I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth; the whole world is my home and all its people, human and nonhuman, whether organic or synthetic, are my brothers, sisters, and cousins. Like our more distant cousins on other planets across space and throughout time, we are all children of the Universe. None of us asked to be born and no one gets out of here alive.
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| Schoolchildren in Florida, September 1915 |
Stating that fact is hardly an endorsement.
Not only did national socialism really arise from actual socialists, contrary to what many say, as an ideology its roots lie in American socialism. Despite its origin, however, it is most definitely not a form of actual socialism any more than are Leninism and its various offspring.
It all started with a utopian science fiction novel which became the second-most popular American novel of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.
Young America: A Prelude
In 1836, German workers in Paris found the League of the Just, an offshoot of the League of Outlaws (1834), originally devoted to the ideas of Gracchus Babeuf. The leaders of its parent organization were focused on German unification and less so than on the welfare of its expat rank-and-file. The new group was led by Wilhelm Weitling.
The League of the Just supported the Blanquist revolt of May 1839, and the French government expelled the group and its members, who relocated to London. From there, the organization spread out across Continental Europe, and even across the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1844, George Henry Evans (of the Workingmen’s Party of 1828), Edwin de Leon, and a small group of workers in New York City, then still limited to Manhattan, established the Agrarian League to push for land reform. The next year, the League became the National Reform Association and affiliated with Tammany Hall and the Democratic Party, bringing along its newspaper called Young America.
(The above National Reform Association is not in way whatsoever related to the group of the same name founded in 1864—and still extant—that was originally called the National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the United States Constitution.)
After land reformers in the German Society of New York formed the Social Reform Association (SRA) as NRA’s German-speaking counterpart, Hermann Kriege, leader of the American branch of the League of the Just, reorganized his group as an insider organization within SRA called Young America.
Karl Marx initially referred to the NRA organization with its affiliates as a socialist movement. In his 1847 tract Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels wrote that under the USA’s democratic constitution communists would “work side-by-side with the agrarian national reformers”. Once the two became aware of the reality on the ground, however, they expelled Kriege from the League of the Just.
Also in 1845, Marx and Engels began forming Communist Committees of Correspondence in European countries to prepare for an international proletarian revolution. In the 1840s, “communist” referred to those who counted the left wing of the Jacobin Club (the Montagnards as opposed to the Girondins) as their ideological forebearers. The two joined the League of the Just in 1847 and began merging it with their own association into one body called the Communist League.
The National Reform Association had all but ceased to exist in 1849, with most of its members migrating to the new Free Soil Party. By the early 1850s, the German-language Social Reform Association also dissolved, but Young America survived as a faction of the national Democratic Party. This faction, which rose to become the most influential in the party, was led by Stephen Douglas, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, August Belmont, and John O’Sullivan. It was the last of these who coined the term Manifest Destiny and whose newspaper, the Democratic Review (published since 1837), became their semi-official organ.
Young America became the leading proponent of the Market Revolution, Manifest Destiny, Jacksonian democracy (complete with Indian Removal), labor republicanism, agrarian reform, and American exceptionalism.
This prelude is not directly related to the subject matter at hand; however, it demonstrates several key points relevant to how the following set of related events unfolded.
First, the fact that transoceanic communication between European and American socialists was well-established (Marx himself lived in New York City in the early 1860s) long before the late 19th century.
Second, it’s very easy for reform and revolutionary movements in the USA to get sidelined by American exceptionalism.
Third, entry into or even mere affiliation with the Democratic Party is the death knell of any progressive movement, a fact illustrated even more thoroughly in sections below.
The Curse of Interesting Times
Among USA economists, the term Long Depression is confined to a more limited period based on questionable standards. While true there was a climb afterwards, the USA “official” Long Depression of October 1873-March 1879 was followed by a recession of March 1882-May 1885; a recession of March 1887-April 1888; a recession of July 1890-May 1891; and one final recession of January 1893-June 1897. During this time there were also major bank panics in 1873, 1893, and 1896.
Think carefully about that; the USA’s Gilded Age of 1877-1895 for the 1% coincided with the Long Depression of 1873-1897 for the 99%.
The years 1873-1897 also included the latter half of Reconstruction and the end of Reconstruction, the dissolution of the First International (International Workingmens Association) in 1876, which had transferred its headquarters from Europe in 1872, Great Upheaval of 1877, Great Southwestern Railway Strike of 1886, Haymarket Affair of 1886, Louisiana sugar fields labor strike of 1887 ending in the Thibodaux Massacre, establishment of the Second International in 1889, Coal Creek War in Tennessee that lasted over a year, Great Northern Railroad Strike of 1893, and Great Pullman Strike of 1894.
