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Foreword: Why I Write a Book 7

PART ONE

Organization and Methods

PART TWO

The Fading Hope of Democracy

PART THREE

A Salvaging Policy for Americanism

WHY I WRITE A BOOK

Various representatives of the press, as well as many of my colleagues in the organization of which I have the honor to be the Founder and head, have repeatedly asked me to make a public statement, descriptive of our organization. It was anticipated in certain quarters that we should at once make specific reply to the embittered attacks upon the Klan. Although abundant space in the press was placed at our disposal for this purpose, we did not take advantage of the offer. It is no part of the policy of the Klan to enter into heated public controversies--even in self-defense. We felt all along that a clear and simple statement of facts concerning the form of our organization, its methods and ultimate purposes, while perhaps due the public, was not due the instigators of the attacks upon us. We are not as yet aware of the exact source of these attacks. Yet, I may say, the membership of the Klan universally welcomed it, realizing that sooner or later the Klan must be under fire. Whether or not we are enemies of our country and of freedom we are quite willing to leave for the public to decide.

Meanwhile, the direct effect of these attacks upon the Klan will not be without interest. Our ranks have been rendered more firm and steady. The public has been rather amused than affected seriously by the reams of villification which were heaped upon the Klan. It now remains for us to tell what the Ku Klux Klan really is, how it came into existence, and what it purposes to do through the organized power of its membership.

We have been outrightly accused of maintaining secrecy in the conduct of our organization. We ask, in rejoinder, for how long has it been a crime or a misdemeanor in the United States for a fraternal organization to employ secrecy in the conduct of its affairs? We have, literally, hundreds of secret organizations in this country. The fact that a number of persons draw themselves together in an organization for mutual aid, for mutual confidences, and for mutual effort, implies that they have something in common which they do not wish to share fully with the public. So has every family and almost every business. Then, too, the element of secrecy no doubt develops the interest of the membership, adding to the charm as well as to the value of their fellowship. Concerning this feature of our organization, I feel assured that we might appeal to the common sense and fairness which Americans are always and everywhere ready enough to show. No one expects the Masonic fraternity or the Knights of Columbus,--to mention two large, well-known and respected fraternal organizations in this country,--to exhibit all their forms of salutation and other formalities to the public. We simply claim the same rights and privileges which other fraternal organizations share, both under the law and in the esteem of the public mind.

New organizations and movements usually draw the fire of the uninformed. People are inclined to be suspicious of that which they do not understand. When Masonry first assumed its larger importance in America it was the object of attacks so bitter that some of the members were placed in danger of their lives. An Anti-Masonic party, nearly a hundred years ago, acquired material importance and sent several members to Congress. Just preceding the War Between the States, the Know-Nothing, or Anti-Catholic party ran through its brief but stormy career. This party was caused by the fact that the Catholic Church was growing in certain parts of the country where it had hitherto been almost unknown. When we Klansmen reflect upon these historical facts we are much consoled. It remains only to say, in this connection, that we bear our recent detractors not the slightest ill will whatever. They do not understand us. That is all.

We confess that the Ku Klux Klan has been organized in order to help in the accomplishment of a great task. Neither the magnitude of this task nor its vital importance to the future of our country are yet widely realized. Our American citizenship is usually earnest and active with regard to the discharge of its more simple duties. With reference to larger social problems, however, problems which sometimes assume the form of great national dangers, our country is often enough soundly asleep. The Ku Klux Klan proposes to wake the sleeper and make him at least sit up, look around, and ask the time of day.

Whether or not we are enabled to accomplish all that we have set out to do remains for the future to decide. But I may say that the growth of the Klan and the universal spirit and activity of its membership indicate pretty clearly that neither our hopes nor our efforts, thus far, have been in vain. The Klan is growing in the North and West more rapidly than in the South. It has been carefully and permanently grounded in nearly every large city. It will eventually spread to every town, hamlet and country cross-roads. With our six years of organized effort and our present status in mind, we may be pardoned for saying that we feel that there must be some need for an organization which has, in so short a time, shown such phenomenal strength. The Klan exists because it satisfies a most vital need in our national public life. Our opponents have tried to indicate that our position and purposes are purely negative. Nothing is farther from the truth. Any candid, logical and patriotic mind which will reflect upon this and the following chapters of this book can not be our enemy.

