The following are some excerpts from a rather interesting volume that I read today:
Larry R. Gerlach, Blazing Crosses in Zion: The Ku Klux Klan in Utah (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1982)
Far removed from the Deep South, territorial Utah was nonetheless created by the Reconstruction Klan in ways that created a decidedly hostile attitude toward the Invisible Empire among the Mormon majority. The leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints minced no words in denouncing the hooded order on religious, social, and political grounds. Initial opposition to the Klan was based on the numerous scriptural proscriptions in the Book of Mormon against “secret combinations” per se. More specifically, LDS officials condemned the Klan because its acts of violence and intimidation not only violated the civil liberties of both blacks and whites but also threatened to undermine law and order and perhaps provoke warfare between the races. During the height of Klan activity, the Deseret News published extracts of letters from Mormon missionaries in the South describing the reign of terror imposed by the Klan and repeatedly editorialized against the Invisible Empire, applauding efforts of the federal government to break up “the iniquitous organization.”
Even after its demise as a formal organization, the Klan was viewed pejoratively in Utah. The order’s terrorist image was no ingrained that the label Ku Klux Klan was frequently applied to Mormons and non-Mormons alike who perpetrated acts of violence or coercion. More important, Mormon missionaries were harassed periodically by Southerners acting under the name of the Klan. In Georgia, for example, Klansmen in 1883 posted a sign near an LDS conference site advising the “Mormon Devils” that they had thereby been given “fair worning [sic] to get out of Haywood valley”; in 1886 the Klan sent Elder William Spry a latter which, in advising the missionary not to come within three miles of the town of Fish, snarled that “death is too good for such contemptible puppies as you are”; and in 1887 the Klan threatened a group of elders led by G.S. Spencer with “a coat of tar and feathers” if they did not leave the area within twenty-four hours. Such incidents, combined with numerous indignities, mobbings, and even murders suffered by Mormons in the South caused many Saints to regard the Ku Klux Klan as a band of lawless, anti-Mormon cutthroats. (pp. 10-11)
At first glance it would appear that Utah did not afford a social climate conducive to the growth of the Klankraft. First of all, the state was geographically extensive and demographically restricted. According to the 1920 Federal Census, the land of deserts, Canyonlands, and mountains was home to only 449,396 persons. The lone metropolitan center was Salt Lake City with 118,100 residents; Ogden (32,804) and Provo (10,303) were the only other urban towns. Moreover, the population was racially homogeneous. The vast majority of the inhabitants were Caucasian (441,901); there were only 1,446 blacks, 2,711 Indians, and 3,338 persons of “other” (mostly Asian) stock. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a secular as well as spiritual force, was the dominant influence in the state. The three largest religious groups in 1926 were: LDS, 337,200; Catholic, 13,595; and Greek Orthodox, 6,000; there were only 1,290 Jews. In short, Utah in the 1920s was an extraordinarily homogenous state, one which was overwhelmingly rural, Anglo-Saxon, and Mormon.
On the other hand, Utahns were as susceptible as anyone to the all-American prejudices promulgated by the Ku Klux Klan . . . Blacks, most of whom lived in Ogden or Salt Lake City, were openly despised; even the LDS church placed its Negro members in a position of inferiority by denying the Mormon priesthood to black males. The Utah press in the 1920s was full of antiblack cartoons, stories, and epithets when a suburban Salt Lake social club advertises its minstrel show at the local LDS ward as “[N-word] Night,” when a newspaper prints “Rastus” stories, and when a story relative to legislative logrolling carries the headline “Senate Concerned Over ‘[N-word] in the Woodpile,’” racism is deep-seated. The Klan’s racist appeals, whether its advocacy of “white supremacy” or its admonitions against “mongrelisation of the race,” would find adherents in the Beehive State.
Religious bigotry was also a fact of life in the Mormon Zion. Anti-Semitism was restricted largely to covert hostility and private derision because of the financial success and civic contributions of the state’s small but influential Jewry. Thus, while often highly respected as individuals—as evidenced by the election in 1916 of Simon Bamberger as the second Jewish governor in the United States—Jews as a group were feared or disliked and thus banned from numerous social organizations. (pp. 16-17; I have censored the N-word in case Google/blogger might think I am spreading racism in this article)
[T]he Klan appeared to be absolutely correct in prescribing a return to “law and order” and the puritanical precepts of “old-time religion” as the only cures or a host of evils ranging from “demon rum” to “wild women.”
