Echoes of Reconstruction: Kommercialization of the KKK: How Businesses and Charities Kashed In

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog.

I have been posting about Reconstruction for the last five years on Emerging Civil War, and several readers have asked me why so few of my articles have dealt with the Ku Klux Klan. One reason is that many who come to this site know at least a rudimentary amount about the Klan, without much knowledge about the Freedmen’s Bureau, Black resistance to terrorism, or the statutory prohibitions on racial discrimination. I have also written articles explaining the role of Federal troops in the South, the evolution of the Lost Cause during Reconstruction, and the establishment of Black institutions in the old Confederacy.

However, over the last three months I have started a new series on the Ku Klux Klan and its “Echoes” long after it ceased to actively exist. I started with a look at the constitution of the Ku Klux Klan and why the Klan persecuted Scalawags as political and race traitors. Today, I want to discuss the commercialization and popular appeal of the Klan during the Reconstruction Era and for a half-century afterwards. This commercialization kept the Klan ideology alive even after its activities ceased and helped revive it into a bigger group in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Within two years of the first meeting of the Klan, commercial interests were starting to capitalize off of their connection to the group. For example, Pulaski, Tennessee. is usually considered the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. In the hottest days of 1868, as a campaign of White Terror was sweeping the South, a candy store advertised in the Pulaski Citizen that it had a Ku Klux soda fountain! Perhaps the only flavor was vanilla… but this was not just a Tennessee phenomenon. In October 1868, the Oxford Mississippi Falcon reported on “Ku-Klux” flour for baking was being sold in the local markets. Tie-ins between the “secret” organization and publicly traded goods increased the value of both.

Recreational allusions to the Klan also became popular. So, for example, by January of 1869, the Mobile Register reported that men in Augusta were now playing Ku-Klux Euchre, a four-player card game in which the Ku-Klux “always trumps.” Song sheets were being sold invoking the Klan, and plays were being produced as well.

The Klan was so popular that even during general community events, it was invoked. The 1872 Memphis Mardi Gras featured a Klan float. This was the first-ever Mardi Gras parade in the city, which had seen a bloody massacre of Blacks in 1866 and Klan activity from 1867 onwards. The rabidly pro-Klan Memphis Avalanche described the float; “Those mythical terrors to negroes, the Ku-Klux were well represented. . . . In every instance they were in black, with high hats of a conical shape. Each hat bore the skull and cross bones and the terrible letters K. K. K. in white. As they marched along, the Negroes [moved] back. Many of the K. K.’s had rope lassos, and it was a favorite bit of pleasantry to lasso a Negro. No violence was offered, but the contortions and grimaces of the captives were highly amusing.”

One of the odder events one encounters in reading Southern newspapers of the Reconstruction Era is the propensity of elite white citizens to organize Medieval–style tournaments in which contestants pretending to be knights would fight each other with lances and broadswords. These were, I suppose, a sort of 19th century RenFaire. The Nashville’s Daily Union newspaper reported on Nov 10, 1867 that one of these tournaments had taken place nearby. This 1867 “tournament” was held to benefit the Rose Hill Cemetery by raising funds to erect a Confederate statue honoring the dead. Rose Hill is in Columbia, Tennessee, the heart of Klan Country at the time. Four Ku Kluxers appeared at the gathering, two dressed in red robes and the other two in black. They had a white flag with “Ku Klux” on it. Four hundred spectators witnessed the appearance of the terrorist organization on the field. The newspaper described the white women in attendance as the “prettiest” of their gender.

By the early 1900s, the association of the Klan with the legacy of the Confederacy was a potent fundraising force. The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans used their fathers’ ties to the Klan as a motivating force for joining the later-day Confederate heritage organizations. For example, at the 1909 United Confederate Veterans convention, Thomas Sisson addressed the meeting on behalf of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in which he said:

Great and trying times always produce great leaders, and one was at hand—Nathan Bedford Forrest. His plan, the only course left open. The organization of a secret government. A terrible government; a government that would govern in spite of black majorities and Federal bayonets. This secret government was organized in every community in the South, and this government is known in history as the Klu Klux Clan [sic]… Here in all ages to come the Southern romancer and poet can find the inspiration for fiction and song. No nobler or grander spirits ever assembled on this earth than gathered in these clans. No human hearts were ever moved with nobler impulses or higher aims and purposes…Order was restored, property safe; because the negro feared the Klu Klux Clan more than he feared the devil. 

“The Clansman” by David Dixon was one of a number of novels to use the Klan as the background for romantic novels of Southern whites defying the relaxation of Black subordination during Reconstruction. “The Clansman” was published in 1905, and in 1915 D.W. Griffith released “Birth of a Nation.” This film was so popular that even outside the South people flooded theaters to view it. In its first year, more than 3 million people in New York alone paid to view it.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was reportedly a guiding force in the original Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s, and his grandson and namesake played a similar role in the revived Klan of the 1920s and 1930s. The 20th century Nathan Bedford Forrest ran the business side of what became known as  Klan Kollege (Lanier University) for a year before it failed financially. Ironically, the Klan Kampus of Lanier later became a synagogue! Forrest said “Our institution will teach pure 100% Americanism.” He added that “the central idea involved in the operation of Lanier University by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is to do what few universities are doing…and that is to teach pure Americanism…Most of our large universities now are turning out socialists, cynics and atheists.” He appealed for one million dollars in charitable contributions saying that “Lanier will be operated under the direction of the Ku Klux KLan…” and it “will be open to the sons and daughters of real Americans who desire that their children receive instruction in the true history of their country…”