In order to first clear the way of the trivialities which have been placed there to clog our footsteps, I wish in this foreword to state most positively certain facts with reference to our organization. The Ku Klux Klan has not been organized or conducted in opposition to any religion or religious sect, or against the members of any race or language group, either within or without the borders of our country. Upon this point let no doubt be left in the mind of any American. It has been falsely stated that we are fanning the flames of hatred against the Negro race. Exactly the opposite is the truth. To our fellow citizens of the Jewish or the Roman Catholic faith, and to other groups too numerous to mention, we enter a flat denial to all those pure fabrications which have seemingly given them so much alarm. It is, indeed, quite true that our membership is restricted. It includes only citizens of the white race. So does the membership of the Clan-na-Gael and of B'rith Israel. If it may be truthfully said that our membership is also restricted to Christians and to Protestants, this is due purely to the fact that certain deductions may be made from certain paragraphs in our Constitution and By-Laws. We have not yet ceased wondering why attacks should be made upon us in the public press on that score. The membership of the Knights of Columbus is, I believe, restricted to members of the Roman Catholic Church. Is there anything especially dangerous or wrong about that? I should not say so. Catholic Churchmen have both a legal right and a moral right to organize and conduct a fraternal order by and for themselves alone. Moreover, the Knights of Columbus as an organization, and in the personnel of its individual members, would be well within their rights in demanding that they be saved from slander, villification and unjust attacks of every sort, because of the restriction of their membership to those of one faith. Since the end of the war various German organizations, such as fraternal orders, singing societies, etc., have begun to re-establish themselves. These organizations are fully protected by the law and their members do not lack the esteem of their English-speaking fellow citizens. Hence, I would most candidly ask--and would that my voice could be heard throughout the length and breadth of the land--since when has it become a crime for a body of American-born, English-speaking, white citizens to organize themselves into a fraternal order? What has happened in our country which seems to bring our particular racial and social group so much into disrepute? Since the House of Representatives in Washington has investigated us, why is not a resolution presented asking the House to investigate other institutions of a similar nature? However that may be, since we have been duly investigated, and the investigation has ended without the slightest accusation or criticism, so far as we know, on the part of the House Committee, we would now ask our accusers, in their turn, to be candid enough to do one of two things. They must either present further facts to substantiate their accusations or retract the accusations.

We repeat most emphatically--The members of the Ku Klux Klan, as individuals or as Klansmen, are not the enemies of the Negro. We are the best friends the Negro has, here or anywhere. Our organization makes opposition to no religious sect or creed, as such. Our order is based squarely upon the Constitution and laws of our country. We hope never to be unmindful of the basic fact that both the Federal and State Constitutions guarantee freedom of religious belief and practice. We invite our fellow citizens of every faith to join us in the protection of so valuable and sacred a right. Every statement made at any time that we would deny this right to others than ourselves is an absolute and unmitigated falsehood. In conclusion, let me emphasize that the Ku Klux Klan conducts its activities not only within the law, but in active support of the law. Our general organization would not tolerate for a moment any illegal act on the part of any of our local organizations. The Klan has not been formed to express little hatreds but to study crucial problems and aid in the execution of large national policies.

I might add a further word. We take pride in the fact that our national and local organizations have conducted themselves, generally, within the bounds of the strictest discipline. Perhaps it has been because of the ease with which crimes might be committed and our local organization unjustly blamed therefor that we have suffered from a certain sort of criticism and attack from the uninformed and the misinformed. We are now taking steps to make the Klan perfectly secure against such criminal misuse of its name and regalia. Suffice it to say here that we take the keenest pride in our record, and in challenging our opponents and detractors to present the facts which their allegations demand, we ask of them in the most kindly spirit. We take much for granted. We can not be misunderstood for long. We know that many of those who unknowingly oppose us to-day will be our best friends, in many cases, indeed, our ardent companions of to-morrow.

