Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy examples of the reporting craft.
The original Ku Klux Klan was started in Tennessee almost immediately after the Civil War by defeated Confederates from the heavily Democratic South to thwart Reconstruction, forced upon them by Radical Republicans. According to contemporary accounts, it soon attracted racists across the country. This supposedly secret society also received broad attention, especially after the New York Herald published a letter in April 1868 that began: “By command of the Grand Cyclops of the secret order known to the outside world as the Ku Klux Klan, I am directed in the name of truth and justice to make the following statement in reference to this organization.”
On May 1, 1868, the National Opinion of Bradford, Vermont, informed its readers that:
The New York Herald has what professes to be an official communication from some dignitary of the Ku Klux Klan, setting forth the origin and purpose of the Klan, from which it would appear that the organization numbers over seven hundred thousand members, and that it is spread over the whole country, from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Only white citizens of the United States can become members, and radicals, negroes and infidels cannot. The meaning given to the term Ku Klux Klan is a “circle of friends” which “first organized in Giles County, Tenn., in August, 1866, and was an absolute necessity, resulting from the tyranny, domination and aggression of the Brownlow legislature.”
Two weeks before, the Daily Phoenix of Columbia, South Carolina, also addressed the Herald report. It began with what it described as a snippet from the Herald letter:
“Many months ago we warned the radicals that they were sowing a fearful harvest in the South. We told them that the measures they were adopting would inevitably result in a conflict between the two races. Heedless of the solemn lessons which history teaches, and utterly regardless of the laws of nature, our radical rulers forced their policy upon the South, and already are we beginning to see what the consequences will be. From all appearances a war of races in that unhappy section of the Union is rapidly approaching. The first seeds of distrust were sown by the Freedmen’s Bureau, which, although under the patronage of the general government, was most shamefully used by the radical party to poison the minds of the ignorant blacks against their former masters.”
The Daily Phoenix writer then offered his own analysis. While claiming that the Klan was not “generally prevalent” in South Carolina, he called the Herald letter “full of truth” and echoed its message:
The white race of the South are now earnestly striving to prevent the necessity of any such organizations, by defeating the negro Constitutions, by which negro rule is to be put over them. Until it is tested whether they will have this rule put over them, they will endeavor to avoid all organizations looking to its defeat by violence in any form. But should they fail in their efforts, and negro governments be put over them, we doubt not that every city, town, village and neighborhood in the South will have combinations of the White population to protect themselves against negro rule. Our own impression, however, has ever been, that Congressional reconstruction (or rather destruction) for the Southern states will fail, that is, that so many states will fail adopting it, as practically to defeat the object for which it was put into operation—the perpetuation of the radicals in power.
Although the Klan was a public organization that seemed to be growing in strength, in 1871 at least one writer for the Daily State Register of Carson City, Nevada, was arguing that the KKK was the “hugest ‘bug-a-boo,’ and most exaggerated, unfounded, unwarranted, senseless, sensational humbug that has ever been inflicted on the country that it did not exist.”
He continued:
He is the scapegoat for all the sins and crimes committed south of Mason and Dixon’s line. If a thieving carpetbagger happens to get his deserts meted out to him, by proper punishment, for the commission of some characteristic mean act, the circumstances is at once magnified into a terrible “Ku Klux outrage.” If a pilfering [epithet deleted] happens to fall into a blind shaft while on a hen roost raid, and breaks his infernal neck, the “pale corpus” is exhibited to the sympathizing gaze of the “loyal people” as the fiendish work of the murderous Ku Klux Klan. … The motive of those who keep alive this manufactured excitement is too transparent to deceive anyone. It is alleged by “persecuted loyalty” that outrages are so flagrant and frequent in the Southern States that life is endangered, and it must have federal protection; and special legislation to “protect Southern loyalists” is urged upon Congress, which the Radical majority are very willing to enact; but, unfortunately it is difficult to find a decent pretext.
