In addition to its field force, the propagation department of the Ku Klux
Klan, I learned, uses motion pictures and paid lecturers to spread the
germs of Ku Kluxism. There is a picture entitled, "The Face at Your
Window" that is being used extensively as an aid to the canvassing
Kleagles. The film company arranges with the local Kleagle to have this
picture exhibited on a certain day, and each Klansman is requested to
bring a friend with him to see it. At the close of the performance the
Klansman hands his friend an application blank and through the
psychological effect of the picture usually gets the other to join. The
system of using lecturers seems to help considerably to swell the Ku Klux
roster.
Still another method of winning members was by newspaper advertising. The
Exalted Cyclops, the head, of the Knoxville Klan showed me the copy for a
full page advertisement that his Klan intended inserting in the Knoxville
papers to secure the five hundred membership necessary before their Klan
could procure a charter. I saw that such wholesale solicitation of
members could have but one result--inevitably the control of this secret
organization would pass into hands least competent to exercise it.
As I became more familiar with the movement, as it was being propagated
elsewhere, and from my own study and observation, I reached some definite
conclusions. From the first, I had observed carefully the classes of men
who were being enrolled, the motives for their enlisting, and the effect
the organization had upon them. The result as a whole had been disturbing,
but it was from my study of the organization itself that I finally turned
in revulsion from it. It was not easy to get the real facts. I asked many
questions, both in writing and orally, of the King Kleagle, some of which
he could answer, but most of them he could not. The Constitution of the
organization I could not get. The King Kleagle had no copy and had never
seen a copy. It was not until a short time before my withdrawal that I was
shown the constitution and the reading of the document confirmed all too
well the suspicions I had already formed about the menace that lay in Ku
Kluxism. That it was a political money-making scheme rather than a
fraternal order, I began to comprehend from the sales-methods I saw around
me. It also seemed to me that there were certain potential dangers
inherent in it. When I had once asked the King Kleagle how a Klan should
function when once it was organized, "Tell them," he had answered, "to
clean up their towns." That "cleaning up a town" by illegal means could
end only in mob rule was clear enough to any thinking man, and the fact
that the newspapers had been reporting outrages in various Southern
States--outrages committed by masked men--did not make me feel any more
comfortable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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