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Title: The Klan Unmasked
Author: William Joseph Simmons
Illustrator: J. A. Murdoch
Release Date: December 9, 2021 [eBook #66917]
Language: English
Produced by: Tim Lindell, Graeme Mackreth and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KLAN UNMASKED ***
[Illustration: WILLIAM JOSEPH SIMMONS
Founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Emperor Invisible
Empire]
THE KLAN
UNMASKED
_by_
WILLIAM JOSEPH SIMMONS
_Founder of_
THE KNIGHTS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN
AND
EMPEROR OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE
PUBLISHED BY THE
Wm. E. THOMPSON PUBLISHING CO.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA.
COPYRIGHT, 1923
by
The Wm. E. Thompson
Publishing Company
Illustrations by J.A. Murdoch, Atlanta, Ga.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
Foreword: Why I Write a Book 7
PART ONE
Organization and Methods
I. The Klan Yesterday and To-day 18
II. We Americans--A Vanishing People 26
III. Fraternalism of The Klan 38
IV. The Klanishness of The Klan 46
V. Is The Klan Anti-Semitic? 55
VI. Is The Klan Anti-Catholic? 64
VII. The Terminology of The Klan 79
VIII. Symbolism of The Klan 87
IX. The Rendezvous 97
PART TWO
The Fading Hope of Democracy
X. Democracy as a Social System is on Trial 103
XI. Our Cities a Menace to Democracy 113
XII. The Failure of Democracy in Central and
Eastern Europe 119
XIII. Foreign Outposts in The United States 126
XIV. The Racial Limitations of Democracy 139
XV. The American Negro as Ward of The Nation 147
XVI. We Americans are a Peculiar People 161
XVII. Giantism--The National Disease of America 174
XVIII. Drifting 184
PART THREE
A Salvaging Policy for Americanism
XIX. "The Federal Union--It Must be Preserved" 198
XX. Our Country's Part Among the Nations 212
XXI. We English-Speaking People Must Stand
Together 219
XXII. The Nemesis of Immigration 230
XXIII. The Problem of Restricting The Suffrage 248
XXIV. National Solidarity Through Education 260
XXV. The Conservation of The American Home 274
XXVI. A Final Word 284
WHY I WRITE A BOOK
Various representatives of the press, as well as many of my colleagues
in the organization of which I have the honor to be the Founder and
head, have repeatedly asked me to make a public statement, descriptive
of our organization. It was anticipated in certain quarters that we
should at once make specific reply to the embittered attacks upon
the Klan. Although abundant space in the press was placed at our
disposal for this purpose, we did not take advantage of the offer.
It is no part of the policy of the Klan to enter into heated public
controversies--even in self-defense. We felt all along that a clear and
simple statement of facts concerning the form of our organization,
its methods and ultimate purposes, while perhaps due the public, was
not due the instigators of the attacks upon us. We are not as yet aware
of the exact source of these attacks. Yet, I may say, the membership of
the Klan universally welcomed it, realizing that sooner or later the
Klan must be under fire. Whether or not we are enemies of our country
and of freedom we are quite willing to leave for the public to decide.
Meanwhile, the direct effect of these attacks upon the Klan will
not be without interest. Our ranks have been rendered more firm and
steady. The public has been rather amused than affected seriously by
the reams of villification which were heaped upon the Klan. It now
remains for us to tell what the Ku Klux Klan really is, how it came
into existence, and what it purposes to do through the organized power
of its membership.
We have been outrightly accused of maintaining secrecy in the conduct
of our organization. We ask, in rejoinder, for how long has it
been a crime or a misdemeanor in the United States for a fraternal
organization to employ secrecy in the conduct of its affairs? We have,
literally, hundreds of secret organizations in this country. The fact
that a number of persons draw themselves together in an organization
for mutual aid, for mutual confidences, and for mutual effort, implies
that they have something in common which they do not wish to share
fully with the public. So has every family and almost every business.
Then, too, the element of secrecy no doubt develops the interest of
the membership, adding to the charm as well as to the value of their
fellowship. Concerning this feature of our organization, I feel assured
that we might appeal to the common sense and fairness which Americans
are always and everywhere ready enough to show. No one expects the
Masonic fraternity or the Knights of Columbus,--to mention two large,
well-known and respected fraternal organizations in this country,--to
exhibit all their forms of salutation and other formalities to the
public. We simply claim the same rights and privileges which other
fraternal organizations share, both under the law and in the esteem of
the public mind.
New organizations and movements usually draw the fire of the
uninformed. People are inclined to be suspicious of that which they do
not understand. When Masonry first assumed its larger importance in
America it was the object of attacks so bitter that some of the members
were placed in danger of their lives. An Anti-Masonic party, nearly
a hundred years ago, acquired material importance and sent several
members to Congress. Just preceding the War Between the States, the
Know-Nothing, or Anti-Catholic party ran through its brief but stormy
career. This party was caused by the fact that the Catholic Church was
growing in certain parts of the country where it had hitherto been
almost unknown. When we Klansmen reflect upon these historical facts we
are much consoled. It remains only to say, in this connection, that we
bear our recent detractors not the slightest ill will whatever. They do
not understand us. That is all.
We confess that the Ku Klux Klan has been organized in order to help in
the accomplishment of a great task. Neither the magnitude of this task
nor its vital importance to the future of our country are yet widely
realized. Our American citizenship is usually earnest and active with
regard to the discharge of its more simple duties. With reference to
larger social problems, however, problems which sometimes assume the
form of great national dangers, our country is often enough soundly
asleep. The Ku Klux Klan proposes to wake the sleeper and make him at
least sit up, look around, and ask the time of day.
Whether or not we are enabled to accomplish all that we have set out
to do remains for the future to decide. But I may say that the growth
of the Klan and the universal spirit and activity of its membership
indicate pretty clearly that neither our hopes nor our efforts, thus
far, have been in vain. The Klan is growing in the North and West
more rapidly than in the South. It has been carefully and permanently
grounded in nearly every large city. It will eventually spread to
every town, hamlet and country cross-roads. With our six years of
organized effort and our present status in mind, we may be pardoned for
saying that we feel that there must be some need for an organization
which has, in so short a time, shown such phenomenal strength. The
Klan exists because it satisfies a most vital need in our national
public life. Our opponents have tried to indicate that our position and
purposes are purely negative. Nothing is farther from the truth. Any
candid, logical and patriotic mind which will reflect upon this and the
following chapters of this book can not be our enemy.
In order to first clear the way of the trivialities which have been
placed there to clog our footsteps, I wish in this foreword to state
most positively certain facts with reference to our organization.
The Ku Klux Klan has not been organized or conducted in opposition
to any religion or religious sect, or against the members of any
race or language group, either within or without the borders of our
country. Upon this point let no doubt be left in the mind of any
American. It has been falsely stated that we are fanning the flames
of hatred against the Negro race. Exactly the opposite is the truth.
To our fellow citizens of the Jewish or the Roman Catholic faith, and
to other groups too numerous to mention, we enter a flat denial to
all those pure fabrications which have seemingly given them so much
alarm. It is, indeed, quite true that our membership is restricted. It
includes only citizens of the white race. So does the membership of the
Clan-na-Gael and of B'rith Israel. If it may be truthfully said that
our membership is also restricted to Christians and to Protestants,
this is due purely to the fact that certain deductions may be made
from certain paragraphs in our Constitution and By-Laws. We have not
yet ceased wondering why attacks should be made upon us in the public
press on that score. The membership of the Knights of Columbus is,
I believe, restricted to members of the Roman Catholic Church. Is
there anything especially dangerous or wrong about that? I should
not say so. Catholic Churchmen have both a legal right and a moral
right to organize and conduct a fraternal order by and for themselves
alone. Moreover, the Knights of Columbus as an organization, and in
the personnel of its individual members, would be well within their
rights in demanding that they be saved from slander, villification
and unjust attacks of every sort, because of the restriction of their
membership to those of one faith. Since the end of the war various
German organizations, such as fraternal orders, singing societies,
etc., have begun to re-establish themselves. These organizations are
fully protected by the law and their members do not lack the esteem of
their English-speaking fellow citizens. Hence, I would most candidly
ask--and would that my voice could be heard throughout the length and
breadth of the land--since when has it become a crime for a body of
American-born, English-speaking, white citizens to organize themselves
into a fraternal order? What has happened in our country which seems
to bring our particular racial and social group so much into disrepute?
Since the House of Representatives in Washington has investigated us,
why is not a resolution presented asking the House to investigate
other institutions of a similar nature? However that may be, since we
have been duly investigated, and the investigation has ended without
the slightest accusation or criticism, so far as we know, on the
part of the House Committee, we would now ask our accusers, in their
turn, to be candid enough to do one of two things. They must either
present further facts to substantiate their accusations or retract the
accusations.
We repeat most emphatically--The members of the Ku Klux Klan, as
individuals or as Klansmen, are not the enemies of the Negro. We are
the best friends the Negro has, here or anywhere. Our organization
makes opposition to no religious sect or creed, as such. Our order
is based squarely upon the Constitution and laws of our country. We
hope never to be unmindful of the basic fact that both the Federal
and State Constitutions guarantee freedom of religious belief and
practice. We invite our fellow citizens of every faith to join us in
the protection of so valuable and sacred a right. Every statement made
at any time that we would deny this right to others than ourselves is
an absolute and unmitigated falsehood. In conclusion, let me emphasize
that the Ku Klux Klan conducts its activities not only within the
law, but in active support of the law. Our general organization would
not tolerate for a moment any illegal act on the part of any of our
local organizations. The Klan has not been formed to express little
hatreds but to study crucial problems and aid in the execution of large
national policies.
I might add a further word. We take pride in the fact that our
national and local organizations have conducted themselves, generally,
within the bounds of the strictest discipline. Perhaps it has been
because of the ease with which crimes might be committed and our
local organization unjustly blamed therefor that we have suffered
from a certain sort of criticism and attack from the uninformed and
the misinformed. We are now taking steps to make the Klan perfectly
secure against such criminal misuse of its name and regalia. Suffice
it to say here that we take the keenest pride in our record, and in
challenging our opponents and detractors to present the facts which
their allegations demand, we ask of them in the most kindly spirit. We
take much for granted. We can not be misunderstood for long. We know
that many of those who unknowingly oppose us to-day will be our best
friends, in many cases, indeed, our ardent companions of to-morrow.
CHAPTER I
The Klan Yesterday and To-day
In many questions, from all sources, I have been asked as to how the
Klan of the Sixties was related to the Klan of to-day. The original
Ku Klux Klan sprang from the urgent necessities of the Reconstruction
period. At the close of the War Between the States, the South was
prostrated and devastation was spread from the Potomac to the Rio
Grande. Following hard upon the collapse of the Southern Confederacy,
hordes of bad white men, generally termed "Carpet-Baggers" and
"Scalawags", came into the South to prey upon the prostrated people
of that section and to fatten on the ruins of war. This crowd of
men had been loyal to neither the Union nor the Confederacy, and,
in most instances, traitors to both. The tremendous upheaval had
thrown them from obscurity into publicity. They availed themselves
of the conditions that obtained to establish themselves and utilized
the recently emancipated race of slaves to further their ends.
Negroes everywhere were organized and taught to hate the white people
of the Southern states. Under martial law they controlled all the
elections that were held in the South. From these was elevated to
our legislatures and courts an alien race, untaught, unskilled and
incapable of government. White men in the South who had borne arms
in defense of the Confederacy had the hostility of the so-called
Union League directed against them. Their property was invaded, their
homes were menaced and in many instances the white women of the South
became the prey of Negroes who had been inflamed by the teachings of
"Carpet-Baggers" and "Scalawags." The evident purpose was to establish
for all time the supremacy of the Negro over our Anglo-Saxon people and
civilization.
[Illustration: LT. GEN. NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST
The Grand Wizard of the Original Ku Klux Klan.]
To meet this condition and arrest this menace, the Ku Klux Klan sprang
into existence. The white man's civilization that had been thousands
of years in the building was imperilled. The blood of the white man
ran like lightning. Tremendous forces leaped from the ashes of defeat
and drove like the whirlwind throughout the land. Civilization sounded
the note of wild alarm. An empire covering half a continent took form
in an hour and more than a half million men were mobilized in a single
day in defense of the white man, his home, his civilization and his
freedom--against the rise and assaults of an inferior race, many of
which within the century, had been cannibals, and some of which were
still speaking the jargon of the jungles of Africa.
In the formation of the original Ku Klux Klan there was no thought
or purpose in the mind of the white men of the South which made for
the suppression of the misguided Negroes by violence. Wise men they
were who founded the Invisible Empire and directed the movements of
its citizenry. They knew the superstition of the Negro. Interwoven in
the Negro's life, religious, social, industrial, was the fantastic
belief in the supernatural and the grotesque. To him the ghost was
very real and not at all unusual in appearance. In all their folk tales
there was a weird intermingling of ghostliness. Rather than intercept
by violence the movement of the Negro toward supremacy in the South
under the leadership of vicious white men, the Ku Klux Klan devoted
itself to thwarting the movement by overawing the Negro through his
superstitions. Had this plan not been adopted, the Negro would have
been largely exterminated.
This organization of the original Ku Klux Klan made a most thrilling
chapter in the history of the Anglo-Saxon civilization in America.
It has never been written. The organization has been maligned,
misrepresented, and misunderstood for more than fifty years. The
Congress of the United States instituted an investigation of the Klan
that totaled forty-six volumes in reports and findings, but not in a
solitary instance was an outrage or an atrocity in the South fastened
upon the organization. The supremacy of the white man was established,
the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race was maintained, and both races,
white and black, settled down side by side in peace and contentment to
work out their essentially different destinies.
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.
CHAPTER II
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.
[Illustration: Only Americans May Pass]
To place these facts in their proper relation, one to another, we must
study the map of the United States. That map, hanging on the wall of
the old school-house, or facing us over our desks in the library at
home, seems always to appear so big and brave and bold. To the child
at school it appears to flaunt its very bigness in the face of all
the world. My fellow American citizens in all the states, study that
map carefully. In terms of the civilization of the whole world it
will richly repay investigation. Let us move with the sun from the
valley of the river St. Johns in Maine, to the far-off mountains of our
California. Incoming masses by the hundred thousand flood New England.
They do not speak our language, can not know our laws, and do not mix
with our native people because there are hardly any natives in New
England left to mix with. In dozens of schools built for the children
of the great city of Boston and its suburbs the English language is
not even taught, not to speak of as being used as a means of acquiring
knowledge or of taking loyal and useful part in our national life.
Throughout twenty varieties of the stupendous foreign sections in
all our great industrial cities of the North, the very conditions of
life prevent millions from learning the English language or taking an
American breath into their nostrils. From St. Louis and Chicago and
Milwaukee on the West to New York and Boston on the East democratic
American political life is now almost impossible--unthinkable. To this
we shall recur in later chapters. Just now we must proceed rapidly
to other parts of our map. In our Far Western territory, where a
million square miles of mountain and valley are beginning a marvelous
development, we Americans are fighting one of the most desperate and
crucial social conflicts in the history of our country and of European
civilization. Our Western people are striving for the very salvation
of our soil as the heritage of the white American. This conflict rages
day by day--week by week--year by year. Our brethren of the West are
misunderstood and their crying call for help is largely rejected by
the East. There are counties in California where more Japanese babies
are being born each year than white babies. The Japanese in California
are multiplying at the stupendous rate of sixty-nine per thousand,
annually, while the white people of California increase at the rate
of eighteen per thousand. But the eighteen per cent. includes the
relatively high rate of the foreign-born whites. The American white
people of California increase by an annual rate of less than ten per
thousand. Look you well, fellow Americans, to this part of our map. Go
on in your indifference and carelessness, and these western valleys
and mountains will, in the days of your children, be blood-soaked by
one of the most desperate of interracial wars--a war at once civil
and international--in the history of the world, and despite all your
treaties of peace.
In the Southwest are over eighteen hundred miles of boundary line
between ourselves and the people of Mexico. I know that I am expressing
for my colleagues of the Ku Klux Klan who dwell along that eighteen
hundred miles of boundary line their inmost thought, when I say that
they wish only peace and fellowship and mutual aid and generosity to
mark all our relations with the simple and kindly people of Mexico.
But we are here marshalling the facts--the staggering facts which
the American people must know and ponder well to-day. Nearly half a
million Mexicans, speaking various dialects of the Spanish and Indian
languages, have recently come across our Southwestern boundary line.
Surely it is not with any ill will in our hearts that we say with all
the power we have that these thousands can not share our American
democracy with us in this generation. In Mexico these people can be
ruled in such a way and take such measures of progress as may befit
them. Granted time and they may evolve a successful democracy all
their own. But in this generation they will make democracy impossible
wherever large numbers of them settle among us. If immigration
continues through the next generation THEY WILL FOREVER ENCROACH UPON
AND OCCUPY OUR SOUTHWEST. The native-born, white American will either
become a small ruling class, or fade from sight altogether. There are
factories in Texas with practically none but Mexicans employed. There
are sections of the Southwest where, in town and on the countryside,
there are many Negroes, Mexicans and Japanese, few Americans.
Finally, we come to the South. Leaving the burden of this argument to
future chapters, we can here take but a rapid glance at the inexorable
problem of the Southland. May Providence give to us men and women of
the South the power we need to place our problem before our fellow
citizens in other sections in such a way as to win their minds and
hearts by the goodness of our cause. If I but could, I would move my
hand along that ancient and deadly line which separates us from our
country-men and wipe it out forever. Our problem of the Negro, men and
women of the North, is your problem. If we fail, you fail. We plead
with you to join with us in freeing all our minds from bigotry, all
our hearts from unworthy passions, and all our thoughts from sectional
misunderstanding.
The larger fact which I seek in this connection to strike into the mind
and conscience of my country is as simple as the multiplication-table.
The Negro of to-day is less in numbers than the white inhabitants
in all states but one, for a single reason. That reason is the high
average mortality among the Negroes. The enormous birth rate of the
Negro population would rapidly submerge our white population if the
Negroes were not decimated by a high death rate. The Negroes' numbers
are kept within the number of our white population by various dreadful
diseases. Though these diseases afflict us all in the South, the white
people are generally far more immune than the blacks. We are somewhat
behind the North and West in the practice of medicine, sanitation, and
the general prevention of disease. But we are making great strides
in this as in other means of progress. As all our people, including
the Negroes, are progressively saved from the ravages of disease, the
Negroes' birth rate will be more and more relentlessly shown in the
census of the living. As night follows day, the Negro will, in the
future, move on toward larger and larger comparative numbers in the
South.
And so this map of our beloved land, which, as school children, we
gazed upon with deep longings toward the future greatness of our
country--this map to-day, section by section, is discolored and fading.
So do our hopes, too, fade and fail. We Americans are a perishing
people, and the things we have inherited and hold dearest in our hearts
are on the way to dissolution and total loss. Of all the greater
people of history, we Americans least deserve even the pity which is
the portion of those who fail. The glory of our rise, the large part
that is ours in the present, the majestic hope of the nation which
prophesies such a resplendent future--all this is our heritage. We lack
only understanding of ourselves and the public spirit required to take
action. The Ku Klux Klan, in garb of strange device, marshalled under
the flag of our country, has thrust itself as a dire warning across the
downward pathway of the American people--our own people, whom we love.
CHAPTER III
The Fraternalism of the Klan
Surely there can not be in this frank statement of the principles and
the purposes of the Ku Klux Klan any ground for the criticism that
the organization was founded on racial and sectarian animosities and
hatreds. The Klan is neither anti-racial nor anti-sectarian. It is
pro-American. We concede to every distinctive organization in race and
religion the same rights of restricting and qualifying its membership
that we claim for ourselves. If, in the light of all the past, and
in view of the present, we are insisting upon an organization of
native-born white American citizens, we do not, by stipulating the
conditions of membership in the Ku Klux Klan, avow hostility to any
one class or company who may not, for one reason or another, qualify
for membership in our organization. Indeed, as Americans we not only
have the right to organize under the law and in keeping with the law,
but far more than that--in the exercise of that right the Klan is
positively committed to vouchsafing the same right to any other class
of people on the American continent who desire to organize themselves
for patriotic, social, fraternal or religious purposes. Only this
too is also stoutly maintained: Any organization that is formed and
fostered under the flag of our common country must not be inimical to
our democratic government and institutions.
There are numerous organizations in America to which members of the
Klan would not be admitted. These organizations are racial, social,
political and sectarian. There has never been any complaint against
these organizations. They have never been subjected to scrutiny by the
Department of Justice of the United States Government. They have never
been brought under Congressional investigation. They have lived and
grown and pursued their purposes of organization without restraint or
interference from the outside. All this is in exact keeping with the
freedom that is granted under the Constitution and the laws. We realize
only too well that when organizations have arisen that have threatened
the peace or morals or health of our social life, or, for any purpose,
inveighed against the basic institutions of our country or the orderly
conduct of our people in obedience to constituted authority, such
organizations have been speedily suppressed. There are not a few of
the leaders of such movements in the penal institutions of our country
to-day, designated as political prisoners, because they undertook to
obstruct the machinery of the country in its war activities. The Ku
Klux Klan is committed so thoroughly--nothing remaining uncommitted--to
the full freedom of human life guaranteed under the Constitution to
American citizens that it can never interfere with the rights of
groups or individuals outside its ranks. It stands everywhere against
disorderly and disruptive movements which deny the authority of the
government and disobey its mandates whether in time of war or peace.
If there is one thing, more than any other, which we Americans must now
devoutly take to heart it is obedience to law. Perhaps we are rightly
accused by Europeans of being quite the most lawless among civilized
nations. This is indicated by nothing so much as by the series of
terrible race riots which have disgraced some of our great cities
during recent years--notably Atlanta, Washington, East St. Louis,
Chicago and Omaha. Space limits us here to the description of a single
case in which the Klan has been involved. At a small town in Florida,
a terrible race riot was precipitated on election day, 1920. It was
reported that one or more Negroes, disqualified by law from voting,
were nevertheless demanding that they be permitted to vote. This
incident led to others, and resulted in a terrible race riot. More than
a score of persons, mostly Negroes, were killed. The white men, having
defeated and dispersed the Negroes of their own community, thoroughly
inflamed, proceeded, late in the day, to march upon --------, for
the purpose of attacking the Negroes of that community. The Klansmen
notified by a member of the ---- Klan, of the approach of a force
of armed whites, armed themselves and placed their services at the
disposal of the officers of the law. They met the oncoming force just
outside the limits of their own town. Unhappily, the attackers were
not turned back without an armed conflict. In this affray two Klansmen
were killed. The mob was driven back. The Klansmen lost their lives in
defense of the law and while protecting the Negroes of their town.
On another occasion one of the largest and soundest local Klans ever
founded by our organizers was instantly dissolved, because our rules
and regulations in these things were violated. The Klan in question
wished to find a remedy for a serious local disorder. A tradesman in
the community was conducting a thriving bootlegging establishment which
grew to be a scandal to the whole town. The Klan, recently organized,
and not fully comprehending our methods, posted notices warning the
culprit to leave town. They emphasized their warning by posting along
side certain signs of the Ku Klux Klan. For this interference with the
orderly process of justice in this case the local Klan in question was
quickly disbanded by our headquarters.
With this and other similar incidents in mind the reader may well
imagine the thoughts and feelings of Klansmen everywhere when they
are told that their organization has been founded for the purpose of
"Lynching Niggers." We have been accused of crimes in towns where we
had no local Klan within hundreds of miles. In such cases the lynching
accusations are often carried on the wings of great organizations of
the press. Our denials we find ineffectual. But of this I am certain:
The truth will sometimes overtake the lies and the evil will recoil on
the heads of the evil-doers.
But in addition to the purely patriotic principles of the Klan, which
are fundamental, it is a fraternal organization. A Charter for the
Klan was granted by the State of Georgia. All of its activities are
subject to scrutiny by the State and review by properly constituted
authority. The Charter may be revoked at the will of the State.
Where-ever irregularities are shown in the conduct of the Klan, or
wherever the Klan departs from the purposes of its organization as set
forth in the Charter, the Klan may be disbanded by due process of law.
It is therefore not an organization that has sprung up over night,
without responsibility, claiming independence of the law of the land.
The Klan offers its membership a graduate course in fraternalism.
There are several orders administered and each of these orders marks
an advance in devotion to our common country and in those fraternal
relations and responsibilities which bind us to our fellow men. There
can be nothing in this organization, as there is nothing in the many
fraternal organizations in this country, that is inimical to the
highest sense of social order. Indeed, underlying the fraternalism
of the Klan is a consecration to the American home, the preservation
of its sanctity and the maintenance of ideal family life. From
this a sympathetic helpfulness flows out to those in distress and
discouragement, and a force of strong men is thrown about the weak and
helpless without respect to color or creed. This is the service of love
and sacrifice to our age and generation which is symbolized by the
fiery cross.
