by his bodyguards. At one point she says to Stevenson, I'm gonna set the law on you. And he says to her, I am the law in Indiana. They go up to the room, he falls asleep. She persuades his chauffeur to take her out to a drugstore, and there she buys some mercury bichloride tablets which were used then to treat syphilis. She wanted to kill herself. She was so horrified and ashamed about what had happened to her. She takes three of the tablets. She intended to take the lot, but she could only swallow three and immediately became horribly ill and started vomiting blood everywhere. Stevenson has now woken up from his drunken stupor and he panics and he says to his bodyguards, drive us back towards Indianapolis in the car. She's in a terrible state. Poor Madge has been sick all over the car. Stevenson keeps saying to her, you must forget this. What's done is done. I am the law, I am the power. But clearly he's anxious because he keeps saying to her, we should stop and you should marry me, you know, because basically he wants to shut her up. And she says, I won't marry you, and all this. And eventually, after a long delay, they take her home and they say to her parents, who are horrified by the sight of her, oh, we've been in a car accident. Her parents are not fooled by this. And poor Madge, she lived for another month in terrible agony. And she died on 14 April of infection from the bites as well as kidney failure from the mercury poisoning. And by this point, her father had already gone to the police. And Stephenson was charged with rape, kidnapping, assault and battery and second degree murder. Murder, because doctors testified in courts that the infected bites alone would have been enough to kill her, so it didn't require the mercury poisoning as well. Stevenson was convinced that his connections in Indiana meant that he would get off. He couldn't believe it when in November 1925, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison and sent to the Michigan City Penitentiary. And he believed that the governor, his puppet, Governor Jackson, would pardon him. But no pardon came, and eventually Stevenson loses patience and he gives all of his confidential papers to the Indianapolis Times. And he says to them, well, I'll tell you all about the bribes that I've paid to local officials. And the result was an earthquake in Indiana politics up to this point, very heavily Republican. The scandal took down the governor of Indiana, the mayor of Indianapolis, the local head of the Republican Party, loads of state officials, loads of mayors, all of this kind of thing. And so it is that by the end of the decade, the Democrats had won pretty much every city in the state. And not a disaster, not just for the Republicans, but for the local Klan, once the strongest in the nation. But the Stevenson scandal, the death of this poor woman, Madge Oberholtzer, totally destroys the Klan's image. So in two years, its Indiana membership collapsed from hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people to just 4,000 people.
- [57:35]
B
And what happens to David Stevenson?
- [57:37]
A
He was released, I think, in 1950, if I recall correctly. He then got out. He then was arrested again, convicted again for sexually assaulting a 16 year old girl, I think. So in and out of prison and then died, I think, in the 60s. And the woman he was living with, possibly his wife, I can't remember, said, oh, he seems such a nice person. I can't believe all these stories about him are true. But clearly an incredibly dodgy and unpleasant man.
- [58:04]
B
Died in 1966, age 74.
- [58:06]
A
So what happened to the clan in Indiana was a symptom of a wider story. In the mid to late 1920s, the Klan absolutely hemorrhaged members. It had risen so quickly and then suddenly it declines. And historians have spent, you know, huge quantities of ink trying to explain why this is. There are obvious underlying reasons as well as the scandals. The clan's vision was much too negative. It had nothing positive to, you know, it was all about hatred of Catholics and stuff more than anything else. Apart from some anodyne stuff about patriotism and family values, most of its appeal is based on negativity. Its vision of America is an outdated one. You know, America by the 1920s is clearly much too diverse to be turned back into a white Protestant enclave. That's never going to happen. Also, I think most historians think it was a terrible mistake for the Klan to enter mainstream politics. The Klan's values of secrecy and exclusivity don't work in a Democratic arena where you have to make deals and compromises and you have to, you know, a pluralistic world in which you're appealing to bigotry and sectarianism. It doesn't work. There are some historians, like Linda Gordon, who point out that actually maybe the Klan stopped being so popular because it had actually won some of its battles. So the Klan was always in favor of eugenics. And by the end of the 1920s, 30American states had adopted eugenics laws with forced sterilization of criminals or people that were called defectives. And often the people who were singled out for this treatment tended to be very poor people or black people. So in other words, people that the Klan didn't really like anyway. The Klan also won the argument on immigration. So in 1924 the Johnson Reed act brought in immigration quotas that were based on an outdated census, the 1890 census. So basically an immigration regime that tried to turn back the clock because 70% of immigrants under this new legislation had to come from Britain, Germany or Ireland. In other words, let's try to recreate a 19th century white America. All immigration from Asia, for example, was banned under the new legislation and southern and eastern European immigration was severely curtailed. And this regime lasted until the 50s. And partly as a result of this, anti Catholicism as a force in American life basically began to dissipate. So you know the Pope's plot to attack the people of North Manchester on
- [60:42]
B
the northbound train by disguising himself as a corset salesman.
