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.

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.