The Klan Yesterday and To-day

In many questions, from all sources, I have been asked as to how the Klan of the Sixties was related to the Klan of to-day. The original Ku Klux Klan sprang from the urgent necessities of the Reconstruction period. At the close of the War Between the States, the South was prostrated and devastation was spread from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. Following hard upon the collapse of the Southern Confederacy, hordes of bad white men, generally termed "Carpet-Baggers" and "Scalawags", came into the South to prey upon the prostrated people of that section and to fatten on the ruins of war. This crowd of men had been loyal to neither the Union nor the Confederacy, and, in most instances, traitors to both. The tremendous upheaval had thrown them from obscurity into publicity. They availed themselves of the conditions that obtained to establish themselves and utilized the recently emancipated race of slaves to further their ends. Negroes everywhere were organized and taught to hate the white people of the Southern states. Under martial law they controlled all the elections that were held in the South. From these was elevated to our legislatures and courts an alien race, untaught, unskilled and incapable of government. White men in the South who had borne arms in defense of the Confederacy had the hostility of the so-called Union League directed against them. Their property was invaded, their homes were menaced and in many instances the white women of the South became the prey of Negroes who had been inflamed by the teachings of "Carpet-Baggers" and "Scalawags." The evident purpose was to establish for all time the supremacy of the Negro over our Anglo-Saxon people and civilization.

To meet this condition and arrest this menace, the Ku Klux Klan sprang into existence. The white man's civilization that had been thousands of years in the building was imperilled. The blood of the white man ran like lightning. Tremendous forces leaped from the ashes of defeat and drove like the whirlwind throughout the land. Civilization sounded the note of wild alarm. An empire covering half a continent took form in an hour and more than a half million men were mobilized in a single day in defense of the white man, his home, his civilization and his freedom--against the rise and assaults of an inferior race, many of which within the century, had been cannibals, and some of which were still speaking the jargon of the jungles of Africa.

In the formation of the original Ku Klux Klan there was no thought or purpose in the mind of the white men of the South which made for the suppression of the misguided Negroes by violence. Wise men they were who founded the Invisible Empire and directed the movements of its citizenry. They knew the superstition of the Negro. Interwoven in the Negro's life, religious, social, industrial, was the fantastic belief in the supernatural and the grotesque. To him the ghost was very real and not at all unusual in appearance. In all their folk tales there was a weird intermingling of ghostliness. Rather than intercept by violence the movement of the Negro toward supremacy in the South under the leadership of vicious white men, the Ku Klux Klan devoted itself to thwarting the movement by overawing the Negro through his superstitions. Had this plan not been adopted, the Negro would have been largely exterminated.

This organization of the original Ku Klux Klan made a most thrilling chapter in the history of the Anglo-Saxon civilization in America. It has never been written. The organization has been maligned, misrepresented, and misunderstood for more than fifty years. The Congress of the United States instituted an investigation of the Klan that totaled forty-six volumes in reports and findings, but not in a solitary instance was an outrage or an atrocity in the South fastened upon the organization. The supremacy of the white man was established, the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race was maintained, and both races, white and black, settled down side by side in peace and contentment to work out their essentially different destinies.

The present Klan is a memorial to the original organization, the story of whose valor has never been told, and the value of whose activities to the American nation has never been appreciated. In a sense it is the reincarnation among the sons of the spirit of the fathers. It is a flaming torch of the genius and mission of the Anglo-Saxon committed to the hands of the children which the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are again holding aloft.

The name of the old Klan has been taken by the new as a heritage. The regalia and insignia of the old have been adopted by the new as a mantle of one worthy generation might fall upon the shoulders of its successor. Beyond this point the connection and similarity between the two organizations do not extend. The ritual is not identical. The purpose of each organization, while having a common impulsion, is not the same in extent. The old Klan never intended to reach beyond the horizon of the Southland. The present Klan has purposed the supremacy of our heritage of ideals throughout the nation. There is no intention on the part of the present Klan to intimidate or overawe by spectral, ghostly garb, or to accomplish its aim by demonstrations of force or acts of violence, or by a supergovernment under disguise, or by moving in the darkness of the night. But there is a purpose underlying the entire organization and pulsing in every fiber of its being, to maintain Anglo-Saxon civilization on the American continent from submergence due to the encroachment and invasion of alien people of whatever clime or color. There was not in the old organization a solitary motive except to save the civilization of the white man that had been wrung out of the thousands of years of his struggle upward. There is not a single motive actuating the new Klan except to save the heritage which the fathers have left for us in the present to transmit to the generation yet to come.

