You Think This Year’s Presidential Conventions Will Be Crazy? 1924’s Fights Over the Ku Klux Klan Were Wilder

With white nationalist forces afoot, look back 100 years to when the Republican and Democratic conventions failed to condemn the flourishing hate group.

The post You Think This Year’s Presidential Conventions Will Be Crazy? 1924’s Fights Over the Ku Klux Klan Were Wilder appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After Joe Biden’s uncertain performance in last month’s debate, the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago should stir interest in past contentious conventions –not so much the tear gas-soaked disaster of Chicago 1968, but the epic fiasco in New York one hundred years ago.

Sorry, Chicago—when it comes to Democratic debacles, you’re still the second city. In June and July 1924, in the overcrowded, overheated old Madison Square Garden in New York City, Democratic delegates duked it out for 16 days. The fight over the party platform was followed by a record-setting 103 ballots to nominate the dark horse, John W. Davis.

In 1968, by contrast, Hubert Humphrey came within an eyelash of winning the popular vote despite a divisive Chicago convention, losing to Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, by just seven-tenths of a percent.

The 1924 Republican convention is mostly forgotten, but let’s remember it.

There was no doubt who Republicans would choose in June 1924 when they gathered at Cleveland’s Public Auditorium. Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded to the presidency after Warren Harding died, was firmly in control of the party and nominated with only token opposition on the first ballot.

While selecting a candidate was easy, writing a platform was not. GOP delegates, like their Democratic counterparts, had to wrestle with what to say—or not say—about the Ku Klux Klan, the surging nativist movement with potent influence in both major parties.

Whether or not to denounce the Klan and how to phrase such a denunciation–Do you call them out by name or simply condemn bigotry and intolerance?—was front-page news in 1924, alongside issues like immigration, Prohibition, and the League of Nations. Time magazine featured Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans on its cover for a story on the GOP’s “Kleveland Konvention.” Evans, Time reported, “conducted his efforts against an anti-Klan plank” from a private home in the city, backed by an entourage of some 60 Klansmen.

While the Klan is no longer front and center in U.S. politics, other white nationalists, often with close connections to Republican elected and appointed officials, persist. The fever is not confined to the United States; European far-right parties, typically infected with noxious pro-nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment, command large blocs in many parliaments.

Back in 1924, both major U.S. parties tested positive for this virus. Leading champions of an anti-Klan plank from both parties—Texas national committeeman R.B. Creager for the Republicans and Alabama Senator Cecil Underwood for the Democrats—were also public advocates for segregation and white supremacy. Coolidge, meanwhile, lived up to his “Silent Cal” nickname by staying mum on the Klan.

Politicians didn’t start the campaign to counter the Klan. It was activists from the NAACP, including poet and playwright James Weldon Johnson, who served as the organization’s chief executive, and his assistant, Walter White, who later succeeded him.

White was of mixed ancestry and could pass as Caucasian; A.J. Baime, his biographer, describes him as “fair-skinned, blond-haired and blue-eyed.” White used this ambiguity–at no small personal risk–to go undercover, gathering information about lynchings and hate crimes that would never have been available to a Black man.

In November 1920, White was rattling south on the train from New York to Florida, headed to the tiny hamlet of Ocoee, about 30 miles north of the present-day Walt Disney World, to investigate what The Washington Post describes as “the worst instance of Election Day violence in American history.”

White, a novelist and a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, shared his findings in two January 1921 articles, one in and one in The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, reporting on a menacing letter to a local white attorney, written six weeks before Election Day.

“You have been telling Negroes to register… and how to assert their rights,” stated the letter. “We shall always enjoy WHITE SUPREMACY in this country, and he who interferes must face the consequences.” It was signed “Grand Master Florida Ku Klucks.”

As White related to readers of The Crisis, when Mose Norman—a prominent Black homeowner and landowner in Ocoee—attempted to vote, “[h]e was beaten severely and ordered to go home,” but instead, sought refuge with July Perry, “foreman of a large orange grove… a job which the community felt was too good for a Negro.”

