Ku Klux Klan Secrets Exposed Part 1

Ku Klux Klan Secrets Exposed.

by Ezra Asher Cook.

CHAPTER I

THE OLD KU KLUX KLAN

To the old Ku-Klux Klan which rode through the south in the days following the civil war the new Ku-Klux Klan is a relative only in name.

It is not tied by blood. It holds the same position to its southern aristocratic forbear as an imposter in social life does to some ill.u.s.trious gentleman of the same name of whom he claims to be a descendant.

The old Ku-Klux Klan was a historical development. The new is a man's contrivance. The old Ku-Klux Klan movement was an outcome of conditions that prevailed in the southern states after the war. The present Klan, apparently, is an outcome of a group of men's desire to make money.

Widespread, spontaneous, popular, the movement of 1866 grew out of a disordered society, not as a "movement" at all at first, but as a scheme for having fun, a source of amus.e.m.e.nt among a group of young, full-blooded southern men to puzzle outsiders. Its use as a weapon against the stranger in the old south came later.

The "stranger" was the northern carpetbagger. To the south he was the pestilence that follows war. He was the blunderer who entered the land whose social customs were unknown to him, in a year when the fabric by those social customs was in need of mending.

NO RELIGIOUS TEST

When southern society seized the Ku-Klux Klan as an instrument with which to resist there were only two cla.s.ses, carpet-bagger and unruly negro, against which it operated. To join the ranks of the white-robed hors.e.m.e.n, there were no qualifications of religion. The Klan made no mention of Jew or Catholic. Its purpose was to restore order, not to fan prejudice, and therein lies the difference between the old Klan and the present Klan which makes the latter a maverick.

The first unit of the horseback riding knights was founded in the village of Pulaski, Tenn., with the same motive for its organization as the old-time college hazing society. Its members were young men who had come back from the war, poor, exhausted, discouraged, and bored with the tameness of a country town.

HOW IT STARTED

According to the story which has lived south of the Mason and Dixon line since those post-bellum days, a group of youths cooling their heels in a law office one May evening in 1866 organized a society for a good time. If anyone had suggested to them at that time that five years later a committee of congress would devote thirteen volumes to a history of their "movement" and pa.s.s a law to suppress it, or that before the child of their wits was fully grown it would have developed into a terrorizing "hobgoblin" sheeted for lawlessness, they would have thought it a jest.

When their mere joke had become a grim joke, neighbors who feared it found in its name "Ku-Klux" the suggestion of a clicking rifle. But the name itself was proposed by its charter members in Tennessee as a derivative of the Greek word "Kuklos," meaning a circle. From "Kuklos"

to "Ku-Klux" was an easy transition. The "Klan" followed because these youthful students of Greek had an ear for the alliterative.

From the Pulaski law office the society migrated to a haunted house on the outskirts of the village. Its members found their first source of amus.e.m.e.nt in initiation rites. They named their chief officer a Grand Cyclops and their vice president a Grand Magi. Other officers were the Grand Turk, or marshal; a Grand Exchequer or treasurer, and two Lictors.

WORE WHITE MASKS

The only germ in their const.i.tution from which the "Imperial Wizard"

Simmons of the twentieth century Klan could breed his present organization was the promise of absolute secrecy. For his copying years later, the first Klan also contrived a disguise. It consisted of a white mask, a tall cardboard hat, a gown or robe, and for the night riding excursions, a cover for the horses' bodies and m.u.f.flers for their feet.

Only after the Pulaski organization had entertained itself for many nights did the phenomenon present itself which was to make the Klan a weapon in the progress of post-war reconstruction. It was the discovery that the African negro was twice as fearful of mysticism and mystery as the white man. It taught the white men of Tennessee and neighboring states that they had a means of their own of preventing what they considered political mismanagement and social insolence in the control by northerners and freedmen of the state government.

BECOMES MILITARY ORGANIZATION

The Pulaski riders made themselves popular. Young men of neighboring towns organized brother Klans. When southern society found itself a Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall, it grasped the Pulaski idea as the means for pulling itself up again. The Klan became a military organization, with the purpose of keeping order among the negroes by intimidating them. Mysticism in the order grew. Humor grew with it, and by the time the states of the north discovered that the south had an organization which was in purpose a society of regulators, the young southern war veterans were donning their white robes and cardboard hats with a human skull and two thigh bones as the symbols of allegiance.

The oath which the grand cyclops administered has been preserved in southern diaries and doc.u.ments. It was taken in a solemn manner as the knights were grouped amid the bones. The oath follows.

