The beginning of the way
1865, December 24 - On Christmas Eve, six young people gathered in the small town of Pjulaski in the South of America, in the state of Tennessee, and for their entertainment they organized a secret society, something like a club. He very soon had his own rituals and uniforms, hierarchy and charter, and most importantly - a big name that was well known many decades later - the Ku Klux Klan. Oddly enough, the Clan and the era that gave birth to it remains the subject of political disputes and historical rapprochement today.
There are those who consider it the first terrorist organization in the United States and the first so-called hate-group, that is, a community that is united by hatred of a particular social group. Some see the Clan as an example of heroic resistance to the invaders, a popular movement that tried to maintain law and order in the conditions of post-war devastation and anarchy.
Others recall that the Ku Klux Klan, the Klan's allies and the impostors who used its attributes, killed more Americans in the 1860s and 1870s than al-Qaeda terrorists. There are those who readily compare the use of regular troops of the northerners for the occupation of the South after the Civil War with the equally unsuccessful use of the American army against Iraq …
Night ghosts
Arthur Conan Doyle, in his story "Five Orange Pips", explained the origin of the name "Ku Klux Klan" by onomatopoeia: a similar sound is made by a rifle bolt when it is cocked.
But the conventional wisdom is far less bleak: six educated young men, Irish by birth and former Confederate army officers, used the Greek word for "circle" (meaning circle of the elect) and the English word for clan. After creative processing it turned out "Ku Klux Klan", or three mysterious "KKK". The choice of the name turned out to be surprisingly successful: historians believe that the Clan's rapid success is largely due to its successful branding.
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In the beginning, there was nothing malicious in the newly created society. For fun, the guys came up with the most incredible titles and positions, and in the evenings they drove around the neighborhood in masks and robes from sheets. The uniform was complemented by a cone-shaped cap, making the person taller. Complex rituals of initiation were invented for the new members: the applicant was blindfolded, he had to say several meaningless oaths, they gave a couple of cuffs, then they brought them to the “royal altar” and hoisted the “royal crown”. When in the end it was allowed to remove the blindfold from the eyes, it turned out that a mirror served as the altar, and instead of a crown on the head there were two large donkey ears.
Practical jokes were also arranged for the uninitiated. A horseman wearing a mask drove up to the house of some negro at night and asked for water. When they brought him a bucket from the well, he drank it in one gulp and asked for more. In fact, he had a rubber tube under his mask, through which water was poured into a large leather bag, invisible under the robe. Having "drunk" several buckets in this way, the rider exclaimed: "I have not drunk a sip since I fell on the battlefield!" - and hid in the night, leaving the superstitious master to tremble with fear.
In the morning, everyone in the area, of course, only talked about the giant white ghosts of Confederate soldiers driving around the neighborhood at night. Negroes still remembered very well how white patrols rode along the same night roads, catching runaway slaves and participating in plantation riots. And whites still remembered the spirit of the pioneers, who were quick to punish if they saw injustice or a threat to their lives, and at the same time did without long legal proceedings.
Having discovered what impression they made, the Ku-Klux-Klanists began to deliberately frighten the Negroes and threaten them with all kinds of punishment if they "behave badly" (and yesterday's slaves were not averse to abuse the freedom they had received). The clan declared itself "an organization dedicated to protecting whites from possible problems with blacks." The fun had every chance to turn into something quite serious.
All against all
At the end of 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan was created, the situation in the southern states was, to put it mildly, difficult. Just a few months ago, the Civil War ended with the defeat of the South. Cities and plantations were in ruins. The soldiers of the defeated army, ragged and hungry, were returning home. "We are a conquered and humiliated people," wrote the editor of a South Carolina newspaper in April 1865, "Without rights, without privileges, without property …"
Meanwhile, the freed blacks were waiting for the government to give them 40 acres of land. Various businessmen and adventurers from the North headed South in the hope of getting rich. Local supporters of the northerners were eager to avenge all the oppression. They created numerous armed groups of volunteers who had to monitor the observance of the rule of law and public order, but in fact they protected whites from blacks, the rich from the poor, Democrats from the Republicans, the winners from the vanquished and vice versa. And the federal authorities could not decide in any way how they would arrange life in the defeated states.
At first, the pre-war aristocracy remained in power, but they quickly found out that they did not want to change anything in the traditional way. One by one, the states adopted the so-called black codes - "laws on blacks", according to which the position of the Negro was not much different from the pre-war one, only the state was now acting as the owner. Negroes had the opportunity to work only on farms or to be servants; to get any other job, they had to pay tax. They had to work "from dawn to dawn", had no right to leave the plantation without permission, could not have weapons or drink alcohol.
