James Madison–my favorite Indiana historian, not my favorite Founding. Father–has recently written a column documenting what many of us have come to recognize: White Christian Nationalism is the contemporary KKK.
Madison should know. He wrote the book tracing the history of the Klan in Indiana.
The inauguration of Gov. Mike Braun and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith sparks thoughts of the similar inauguration 100 years ago, on January 12, 1925, when Edward Jackson and Harold Van Orman took their oaths. The past never repeats itself exactly, but in this case there are lines that rhyme and questions that cause concern.
At the dinner following Gov. Jackson’s inauguration, William Herschell recited his beloved poem, “Ain’t God Good to Indiana.” In the reception line next to the new governor stood Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, the man who boasted that “I am the law in Indiana.” The two men had plans.
Madison notes that Jackson is considered the worst governor in Indiana history, and most Hoosiers know that Stephenson–Madison calls him “vile”–was a murderer and a blot on an already dark Indiana history.
The forces that created these two men remain with us. Indiana’s new governor and lieutenant governor are not Klansmen, but in the religious and political culture around them are scents of a century ago, when the Klan dominated the Hoosier state.
Those white, native-born Protestants who flocked to the Klan in the early 1920s called themselves 100% Americans. They boasted that only they were the real Americans. They created enemies to exclude and people to hate. Jews, African Americans, immigrants and, above all, Catholics were “the others.” By 1924, one political operative lamented, “Ideas of race and religion now dominate political thought.”
Those Klan boasts sound eerily like the rhetoric employed by MAGA cultists. Madison tells us that fear of Russian Bolsheviks and German Huns widened to include all immigrants and non-White Christians. The Klan repeatedly insisted on “America First.”
In rhetoric that sounds a lot like Trump’s, the Klan claimed that the country was going to “hell in a handbasket.”
A Christian crusade was the remedy. The Klan promised to enforce prohibition, censor Hollywood films, stop backseat sex, end political corruption, and keep women closer to the kitchen, nursery, and Sunday school room. Giving women the ballot, reported the Klan’s weekly newspaper, The Fiery Cross, “would foster masculine boldness and restless independence, which might detract from the modesty and virtue of womankind.”
Shades of today’s “tradwives.”
Madison explains that Klan members were convinced that they were the real, “100% Americans.” Much like today’s Christian Nationalists, they were motivated by White Supremacy. “Onward Christian Soldiers,” became the “beloved hymn of the Klan.”
Indiana had (and I think it is fair to say, still has) what Madison called “low expectations for government and high tolerance for corruption” –an environment that invited the state’s descent into a Klan stronghold.
Along with a governor, a majority—perhaps a supermajority—of the 1925 General Assembly were Klan members or sympathizers. Nearly all were white, Protestant and native born, joined by only four Catholics, four foreign born, and not a single African American or Jewish member.
The 1925 Klan legislature was mostly a bust. Internal divisions and self-aggrandizement led to only modest success in pushing through the Klan agenda. All assumed there would be other sessions to make good.
Madison’s column includes information about the resistance to the Klan. Stephenson’s conviction for rape and murder in 1925 added to the growing awareness of the Klan’s threat to basic American values, and Madison tells us that by 1930, the Klan was mostly gone in Indiana. “Nobody wanted to admit he’d ever belonged,” one reporter recalled.
Perhaps the most important observation in Madison’s essay is the following:
The intolerance in the last 50 years has come not from an out-of-date Klan but from a potpourri of sprawling and amorphous groups and movements, often linked to versions of Christian nationalism. As with the old Klan, today’s Christian nationalists tend toward binary choices of good and evil, toward a willingness to force their religious and cultural views on all of us, and toward use of government power in undemocratic and authoritarian ways that Indiana’s pioneers would have found appalling. Those pioneers wrote a Constitution in 1816 that contains the finest words ever penned on Indiana soil, including such commitments as “no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious societies, or modes of worship.”
Too many of our lawmakers have failed to heed that state Constitutional provision.
You really need to click through and read the whole essay–and then join us at tomorrow’s rally to kick off resistance to the re-emergence of the Klan, this time wearing red hats rather than sheets.
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