- [60:45]
A
Yeah, that never comes to fruition. You know, the clan has been saying for years the Pope is poised to launch his attack, but the Pope never does. The uprising of armed Catholics never happens. And so people start, I think over time to say to themselves this is obviously demented, you know, this is never going to happen. And the Klan just starts to sound a bit silly. The other thing of course is the Klan's violence. Things like the killings in Mehr Rouge that we talked about, the reign of terror in Goose Creek, the murder of Madge Oberholtzer, the vigilance anti violence in Williamson County. To most of the people who are there for the picnic and the barbecues, they're not up for all this. They're horrified by all this actually. And so once that becomes established in the public mind, people say listen, I don't want to have anything to do with this organization after all. So by the late 1920s the numbers are in freefall. They've collapsed. And then the depression strikes. No one's got any money. You're not going to spend your money on klectokens and ludicrous garbage if you haven't got any money. The Klan completely loses its mojo in the 30s. Hiram Evans, the dentist is still running the Klan and he tries to rebrand it. He actually abandons the anti Catholicism and says we're an anti communist group, we're anti labour unions, that's what we're all about. But basically no one's really interested. He ended up resigning in 1939 as Imperial wizard that done him no good at all. The clan just splintered and splintered and then it disbanded in a very banal way for tax reasons. Now, of course, that's not the end of the Klan or a clan as a feature of American life. So there is a third Klan, and this was founded in 1946 at the same place as the second clan, Stone Mountain, Georgia. This is the one that still exists. So this basically is anti communist and intensely racist. It's well known because it carries out some hideous atrocities. So bombing of black churches in Birmingham, Alabama, and killing civil rights workers in 1963 and 1964, some very famous examples. But it doesn't have many members. It's purely reactionary and racist insofar as it thrives at all. It's in counterpoint to the civil rights movement, which is obviously much bigger than the Klan is. It's never remotely a mass movement. It still exists today, but it has, I think, fewer than 3,000 members, according to researchers.
- [63:14]
B
Was it David Duke?
- [63:15]
A
See, David Duke, everyone's heard of David Duke, but he was never a significant. It's his exoticism, I think, that makes him interesting.
- [63:26]
B
He's the kind of character that Louis Theroux depends on for his TV programmes. Kind of sinister, but not so sinister that he wouldn't look ridiculous if he comes on a TV show.
- [63:37]
A
Exactly. So. So today, I mean, they're much smaller than the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, if you're a far right person. Those are the groups you join in America, not the Ku Klux Klan. So that's the story of the second clan. Anyway, I think the second is by far the most interesting of the clans. I think the first is the most important because the first reverse is reconstruction, or plays a part in reversing reconstruction.
- [63:59]
B
Could I just ask Dominic? We've done series on the Nazis, which features people dressing up in uniforms and parading round at night and torchlight processions and holding things for families, and combining a kind of schmaltzy sentimentality with extreme violence against Jews and so on. To the extent that there's a fascist party in America, would the Klan be that fascist party, do you think?