"We (or I, as the case might be) do solemnly swear before Almighty G.o.d and these witnesses, and looking upon these human bones, that I will obey and carry into effect every order made by any cyclops or a.s.sistant cyclops, and if I fail strictly to conform and execute every order made, as above required of me, unless I am prevented from some cause which shall be no fault of mine, or if I shall give any information to any person or persons except members of this order, that the doom of all traitors shall be meted out to me, and that my bones may become as naked and dry as the bones I am looking upon. And I take this oath voluntarily, without any mental reservation or evasion whatever, for the causes set out in said order, so help me G.o.d."

Ku-Klux hors.e.m.e.n who rode white-sheeted through the south in the nights of 1866 regarded themselves as upholders of sectional patriotism.

They considered themselves the spiritual descendants of the New Englanders who threw the English tea overboard into Boston harbor nearly 100 years before. Their protests, and the acts of intimidation by which they enforced their protests were against the white "carpetbagger" from the north, the negro freedman to whom liberty meant arrogant office-holding, and the "scalawag," by which terms they designated those deserters from the southern aristocracy who had joined the ranks of the northern stranger.

The second stage came within a year after the secret body had its birth, when the band of burlesquers became a band of regulators.

To the south, the reconstruction acts which congress pa.s.sed in 1867 were pernicious. The one-time white confederate soldier believed that the congressional legislation made official mismanagement permanent.

He saw negroes organized into the militia. He saw his former slaves voting twice and thrice at elections where he himself had to pa.s.s, literally, under bayonets to reach the polls. He disliked the freedman's bureau, which subst.i.tuted northern alien machinery for the old patriarchal relation between white employer and black employe. He heard drunken negroes at his gates in the night. He saw the "carpetbagger" urging upon the freedman civic rights which he knew the latter was not educated enough to perform.

FIRST OBJECTS POLITICAL

These were the prejudices against which the original Ku-Klux Klan threw itself. They were surface indications of an historical development. They had nothing to do with the racial and religious biases which the present Klan attempted to propagate. To the present Klan, the old Klan, in its first stage, was unrelated. In its second stage it was related only in its methods of terrorism and its removal of justice from the courts to the masques until its own leaders were powerless to check it.

The Klan early fell a victim to the abuses inseparable from secrecy.

It happened that Tennessee, the birthplace of the hooded inst.i.tution, was also the first southern state to find itself turned upside down in reconstruction. "Dem Ku-Kluxes," as the negro called the mysterious union, became a band of regulators. Their first official convention was held in Nashville early in 1867.

The Klan, which, until then, had been bound together only by the deference which priority rights gave to the grand cyclops of the parental Pulaski "den," was organized into the "Invisible Empire of the South." It was ruled by a grand wizard of the whole empire, a grand dragon of each realm, or state, a grand t.i.tan of each dominion, or county, a grand cyclops of each den, and staff officers with names as equally suggestive of Arabian Nights.

LAWS DEFINE OBJECTS

For the first time its laws defined serious objects. First was the duty of protecting people, presumably white southerners, from indignities and wrongs; second was the duty of succoring the suffering, particularly among the families of dead confederate soldiers; finally was the oath to defend "the const.i.tution of the United States and all laws pa.s.sed in conformity thereto," and of the states also, to aid in executing all const.i.tutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizures and from trial otherwise than by jury.

It is these purposes which Imperial Wizard Simmons of the modern clan pretends to perpetuate, plus persecutions of Jews, Catholics and negroes, while denying charges of terrorizing outbreaks.

The Nashville convention chose Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, the confederate cavalry leader, as its supreme ruler. He is known to have increased the membership of the hooded hors.e.m.e.n in the old south to 550,000.

Among his aides were Generals John B. Gordon, A.H. Colquitt, G.T.

Anderson, A.B. Lawton, W.J. Hardee, John C. Brown, George W. Gordon and Albert Pike. The latter became one of the foremost authorities of Masonry.

Terrorism spread, until during the political campaign which preceded the 1868 presidential election, 2,000 persons were killed and injured in Louisiana by Ku-Klux Klansmen, who rode at night, disguised as freebooters, and according to James G. Blaine, defeated candidate for the presidency at a later date, hesitated at no cruelty.

In the north, in the years immediately after the civil war, the original Ku-Klux Klan was called a conspiracy.

In the south, where society was being ground in the mills of reconstruction, the Klan started its midnight rovings as an instrument of moral force. But within three years its period of usefulness, as the white southerner saw it useful, was over.

Its founders had played with it as with an exciting bonfire. During the months, however, when former confederate soldiers used it to frighten away northern officeholders with oppressive tactics, it had leaped in size until when the moment came for smothering it out its leaders discovered it beyond control.

Not until the full fire department of federal and state law had been called out did the Invisible Empire cease to operate.

TENNESSEE ACTS AGAINST IT

By 1872 the white-robed knights of midnight, whose purpose to enforce law had in itself yielded to lawlessness, were for the most part disappeared. But so, in one state after another, had the northern carpetbagger and the southern scalawag.