Historically speaking ...

How the Ku Klux Klan flourished during the 1920s in the Midwest, including in Northern Illinois, is a cautionary tale of how extremism can become normalized.

What is known as The Second Ku Klux Klan arose in the heartland as a reaction against the political and cultural changes that followed World War I. The first Klan emerged in the South after the Civil War, terrorizing black Americans, as it did again in its third iteration during the 1960s civil rights movement.

If there is less vigilante activity associated with the Second KKK, Klan ideology has always been based on white supremacy: anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and in the 1920s, anti-Catholic. There is still an Illinois KKK claiming to have “new members taking the Oath for God, Race, and the Nation.”

In towns around Illinois in the 1920s, the KKK claimed protecting the white Protestant way of life was a moral duty. The perceived threat? New immigrants from eastern and southern Europe bringing their Catholicism, their different languages, and their own customs to the heartland.

In the Klan’s worldview, anyone who was not white, American-born, Protestant, and a teetotaler was suspect.  Newspaper stories abound that describe Klan activity in towns all around Illinois: Anna, Springfield, Plainfield, Cicero and across Bureau, LaSalle, Henry, Stark and Lee counties.

Frequent stories in the Bureau County Record and Bureau County Tribune between 1922 and 1925 reported regular KKK rallies, membership inductions, and at least one parade, drawing large crowds, whether in Princeton or in fields near Ottawa, Sheffield, Tiskilwa, Walnut or Wyanet. The rallies, where large burning crosses were often displayed, were usually led by state Klan leaders. A Dr. Oldacre from Danville was a regular headliner.

While today the Ku Klux Klan is widely disparaged (at least publicly) as an extremist organization beyond the pale of American politics, it was not so in l920s Illinois. Then, a battle royale raged in small towns like Princeton about whether the Klan had something positive to offer to upstanding white Protestant Americans.

A Northern Illinois conference of a mainstream Protestant organization meeting in Princeton in October 1922, initially voted for a fierce anti-Klan resolution, calling it “founded on prejudice and class hatred operating in the dark behind masks of an invisible empire responsible to no one and acting as judge, jury and executioner all at the same time. ‘Nothing is more dangerous to democracy than that’” (Bureau County Record, Oct. 12, 1922).

Yet, at a later session of the same conference, the assembled clergy reversed the resolution, with one minister saying that “except in the matter of methods, the Klan stood for many of the things that the Church stands for.”  The Klan presented itself as a moral crusader against gambling, sexual promiscuity and alcohol use. “Dry” political candidates found common ground with the Klan on “the liquor question,” which persisted despite (or because of) Prohibition.

In June of 1924, a news story reported the Great Titan of the Northern Province of Illinois, KKK, representing 25 northern counties, would open an office on South Main Street in Princeton. It continued “... their (the Klan’s) first open air meeting of the summer was held in a pasture west of the village of Sheffield, where the large fiery cross illuminated the scene as hundreds of automobiles carrying Klansmen from all parts of the county assembled for an initiation ceremony at which time 60 new members were initiated (Bureau County Record, June 4, 1924).

The local KKK seemed to be on the ascent. In November 1924, Klan contingents from Bureau, Henry and Stark counties paraded in full Klan regalia down Princeton’s Main Street (Bureau County Record, Nov. 2, 1924). And, in January 1925, a series of KKK meetings with a Bureau County minister in charge of each received a good response. But before long, the Second Ku Klux Klan sputtered out of existence locally and nationally. Waves of immigrants had not destroyed society after all. The national Klan self-destructed amidst stories of sex scandals and internal power struggles.

Recognizing the popularity of the Klan in 1920s Illinois is a reminder of how easy it can be to demonize entire groups of people, based on their race, ethnicity, religion or other perceived differences.  Scapegoating that masquerades as patriotism is still scapegoating and a threat to democracy.