Any unemployed ex-slave could be arrested and convicted of vagrancy. In Mississippi, interracial marriage was punishable by death (this law was only repealed in the 1970s). In Louisiana, the Democratic Convention (and the aristocrats of the southern states were Democrats) adopted a statement that "people of African descent cannot be considered US citizens." The responsibility to ensure the new (and essentially the old) order was taken over by the Ku Klux Klan.
During 1866, the Clan became famous in the South. Its cells have appeared in many states. Increasingly, the Ku Klux Klan moved from words to deeds: they beat, set fire to houses, robbed and killed those whom they considered to be offenders. The offenses could be different: disrespectful attitude of a black man towards whites, a black man's relationship with a white woman, supporting the federal army, or helping blacks get an education or acquire land.
One of the most widespread "crimes", especially the indignation of the Ku Klux Klan, was the desire of blacks to exercise their suffrage. The lynching trial became widespread, when a group of people without trial or investigation dealt with the "accused": beat, flogged, maim, yanked on the nearest tree or threw into the water with a stone around his neck.
Of course, the northerners did not win the Civil War to come to terms with this situation. In protest, Congress refused to admit senators from the southern states. The result of the Clan's activity turned out to be the opposite of what was intended: the radical republicans, who insisted on a tougher treatment of the vanquished and on ensuring the equality of former slaves, won a landslide victory.
For southerners, it was another reminder that state rights no longer exist and that they must be obeyed. But they could not fight openly, when there was an army of victors on their territory. But they could take advantage of the Clan that turned up by the arm, where their faces were hidden under masks, and the sight even without weapons inspired fear. But for this it was necessary to turn the club of young rakes, "educating" blacks for their own pleasure, into a military organization with iron discipline and clear political goals.
Defenders of women
At the beginning of 1867, a new stage of the "reconstruction" of the South began. The southern states refused to ratify the 14th amendment to the constitution, which stated that "the state has no right to enact and enforce laws restricting the rights of US citizens …". In April 1867, representatives of the Ku Klux Klan from various states gathered in Nashville to discuss a plan of action in the new environment and resolve a number of organizational issues. The head of the Clan was Confederate Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest, known for killing 300 captured black soldiers and their white commanders at Fort Pillow in 1864.
Initially, the Ku Klux Klan invited the famous General Robert Lee to this role; he did not agree, citing poor health, but promised to provide the Clan with "invisible support." Upon learning that the Ku Klux Klan would be headed by Forrest, Lee remarked: “There is no man in the South who can successfully lead such a huge organization. But convey my respect to the general and tell him that I hope he will succeed."
The great mage Forrest was the head of the entire Clan, or "Invisible Empire". The territory under his jurisdiction was divided into "kingdoms" corresponding to individual states, then there were "dominions" (several districts of the state), "lairs" and primary cells - "caves".
The deputies of the Great Mage were called Geniuses, the heads of the kingdoms bore the title of Great Dragons, the heads of the dominions were the Great Titans, the heads of the lair were the Great Cyclops. Other members of the organization, depending on their functions, were called not so majestically, but no less frightening: hydras, furies, night hawks, vampires. As befits any serious organization, the Clan had its own flag: a triangular banner with a yellow background and a red border. It depicted a black winged dragon and wrote the Latin slogan "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus", which can be translated as "That which is believed always, everywhere, everything."
Forrest himself formulated the Clan's goal as "protecting the women of the South." They meant, of course, white women, and they had to be protected mainly from black men. Almost all male southerners not only fully shared this goal, but also took an active part in achieving it. For example, in one of the counties in South Carolina in the late 1860s, 1,800 of 2,300 adult white males were active members of the Clan. This is perhaps too much for a terrorist organization. Rather, it was about the partisan army.
Fighters of the invisible front
1868 - The threat posed by the Ku Klux Klan became apparent to the authorities of the southern states and to the central government. The newspapers wrote about the atrocities committed by people in masks and white robes. Thousands of pastors, doctors, officials, merchants, politicians, former officers turned at night from civilians into militants who killed and maimed not only blacks, but also whites who sympathized with them, and hated northerners. According to Forrest, the Clan consisted of more than 0.5 million people, according to other sources - 2 million. In different regions of the Ku Klux Klan operated under various names so that its members could, if necessary, take an oath in court that they are not members. in the Ku Klux Klan.
It became clear that the situation was out of control. When Tennessee Governor William Brownlow tried to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan with his spies, all three attempts ended tragically: the Clan knew too much about the Governor's intentions. The negroes were in despair: “The rebels boast that the negroes will no longer even have as much freedom as they did under slavery. If things go on like this, our fate is sealed. Lord, you know it's worse than slavery."