For all the attention given to its racial and religious proscriptions, the Ku Klux Klan was first and foremost an agency of social regulation. During the 1920s, social regulation was ardently desired by Utah traditionalists, a people whose sense of community turned on conformity and whose attempts to control sumptuary habits included the recent banning of cigarettes . . . In a very real sense, Mormonism rendered the Ku Klux Klan superfluous. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints functioned in a manner such as to discharge effectively the “moral reform” function of the Invisible Empire. More important than the essential clannishness of the Mormon people in secular, as well as spiritual affairs was the fact that the LDS ward was a homogeneous, corporate community emphasizing conformity and obedience and where the bishopric systematically supervised the personal deportment and sumptuary habits of communicants. The cultural cohesiveness and communitarianism of a people willing to “listen to counsel” and who tried to live in, but not be of, the world probably best explains why so few Mormons disobeyed the admonitions of church officials against joining the Klan. (pp. 18, 151)
Although Kleagles never openly attacked the LDS church in Utah, their emphasis on the infrequently publicized Klan principle “the absolute separation of church and state” was not misunderstood. In other states the call for the separation of church and state was an attack on Catholicism, but in Utah the reference was unmistakably to the involvement of the Mormon church in secular affairs—an involvement that was particularly pronounced in the city and county of Salt Lake. Moreover, Salt Lake Saints were surely aware of the anti-Mormonism of such local Klansmen as Charlie Kelly. Since the Salt Lake Klan was non-Mormon (if Kelly was an officer in the Klan, good Mormons most assuredly were not members) and little or no attempt was made to recruit Saints to the fold, the Klan itself severely limited its potential for growth. (pp. 37-38; a “Kleagle” is an officer in the KKK)
As before, anti-Mormonism in the South took the form of Klan harassment of LDS missionaries. For example, in August 1924 a band of robed and hooded Klansmen ran four Mormon elders out of Iron Ridge, Georgia. See the letter of S. Olsen Josephson printed in the Box Elder Journal, August 28, 1924. Glen W. Ahlstrom, who also served an LDS mission in Georgia in 1923-24, recalled a similar incident near Atlanta in 1924. During Sunday services at a local branch of the LDS church, “a bunch of Ku Klux Klanners came in. They had their robes on and all their paraphernalia and they walked right up to the pulpit. The leader said to me ‘You Mormons get out of here. Leave this part of the country or we will kill you.’” At the urging of the branch president, the missionaries left the next morning. Ahlstrom also recalled several other instances where Klan activities threatened the lives and disrupted the work of Mormon missionaries in the South during the 1920s. Tape recorded interview in the possession of C Blyth Ahlstrom, Logan, Utah. (p. 205 n. 48)
The dual forces of traditionalism and nativism that fueled Klanskraft throughout the state were exhibited by the actions of Klansmen in the heavily Mormon farming community of West Jordan. When a young LDS woman and Greek man announced their desire to wed, Klansmen burned crosses on their parents’ front laws; they married anyway—but went to Nevada for the ceremony. When Lorenzo Cooley, who was in charge of the dances at the community hall, rigged up a ceiling fixture made of glass prisms which reflected flashing lights (รก la modern disco lighting), the young people were delighted; the Klan, however, showed its displeasure with the glittering manifestation of the new urban social mores by burning a cross in front of the dance hall, and young Cooley went back to more traditional lighting systems. As Cooley’s younger brother succinctly put it: “We were scared to death of the Klan.”
Notwithstanding sporadic pyrotechnics, there is no evidence that the Ku Klux Klan established formal chapters in the outlying towns of south Salt Lake County. Faced with Mormon predominance in some communities and immigrant preponderance in others, county Klansmen undoubtedly participated in the rituals and fetes of the Salt Lake City Klavern. The same was apparently true for any Klansman who may have been stationed at Fort Douglas, an army installation located on the northeast beach of the city. Despite the appearance in Klan regalia by a member of the Thirty-eighth Infantry during Organization day celebrations on September 14 and periodic cross-burnings in the adjacent foothills, there is no evidence of formal Klan activity at the post. (p. 84)
Ultimately, it was the inability of the Klan to overcome “powerful opposition by the Mormons” that doomed the Invisible Empire in Utah. Efforts by Klan leaders to consult with President Heber J. Grant, the spiritual leader of three-fourths of the inhabitants of the state, met with rebuff as LDS church officials systematically condemned the Klan. Through editorials in the church-owned Deseret News, pronouncements at general conferences, and counsel from some stake presidents and ward bishops, Latter-day Saints were repeatedly admonished to shun the secret society. Although some members of the LDS church, including at least two bishops, joined the Klan, Mormons en masse heeded the injunction against the Invisible Empire. Opposition from the Mormon church was easily the single most important factor inhibiting the growth of Klankraft in the Beehive State.
Even without the opposition from church, state, and press, the Ku Klux Klan faced bleak prospects in Utah. It is not simply that there were few ethnic, racial, and religious “enemies” of the Klan in Utah, for a similar demographic profile existed in the other Intermountain states. Rather, it was the peculiar social configuration that reflected Utah’s distinctive identity as the Mormon Zion. (pp. 149-50)