CHAPTER IV
The Klanishness of The Klan
It is perhaps not only proper but also necessary, in view of the
vigorous and persistent attacks made on the Klan, to discuss more
fully the apparent exclusiveness of the organization. I desire to
reiterate with emphasis that the Klan is a purely American organization
assembled around the Constitution of the United States, to safeguard
its provisions, advance its purposes, and perpetuate its democracy.
This definition of the Klan in its organization necessarily carries
the idea of exclusiveness. All men without respect to race, color
and religion may not be organized into a democracy. Democracy can
not be established by outside pressure. It is something which must
be developed in the individual consciousness, and is of very slow
growth. We speak loosely when we talk of the Anglo-Saxon having grown
into a democracy through a thousand years of struggle. Five thousand
years would be a more accurate statement of the fact. During all the
slow processes of the development of the white man's civilization,
there was something inherent in his life that slowly pushed its way
up into the consciousness of the individual until it found expression
in constitutional government, in freedom of thought and speech, and
in all the elements of political and religious liberty. One of the
most developed expressions of this growth into democracy is our
American Government with all its complexities and intricacies. It
should go without saying that all men, without reference to origin or
history, can not be thrust into this country, and, under restraint
and repression, be forced into our ways of thinking and living and so
attain the true value of American citizenship. To begin with, a great
many people, living under one form of autocracy or another, have never
been awakened to a sense of and desire for democracy. In others the
sense has begun to stir, but has not had the opportunity or the time
for that sure growth that would transform them into a citizenship
capable of pure self-government.
This fact has been demonstrated by the futility of the attempts in
Russia, first under the administration of Kerensky and now under Lenine
and Trotsky. The bolshevist camarilla attempted to take that nation,
which has been subjected for ages to one of the simplest and meanest
despotisms on earth, and organize it into a sort of democracy. This
proposition is still further illuminated by the experience of Germany
in her attempt to build a democracy on the ruins of her old autocracy.
The best thinkers in the German nation, notwithstanding the superior
intellectual, economical and industrial qualifications of the people,
predict that a real democracy can not be established in Germany in less
than fifty years. If these two nations, both white, the one having
the most robust physical manhood in the world, and the other the most
vigorous mentality, can not rise from autocracy into democracy, how
absurd it appears that we should take great masses of the untaught,
underfed, inferior people of all the lands and undertake to precipitate
them, in masses, into our very peculiar and intricate national
democracy.
[Illustration: The "Starry" Flag and the "Fiery" Cross Shall Not Fail]
The Klan, organized to protect and advance the cause of our native
institutions, is therefore exclusive in the restriction of its
membership to white native-born Americans. We believe that only one
born on American soil, surrounded by American institutions, taught in
the American schools, harmonized from infancy with American ideals,
can become fully conscious of what our peculiar democracy means and be
adequately qualified for all the duties of citizenship in this republic.
In order to become a member of the Klan one must subscribe without
reservation of any sort to the Constitution of the United States.
Loyalty to the Constitution must be so thorough that no ultimate
allegiance to any foreign institution, power or country can be
retained. Committal to Americanism is so absolute that nothing is left
uncommitted. The Ku Klux Klan is patriotic to the last and highest
degree. We believe that the principles upon which this republic was
founded, and around which the great War Between the States was waged,
should be constantly reaffirmed and emphasized.
The American nation has acted as a great magnet. The American city in
particular has been an irresistible lure to the unhappy and oppressed
peoples of the world. From all shores great tides of immigration have
flowed in upon us. The alien peoples have not been distributed over
the vast area of our common country, but have, for the most part,
been congested in our great centers. Many of them can not read and
write their own language. On the average they are three times as prone
to pauperism and nine times as prone to crime as our native-born
Americans. Because of their numbers, as well as their nationalistic
tendencies, they organize themselves into separate communities and
often breed hostility to American institutions. How natural that such
foreign communities should spawn all forms of social and political
vices.
Of course this plethora of population violates the fundamental law
of our social life. This nation grew strong and took on its peculiar
virtues out in the open fields and under the gleaming stars. Granting
that the possibilities of democracy are inherent in many of these
aliens that have been admitted into our country, the possibilities can
not now be realized in the great cities of the nation. We believe that
one can never be wholly patriotic or thoroughly democratized until
he obeys God's great first commandment and settles upon some spot of
ground and subdues it and makes it yield its secrets and its wealth.
Permit these people that have come to us to segregate in cities by race
and tongue, and continue to live in squalor and dirt, often accursed
by disease and ignorance, foreign in habit and thought and pursuit,
understanding our country only as an unrestricted opportunity for
license, and it presents the gravest problems that our nation was ever
called upon to solve. This is especially true since these aliens have
been permitted to qualify for citizenship and given suffrage within
a space of time so short that they can not even become acquainted
with the outward manners and customs of the American people, not to
mention the basic intellectual and spiritual factors of our national
consciousness.
More than fifty per cent. of the votes cast in the last presidential
election were cast by cities. For the first time in the history of
this country the urban population exceeds the rural. This vast alien
population now holds and exercises the balance of political power. HERE
IS A CHALLENGE WITH TRUMPET VOICE TO EVERY NATIVE-BORN AMERICAN TO FACE
THE CRISIS AND PRESERVE OUR DEMOCRACY FOR THE GENERATIONS TO COME.
One other condition is imposed on all men who would be associated with
the Klan, and that is subscription to the tenets of Christianity.
We are in no sense a religious organization. There is no purpose
of founding what has been suggested by our critics, a new American
church. The Klan does not interfere, through membership, with any man's
interpretation of religious truth or his connection with any branch or
denomination of the Christian church. In fact, the Klan has nothing to
do with dogma, creed, or ritual. Yet the Klan does insist that every
man becoming a member shall strive to carry himself by the code of
conduct promulgated by Jesus Christ. It is a high standard of living
that the Klan undertakes to maintain, and at the very threshold of the
organization one must accept this highest standard of ethics and morals
that the world has ever known.
There are many who can not accept these stern conditions. But certainly
it is not an arbitrary discrimination against any class, or sect,
or race. We believe that, interwoven into the entire fabric of real
Americanism, are the principles of Christianity. Reverent recognition
of this fact has been made in the Bills of Right and in nearly every
state constitution of the Union. In 1895 the Supreme Court of the
United States, in a decision on the Alien Labor Contract Law, declared
this to be a Christian nation, and the Court was very careful to
establish its decision by referring explicitly to the principles and
declarations of Christianity which run through all the organic laws of
the country. So, believing as we do, that our patriotic principles and
Christianity are inseparable and indivisible, we hold steadfastly to
the Constitution and the Sermon on the Mount. It goes without saying
that men who repudiate either can not look for fellowship in the Klan.
CHAPTER V
Is The Klan Anti-Semitic
Referring to the exclusiveness of the Klan, I am not quite prepared to
admit that the conditions stipulated for membership in the organization
set up the insuperable barrier that some people suspect. It has been
pointed out in many hostile criticisms that the Semitic race is
excluded from membership in the Klan. It is not true, for instance,
that the Klan has set up arbitrary barriers to the admission of the
Hebrew; but it is true that the orthodox Hebrew has established around
himself barriers that preclude his admission into the organization.
The orthodox Jews are perhaps the most exclusive people in the
civilized world. Their racial pride exceeds the pride of any nation or
any land. They have a right to be proud in view of all their history.
The Hebrew literature, the Hebrew religion, the Hebrew commonwealth,
and more than all, the Hebrew jurisprudence, much of which has been
adopted by our western society, entitles the race to hold to its
distinctive qualities and characteristics with a pride that all the
world respects and admires. They have everywhere been a peculiar
people. Because of marked racial distinctiveness, not to say eminence,
they have drawn a boundary line about their social and religious life,
shutting themselves in and the rest of mankind out.
Perhaps there is no patriotism in the world comparable to that of the
Jew. His attachment to his ancient home-land and to his institutions
has been through the ages a consuming passion. In the early history of
his development, when defeated in war, reduced to slavery and crushed
under mountainous oppression, his loyalty to his country and his creed
never wavered. There is no picture in history more pathetic and,
indeed, more inspiring than that of the Jew in bondage. Toiling in the
brickyards of Goshen, taunted with the despoiled glory of his country,
the taskmaster demanding, as the burning lash was laid upon his bared
shoulders, that he sing the songs of his native land, his intrepid
spirit was unconquered and his superb loyalty unbroken: "If I forget
thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning, and if I do
not esteem thee above my chiefest joy, let my tongue cleave unto the
roof of my mouth."
The Jew has brought his religion to America, establishing his temple
worship and clinging tenaciously to his creed of Theism. He has been
welcomed with a hospitality such as has been tendered the Jew by no
other nation. His religious institutions have had all the protection
of the law thrown about them, and they have been covered by the broad
mantle of American liberalism. He has been granted the right to worship
Almighty God according to the dictates of his own conscience, with none
to molest him or make him afraid. But he has organized in America no
system of evangelism to convey his religious message to the people
without the pale. He has made no proselytes or attempted to make any.
He has held his church exclusively for himself and his posterity.
To the orthodox Jew his religion is entirely an expression of his
nationality. He has never invited men without creed to inquire into
his dogmas and his doctrines. Indeed, he has held to his religion as
a heritage that belongs to the Jew and to which none other than a Jew
could subscribe as a matter of right or even as a privilege. A highly
intelligent and influential Gentile sect, the Unitarians, has built its
religious life about the doctrine of Theism. There are no fundamental
or essential differences between the orthodoxy of the Jew and that of
this Gentile sect, but even the Gentile theist has had no invitation
to Judaism, and has been tendered scant cordiality by this proud,
exclusive race that took its religion from the visible and audible
presence of Jehovah and preserved it inviolate for themselves and for
their kind.
In coming to America the orthodox Jew has brought with him all the
racial pride that distinguishes him throughout the ages. He does not
undertake to mingle his social life with that of the native people of
the country, nor does he invite those of other racial lineage to cross
his threshold. He marries and intermarries only with his kind. If the
offspring of the orthodox Jew marries a Gentile he is excommunicated
with drastic and fearful ceremony. So does the Jew keep himself apart.
Even in the remote and sparsely populated sections of the country,
where a single Jewish family is established in a village or at a
cross-roads, selling merchandise, when the time comes for the marrying
of his children, he does not seek or desire that the people with whom
he has been trading, or that the children with whom his children have
been taught in the common schools, shall be introduced into Jewish
family life. He seeks to mate his children with members of his own
race, even though the mating has to be done at long range. Sometimes a
suitable husband for a marriageable daughter, or an acceptable wife
for a marriageable son, has to be obtained in New York or Chicago or
San Francisco, from a thousand to three thousand miles away.
Perhaps this Jew has understood for ages what some of our American
sociologists will not learn from biology; that is, that the
amalgamation of two distinctive race types may lose, in the offspring,
much of the distinctive good of both. A people of mixed race is long
in establishing both the fact and the sense of unity. Its individual
minds tend to instability. Witness, for instance, the results due
to the divergent people who inhabit Ireland. Racial stability, as a
biological fact in the realm of psychology, is a precious result,
perfected only by long, very long unity of blood. A mixed race finds,
for a long period, difficulty in attaining individual balance and
social peace. With the orthodox Jew another racial purpose inclines
him, with relentless will, toward racial segregation. His people are
the chosen of Almighty God. They listen through the centuries for the
voices of angels proclaiming the advent of the true Messiah. To mix his
blood with that of the Gentile is to lose his vision, his hope and his
immortal soul.
The Klan organizes itself around the principles of Christianity, which
diverge widely from the principles of Jewish orthodoxy. If it requires
that those seeking admission into the organization should subscribe to
the tenets that are Christian, it can not be construed into hostility
toward the Jewish race. We believe that, side by side, a few Jews and
many Christians, or a few Christians and many Jews may live in peace
and contentment. For in either case the minority can never, by power
of number, challenge the basic things of civilization of the majority.
Let me here emphasize with all the power I possess: in America the Jew
must ultimately mix with the Gentile. One million Jewish immigrants
and their descendants can be, and will be, through the centuries,
absorbed into the great body of our American people. Here we touch
upon the true cause of the modern Zionism. His exclusiveness forbade
the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Roman, and the Russian, to destroy
his racial identity. To-day he is surrendering in Western Europe and
America to the liberalism of the younger generation of Jews and the
neighborliness of the modern Gentile. Liberalism and Americanization
will eventually break down the exclusiveness of even so large a number
as we now have among us. But if practically free immigration continues
and five millions, or ten millions, of Jews come to us within the
next generation--then we shall have a people within a people, a state
within a state, and the sad conditions of Poland or Roumania will
be re-enacted in America. A two per cent. Jewish population can be,
ultimately, thoroughly Americanized. A ten per cent. Jewish population
will lead us from danger unto danger. We shall have absolute Jewish
separatism on the one hand, and anti-Semitism on the other. We
shall then witness all those profound and terrible reactions which
relentlessly mark the sharp contacts of two vitally different societies
upon the same soil. I submit that when the Klan as an organization,
holding to the tenets of Christianity, provided that any white
native-born American who subscribes to its conditions may enter into
the Klan, the Jew was not arbitrarily excluded. In fact, there are some
native-born American Jews who have accepted Christianity and have at
the same time become eligible to membership in the Klan. But the hard
and fast racial organization of the orthodox Jew does not permit him
to go outside of prescribed boundaries in either his social or his
religious life. We have not excluded the Jew. The orthodox Jew has
excluded himself.
The Klan not only protests that it is not anti-Semitic. The Klan
seeks the execution of a policy which will prevent the growth of
anti-Semitism in America.
CHAPTER VI
Is The Klan Anti-Catholic?
The Catholic colony of Maryland, under the Calverts, was composed of
a most excellent type of freedom-loving Englishmen. Cardinal Gibbons,
who recently passed to his reward, was a fine example of this type.
These people were seeking, as were so many others who then came to
America, liberation from tyranny, bigotry, and intolerance. They
brought with them a spirit not unlike that of the Cavaliers to the
south of them, to whom their destiny was to be indissolubly linked by
ties that remain unbroken to this day. These brave Catholic settlers in
the wilderness, many of whom were people of refinement and education,
invested themselves whole-heartedly in the early development of our
country. No well-informed student of American history doubts that their
large contributions to our American nation have seldom enough been
sufficiently recognized.
[Illustration: Klankrest--Home Donated to William Joseph Simmons by
Klansmen of the Nation "As a Token of Love and Esteem."]
In the great battle of Long Island, in the summer of 1776, Washington
stood upon an eminence and watched the Maryland brigade as it strove to
cut its way through the encircling forces of the British. "Good God,
what brave fellows I must this day lose," he said, as he observed their
desperate position. Later in the day, when he saw them fall, like the
leaves of Autumn, he is said to have wept over the loss of the very
elite of his army. Of such stuff as this were the Maryland Catholics
in the American Revolution. The historian, John Fiske, describes that
terrible and unhappy day (Battle of Long Island, 1776) as follows: "In
this noble struggle, the highest honors were won by the brigade of
Maryland men, commanded by Smallwood, and throughout the war we shall
find this honorable distinction of Maryland for the personal gallantry
of her troops fully sustained, until in the last pitched battle, at
Eutaw Springs, we see them driving the finest infantry of England at
the point of the bayonets."
Just a word more with reference to this sort of American Catholic. In
the spring of 1921 a distinguished assembly of educators and savants,
representing nearly every country, assembled with the University
alumni to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the
University of Virginia. The opening prayer of the first public meeting
was offered by the Catholic Bishop of Richmond. In that invocation the
Bishop returned thanks to Almighty God for that great deed of Thomas
Jefferson which led to the separation of Church and State in Virginia.
To such Catholics as these all true Americans, whatever their religious
beliefs, are bound by ties so indissoluble as to make perfect our
fellowship in Americanism. It is to this section of Roman Catholic
believers, no matter what their ancestry may be, that the Klan makes
especial appeal for understanding and co-operation.
Catholic Maryland won for herself the high distinction of being among
the three colonies which permitted and protected religious freedom.
So we can acclaim the Catholic colonists as among the very first to
realize the full meaning of Americanism, not only as to the outward
things of government, but also as to the inner things of the human
soul. It should not be forgotten, too, that these same advocates of
political liberty and freedom of conscience were themselves grossly
offended and injured for a time in their own colony by a period of
Protestant oppression. American history is a strange, strange story. To
understand our America of the present, and her problems, we must look
deep into the records of the past. With an unbiased mind we must set
ourselves to seek out the truth.
In the State of Maryland one still finds in remote hamlets the original
Catholic edifices, with their sacred symbols, gracing the countryside.
Wherever we find such an American Catholic church, the American public
school is seen in the immediate vicinity. When the American Catholic in
Maryland, or in any other state, goes to the ballot-box, he votes as an
American citizen, not being under ecclesiastical control. We members of
the Ku Klux Klan, positively insist upon making this distinction among
Catholics. We ask, and who can say that we ask too much, that our whole
Catholic population bring its American citizenship up to these high
standards set by the original American Catholics. When this is done, we
shall surely find the greatest pleasure in rendering to the Catholic
Church that full measure of esteem which shall be its due.
During the past two generations great submerging waves of European
immigrants have rolled in upon us. One wave brought with it loyalty
to the German Kaiser and treason to America. Another wave threatened
to smother our working people with the noxious poison of Bolshevism.
Still another sought to make a bitter animosity toward England and
the British Empire the main-spring of all its political and social
activities in America. Is there anything remarkable, anything
inexplicable, about the fact that millions of illiterate peasants
from the more backward parts of Europe, if they happen to be Roman
Catholics, should continue among us their backward European methods?
The peasantry of Poland were, until the Great War, practically a
serf population. Why deny the most evident facts? They are still, in
general, verminous and insanitary, illiterate and stupid. The theory
that they can quickly be made into Americans is the thought of a
fool. The view that their church can conduct itself like the American
Catholic church in Maryland is equally ridiculous.
This immigrant element has been misused in two ways. Its clergy has
kept it ignorant of America by keeping its children out of our public
schools; and it has been used in our elections as a mass vote by those
who exercise control over its votes through the political power of the
church.
With reference to the public schools our American position is as simple
as it can possibly be. Having established the public-school system
as the veritable cornerstone of the nation's democracy, we request,
in the most brotherly spirit, all our immigrant peoples to give it
whole-hearted support. We invite their children to sit beside our
own children and receive the education needed to insure their good
citizenship, their self-support, and their self-respect. And then there
are those who say that we of the Klan hate the immigrant and seek to
deny him his rights!
These immigrant children, sitting side by side in the same school, will
be received as guests in one another's homes. They will form those deep
and lasting friendships which will make for true social unity. When we
open our arms and our hearts to receive them and to give them all we
have, it is they who reject us. They deny themselves the best gift we
can possibly offer--a free public education. How often are we Americans
made unhappy--sometimes, I fear, a bit displeased--when we see on one
side of the street a beautiful, spacious and sanitary public-school
building, and on the other side of the street a poorly constructed,
insanitary and overcrowded parochial school. Our own children go to
the public school. The immigrant children go to the parochial school.
Our own children are taught by teachers carefully selected and trained
for their service. In the overcrowded and insanitary parochial school
the teaching is usually of a standard incomparably lower; often it is
unworthy to be called education. Has the world ever presented a more
curious and perplexing problem than we have here? We see American
citizens of property and influence anxious to tax themselves in order
to present to the child of the Sicilian, Hungarian, or Polish peasant
the best common-school education in all the world. And then we see,
to our unutterable amazement, this peasant serf, or city wastrel,
misled by his clergy, rejecting the only worthy means we have of making
Americans out of his children. To an average American this whole
situation is both perplexing and distressing.
As regards the use of the Catholic vote in elections, the facts, while
startling enough, are more easily understood. In 1917, to mention a
single instance, all the country watched the Catholic church of New
York City defeat one of its own distinguished members, Mr. Mitchell,
for Mayor. No informed person longer seeks to deny the political
influence of the Catholic church. Very recently Archbishop Hayes, of
New York, personally directed the New York police to break up a public
meeting called in the Town Hall by American citizens. The police
appeared before the meeting began and actually went so far as to
prevent its beginning. The law could not have been violated because no
chance was given to violate the law. Archbishop Hayes simply decided
that he would not permit this meeting, which had nothing whatever to
do with any church or religious issue. So he ordered the doors of
the building which had been hired for the purpose to be locked and
the crowd driven away by the police. All we can say to our Catholic
fellow citizens is just this: DO NOT FORCE US TO RESIST YOU. If you
take direct control of the police power out of the hands of the duly
constituted officers of government, then we, as Americans, must
eventually resist your police power in defense of our liberty. Gifted
with an infinite desire for peace and with great patience, we shall
wait until we do not dare to wait longer. Meanwhile we plead with you
daily: Do but accept the basic principles of our Americanism and all
arguments, all unpleasantness, will vanish in a single hour.
In a democracy the separation of church and state implies much more
than the abolition of state support of the church. Separation of
church and state must mean with us that the individual citizen shall
permit neither the state to interfere with his religious worship nor
the church to interfere with his duties as a citizen. Only a developed
political mind can understand the nature of this very modern duality
of attitude. The outward separation is, after all, largely a form of
law. The inward separation, the state of mind, is the true source of
the freedom both of the church and the state. When the individual
walks into his church he must enter with his body and his mind free to
worship according to the dictates of his conscience. When he enters the
voting-booth, when he enters the court-room, when he opens his mouth to
mix his thoughts with his fellow citizens as regards things political,
mind and mouth and hand must be free from the control of the church.
To understand our problem fully we must never forget the platitude
that our immigrant people are not Americans. They are Europeans.
Immigrant Catholics are European Catholics. In almost every country of
Continental Europe there is a Catholic party. The Catholic political
party of Germany, of France, of Italy, of Belgium, of Austria, or
of Hungary, seeks to win the elections and control the government
outright. Again, to repeat myself, is there anything strange about the
fact that when these immigrants form themselves into enormous foreign
communities in our great cities or industrial districts they should act
here just as they act in Europe? I do not think so. It is all simple
enough. Its outward effects, at least, are as easily understood as a
Mississippi flood or a San Francisco earthquake. We must either put an
end to this thing or this thing will put an end to our democracy. We
can not have a Hungarian, a Polish, an Italian, or an Irish peasant
Catholic party among us and still preserve the political system of our
American nation which has been created by three centuries of democratic
evolution. A political system run by sectarian ecclesiastics and an
Anglo-Saxon bill of rights can not live on the same soil. In these
things there can be no compromise. To surrender an inch is to surrender
all and yield to the executioner.
As regards this whole matter, our American humility and false modesty
has already worked us great harm. These matters must at last be dragged
into the open and publicly discussed. Hence this exceedingly plain
statement. If some of our citizens wish their children to attend
parochial schools, then we want those parochial schools properly
inspected. We would like to know what textbooks are being used. The
public ought to know just how much education, and what manner of
education, the fourteen-year old immigrant boy or girl is possessed of
when he leaves school. What does this boy or girl know about himself?
How much reading and writing and arithmetic has he laid hold of? What
has he learned of American history and American institutions? We
Americans of all sections confess, not without shame, that we have
not as yet done nearly enough for public education. But the means we
have provided we wish to have used; the standards we have set, none too
high, we wish to have regarded; and what we are seeking to do for the
immigrant we would like to have fully appreciated.
We seek for all our more recent immigrant peoples such a blending with
our people as shall find in religion and the church no hindrance to
Americanism. We expect, that, more and more, we shall be united by the
lasting bonds of a common patriotism, a common morality, and common
social ideals. We crave the development among us of such a Catholic
church as will not make intermarriage with those of other faiths
impossible or difficult. To throw such a chasm between our young people
as is never bridged by the marriage tie would be a lasting curse to our
country. Let us seek by every means to make all Christians ready for
that more perfect unity of the entire Christian church which should
ever be an ideal with all of us.
The reader will find repeated again in this book, until it perhaps
wearies him, a certain expression. This statement represents something
which I have made fundamental in all my thinking. We Americans must
approach this and similar tasks in a spirit of the utmost fellowship
and gentleness. Our every act must partake of kindliness and
consideration. We expect to find, side by side with us in this matter,
the American part of the Catholic church. Together we shall work out
the problem and then forget it. This difficulty is, after all, but a
passing phase of our complex social process. In a generation it will
have been left behind us. The difficulties, even the tragedies, of
one century often furnishes amusement to the historians of the next.
