[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 103rd 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?
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