Abstract

"Why we must call the Second Ku Klux Klan an Employers’ Association "

Chad Pearson, University of North Texas (chad.pearson@unt.edu)

This paper explores the second Ku Klux Klan’s anti-labor and anti-leftist activities. I seek to make two points. First, I maintain that we must identify the second Klan as an employers’ association. I am not alone in making this case. In 1924, a writer for the Daily Worker, acknowledging the organization’s involvement in breaking strikes and busting unions, referred to it as a “bosses’ organization.” While most scholars have focused chiefly on the organization’s white supremacist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-vice activities, this paper examines its participation in various labor suppression actions against workers across racial and religious lines. Like the Reconstruction Klan, the second Klan was led by elites, broke strikes, drove out activists from communities, and suppressed information its leaders found subversive. The second Klan, consisting of WASPish members from across class lines, was one of numerous organizations that participated in the second wave open-shop movement. Like other employers’ associations, including Law and Order Leagues in the 1880s and 1890s and Citizens’ Alliances from the Progressive Era, the Klan couched its repressive activities in the language of patriotism. Its appeal to “100 percent Americanism” was perfectly consistent with what anti-labor union spokespersons called “the American Plan”—the patriotic name of open-shop workplaces.

My second goal is to illustrate that the second Klan followed a long tradition of elite-led repressive organizations. Its members’ violent actions were consistent with the activities of earlier vigilantes, including those in national ones. Here I challenge historian Nancy MacLean’s claim that the Klan “differed from its predecessors in a fundamental way. It was the first national, sustained, and self-consciously ideological vigilante movement in American history.” This is simply not true. Though their memberships were considerably smaller, earlier employers- associations, including Law and Order Leagues and Citizens’ Alliances, were national, hyper secretive, ideologically committed to fighting labor militants, and willing to employ vigilante methods to achieve their goals.