- [64:24]
A
I think that's the interesting question, and I think that's what makes the 1920s Klan the most interesting to me as a modern historian of the three. So the clan is not a European fascist party. It doesn't have a dynamic figurehead, it doesn't have a cult of the leader. They don't produce any leader of the caliber of the ruthlessness that European Fascist parties do. The Klan doesn't appeal to a kind of national irredentism. You know, it doesn't say we have territories that have been taken from us by force. We must reassert ourselves internationally. Quite the reverse. The Klan is quite isolationist. The Klan is much less forward looking, I think, than, for example, Italian fascism, more backward looking. And the clan, of course, has no interest in war.
- [65:10]
B
They just like riding around beating people up.
- [65:12]
A
Yes, they like vigilante violence, but invading people, fighting wars is not really part of their repertoire. But you're dead right. There are some huge similarities. So victimhood, the family, hatred of the outsider, paramilitary violence, costumes, parades, rituals, torchlight, processions, airplanes. Yeah, there are definite similarities. And, and for me, I would say that there never has been a mass fascist movement in the United States. But if you want to imagine what one might have looked like, I think it would look not unlike the 1920s clan. Not least because actually the people. Just think about it. Demographically, the people who joined the 1920s Klan are not dissimilar from the people who joined the national socialist movement in 1920s, 1930s Germany. Protestant, small businessmen, salesman. You know, people who feel threatened by. They don't. Like, they're not members of labor unions, they're not very rich, they're not very poor. They feel squeezed, they feel anxious about change. You know, they like dressing up.
- [66:20]
B
Do you think the. The fondness for kind of galloping around on horses is a legacy of the Wild West? The sense of people on horses going out there and imposing law and order? Whether there is no law and order and that, that's a hangover because the. The Wild west is being romanticized in films at the same time as the
- [66:40]
A
Ku Klux Klan are.
- [66:41]
B
And it just becomes part of American mythology.
- [66:43]
A
Yeah, I think American mythology absolutely has a cult of the vigilante, the kind of Batman. Yeah, look at Batman. The man who rides into town to. To. Because the useless authorities can't do it, to clean up the town. And actually, you know, the reason it's so successful in, let's say Indiana is partly because Indiana had always had this tradition of vigilantes. You know, it was not that long since Indiana had been on the frontier. A generation, a couple of generations. So completely. Yeah, that is not un American. It is very American. And that's why. Exactly as you say, that's why Batman and stories of masked vigilantes are so popular. You know, there's a comic book. I don't think you are a massive fan of comic books by Alan Moore. Called Watchmen in the 1980s.
- [67:25]
B
Yeah. And they made it into a film.
- [67:26]
A
So there was then a TV series which I have to say was brilliant, which departed from the comic book but was all about the Klan and superheroes and vigilantes. And it basically played with the similarities between superheroes dressing up in masks and going out to enforce orders and racist paramilitaries doing the same. And in fact, the Tulsa massacre of 1921 played a big part in that series. So, yeah, I really recommend it. Actually. It didn't get the attention that it should have done, but it's a brilliant, brilliant series. But anyway, that's enough of the Clan, Tom, because I think we should do something totally different next time because that's the beauty of the rest is history. So tell us what you have lined up for next week.
- [68:13]
B
So we will be going to medieval Japan to explore the emergence of the samurai. And you say completely different, but of course the samurai are, they're people who like galloping around indulging in acts of violence and they're also incredibly mythologized. So this is a series that will, will explore how the Shogunate emerges and replaces the the traditional imperial order. But it is also a story that will feature flying heads and the ghosts of drowned samurai turning into crabs. So that will be on its way next week. And of course, if you are a member of the rested history club, then
- [68:57]
A
you will be able to get all
- [68:58]
B
four episodes of the Samurai on Monday. And to join them you just go to TheresaHistory.com and sign up there. And also of course we've got our sensational newsletter and you can can access that by replying to the email that features in the program notes to this series. Dominic, thanks so much for an absolutely sweeping account of an organization. Very sinister, very dark. Thank you. Thanks everyone for listening. Bye bye.
- [69:23]
A
Bye bye.