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 7—
Conclusion    
 
 Many Hoosiers were deeply troubled by the ability of the Ku Klux Klan to influence state and local politics. Blacks, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and numerous white Protestants expressed amazement, outrage, and frustration that the Klan had come so far. They also worried, of course, that Klan-dominated government would produce undesirable changes in Indiana. After the Klan's victory in the 1924 primary, the state's leading black newspaper concluded that "the Republican party exists in Indiana today only in name," having been turned into "an agency for the promotion of religious and social hate." The Indiana Catholic and Record, after struggling against the Klan throughout the spring and fall campaigns, could not bring itself even to mention the outcome of the November election. 1  
 
 Fears that Indiana had embarked on a new and perhaps dangerous political course, however, were not realized. By mid-1925, the Klan movement had lost much of its momentum. Active membership had declined; the Klan-controlled state legislature had adjourned, leaving behind a generally insignificant record; and the organization's former Grand Dragon was serving a life sentence for murder. The election of 1924 had been not a beginning but a climax.     
 
 Success in the statewide campaign actually contributed to some extent to the Klan's decline by providing an obvious demonstration of continued white Protestant hegemony in Indiana. After all, the cen- 

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 tral issue of the campaign had been the Klan itself, not Prohibition, the Catholic threat, racial fears, or immigration. Even when these issues were raised, the electorate regarded them primarily as symbols of a wide range of commonly felt concerns, anxieties, and indignations. On one level, the Klan's political victory resulted not from a strong attachment to a specific agenda, but from the need of a huge section of the population to express its frustration arising from a complex, often ambiguous array of social and cultural conditions. In this regard, the election of 1924 had been extremely successful—so successful, in fact, that it seemed to begin dissipating the energy behind the Klan movement. The election proved that Klansmen could be elected to all levels of public office and affirmed that Indiana's white Protestant majority was still in command. Men and women who had believed that the foundation of their way of life might be crumbling beneath their feet could feel an uncommon sense of satisfaction. Deeply held traditional values, a common ethnic bond, and a sense of community seemed to have been upheld.    
 
 Of course, the Indiana Klan did not immediately disappear after 1924. The Indianapolis city election of 1925 represented one example of the order's continued popularity in some places. Many klaverns held meetings and scheduled holiday social activities just as they had in previous years, even though they sparked much less interest. Klan political candidates continued to be elected in other communities as well, and a brief Klan rejuvenation occurred in response to Al Smith's presidential campaign in 1928. 2 But the movement never again stimulated the wild excitement of 1923 and 1924, and, given the enormous following it attracted in that brief time, the speed with which it appeared to lose significance was remarkable indeed.  
 
 Clearly, the shameful scandals involving the leaders of the Indiana Klan played a major role in the decline of the statewide movement. The ugly details of Stephenson's assault and murder of Madge Oberholtzer; his obvious contempt for the judicial system that tried him and his smug belief that he would escape punishment; the association of the governor of the state and the mayor of its largest city with Stephenson, or even with the organization that had allowed such a man to be its leader—all of these events violated the moral standards that the Klan had claimed to champion. Surely, thousands 

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 of Klansmen abandoned the movement as a direct result of the scandals. One Lake County Klansman probably spoke for many disenchanted members when he explained in his letter of resignation that he still supported the Klan's ideals but could no longer follow its corrupt leaders. 3  

   
 
 It may also have been inevitable that the Klan would begin to lose momentum once the building phase of the movement was complete and the onus fell—for the first time—on the order's inept leaders to produce something tangible with their newfound political influence. Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana's Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan's stated goals. They were disinterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement. For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power. These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership. More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan—even those who did not but felt pressure to pursue some of the interests of their Klan constituents—also accomplished little. Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience. When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan's behalf.  

   
 
 Even if the Klan had not been undermined by corruption and weak leadership, the movement could not have survived long as a viable political force. Klan organizations inspired constant, dedicated opposition by black, Catholic, Jewish, and immigrant groups. In many of the nation's major urban centers, these groups were so powerful that the Klan could not hope to sustain any lasting momentum. Even in Indiana, spokespersons for ethnic minority groups helped thwart the Klan with persistent reminders that democratic institutions were not well served by an organization that had a reputation for secrecy, violence, and bigotry. At the same time, none of the social ills that had stimulated support for the Klan showed any sign of disappearing and very quickly the order proved to be useless 

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 as a vehicle for change or reform. The problem of Prohibition violation, for example, was not made any less intractable by the Bone Dry bill, Ed Jackson, or other Klan politicians at the state and local level. Illegal alcohol continued to flow, and by the mid-1920s few white Protestants entertained hope that anyone or any movement could succeed in stopping it. 4 Even more significant, the vast array of social changes that had undermined traditional values, altered the structure of community life, and concentrated more authority into the hands of elites was also resistant to the Klan's unfocused efforts. In fact, business leaders and Old Guard politicians who had been displaced by the movement stood ready to counterattack at the first opportunity.  