So let us, in this thing, take thought of the morrow, too. May the
execution of the policy we have declared be everywhere so inwrought
with honorable motive and worthy purpose that presently none shall have
the slightest cause to be against us or deny to us that fellowship and
affection we seek to win from every American.
CHAPTER VII
The Terminology of The Klan
Diligent inquiries have been made into the peculiar terminology
used by the Klan to designate its purposes and mission. Why is the
word "Imperial" employed to characterize the chief officers of the
organization? Why is the organization designated as an "Invisible
Empire"? Does the Klan contemplate, perhaps, a nation-wide organization
that at the height of its strength means revolution and the overthrow
of our present republican form of government? These and other similar
questions--some intelligent, others less so--are being asked by both
the enemies and the friends of the Klan.
The words "Imperial" and "Empire" find no friendly place in the
vocabulary of a democracy. Whenever used they are connected with
autocratic government and centralized power. These terms, as usually
employed, are in sharp contrast to the principles of our great American
democracy. We have everywhere and always held that imperialism is
a despicable thing, a survival of despotic power that came up from
the caveman and was exercised always by force. Germany and Russia
were the last great exponents in Europe of this imperialistic idea
of forcible conquest. Nothing has been more revolting in America
than the suggestion of centralized power by which a nation was to be
governed and directed. Even the temporary expedient of taking the
Philippine Islands into our keeping, as a necessary sequence to the
war with Spain, and holding them under military rule until the people
could be developed into approximate democracy and govern themselves,
found strenuous opponents. During all the twenty years that we have
maintained the mandate, it has caused dissatisfaction among the nations.
[Illustration: The Imperial Symbol of the Klan]
We of the South know only too well what the reign of the bayonet
means. The tragedy of American history was the untimely death of
Lincoln. Had he lived the story of the Reconstruction would have been
different, very different. Following the "deep damnation of his taking
off," the white race of the South was subjected to the supremest test
to which Anglo-Saxon worth was ever put in the history of the world.
The test did not result from the defeat of the Confederacy, or in the
devastation of the states over which the armies fought, or in the
appalling loss of life during the four sanguinary years. It was in the
Reconstruction period, when the armed forces of the victorious North
occupied the entire Southland and secured to the Negro a lordship over
Anglo-Saxon democracy, refinement and civilization. The mute anguish of
those years can not be put into any form of speech. But let me speak
no word of blame. My people of the South hate every form of coercive
government as they love the freedom of our great democracy. There is to
us one symbol expressing the deepest loyalty of the Klan, elevated even
above the Fiery Cross. It is the American flag. To the Klan it is the
emblem of human liberty and security, guaranteed to every citizen of
the land and signalled to all the world beyond our borders. So jealous
is the Klan of the American flag that it is unwilling to share its
place with the flag of any other nation. We are unwilling even that the
colors of the nations to whom we are bound by ties of both blood and
gratitude shall in this country mingle their colors with the American
flag. We desire no confusion in the minds of American people as they
look upon the emblematic flags of different nations as to that place
of supremacy in our loyal devotion which we hold for the American flag
alone.
But at the same time the Klan renounces no obligations or
responsibilities to the rest of the world. We believe that the world
is moving toward "That one far-off divine event," "the Parliament
of man, the Federation of the world," but even when this greater
fraternalism of the world is consummated, we should not be willing for
our colors to be commingled with those of other nations. The emblem
that symbolizes our sacrifices and our victories, our failures and our
triumphs, and out of which our common democracy has come, must have in
our hearts no lesser place, or even an equal place, with those of other
nations. With us the place of our flag is not below, or along-side, the
flags of other peoples. It must be kept apart and above.
We are ready to interpose our will and our strength to prevent the
strong from oppressing the weak anywhere. We are ready out of our
abundance to distribute charity to the unfortunate to the uttermost
ends of the earth, without respect to race, color or clime. We are
quite prepared to promote a great democratic evangelism to the
oppressed and downtrodden peoples of all the earth, that they too
may become conscious, through democracy, of human worth, and achieve
something of the freedom which we enjoy. Yet everywhere we shall serve
under our own colors. All the nations of the earth shall continue their
separate existence and work out their destiny under the emblems into
which have been spun and woven the distinctive characteristics of their
race and their country. All this has been relentlessly brought home to
us through the resurgence of the nations during and after the Great
War. Nothing but absolute independence would satisfy the Poles. Ireland
must be free or perish in revolutionary effort. The smaller the people,
the greater its effort to prove its right to national independence, its
capacity for a separate government. With these facts in mind it would
seem superfluous for native-born Americans to explain or defend our
spirit of patriotism and nationalism.
The phrase "Invisible Empire" means that the Ku Klux Klan undertakes
to establish and maintain a nation-wide organization in the thought of
our people. It plans a conquest only in the realm of the invisible
where men do their thinking. The mentality of the American people is
to be awakened, stimulated, and directed. It means the sovereignty
of Americanism, of the democratic idea, in every American mind. We
plan no system of coercion or outside pressure by which the American
people are to be forced into this "Invisible Empire." I may modestly,
and not irreverently, say that the idea underlying the establishment
of the Klan and its principles in America was taken from one of the
leaders in the early Christian Church, who said that the propagation
of Christianity was without force, noise, or violence, without army
or treasury, but that the Great Leader had established an everlasting
kingdom by taking captive the thoughts of men. So the Klan holds that
anything constructed by force may be destroyed by a superior force.
Anything impressed upon unwilling subjects by outside effort may be
rejected and thrown off in the springtime of returning power. Anything
and everything that is established by such exercise of force is
marked and destined for decay and return to the dust. But that which
is once established in the deeper thought, from the spiritual need, of
mankind is indestructible because there is no manner of force that can
lay hold of it. Alexander said, "Philip, my father, gave me life, but
Aristotle taught me to think." It is not the blood of Philip, through
Alexander, that pulses in the arteries of the world's civilization
of to-day; but it is rather the thought of Aristotle, which, despite
all the Alexanders of history, runs through the story of the world's
civilization in all the lands and all the centuries. It is the idea
possessing the spirit which vitalizes all our basic institutions and
movements toward human freedom which animate the noblest endeavors of
human life. It is in the thought of the American people that the Ku
Klux Klan undertakes to establish its "Invisible Empire," mighty in its
ultimate consummations, indestructible and glorious forever.
CHAPTER VIII
Symbolism of The Klan
Much ado has been made about the strange symbolism of the Klan.
I stated at the beginning that the regalia now in use by the
organization, like the terminology, was selected as a memorial to the
original Ku Klux Klan. It has been generally regarded as grotesque
and ghostly, designed to intimidate and terrify persons against whom
the displeasure of the Klan might be directed. But the only purpose
in adopting the white robes and incidental trimmings was to keep
in grateful remembrance the intrepid men who preserved Anglo-Saxon
supremacy in the South during the perilous period of Reconstruction.
The regalia of the Klan, however, expresses something more in the
present organization than a mere memorial. Its symbols convey to the
initiated the highest sense of patriotism, chivalry and fraternalism.
These symbols were designed by myself during the years that I pondered
a revival of the old order, and contemplated the endangered position
of the native-born American throughout our commonwealth. Every line,
every angle, every emblem spells out to a Klansman his duty, honor,
responsibility and obligation to his fellow men and to civilization.
None of it was wrought for mere ornamentation, and none of it designed
as mere mysticism. All of it was woven into the white robes of the Ku
Klux Klan for the purpose of teaching by symbolism the very best things
in our national life.
Emblematic robes are not uncommon to organizations of men banded
together for either religious or fraternal purposes. My affiliations
with the church and my connection with a number of fraternal orders
have convinced me that the impelling truths which grapple and hold
the loyalties and convictions of men are taught better by symbolism
than ritualism. The Roman Catholic church proclaims the authority of
its mission to the world through the insignia of its clergy and its
rulers; while its service of sacrifice and sanctity, of separation and
consecration, is expressed in the robes of its nuns and its celebrants.
In that colossal pile, St. Peter's at Rome, the most splendid edifice
of Christianity in all the world, is to be found a vast collection of
stones and gold, an array of art so magnificent that it dazzles even
the imagination, an amazing accumulation of trophies torn by conquest
from pagan temples--all symbolizing the universal dominion of the
church not only over all things material but also over all things
religious. The robes of the cathedral are elaborate and impressive
throughout all the grades and ranks of service, from the drab garb of
the keeper of the portals to the flashing parti-colored uniforms of the
Swiss guard, and on through the white, red, and black trappings of the
attendants in the inner courts to the vivid scarlet of the cardinals
and the gorgeous purple of the pope. All are designed to express some
function, or mission, or doctrine of the church in its vast system of
evangelism.
The Anglican church of Great Britain and the Protestant Episcopal
church of America, as well as various other Protestant organizations
have found it to be impressive and inspiring for the clergy and the
sisterhood to wear robes designed to mark them as men and women set
apart for service to humanity. Perhaps the Greek Catholic Church
has the most elaborate system of teaching great religious truths by
symbolism of any other religious organization. It undertakes to convey
to the world the idea of its virility as a Christian organization by
an extensive and artistically wrought out symbolism in its robes and
insignia.
It goes without saying that nearly all, or perhaps all, of the great
fraternal organizations of the world are characterized by the robes
they wear. There are different robes of different orders and various
robes for the same order in different degrees. These carry the message
of fraternalism in the garments that are worn. Why should we, Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan, be singled out and condemned for adopting a
symbolism altogether unique, to represent our particular service to the
age in which we live?
Some objections, probably not wholly misdirected, have been made to the
mask that is worn by the Klan in public parades and demonstrations.
The objections would have all the more force if it were true that the
membership of the Klan were concealed from public scrutiny; but this is
not true. Every local Klan has the custody of its roster and the roster
may be given to the public at the option of the local Klan. Besides,
it is overlooked that the Ku Klux Klan is a chartered organization--in
fact twice chartered under the laws of Georgia.
Its membership is subject to the scrutiny of the State at its will. In
addition to all this, the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in respective
communities are well-known, responsible and representative men, and
their connection with the Klan is generally known to the community
at large. So influential and conspicuous are those men that their
leadership is a guarantee of the worthy and orderly purposes of the
Klan. However, the matter of removing the mask from the Klan whenever
it appears in public is under consideration, and it is not improbable
that the Klan will be authorized to remove the mask whenever a public
demonstration is given.
Outrages and atrocities, expressing various forms of prejudice and
hate, have broken out in some parts of the country during the past
twelve months. Often they have been charged to the Ku Klux Klan. It
is the same old story repeating itself. During Reconstruction days
crimes were perpetrated by men wearing regalia similar to that of the
Ku Klux Klan. The government spent much time and money investigating
these crimes, and compiled altogether forty-six volumes in reports,
but wherever the perpetrators of an outrage against order and decency
were uncovered, they were found to be not Klansmen but Scalawags
and Carpet-Baggers who had used regalia like that of the Klan under
which they might enact their dual purpose of committing a crime and
blackening the reputation of the Klan. At the recent investigation in
Washington numerous crimes were charged to the present-day order of
the Ku Klux. These had been heralded in startling stories by the press
throughout the land. I vigorously denied that a single crime had ever
been committed by the authority of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. I
repeat that it is not an order that can tolerate or condone disorder,
violence or lawlessness. It pledges itself now and always, here and
everywhere, to the protection of society under constituted authority.
It holds itself in readiness to serve the best interests of society,
not despite the law, but always under the law and through the law.
Symbolism teaches the great principles of life, and being, and destiny,
better than any form of speech. There is in human nature an element of
mysticism that responds to suggestion and intimation when no logic or
philosophy could reach it. The mightiest movements in our human nature,
those which transform the character and transfigure the spirit, have
their seat in a realm deeper than where man does his thinking or even
his willing. It is in that part of human nature where the loyalties
and affections, the prejudices and the passions are kept, and it is
only the mystical, the mysterious, the intangible that can reach these
forces in human nature, arouse them, and put them into action. It is
poetry and art and music that move and stir the best that is in us and
make us conscious of what we may do and be. It is not strange then that
symbolism has been used by the church in order to stimulate reverence
and devotion; that it has been used by lodges to awaken fraternalism
and humanism; and that it has been used by every great patriotic
organization to arouse passion for native land and freedom. Indeed,
every cause that has ever lived and flourished in the world, whether
religious, fraternal, or patriotic, has been highly spiritualized and
all the fiery forces of the inner man have been elicited and organized
in its service. There must be in every real movement something of the
fervor of the Crusaders. Without this every spiritual effort of man,
whether great or small, has had its ardor grow cold and the bright
light of its enthusiasm go out in darkness.
What, indeed, could be more appealing to the finer things in human
nature than the fiery cross? "By that symbol we conquer." It carries
the idea of illumination and sacrifice. It symbolizes a love that
lights the way to the noblest service; it symbolizes a service that
is impelled by a burning love. Here lies the only way forward. The
world's amelioration is proclaimed by the glowing cross. We sometimes
think of the cross as remote, as belonging to the past, as an
isolated event. The cross is now and here, and it is an essential
part in the advancement of the world's civilization. It means, in
the highest sense, freedom--the freedom of all mankind. But there is
no emancipation in all the world that comes as a gratuity. Wherever
human life is freed a ransom price must be paid. When it comes to the
liberation of human thought and the breaking of chains from immortal
souls, there is no ransom that will pay the price except that into
which men mint their lives, and out of which they coin their higher
selves. All this and more the fiery cross of the Ku Klux Klan conveys
to the Klansman. It means the supreme agony of love through the
sacrifice of life, to the end that freedom and democracy may be secured
to all mankind forever.
[Illustration: Stone Mountain--The Klan Rendezvous]
CHAPTER IX
The Rendezvous
Once a year, to be exact, on the sixth day of May, the Klan from
all over the country makes a pilgrimage to Stone Mountain. Men from
every walk and station in life leave their daily pursuits and journey
to the Klonvocation. They come from the pulpit, the schoolroom, the
market, the bank, the mine, the factory, the shop, the farm, and
from high offices of public trust and authority, and meet at this
unique rendezvous. Stone Mountain is sixteen miles south of Atlanta.
The place of assembly is not without interest. It is a huge boulder
compacted into solid granite and thrown up, ages ago, by some terrific
convulsion. The stone is three miles in circumference and something
more than a mile in altitude by the trail leading to its summit. Its
frowning and forbidding front is scant of foliage. Soil which the winds
have brought and deposited in its crevices and on its craggy sides
has no deepness. Adventurous shrubs and trees that have sprung up from
time to time have been beaten back by sun and storm because they had
no anchorage in the earth. To this mountain boulder of solid granite
the Klan resorts for comradeship and consecration. The pilgrimage is
not unlike that conjectured by a noble and worthy order which takes its
initiates to the far East, travels them through the unmarked desert,
over blistering sands, and under a sky of brass, while the breath of
the winds is like that of a furnace, scorching the weary pilgrims as
step by step they fight on to the Mecca. The Klansmen make their way
along the poorly defined and jagged trail of Stone Mountain, climbing
upward, always upward, every step taken requiring a step higher, until,
among the elderly members, the last ounce of fortitude and endurance
is expended in the ascent to the top. There on the bald crest, far
above the insistent clamor and demands of daily life men are alone
with each other and in the presence of the infinite. It has sometimes
seemed to us to be a place where two eternities met, the past giving
its solemn command to the men so isolated and elevated, and the future
beckoning them on to still further achievement. First, there comes a
sense of tranquillity. The men look out upon the peace and harmony of
the stars and seem to feel in their souls something of the strength
and orderliness of the planets in their courses. Then comes, during
our preliminary ceremonies, a moment of marvelous moral tension and
exhilaration. The vast throng, with upturned faces, deeply moved to
eloquent agony of speechless prayer, catches a glorious inspiration. It
comes upon the multitude as a wind moving gently through the forests in
the autumn time. Every soul is thrilled. In this conscious moment each
man feels as if he were in a holy temple consecrating all that he is
and all that he has to a great cause. In response to his dedication,
new and secret divine forces begin to stir in his consciousness. I
have looked upon the whole assembly of strong men, a few of whom had
jeopardized life unto death on the fields of war in the Sixties, and
a larger number of younger men who had just carried themselves like
demigods in the fierce fighting in France, and I have seen the tears
rush unbidden from their eyes and trickle down their cheeks, while
here and there a sob that could not be controlled shook the frame of a
man unafraid of either life or death. It is the time and place where
all pettiness and meanness is submerged and washed out by the great
surge of the profoundest sense of human worth. It is a moment in which
all hates and animosities and prejudices die and in which love and
sacrifice and altruism are reborn. It is a time in which all that is
coarse and unchaste and unrefined in human life is consumed by a holy
passion, and all that is noble and courteous and divine is made regnant.
In the execution of such ceremonies, the Klan evidences its practical
nature and its concrete knowledge. Americans can not be aroused by
the mere citation of facts. Our minds are stuffed unto bursting with
facts. We want action. And we do not propose to wait a generation
as has been so often the case, and then weep because it is too late
to act. We seek to draw the souls of men into a service which means
sacrifice. This service is vital to the nation, and essential to
the salvation of our civilization. The language of symbolism is the
language of the soul.
The Klan disperses, goes back to mingle with men, to meet all the
stresses and the exigencies of life. But in each man there is a light
that never before fell on sea or shore, that will lie upon the task
that he is set to do, and, however hard and menial it may be, will
transform that work into a beatitude. More than this: We have daily
evidence that this light, in honor, kindness and charity, falls upon
our fellow men along the pathway that they and we walk together. Surely
there can be no hidden dangers in the assembling of men under such
conditions, impelled by such motives, capable of such inspiration.
If we undertake to build or maintain a civilization in which the
moral and social idealisms of men are not mixed with the mortar in
the structure, we shall most surely build for decline and decay. But
if Americanism becomes a holy cause in which the souls of men are
enlisted, in which service of our country and our country's service of
the world is made first and foremost, then we shall build an empire
indestructible; because, mingled with the cruder material there will be
the elements that are everlasting. In such workmanship alone can there
be security for those American institutions which we seek to save by
the consecration of all we have and all we are.
CHAPTER X
Democracy as a Social System is on Trial
In a preceding chapter I stated that we Americans are barely
reproducing our numbers on our own soil. In comparison with the colored
and foreign elements our percentage is every year being reduced.
In full view, within a few decades at most, lies the new America.
Perhaps it has been fear of giving offense to others, more likely it
has been pure carelessness and individual selfishness on our part,
which has prevented us from discussing our country of to-morrow. The
new America, if the present tendencies continue, will be a nation
composed of a majority of American white farmers only in the middle
western and plains states. Black farmers will ultimately predominate
throughout the coastal regions of the South and the Mississippi Delta,
and Japanese farmers will rapidly multiply their numbers on the Pacific
coast. But the ever-increasing city population already numbers over
half the nation. This city population in the North and East contains
to-day about fifteen per cent. of original Americans. Presently this
diminishing element will count only a few capitalists and professional
persons. The majority of the business class, even, will be composed
of Greeks, Jews, Germans, Italians and their descendants. The great
working class of the cities is even now composed of two elements.
First, there are the skilled workers, mainly British, Irish, Germans,
and Scandinavians, with their immediate descendants. The unskilled
working people of the cities, always tending to submerge the skilled,
are composed of Italians, Negroes, Slavs, Jews, French-Canadians, and
thirty-odd other elements from the south and east of Europe and from
Asia. Recently seventy-two Americans, members of a literary club, in
a small industrial town in New York, took a census of their children.
They discovered, much to their surprise that altogether they were
rearing exactly fourteen offspring. Meanwhile fourteen children is not
an uncommon number at all for an Italian or French-Canadian couple to
add to the citizenship of our country.
Questions arise here which it is quite necessary for us to answer at
once. Why, indeed, do we Americans lay such great store by our peculiar
racial heritage? Are not our recent immigrants, taken as a whole, as
"good" as we? If we do not desire to bring children into the world,
should not our country be left to others who are willing to undertake
the responsibilities of parenthood? Hence, why are we not disposed to
accept our dissolution silently and go to the grave with a smile?
The answer to these questions is implied in the title of this article.
It is the cherished belief of the members of the Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan that democracy--democracy in all its aspects, the social spirit
of democracy, the practice of democracy, the regeneration of the soul
of mankind through democracy--that this is the greatest of all values
created by modern civilization. We hold further that the part played by
the American people in the evolution of democracy has been of primary
importance. Despite all our mistakes, and they have been many, we have
succeeded. And our success, even with its limitations, has been, we
fully believe, as a light and as a leading to all the world. It was our
glorious privilege to unlock the prison door of France when our sister
republic was first created in the French Revolution. It was largely the
success of universal, white, male suffrage in America which impelled
our brethren of the British Empire to undertake the same colossal
experiment. No doubt our history has been the subject of far too much
fervid eloquence and vain boasting. We have not often hesitated to tell
all the world about ourselves. Here I am seeking merely to state the
simple facts, because without them the standpoint and argument of the
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan could not be understood.
Among the most false of theories which sane minds ever gave themselves
over to believing, has been that which claims that the democratic
system, if only put on trial, will work among any people at any time.
Indeed, many persons otherwise well informed still accept this folly.
They believe that democracy is a sort of "universal truth." All that we
must do is to preach it to all mankind as a sort of saving gospel. All
the heathen need do is to accept it, believe it, and forthwith practice
it. Oh, vanity of vanities! It has been three hundred years since the
English Bill of Rights was signed by King James First and nearly one
hundred and fifty years since our American Declaration of Independence.
And now the Great War has ended with our seeking to ram democracy down
the throats of nations which do not want it. What blows in the face our
optimism receives from the simplest facts of history! One hundred and
thirty years ago the French revolutionists attempted to pull down every
throne in Europe and plant democracy in every land. And then only
seven years ago the hosts of the Kaiser made their plunge toward Paris
in order to destroy the French Republic and establish absolutism and
kultur in its place.
No! The practice of democracy does not spread around the world as
rapidly as we can tell people how nice it is and how much we like it
ourselves. Democracy has been a slow, delicate and perishable growth
among a specific group of Europeans. These peoples have been much
favored through a peculiar heritage. No doubt, ages ago, it took the
ancestors of man a long, long time to stand upright. Some quadrupeds
seem to have tried but never could learn the new method, so they still
amble along half the time on all fours. So to-day it seems to take a
considerable period for the masses to learn how to rule themselves
successfully. Yet we ought not to be utterly discouraged. If the facts
indicate that some peoples can never learn, that is no reason at all
why we should surrender our own learning and growth in order to be
equal again with the weaker brethren.
Democracy is on trial. It is on trial in America just as much as
anywhere else. It is being weighed and revalued before the whole
world. We have seen many a European people after being overurged to
accept a republican form of government, again returning to autocracy.
The Greek majority which recently voted to bring back the Kaiser's
ally, King Constantine, and the Kaiser's sister, the Queen, was rather
staggering in its size. If a vast majority of the Greeks in their
home country joyously accept monarchy and Hohenzollernism, how can
we expect our Greek immigrants here in the United States to enthuse
over our republican institutions? They come, like others, as everybody
knows, to avail themselves of the opportunity to advance their material
interests. This has been true with the majority of our immigrants for
over fifty years. Who, indeed, can blame them for taking advantage of
economic conditions in America? Indeed, these immigrants of every
sort and kind are well within their rights. If some of them seem to
make too much money out of us, is it not because some of our employing
class first urged their coming in order to make money out of them? We
brought them in because we thought they would be cheap and profitable
to us. Some of them have proved in the long run to be very dear and
unprofitable.
Let me here make a general observation regarding the attitude of
my colleagues and myself in connection with this whole matter of
immigration. Where, in these chapters, mention is made of any
particular race or group of immigrants, not the slightest offense is
intended. But too often our squeamish fear of giving offense to the
over-sensitive has prevented our discussing this most crucial of our
national problems. Everyone feels free to-day to discuss Russia, to
investigate Russia, to come to conclusions with reference to what is
being done in Russia, and to make suggestions as to a Russian policy.
Why, then, we ask in the name of all common sense, should it be an
offense to anyone to discuss the millions of Russians who live in the
United States? How do they make a living, and what is their percentage
of national increase? Are they or are they not desirable immigrants?
The same holds good of the Germans, the Irish, and of every other
racial element which is increasing among us. All this is interesting
to us and greatly important. It is interesting and important in more
ways than one. What the immigrants may and should demand, what the
Negro or the Japanese are quite right in demanding of us, is that we
as native-born, white Americans should discuss these questions of
population in a way that is at once honorable and kindly. We must
stick to the facts. We may indulge neither in slander nor in base
insinuation. Those of our immigrant population who have been received
into citizenship may ask especial consideration. We, of the Klan, on
our part propose to bring facts in support of a policy. There may be
those who wish to disagree with us publicly. If so, we shall expect to
be asked to consider only facts brought in rebuttal. As man to man,
marshalling fact for fact, let us sit down together and seek to sift
this matter to the bottom.
