The Fiery Cross

Wyn Craig Wade, “The Fiery Cross” (The Ku Klux Klan in America), Simon and Schuster, 1987, 403 Pages

This book on the Klan should be required reading for anyone teaching American history; it would be too much to expect the students to actually read it. Wade thoroughly documents his assertions, many which are quite novel. The Klan has often been a powerful force, as it encouraged Americans to protect themselves from those they find "unacceptable." Its actions have often made it one of the most feared groups in America.

In The Fiery Cross, Wyn Craig Wade traces the Klan from its beginnings after the Civil War as a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, to the present. Wade provides us with the history of the group, which has gone through a number of declines and rebirths over the last hundred years. He describes the Klan's resurgence in 1915 after D.W. Griffith's epic film The Birth of a Nation depicted Klan members as heroic saviors of the old Southern society, to the swearing in of President Warren G. Harding as a Klansman in the Green Room, and from the Klan's championing of white supremacy as a response to the Civil Rights movement in the 60s and J. Edgar Hoover’s obstruction of any worthwhile investigations (also, see COINTELPRO), to their present day activities, aligning themselves with a variety of neo-fascist and right-wing groups in the American West.
My notes:

Pg. 82: Ever since the passage of the Reconstruction acts, the South had taunted the North with the injustice of enfranchising Southern blacks when they were still denied the ballot in a majority of states above the Mason-Dixon line. Congress eventually came through with the 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade denying suffrage anywhere in the U.S. on the basis of race.

Pg. 105: The Klan had been caused by a continuation of Southern Civil War passions, carried on by the most violent diehards of the former Confederacy who denied that blacks were entitled to anything more than a servile role in society. In time, the Klan had become a political organization whose purpose was to overwhelm blacks, preserve the South inviolate from Northern and federal influence, and to guarantee white Democratic supremacy.

Pg 110: In retrospect, the Ku-Klux Klan didn’t weaken Radical Reconstruction nearly as much as they nurtured it. So long as an organized, secret conspiracy swore oaths and used cloak-and-dagger methods in the South, Congress was willing to legislate against it—legislation that would provide vital safeguards for the cause of racial equality in the future. The Klan was temporarily suppressed in the later 1870’s which then ended the Reconstruction period. The North may have won the war, but the South had now won the peace. It was a peace in which Southern blacks fund themselves noncitizens, unable to vote, consigned to inadequate housing and menial employment and their children to inferior schools.

Pg. 113: The Republicans’ abandonment of Southern blacks was strongly abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court. In crucial decisions made between 1876 and 1898, it steadily eliminated the human protections of the Fourteenth Amendment while it expanded its meaning in terms of property. By 1883, the court had struck down the most stringent clauses of the Enforcement and Ku-Klux acts; although it left significant scraps that would be useful a century later, its declaration that the enforcement acts protected only federal, not states’, rights effectively curtailed the enforcement program. In the same year, the court declared the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional and wiped it from the books completely. Finally, in the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896, the court legitimized racial segregation. Only Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented in this historic decision, saying the “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case”. After the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the South began enacting segregation laws, barring blacks from white public vehicles, train depots, restaurants, circuses, pool halls, drinking fountains, bathrooms, beaches, parks, pools, and recreation centers.

Pg. 120: The D. W. Griffith 1915 movie, Birth of a Nation, was the first motion-picture blockbuster—one that would gross well over $60 million & establish movies as a major American industry. This movie would soon envelop the nation in a bitter controversy, trigger race riots and revive the Ku-Klux Klan. President Wilson had a showing in the East room and commented after the showing: “It is like writing history with lightning,” he told them, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” (Also, Chief Justice Edward D White was a Klan member). It is also important to know that while Birth of a Nation should not be confused with truth, but it was indeed history. It was a faithful composite of the “proven facts” and “authentic evidence” contained in the most reputable history books of 1915, one which was written by Woodrow Wilson. The unfortunate thing was that The Birth of a Nation would bring these distortions powerfully to the masses, indelibly affecting the way white America regarded Reconstruction for the next forty-five years.

Pg. 165: In 1922, President Warren G Harding agreed to be sworn in as a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the Green Room of the White House. Afterward, the President appreciatively gave the Klan members of the team that sworn him in War Department license tags that allowed them to run red lights all across the nation. (Other historians dispute this allegation).

Pg. 169: While fundamentalism would make a controversial, oven divisive contribution to religion in twentieth-century America, its most critical impact on our social and political history was that, without it, the Ku Klux Klan could never have enrolled the fantastic numbers nor have gained the remarkable power it wielded between 1922 and 1925.
Possibly as many as forty thousand fundamentalist ministers joined the Klan. Many of them became the first Exalted Cyclopes of their local communities. In Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Maine, the support of the clergy was indispensable to Klan growth.

Pg. 182: The ultimate result of the Klan’s virile Christianity, its alliance with the fundamentalist clergy, its anti-Catholicism and uniting of diverse white Protestants under the twin banners of fear and prejudice was that, by 1924, the Klan had essentially became its own church. From 1921 to 1924, Klan membership grew to 4 million, and available evidence suggests that most of these people were led into the Invisible Empire primarily by spiritual needs . Membership would wither to about 45,000 by 1930.

Pg. 215: In no other state would the Klan have the impact it had on Indiana (1922-25). It was the only state where Klaverns were chartered in every one of its ninety-two counties. It was the only state where the Klan elected the governor and both US. senators.

PG. 366: Instead of hobbling the stride toward freedom in the 1960’s, the Klan quickened it. By beating the freedom riders, Klansmen accidentally killed Jim row in interstate travel. In the wake of Birmingham, St. Augustine, and the COFO murders in Mississippi came the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the wake of Selma and Viola Liuzzo’s murder came the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1974 the number of Klansmen had shrunk to an all-time low of fifteen hundred. It seemed as if the Klan was dying out completely. Of course, it had also seemed that way in 1930, in 1944, and in 1952.