   
 
 D. C. Stephenson, Ed Jackson, and John Duvall provided perfect openings for Indiana's Republican establishment. Once the scandals erupted, Old Guard leaders began a two-year campaign to distance the party from the Klan movement and to explain the order's political influence as a particularly insidious episode of corruption. In 1926, an unidentified group of wealthy Republican businessmen financed a "secret investigation to find out on whose front door the crookedness could be hung." Concurrently, the editors of fifteen Republican newspapers around the state agreed to take up the same task, publishing a series of investigative reports on the Klan's political corruption. One of the leaders of this effort was Thomas H. Adams, of the Vincennes Commercial, who initially had been receptive to the local Klan chapter. Edward H. Harris of the Richmond Palladium, a business booster and longtime opponent of the Klan, was also deeply involved, attacking state and local Klan politicians in a series of reports appearing from 1926 to 1928. The anti-Klan Indianapolis Times, while not as closely linked with the Republican establishment as other newspapers, gained the widest reputation for its assault on political corruption within the Invisible Empire; in 1928, it won the Pulitzer Prize for a two-year series of articles.5  

   
 
 Soon after the scandals began, the Republican establishment was back in control of the party and the politicians who had been elected with Klan support in 1924 or 1925 could no longer count on the Klan voting bloc. Those who remained in office for more than a few years had no choice but to accept the power of the Old Guard. The Repub- 

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 lican establishment would not be successfully challenged again until after 1929, when the Great Depression transformed state and national politics. 6  

   
 
 Still, the Indiana Klan movement was extremely powerful, albeit for a short time. On the surface, the movement symbolized ethnic chauvinism and political corruption. But beneath the outer layers of racial and religious bigotry and venal leadership, both of which hardly distinguished the Klan movement from America in general during the 1920s, there existed a more complex and fundamental explanation for the Klan's popularity. Indiana's Invisible Empire was molded out of populist energies representing a broad spectrum of concerns. It became a kind of interest group for average white Protestants who believed that their values should be dominant in their community and state as well as in American society. Those who joined the Klan did so because it stood for the most organized means of resisting the social and economic forces that had transformed community life, undermined traditional values, and made average citizens feel more isolated from one another and more powerless in their relationships with the major institutions that governed their lives.  

   
 
 A number of recent works on the Klan have drawn similar, if not exactly the same conclusions. Taken together, these works along with this book provide some justification for making several new generalizations about the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.  

   
 
 First, historians should abandon the notion that the Klan movement was driven primarily by a sense of conflict between white Protestant America and urban-immigrant America. Although white Protestants had been aroused, and Catholics, Jews, and blacks represented convenient, time-honored targets for the expression of their pent-up frustrations, the real source of white Protestant discontent was more deeply rooted in a broader process of social change. Previous interpretations of the Klan were flawed because they began with the premise of ethnic conflict and built their arguments around the Klan's rhetoric rather than around its activities. According to the oldest explanation, the conflict was between rural, small-town white Protestants and the ethnically diverse cities. Later, Kenneth Jackson argued that the site of the struggle actually lay within the nation's large cities, where ethnic minorities encroached  

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 on native white Protestant hegemony. In Orange County, California, however, the Klan took over local government, completely ignoring the small population of Mexican-Americans that resided there. And in Colorado, where the Klan was powerful enough to assume control of state government, Robert Goldberg found that ethnic minorities constituted an insignificant threat to white Protestant authority and were not the main focus of the Klan movement. Even in Youngstown, Ohio, where the immigrant and black populations had made native-born white Protestants a numerical minority, the Klan's success resulted from widespread support for traditional moral values and law enforcement, not from problems of residential competition or economic marginality among white Protestants. 7  

   
 
 In Indiana, ethnic conflict also played only a minor role in the success of the Klan movement. Patterns in statewide Klan membership showed no significant relationship with the geographic distribution of the state's relatively small number of ethnic minorities. The Klan thrived in cities, but it demonstrated equal strength in many rural areas where immigrants and blacks represented only a minuscule proportion of the population. In fact, regression analysis shows that residents of communities with populations of less than 2,500 were no more likely to join the Klan than residents of communities with 25,000 or 250,000 inhabitants. For the most part, individual Klan chapters paid little attention to local neighborhoods of Catholics, Jews, or blacks where they existed. Given the insignificant threat these groups represented to white Protestant dominance and the fact that numerous means already existed to control them if it appeared necessary, Klan chapters generally had little reason to concern themselves with harassing ethnic minorities.  

