"...no new thing under the sun."

I've written several posts lately about the Ku Klux Klan in Lucas and Wayne counties, a topic that I've been exploring in a scattershot kind of way since 2012. And in the process, affirmed a pet theory  --- that the seeds of the Klan were planted and nurtured in Wayne County by organizers from Lucas County --- among them John P. Ream and the Rev. Jesse D. Pontius.

The Klan seems not to have taken hold in Wayne County and although it gained considerable strength in Lucas during and after 1923, it dissipated rapidly during and after 1927.

Although the Klan used shows of strength and fiery crosses to intimidate in both counties, I've not come across reports of anyone being targeted specifically in either Lucas or Wayne. The closest seems to be a story carried forward within Chariton's Sacred Heart Parish that a cross was burned at one point at the church, intersection of North Main and Auburn. But if so, and there's no reason to doubt the story, there doesn't seem to have been a published report.

Elsewhere, especially where the black population was larger, Klan members did actively seek to intimidate black people, as evidenced by the front page (above) of The Des Moines Register of April 23, 1925.

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I've generally shared my posts about the Klan both locally and to what perhaps is Iowa's largest online local and state history group and was interested to note this time around some of the angry comments the posts attracted. In the case of one, commenting had to be suspended by diligent moderators who do their best to steer the group away from current politics.

Most of the debate there wasn't about anything substantive, but instead about the party affiliation of the six young men who founded the KKK back in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee. Truth is, we don't know much about the affiliation of the young men, only that after white supremacists turned the group away from its original social purposes into a political tool, Southern Democrats used it as a medium for racial intimidation before it was suppressed during 1870-1871.

The second Klan, founded in Georgia during 1915, was bipartisan in its appeal.

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I'm a big fan of Ecclesiastes 1:9 --- "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."

So part of my personal agenda in all of this has been to locate the themes present during the rise of the Klan in Iowa during the 1920s and compare them with themes that have emerged again in full flower during our current season of discontent.

Those themes were summed up by the Rev. Mr. Pontius during his address to the Klan's organizational meeting in Seymour during May of 1924 as reported in The Seymour Herald:

"The meeting was called to order and the first verse of 'America' was sung, followed by prayer. The speaker read the creed of the Klan, Proverbs 14th chapter, 31st verse. In his address, he stated that the Klan is composed of native-born Americans of the Caucasian race who must be supporters if not members of some Protestant church. the object of the Klan is the protection of the United States by aiding officers in the enforcement of the law, the restoration of the Bible to the public schools, the shutting off of undesirable immigration, resistance to any further gain in power by either Jews or Roman Catholics and awakening the native born Caucasians of the United States to the fact that this is their country."