One of the puzzles of our history is how western New York fell under the sway of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Most people would have thought it was a relic of Reconstruction days down south. But exploding almost from nowhere after the First World War, the Klan suddenly became a great power in the land, up to and including controlling the goverments in some states… even in the north. In New York it was especially powerful on Long Island, in Binghamton, and here in the western counties.
*Hate, bigotry, prejudice, stereotypes, and POWER drove the Klan. In the 1920s, a CATHOLIC, Al Smith, was governor of New York! He ran for president! Well, this was a Protestant country! “Everybody knew” that Catholics HAD to obey orders from their priests, or they would go to Hell, and priests HAD to follow orders from the Pope, so all the Catholic voters would put a Catholic in the white house, and we would be ruled from Rome by the Pope pulling the president’s strings. When Al Smith campaigned through Oklahoma in 1928, the Klan burned crosses all along the railroad route. It didn’t break him, and it didn’t stop him. But his family said that the tidal wave of hatred haunted him for the rest of his life.
*Fear also drove the Klan, and certainly there were things to be afraid about. Here in our region in the 1920s, farm folks were already in the grip of the Depression. As far back as 1900 families had begun walking away from the hilltop farms, which had become so uncompetitive that there wasn’t even any point in trying to sell the land. Now prices collapsed as World War I ended, and farmers were stuck with time payments on the tractors and other equipment that they’d bought to replace the young men who went into uniform. Prohibition clobbered the grape growers and the wineries. The big Curtiss plant in Hammondsport closed, putting almost a thousand people out of work. Then the young men came back from the war, and couldn’t find work, as the government said, not OUR problem! If you haven’t got a job it’s because you’re lazy, or because you’re not good enough to be hired. It’s your own fault.
*Motorcars annihilated economic life out in the hamlets. They had had their own stores, schools, doctors, churches, undertakers. But who needed the little store in Coss Corners or Harrisburg Hollow when you could drive to Bath… or from Perkinsville to Wayland, Bloomerville to Avoca, Hornby to Corning? The rich man of Risingville was now a guy who ran a funny little shop in the sticks, with an outhouse in the back, and a kerosene lamp on the counter.
*How could this be happening? How was their way of life being snatched away from them? They could have answered this question by sitting down to study historical, social, economic and technological forces, OR they could grab a prepackaged answer that (a) was easy and (b) gave THEM no blame and no responsibility whatsoever!
*So if you didn’t have jobs, it’s because of the immigrants! If kids were leaving the churches, it’s because of modern ideas foisted on us by faraway professors and writers and movie makers! If the bank wouldn’t extend your loan, it’s because the Jews are strangling us! If there was crime, it’s because of all those Italian mobsters that we’ve never actually SEEN, but people keep telling us about! If our political power was slipping away, it’s because women can vote now, and so many people have moved to those cities!
*The Klan got its start as a terrorist group attacking African Americans, and also attacking white Americans who believed in a biracial country. One of the first movie spectaculars, “The Birth of a Nation,” had whitewashed and popularized it in the ‘teens, and that surely helped the “new” Klan, along with aggressive modern marketing and advertising techniques.
*So did the expansion of its “mission.” Here in our area, Klan propaganda against African Americans seemed sort of pro forma. Their real rage was reserved for Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and leftists.
*The Klan was wildly popular in, and enthusiastically supported by, many area Protestant churches. In Penn Yan they picketed against the Catholic church, and boycotted non-Protestant businesses. Many churches hosted Ku Klux Klan delegations, in which robed and hooded Klansmen marched into services singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” made a donation, and received the blessing of the pastor and the thunderous applause of the congregation. Crosses burned on hills throughout the region, and sometimes on the lawns of Catholics and immigrants.
*The movement lost steam once Al Smith passed from power, and the Great Depression demanded everyone’s full attention. The Klan’s state head in Indiana raped and brutalized his secretary, then prevented her from getting medical help until she died, undercutting the Klan’s claim to be defending Christian morality.
*People in our region gave up on the Klan, and pretty much stopped talking about it. But a surprising number kept their robes, regalia, and other memorabilia, squirreled away in attics in trunks that would be opened by horrified grandchildren cleaning out after the old folks’ deaths.
*One senior citizen told me that his father-in-law had admitted his long-ago membership in the Klan, but insisted that the only real issue locally was to demand than any voter be required to be literate in English. While that concern would fit, I have to say that I’ve never actually found it in any documents from the 1920s. My friend and I both assumed that that was how the father-in-law, decades later, justified to himself the years that he spent in America’s leading hate group.