Unmasked

Historians of another century will record the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the "World War," and its fall thereafter, according to humor. A Carlyle will call it a peculiarly malignant form of social indigestion, where avaricious scoundrels milked a large and ignorant public of great sums in "membership fees," in return for inflaming mass prejudices against

20,000,000 Foreigners

16,000,000 Catholics

10,000,000 Negroes

4,000,000 Jews

or nearly half the U. S. population of that time. The ignorant public enjoyed being inflamed until it learned how it had been milked.

A Voltaire will say that the Klan was a movement of child-minded men whose age prevented them from sharing otherwise in the romantic spirit of the time and who dressed themselves up with regalia, symbols and gibberish to play solemnly at an exciting game. After a while, the game got boring.

Last week, the 13-year-old game had so far palled, and so far deteriorated from the exalted pastime it was meant to be, that the men who still make a living from it changed its character. It was on top of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Ga., that the Klan's 34 adventurous founders met on Thanksgiving Day, 1915, to swear their tremendous oath, but last week it was in stuffy meeting halls and hackneyed offices that Klansmen met to obey the following "edict" of Emperor and Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans:

"That on and after midnight of February twenty-second, year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty eight, no mask or visor shall be upon the helmet of the regalia of any Klansman. It shall therefore be unlawful for any Klansman to wear any mask or visor as part of his regalia, and each Klansman . . . shall . . . become a member of the Knights of the Great Forest.

"That on and after said date all Klansmen are forbidden to fraternize with or remain in Klannish Fidelity to any who shall thereafter wear upon his helmet a mask or visor."

The repetitious, childlike pomposity of this "edict" is not quite an accurate index of Wizard Evans' mental calibre, for with the edict went a rider. Wizard Evans, who gained his knowledge of human nature as a dentist, had invented the "Knights of the Forest" as a painless method of extracting $1 from each & every Klansman. Salaries had to be paid, and it would have been unwise to levy an unembellished assessment. The "Knights of the Forest," therefore, constituted an obligatory degree palliated by the following ritual:

The applicants filed forward, dollar in hand, to the Klavern table. There each repeated a new oath* to further the Klan's "mighty purposes," to obey the Wizard, to make the white race supreme and to remember the password, "Patriotic Service." An initiate in the line, feigning a troubled conscience, then confessed: "My mother was a Catholic." A long argument ensued, ending finally with the penitent's admission to the "Forest." The awesome Cyclops (in real life a streetcar conductor, realtor, dentist or the like) then explained that the Klan's great accomplishment had been the restriction of immigration; that its new aim is (in the Wizard's words) "to promote the assimilation of . . . aliens in America." Then the $1 was paid down and the Cyclops ripped from the member's regalia its mask and visor. From within the hood, which now hid only his ears, the remade Klansman stared out uncertainly, wondering what it would be like to parade in public with his timid, commonplace, rather foolish face exposed to public view. . . .

Such was the scene enacted in many a big city's outskirts and small town's centre, one dramatic midnight last week.

*The old Klan oath having fallen into "alien" hands, a new one had to be invented for secrecy.