An armed white mob surrounded Perry’s home, his family and Norman inside, terrified. Gunfire broke out–it’s not clear who fired first—and two white men fell dead. “[T]he mob surrounded the settlement,” White reported, including other homes nearby. The vigilantes set fire to them and then, “shot down or forced back into the flames colored men, women, and children who attempted to escape.” Perry survived, was taken to a hospital, then dragged to Orlando and lynched.

White interviewed a “lean, lanky and vicious looking white citizen of Ocoee,” who must have thought he was talking to a white man. When asked the number of dead, he replied: “I don’t know exactly. But I know fifty-six n****** are dead. I killed seventeen myself.”

Four years later, when delegates debated how to respond to the KKK during one calm and contentious political convention, the dialogue focused on law, religion, and other weighty matters, with a robust subtext about positioning for the upcoming election. For the NAACP and its members, the stakes were far greater.

The 1920s Klan was the second version of the organization, distinct from the unrepentant rebels organized by former Confederates in the 1860s and 1870s and from the domestic terrorists of the 1950s and 1960s. The second Klan was reborn in 1915 during a cross-burning ceremony at Stone Mountain, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Its leaders attempted—with considerable success, despite violent incidents like the one in Ocoee—to rebrand themselves as a “100% American” mainstream political and social organization.

This version of the KKK opposed immigration, supported Prohibition, and—with a large women’s auxiliary—backed women’s suffrage. It “was stronger in the North than in the South,” writes historian Linda Gordon in “The Second Coming of the KKK”:

It spread above the Mason-Dixon line by adding Catholics, Jews, immigrants and bootleggers to its list of enemies and pariahs… Its leaders tried to prohibit violence, although they could not always enforce the ban… Never a secret organization, it published recruiting ads in newspapers, its members boasted their affiliation, and it elected hundreds of its members to public office.

This second Klan and its nativist allies won a major victory in May 1924, when Coolidge signed a sweeping immigration bill passed by overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate, banning migrants from Asia and sharply restricting them from Southern and Eastern Europe while potential newcomers from England, Germany, and Scandinavia were treated favorably. The KKK was aligned with public opinion in defining who was entitled to become “100% American”: White Protestants from Northern Europe.

This ethnic pre-cleansing, sadly, is echoed in today’s rhetoric about an “invasion” on our southern border. If you feel queasy about how the MAGA movement has taken over the current GOP, imagine how you would have felt 100 years ago when the Klan had a solid foothold in both major parties. Sixteen Klan members were elected to the U.S. Senate, reports Gordon, along with “scores of Congressmen…and eleven governors, pretty much equally divided between Democrats and Republicans.”

At the NAACP, White and Johnson initiated private meetings with Catholic and Jewish leaders and began a campaign in the Black press to discredit this latest version of the Klan. White also reached out to his friend Herbert Bayard Swope, editor of The New York World. Swope commissioned a 21-part exposé, outlining how Klan officials enriched themselves with commissions on membership dues and showing the “new” organization’s involvement in old-style terror tactics. The series, launched in September 1921, relied on findings from White’s investigations.

In 1923, Johnson signaled the NAACP’s intention to make the Klan an issue in the 1924 campaign. “Colored voters, before voting for any man should obtain from him and his party an explicit statement about their attitude toward the Ku Klux Klan,” he said in a November press statement. “No vague phrasing about standing for the Constitution will do.”

Before the 1924 conventions, The World challenged leaders of all parties to pass resolutions denouncing the Klan. Within the GOP, this call was answered by Creager, a Republican power broker, attorney, oil executive, and real estate speculator.

Creager may have been eager to use the Klan as a cudgel against Senator Earle Mayfield, a Texas Democrat elected in 1922 with overt Klan support. He was less enthusiastic, however, to recognize the political rights of Black Texans. At the same convention where he urged the GOP to condemn the Klan, Creager faced a credentials challenge to the “lily white” delegation he headed against a rival “black and tan” slate with several Black Republicans.

In a bizarre case of strange bedfellows, the Klan supported the challenge to Creager’s all-white delegation. In states like Indiana, where Klan-backed candidates swept the 1924 Republican primaries, Black votes could be pivotal in the general election. “This play,” reasoned a correspondent from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “would convince the blacks that the Indiana and Northern Klan is not anti-negro.”