In 1869, the newly elected President Ulysses Grant is believed to have secretly met with the Great Magician Forrest. Grant promised Forrest to begin withdrawing federal troops and gradually restore the rights of the South to the United States in exchange for ending the insurgency. Forrest actually dissolved the Ku Klux Klan in 1869, claiming that it had ceased to meet its earlier goals, but there are suspicions that he did it solely for the sake of appearing to absolve himself of responsibility for the atrocities of the Klan.
Be that as it may, after the official dissolution, the Clan's activity and brutality only increased. Moreover, the representatives of the aristocracy did not want to look like murderers in the eyes of society and left its ranks, but real thugs came to their place.
Meanwhile, in 1870, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted, which explicitly stated that "the right of US citizens to elect should not be taken away from them or restricted by the US or any state on the basis of race, color, or prior slave status." Seeing that the situation in the South was not changing for the better, in 1871 Congress held hearings on the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, after which very harsh acts were adopted, outlawing the Klan and authorizing the use of force to suppress its activities. Southerners have lost jurisdiction over crimes against the person, and the president has gained the right to declare martial law. Night raids and the wearing of masks were now banned.
The period of reconstruction of the South was coming to an end. The most recent piece of legislation of this time was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which recognized "the equality of all people before the law" and "the government's duty … to provide equal and accurate justice regardless of nationality, race, color, religious or political beliefs." But these good intentions were destined to be realized rather long ago.
In the 1876 presidential election, which went down in history as the most venal, Democrat challenger Rutherford Hayes, in exchange for the controversial votes of the southern states, promised them to withdraw all remaining federal troops. As a result, Hayes became president, and the southern states regained their independence.
The need for bloody terror has disappeared. The states very quickly passed local laws, according to which blacks could not participate in elections. For this, various methods were used: electoral taxes, literacy tests, or even an amendment according to which only those whose grandfathers had voted in the previous elections could take part in the elections. Formally, these clauses did not mention skin color, but they actually excluded the right to vote for most former slaves. As for the legal prohibition of the Klan, in 1882 it was declared unconstitutional and canceled, but by that time the Ku Klux Klan was already history, as it seemed, forever.
Second birth
1915 - 50 years after the historic Christmas Eve in Pjulaski, the Ku Klux Klan is reborn. This time he was born on Stone Mountain in Georgia, and his father was an unfortunate Methodist pastor, Alabama native William Joseph Simmons. Simmons was a member of half a dozen different clubs, but his whole life dreamed of creating his own "brotherhood."
On the eve of Thanksgiving, Simmons gathered 15 future brothers in Atlanta, put them on a bus, drove them up the mountain, and there he put a match to a cross, hastily hammered out of pine boards. Nearby, an American flag fluttered in the wind, and the light of a burning cross illuminated the pages of the Bible opened in the Book of Romans. In this solemn and romantic atmosphere, those present took the oath of allegiance to the "Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan."
The new Clan proclaimed as its main idea "all-encompassing Americanism" and was inspired by the romantic notion of brave knights, which still remained with many Southerners and at that moment were spurred on by the grandiose film "Birth of a Nation", based on the novel "Clansman". When the film hit screens in Atlanta, Simmons placed Clan's ad in the local newspaper alongside the film's ad. It was from this film that Simmons borrowed the burning cross as one of the brightest symbols of the new organization; in fact, the Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction era did not practice the burning of crosses, but the Methodist preacher was close to the Christian symbol of the cross engulfed in flames.
Most likely, at first Simmons simply wanted to earn extra money (membership fee was $ 10) and command in his “brotherhood”, although he himself formulated his priorities differently: “Goodwill and brotherly kindness are the properties of my soul. Selfless patriotic service to people has been the unchanging goal of my mind and heart. To live "not for myself, but for others" (Non silba sed anthar) is my life motto, my highest goal and my royal glory. I truly love my brothers and all my life I wanted to serve them selflessly and for their good."
But in the conditions of mass immigration to America of "outsiders", as well as in the wake of patriotism caused by America's entry into the First World War, the Clan, like the first time, quickly surpassed the wildest expectations of its creator. The "purely charitable organization", which at various times was about to engage in the creation of universities, publishing houses, free housing for newlyweds, an orphanage program, medical research and the construction of hospitals, at the same time was determined to fight "external enemies, idlers, strikers and immoral women." The members of the club professed one hundred percent Americanism, Protestantism and the superiority of the white race, so that blacks, Catholics, Jews and foreigners in general were automatically among the enemies.