[Illustration: The Emperor Addressing First Imperial Klonvokation.]
CHAPTER XI
Our Cities a Menace to Democracy
Referring again to the menace of the American city to American
institutions, I desire to remind the reader of the thought of some
of our most profound thinkers on the great problems of democracy.
Some of these views expressed at different periods of our history
were prophetic, and some of them were conclusions, as though the
visions of the seers were being fulfilled. In the early days of the
republic when there were no great cities in our country and when the
tide of immigration had just begun to flow to our shores and settle
in the growing centers along the Atlantic seaboard, Mr. Jefferson
said, "The American city is a cancer on the body politic." He seemed
to foresee, at the very beginning of the republic, the deadly poison
of anti-democracy generated among the alien people congested in our
cities. In 1866 Wendell Phillips, a powerful advocate of emancipation,
said, after the great conflict was ended and the Negroes free, "The
time is coming when the American city will strain the government
as slavery never did." He, too, foresaw the virus which the city
would spread to the entire nation, attacking and consuming the great
principles of democracy upon which the republic was founded. In recent
years, Lord Bryce, Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States,
after years of study and careful investigation, wrote that classic
entitled "The American Commonwealth." In this work there was much
commendation of American institutions, but the book was not without
candid criticism. He said that "the conspicuous failure of American
democracy is in its great cities." The clear meaning of the eminent
Englishman was that the American people remained really democratic
only in the rural sections and the villages. Already conglomerate
population from every clime and shore had destroyed democracy in our
congested centers. Only recently Mr. H.G. Wells, one of the most
conspicuous, progressive thinkers in the world, looked upon New
York with its seething millions, heard its Babel of languages, felt
its delirious fever, and then calmly announced that Petrograd in its
rust and desolation was a picture of New York in the future. In our
greatest city, this profound student of social and political life saw
unmistakable evidence of the real and seething madness of Bolshevism
which meant the overthrow and the utter collapse of all things
democratic.
We are told to-day (1920) that millions of workers in our great cities
are unemployed. I reflect at once upon the figures which are placed
before us. In round numbers we have, this winter, about six millions of
unnaturalized foreign working people living in our cities, and almost
exactly the same number of employed on our hands. What would they have
us do? Are six millions more to come to us and thus give us a total of
twelve millions of unemployed? What would these people all do for a
living? There are simply not enough jobs in the cities for them, and
it seems evident that there will not be in our generation. It is these
masses, which, by sheer force of number, gave us the present insoluble
problem of the city. Our cities can maintain their large populations
only if the country population is increased to supply them food and raw
materials on the one hand, and with markets on the other.
Overgrown cities are in themselves a menace. When the surplus is
composed of unassimilated and unemployed aliens the menace is
doubled,--nay, it is multiplied tenfold. The great city as at present
constructed and conducted corrodes the very soul of our American
life. Factory work, with every new invention of automatic machinery,
progressively selects those who are more and more unfit to be
Americans. A factory manager in Chicago recently amended a new rule for
the selection of employees. He would hire no blondes. The big blonde
people, he said, "would not stay at their machines until the whistle
blew." He was evidently hunting for a people who could be trained
never to move a foot, or an eye, for ten hours a day. The growth of
an American is ordinarily impossible under the conditions of either
great wealth or great poverty. The city simply can not furnish the
character-building elements which must needs go into the making of an
American. Every American child should be born to a vast heritage. This
heritage should include a fine healthy parentage, clean birth, gentle
care, proper nourishment and opportunity for play and education in the
open country.
Is there no cause for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan among the robust,
native-born folk of the countryside? Is not the menace of the city to
our ideals and institutions an urgent demand for the organization of
our unspoiled rural life to save the nation from infection by the great
cities?
It may be that we are too late in starting this movement of "America
for Americans and Americans for America." No doubt it should have been
begun thirty years ago. But if we can find some method by which, after
ten years of entire rejection, immigration can be narrowly and rigidly
restricted, and by which the surplus population can be distributed
over the vast, uncultivated area of our great country, and slowly
wrought into our social life, there is yet a hope left for our country.
But if alien populations are permitted, as in the past, to flood our
land, colonize in our great cities, and propagate their kind with such
amazing rapidity, while only native-born Americans continue to till
the soil and propagate their kind in an appallingly decreasing ratio,
then our country is lost and everything the fathers strove to build for
posterity will sooner or later be wiped out. We do not in the least
seek to hide the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is making a last stand for
America as the home of Americans and Americanism.
CHAPTER XII
The Failure of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe
To the average country-born American the period of the war has been
a time of painful disillusionment. There may have been among us some
who, before the war, had some accurate knowledge of what was going on
in the world; but the great mass of Americans were very much shocked
by the succeeding event. We took the statements of the leaders of the
people in Germany and Russia at their face value. It seems to me to be
very much worth while, at present, to trace the various events by which
we were led into knowing what central and eastern Europe were really
thinking and doing. Let us recall our first period of disappointment.
We had always believed that the parties of the people in Germany,
especially the great social-democratic party, had the power to prevent
the Kaiser from undertaking a war of conquest. The declaration of war
was to be the signal for a revolution and the creation of a republic.
This was rather taken for granted, without investigation, by reading
people all over the world. When we saw the entire German nation, with
hardly an exception, turn quite insane with the war spirit, we sat back
and wondered what this people was really like.
It was also a generally accepted theory among us that the German
immigrants who came to us had left Germany because they disliked
the tyranny of its government. Then, in 1914, with a suddenness
that quite took our breath away, came the propaganda of "Kultur."
The entire German nation, through every means it had of speaking to
the outside world, informed us blandly that it possessed a system
of society infinitely more efficient and desirable than democracy.
"It is Germany's duty under God," wrote Bernhardi, "to give her
superior culture (Kultur) to all inferior peoples." Indeed, the war
itself was generally interpreted by Germans as an act of charity and
self-sacrifice upon their part. At the time the idea was so new to us
that it took us just three years to really comprehend what was going on
in Europe. Even President Wilson, in 1916, declared publicly that we
did not know the real causes of the War.
We may or may not have completely destroyed the Germany autocracy; but
we may be sure we have by no means done with the system of Kultur.
It is all too easily put into practice. The stupendous machinery and
organizations of modern industry presents a perfect maze of social
problems for solution. Kultur is, by far, the easiest way out. The
direction of the whole business of life is simply turned over to a
"great man" or to a small clique. People everywhere are naturally lazy
and morally irresponsible. For the thinking and characterful minority
there come times of mental anguish and disillusionment. To-day the
times tempt us to despair. We are almost driven to lose faith in the
majority and so in government by the majority. "Why not try a change,"
"it could not be worse;" we hear it said on every hand. So, perhaps,
we in America may yet try Kultur. Certainly we shall if we again have
unrestricted immigration. When democracy fails, some form of monarchy
will be our only salvation from oligarchy; and an oligarchy is more
dangerous to freedom than monarchy. A monarchy, with our peculiar
industrial development and our great propertyless masses, means Kultur.
In the midst of the Great War came the Russian revolution. We sat
back and said, "How fine! Now they are going to follow our example
by building a great Russian Republic, which will soon break down the
German autocracy." Even now most of us do not begin to understand what
has really happened. What we do know is that the Bolshevists have not
only created a state of universal starvation, disease, and despair
throughout Russia, but they have also tried to spread their system
throughout Europe and the world. To this end they have made foreign
war and conducted an enormous and costly world propaganda. As I write
we learn that, while we were voting credits and collecting funds for
the starving in Russia, they were paying $30,000 to a single agent to
execute a single murderous bomb-plot in New York City.
In our last chapter we quoted Mr. H. G. Wells's statement that New York
City will be the next Petrograd. This observation can be, by no means,
taken jocularly. Go in our present course, and Bolshevism will be, in
all our larger cities and industrial districts, the natural alternative
for monarchy. Compelled to choose between the two, our original
American people will probably divide and civil war will result. Lenine
and Trotsky did not create Bolshevism. Bolshevism grew as naturally
as a rank weed on a dunghill. It sprang from ignorance and poverty
and despair. It will appear wherever ignorance, poverty and despair
are mixed together. Quite likely we shall have, with unrestricted
immigration, a Bolshevist revolution first, then monarchy and Kultur.
A great many persons are disposed to compare the present state of
central and eastern Europe with the conditions in France at the time
of the French Revolution. I, for one, am not at all impressed by this
easy explanation. The French Revolutionists represented and advocated
a movement toward democracy for all Europe. Both the Germans and
Russians have burst out upon us shouting that, in their peculiar system
of tyranny and slavery, they had something better than democracy to
proffer us. The average reading American throws up his hands and cries,
"What in Heaven's name, will China next urge upon us, or Africa?"
What has happened to us is, after all, upon reflection, quite simple.
We are placed on the defensive for democracy. And we have wisely given
over trying to urge our point of view and our peculiar system upon
those who not only reject it but openly despise it. No doubt this has
been a severe shock to our ancient national conceit. Let me again
emphasize that democracy seems to be, for the present, limited to the
boundaries of certain peculiar nations. Other peoples may evolve into
democracy later. But their steps will be slow. Their experience will be
gained gradually. We can not help them much, if at all, by urging them
merely to follow our example. Meanwhile, if there be anything precious
in democracy for us, we had better bestir ourselves to save what we
have left of it.
CHAPTER XIII
Foreign Outposts in the United States
Four distinct national elements in the United States showed, in
lesser or greater part, disloyalty and pro-Germanism during the War.
These were the Germans, the Jewish Bolsheviki, the Sinn-Feiners, and
the French-Canadians. Of course these four were no different from
most other foreign-speaking elements. Only their standpoints and
loyalties were clearly brought out by the war--that was all. Italian or
Portuguese, Greek or Slav, in case their home country had been lined up
against the United States, would have acted in just the same way.
Here we must touch upon a fact which is pretty widely known or taken
for granted. There is a fundamental difference between this later
immigration and that of the middle portion of the nineteenth century.
The Germans, Hungarians, and Italians of 1848-70, for instance,
came to America for the same reason as most of the original British
and Irish. They were seeking freedom and democracy. Their purposes
were idealistic. They sought in the new country not only economic
opportunity but political liberty which were denied them in the old.
They were Americans at heart before they left their old home.
The new immigration is totally different. This later swarm has come
mostly to get jobs and money. Among them, no doubt, there are a few
who are gifted with qualities of mind and character which make this
description inapplicable. I am referring to the many, not the few.
In Southern and Eastern Europe they form the lowest grade of the
working class and include a large percentage of beggars and peddlers,
of thieves and criminals. The average immigrant of this sort has
been accustomed to a condition of poverty unknown to, and almost
unimaginable to, the average American. His physical standards of living
are such as to make his competition with the original American worker
unfair and deadly. Great masses of them have come without the slightest
intention of remaining with us and adopting American standards. Herded
together under the most unsanitary conditions, hoarding up their wages
with a greed incomprehensible to an American, crowds of them rush back
to the country of their origin as soon as their savings are sufficient
for their purposes. Meanwhile they are replaced by others until the
standards of living of the American-born wage-earners are hopelessly
undermined. Each immigrant who comes to us under these conditions
prevents the founding of an American home and the birth of American
children. Let us hasten to add that their coming and going can not in
any way be held as an accusation against themselves. Responsibility
lies entirely with us. Employers who bring them over, or prevent their
rejection, under the conditions stated, are guilty of a monstrous crime
against civilization. This crime is comparable to only one other in
our history--the African slave-trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
[Illustration: Where the Water Gushes From the Rock Klansmen Assemble
Each Year to Drink the Libation of Fellowship.]
Meanwhile every conception and institution upon which our social and
political life is established is torn from its mooring and broken up by
the force of the inpouring waves. In Southern and Eastern Europe and
in the Near East, these masses are, or have been, until very recently,
ruled as they were in the Middle Ages. Rebellion against tyrants to
them means acceptance of Anarchism or Bolshevism, or at least German
state Socialism. East of the Rhine and south of the Alps they are
capable at present only of running wildly about from one tyranny to
another, from one stupid blunder to another and back again. If this
population in Europe is proving itself to be totally incompetent
to govern itself, how can we expect it to take an intelligent and
useful part in all the complexities of democracy here? If a million
Hungarians, for instance, have failed at every point of the political
compass in Hungary, how, in Heaven's name, can we expect them to
succeed in New York or Chicago? That mass of Hungarians, like Italians
and Germans, like Jews and Greeks, induces the vilest sort of boss
rule. They are largely kept away from our public schools by clerical
opposition to our school system. A slave population in Europe, they
become a slave population here. Politically they are the willing tools
of every hidden and dangerous force at work in our public life.
It is no part of my purpose to arouse, in the slightest degree, hatred
of these people. Many of them are kind, innocent, simple, unknowing
creatures. As strangers in a strange land, they deserve every degree
of consideration, every means of help at our hands, which it is in our
power to give to them. Their natural inclination, as well as their
great numbers, are responsible for that separation from us which the
foreign quarter implies. The continued use of foreign languages, and
the clinging to foreign customs, are things which should never have
been tolerated on our soil. By herding together they bring up their
children in a foreign atmosphere, thus perpetuating and increasing the
weaknesses and dangers which they have brought into our national life.
I used the word "increasing" advisedly. In Europe each unit of this
backward and inept mass of poor is merged in a nation which understands
him and where he, in turn, somewhat understands his surroundings. But
segregated by language and nationality here, they are broken away from
their old moorings without binding themselves to the new. In the old
world they are led politically, sometimes, by men of education and
ideals. With us they fall easy prey to any fool and fakir and dishonest
representative of the political machine or vicious interest which may
seek to prey upon them and mislead them.
A few particular facts concerning propagandistic activities among our
immigrant population may be illuminating if set down together. During
the war the pro-Germans organized and conducted a most elaborate and
expensive propaganda among our Ukrainian immigrants. This was done in
order to weaken Russia at home, both before and after the revolution.
Sinn-Fein Irish, because of their inveterate hatred of the British,
were in many cases used to spread pro-German propaganda. This was
effectual both before and after we went into the war.
A very large percentage of the Russian Jews in New York City and
elsewhere were, at the beginning of the war, pro-German because
they were anti-Russian. After we entered the war they were bitterly
anti-American because they were pro-Bolshevist. No possible turn of
events could make them take a pro-American position upon any issue
under the sun. This is the element, by the way, which used funds from
Russia to carry on its pro-Bolshevistic propaganda among our Negroes.
In certain places, including New York City, it urged the Negroes to
arm themselves and fight the whites.
The French-Canadian immigrants among us number, with their children,
nearly half a million. During the war they were, strange as it may
seem, anti-French. The French-Canadian population is completely
dominated, politically, socially and intellectually, by their clergy.
These clericals still hate France and the French Government because the
French Revolution overthrew the power of the Roman Church in France.
They still belong to the ancient regime. So they naturally took the
side of the ancient regime, the German side. Among us, they were
largely passive. In Canada they actively opposed every war activity of
their government from start to finish of the war.
Of the Asiatics there are two main elements--the Japanese and the East
Indians. Of the East Indians there are not many, but their number is
steadily increasing. They are being widely used to stir up an Indian
revolution against the British Empire. Whether this is or is not
justified we are not discussing here. The point is that this foreign
element is using America as a vantage-point from which to make war upon
another country.
Finally, we come to the Japanese. Here we find the climax of this
whole matter. The religion of the Japanese immigrants is, primarily,
Mikado-worship. Sums of money to build the temples for this delectable
form of religious expression are furnished largely by the Japanese
government. When we ponder these facts we may well ask whether we as a
nation do not ourselves require a guardian. We resemble a five-year old
child with a purse full of money, sitting in a poker game with greedy
and astute gamblers. To carry our sentimentalism so far, to overwork
the theory of the brotherhood of man to such an extent as this, is
to court total disaster. We as a nation are asleep because selfish,
corrupt and designing interests among us have drugged us out of our
senses. These great interests want cheap labor. They are aided in their
designs by a crowd of well-meaning but ignorant sentimentalists, most
of whom do not dream that they are helping to destroy our American
nation in order to experience an emotional satisfaction. The employers
get their cheap labor, and the sentimentalists their self-satisfaction.
We, the foolish majority, are losing our freedom and our country. If
the facts do not cry us into action, why multiply words? All America
is hoping, praying and preparing for peace with Japan. But to further
permit even the smallest amount of Japanese immigration will surely
tend to war. In the event of war any American in Japan will undoubtedly
take the side of his own country. We shall fully expect him to do so.
For the same reason the hundred and fifty thousand Japanese in our
own country will prove to be a hundred and fifty thousand skillful
and resolute enemies. Making an American out of a Japanese under the
conditions above described is as impossible as making a sheep out of
a goat, or a dog out of a cat. As to whether or not we are superior
to the Japanese, is not the matter at issue here. The important fact
right here is that we differ greatly from each other in the basic
things of life, and these differences are largely inherited qualities.
Furthermore, these differences must surely make Japanese amalgamation
with our people wholly undesirable. Such a mixture of bloods runs
counter to a fundamental principle of biology which all high-school
children learn as a matter of course. The offspring of such a blending
of widely different stocks are likely to be unstable in mind. In
general they can not qualify as to either the physical, mental or moral
standards of either race. In amalgamation there is likely to be a loss
from the standards of either side.
The Japanese child in the United States is sent to a school owned and
controlled by the Japanese Government. There he is taught the language,
ideals and duty of an abject subject of the Mikado. Finally, the
Japanese birth rate in California is sixty-nine per thousand annually,
the white birth rate nineteen per thousand.
"But the pure descendants of the Japanese immigrants may surely change
and become real Americans," I hear somebody saying. Meanwhile, we
have just been informed that the son of German parents in Cincinnati,
who had accepted a Captain-Surgeon's commission in our army and gone
to France had not been perfectly Americanized. The fellow was hanged
for inoculating our soldiers with disease germs instead of typhoid
serum. This creature was born and reared not in the United States, but
in the German section of Cincinnati. With this in mind we expect to
Americanize the Japanese, the very breath of whose intense religious
emotion is the sacred worship of their absolute and august ruler, the
Mikado!
Be it a million Russians or a million Japanese, a million Italians or
a million French-Canadians--either their importation or their birth
upon our soil prevents by the stifling force of economic competition
the birth of a million Americans. In the name of Almighty God and our
country, what has become of our brains? These facts are enough to make
any of us not totally bereft of his senses to go into the highways and
the byways crying for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, or if some man
has a better plan for safeguarding the nation conjuring him in God's
name to proclaim it.
CHAPTER XIV
The Racial Limitations of Democracy
Democracy is the practice of self-government by the people. It is the
rule of law instead of persons; of the majority instead of the minority
or individual. As a system both of government and social life it has
but recently been either widely accepted in theory or established in
practice. A short three hundred years mark its very real advance in the
modern world. Only during the past hundred years has majority rule been
accepted as desirable or possible among a very few of the more advanced
countries. If we examine the political map of the world we find that
the triumphs of democracy are limited to but a few nations. We may
generalize by observing that a very few nations have but recently
succeeded in making democracy work.
What part is democracy likely to play in various quarters of the world
during our present century? Are we to see, now that Europe and Asia
are torn from end to end by revolutions, a sudden adaptation of all
these backward peoples to the democratic method? All recognize that we
are just now going through one of the greatest of revolutionary periods
in history. Maybe the millenium of universal freedom and democracy is
even now at hand. Let us see.
The practice of political democracy to-day is practically limited to
two main groups of nations--the English-speaking and the Latin. Of the
latter group, Spain alone tarries in the Middle Ages. Besides these we
have Holland and the three Scandinavian countries, which, while ruled
by kings, are democratic in both thought and practice. In a previous
chapter we have described the pitiful surrender of the German people
to absolute monarchy and state socialism, and their recent trembling
efforts toward freedom, as well as the sad miscarriage of the attempted
democratic revolution in Russia.
Beyond the limits of Europe, the two Americas, and English-speaking
colonies over seas, there is little enough hope for the growth of
democracy anywhere in the immediate future. The most fulsome optimism
can not expect the Chinese republic to succeed in our day. For a long
time in the future, as in the past, the "white man's burden" is going
to include practically the whole of Asia and Africa.
The limitations of democracy are set by many considerations. These
involve first the state of biological evolution in which a particular
race finds itself; second, the particular history of the particular
country under discussion. The African Negro can not realize democracy
to-day because he is psychically, and hence morally unfitted for its
responsibilities. The cause here is biological. The German people are
the first cousins of the English, being much the same in blood. The
difference between the two peoples are not biological, but historical.
Democracy in practice requires certain mental and moral qualities. The
most outstanding among these are intellectual acumen and a knowledge
of public affairs. Among the moral essentials are a spirit of good
sportsmanship, a profound regard for the rules of common honesty, and
above all, a fine sense of personal honor. Democracy must be based
upon character. Every qualification we have mentioned necessitates a
large measure of economic freedom; for without this, the individual
is enslaved and driven in things political. They imply, also, freedom
from tyranny of intermeddling by any religious power. Unity of church
and state, or the interference in politics by a religious organization
for ulterior purposes, makes true democracy impossible. The individual
citizen must always have perfect freedom of political choice. For the
masses in any nation to acquire these qualities is to place that nation
in the very front rank of the world's political civilization.
We now come to the most important element of all. In any well ordered
democratic country there must be a high degree of unity in both the
thought and feeling of the people. There is a principle of mechanics
involved here. If the machine is to run at all, its parts must
function together properly. If it is to run smoothly, without mishap
of any sort, then those parts must have been most carefully fitted
and adjusted together. If a population is seriously divided along
lines of race, language, religion, or social classes, in just so far
is a working democracy made difficult. Given enough differences and
the machine breaks down. For instance, Switzerland is often cited as
a country where democracy works even though the people are divided
into three language groups. Nothing is more untrue. In Switzerland
the entire population is united because almost everybody uses two or
three languages in common instead of one. Religious differences among
the Swiss are not dangerous to democracy because church and state are
completely separated, and it is taken for granted that no church shall
meddle in the slightest degree in political affairs.
Any larger disunity robs a nation of its hope of democracy. Witness
the peculiar failure in the democratic effort in Russia, where the
fanatical sect of Bolsheviki has set up a dictatorship in the name of
the wage-working class alone. What a lesson can be learned from Poland,
where religious difficulties have recently resulted in bloody riots;
or in Italy, where Nationalists, Socialists, Communists and Catholics,
each organized into a party, have recently gone out seeking the blood
of one or more of the opponents. In this the famous words of Lincoln
forever come into mind. "A house divided against itself can not stand.
This nation can not endure half slave and half free. It will be all the
one thing or all the other." Democracy in America has been successful
hitherto because we have been enabled, first and last, at whatever
sacrifices, to preserve our national unity.
[Illustration: THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE
Where Country, Our Home, The Klan and Each Other are Secured]
Democracy is limited to those nations whose citizens possess these
peculiar and lofty qualifications of mind and character. It is limited
to nations which are blessed with unity and solidarity among its
people. It is further limited to nations which have grown into the
practice of democracy during long experience. Instead of asking what
nations and peoples are likely to fail at democracy, we had better
start by inquiring as to what few nations are fortunate enough to
possess all of these qualifications which, taken together, make
democracy possible.
Democracy, we shall all agree, can not develop among the Australian
bushmen. It will not develop among the gypsies. It will not develop,
for a long time, among the African Negroes. Democracy will grow slowly
among the white peoples of central and eastern Europe. It will probably
grow much more slowly among the brown and yellow peoples of Asia. We
can best advance the cause of democracy in our time by saving it and
developing it in those countries where it has been already pretty well
established. Surely the greatest possible service we can render the
cause of democracy among the peoples not yet wholly fitted for its
practice is to give them a high and striking example of its success
in our own country. The supreme battle for democracy in this our day
is taking place in the minds and hearts of American citizens. There
is no immediate cause for doubt and worry concerning the preservation
of democracy in Great Britain and France. There is cause for deepest
concern in our own country, whose democracy is threatened from every
side, by greedy and designing powers above, as by a great mass of
incompetent, unprincipled and undemocratic voters from below.
CHAPTER XV
The American Negro as Ward of The Nation
Grover Cleveland once declared that one American problem for which he
saw no solution whatever was the problem of the Negro. If we were in
The land of the beginning again, that country of our dreams, we should,
of course, not bring the Negro to our shores. It is easy to idealize
our American ancestors, but no doubt they made enough errors in their
time. Their most gigantic blunder, one to make Providence himself
almost despair of humanity, was the Afro-American slave trade. "Man's
inhumanity to man" brings at last the greatest of all sorrows upon him
who works the inhumanity.