Creager was successful in the credentials fight; the Lone Star delegation remained all white. Black GOP delegates from other states were assigned segregated seating behind chicken wire.

No matter where they sat, GOP delegates would not get to vote on an anti-Klan plank. Creager cribbed language from The World, pledging no support for “any organization based on prejudice or discrimination against any citizens for reasons of race, color or creed.” This was defeated on June 12 during a closed-door session of the GOP Resolutions Committee. An alternative, stating the party’s “unyielding devotion to the Constitution”—exactly the “vague phrasing” the NAACP’s Johnson wanted to avoid–was substituted at the last minute.

Creager abandoned a previous threat to bring the issue to the entire convention, a gift to Coolidge, whose triumphant nomination was the next day.

Following custom, the president did not attend the convention (although he was consulted by telephone about the platform). His handlers, however, must have been pleased. “Coolidge organization leaders here openly deplore the Creager move,” reported The Baltimore Sun as the Resolutions Committee began its deliberations. “They are afraid there is political dynamite in the Klan issue… and that the safe course would be to let the ‘sleeping dog’ lie.”

Also pleased: The Ku Klux Klan. “The plank as finally adopted,” according to The Indiana Fiery Cross, a Klan newspaper, “is really a Klan plank and not an anti-Klan plank… it was a great Klan victory … The buck is now respectfully passed up to the Democratic party at its coming New York convention.”

The buck was picked up in New York by Senator Underwood of Alabama, who made opposition to the Klan the centerpiece of his long-shot presidential campaign. The only person ever to serve as leader of his party’s caucus in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, Underwood nevertheless led a filibuster against federal anti-lynching legislation in 1922.

He was more successful in blocking federal action against lynch mobs than he was in marshaling opposition to the group organizing such mobs. The catastrophe that unfolded in the Garden–where not a single Black delegate was credentialed—has been repeatedly chronicled. All these accounts, however, skip the NAACP’s role in making the Klan an issue in the 1924 campaign and ignore how the GOP dodged the dilemma in Cleveland.

Unlike the Republican convention, which was tightly controlled by a sitting president, the Democrats arrived in New York in June 1924 with two strong candidates: New York Governor Al Smith and former Treasury Secretary William McAdoo. Neither had the two-thirds support needed to clinch the nomination, so neither had the clout to kill an unwelcome proposal in committee.

The result was a fiery floor debate, beginning on Saturday night, June 28, and lasting until early morning on Sunday. Both sides insisted they had no use for the Klan; the argument, as articulated, was about the most effective way to oppose it. Three-time Democratic presidential nominee (and three-time loser) Williams Jennings Bryan insisted there was no point in threatening party unity to denounce by name a “transient organization” that would soon wither away. “The Klan does not deserve the advertisement you give them,” he thundered.

After all the votes were counted and re-counted, Democrats enacted merged, by a margin of 4.3 votes out of over 1,000, with yet another vaguely phrased resolution. It included no mention of the Klan, affirming “cardinal principles” of free speech, assembly, and religion. Condemning “any effort to arouse religious or racial dissension,” it was an iota more forceful than the plank Republicans quietly agreed to in Cleveland—but the result is not remembered that way. As The Gothamist recalls it, “The 1924 Democratic Convention Was A Violent, Racist Clusterf***k.” 

The chaos continued for ten days, with McAdoo and Smith slugging it out like weary heavyweights, neither able to muster a winning margin. Delegates finally settled on Davis, a former two-term congressman from West Virginia. U.S. solicitor general under Wilson, Davis was considered one of the nation’s pre-eminent attorneys. He treated the party platform the way most people do: He ignored it. During an August 22 speech in Sea Girt, New Jersey, he denounced the Klan by name and urged Coolidge to do the same.

Coolidge disregarded the challenge from Davis and a previous appeal from the NAACP. Earlier in August, however, the White House released a remarkable letter by Coolidge to an Army sergeant named Charles F. Gardner, stationed at Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton.

Gardner had written to the White House and was alarmed that a Black candidate was on the ballot in an upcoming GOP primary. “It is of some concern,” he wrote, “whether a Negro is allowed to run for Congress… in this, a white man’s country.” 