A moment's reflection will indicate how natural it is to see the new Klan take form first in the South. With us the issue and the conflict is an old one. Instinctively we scent dangers which our brethren in other sections of the country are apt, as yet, to ignore. For centuries we have been forced to deal, in one form or another, with a problem which always seemed to us and still appears to some of us to be insoluble. I mean the race problem. Yet in this, as in all else, our kinship with our fellow citizens of the North was made evident by an outstanding fact of Reconstruction days. The original Ku Klux Klan was almost as strong in the Union army, maintaining martial law in the defeated states, as among the men who wore the gray and went down to glorious defeat. Had it not been for the active and sympathetic co-operation of large numbers of the Union forces, the achievements of the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction period could not have been accomplished. The time has now come, once more, to bring to our whole country a sense of this great issue. And this issue, the causes of this crisis, has broadened and deepened to a degree which threatens the complete destruction of our civilization.

We Americans--A Vanishing People

We Americans as a peculiar people face extinction upon our own soil. Let me be fully understood. I do not wish in the least to appear sensational. I wish only to state a few simple facts which should be apparent to any American who investigates, ever so briefly, the true condition of his country. So often, during the past twenty-two years, I have been oppressed in heart as I have seen how little public interest this crucial matter has aroused. If my tendency has, at times, been somewhat pessimistic and fearful, I claim that there is cause enough for fear and pessimism. Surely there is great need that intensest sadness and sorrow strike deep into the hearts of Americans, if we are now to help ourselves and live.

To place these facts in their proper relation, one to another, we must study the map of the United States. That map, hanging on the wall of the old school-house, or facing us over our desks in the library at home, seems always to appear so big and brave and bold. To the child at school it appears to flaunt its very bigness in the face of all the world. My fellow American citizens in all the states, study that map carefully. In terms of the civilization of the whole world it will richly repay investigation. Let us move with the sun from the valley of the river St. Johns in Maine, to the far-off mountains of our California. Incoming masses by the hundred thousand flood New England. They do not speak our language, can not know our laws, and do not mix with our native people because there are hardly any natives in New England left to mix with. In dozens of schools built for the children of the great city of Boston and its suburbs the English language is not even taught, not to speak of as being used as a means of acquiring knowledge or of taking loyal and useful part in our national life. Throughout twenty varieties of the stupendous foreign sections in all our great industrial cities of the North, the very conditions of life prevent millions from learning the English language or taking an American breath into their nostrils. From St. Louis and Chicago and Milwaukee on the West to New York and Boston on the East democratic American political life is now almost impossible--unthinkable. To this we shall recur in later chapters. Just now we must proceed rapidly to other parts of our map. In our Far Western territory, where a million square miles of mountain and valley are beginning a marvelous development, we Americans are fighting one of the most desperate and crucial social conflicts in the history of our country and of European civilization. Our Western people are striving for the very salvation of our soil as the heritage of the white American. This conflict rages day by day--week by week--year by year. Our brethren of the West are misunderstood and their crying call for help is largely rejected by the East. There are counties in California where more Japanese babies are being born each year than white babies. The Japanese in California are multiplying at the stupendous rate of sixty-nine per thousand, annually, while the white people of California increase at the rate of eighteen per thousand. But the eighteen per cent. includes the relatively high rate of the foreign-born whites. The American white people of California increase by an annual rate of less than ten per thousand. Look you well, fellow Americans, to this part of our map. Go on in your indifference and carelessness, and these western valleys and mountains will, in the days of your children, be blood-soaked by one of the most desperate of interracial wars--a war at once civil and international--in the history of the world, and despite all your treaties of peace.

In the Southwest are over eighteen hundred miles of boundary line between ourselves and the people of Mexico. I know that I am expressing for my colleagues of the Ku Klux Klan who dwell along that eighteen hundred miles of boundary line their inmost thought, when I say that they wish only peace and fellowship and mutual aid and generosity to mark all our relations with the simple and kindly people of Mexico. But we are here marshalling the facts--the staggering facts which the American people must know and ponder well to-day. Nearly half a million Mexicans, speaking various dialects of the Spanish and Indian languages, have recently come across our Southwestern boundary line. Surely it is not with any ill will in our hearts that we say with all the power we have that these thousands can not share our American democracy with us in this generation. In Mexico these people can be ruled in such a way and takble for us all to escape censure."

