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.

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.