November 6, 2024: The 1924 Election: KKKonventions

[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]

On the Klan’s influence on both 1924 Conventions, and a frustrating national parallel.

More than 8 years ago, I wrote for The American Prospect about the chaotic 1924 Democratic National Convention (to this day the longest continuously running convention in US history) and the frustratingly over-sized role that the Ku Klux Klan played there. I’d ask you to check out that column (at the first hyperlink above) if you would, and then come on back for more.

Welcome back! I’m always learning, and it’s important to note that I was apparently mistaken that the Convention was widely known as the “Klanbake”—that’s apparently a myth which developed after the fact, based on a single newspaper editorial. But nonetheless, the Klan was a prominent presence at that DNC in New York, and a driving force in the Convention’s inability to settle on a nominee until the 103^rd ballot. And it’s worth noting that the Klan was also prominently present at the RNC in Cleveland that year, leading another editorial writer to dub that one the Kleveland Konvention. Just as the DNC failed to censure or in any formal way call out the KKK, so too was an anti-KKK measure voted down at the RNC; eventually the Republican VP nominee Charles Dawes did publicly criticize the Klan, but with sufficient mixed signals toward the organization that, as New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia noted, “General Dawes praised the Klan with faint damn.” There’s no question that the Ku Klux Klan was a major political player for both parties in the 1924 campaign.

Moreover, whatever we call the conventions or say about the KKK’s role at and around them, I stand by the final arguments I made in that American Prospect column—that we can’t separate the Klan from the most significant legislation passed in 1924, and one of the most influential laws enacted in American history: the Johnson-Reed Act, better known as the Immigration Act of 1924. I said most of what I’d want to say about that horrific law in those two hyperlinked columns, as well as in those final paragraphs of the Prospect piece. The bottom line, to me, is that it wasn’t just the respective national conventions and political parties which were under the sway of the Ku Klux Klan in 1924—it was the entire nation, and in its immigration policy, its visions of diversity and inclusion/exclusion, and its definitions of American identity it would remain so for the next forty years.  

Next 1924 contexts tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other crazy elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d share?