Perhaps not. At any rate, it was a philosophic conclusion, and it enabled the Board, with unruffled feathers, to proceed to the business of receiving tenders for the construction of the line. Out of seven, the lowest was that of Mr. David Davies, who was, moreover, prepared to accept part payment in shares, an arrangement which, later, paved the way to the process of leasing these local railways to the contractors, that became almost a custom. Hardly, however, had these preliminaries been successfully negotiated, when Mr. Rice Hopkins died, and after a temporary agreement with one of his relatives to carry on in an advisory capacity, the Board proceeded to select a successor out of four "persons who presented themselves as eligible for this purpose."

Their choice was easily made. The line was being built by a local contractor. Fate was now to throw up a new engineer, whose claims were not less obvious on similar grounds. A native of Trefeglwys, Mr. Benjamin Piercy had, from an early age, taken great interest in railway planning, and, though this branch of the profession did not directly touch his daily routine, he devoted many leisure hours to its study. In his journeys through Wales he was impressed with the necessity of opening out its valleys to the great railway world that was developing beyond the English border, and when Mr. Henry Ronal misunderstanding.

The larger fact which I seek in this connection to strike into the mind and conscience of my country is as simple as the multiplication-table. The Negro of to-day is less in numbers than the white inhabitants in all states but one, for a single reason. That reason is the high average mortality among the Negroes. The enormous birth rate of the Negro population would rapidly submerge our white population if the Negroes were not decimated by a high death rate. The Negroes' numbers are kept within the number of our white population by various dreadful diseases. Though these diseases afflict us all in the South, the white people are generally far more immune than the blacks. We are somewhat behind the North and West in the practice of medicine, sanitation, and the general prevention of disease. But we are making great strides in this as in other means of progress. As all our people, including the Negroes, are progressively saved from the ravages of disease, the Negroes' birth rate will be more and more relentlessly shown in the census of the living. As night follows day, the Negro will, in the future, move on toward larger and larger comparative numbers in the South.

And so this map of our beloved land, which, as school children, we gazed upon with deep longings toward the future greatness of our country--this map to-day, section by section, is discolored and fading. So do our hopes, too, fade and fail. We Americans are a perishing people, and the things we have inherited and hold dearest in our hearts are on the way to dissolution and total loss. Of all the greater people of history, we Americans least deserve even the pity which is the portion of those who fail. The glory of our rise, the large part that is ours in the present, the majestic hope of the nation which prophesies such a resplendent future--all this is our heritage. We lack only understanding of ourselves and the public spirit required to take action. The Ku Klux Klan, in garb of strange device, marshalled under the flag of our country, has thrust itself as a dire warning across the downward pathway of the American people--our own people, whom we love.

The Fraternalism of the Klan

Surely there can not be in this frank statement of the principles and the purposes of the Ku Klux Klan any ground for the criticism that the organization was founded on racial and sectarian animosities and hatreds. The Klan is neither anti-racial nor anti-sectarian. It is pro-American. We concede to every distinctive organization in race and religion the same rights of restricting and qualifying its membership that we claim for ourselves. If, in the light of all the past, and in view of the present, we are insisting upon an organization of native-born white American citizens, we do not, by stipulating the conditions of membership in the Ku Klux Klan, avow hostility to any one class or company who may not, for one reason or another, qualify for membership in our organization. Indeed, as Americans we not only have the right to organize under the law and in keeping with the law, but far more than that--in the exercise of that right the Klan is positively committed to vouchsafing the same right to any other class of people on the American continent who desire to organize themselves for patriotic, social, fraternal or religious purposes. Only this too is also stoutly maintained: Any organization that is formed and fostered under the flag of our common country must not be inimical to our democratic government and institutions.

On another occasion one of the largest and soundest local Klans ever founded by our organizers was instantly dissolved, because our rules and regulations in these things were violated. The Klan in question wished to find a remedy for a serious local disorder. A tradesman in the community was conducting a thriving bootlegging establishment which grew to be a scandal to the whole town. The Klan, recently organized, and not fully comprehending our methods, posted notices warning the culprit to leave town. They emphasized their warning by posting along side certain signs of the Ku Klux Klan. For this interference with the orderly process of justice in this case the local Klan in question was quickly disbanded by our headquarters.