The first emotion that thought of the great problem of the Negro must
awaken in the hearts of all Americans is humility. Before Almighty God
we must resolve in this matter to do justice, and more than justice.
Here more than any other place, we must be moved by Christlike kindness
and love. The bane of us Americans, in all periods of our history,
has been carelessness. We have a tendency to let things drift from
bad to worse. Such has been particularly the case with reference to
our attitude toward the Negro. It is high time that we applied to our
public thinking some of that sounder knowledge of society and social
laws which recent years have given to us.
Why should the simple truth give offense to anybody? The Negro in
Africa is a childish barbarian. Left to himself, he has never at any
time or place evolved even the beginning of a civilization. Do what we
may in the way of an education, the mind of the pure Negro, compared to
the white, on the average does not get beyond the age of twelve years.
To ignore this fact is to get into error from the start. Continue
to ignore this fact, especially in the execution of larger national
policies, and we shall invite, as we have done in the past, trouble
that is deep and dangerous. Two facts should be remembered if we would
make real progress in this discussion. The first is that only those who
live among the Negro and so learn to know him at first hand can really
understand his manifold traits. To sit down five hundred miles from the
nearest considerable Negro population and write books about the Negro
is not likely to help much.
The second fact to be kept constantly in mind relates to our population
of mixed blood. Every distinguished leader of the Negro race in the
United States has been part white. In fact, a majority of the more
distinguished have contained only a small infusion of Negro blood. It
is the presence of this Mulatto element which clothes the whole problem
in porcupine quills. It is this portion of our colored population which
is restless and often unhappy to the point of bitterness because of our
present policy with reference to the Negro. If there were no mixed
population to consider our problem would not be nearly so difficult.
I have always felt that superficial minds have a peculiar tendency to
lay hold of the Negro problem. For instance, witness the illogical
claims of some of those who think they are the special friends of the
Negro and who continually emphasize the necessity for an enlarged
sphere for Negro opportunity. On the one hand they boast of the very
great progress the Negro has made during his half century of freedom.
On one page they will emphasize Negro accomplishment. More than half
of our adult Negro population, for instance, can read and write. Tens
of thousands of Negro families own their own farms or city homes. An
even greater number of Negroes are attending high schools and colleges.
Then, on the very next page, the same author will take pains to show
that the Negro is most foully treated. He is kept in ignorance and
poverty. The wicked white population which surrounds him denies him
every advantage and means of progress. Of course both of these tales
can not be true at the same time.
Those of us who grew up among the Negroes and have lived with them on
terms of mutual kindness and of helpfulness all our lives are inclined
to the conclusion that it is easy to exaggerate the progress of the
Negro. The record of what we people of the South have done and have
tried to do for the Negro during these fifty years is an open book to
all the world. It need not be described or analyzed here. Our task has
not been easy. In general, I think we have tried to do it in a way to
win both the approval of our own conscience and the commendation of our
fellow citizens of other sections of the country. Yet we have acted not
only according to our means, but also according to our knowledge of
what could be accomplished. In so far as we have failed we simply ask
that our fellow citizens of the North and West make special effort to
understand the true cause of our failure.
This brings us to the main issue of this discussion. The Negro problem
is not peculiar to the South. The Negro problem is the burden of the
nation as a whole. The Negro was brought here during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries on the merchant ships which sailed mostly from
the ports of Great Britain and New England. Some few put forth from
Philadelphia and New York, but none from the South. This was not due to
the fact that all Southern people were morally above taking advantage
of the African slave trade. It was because commerce on the high seas
was not developed in the South. We were then wholly agricultural.
But the fact remains. The Negroes were brought to us by the ships
of old England and New England. For this terrible error of all the
English-speaking world of colonial times we in the South have paid and
paid and paid. We have paid by reason of the very fact of slavery,
which continued so long among us because no one knew how to make an
end of it. We have paid and are still paying in the form of the most
inefficient labor force in the world. We paid in the War Between the
States and during the Reconstruction, until extinction threatened us;
and we still pay. Not the least portion of our bill is the disesteem
in which we are often so wrongly held by those of our own language and
blood throughout the world. Yet we patiently await the day of complete
understanding, of perfect reconciliation.
How long will it be before our modern knowledge of the fundamental
facts of American history are accepted and used in our political and
social thinking? Slavery continued in the South and died out in the
North not because our people were different at the start. They were
quite the same. But the climate was different. Crops were different. In
the South the slaves produced cotton, tobacco, and sugar-cane during
a long growing season, and hence slaves were profitable to their
masters. In the North where they produced only food and fodder crops
during a short growing season, slaves were an economic loss. Short
summers and long winters do not permit the Negro to become a permanent
inhabitant of Northern climes. So the few Northern slaves were mostly
sold South and total emancipation followed.
Meanwhile, let it not be forgotten that during the period when cotton
was king, the North shared with the South in the profits of slave
labor. The economic system of our country was based upon cotton
and tobacco. For a full generation it took the following form: the
South sent her products to Europe, America received, in return, not
commodities but capital. This capital was invested in railroads and
other public improvements. Pennsylvania, New York and New England
furnished the articles of manufacture which the South needed at prices
much higher than obtained in Europe. These high prices were maintained
through a protective tariff. The profits of slave labor were thus
divided between the South and the North. When, in the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, Virginia led the border states in demanding the
Constitutional prohibition of African slave trade, the New England
delegates joined with those of the far South in keeping this nefarious
traffic open for twenty-one years more. When we say to-day that the
problem is in every sense a national problem, we base our statement
not only upon present necessity--but also upon the basis of historical
facts which lead to definite conclusions.
Finally, the title of this chapter has a wider significance which I
would emphasize with all possible vigor. In maintaining that the Negro
is a ward of the nation I wish to place emphasis upon WARD. The Negro's
presence among us requires an ever greater interest and care on our
part. It is high time that the people of the South made a wider appeal
to their fellow citizens of the North and West. A stupendous moral
responsibility is involved in the presence of these ten millions of
black people. Not only the past, but the future, too, is looking down
upon us. All Americans may well realize that in this, as in so many
other matters, we are being weighed in the balance as a nation. As a
people we are fortunate in being quick to let bygones be bygones. We
of the South know that if other sections come to understand us and
our peculiar problem better, not only we, but they also, will be the
ultimate gainers. The sooner the nation unites in looking upon our
ten millions of colored folk as ten millions of children for whose
protection and care we are morally responsible, the sooner we shall all
be placed upon solid ground.
Let me repeat here what I have been constantly touching upon in
these chapters. The maxims of our democracy are not for universal
application. Some Europeans are a hundred years, others five hundred
years, behind us in the process of democratic evolution. We may
guess, but we can not know, how long they will be in catching up.
How far behind them the Negro may be in these things I leave for the
anthropologists to determine or surmise. But what we of the South
assuredly know, because of our experience, is just this--to treat the
Negro as the political equal of the white is to do grave injustice not
only to the white, but to the Negro as well. We can not justly enforce
the laws among children that we make for adults. To enforce the white
man's law, in all cases, upon the Negro is an injustice so great that
the effort often causes sorrow to every normal mind among us. Cared for
and protected as a child, the Negro's better qualities are developed
and made evident by his works. But when he is burdened by moral and
legal responsibilities which neither his mind nor his character is
prepared to bear, in the vast majority of cases he breaks and falls
under the load. The errors of our mistaken policies during the past
fifty years have caused unfathomable suffering among our Negroes. Our
country took its foolish fling and sowed its wild oats of democratic
Utopia during Reconstruction days. We proved then that the vote is
an unmitigated curse to the Negro. From this curse he still suffers.
We were forced by Federal act to make him everywhere subject to the
white man's civil and criminal law. Often enough the white man's law
sends him to the penitentiary for twenty years when twenty days of
hard work upon the public highway would be punishment enough for his
unthinking crime. In this matter we have simply tried to put a gallon
of water into a quart bottle. So we have spilled much water and come
near breaking the bottle. The people of the Philippine Islands are,
on the average, much more highly developed than our Negroes. Yet the
better advised among them realize that they are not yet ready to get on
without our supervision and help.
Let me not be misunderstood. I am not here trying to offer any
permanent solution for certain aspects of this problem. That solution
if ultimately sought will require, for many years, the painstaking and
united efforts of our best thinkers in all sections. I am now merely
stating certain facts and principles upon which any future solution
whatsoever must be based. All I ask is that we take these facts into
every phase of our argument. The Negro is not yet prepared, mentally or
morally, to share all the results of our civilization with us. Amid the
great complexities of modern social and political life, it is difficult
indeed to prepare our white electorate to bear the responsibilities
of government. Wherever the Negro numbers twenty per cent of our
population, his vote on election day would endanger democracy. In every
state where he lives there are and will be vicious white demagogues who
will work upon his credulity to mislead him and misuse him politically.
Where he numbers forty per cent of the population, his suffrage would
throw us back to Reconstruction times and make democracy impossible.
Let us not refuse to shoulder the full burden of this responsibility.
But the burden belongs rightfully to the Nation as a whole, not to
the people of the South alone. We of the South know full well that,
once rightly understood by thoughtful minds in other sections, we
can ask the nation to undertake those larger policies of reform and
readjustment which conditions undoubtedly require.
[Illustration: Revealing the Mysteries at Midnight]
CHAPTER XVI
We Americans are a Peculiar People
Even among the various nationalities of the white race there are very
great differences of character and temperament. To try to overlook
these, to declare that they do not exist, is both dishonest and
dangerous. Moved by the inspiration of a common cause in the Great
War, no doubt the American troops and the French people made every
possible effort to be agreeable and companionable. Still their very
real differences caused friction. We recognize all sorts of peculiar
characteristics among individuals. Why this folly of trying to deny
their existence among nations? Sound conclusions in any matter
are reached only by starting with facts. But the humanitarian and
sentimental purposes which some of us have in mind often lead to the
misuse of facts. Self-deception is the very last support upon which to
build a sense of international or interracial friendship and good will.
Democracy, as a working system, as we have said in previous articles,
is peculiar to a few nations of the white race. As such it is perhaps
the greatest social and spiritual adventure in the history of humanity.
Democracy can thrive only where it sinks its roots deep into the
personality of the individual soul. In a successful democracy the
citizen must be free, honest, intelligent, informed, sportsmanlike, and
willing to be always active in the performance of his political duties.
These qualities can not be brought forth by the hocus-pocus of wishing
them upon anybody. They are the result of a long evolution. They
have grown, thus far, only in particular environments and only among
peculiar peoples whose whole history furnishes the essential background.
It is often pointed out as an evidence of the success which follows
the mixing of our various nationalities, that we original Americans
have resulted from the greatest of all mixtures. We began, in Colonial
times, as English, Welsh, Scotch and Irish; as French, Dutch, German
and Swedish elements. The results of this mixture, we conclude, have
been entirely satisfactory. But right here we are apt to come to error.
True, the original American people were formed by the mixture of
these various nationalities. Yet the success of out great experiment
was due to the fact of a much greater social unity than at first
appears on the surface. Our American people were drawn, mostly, from
a single European class. This was the class of small property-holders
and skilled workers. They came from the progressive countries to the
north and west of Europe. What members of the British country gentry
who came to Virginia and South Carolina were quickly unified with
those among whom they settled. Indeed, ever since Magna Charta, the
English country gentry were thrown together, especially in the House of
Commons, with the representatives of the small farmers and the towns
people. To ignore this fact of essential unity is to leave Hamlet out
of the play. The dominant group, the great majority in every colony,
was this mixture of gentry, independent small farmers, shopkeepers and
skilled mechanics. This was then the rising class of Europe, struggling
to find itself; hungering to give expression of its peculiar form of
civilization; ardent in its desire for larger freedom. These facts can
not be over-emphasized.
The original settlers, in large part, came to America to find the
freedom and political opportunity they so richly deserved. If they
did not, at once, always grant freedom to others in their own
settlements, there was plenty of room for the others elsewhere. The
Baptists, driven out of Massachusetts, found refuge in Rhode Island.
The Quakers, whipped out of New England, discovered room and to spare
in Pennsylvania. The Cavaliers, forced into exile during the Puritanic
tyranny of the Commonwealth period, settled in Virginia and South
Carolina. When the French Protestants came, after the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, they were not really foreigners in
America. They possessed the same faith, they were guided by exactly the
same system of morals, they were the same class of people basically, as
those among whom they settled. One of the most liberal and democratic
groups to organize a colony were the English Catholics of Maryland. The
secret of understanding the beginnings of America is to know that there
was room for everybody and for everybody's beliefs. Even the bigot in
Europe eventually became the liberal here. The indentured servant,
of whom there were comparatively few, eventually found freedom and
acquired property in the wilderness.
It was this abundant opportunity to possess free land which finally led
to the complete triumph of our democracy. The real America has always
been country America. The settlers came from Europe ready in mind and
heart for the great adventure. The effort required independence,
self-reliance and high courage. The weaklings failed and died. With
every movement into the wilderness these mightier qualities of body,
mind, and soul were renewed and developed. So our American democracy
came, at last, to its greatest triumph west of the Alleghenies. Here
the limitations upon opportunity which obtained in the coastal colonies
were not to be found. Here was, at last, rich soil in abundance for any
hand that could wield the axe or hold the plow. Under the leadership
of men like Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln there was finally builded
a great nation upon the broad foundation of universal white male
suffrage. Here came, with the nineteenth century, the realization of
the democratic visions of twenty-five hundred years. Here our American
vanguard of democracy, at last, placed the banner of its hope and its
triumph upon the topmost pinnacle.
Sometimes we refer to these pioneer Americans as "common people." In
fact they were most uncommon. The wilderness environment made them
deeply spiritual, even mystical. In men like Andrew Jackson and Abraham
Lincoln their basic qualities, however crude the outward aspect, took
on the forms of genius. The mind and the spirit of this individualistic
American is seen in everything he was and did. He built his solitary
house, hidden among the trees, upon his own land. In physical form
and manner he came to resemble the native Indian quite as much as the
European. He grew to be slender, "rangey," keen of eye, and ready of
hand--a "Jack of all trades." This type to-day can not possibly live in
American cities as it is unless it keeps one foot in the country.
As to unlovely qualities, we Americans have no doubt been richly
endowed. The frontiersman farmer readily enough fights his neighbor
with fists or firearms. The laws we make for ourselves we often find
too irksome to obey. We are careless, often inefficient, and most
wasteful of our national resources. Recently we have been led far
astray by the deceitfulness of riches. Finally we are apt to become
blind to the quieter graces and refinements of life. In certain
sections an original austerity gives way these days to pleasures that
do not really please anybody. Having conquered a continent with such
tumult and shouting, we have not yet learned how to live sanely or even
safely. The finer values of life easily elude us, even when we try to
seek them out. Yet, are we entirely in error when we claim that we,
as a people, have had something valuable placed in our keeping by our
history and evolution? Are we not worth preserving in the world? We
know that we are. Even in the moments marked by failure and humility we
can not lose our national pride and sense of worth.
Assuredly, we Americans are a peculiar people. The conditions of our
European origin gave us a careful selection of personal qualities. Our
remarkable environment has upbuilded us. Infinite possibilities have
been opened up to us through the extent and resources of our country.
We have lacked nothing needful to a great destiny. Our future has
seemed so certain that we have never permitted it to be questioned. So
have we been prepared to become the ancestors of a glorious and ever
unfolding race. And now, within the short span of half a dozen years,
we are given over to every terrible doubt and misgiving. Ours has been,
were we but so minded, the wonderful privilege of continuing to select
the ancestors of America's future. We have shamelessly neglected this
privilege which is, indeed, the most sacred of duties. The ancestors
of America's future sons and daughters have been recently drawn, in
large part, from the most stolid peasantry and denizens of the slums of
Europe and Asia, simply because these sell themselves cheapest in the
labor markets of the world. So we are self-accursed. History may unfold
every page of her story and discover nowhere a profounder reason than
this for damning a great nation to destruction.
Our peculiar Nordic civilization, the creation, par excellence, of the
whitest of the white European races, has found but one primary field
for its larger expansion. That field is North America. Both South
America and Africa lie too much within the tropics to make of them the
home of our race. The Southern extremity of South America, including
Argentina and Chile, possesses a soil and climate comparable to our
own in the Northern and border states. But the incoming Mediterranean
people are giving this temperate area the aspect of a subtropical
civilization.
The larger portions of both tropical South America and all of Africa
will no doubt be kept for or won for the darker peoples. The white
population of South Africa is now less than twenty per cent of the
whole. Australia, too, is largely tropical. Within the greater portion
of her territory the Nordic white man can hardly conserve, through
centuries, his distinctive physical and spiritual qualities. Our North
American continent was destined by history to be the greater Nordic
Europe. Here our stalwart race has been offered a gigantic area for its
expansion--a suitable field upon which to play its mighty part in all
the future. Indeed, this marvelous home is suited by nature to meet our
reasonable needs for many thousands of years. An intelligent population
policy might have permitted us to welcome from Northern Europe a
considerable number of immigrants throughout the twentieth century.
Restricted to Europe and a few outlying insular colonies, our race
will, at an early date, cut but a sorry figure beside the populations
of the colored peoples on the one hand, and the undeveloped white
peoples on the other. The British Empire is to-day more than
three-fourths colored. The World War has only hastened the sinking of
the hopes of the European. The "natural" tendency in racial evolution
is always for the races with the more developed standards of life and
culture to be dragged down and engulfed by the surrounding world of
less developed peoples. A high standard of living with leisure among
the masses must be jealously preserved from competition or it will
become extinct in another generation. The most expensive thing in the
world is a moral ideal. The most wasteful system of government is a
democracy. But these things are worth the cost. We Americans have set
out upon a great adventure in social life. We have made some valuable
discoveries. Our spiritual possessions are numerous and valuable. We
can not successfully give them to all the world by first letting the
world take them away from ourselves. The "rising tide" of the colored
peoples and the backward white peoples, their ultimate domination of
the human process, to-day OVER-TOPS IN IMPORTANCE EVERY OTHER FACT IN
THE WORLD.
We are throwing away North America as the home of our people and our
civilization. Were we to open our gates to hostile armies and welcome
the yoke of servitude to a foreign autocracy, the results, in the end
might be less tragic. In the Hawaii of to-day, with its white American
element a small minority and rapidly becoming a fading remnant, we see
the North America of to-morrow. Across the length and breadth of our
Continent falls the darkening shadow.
CHAPTER XVII
Giantism--the National Disease of America
Giantism is a disease. In the human body it is caused when certain
glands do not function properly. A child does not stop growing in the
right way or at the right time. Perhaps the whole body, more often
parts of the body, grow to enormous size. The head or the hands may
become too large. The features are apt to be made ugly by frightful
distortions. For any child to grow too fast is dangerous. For certain
organs or features, or the whole body, to keep on growing when the time
has come for them to retain normal size is in itself a sign of this
terrible disease of--Giantism.
Economic and social giantism is the curse of the United States. Our
larger cities have grown far beyond the bounds of national safety.
New York, Chicago, and a dozen other large cities are monstrosities.
It will take a full generation, with no immigration at all, and the
forces of reform fully mobilized, to bring them to correspond properly
with the other parts of our country. Everywhere the disease works
havoc. We crowd a few square miles with stupendous structures, leaving
narrow chasms for streets. Each new building shuts the light and air
away from many others. Then we pack ourselves into these buildings
more like stifled vermin than human beings. Whereupon we go about the
world boasting in a loud voice, as though we deserved praise for our
achievement.
Giantism is found in every form of our national activity. We measure
the greatness of a university by the size and number of its buildings,
or by the millions of money which constitute its endowment. The richest
among us in money figure most in the newspapers, which proves that
they are considered by the public to be the most important. An author
is held in esteem in proportion to the number of copies of his books
which are sold. Works of art prove interesting because they bring
fabulous prices on the market. At every census the inhabitants of our
cities and states wait with bated breath to discover whether or not
they have increased in numbers more than their neighbors.
Giantism everywhere. To boast of the greatest city as the city with the
most people is like boasting of an enormous scrofulous swelling. We
even boast of the height of mountains, the size of lakes, or the length
of rivers, as though we had created them all. One state cries out that
it is the first in the production of hogs, another that it slaughters
more wild animals and peddles more furs than any other. Often there are
not nearly enough houses to shelter the people of a "great" city; many
of the students of a "great" university may leave as ignorant as they
came, and weaker in mind and morals. The colossal battleships we build
are used as targets before the sound of our boasting has died away. Our
piled up statistics of "progress" mostly prove our degeneracy.
[Illustration: The Fiery Cross on the Mountain Top.]
All this seems to escape the accredited leaders and teachers of the
people. The tendency shows in us as individuals. A large proportion of
our people are cursed by overeating, lack of exercise and overweight.
Meanwhile the unemployed may starve. Everywhere that old and absolutely
sound principle of "plain living and high thinking" is surrendered
for the exact opposite. In all our great cities we build palatial
private residences which are more fit for cold storage houses than
for human habitations. A woman pays fifty thousand dollars for a
fur wrap weighing two pounds. If the most abominable whiskey at ten
dollars a quart did not find plenty of purchasers, the price would
be falling instead of rising. Behold the size, weight and contents
of our Sunday newspapers! They need no further describing here. A
popular magazine recently contained eighty-two pages of advertising,
and less than twenty pages of reading matter. In whole sections of
our cities natural human affection is lavished on expensive dogs. In
other sections the swarming children of the poor lack food, shelter,
clothing, affectionate care and education. Meanwhile we boast of both
the number of children and the value of the dogs. Fatty degeneration of
the heart is one symptom of giantism.
If we continue in the way we are going, our future national self can
be easily enough pictured. Any amateur mathematician can plot the
curve of our "progress." Our wealth to-day totals two hundred and
fifty billions. Pretty soon we shall be worth a full trillion. The
last census of New York gives its population as 5,620,000. Of this
total a single Brooklyn insane asylum contains four thousand. Several
of our states spend as much of their taxes to care for the insane as
to educate their young. Let us have pencil and paper and calculate how
many will be shut up in lunatic asylums or homes for other defectives,
and what will be the cost of their keep, when we number three hundred
millions of people. If we bring all the underfed masses, all the
beggars and peddlers and criminals from every country in the world,
and thrust them into our over-populated cities to prey upon us, then,
assuredly, we shall have soon enough more inhabitants than China or
India. Some of our private dwellings now cost as high as eight millions
each and the windows are boarded up because the owners live in Europe.
According to our present standards that, too, may be taken as an
indication of our "progress" and "greatness."
Of course the masses of the factory and office population, and most of
the idle rich, are physical weaklings. They get no adequate exercise.
They breathe no clean air. In some of our southern states the curse of
degenerating factory labor for young children is still permitted by
law. But whether enslaved in factory, idle upon the streets, or shut
up in a crowded apartment the child of the city has no fair chance
to grow. Always the thought--this mass of weaklings is fit only to
be the subject of a more or less absolute monarch. They can not be
citizens in a republic that is a reality. Any strong, healthy, normal
American farmer turns from looking upon these city types, hopeless for
his country. Our cities are not built to live in. They are built to
get rich in. Jefferson was right. Unless they are reformed they will
destroy both democracy and civilization. Somehow we must spread our
cities out in the air and sun upon the countryside.
The old America of our fathers is everywhere fading from sight. The
new America is full upon us. And that new America is rapidly becoming
a stench in the nostrils of the decent and intelligent minority. We
Americans must change our ways. We need a great revival--a revival of
common sense and healthy-mindedness. Our national life is starving
for the want of fine, thoughtful, educated, young persons with the
courage to wish themselves poor. Our whole national life must change
its direction. We are not going ahead. We are going backward. Instead
of seeking to find, through our wealth, a richness of mind and heart,
we crave yet more bigness and fatness in things purely physical. We
seek our brother's purse strings instead of the affection of his heart.
We are holding fast to lies instead of the truth. All this abnormal,
distorted growth is making us ugly and disgusting in almost every
feature. In us the better America will soon be hardly recognizable.
Never before have we so much needed the stalwart teaching of those
who have led us in our greater past. These still speak to us if we
would but listen. Benjamin Franklin still says on every page of "Poor
Richard's Almanac" that "We are giving too much for our whistle," and
that an old coat is often more to be desired than a new one. The tall
Thomas Jefferson still rises above the petty minds about us to say that
it were better that we had a nation composed of two persons, a man and
a woman, who were truly free, than a nation with millions enslaved.
