LizzieMaine
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I find this all fascinating reading. Thank you everyone for sharing.
I know this shouldn't make me laugh.... but it did.
I wonder what makes the crazies come out so badly. I suppose we still have crazies running around, but they mostly fail to organize themselves into anything "meaningful" (thank god)- and not anything as networked as the Klan. These people obviously had a few screws loose already, felt excluded from what they thought should be their status by birth, and then organized into these groups that killed people. I've often wondered if some of it wasn't fueled by the "prosperity" of the 1920s- which these people felt entitled to but weren't a part of.
I think there was quite a bit of that -- there's a myth that the "Roaring Twenties" had everybody riding high, playing the stock market, driving Packards, swilling bootleg whiskey, and dancing the Charleston every night till dawn. The reality is that "twenties prosperity" made a lot of money for a relatively small group of people, strung along a whole lot of others, and completely ignored the rest. If you lived in a small town or on a farm, the twenties didn't roar at all.
But the thing that really made the twenties Klan was, again, marketing. They actively recruited members with a coast-to-coast network of professional salesmen called "Kleagles" who went door to door like the Fuller Brush man, selling the idea of "100 Percent Americanism" for ten dollars a membership. The Kleagle got four dollars of that, his supervisor got a dollar, the supervisor's supervisor got fifty cents, and the Imperial Treasury got the balance. There was a lot of money in Kleagling, and it was more profitable for the salesman than selling brushes, soap, or the Saturday Evening Post.
They got their sales by, essentially, selling the Klan as the cure for whatever the potential customer was against. Don't like the uppity coloreds? Don't like the Eye-talians or the Irish? Don't like Catholics? Don't like Liberal Protestants? Don't like Jews? Don't like anybody who doesn't think exactly like you? Here's your chance to stand up for "100 Per Cent Americanism," for just ten dollars. Oh, and two dollars for the robe. And here's our catalog of key chains, watch fobs, lapel buttons, phonograph records, and approved literature, sure you'll find something you like heh heh heh.
If the Klan hadn't been so cynical about its money-making aspects, it could have been a real, credible threat in the Depression era. But it had blown its credibility long before the twenties ended, and by the thirties it was a bad joke.