With this and other similar incidents in mind the reader may well imagine the thoughts and feelings of Klansmen everywhere when they are told that their organization has been founded for the purpose of "Lynching Niggers." We have been accused of crimes in towns where we had no local Klan within hundreds of miles. In such cases the lynching accusations are often carried on the wings of great organizations of the press. Our denials we find ineffectual. But of this I am certain: The truth will sometimes overtake the lies and the evil will recoil on the heads of the evil-doers.

But in addition to the purely patriotic principles of the Klan, which are fundamental, it is a fraternal organization. A Charter for the Klan was granted by the State of Georgia. All of its activities are subject to scrutiny by the State and review by properly constituted authority. The Charter may be revoked at the will of the State. Where-ever irregularities are shown in the conduct of the Klan, or wherever the Klan departs from the purposes of its organization as set forth in the Charter, the Klan may be disbanded by due process of law. It is therefore not an organization that has sprung up over night, without responsibility, claiming independence of the law of the land.

The Klan offers its membership a graduate course in fraternalism. There are several orders administered and each of these orders marks an advance in devotion to our common country and in those fraternal relations and responsibilities which bind us to our fellow men. There can be nothing in this organization, as there is nothing in the many fraternal organizations in this country, that is inimical to the highest sense of social order. Indeed, underlying the fraternalism of the Klan is a consecration to the American home, the preservation of its sanctity and the maintenance of ideal family life. From this a sympathetic helpfulness flows out to those in distress and discouragement, and a force of strong men is thrown about the weak and helpless without respect to color or creed. This is the service of love and sacrifice to our age and generation which is symbolized by the fiery cross.

The Klanishness of The Klan

It is perhaps not only proper but also necessary, in view of the vigorous and persistent attacks made on the Klan, to discuss more fully the apparent exclusiveness of the organization. I desire to reiterate with emphasis that the Klan is a purely American organization assembled around the Constitution of the United States, to safeguard its provisions, advance its purposes, and perpetuate its democracy. This definition of the Klan in its organization necessarily carries the idea of exclusiveness. All men without respect to race, color and religion may not be organized into a democracy. Democracy can not be established by outside pressure. It is something which must be developed in the individual consciousness, and is of very slow growth. We speak loosely when we talk of the Anglo-Saxon having grown into a democracy through a thousand years of struggle. Five thousand years would be a more accurate statement of the fact. During all the slow processes of the development of the white man's civilization, there was something inherent in his life that slowly pushed its way up into the consciousness of the individual until it found expression in constitutional government, in freedom of thought and speech, and in all the elements of political and religious liberty. One of the most developed expressions of this growth into democracy is our American Government with all its complexities and intricacies. It should go without saying that all men, without reference to origin or history, can not be thrust into this country, and, under restraint and repression, be forced into our ways of thinking and living and so attain the true value of American citizenship. To begin with, a great many people, living under one form of autocracy or another, have never been awakened to a sense of and desire for democracy. In others the sense has begun to stir, but has not had the opportunity or the time for that sure growth that would transform them into a citizenship capable of pure self-government.

This fact has been demonstrated by the futility of the attempts in Russia, first under the administration of Kerensky and now under Lenine and Trotsky. The bolshevist camarilla attempted to take that nation, which has been subjected for ages to one of the simplest and meanest despotisms on earth, and organize it into a sort of democracy. This proposition is still further illuminated by the experience of Germany in her attempt to build a democracy on the ruins of her old autocracy. The best thinkers in the German nation, notwithstanding the superior intellectual, economical and industrial qualifications of the people, predict that a real democracy can not be established in Germany in less than fifty years. If these two nations, both white, the one having the most robust physical manhood in the world, and the other the most vigorous mentality, can not rise from autocracy into democracy, how absurd it appears that we should take great masses of the untaught, underfed, inferior people of all the lands and undertake to precipitate them, in masses, into our very peculiar and intricate national democracy.

The Klan, organized to protect and advance the cause of our native institutions, is therefore exclusive in the restriction of its membership to white native-born Americans. We believe that only one born on American soil, surrounded by American institutions, taught in the American schools, harmonized from infancy with American ideals, can become fully conscious of what our peculiar democracy means and be adequately qualified for all the duties of citizenship in this republic.