The calm voice of Robert E. Lee urges upon our hearts that he who does
his duty with all the strength he has may well leave even the matter
of victory or defeat to Almighty God. During these later years, the
entire nation has claimed to do honor to the name of Abraham Lincoln,
even while we forget everything he stood for, by word and deed, when he
was among the living. He is much honored for making the black man free.
We have forgotten that great speech of his in which he declared that
the white man's freedom should be forever guaranteed by free soil as a
national institution. One Robert E. Lee or Abraham Lincoln is worth a
great city full of crowding and scheming neurotics, treading upon one
another's toes, always trading in their eternal souls for a chance to
get rich and then mostly losing out and dying in misery and poverty.
Present-day America is unworthy of the mighty voices which have, in the
past, led her and called her to the leadership of the world. Those
voices spoke to us when we were weak, unformed and poor, yet so rich in
thought and in the impelling forces of our national soul.
CHAPTER XVIII
Drifting
Our country is not lacking in incurable optimists, more commonly known
as fools. Do we not always hear, they repeat, the cry of "Wolf, wolf"
by night, and do we not always wake up in the morning quite safe and
sound? I maintain that these poor words of mine are no mere warning
of the wolf. Yesterday he was in close pursuit. To-day his jaws are
closing upon our flesh. This outcry wrung from pain and fear is due to
no imaginary ills.
We are drifting on every hand. The stupendous national problems
which beset our country internally can not be counted off on the
fingers of both hands. The exploitation of our farmers is leaving our
countryside, the cradle of our national character and well-being,
depleted of population. The Great War is over, but high prices largely
remain. We have not even approached a solution of the problem of both
safeguarding and properly controlling the nation's greater industries.
Labor strikes take on the nature of social revolutions. The advocacy
of Bolshevism arouses mighty crowds to wild enthusiasm. The children
of the rich and poor alike grow up without proper normal training, not
to speak of spiritual vision. With millions of people lacking houses
to live in, we find ourselves with millions of people unemployed. The
problem of the Negro is no nearer permanent solution than it was forty
years ago. I might go on adding to this list indefinitely.
Throughout the length and breadth of the land our political life
draws ever weaker character and poorer mind to political leadership.
Strength, purposefulness and astuteness, when united together, are
used mostly to win riches. The weaker brethren are more and more being
drawn into the public service, into the pulpit and into the profession
of teaching. If we really wanted, as in the past, our first-class men
to preach to us, to teach us, and to direct our government, we could
easily enough secure their services.
A century ago our national problems were exceedingly simple. Their full
meaning and purport could be quickly explained and grasped. To-day our
economic and social problems are infinitely complex. Keeping the trains
running between New York and San Francisco in the year 1921 is a vastly
different piece of business than keeping the stage coaches running
between New York and Boston in 1787. But the average of intelligence
and character in both our state legislatures and in Congress is far
lower than it was in 1787. If any be disposed to deny this, let him
make a comparison between the debates of the Federal Convention of
1787 and the debates of our Federal Congress or the average state
legislature of to-day. Our political mind, in so far as we have any,
is still living on the contributions of our national past. The last
quarter of the century, especially, has registered failure with
reference to almost every internal national problem presented by our
time.
Reflect, for a moment, upon the present colossal issues of municipal
government. A hundred thousand, a million, or five millions of persons
are forced, for better or for worse, for good or for evil, to live
together. In the recent municipal elections, the great city of New
York continued the domination of Tammany Hall, by a vote of more
than two to one. The people of Buffalo elected a mayor who received
a majority of votes because he promised upon election to throw the
Eighteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution into the waste basket.
Youngstown, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana, elected "freak" mayors,
ignorant and inexperienced, whose campaigns for office both they and
those who heard them treated as huge practical jokes. The great city
of Cleveland, Ohio, containing nearly a million inhabitants, elected
as mayor a man who was expelled from the position of Chief of Police
because of proved irregularities and unfitness to hold office. In
the midst of our war with Germany, Chicago re-elected as mayor a man
who, throughout the war, was an outspoken enemy of his country. In
the outright venality of every sort, the government of the city of
Chicago, I am informed, exceeds any in the country, even New York.
Through the South we have not been able to secure since the War Between
the States, as a general thing, that fine type of political leader
who did such honor to our section in the earlier period. Our country
is not receiving from the South that contribution of leadership which
history might lead us to expect. The industrial North and East should
naturally lead the nation in the solution of the peculiar problems of
industrialism. Its remnant of American population readily admit their
utter failure. We of the South can offer no help.
A full generation of so-called reforms have ended largely in failure.
Even seats in the United States Senate now go to the highest bidder
like old furniture at an auction sale. The minority which is decent,
honest, and informed, is giving up the fight. The ballot in the hands
of ignorant and untrained immigrants, of Negroes, and of illiterate
native whites, has proven to be a terrible flare-back, burning our hope
of progress to ashes. Again force the ballot upon the southern Negro
and we of the South will outdo the North in political failure and decay.
Our greater internal public problems, only a few of which I have
enumerated at the beginning of this article, will ever grow more
complex in character, more threatening in aspect. Who can expect men
with neither work nor property to take an idealistic attitude toward
our government and the public service? Their vote must express their
meanest immediate interests. He who stands in the bread line votes for
sugar in his coffee and a bigger slice of bread. Every unemployed man
is a prospective Bolshevist. Every illiterate man who votes inevitably
supports bossism and graft rule. With such an electorate how can
we move safely and intelligently into the uncharted and terrifying
future? Soon we must rule the great industrial organizations by law,
or they will rule us ignoring the law. Meanwhile the efficiency of
the individual wage-worker is decreasing. His joy in his work becomes
less and less. His loyalty to his task has almost struck the zero
point. Ignore the problem of the white small farming class yet a little
longer, and we shall be driven into farming on a great scale, with
armies of stolid peasants doing the work. We already have agricultural
communities where a score or a hundred small farms have recently been
joined together in one estate. What a sign post of our times to see
the old farm house made to serve as the dwellings for the immigrant
serfs who till the land! So "Wealth accumulates and men decay." It is
with a shudder that any patriot foresees the time when the countryside,
like the city, shall have lost its free, independent population.
In our South this small, free, white farming class requires special
consideration. The danger of its submergence and total loss here is
greater than in any other part of the country.
As an American, ardent alike for Americanism and the Americanization of
our foreign born, I have often enough been accused of narrowness. I saw
others burning with enthusiasm over the hope of the League of Nations,
but I felt my own heart chilled by the sense of the shortcomings of my
own country. With the majority I was hesitant. The map of the world
to-day, in all its parts, strikes suffering into the heart that feels.
The blood lines in every direction indicate that the world as a whole
is drifting from failure unto failure. Europe is struggling helplessly
in the midst of storm and crying piteously for help which never comes.
With the German financial system broken down, France, denied the
reparation she expected, is immersed in gloomy despair. The smaller
nations East and Southeast of Germany are collapsing, if not already
fallen down, starving and diseased; their peoples are becoming every
day more helpless and hopeless. Italy, wasted by the war, is now in the
throes of civil strife and revolution. Russia, the first white nation
of the world, continues to rot in her insane orgies. With the passing
months and years hope for the early salvation of Russia no longer
deceives us. The battle lines of the Greek army, facing the Turks in
Asia Minor, are awaiting reinforcements and supplies in order to resume
the offensive. The four hundred millions of China, torn from without
for a generation, lacerated by revolution and civil wars for ten years,
have merely proven to us their incapacity for self-help. India is in
revolution and Egypt cut adrift. All the world is more decadent to-day
than when America entered the war. Again and again the nations come
to us begging for the strong arm of leadership. Again and again they
go from us, broken hearted and bowed down by the weak words of our
indecision and failure. Yet again they come because elsewhere there is
no help to ask.
[Illustration: The Imperial Wizard Kneeling and Kissing the Flag, the
only Flag to which a Klansman Kneels.]
Such is the world which our times have given so largely into our
keeping. This world demands a leadership such as gave our country unity
under the Constitution of 1787. The giants of those days--a full dozen
strong, loom large over the succeeding generations, and like Titans of
old, their deeds illuminate our whole history. Much accursed as we are
to-day by petty minds and selfish hearts in high places, we read the
history of our heroic period with deepest yearning that the mighty dead
might rise up and speak to us the living words we need to hear. We feel
so helpless, so lost, and gone astray. What mind and character we may
still have has ceased to function normally. From now on we may expect
a steady drift toward monarchy. In a decadent republic monarchicalism
is a natural growth. First comes a great class of the rich on the one
hand and a great class of poor on the other. Both tend, because of
their conditions, toward corruption. Both corrupt the state. The one
will barter the ten commandments to keep what it has; the other to get
what it wants. For a time the proletariat is oppressed with free corn
and the circus, with organized charities, baseball and the movies. No
republic can long endure on that regimen. Gold has already paved the
way that leads to the United States Senate. All that is needed is more
gold and the way will be smoothly paved to the throne of Caesar or
Belshazzar.
It has always seemed to me that our stupendous national sacrifices
during the War Between the States have never been recovered. We lost
a million of the sturdiest and best men who ever grew to manhood
in the world. So did that generation lose a million homes. We have
to-day, instead of the ten millions of their descendants, equally
divided between the city and country, some twenty millions of unskilled
foreign workers crowded into the cities alone. With the close of the
War Between the States we ceased, in every section, to produce first
class national leaders. To-day Charles Murphy has replaced Alexander
Hamilton. In Illinois, Lincoln the Great gives way to William Hale
Thompson the Little. The passing of Woodrow Wilson from the public life
leaves the South searching, perhaps in vain, for a leader to present to
the service of the republic. Into our Southern political life, as into
that of the North a generation ago, there is creeping the hireling of
special interests. Only the ignorant can say that we have not fallen on
times that are weak and evil and failing at every point.
So we drift--on and on; when to drift at all is to drift toward the
abyss. With each setting sun we become less capable of doing well the
great task assigned to us. We are deceived by the superficial results
of mechanical progress. Hence we do not care to know that each waning
summer marks a loss for us in all the fundamental determinants of
blood, of character, of all the elemental forces. These basic elements
of our peculiar civilization can be maintained only through the most
watchful care. A single careless deed done to-day by the nation and
countless ages must pay an ever increasing price of failure and misery.
Our English-speaking peoples are as a ship of democracy struggling in
the sea of unfaith,--an ocean of the world's failure and despair. We
are driven before a furious gale; great waves wash over our decks. We
drug ourselves into believing the theory that somehow Divine Providence
always has cared for, and always will care for, the children, the
lunatics and the United States. Of course this theory is trash. The
Almighty helps only those that help themselves.
You millions of the middle classes of America, living in comfortable
ease--upon your conscience is the greater burden placed! Will you
continue to fiddle while the common weal is in flames? The future
throughout your country and the world will hold you responsible! "BE
NOT DECEIVED, GOD IS NOT MOCKED. WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH, THAT ALSO
SHALL HE REAP."
CHAPTER XIX
"The Federal Union--It Must Be Preserved"
The American government under God shall not perish from the earth.
In 1830 Andrew Jackson arose before a group of distinguished men
assembled at a dinner in Washington and proposed the toast which forms
the title of this chapter. It seems to me that this expression of the
iron resolve of the old war-worn hero should be placed among those
statements of our great leaders which have been as divine commands in
the great crises which our country has experienced. Jackson loved the
Union. In 1830 few people understood those peculiar underlying forces
which were drawing the Union apart. It is evident to us now, after
studying the history of the generation preceding the Civil War, that
only a Union which exists in the minds and hearts of all its citizens
can be an enduring entity. It may seem rather trite to say again that
national unity is based first of all upon an individual sentiment.
Even during the War Between the States this love of the Union as an
ideal never ceased to animate the people of the South. They sought
merely to rebuild the Union on a different basis. After the surrender
at Appomattox the South faithfully accepted the old Union under the
changed conditions of its re-establishment. Since that time their
loyalty to the Union, as it is, has never been questioned. All must now
recognize that until the great differences which severed the Union had
been finally settled, the Union itself could not be re-established.
If a nation is to exist at all, certain basic principles and forms of
procedure must be generally accepted by all its citizens. As regards
these essential things we cannot afford to differ at all and yet try to
live side by side. In English-speaking countries, for instance, we must
needs all accept and support the constitutional bill of rights. Without
freedom of speech, of the press and religious worship, to mention
three of the more important guaranteed constitutional rights, any
English-speaking country would very quickly find itself in the throes
of revolution and civil war. We must agree, also, to be subject to the
same general principles of morality. If a citizen argues, for instance,
that the crimes of robbery and murder are sound and correct modes of
political procedure, he thereby rejects his citizenship. We must all
agree to live peaceably and lawfully under the same constitutional and
legal system. Finally, to attain national unity and national peace
we must not only accept, but unitedly support, with affection and
enthusiasm, the prevailing system of law and social order. That great
poet of democracy, Walt Whitman, expresses this thought so exquisitely:
"To hold men together by paper and seal, or by compulsion, is no
account;
That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living
principle, as the hold of the limbs of the body, or the fibres of
plants."
Our American people, if we are to be perfected in unity, must come to
be a sort of family.
Differences of personality among individuals, differences of opinions
among groups, differences which show themselves in a variety of
religious beliefs and political policies, all these are not only
natural but necessary to civilization and progress. Absolute unity in
thought and action can be attained only among a tribe of savages. The
political unity of an absolute monarchy is a leftover from savagery.
Above all, these valuable and desirable differences show in all the
interesting variations to be discovered in our cultural life. In the
education of children these differences of personality should be not
only tolerated but purposely developed. The growth of this quality
of personality is one of the most precious results of our democratic
civilization. Yet it can not be too much emphasized that all these
differences must work themselves out and perform all their desirable
functions within the restricted bounds of a generally accepted law and
custom. Otherwise nationality is impossible; and this is but another
way of saying that human society is impossible.
Imagine a group of relatives and friends sitting down to break bread
together. They differ in age, in appearance, in understanding, and in
almost every purpose of life. Some will reject soup, and others fish.
As the dinner proceeds sharp differences of opinion lend interest
to the conversation. In our present day society any two members of
this group may well belong to two different political parties and
two different religious organizations. Yet if there is to be a true
companionship in this place, how dominating must be the things that
unify! This group, to get on well, must speak the same language and
abide by the same established forms of social manners. In all the
deepest things there must be the same regard for essentials, the same
attitude toward life. In the mind of each, unity with all the others
must be truly desired as a spiritual attainment. How seldom do we
pause to reflect upon how many such principles and forms are taken
for granted, every day and all day, in ordinary business and social
intercourse. If people are to live together happily they must not only
tolerate one another. They must enjoy companionship, one with the other.
On the same soil you can not have, permanently, two systems of law.
Two basic forms of moral conduct can not function side by side. If
there are two groups of people in any society, one of which totally
rejects the other, trouble is sure to come. Given two groups of people
with such a gulf fixed between as is never crossed, for instance, by
intermarriages, and it is time to hoist the danger signal. Civil strife
lurks in the offing.
That generation of Americans which grew up under the shadow of the
Civil War, and in the terrible period of Reconstruction, has had
occasion to have burned in its inmost consciousness, as by intense
religious conviction, this necessity of national unity. Such a complete
sense of unity, such a practice of solidarity, I have visualized for my
country. It is the disunity of the present which, with "Hope deferred,
maketh the heart sick." About us on every hand are discordant voices,
clashing interests, screaming recriminations and blazing hatreds. Our
republic cannot continue unless we re-establish, and that very soon, a
status of civil peace in the minds and hearts of all our people.
Everybody who reads the newspapers or talks with his neighbors knows
that the conflict between labor and capital is drifting us into another
civil war. We can already reach ahead in imagination and fix our eyes
upon the dreadful moment when the forces of class revolution will
raise their standards and move to the attack. Among thousands it is
being openly advocated. Among great numbers of quieter citizens of all
classes it is accepted as a sort of grim necessity. Men seem always
to be ready enough to fight. However, a sound national life can not
be maintained by crushing down the masses, any more than freedom and
progress can be secured for anybody through a Bolshevistic revolution.
And how much more deadly is disunity between classes than between
sections!
How difficult it is to make men so desirous of peace that they will
consecrate their lives to secure its conditions! Are there none among
us so devoted to our Union, so ardent in the cause of peace, that
they are willing to rally around the principles which will make both
peace and unity possible? I steadfastly maintain that, if properly
led, a majority of Americans are willing to think and act in order to
forestall anarchy and civil war. A vast majority of our farming people
and middle classes are ready to demand, as Andrew Jackson demanded in
1830, that the nation do lawful justice to all. We who still constitute
the solid body of the nation wish to urge upon the wage-working people
with all our hearts that America and Americanism can solve their great
problem without rebellion and bloodshed. And we are just as ready to
assure those who own and direct capital, even those who are so often
hated because of their great riches, that no penny shall ever be taken
away from them without due process of law. Surely a majority of us
have not yet lost faith in the very foundations of our democratic
union. The recent stupendous events in revolutionary Europe should
cause every thoughtful American mind to re-examine most carefully the
principles of our government and of our democracy. We stoutly maintain
that these principles and the constitution based upon them furnish a
peaceful means, even a brotherly means, for the solution of the labor
problem. But if, under the dangerous conditions which impend, our
Federal Union is to be preserved, our love for it must draw us ever
closer together in its service. Every principle of the bill of rights
must be steadfastly defended. Embittered hatreds and suspicions must
be allayed. The nation as a whole must be persuaded to take counsel
in a quiet way. To those who shriek out upon us that "Might makes
right," and that "Government is founded upon power and wealth alone,"
we must be able to reply that our Constitution and laws are still
vitalized by the love of our American hearts, and by our willingness
to sacrifice self for the sacred things of the Union. May we not still
reply, also, that freedom is only curtailment of power--power to rule
over others--and that true freedom can be experienced only in a nation
whose citizens highly resolve to protect the freedom, the rights and
interests of all.
Both plutocracy and Bolshevism are new forms of tyranny. Neither have,
as yet, run their course. None can refuse to take note that during the
last decade some of our rich, as for instance, Mr. Henry Ford, have
begun to learn the lesson of the stewardship of wealth. With what pride
and pleasure we have observed, too, that organized labor in America
has rejected Bolshevism and declared ardently and almost unanimously
for purely democratic methods of action. It is not among the twenty
per cent who are organized; it is among the eighty per cent of our
workers who have not the capacity to organize, or who are denied the
right to organize, that Bolshevism is raising its ugly head and weaning
the workers away from democracy and from the love and service of their
country. If our Union is to be preserved in our day, it must win a new
hold upon the affections of this vast number of our people, native-born
and foreign alike. Among them all its interests must be made the
subject of constant thought and conversation. All must learn that no
man who hates his neighbor can sit down in peace under his own vine
and fig tree. So, to this, our altar of unity, we who labor for social
peace must bring in absolute sacrifice the work of our hands and all
the cultural results of our civilization. Only thus shall we be enabled
to lead the warring classes back to Americanism. The Union, if it is
to be preserved from social disintegration, must be established upon
character as well as upon a common material interest.
[Illustration: Consecration to the Flag]
The time has fully come for all Americans to reason together and
finally think this thing through. Who among us can say that he knows
exactly what to do? But this we all can say: That if our people
approach this whole matter in the attitude of affection, one for
the other, if we consider this issue as ardent patriots and sincere
Christians, then we are sure to discover, presently, the straight way
in which all can walk together in unity and fellowship.
The Ku Klux Klan is composed, I trust, of men who will face this
crucial issue with relentless firmness. We shall say to Americans of
all classes who now prepare their minds for civil war that they must
and shall make peace. We do not propose, as the years pass, to wait
and wait and drift and drift. Let none mistake our purpose. Civil war
is the most terrible curse a nation can suffer. We do not propose to
look idly upon the mischief of others until it rages all about us. We
shall prevent war by planning for peace, by preparing for peace, and by
knowing in our inmost hearts that peace can be maintained. The way to
the peace we demand lies through justice, righteousness and affection.
"The Federal Union, it must be preserved."
National unity, as we here understand it, is more than a means to an
end. National unity is an ever enlarging result. It is the loftier and
worthier goal. In the full joy of its realization the individual soul
is enriched and finally saved. Thus is patriotism made to share in the
spiritual values of religion. So the individual losing self, shall
again find himself in the service of his fellowmen.
Looking back beyond the temporary issues of the War Between the States
we can see, rising in clear outline against the times in which he
lived, the tall spare form of "Old Hickory." There rung through his
brave utterance both resolution of will and high purpose of policy. So
were his faith and his hope maintained. To-day, amid the clamor and
disunity of our times, his memory again urges upon the troubled hearts
of our people this great word of a day that is done, that it may again
be made flesh and dwell among us.
CHAPTER XX
Our Country's Part Among the Nations
Preceding chapters have indicated our present national unfitness
in so many things concerning our domestic public life. Yet, until
recently, we were enabled to concentrate what public mind and spirit
we had upon such problems as arose among ourselves from the conditions
of our internal growth. Now, being weak, hesitant, and our wills
quite unformed, we are suddenly hurled into the very center of the
international whirlpool. In the preparation for and in the execution of
our part in the Great War, we were, no doubt, quite magnificent. But no
one ever doubted our ability to fight. It is in the execution of the
greater tasks of peace that we falter and fail.
With the close of the war there was presented to us, in the urge to
world leadership, the most difficult and dangerous problem of all.
Here, again, we were offered no alternative. We must go. We must
help to "settle order once again." We drew back from Paris, only to
reassemble the nations at Washington.
Two opposite opinions have settled in the minds of the majority of
Americans with reference to the subject matter of this chapter. One
would have us move far out and lose ourselves in a mad mixing world.
The other would withdraw us from the world utterly and hide us like a
"hermit crab" in any rotting shell we find. I shall here show that one
of these policies is impossible to execute. I shall prove, also, that
the other, if fully carried out, would destroy us as a people. Between
the two, surely, there lies a way in which our ship may move more
safely towards its appointed haven.
Changed international relationships are largely the result of new
forces, physical forces, in the economic and social life of the world.
These forces were drawing and pushing all the nations of the world
very close together. The first wireless message has only recently been
sent entirely around the world. Commercial aviation, already widely
in vogue upon land, will presently span the Atlantic and then the
Pacific. The commercial and financial dependence of each modernized
country upon the other is too commonly realized to need much emphasis
here. If Europe does not buy cotton, the Oklahoma farmer can not pay
his taxes or his grocery bill. If the Germans can not borrow money in
New York and London, they can not buy raw material to work upon; hence,
France, Belgium and Italy, getting no reparations, will not be able to
pay their American creditors. So runs the system into every counting
house, factory and cow stable of the civilized world. Railway lines now
penetrate the deserts of Asia and the jungles of Africa. Everywhere
the half-naked savage is trained to work at strangely modern tasks.
So is his labor interwoven by the machine process into our gigantic
fabric of international industrialism. All the world unites because it
is impossible to any longer stay divided. He who does not understand
these things of the world's work can not begin to think intelligently
concerning international relationship.
Our large American part in the life of the world is, and is to be,
determined by a number of factors. These include our wealth, our
comparative numbers, our national state of mind, and the place we hold
in the opinions of other peoples. We are seven per cent of the world's
population and sixteen per cent of the world's white population. At the
table of the great International Disarmament Conference at Washington
we sat with Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Our wealth is probably
greater than that of all these combined, including the white colonies
of the British Empire. In power to make war we undoubtedly stand alone.
These elements of physical greatness indicate our natural part in the
reorganization of the shattered world. We can not leave the world to
its ways and build a Chinese wall around America; nor would we if we
could. No wonder our old-fashioned American citizen was deeply worried
in the year of 1920. "Whither," he asked, and "how far are we going?"
So he decided to pause and wait awhile. Deep within the national mind
was the terrible knowledge that, with our feet entering strange and
devious ways, our lamp was untrimmed.
We cannot accept an internationalism that would compromise the
immigration issue either in the East or West. We can not serve Japan
by permitting her to annex California as she has already annexed
Hawaii. We can not save the world by seeking first our own dissolution.
An international market for money and goods is one thing. A free
international market for wage-laborers is quite another. If we are to
undertake our international task, we must ever more jealously guard
the strength which is ours by inheritance. Let us cleave even more
firmly to those things of mind and character that have created us a
nation. As a unified and democratic people, as a successful, happy and
educated people, we can no doubt play a leading part in organizing the
world for better things. All the world cries out for this leadership
of America. But we are as yet unfit to lead. The nations, which are
sinking, stretch out their hands to lay hold of ours, but we ourselves
are falling into the pit. One who reaches down his hand to rescue a man
falling into Niagara's current must first be sure of his own footing.