Silent Cal made some noise about this topic. “I was amazed to receive such a letter,” he told Gardner. “…[A] colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party as is any other citizen… I propose to regard [the Constitution], and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.”

Coolidge, or someone who worked for him, decided this message deserved a wider audience. The letter to Gardner, dated August 9, was released to the press on August 11, and stories about it appeared in multiple newspapers. The candidate Gardner complained about–Charles H. Roberts, a Harlem dentist and former city alderman–won the Republican primary but lost the general election.

In October, The New York Age, a leading Black newspaper in New York City—the NAACP’s Johnson was a regular columnist—evaluated the presidential candidates, including third-party challenger Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin. All three, The Age said, “are… men of high character… the rights of all classes of citizens, irrespective of race, color or religion would be safe with any one of them.”

The editorial noted that both Davis and LaFollette had denounced the Klan while Coolidge had not. But LaFollette had no chance to win, and Davis, if elected, would “owe his election to the Solid South” and be “dominated” by segregationists. That left Coolidge, who had defended Roberts’ right to run for Congress and appointed Blacks to federal posts. “We feel it is our duty,” The Age recommended, “to advise our people to vote the Republican ticket.”

The Age was right about Davis’s political base; in 1924, he won electoral votes from the eleven states of the old Confederacy, Oklahoma, and nowhere else. But the paper was too generous, perhaps, about the distinguished attorney’s commitment to defend the rights of all citizens. In 1954, thirty years after his failed presidential campaign, Davis appeared before the Supreme Court on behalf of the state of South Carolina in the historic Brown vs. Board of Education case. He argued against Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in favor of segregated public schools. This cause, which Davis lost, was so close to his heart that he never billed his client.

In the fullness of time, characters like Creager, Underwood, and Davis—denouncing the Klan when it suited their political needs and supporting white supremacy on other occasions–appear inconsistent and unprincipled. It may not have looked that way, however, to contemporary participants. Southern segregationists backing an anti-Klan crusade could convince themselves they were for the separation of the races but did not like the KKK’s vulgar, violent methods.

What story, I wonder, did Calvin Coolidge tell himself? His letter to Gardner, consistent with other actions, reflects a commitment to equal opportunity. So why allow a convention you control to approve a platform plank regarded by members of the KKK as a “great Klan victory?” Why not say something—anything!—about the clear and present danger of a powerful organization thriving on racial and religious animosity?

Perhaps Coolidge agreed with Bryan that the name of a disreputable group like the Klan had no place in a party platform, much less coming out of the mouth of the president of the United States.

Or maybe Coolidge agreed with his handlers, who judged it best not to antagonize an outfit with hundreds of branches in all 50 states, capable of turning out thousands of people for public events—and bringing an even greater number to the polls. If so, he is among the ranks of less-than-courageous officeholders, then and now, who can be remarkably flexible about their principles when they find their political survival at stake.

Having studied the period, Linda Gordon finds it plausible “that in the 1920s, a majority of Americans shared the Klan’s values.” Within a few years, however, the second Klan—as Bryan had predicted—disintegrated, undermined by internal power struggles, a truly horrific sex scandal, and reports about its leaders fleecing their members.

But the core of the Klan agenda remains very much alive: “[D]eveloping America… for the benefit of the children of the pioneers who made America… against radicalism, cosmopolitanism and alienism of all kinds. ” In 2024, half the electorate, more or less, is prepared to support a political party that is proudly, loudly illiberal.

Convicted felon Donald Trump is no Calvin Coolidge; he can barely stay silent even under court order. When he speaks, he has a hard time denouncing white supremacists and develops an odd case of amnesia about former Klansman David Duke. Also, he somehow winds up with Nazi and fascist imagery in his social media feeds.

In 1924, both Republicans and Democrats tried and failed to find broadly acceptable language to denounce racist hate speech and hate crimes. One hundred years later, the problem remains. It’s not that we can’t find quite the words to express shared values. It’s a frightening lack of clarity about whether the values needed to make democracy work—tolerance, inclusion, equality—are widespread enough in the first place.

The post You Think This Year’s Presidential Conventions Will Be Crazy? 1924’s Fights Over the Ku Klux Klan Were Wilder appeared first on Washington Monthly.