I recently read an article by Dan Sinker entitled “What Felt Impossible Became Possible“. This is a good article to remind us of the history of the United States, ok, a portion of the history of the United States.
Dan Sinker is writing about the KKK in the 1920’s. Most people do not realize how prevalent the KKK was.
It’s not a history you learn about in school—we were whitewashing history long before the current executive orders—but the Klan in the ’20s was everywhere. There will millions of Klan members across the country. People joined it like they were joining a golf club or the Elks Lodge. There was a women’s auxiliary. There was the Ku Klux Kiddies, for children.
See, the KKK wasn’t some fringe group. The KKK was fully embedded into American culture. Some think that the KKK was just a few white men in the south.
Once you start learning about the KKK, you may see a few familiar points.
The Klan of the ’20s was a little different than what you might think of now. They didn’t just hate Black people (though, obviously, anti-Blackness was a central driver), they also went hard after immigrants, Jews, and Catholics too. The Klan’s slogan at the time? “America First.”
A big part of the story is the experience of George Dale from Muncie Indiana. George Dale “hated the Ku Klux Klan”. And the KKK was powerful in Muncie, Indiana at that time. Hating the KKK was not a safe thing to do. There was a ton of “proactive compliance”, after all, you never really knew for sure who was in the KKK (there is a reason for the white hoods). Hm, proactive compliance to avoid possible repercussions, does that sound familiar?
George Dale also ran a newspaper. So, he published the names (see page 1) of some of the Klansman. George suffered physically and economically. The KKK tried to kill him. His business lost advertisers and customers. However, George never gave up.
It nearly got him killed, when hooded men broke into his house and tried to shoot him. Dale said that he wrestled the gun away and killed one of them instead.
And hating the Klan sent him to jail repeatedly, rounded up by the Klan cops and put in front of a Klan judge with a Klan-packed jury. It was reported at the time that he was sent to the Muncie jail so often that inmates would applaud when he’d return.
His letter from 1927 lays out what happened.
There is good news.
And I think about people like George Dale—there were many like him—who, despite it feeling impossible, and despite paying incredible personal cost, kept fighting anyway.
And they won.
Two years after the letter, George Dale became Mayor of Muncie. He fired all of the cops and stripped Muncie of Klan members.
This tracks with my deeper learning and understanding of history. I attended a terrific college, Go Blue!, with a minor in history. However, I have learned so much history via reading after graduation. There is just so history that isn’t taught, even at the finest of fine collegiate institutions. The problem really is that by not teaching a full accounting of history, heck, even a balanced accounting, we truly do present people with a really bad, inaccurate background to base understandings.
America has always been more of an idea to shoot for rather than an accomplishment. However, we have tended to teach and act like America has reached those goals and is a shining example of them. Although our Founding Fathers stated that “all men are created equal”, they owned slaves. The Founding Fathers clearly didn’t act like all men were created equal. Naturally, we can discuss whether “men” meant mankind (i.e. included women) or white men who owned property.
One of the biggest areas that I had to learn about on my own was Eugenics (kind of surprised that this website hasn’t been shut down by those in power, so I’ll also link to the Internet Archive version as well). Unfortunately, these beliefs are making a comeback.
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