If we are to save others we must begin by first saving ourselves. It is
impossible to resist the influences that make for internationalism. But
it is possible, it is absolutely necessary, to save and make perfect
our nationalism upon which any useful internationalism must be based.
To speak of internationalism as taking the place of nationalism is to
deny the very meaning of the word from the start. The separate nation,
in its world relationships, may be compared to a separate home in a
community. The citizen joins with his neighbors to construct a road,
to build a village school, to maintain a police and fire service. But
the community effort is not undertaken for the purpose of dissolving
and destroying the home. Just the contrary. The community protects and
serves the home. It accomplishes what the single can not undertake.
Eventually there will come, if we learn to lead, a great world
community. It will come slowly, growing through the centuries. Our own
country, ever more positive of her individuality, of the deeper things
of her own personality, of the true worth of her inmost soul, and with
a realizing sense of the value she can so contribute, may yet aspire to
the privilege and the honor of that world leadership which will make
for the peace, unity and well-being of all.
CHAPTER XXI
We English-Speaking People Must Stand Together
Here, too, a choice is not permitted us. The desperate condition of the
world is forcing our minds and hearts. The demand is given to us who
speak English: "CO-OPERATE, OR PERISH WITH A PERISHING WORLD."
This broken world can not be put upon the path of peace and prosperity
without the most careful and courageous leadership. Modern industrial
and commercial conditions, in a word, the machine process, has thrown
all the nations of the world together. If we can not separate ourselves
from the other nations, if all the world must eventually march in the
same direction, the only practical question relates to the direction
of the march. Are we to be saved together, or are we going to fall
together into the pit of a new sequence of the Dark Ages? The great
masses of the colored races, mostly unfitted for self rule, must be
protected, civilized, educated, and led onward and upward toward the
best that they can do. On the other hand lies the dread alternative
of a military imperium which might eventually organize the whole
of China and India. If we do not organize the world for peace, it
is not impossible to conceive that twenty-five years of astute
propaganda might win all these seven hundred and fifty millions to the
militaristic leadership of Japan. A great Indian nationalist leader
recently said that no one fact had so aroused and encouraged the spirit
of India as the present brilliant role of the Japanese nation. Such a
pan-Asiatic movement might very likely draw Russia, Germany and several
other European nations into a new and terrible alliance. The poor and
the dejected always seem to find cause enough to pick a quarrel with
the rich and the powerful. I repeat, if the English-speaking people
will not undertake together the task of giving ordered progress and
freedom to the world, upon what nation or nations is the duty to
devolve? We have rejected, rightly or wrongly, the League of Nations.
What next?
In this connection the happy solution of the age-worn Irish
question makes straight the way. While the Irish in the home-land
were in rebellion against Britain, the political waters of every
English-speaking country in the world were made muddy. Peace in Ireland
makes our task of co-partnership with the British Empire easier and
simpler. Indeed, directly after the signatures were attached to the
British treaty of peace with Ireland, a distinguished Irish leader
remarked that he hoped to see America cooperate with all the other
English-speaking people who are united through the British Empire.
Let us glance briefly at some essential conclusions to which the
reduction of naval armaments inevitably leads. The American and the
British navies are to be made about equal. In ten years time an almost
perfect equality will be secured. These two navies, taken together,
will of course dominate the seven oceans. The only naval power which
will remotely compare to either is that of Japan. Because of our
wealth and population, also because of our industries, production and
commerce, the United States and the British will have no immediate
rivals. Together, we can declare the world's peace. Together, we can
give the world a decent measure of order. We include, of course,
the practically independent and rapidly growing nations of Canada,
Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It will be readily seen how
much greater is our power, a united power, for good than any other
possible combination of nations in the world. Here, tossed about in a
sea of color, lies the white man's hope. Here, too, is large hope for
all the world. Under the world peace we can establish the forces that
make for international justice which will at last be given a chance
to function; while under the threat of war every sort of inhuman and
barbaric force will win its way. Given an assured peace and better
minds and gentler hearts among our English-speaking people will never
be silenced. They will triumph in our own countries first. They will
save the world as a matter of course. On the other hand, world anarchy
and world war will always submerge every liberal voice and every
progressive policy among all nations, ourselves included.
We need no formal alliance with the British to bring these things to
pass. The alliance of the American with the British people is formed by
all the qualities we have in common. These are already more powerful
than any document. The theory that competition for the world's trade
makes co-partnership in everything and anything impossible for us is a
piece of ignorant nonsense. All our better humanity is crying out the
command that trade keep to its rightful place in human affairs. If this
Anglo-American understanding could have been possible ten years ago
there would have been no World War. At that time we in America were not
ready for co-operation. If we are not entirely ready for it to-day,
then under the Providence of Almighty God, and being responsible to Him
alone, those of us who see the light must make all ready for it.
With every forward step we try to take toward the peace and the
salvation of the world, we shall find, at first, blocking our way and
attempting to push us back, our great foreign cities. The war, in so
far as we Americans ourselves are concerned, has not liberated us
from this tyranny of the foreign vote. It is, in large part, still
mobilized on the wrong side of almost every public question we can
think of. However, we may now expect this influence to slowly give way
to better knowledge and wiser counsels. With the Irish question finally
settled, our Irish fellow-citizens here will have no further occasion
to oppose the British at every step. Our German voters, too, may soon
come to learn that Germany cannot be saved if the world be lost.
If we American-born citizens can only attain sufficient unity to once
for all ignore the foreign vote, and rule ourselves intelligently,
we shall soon discover that vote has ceased to be a danger. But it
will not cease to curse America for fifty years if it is not met with
the firmness of a united American will. Let us draw a line about the
foreign sections and about the hyphenated votes, and declare our
absolute independence of them. During the war this foreign vote was
silenced and nullified. So it will be again as soon as we speak our
national mind with certainty of purpose.
[Illustration: God is our Refuge and Strength]
In perfect harmony with the British people, we are now seeking and
securing naval disarmament. Having limited and equalized our power for
defense, it is absolutely essential that we stand together to prevent
the building, among possible enemies, of dangerous armaments on sea
or land. No doubt Japan will, from this time on, carefully heed the
united demand of our two English-speaking peoples. The first imperative
duty that we must accomplish together concerns the protection of China
from the lusts of the exploiter. The independence of the Chinese nation
must be guaranteed. Her unity must be re-established. Her resources
must be protected from the greedy ones among our own citizens who would
take from the Chinese people the resources they so much need for their
future. To-day China can not protect herself. It is incumbent upon us
to afford her the fullest measure of protection. The gratitude and
esteem our children will receive from the Chinese nation will be in the
future the strongest and surest of all the guarantees of world peace.
We in America are as much interested in the care and progress of the
African peoples as are the British. Why should we not share in this
responsibility? What a boon to the future of those backward black
people of Africa, should they find themselves more largely united
through the more general teaching of the English language! More and
more will such of our American Negroes as are unhappy here, find a
place of refuge in their native land of Africa. We should be serving
the highest purposes in a number of ways were we to purchase the Congo
Free State from Belgium and the Portuguese colonies in the Southern
part of the continent. Side by side with the British Empire we could
help in administering the affairs of those barbaric peoples in their
own interest. The third international plague spot is the Near East.
With the heavy tyranny of the Sultan removed, the conglomeration of
broken and unhappy peoples who composed his subject population have
been freed. To-day they fight and fester like vermin stifled and
starving in a dark place. It seemed to many Americans that, after the
war, supervision of these Christian peoples was our particular duty.
Why should we, speaking the language of the mighty dead, who gave
command in the English tongue, be so fearful of sharing each other's
purposes and each other's tasks? We are what we are; and it so happens
that we are forced by circumstances to guide the world. Let us lead
wisely and well, winning for our children gratitude and esteem. Let us
have done with all this sickening pose of Pecksniff and Uriah Heap,
and do the great deeds to which our times call us as Cromwell and
Washington would have done!
We need world vision to-day. "Without vision the people perish."
But we need more than vision. We require great, practical, general
policies of world reorganization; and the veritable cornerstone of that
policy is this mighty English-speaking co-partnership. This saving
fellowship we Klansmen propose to advance by every means in our power.
The common language through which the whole world must ultimately find
communion is the English language. This is evident to anybody who
even casually surveys the linguistic map of the world. North America,
India, Australia, more than half of Africa--such is the future empire
of Shakespeare and Milton and Lowell and Poe. Beside all the various
national languages and local dialects, our language will be used as a
means of universal conversation. So shall our every word, for good or
for ill, be a word spoken in authority to the whole world.
CHAPTER XXII
The Nemesis of Immigration
Our American civilization has received during these three hundred
years two crushing blows. So staggering have been these onslaughts
that it is still doubtful whether or not we can recover and go on as a
democratic people. On both occasions the blows have come primarily from
a relatively small group of profiteers. During the first two hundred
years of our history the African slave traders of old England and New
England traded their vile cargoes of rum for the black man, and sold
him throughout the Americas. So they accursed half our country with
slavery. To-day their deeds remain in the form of a large population of
black people, which, like a millstone about its neck, still drags upon
every natural aspiration of the Southland.
The desire for cheap labor was not fully satiated through the
importation of the African slave. The coming of modern industrialism
gave it a new turn. Our American system of industrialism has been
based, from the first, largely upon a European system of labor. Without
the slightest question as to their unfitness to take part in our social
life, or our political democracy, without thought of anything in the
world but securing much labor for little money, our employing classes
have, until very recently, persuaded the nation to give them a free
hand in their immigration policy. What the importation of the black man
did to the South in accursing our history for centuries, immigration
has done and is still doing to the industrial districts of the North
and West. Having advanced far beyond Europe in the development of a
democratic civilization, we have now again, deliberately, turned back
upon our past and prevented the social, intellectual and political
progress of our country by instituting the conditions of a degrading
poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, slums, and mediaeval religious
worship. The gang rule and the boss rule of our cities are simply a
return to monarchical forms without the decencies of government and
the refinements of society which an hereditary monarch provides. All
this we have gotten together with the riches we so much craved. We have
amassed our wealth only to realize, perhaps too late, that our very
food and drink are ashes and vinegar.
There have come into America during the last fifty years great hordes
of immigrants. The tide reached its height in the fiscal year ending
June 30, 1914, when it totalled 1,320,000. From Europe there came
during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1921, 805,000. With our cities
swarming with millions of unemployed, congress was impelled at the
end of the last fiscal year to pass the three per cent law. This law
permits, annually, immigrants to come from each European nation to the
extent of three per cent of their peoples already here in 1910. That
is, if 100,000 Rumanians were settled among us in 1910, 3,000 a year
are now permitted to come. This law is difficult to enforce. Within an
hour I have read in the day's news that 1,100 immigrants, mostly from
Hungary and Armenia, brought over by the greedy shipping companies
in excess of the three per cent quota of those nations, are to be
admitted. This is done as a Christmas gift to these unfortunate people.
Once arrived at our ports, who can have the heart to return these
unfortunates to Europe. No doubt this act of charity will be repeated
again and again.
If we permit this three per cent law to be continued during a time of
economic stress and unemployment, we may expect the profiteers, and
cheap labor advocates generally, to come upon us with their demand
of unrestricted immigration as soon as times are better and workers
are more in demand. Of course, as might be expected, these foreign
born already here are most zealous in their advocacy of unrestricted
immigration. In the first place they wish to bring over their relatives
and friends. Then, too, the foreign born wrongly interprets all
opposition to unlimited immigration as being a base imputation against
his particular people. The thoughtless and unpatriotic appeal of all
these groups is usually made upon the basis of a sentimentalism. "Is
America not the haven of refuge for the oppressed?" they ask. In the
same manner was the trade in African Negroes defended three hundred
years ago. The blacks were being brought over, it was said, "in order
to Christianize them." If half of them died on the way and were thrown
overboard to feed the sharks, as often happened, still our intentions
were said to be Christian. This sickly, and ofttimes affected,
sentimentalism is one of the most disgusting features of both the
criminal profiteering of the few, and of the criminal carelessness of
the many among our people.
Reflect for a moment upon the fact that there are at least one hundred
millions of poor in Europe, who would come to America now if they
could. They await only ship space and money to pay for their passage.
To bring over one million this year is always to prepare the way for
two millions next year. Each incoming crowd soon invites and pays the
way for a greater host of relatives and friends.
This importation of the poor and destitute does not much benefit
European countries, if indeed it helps them at all. A country, which,
like Italy or Belgium, is primarily industrial in character, has long
since reached its limit of population. Remove a million Belgians or
a million Italians to America, and their places are at once refilled
by a million more births at home. Hence the creation of Italian or
Belgian slums in Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago does not ultimately
decrease the size of the slums in Brussels or Naples. Nor does the
overflowing tide help the home country where, as from Poland or
Hungary, the emigrants are largely peasants. The land of Poland and
Hungary is held in large estates. Every peasant who deserts the
soil of Europe to fester in our cities merely postpones the change
in the land system which denies him opportunity in his own country.
Furthermore, in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, etc., this peasant is now
needed more than ever before to raise food crops. He leaves his country
because conditions are bad. These evil conditions are due, in part, to
the aftermath of war. But this is only secondary. The primary cause
of poverty among the peasants of Southern and Eastern Europe has been
large holdings of land and conditions of practical serfdom, but, above
all, primitive and backward means of production. Instead of plowing his
land with a plow, this backward peasant turns it up with a hoe three
times the weight and with only half the cutting edge of an American
garden hoe. Instead of reaping his grain with a reaper, the Polish or
Russian peasant reaps with a scythe of about the size, weight and shape
of an American fence rail. So, to compensate for his own ignorance,
backwardness, and the crude mediaevalism of his whole environment,
this peasant escapes responsibility by rushing to the United States.
His case is exactly the same as that of the city wastrel from Belgium
or Italy. In leaving his own country he does not help it in the least.
In coming to America he drags us down to the pit of Hell.
As regards the immigration from Japan, the West Indies, and Mexico,
the conditions are only exaggerated. They are exaggerated by greater
differences in race and by the wider gulf which separates our economic
conditions from theirs. There are tens of millions of people in India
who never know from one year's end to another what it means to have
enough to eat. One good American dollar will outfit their wardrobe
for twelve months. Throw these millions into the industrial life of
America, and in twenty years' time their place in India will be taken
by as many millions more, just as wretched, just as absolutely hopeless
as the millions who are begging, starving and dying to-day. Here is a
place where sentimentalisms are only trash. A sentimental attitude by
an American toward this problem is a criminal attitude. It is a sort
of criminal insanity which makes for suicide. If the suicidal intent
concerned only the individual, we should not worry nearly so much. But
it is our country which is committing suicide.
The problem may be simplified by a comparison. Let us picture our
sentimentalist as possessed of an American family of wife and three
children living in an eight room house. Will this average citizen
welcome the arriving immigrants into his own house to the extent of
five per room? If he lives in Texas, will he fill his home with Mexican
peons; if in California, with Japanese and Hindoos; if in New York,
with Sicilians or Turks? All that I ask is that he be fully consistent.
If the sentimentalist is willing to prevent his own children from
having homes in America in order to provide homes for the Japanese;
if he is willing to prevent his American neighbors from having
children in order to make way for the children of the Japanese of
to-morrow--then he ought to be willing to open wide the door of his own
house in order to provide for the destitute immigrant.
There is something quite terrible in the stern fact that this country
will belong to the people who multiply most rapidly. The imbeciles and
the other feeble-minded, if permitted to do so, multiply much more
rapidly than normal persons. Suppose that we permit this class to
multiply at will and carefully preserve its progeny from disease and
other causes of a high mortality. In that case we can easily calculate
the time when the feeble-minded and insane will number a majority of
our population. Among the competing races in America the birth-rate
is the ultimate victor. The German and the Irish among us outbreed
the original Americans. The French-Canadians and the Poles outbreed
the Germans and the Irish. The Negroes and the Japanese outbreed all
the whites. Return to the liberal immigration policy of five years
ago and we shall become a conglomeration out of which it will be
impossible to build a nation. Under such conditions almost no sound
reform policies, no national progressive movement of any sort, can be
successfully advocated and executed. Stop immigration and a homogeneous
English-speaking nation will again be developed. Such a nation will
solve every economic and social problem as it arrives. Such a nation
will develop according to our Anglo-Saxon methods of free speech,
free press, democratic methods and popular respect for the law. We
are dealing here with the most crucial and fundamental issue of our
generation.
The time has come to brand every advocate of continued immigration as
the outright enemy of this country and of our American civilization.
We are already two generations late in waking up to this matter. We
are on the very brink of the pit, and if we are to act at all, we must
act in unity and at once. Eventually, after our present foreign
element has been Americanized and absorbed as best it may be we might
permit again a small amount of carefully selected immigration annually.
But even that would be a mistake. Future Americans should be born and
reared in America. Again and again let me urge that I am not claiming
that Americans are inherently superior to other peoples. We have a
peculiar civilization to guard and to guide. The tendency in our
industrial regime is always for the weaker, the more humble, the more
serf-like peoples to undermine the sturdier native whose standard of
living spells his destruction. The lower standard of living which the
immigrant willingly accepts, at least at first, is his essential curse.
Admitting swarms of low standard Europeans in order to "bring American
working people to reason" as regards their wages and conditions is a
piece of ignorant folly. In the end this always increases, instead of
decreases, our labor difficulties.
[Illustration: A "Klonklave" where One Thousand "Aliens" were
"Naturalized" and Became Citizens of The Invisible Empire.]
As I have already stated, our American labor problem can not be solved
by breaking down the American standard of living and the American
spirit among American born working men. Our labor problem can be
solved only by winning the employers and workers alike to accept a
common policy of justice and Americanism. The view that there is ever
"more work in America than we can do ourselves" is the falsest of
false economic theories. Why should we try to exploit our resources or
develop new projects of any sort at the crazy and destructive rate of
speed which has marked our industrialism during the past generation?
Just the contrary is the correct policy. The unskilled labor of America
must be done by Americans. A dozen of our presidents have wielded
the axe and guided the plow. The very foundation of our country is
a sturdy, intelligent, characterful and self-respecting working
class, who do not at all crave to be parsons and college professors.
Better build fewer miles of highway or dig less coal than destroy our
civilization by the admixture of unsuitable and unworthy elements.
There is an old story of a farmer who burned down his barn in order to
get rid of the rats. Here we have a case of burning down one's house
in order to settle an argument as to who is going to wash the dishes.
Right here appears what may be our supreme test in the building of a
great nation, in the conservation of our democratic civilization. Are
we Americans ready and willing to eat our bread by the sweat of our
brow? If we are, we shall live and prosper as a people. If we are not,
if we crave the importation of an ever larger servile class, then we
shall perish, and we shall deserve to perish. Democracy is impossible
in the presence of a class which holds common labor in disesteem. On
the other hand, no idle aristocratic class exists in all the world,
that the mills of the gods will not grind to dust and oblivion in the
end.
Another aspect of European emigration deserves especial comment. Let us
take for granted that it is desirable for a certain number of Europeans
to emigrate from their various home lands. Why do they not go to
South America, where millions of square miles are as yet untilled
and unbroken, and where raw materials in countless amounts await the
tools and the initiative of the worker? Or, why does not the European
emigrant go to East Africa, where a fair and fruitful land, resembling
California, is open to settlement by white men? Australia, with three
millions of square miles, has a population of only six millions. She
can take millions of immigrants, and provide lands and plenty.
The answer is simplicity itself, the mass of European wage workers
and peasants to-day do not wish to become pioneers. Those who are
physically, mentally and morally capable of becoming independent and
successful farmers no longer emigrate. They stay at home and improve
their conditions by instituting modern methods, as in Germany, Ireland,
and Scandinavia. They know that we have no longer free lands for them.
The present European emigrant is one who wishes to become a city
wage-worker or petty trader. Here in America considerable numbers have
attained great wealth. It is this story of the poor emigrant boy who
acquires millions of money and perhaps political distinction which
troubles the mind and disturbs the sleep of the unemployed European
wage worker, the peddler and the landless peasant. Stop European
emigration to the United States and within ten years South America,
Africa and Australia will begin to receive such emigrants as they need
for their natural and rightful development. But those who emigrate from
Europe to the great open spaces of the world will be forced to become
farmers, foresters and miners, producing the solid wealth which all the
world needs.
One further word. We shall presently come again upon a period of
prosperity. It will be limited by world conditions, probably, to
a few months, at the most to a year or two. During this period an
enormous propaganda for unlimited immigration will be again financed
by the profiteers and supported by the feeble minded and weeping
sentimentalists. At that time the intelligent and patriotic portion
of our citizenship must be especially alert and active. We must
so organize our working forces that great numbers can readily be
shifted from city factories to the harvest fields and back again.
Certain seasonable trades and outdoor construction work can be made
to supplement one another, so that the workers will not be forced out
of employment at any season of the year. To a man of the breadth and
experience of, for instance, Mr. Ford, the execution of such a plan
would be simplicity itself. We Americans can and must solve these
peculiar industrial problems on the basis of a slowly increasing native
population.
I realize fully that to consummate so great a reform as the permanent
stopping of immigration requires the setting in motion of larger forces
than the Klan can command. To this end every American must function
through his political party, his fraternal order, his business
associates or labor union, and his church. All the argument is on one
side. What we require is action, and we Klansmen propose to have it
without further dilly-dallying and compromise.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Problem of Restricting the Suffrage
During nearly the whole of the nineteenth century our American people
played up hill and down dale with a very dangerous political doctrine.
I refer to the theory of unrestricted suffrage. Probably a majority of
our people actually came to believe that because a man (or a woman) had
arrived at the age of twenty-one, that was reason enough for granting
him the right to vote. This individual might be illiterate. He might be
mentally undeveloped, perhaps an imbecile. If our imaginary voter were
deaf, dumb and blind, besides being halt, he could still be carried to
the polls and his vote registered and counted.
Only recently have any considerable number of our people come to take
a practical view of this thing. At last we are beginning to see
that this, like any other good principle of life, may be driven to
excess. One may work too hard or think too much. Even the most exalted
virtues may be overdone. So it is with the principles of democracy.
Having succeeded with a large measure of democracy, by the time our
government was put into operation, we did not lack those who were
prepared to see it carried to fanatical and dangerous extremes. So the
spoils system has been long defended as being a necessary attribute of
democracy. Politicians discovered that votes might be secured through
disclaiming all breeding, culture, and even denouncing efficiency in
office. Instead of trying to make of our democratic system a sound
and reasonable way of conducting public business, our people fell to
advocating certain democratic political and social theories with a sort
of religious frenzy.
So it was with universal suffrage. A corrupt government at Washington
would never have been permitted to enfranchise the Negroes directly
after their emancipation had it not been for the wide acceptance among
our people of this false theory of the suffrage. If "everybody should
vote," then, indeed, how could the freed Negro be denied this "inherent
and inalienable right."
Of course, as a matter of fact, the vote has always been denied to
certain groups and classes. To begin with, the young people under
twenty-one years of age, in the eyes of the law, "infants," were
disfranchised. These had no "inherent and inalienable" right to
vote, because of their immaturity. Until recently women were not
allowed to vote on the basis that the franchise would interfere with
the performance of domestic duties. Paupers and criminals are also
disfranchised.
However, it is quite true that heretofore our theory of the suffrage
has been that any adult male could vote unless specific cause were
shown why he should be disfranchised. Right here we must reverse our
approach to the subject. The burden of proof should be upon the other
side. Our prospective voter should be made to show indisputable reason
for enfranchisement, instead of being permitted to vote unless cause
for disfranchisement can be shown. In other words, the ballot must be
considered a privilege and not an "inherent and inalienable right."
This brings us to the question of the standards to be enforced.
No doubt this is a very difficult matter to decide. A very large
proportion of our people are quite likely averse to any change. That
the wind is blowing in the right direction is indicated, however, by
a general tendency to raise the standards of the suffrage. Thus, in
the State of New York, in the last election (1921) an amendment to the
State Constitution was passed requiring that a prospective citizen and
voter should read and write in English. What is needed is an amendment
not only to the various state constitutions, but to the national
constitution. In preparation for such a drastic and far-reaching step,
the national mind should be prepared by the widest possible discussion
of the problem.
The suggestion that I am to make here I wish to be understood as purely
tentative. I realize fully that the whole discussion is just beginning.
Hardly anybody will deny that reading, writing and speaking the
English language with facility should be required of every voter.
Without the ready use of English it is impossible for foreigner or
native born to keep himself sufficiently acquainted with affairs to
vote intelligently. This requirement would disfranchise a considerable
portion of our native born whites, and a much larger portion of
our Negro and immigrant population. It is not too much to say that
the graver danger of the ignorant voter would be abolished by this
measure,--that is, if the measure were properly drawn and strictly
enforced, and at the same time would guarantee absolute and complete
rights of all under a real intelligent democracy.