   
 
 Klan activities and membership patterns demonstrate that the main stimulus of the Klan movement had been the deterioration of a sense of cohesion, order, and shared power in community life, a process in which Indiana's ethnic minorities played only a small role. While the Klan was popular throughout the state, membership was highest in regions where economic growth had done the most to alter the traditional sense of community. These regions naturally included the cities, both large and small, that had been transformed by industrial expansion. They also included the mining counties of southwestern Indiana and a large number of rural counties, particu-  

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 larly those with the most successful and most modern commercial farms. The most popular Klan activities were those that engendered a sense of community, that drew together disparate social groups through a powerful appeal to white Protestant ethnic identity. These comprised not only massive demonstrations, picnics, and parades and well-supported efforts to bring about civic improvements; they also included political campaigns that challenged economic and political elites for the control of community affairs.  

   
 
 Related to the idea that the outpouring of ethnic consciousness resulted from the decline of community rather than conflicts with ethnic minorities per se is a second general conclusion having to do with where the national Klan movement was centered. The views that the Klan owed its strength to rural and small-town America or that the nation's large cities constituted the core of the Klan movement are both incorrect. Goldberg found equal enthusiasm for the hooded order in small Colorado towns and in Denver, concluding that, in this state, at least, "the urban-rural dichotomy proved useless as a guide to understanding the secret society." 8 This was also true of Indiana. Taken together, the cases of these two states suggest that the heart of the national Klan movement lay in those regions of the country, both urban and rural, where white Protestants represented an overwhelming majority and where an awakened sense of white Protestant ethnic identity could be used to gain greater popular control over community affairs. This would explain why the Klan achieved nationwide popularity in the 1920s and why it reached its greatest strength in states such as Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas, and in individual communities like Orange County, California, where white Protestants were particularly dominant. It also would explain why the Klan was doomed to fail in large cities such as Chicago and New York, where the influence of ethnic minorities matched or surpassed that of white Protestants.9  

   
 
 A third idea supported by this and other studies relates to the timing of the national Klan movement. After all, the hooded order had been active since 1915 and the strains on community cohesion had much deeper roots. Why, then, did the Klan erupt when it did? Traditionally, scholars have cited the residual effects of World War I: leftover nationalist passions, anxiety about renewed mass immigration from Europe, fear of internal subversion from political radicals,  

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 and postwar economic difficulties. By feeding the notion of a besieged America, these forces did contribute to the power of the Klan, just as they had helped spark the postwar race riots and the Red Scare. 10 Another common explanation, however, has been that the Klan epitomized the desire of Americans to "return to normalcy," to abandon the crusades of the Progressive Era.11 This view now appears to be incorrect. In Indiana, Colorado, and Orange County, California, the Klan represented a desire to carry on many of the goals and ideals of those crusades, not reject them. The Klan movement was triggered, in good part, not by disillusionment with progressivism, but by a yearning to fill the void left by its demise. The great symbol of that desire was Prohibition. Support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation. The crisis created in communities throughout the United States by the ban on alcohol provided the greatest catalyst for the Klan movement, and during the early 1920s, the Klan became the most popular means of expressing support for the Noble Experiment.12  

   
 
 The pattern of confrontation between Klan groups and community elites represents another justification for the populist interpretation. At a time when organizations like the Rotary club, Chambers of Commerce, and the Indiana Farm Bureau had emerged to advocate definition of community based almost exclusively on the idea of business success, the Klan drew together a powerful cross section of community social groups that were devoted to the primacy of a more traditional value system. Through massive demonstrations, parades, and holiday celebrations—many of them the largest ever to occur in individual towns and cities—Klan chapters forcefully asserted the notion that the essence of community was its shared ethnic culture, not simply its ability to generate profit. To members of the business elite, who generally shunned the Klan and, in many communities, led the fight against it, such populist energies constituted a grave threat, one that eventually was manifested in a wave of Klan political victories over established party organizations. 

