On August 16, 1921, more than a thousand men dressed in white bedsheets with crimson crosses over their hearts wandered up and down Central Park Avenue south of Foster offering each other a ritual handshake of three fingers and three flicks of the wrist, much to the amusement of residents who watched the spectacle from their porches. About 2,000 cars were lined up, ready to begin the procession to the first statewide Ku Klux Klan ceremony in Illinois.
But during that decade Klan membership grew to between 150,000 and 200,000 white, Protestant males in Chicago and its nearby suburbs. The “invisible order” claimed it influenced municipal elections as far away as Aurora. At one point Simmons declared Chicago the most active Klan city outside the south. As the world set out to recover from the “war to end all wars,” Simmons and his lieutenants knew the time was ripe to capitalize on the fears and concerns of white Americans, especially those living in or near large cities. In Chicago the Klan pointed at virtually any social change as a threat to “true Americanism,” arguing that an ever-growing population of non-English-speaking European immigrants was stealing jobs; Roman Catholicism, which happened to be the faith of most of the immigrants, and Judaism were plotting to wipe out Protestantism; moral standards were declining, as evinced by prohibition-era gangster activity; Chicago’s black population had grown by 148 percent between 1910 and 1920; women, who had won the right to vote in 1920, were eroding the political power of men; and worldwide communism and its offspring in the U.S., organized labor, were on a rampage.
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A Klan official spread an American flag on a wooden table and placed a sword with a golden hilt on top. A second sheeted figure positioned a golden vessel on one side of the table and a Bible opened to Romans 12 on the other. After reciting incantations from the Kloran (the official book of rituals), Simmons addressed the blindfolded participants kneeling before him: “Sirs, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan does not discriminate against a man on account of his religious or political creed when same does not conflict with or antagonize the sacred rights and privileges guaranteed by our civil government and Christian ideals and institutions.” Simmons requested that all initiates submitting to “naturalization” respond simultaneously to a list of questions. Those same questions usually were used by unit leaders to screen applicants prior to initiation.
“Is the motive prompting your ambition to be a Klansman serious and unselfish?”
Simmons was taken aback by the smattering of “no”s. A handful of blindfolded men stood up to ask if it was OK to be Jewish. The Illinois Klan officials standing at Simmons’s side whispered back and forth until one stepped into the crowd, gathered up the non-Christians, and led them to a corner of the pasture to inform them that their membership applications had been rejected.
“While millions of red-blooded yankees sit quietly and watch the growth and revival of the infamous Ku Klux Klan in the southland,” the Defender reporters warned on their newspaper’s front page five days later, “this order has come into the north and gathered the southerners in this part of the country into their clan.” The paper’s description of the ceremony was positioned under a triple-decker headline: “Ku Klux Invade Chicago; City Slept as Torches Light Skies; Southern Order With ‘Tainted Reputation’ Gaining Place in North.”
Unionization usually meant businessmen had to spend more money to increase salaries and improve workplace conditions or face worker shutdowns. But those same businessmen turned the Klan rank and file against organized labor by emphasizing unions’ multiracial and nondenominational characteristics as well as their alleged similarities with anticapitalist bolshevism.