It was kind of like having the year 2020 nearly every year for 24 years, with multiple epidemics, like the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 and the Influenza Pandemic of 1889-1890 (which killed over 1 million globally), and more than one highly contentious U.S. presidential election, most notably that of 1876 resulting the Great Compromise (or Corrupt Bargain) of 1877.
Looking Backward
And, no, it’s not about anyone turning into a block of salt.
The novel appeared during one of the most economically unstable periods of American history in the years 1873-1897, a period known in Europe as the Long Depression. The Gilded Age, which coincides with this period, was only gilded for the very few.
In 1888, Edward Bellamy published a utopian future history novel, perhaps the first of its genre, called Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Coming out in the midst of this societal turbulence and economic instability, the novel seized the imagination of reform-minded liberals across the nation.
In it, the protagonist, Julian West, falls into a hypnosis-induced sleep in Boston, Massachusetts and wakes up in the year 2000 to find America transformed into a socialist utopia, though the word socialist is never used. Bellamy’s vision does not embrace merely the economy but the criminal justice system and future technology, such as debit cards. Workers are organized into an industrial army with military discipline under a commander-in-chief who commands the nation’s army. America was the first to create this kind of society, but by the year 2000, it spread to Europe, Australia, Mexico, and parts of Latin America.
Marx and Engels would have scorned Bellamy’s bourgeois authoritarian socialist ideas as “barracks communism”, which, as a matter of fact, Kary Kautsky and August Bebel did on numerous occasions. Of course, Bellamy’s target audience was not actual socialists nor the working class themselves but his peers in the Victorian middle-class.
The Nationalist Clubs
The first Nationalist Club was formed in Boston in 1888.
Its chief leader, labor reporter Cyrus F. Willard, wrote to Edward Bellamy asking for suggestions for a name for the movement. Bellamy chose Nationalism, not only to pit the Nation, representing the People, against Capital, but also to distinguish his ideas from the international socialism of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
The movement was a classic example of middle-class bourgeois socialism from its inception. However, due to the growing popularity of both the novel and the movement it inspired, even many labor and socialist leaders came to support and belong to the Nationalist Clubs, among them leaders of the Knights of Labor and of the American Federation of Labor as well as various leaders of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLPA).
The Socialist Labor Party of America was the last remaining vestige of the First International, at least in the USA. Marx had relocated the International Workingmen’s Association headquarters from London to New York City in 1872. Upon the International’s dissolution in 1876, the thirty sections of its North American Federation joined with Social Democratic Workers Party of North America, Labor Party of Illinois, Socio-Political Labor Union of Cincinnati, and other groups to form the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which later renamed itself the SLPA.
Edward spelled out his ideas for the tenets of Nationalism at the founding club’s first anniversary in a speech later published in print called, “Principles and Purposes of Nationalism”. In 1894, he expanded this in a thirteen-page tract called The Programme of the Nationalists.
The movement and the popularity of Looking Backward even spread across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, with Bellamy societies in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand. The novel enjoyed blockbuster popularity in Germany and Austria; Bellamy himself had personally taken steps to ensure its translation into German. In the Russian Empire, Leo Tolstoy and founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party were big fans such as Maxim Gorky and Nadezhda Krupskaya. The novel and its ideas enjoyed widespread adoration in Japan and China, at least among intellectuals.
One of the more significant examples of this influx of participation and support of Bellamy’s vision was SLPA member Laurence Gronlund, who had published a book called The Co-operative Commonwealth in its Outlines, An Exposition of Modern Socialism. Gronlund’s work was the first and still one of the most important works explaining the ideas of Marx and Engels to the American audience. Gronlund was so moved by Bellamy’s novel and by the Nationalist movement’s rapid growth that he withdrew his own work from publication until the end of the 1890s.
Other significant contemporary supporters of Bellamy’s vision in America included Daniel DeLeon, J. Edward Hall, Eugene Debs, Arthur Devereux, Lucien Sinial, Charles Sotheran, Jesse Cox, P.J. McGuire, Burnette G. Haskell, and Julius Wayland. Later notables inspired by his vision included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Norman Thomas.
