CHAPTER VII

KU KLUX KLAN AND THE JEWS

_"Drive them out of the United States" are the words that are used to enlist Jew-haters into the ranks._

In spite of the fact that ever since the beginning of the American colonies, in the war of the revolution and in other national crises, great Jews have helped to make the United States what it is today, the Ku Klux Klan recruits misguided members on the representation that it has found a scheme to drive the Jews out of the country. Anti-Jewish propaganda is used particularly in large cities and in smaller communities where racial and religious flames may be fanned in order to win members and money for the Ku Klux.

_The Searchlight_, the official paper of the Klan, teems with anti-Jewish literature. Secret documents and stories are passed around privately among the organizers and used in gaining recruits.

"Chaplain" Ridley is one of the most rabid of the campaigners against the Jews. He never lets an opportunity go by to ridicule Jews and stir up prejudice.

In the first place, Jews are barred from the Ku Klux Klan. In a questionnaire that must be filled in by those who are initiated these questions are asked:

"Are you a gentile or a jew? What is your religious faith? Of what church are you a member (if any)? Of what religious faith are your parents?"

CHAPLAIN ATTACKS JEWS

"Chaplain" Ridley in _The Searchlight_, writes:

"I cannot help being what I am racially. I am not a Jew, nor a negro nor a foreigner. I am an Anglo-Saxon white man, so ordained by the hand and will of God, and so constituted and trained that I cannot conscientiously take either my politics or my religion from some secluded ass on the other side of the world.

"Now, if somebody else happens to be a Jew, I can't help it any more than he can. Or if he happens to be black, I can't help that, either. If he were born under a foreign flag, I couldn't help it--but there is one thing I can do. I can object to his un-American propaganda being preached in my home or practiced in the solemn assembly of real Americans."

_The Searchlight_ constantly mixes Jews and negroes in ridiculous "movements." For instance, one writer in the issue of July 30, 1921, declares that his investigations have demonstrated that Jewish plotters are stirring up the negroes to make a race war so that the government will be destroyed.

The writer goes on:

"For the same reason, the Jew is interested in overthrowing Christian Russia. But remember, he does not intend to stop at Russia. Through his Third Internationale of Moscow he is working to overthrow all the Gentile Governments of the world. I am enclosing an editorial clipped from The New York _World_ of Saturday, July 23. You will keep in mind that _The World_ is Jew-owned, as is every other newspaper in New York City except the Tribune. * * * In all my twenty-five years traveling about over this continent I have never met a disloyal American who failed to be either foreign-born or a Semite. With the best wishes for the success of the Ku Klux Klan."

HOW TO THROW JEWS OUT

In the instructions to kleagles, who sell memberships in the Klan, the anti-Jewish feeling in some communities is appealed to in this manner:

"The Jew patronizes only the Jew unless it is impossible to do so. Therefore, we klansmen, the only real Americans, must, by the same methods, protect ourselves, and practice by actual application the teachings of klannishness. With this policy faithfully adhered to, it will not be long before the Jew will be forced out of business by our practice of his own business methods, for when the time comes when klansmen trade only with klansmen then the days of the Jews' success in business will be numbered and the Invisible Empire can drive them from the shores of our own America."

Another favorite way to create interest in the anti-Jewish movement is to represent that Imperial Kleagle Clarke has in hand the organization of a nation-wide Jewish society to oppose the Sons of Israel. This society is to be created by Jews who are in the pay of Kleagle Clarke and who are really traitors to their own co-religionists. Spies working in the ranks of the Sons of Israel will keep the Ku Klux Klan informed of what the Sons of Israel are doing and finally a clash between the two organizations is to be engineered, to the destruction of both. Of course this is the wildest sort of propaganda, but it demonstrates how the agents play with fire in order to get members.

"SEARCHLIGHT" AND THE JEWS

Among the articles in _The Searchlight_ there are those headed, "A Message from Jerusalem--Esau the Wanderer must Pay for His Pottage--the Mightiest Weapons for the Jews are Pounds and Pence."

"Doesn't Think Much of the Jews."

"Jewish Rabbi Gets Rabid."

A paragraph from "Doesn't Think Much of the Jews," published Feb. 12, 1921, contains this passage:

"Their religion is to control wealth and thereby control all nations. And you cannot deny but they are doing so under false names. Jews are entering into every Government, every nation on earth except China and Japan, where their heavenly God received little recognition. They spread their ingenious religion that strangled the ignorant and credulous by causing dissension to their advantage."