The Ku Klux Klan in NYC

One hundred years ago today … The New York Tribune was reporting that a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan based in Van Cortland, the Bronx, had attacked police and destroyed an unpopular billboard, the center of weeks-long feud.

The KKK was in its second ascendancy in 1920, having been re-booted five years earlier, on Thanksgiving, November 25, 1915 at Stone Mountain, Georgia, after its founder William Joseph Simmons watched D.W. Griffith's movie Birth of a Nation. The new KKK was galvanized by rising nativist (what we now call white supremacist) attitudes among US Whites. Linda Gordon's The Second Coming of the KKK explains the function and intent of the Klan's nativism, quoting from the group’s published statements:

Nativism already had a long and respectable tradition in the United States, a tradition that encouraged the second Klan to broaden its enemies beyond African Americans…. The Klan argued not only for an end to the immigration of non-"Nordics" but also for deporting those already here. The date of their immigration, their longevity in the United States, mattered not. The country should expel "certain types and races which will not in a hundred years of residence here be anything but a menace. They should be kept out—and put out." (26-8)

While racism against Blacks was a given, the 1920s Klan inveighed against Catholics and Jews, as such groups, according to white supremacist misinformation campaigns, were both racially inferior and threats to American values. "Catholics were welcome to convert,” Gordon writes, but “Jews and nonwhites–and many at the time still considered Jews nonwhite–were unredeemable" (28). Antisemitism especially fueled the organization, as Jews were part of "a secular international cabal of financiers who planned to take over the American economy" (49). 

The 1920s Klan was a mainstream movement, operating openly, influencing electoral politics and, eventually, immigration policy. “The majority of this KKK were mainstream, mostly Protestant, citizens [who] saw the group as a social or even charitable club” (MacAndrew). Contrary to frequent misconceptions, the 1920s Klan "was stronger in the North than in the South." and was, furthermore, more of an urban than a rural movement (Gordon, 2, 21).

New York played a key role in the KKK's resurgence. As a publishing capitol, NYC facilitated the influence of such books as Thomas Dixon's The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (A. Wessels, 1907), the novel on which Birth of a Nation is based; and racist manifestos like New York native Madison Grant's The Passing of a Great Race (1916), and 1920's The Rising Tide of Color Against World Wide Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard. The latter two were put out by the prestigious Charles Scribner's Sons, the publishing home of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, whose works show influence of nativist thinking.

Note: we covered The Rising Tide of Color Against World Wide Supremacy in our May 2 post, and Fitzgerald makes repeated appearances on this site.

That said, there seems to have been uncertainty over the KKK's presence in 1920 New York City. Contrary to the Tribune, the New York Times report of the November 25 incident does not mention the organization’s involvement ("Armed Party Again Attacks Park Sign," New York Times, 26 November 1920, p. 14).

In December, The NAACP, led by James Weldon Johnson, petitioned Mayor John Hylan and Governor Al Smith to investigate reports that a NYC chapter of the KKK had been formed.

Ten days later, New York State responded by officially banning the organization, instituting a legal battle that would last 80-plus years.

References/Further reading:

Gordon, Linda. The Second Coming of the KKK. (New York: Liveright, 2017).

McAndrew, Tara. “The History of the KKK in American Politics.” JSTOR Daily. 25 January 2017.

– JONATHAN GOLDMAN, NOVEMBER 26, 2020

TAGS: racism, antisemitism, hate groups, cult, gang, domestic terrorism, publishing, white identity