I started this account of the Ku Klux Klan's rise during the mid-1920s in Wayne County last week with a post entitled, The Ku Klux Klan arrives in Wayne County's Seymour, focused on an organizational meeting held there during late May. The next installment was entitled "The Ku Klux Klan spreads across Wayne County," tracing the organization's development in eastern Wayne County and its spread to Corydon, the county seat, which was capped during August of 1925 by a large "konklave" held at the county fair grounds there.
I was (and still am) exploring a theory that the seeds of the Klan in Wayne County were planted and nurtured by organizers from Lucas County, including the Rev. Jesse D. Pontius, pastor of Chariton's First Christian Church; John P. Ream, a Chariton-area farmer who was Klan organizer for Wayne County; and an unidentified Klan organizer for both counties who may have been Wayne Blankenship, a professional organizer from Indiana imported to Chariton during 1923 who had helped the organization build considerable strength there.
What I was not able to do last week was track the Klan elsewhere in Wayne County because digital archives of the newspapers that served other major communities --- Corydon, Allerton, Humeston and Lineville --- are not available online for the Klan years.
But now I can, thanks to Bob Gunzenhauser, of Humeston, whose great-grandfather was E. B. McConnell, publisher of The Humeston New Era from 1919 to 1947. His parents, Paul and Karla Gunzenhauser, widely known for work with Mormon Trail history, hold a considerable archive of New Era issues and Bob was able to use those while researching an excellent article about the Klan that he wrote for the Wayne County Independent during 2017.
Among the items he shared was the following account of a Klan organizational meeting held in Humeston during late May of 1924, during the same period work was beginning in Seymour across the county to the southeast, published in The New Era of May 28. The usual suspects are present here, too --- the Rev. Mr. Pontius, J.D. Ream and that unidentified two-county organizer. Here's the report:
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A meeting preliminary to organizing a klavern of the Ku Klux Klan was held at the opera house Monday night. The room was rented Saturday evening by J.P. Ream of Chariton, a former county official there who is now organizer for the Klan in Wayne county; notice was spread by word of mouth of the meeting and on Monday tickets of admission were handed out to a lecture on Americanism. Each person admitted was obliged to write his name on the ticket, thus the persons in charge have a record of those interested enough to go.
Admitted to the room the visitors found on each seat a card bearing the words, "Burbank for governor;" probably a hundred men and boys were present. the meeting was opened by the organizer for Lucas and Wayne counties, who in a few words stated the purpose of the meeting, announced that Mr. Ream would be in charge of the work in this county, and called upon the audience to rise and join in the singing of the first verse of "America" to be followed by prayer.
He then introduced the speaker of the evening, J. D. Pontius of Chariton, pastor of the Christian church there and formerly pastor of the church here. Mr. Pontius read the creed of the Klan, the 12th chapter of Romans in the New Testament, and then made his address in the course of which he stated that the Klan is composed of native born white American citizens who must be backers if not members of some Protestant church; the object is the protection of the United States by aiding officers in the enforcement of law, the restoration of the Bible to the public schools, the shutting off of undesirable immigration, resistance to any further gain in power in this county by Jew or Roman Catholic power, and the supremacy of the white race.
It was admitted that this local community is apparently not much concerned with these subjects, but to gain the purposes of the Klan it is necessary to have complete organization just as any other great movement must. the Klan is not concerned with the political faith of its members, only working for "clean politics" and the election of real Americans. Investigation is made of the records of all prominent candidates and the result is relayed to the members so that they may know how to vote. Mr. Pontius enumerated a number of causes of benevolence by Klansmen and said that hospitals are built in Arkansas, Kansas, Oregon and another western state, and an orphanage in still another state.
It was made plain that only white men and women of Protestant faith are accepted for membership, and that bootleggers, wifebeaters, persons who have been convicted of felony, gamblers and the like are not accepted. After this statement at the close of the lecture, all who did not care to become members were asked to withdraw and doubtless an organization is being formed and the process of investigation of all applicants is begun. There were a number present who did not care to affiliate at present, but who have no ill will toward the Klan; it is doing good work elsewhere and may be of benefit here. There is no fault to be found with its creed.
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Curiously, some of the phrasing in this article is identical or very similar to that found in reports of the organizational meeting in Seymour --- the line, "there were a number present who did not care to affiliate at present, but who have no ill will toward the Klan; it is doing good work elsewhere ...." for example.
This suggests that the Lucas Countyans were well organized enough to provide the editors of the newspapers in Humeston and Seymour with news releases outlining the Klan position and that both editors, who certainly attended the meetings they were reporting upon, relied upon those releases for some of their "background" material.
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The Klan's next (and final) major appearance in Humeston came on Saturday evening, July 5, when the Rev. Mt. Pontius and his Lucas County friends took advantage of a community band concert to snare a crowd of several hundred who had attended it to conduct another pep rally for the Klan and its agenda.
"They took every possible advantage of the situation," Mr. McConnell wrote in his edition of July 9, "using the band stand with its lights paid for by the town, impeding traffic by calling the crowd in around the bandstand in the street intersection --- these same people having come into town because of musical entertainment financed by merchants and businessmen of the town, inviting any ministers present to come up on the platform, and requesting the mayor to lead the crowd in singing, 'America.' "
The Rev. Mr. Pontius also scolded his former congregation at Humeston's First Christian Church for refusing to allow him use of their church building for his rally, informing him that if the Klan were in need of a hall plenty of rental space was available elsewhere.
It's interesting to note that D.W. Griffith's 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation," which glorified the Klan and provided the inspiration for its resurgence in the United States, had played the Princess Theatre in Humeston June 24-26, perhaps as part of the Klan's Wayne County organizational effort.
Whatever the case, there's no indication that the Klan took root in Humeston or for that matter generated too much enthusiasm in Wayne County as a whole --- other than perhaps in the southeast, perhaps because of that region's proximity to Appanoose County, a hotbed of Klan activity.
Little is heard of it after the "konklave" at the fairgrounds in Corydon during August of 1925 that drew a crowd estimated in the New Era as perhaps 3,000 as opposed to pre-event predictions elsewhere that up to 40,000 would attend.
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In his 2017 article for The Independent, Bob Gunzenhauser suggests what I think is a reasonable theory for the Klan's failure to take off in Wayne County: "The main reasons for the Klan to rally around – anti-immigration, anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Black – simply didn’t exist in large numbers in Wayne County. Unlike Appanoose and Lucas counties, Wayne County didn’t have the same economic drivers to attract these diverse groups to the county, like coal mining and railroads. With the exception of a few mines near Seymour, Wayne County was primarily agricultural in nature, having been settled early in Iowa’s statehood by native born, white Protestant farmers.
"In 1925, Wayne County had the lowest percentage of foreign born residents of any county in the state. Humeston and Corydon had the highest percentages of white, native born, native parents in the state among all cities above 1,000 population, and Humeston had the lowest percentage of white, native born, with foreign or mixed parents at 4.6 percent in the state.
"With such a high level of native born, native parent, white Protestants (some of the highest in the state at the time), one would think that Wayne County, and particularly Humeston, would have been a natural home for the Klan. However, with these high percentages, it gave the populace little reason to need to Klan to “protect their interests” – why belong to an organization that excludes Catholics, Jews, Blacks, or immigrants when these people were in small enough numbers as to not economically threaten potential members?"
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Thanks to Bob for sharing this material from The New Era. There are a couple of other items related specifically to Chariton that I intend to share in another post before wrapping up this installment of Klan history in the south of Iowa.
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