Political power
1920 - The Ku Klux Klan had 5,000 members, mostly in Georgia. By the end of 1921, the "Invisible Empire" had already numbered 100,000. And then the press came to the aid of Simmons: after a series of publications about the atrocities of the clan members and the investigation initiated by her in the Congress, the number of members exceeded a million. At the hearing, Simmons denied any connection with the "old" Clan and said that he knew nothing about the lawlessness of individual members of his organization and was not responsible for them. As a result, Congress left the Clan alone, but the hearings, as the satisfied Simmons admitted, became "free and much needed advertising", after which the new knights of the "Invisible Empire" were learned throughout America.
Many police officers, judges, pastors and city officials joined the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan, so victims could not count on their protection. Unlike the first Clan, the second recruited its supporters mainly not in the South, but in the Midwest, was especially numerous in cities, and not in the countryside, and relied not on rich aristocratic landowners, but mainly on poor whites, for whose white race was the only reason for pride.
During its heyday, the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan were, according to various estimates, from 3 to 5 million Americans, and some even call the figure 8.9 million. Of course, not everyone participated in the violence, but everyone voted for their candidates in the elections … In Texas, a Clan member became the state's representative to the US Senate; in Alabama, Georgia, California, Oregon, the Clan made sure that those who shared his views were elected governors, in many others it was simply impossible not to reckon with him.
Hiram Evans, a Texas dentist who succeeded Simmons as Imperial Magician, even hoped to influence the outcome of the 1924 presidential election, and so moved the Clan headquarters from Atlanta to Washington. The most innocent demonstration of the Ku Klux Klan's power was the grand parades. 1925 - 40,000 clan members in full dress took part in the march through the streets of Washington.
An inglorious end
The transfer of power from Simmons to Evans was accompanied by a series of high-profile scandals, lawsuits and even shooting. It was about millions of dollars: that is how much the property then owned by the Ku Klux Klan was worth. Eventually, in 1924, Evans managed to buy off Simmons, after which he ruled the KKK until 1939. But from the second half of the 1920s, the Clan's popularity began to decline. Monetary squabbles, which all of America knew about, the immoral behavior of many leaders of the organization defending traditional moral values, and numerous cases of beatings and murders motivated by racial hatred gradually tarnished the reputation of the knights of "100% Americanism".
The final straw was the trial of the Great Dragon of Indiana and other states, David Stephenson, who was convicted of brutally bitting, rape and murdering Madge Oberholzer. The end of the Ku Klux Klan was approached by journalist Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the organization and showed the public all its unsightly cuisine. In particular, he gave secret codes and passwords to the creators of the Superman radio series for children, after which all American children enthusiastically repeated this top-secret information. After that, few people could take the Clan seriously.
The state finished off the Clan in 1944, with the IRS demanding that the Clan pay more than $ 685,000 in taxes on income earned in the 1920s. “We had to sell what we had, hand over all the proceeds to the government, and then the business was over,” recalled then-Imperial magician James Colescott. After the war, Atlanta physician Samuel Greene tried to revive the movement, but to no avail. He passed away in 1949, the last recognized Imperial magician in history. After that, the Ku Klux Klan brand ceased to be a trademark and turned into the public domain. After a decade and a half, he was again in demand.
Ku Klux Klan - an attempt at revival
The last time the Ku Klux Klan made them talk about themselves was in the 1960s, when the Negro population of the South fought against segregation, for equal rights with whites. The maximum number of the Clan in the mid-1960s was 17,000. The Clan operated mainly in the South: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi.
This time, no one even tried to come up with any plausible excuses: it was pure terror against blacks who intend to use their suffrage and the white activists who helped them. However, those who sympathized with such tactics this time were significantly fewer than in previous historical periods.
In particular, everyone was shocked by the explosion in Birmingham in September 1963, when a bomb killed on the steps of the church four Negro girls, 11-14 years old, Sunday school students (the youngest of them was a friend of Condoleezza Rice) …
In our time, there are several organizations that are concerned with preserving the historical heritage of the southern states and speak with enthusiasm about the patriarchal, noble South, where everyone was happy, the owners took care of the slaves, and the slaves answered them with devotion, and where slavery would eventually be overcome by itself …
However, even in the conditions of the accelerated emancipation of slaves imposed by the North, it took more than a hundred years to achieve equality of races. So the reasoning about the irretrievably lost good old days does not look very convincing; For some reason, the majority of people associate the sight of people in white caps, masks and robes not with gallant aristocrats and not with defenders of widows and orphans, but with burning crosses and lifeless bodies on lamp posts.
A. Frolova
Recommended viewing: Ku Klux Klan - History of Secret Societies