But the literacy test is not enough. Government to-day is intricate
and the duties of the voter are most varied and difficult. Very few
Americans will hold it necessary to so restrict the suffrage that
only a minority will be qualified to take part. But any American
intellectually fitted to discuss this problem will presently come to
hold, I believe, that the standards may well be raised. They should
be so high that our more backward young people in the schools must be
forced to strive diligently in order to fit themselves to attain this
great privilege and responsibility.
It would be simple enough, in connection with our public school
system, to establish boards of examination to pass upon prospective
candidates. A majority of these boards should have had experience as
school-teachers. They should have in hand the matter of providing
facilities for educational preparation on the part of the student,
young or old, who might wish to continue his school work in order to
qualify for the use of the ballot.
The nature of the educational requirement, in my opinion, would have to
do with two sorts of preparation other than the ability to read, write
and speak the English language. First, we should demand an intelligence
test such as is now required of every applicant for enlistment in the
United States Army or Navy. These tests have been reduced to a high
degree of scientific accuracy. The specific requirements would be
somewhat different, of course, than those demanded for the admission to
the Army or Navy, insofar as they would have a different object. But
the principles should be the same. The purpose of such a test would
be to reject all imbeciles, morons, and the mentally unbalanced. We
now know that these groups number from ten to fifteen per cent of our
population. Placing the ballot in their hands amounts to the same thing
as intrusting it to children from six years to fifteen years of age.
The second feature of our test should have to do with a different
sort of qualification. The purpose of the intelligence test should
be to reject those who are so lacking in natural intelligence as to
be unfitted for the simpler responsibilities of life. Our second
requirement would have to do with positive preparation. Any applicant
should have a full measure of sound knowledge with regard to the
history and government of the United States and current political and
social problems. Unhappily not only many immigrants, Negroes, and
illiterate native whites are at present unfitted to vote intelligently.
I fear that an enormous percentage of quite intelligent, and in some
respects well educated, persons are not in a position to pass the
simplest examination upon the elements of our history and government.
Let me not be misunderstood here. I do not propose to limit the
suffrage to those who are qualified to become judges on the bench
or professors of history and political science. I would favor no
standard so high that an intelligent young person could not fully
prepare himself in a year, by careful study for a few evenings a week.
The last two years of any efficiently graded school should furnish
courses sufficient to prepare the student in these things. Indeed,
any child completing his grade course where such studies were offered
and required would naturally be considered as having measured up to
this part of the suffrage requirement. His diploma on leaving school,
properly attested, signed and publicly registered, should give him,
upon arriving at the age of twenty-one, the right to vote. For children
who have not been enabled, for any reason, to complete the grade school
work, the necessary process seems simple enough. Evening classes or
other means of preparation can be furnished them at any time during
the years preceding voting age. Whenever they can pass the examinations
they will receive the testimonial of proficiency, so there will be
placed in their hands a most valuable and precious document entitling
them to the sacred privileges and duties of an American enfranchised
citizenship.
My basic contention in this matter is simply this: both our young
people and our immigrants must be asked to fit themselves with the
greatest care for the use of the ballot. I am agreed that a great
many, native-born and foreigners alike, should be admitted to every
other privilege and right of citizenship except that of the ballot.
Nothing should be denied these except the power to degrade and destroy
our government through ignorance and incompetence. The ballot is both
a sacred heritage and sacred privilege. It must be recognized and
appreciated as such. The scandal of the criminal use of the ballot by
outright purchase is the primary source from which flows political
corruption. A premium is put upon the achievement and honors conferred
in the hearts of the people upon the successful politician regardless
of the methods by which he attains success. Most recently this has
broken out upon the body of the nation as a putrid sore, revealing
within a systemic condition portending the decay and death of our
democratic civilization.
Our American democracy, generally successful at first, has more
recently left much to be desired. Even a hundred years ago, when we
were a primitive, farming population, our victorious democracy had
its seamy side. It brought with it every sort of inefficiency. It
thrust upon the nation the diabolical spoils system, which is still
so largely with us. Yet at that time democracy was saved by the very
simplicities of our national life. To-day all is so different. It is
time for democracy to tie up its loose ends and pull up the slack at
every point. Our public problems to-day are most perplexing to the best
informed minds among us. Our whole citizenship must not only acquire
a degree of education in public affairs which no people has ever yet
attempted--they must be reanimated by a spirit of sound morals and
an intense desire to serve their country well. Otherwise no purely
negative reforms can save our democratic system.
CHAPTER XXIV
National Solidarity Through Education
In discussing the public school system of the country there is little
new for me to say. But the importance of the public school system
in our democracy makes it necessary to state again and again the
dependence of our government upon the public school. In the building
of a peculiar civilization, the home and the church, as two necessary
institutions of divine planting, have been everywhere emphasized.
But in the maintenance of a democracy, a system of free schooling
is as absolutely necessary as the home or the church. Democracy,
however interpreted, must mean a leveling of all the people upward.
Intelligence is essential to progress. There is no pathway to higher
and better living except that which is illuminated by the light of a
general intelligence. Our democracy must be taught to think, and taught
to think right, if it is to live. The nations that continue to grovel
and grope, indeed, the nations that are being overwhelmed by internal
revolutions and internecine strife, are all untaught or badly taught.
I have been told that a hungry man near starvation has strange dreams
of palaces and feasts. Untaught human minds, unfed by information,
unstimulated by sound knowledge and undirected power of logic, have
strange dreams. Communism, Sovietism, Bolshevism, Anarchy, are the
nightmares of ignorance.
Our American democracy, in its earliest declarations, emphasized the
necessity for the general public training of the children and the
youth. Probably this was the real thought in the mind of Mr. Jefferson
when he wrote his equality clause in the Declaration of Independence.
Nothing he ever said has been so misinterpreted and misapplied.
Certainly he could not have meant that all men are fundamentally and
constitutionally equal. John C. Calhoun, the most logical mind in
American history, except perhaps Hamilton, said that that would be a
self-evident falsehood and not a self-evident truth. The great Lincoln
said that there were physical differences between the African and the
Anglo-Saxon that precluded political and social equality. No two things
in the universe are equal in this impossible sense which has been
distorted from Mr. Jefferson's statement that, "It is a self-evident
truth that all men are created equal." Among the billion colored
people of the earth, the black, the red, and the yellow, not one
nation has ever developed and maintained a constitutional government.
If there were equality in the essential things that go to make up the
characteristics of the colored races, certainly during the ages there
would somewhere have developed among them a civilization capable of
producing an upright, dignified, independent manhood. All that this
phrase meant at the founding of the republic, and all it means to-day,
is equality of opportunity for realizing the inherent possibilities
that are locked up in human nature.
This, of course, contemplates a national school system into which
all the children and the youth of the nation are to be brought to
have their eyes enlightened, their hearts trained, and their ideals
harmonized. So distinctly American must the public school system be
that the young life of the nation, without respect to race, color or
creed, shall be brought into it and subjected to its moulding and
developing process. National unity and integrity cannot be maintained
if a part of the nation is taught and a part remains in ignorance.
A democracy must have uniformity and universality in the elementary
training of its young life. Neither can the nation maintain its
existence and work out its destiny if in its early training its youth
is broken up into sectional, racial and sectarian groups.
Concessions have been made to foreign elements that have come into this
country and organized themselves into communities, holding tenaciously
to the language of the country from which they came. The almost
insuperable difficulty of undertaking to mobilize the American people
in time of war had its roots in just this thing of permitting aliens to
occupy the American soil, live under the American flag, and continue to
teach the political loyalties of their respective countries in their
own languages. It necessitated the draft law by which these people
were compelled to bear arms in defense of the world's civilization. No
thorough American required any sort of compulsion to put him into the
great conflict. The right to volunteer in the time of national danger,
or in defense of the great institutions of human liberty anywhere in
the world, was the inheritance which had been transmitted from the
Revolutionary period to succeeding generations until it came to us and
to our children. We were denied our birthright when drafted for service
in war, and in that fact there is a tremendous indictment of the nation
for its failure to Americanize all its growing life through the public
school system and the English language.
In every state of the union the Ku Klux Klan will insist upon
thoroughly Americanizing the children of the nation through the public
school. All the racial elements in the country must be brought under
the same standard of tutelage. Only in this way can these peoples
be harmonized. It was the idea of Cecil Rhodes when he founded
scholarships in Oxford for American students that British and American
ideals should be harmonized. The difficulty with Mr. Rhodes' idea is
that the American youth are to be harmonized with British ideals, but
he made no provision in scholarships in any great American institution
to which British students might come and be harmonized with American
ideals. The public school, however, contemplates taking all the
elements that are represented in our vast population and harmonizing
them with the ideals of our democracy. So poorly has this work been
done in many sections of our country, and especially in our congested
centers of population, the large cities, that the product turned out
from the schools has frequently contradicted the purpose for which
the system was founded. We cannot take a person of foreign birth or
extraction into our schools maintained by taxation and turn him out
Italian-American, British-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American,
German-American, Japanese-American, Chinese-American or Afro-American.
He must come out an American with all of his distinctive qualities and
characteristics swallowed up and absorbed in American democracy. The
institution was founded by the fathers and the pattern of American
life was made by the great architects of human liberty, and every time
a hyphenated American is turned out of any American school it is a
contradiction of the very purpose of the republic.
This work of educating the youth of the nation must be done in the
open. We have no objections to the foundation of schools privately or
by communities of peculiar racial distinction, or even by sectarians
who, because of peculiar tenets, wish to keep their children under the
eye of the church. To repeat what we have already stated, all we insist
upon is just this--that these schools shall be in every sense public,
open to public inspection. They must be subjected to regulation by
properly constituted authority. The same courses in the fundamentals
of Americanism must be taught in a privately owned or conducted school
as in the public schools. Democracy can not be taught and developed
behind closed doors. Its vital breath is openness. It has recently
broken down many doors throughout the world. There are to be no more
secret treaties, no more diplomatic intriguing, nothing between the
governments of the nations upon which the eyes of all the world may
not look. Surely, a democracy demanding openness in all the ways of
mankind, as the nations move surely toward a common fraternity, can not
undertake to conceal any part of its young life in its training for
service to its country and to the world.
Holding as the Klan does that the tenets of Christianity as a code of
morals are essential to our democracy, we are only too ready to agree
that there should be distinctive religious training. Here, at the very
threshold, there is a difficulty. Absolute freedom of conscience in
religious matters is granted to American citizens. The public school
teachers are drawn from various religious organizations, without
respect to their church affiliations. In the average public school the
children being taught represent numerous Christian sects and not a few
non-Christian sects. It would be contrary to every fundamental of our
national life to introduce specific religious doctrines or tenets among
this diversified group. Perhaps the plan recently tried out in New York
City would solve this problem. The children were dismissed from school
a part of a day each week, that they might go to their respective
places of worship and there be taught by ministers or lecturers of
their peculiar faith in the essential things of religion and ethics.
This much is sure: These foreign peoples must be unified in Americanism
and it can not be done except through our public schools. North
Carolina has adopted the slogan, "Abolish illiteracy in ten years." We
should take that slogan for the whole American nation. By "literacy"
we should mean literacy in English. This can only be accomplished,
however, when native and foreigner, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and
Gentile, gladly bring their children together and place them side by
side to be taught in the things of democracy.
Demands have been made during the past few years that the funds
collected in taxes for the maintenance of public schools be segregated.
Our fellow citizens of one powerful religious organization have
insisted that monies paid out by members of that church in taxes
for public education be returned to the denomination and applied to
the parochial schools, which are owned and controlled by the church.
Of course this means that a considerable percentage of the young
population of the country would be withdrawn from the Americanizing
schools of the public and trained only as the church directed. Church
and state are forever separated in the democracy of America. Any
tendency to bring them together in building the solidarity of the
nation should be arrested. It is not worthwhile to experiment further
in this matter. All history shows the utter futility of attempting
to build a robust, virtuous, enlightened national life through union
of Church and State; and I wish to say with the utmost composure,
and speaking, I trust, for every real American, that not one dollar
of public monies shall ever be diverted from the public schools for
sectarian institutions. This declaration may sound explosive. Yet I
hope it will give no offense to anybody. The sooner it is accepted
as final, so much the sooner will a very real cause of difficulty and
misunderstanding be removed.
A study of our history is fundamental to the construction and the
maintenance of a sound national life. Thomas Carlyle once very
correctly said that one cannot manage the present or predict the future
except from an accurate knowledge of the past. All sectarian textbooks
in histories, partisan textbooks or sectional textbooks, are naturally
distorted and perverted. Men who hold tenaciously to a particular
setting, given a religious truth or any other historical fact, have
looked at their fellowmen through a distorted perspective. The trivial
has frequently appeared to them to be the magnificent, and the
magnificent the trivial. Bias has characterized all such narratives.
It is difficult enough to secure a history of any country or its
people in its political, economic, industrial and social development,
that is basically true to the facts. The man who writes is apt to be
tremendously impressed by the age in which he lives. The tale that
he tells is often a crude compilation of errors. Only recently the
manuscript of a history in its making was tendered by a well known
publishing house to a patriotic organization of the South for review.
One of many glaring errors that obtruded from this book, which was
designed to become a text book, was the statement that the democratic
party originated with the original Ku Klux Klan of the Sixties. Another
history in common use in the public schools of the country, filled with
all sorts of inaccuracies and misstatements, was recently taken from
the schools in one great section of the country. When the attention
of the author was called to the inaccuracies, he offered to expurgate
the offensive statements of which the section complained, but refused
to change his history for other sections of the country where the
statements were as yet unchallenged. If such histories are foisted
upon our school system, and our children are taught the errors of the
prejudiced and inaccurate historian, how much worse, and how much more
dangerous, would the teaching be if the history texts are purposefully
written by narrow sectarians, and the facts discolored by religious
prejudice? The time has surely come when real history should be written
by the truthful and wise, and the facts of our national virtues and
vices, our strength and our weakness, our dangers and our securities,
should be taught in our public schools, and taught to all the children.
The preparation or selection of school text books in history is no more
a fitting subject for rancorous bickering among sectarian politicians
than the writing of text books in chemistry. It is entirely a matter
for trained historians and professional teachers. We must insist that
politicians of all breeds keep their hands far removed from these
things.
CHAPTER XXV
The Conservation of the American Home
The American home is rapidly becoming a failure. After countless ages
of biological and social evolution, that marvelous process of change
and growth which has produced us, we are committing suicide as a nation
and as a people. A home without children is not, in a social sense, a
home at all. It is only a place in which, and a condition under which,
two persons of opposite sex live together more happily and comfortably,
perhaps less so, than they could do apart.
The American home, the home in which healthy, intelligent and
characterful children are bred and reared, both for their own sakes
and the nation's service--this home is the veritable rockbottom of our
national well-being. Let the home fail, and all our wealth and material
achievement is naught but poverty and trash.
The millions of homes in which there are no children, or only one
child, the birth of which was perhaps wholly unintentional, are so
many millions of tombs in which the nation's hope and future lie
buried. The millions of young unmarried Americans, between the ages of
twenty-one and forty years, whatever be the cause of their unnatural
and unsocial condition, are just so many millions of Americans who have
rejected life. All of the unmarried, all of the married who do not
reproduce themselves, are a crushing accusation against our national
intelligence, our national morals, and our national social policy. What
do these figures not mean in terms of disappointment and despair, of
social purpose unfulfilled, of negative sorrow and anguish in the heart
of the individual, of souls unfed in terms of every higher realization
of life?
A people which can calmly behold a large per cent of its marriageable
young people homeless and childless has confessed itself to be a broken
and dissolving remnant among the nations. We, lords of the richest
land in all the four quarters of the world, voluntarily place our
national head upon the block and beckon to the executioner, axe in
hand, to make haste.
Visualize this old-time American home--on the hillside, among the
trees. For many generations it has stood foursquare against every
blast of winter, every ugly aspect of circumstance. From its wide
portals have gone forth a myriad of the young and gay, the hopeful and
the brave. Its offspring peopled all our West. Its victories in the
wilderness, through a hundred years, have no counterpart in all the
history of humanity. The history of America has been the history of the
American home--of what that home has accomplished for the citizens that
were born and reared under its sheltering roof.
Open the door! Wait! You shall see none enter here. Only a going out--a
funeral procession. A death march sounds forth, a mighty people, the
hope of the world--such a people is borne to the grave. Where there is
no laughter of children, there Death is King. And those that see make
jest and frolic.
In the even scales of biological law and of mathematical calculation,
our people are being weighed in the balance and found wanting. We
Americans, all that we have been, and all that we are, are being borne
to the grave in execution of the law. We have been tried and condemned
by a just Judge.
It is a most dangerous error to undertake to build a national life
on the individual as a unit. "God has set the solitary in families,"
said Moses, as he led his people through the vast wilderness unto the
promised land. We may destroy all else, but leave the home and the
family, and yet all the elements and works that make the nation can be
once again regained and rebuilt. We may possess all else, wealth and
power, all the arts and all the knowing, thriving schools and majestic
temples--but if the home crumbles and decays, we perish with it utterly.
Oh! The deep, deep and terrible tragedy of our Nordic race in America!
We have been decimated by fratricidal war. Our flesh and blood have
been corrupted by industrialism. Now, however, we go to our destruction
simply because we do not care to live. We go as blindly as a species
of animals whose conditions of life have been completely upset by
new forces with which they do not know how to deal. Sheep and swine,
nay, the wild beasts of the field, could not act with such utter
carelessness and immorality as we. All that we have done will perish
with us. Other nations have lived and left record of their labors in
a lofty literature or a resplendent art. The glory of the temples
they have builded keeps their memory green centuries after their very
language is forgotten. The people of the age of Pericles will live on
in their work, to beautify and glorify humanity for twice ten thousand
years. But we Americans are perishing miserably to leave no record of
high value, because our greater work has been bound up in our very
selves. We have all lived and labored together as free men. We have
proven to a faithless world that the humblest toiler could wield the
mightiest and most glittering scepter of power. We have made good the
proud boast of a triumphant democracy. All that we have been, as a
beckoning star among the nations, all that we have meant to the world
of hope in the common man, is doomed to perish with us.
All I seek to do in these chapters is to bring the mind and heart of
my country to this place. Here, in the old-fashioned American home,
we shall do battle. Here we shall fight the last fight, to win or to
lose. If we are to have a greater and better America, we must begin by
breeding better Americans in larger numbers. There is no other way. The
man who says our young men and women, in general, do not desire homes
and children, says a falsehood. We neither desire nor expect fifteen
children in the home. What we do insist upon, in recreating all the
conditions about that home, is two, three, four, and sometimes, in
exceptional cases, five or six children. For our country as a whole,
during this century, we crave but a small increase in native born
population in every decade--perhaps ten or twelve per cent. We would
reject, by taking forethought and preventing marriage, the children
of the criminal, the children of the imbecile and the insane, the
children of those who are accursed with incurable diseases or incurable
indolence. We would remould all that needs remoulding in order to
receive into the hearts and the homes of our country the children
of the healthy and the industrious, the honest and intelligent, the
high-minded and the sensitive.
Give our young people of America but half a chance! Let them have
their own country in which to test out the labor of their hands and
the love of their hearts! Let them again lay upon themselves the first
duty of the supreme law of nature! They can and will preserve to this
continent every higher value, every article of faith left to their
keeping. Remove from their environment a competition that is unfair
and killing. Give them bread and not a stone for their toil. Give them
solid assurance and not a gnawing insecurity of livelihood, and they
will give to their country a future through the sons and daughters of
their love.
To admit that there is a growing number of our young women who reject
child-bearing as a burden is merely to re-emphasize the crying need
of a socializing education. It is the work of those who know and who
care, to teach those who are ignorant and careless of duty. We teach
our young people that they must help prepare themselves for citizenship
and self-support. Citizenship for our American young women includes
the essential duty of motherhood, and for our young men the duty of the
creation and support of a family. A cornerstone of our ethical teaching
should be the preparation of the minds of the young for home-building
and parenthood. Every able-bodied man, or woman, who deigns to eat,
should perform some sort of useful work. Similarly every normal young
man and woman who accepts life should be gladly willing to create life.
Around and above these homes and these children we must place the
protection of every means furnished by applied science. To educate them
and to fit them for useful work and public service, we must apply the
first fruits of our nation's wealth. To offer to these young citizens,
upon maturity, full opportunity for fruitful labor and self expression,
we must be ready to reject much error that is ancient, and accept much
truth that is new and sometimes startling.
America consists of and exists in the home. The home is America. To
lose the fight here is to lose all. To win at this point is to win
for ourselves national salvation, and for the world our share in its
ultimate redemption.
A FINAL WORD
Let me confess that I alone am responsible for the reorganization of
the Ku Klux Klan. No one suggested it to me. No one helped me in the
formulation of its new task, nor in the working out of any of its basic
principles or methods. So it may not be entirely uninteresting to the
reader for me to close this statement with a brief narrative of the
first growth of this concept in my own mind.
To begin with, my childhood fancies were much laid hold of by the
stories I heard of the original Ku Klux Klan. These stories were
told me in my own home. Sometimes in Negro cabins the old darkies
would play upon my boyish mind with marvelous tales of the hosts of
white-robed horsemen--the souls of the departed soldiers of the great
war--who were used to ride up and down the countryside. Sometimes I
would imagine these cavalcades passing swiftly and silently, like a
white cloud, across the starry heavens. Later, when a more accurate
book of knowledge of this strange epoch of American history was opened
up to me, I eagerly devoured all the reading I could find pertaining
to the subject. Yet the impressions made upon me by the legendary
account never entirely lost their force. So, as I grew to manhood,
my mind, perhaps overburdened while yet too young, with a sense of
the responsibilities of citizenship, made the service of my country
a deeply set conviction. I never went very joyously either to my
studies or to my active duties. To my generation, as it grew up in
the defeated, broken and impoverished South, the problems of life
presented heavy tasks rather than stirring issues. We had to make all
our beginnings as a people over again. Our mood was much like that
of the Puritan founders of New England when they set themselves to
struggle against the stern climate and the thin and unfruitful soil of
their section. A statement of Robert E. Lee to a member of his staff
the day before he surrendered at Appomattox has been more than once
my sheet-anchor. "Captain," said our great leader, "I should gladly
lay down my life, but it is now my duty to live. The way for me has
been hard, very hard--no pathway of duty is easy--only those who
have encountered obstacles, faced difficulties, and endured extreme
hardships, know how much easier it would be for me to die, than to live
in response to the call of duty."
We people of the South lived on. We have tried to do our duty. We have
even tried to forget the past, though often it may not seem so to our
fellow citizens.
In 1898 it was my privilege to enlist in the glorious service of our
reunited country. Of course every youth who then donned the uniform
imagined that he would proceed at once to Cuba and do battle for the
liberation of that country from the tyranny of the Spanish monarchy.
My first evening in camp, under the old flag of the Union, was an
experience never to be forgotten. I believe that all of the thousand
young men in the Alabama regiment with which I served felt their hearts
moved by something of the same great emotion. We were to be under the
command of Nelson Miles and Fitzhugh Lee, of Wesley Merritt and Joe
Wheeler.
The heat and noise of the day gave way to the soft, warm flush of the
evening. Such an evening! Under the clearest of skies and the brightest
of stars I stood on guard at midnight. My mind seemed to be so passive,
so sensitive, so subjected to the thoughts that rushed out of the
universe, from the past and the mysterious present and the unknowable
future, to take possession of my soul. I saw my country ennobled by
the great task of liberty and of love to which she had set herself on
that occasion. United at last! United in a common cause! Reforming a
Union which had always existed in the hearts of all, underneath those
superficial forces which so long troubled us and kept us apart.
And now a great fountain of joy and of pride, pressing from the
heart, filled every artery almost to bursting. On that night I first
understood my country and saw, emblazoned in the sky, the part to which
the Lord of Hosts had called her.
To a young man whose heart is truly enlisted in the issue of a great
war, the mighty thrill of the soul is the ultimate experience of
life. So is the banner of his country raised aloft. So are his arms
consecrated by the deepest impulses of the spirit. Lyric poetry has
often exhausted its meters and its music at the altar of the lesser
loves. On that strangest of nights I knew that here was a love that
makes the heart of youth deny all that comes from self and lift burning
eyes to the stars.
Oh my people--soldiers--workers--pioneers--adventurers--saviors--in
the four quarters of the earth! Be you--your deeds--your vision,--all
in all--imperishable! The world listens to hear the sound of the
song you sing upon the march. Somehow I feel and know that you shall
live--gloriously--throughout the ages.
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