In order to become a member of the Klan one must subscribe without reservation of any sort to the Constitution of the United States. Loyalty to the Constitution must be so thorough that no ultimate allegiance to any foreign institution, power or country can be retained. Committal to Americanism is so absolute that nothing is left uncommitted. The Ku Klux Klan is patriotic to the last and highest degree. We believe that the principles upon which this republic was founded, and around which the great War Between the States was waged, should be constantly reaffirmed and emphasized.

The American nation has acted as a great magnet. The American city in particular has been an irresistible lure to the unhappy and oppressed peoples of the world. From all shores great tides of immigration have flowed in upon us. The alien peoples have not been distributed over the vast area of our common country, but have, for the most part, been congested in our great centers. Many of them can not read and write their own language. On the average they are three times as prone to pauperism and nine times as prone to crime as our native-born Americans. Because of their numbers, as well as their nationalistic tendencies, they organize themselves into separate communities and often breed hostility to American institutions. How natural that such foreign communities should spawn all forms of social and political vices.

Of course this plethora of population violates the fundamental law of our social life. This nation grew strong and took on its peculiar virtues out in the open fields and under the gleaming stars. Granting that the possibilities of democracy are inherent in many of these aliens that have been admitted into our country, the possibilities can not now be realized in the great cities of the nation. We believe that one can never be wholly patriotic or thoroughly democratized until he obeys God's great first commandment and settles upon some spot of ground and subdues it and makes it yield its secrets and its wealth. Permit these people that have come to us to segregate in cities by race and tongue, and continue to live in squalor and dirt, often accursed by disease and ignorance, foreign in habit and thought and pursuit, understanding our country only as an unrestricted opportunity for license, and it presents the gravest problems that our nation was ever called upon to solve. This is especially true since these aliens have been permitted to qualify for citizenship and given suffrage within a space of time so short that they can not even become acquainted with the outward manners and customs of the American people, not to mention the basic intellectual and spiritual factors of our national consciousness.

More than fifty per cent. of the votes cast in the last presidential election were cast by cities. For the first time in the history of this country the urban population exceeds the rural. This vast alien population now holds and exercises the balance of political power. HERE IS A CHALLENGE WITH TRUMPET VOICE TO EVERY NATIVE-BORN AMERICAN TO FACE THE CRISIS AND PRESERVE OUR DEMOCRACY FOR THE GENERATIONS TO COME.

One other condition is imposed on all men who would be associated with the Klan, and that is subscription to the tenets of Christianity. We are in no sense a religious organization. There is no purpose of founding what has been suggested by our critics, a new American church. The Klan does not interfere, through membership, with any man's interpretation of religious truth or his connection with any branch or denomination of the Christian church. In fact, the Klan has nothing to do with dogma, creed, or ritual. Yet the Klan does insist that every man becoming a member shall strive to carry himself by the code of conduct promulgated by Jesus Christ. It is a high standard of living that the Klan undertakes to maintain, and at the very threshold of the organization one must accept this highest standard of ethics and morals that the world has ever known.

There are many who can not accept these stern conditions. But certainly it is not an arbitrary discrimination against any class, or sect, or race. We believe that, interwoven into the entire fabric of real Americanism, are the principles of Christianity. Reverent recognition of this fact has been made in the Bills of Right and in nearly every state constitution of the Union. In 1895 the Supreme Court of the United States, in a decision on the Alien Labor Contract Law, declared this to be a Christian nation, and the Court was very careful to establish its decision by referring explicitly to the principles and declarations of Christianity which run through all the organic laws of the country. So, believing as we do, that our patriotic principles and Christianity are inseparable and indivisible, we hold steadfastly to the Constitution and the Sermon on the Mount. It goes without saying that men who repudiate either can not look for fellowship in the Klan.

Is The Klan Anti-Semitic

Referring to the exclusiveness of the Klan, I am not quite prepared to admit that the conditions stipulated for membership in the organization set up the insuperable barrier that some people suspect. It has been pointed out in many hostile criticisms that the Semitic race is excluded from membership in the Klan. It is not true, for instance, that the Klan has set up arbitrary barriers to the admission of the Hebrew; but it is true that the orthodox Hebrew has established around himself barriers that preclude his admission into the organization.

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