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 Appendix—
Documentation  

   
 
 All of the Klan membership documents used in this study were made available by the Indiana Historical Society with the stipulation that I not reveal the names of individual Klansmen. Accordingly, the names of Klansmen mentioned in this study were disclosed by another source. The identities of the Wayne County Klansmen I interviewed for this book are not exposed. No one I interviewed and identified by name was a member of the Klan.  

   
 
 Occupational samples for Indianapolis and Richmond were made using city directories for 1922–25. For Indianapolis, the names of five hundred Klansmen were selected at random from the Tolerance membership list (''Complete Roll of Indianapolis Klux," Indiana Historical Society) using a random number table. Names that could not be located in the city directory were replaced by other randomly selected names from the Klan list. A random number table was then used to select the names of five hundred men directly from the directory. Occupational categories were modeled after those used in Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians. Thernstrom's Appendix B (pp. 289–302) provides a list of occupations for each category. The same technique was used to obtain the occupational sample for Richmond. The only difference between the Indianapolis and Richmond samples is that the Richmond sample was compared with a sample of non-Klansmen, rather than with a sample of all men living in Richmond. 

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 While the occupations of Indianapolis and Richmond Klansmen could be determined from readily available public records, their religious affiliations proved much more difficult to establish. In the case of Indianapolis, it would have been almost impossible to discover the church membership status of a sample of five hundred Klansmen. This would have required obtaining the membership records of virtually all of the Protestant churches in Indianapolis during the 1920s. Even if such records existed for all churches, it is doubtful that a meaningful number of churches would have allowed their membership registers to be searched for the names of former Klansmen. Indeed, gaining the cooperation of even a small number of churches in this effort required months of work. The only reasonable way to estimate the religious affiliation of Indianapolis Klansmen was to construct a very large sample of Protestant church members from one geographic area of the city that paralleled the spectrum of Indianapolis's Protestant denominations. Each denomination and group of denominations could then be checked against the Tolerance membership list to establish the percentage of Klan members.  

   
 
 The churches selected were located in the central part of Indianapolis and generally represented the largest Protestant congregations in the city. Almost all membership records were obtained directly from the churches themselves; the balance were made available by the Manuscripts Division of the Indiana State Library and the Roy O. West Library Archives, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana. Indianapolis churches consulted in this study are cited in the bibliography. The names of church members for the sample were selected using a random number table. The number of names chosen for each denomination is proportional to the church membership figures for Indianapolis as reported in the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies (1926).  

   
 
 For the city of Richmond, I originally attempted to construct a similar sample of Protestant church members. This was not possible, however, because key Presbyterian and Baptist churches did not wish their records to be used in this study. An acceptable alternative existed thanks to Richmond's public library. The Morrisson-Reeves Library contains an extensive biographical index of newspa- 

  
 
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 per articles, a very large percentage of which are obituaries. In their obituaries, the Richmond newspapers regularly listed the religious affiliation of the deceased. Using a random number table, I selected the names of more than seven hundred members of the Richmond Klan, then located obituaries for more than a third of these men. Those not linked with a church in their obituaries were counted as "not affiliated." The obituaries used in this study covered the entire period between 1927 and 1981 and did not account for changes in religious affiliation that occurred during those years. Obituaries also had the disadvantage of providing information only about Klansmen who were long-term residents of Richmond. More obscure or geographically mobile individuals were probably underrepresented in the sample.  

   
 
 Occupational and religious data for Crown Point Klansmen came directly from Klan membership applications located in the Crown Point Ku Klux Klan Collection, Indiana Historical Society.  

   
 
 The sample of residence locations for Indianapolis Klansmen and all males in Indianapolis was taken from the Indianapolis Klan membership list published in Tolerance and the Indianapolis City Directory; these locations appear on the National Street Map of Indianapolis (National Map Company, 1921; courtesy of the Indiana State Library). Boundary lines are as follows:  

   
 
 For the North-Central area:  

   
 
 Washington Street on the south; White River on the west; Thirtieth Street on the north; State, West, Windsor, Commerce, Roosevelt, and Martindale avenues on the east.  

   
 
 For the South-Central area:  

   
 
 Washington Street on the north; White River on the west; Morris Street on the south; State Avenue on the east.  

   
 
 For the North:  

   
 
 White River and Martindale Avenue on the west; Thirtieth Street and Massachusetts Avenue on the south and east.  

   
 
 For the West:  

   
 
 White River on the east.  

 

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 For the South:  

   
 
 Morris, Ayers, and Prospect streets on the north.  

   
 
 For the East:  

   
 
 Morris, Ayers, and Prospect streets on the south; State, Windsor, Commerce, and Massachusetts avenues on the west and north.