Nationalism and Theosophy
Half of Boston’s Nationalist Club were also members of that city’s chapter of the Theosophical Society, including Edward Bellamy and Cyrus Willard. The world-wide society of which that chapter was part had been established in New York City in 1875 by founder of theosophy Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and others.
Bellamy’s Looking Backward was published the same year as Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which had on the cover a version of the Hindu swaztika turned to stand on one corner.
In her book The Key to Theosophy published in New York City in 1889, Mde. Blavatsky, then living in the Kingdom of Bavaria in the German Empire, praised Bellamy’s vision as representing “the first great step towards full realization of universal brotherhood”. Of course, for her, this utopia was meant for the “Aryan and other civilized nations” and not for “such savages as the South Sea Islanders”.
As a result, Blavatsky and Bellamy began a correspondence which influenced many ideas of the latter put into his 1897 work Equality.
The Society of Christian Socialism
In February 1889, Episcopal priest and National Club co-founder William D.P. Bliss spearheaded the formation of the Society of Christian Socialism (SCS) as a religious auxiliary to the Nationalist Clubs.
Edward Bellamy and Frances Willard, national president of the Womens Christian Temperance Union (and second cousin to Cyrus F. Willard), became editors of The Dawn, its national newspaper. The WCTU not only advocated abolition of alcohol but supported women’s suffrage, an eight-hour work day, prison reform, labor reform, expansion of women’s rights globally, and Christian socialism.
Among other members of the group in attendance at its founding conference in Boston was Francis Bellamy, first cousin of Edward, who became its vice president. Francis was a Baptist minister who had been forced from his Boston pulpit for preaching about Jesus as a socialist, only to end up in Florida where he left the church over its racism against Afro-Americans.
The SCS only lasted a little over two years, its last chapter folding in May 1891, but its influence carried over to the 20th century with the spread of the Protestant-based Social Gospel in both America and Britain. It also first brought to national prominence Edward’s cousin Frances. In fact, a large part of the reason for SCS’s collapse were the departures of Bliss, over SCS turning out not to be as socialist as he’d hoped, and of Frances Bellamy, who left to work for a popular national magazine with a mail order section.
The (first) People’s Party
More often called the Populist Party despite its official name, this particular organization in large part developed out of the Farmer’s Alliance, adding in the Greenback Party, Labor Reform Party, Prohibition Party, Anti-Monopoly Party, Union Labor Party, and various other small groups. The National Clubs were near unanimous in their support, as were the SLPA and the Knights of Labor, though the latter two did not dissolve their separate organizations to join.
The Farmers’ Alliance itself was composed of three separate regional groups: National Farmers’ (or Northern) Alliance, National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union (or Southern Alliance), and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union. Of all the groups merging into the new party, it had been the most successful electorally, electing John P. Buchanan as Governor of Tennessee (1891-1895) and Thomas Watson as U.S. Representative of Georgia’s 10th Congressional District (1891-1893).
Watson at this time was a left-wing Populist who championed poor whites and poor blacks working together to achieve their common welfare. Among his achievements in Congress was the establishment of the U.S. Postal Service’s Rural Free Delivery (as in Mayberry RFD) system. Prior to its establishment and spread, the rural majority of Americans had to travel each week into the village, town, or city with the nearest post office in order to receive or send mail. (Though the bill became law in mid-1891, RFD was not put into effect until 1896.) After the formation of the People’s Party, Watson became one of its foremost leaders.
Francis Bellamy and The Youth’s Companion
David Sharp Ford, owner of the popular national magazine The Youth’s Companion (published 1827-1929) hired Frances to work with his nephew James B. Upham in the magazine’s marketing department in 1891. In 1888, the magazine had begun a program of selling a U.S. flag to schools that came with a year’s subscription to the magazine. At the time, the only institutions to fly the national flag were military and naval bases and other institutions of the federal government.
For Upham and Frances, it was a business matter. By 1892, the magazine had sold flags to 26,000 schools; they wanted more. Noting that the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ landing on Hispaniola was that year, Upham conceived of using the occasion to push flag sales (despite the fact that Hispaniola is a Caribbean island in the Greater Antilles and that Columbus never came anywhere near North America). So the magazine called for a National Columbian Public School Celebration to mark the occasion, one centered around adoration of the U.S. flag.
The Pledge of Allegiance and its ritual
To design the ritual for this adoration and to write its associated oath, Frances was agreed upon by both the magazine and the National Education Association. In composing his pledge, Frances first considered Montagnard leader Robespierre’s hendiatris of “liberte, egalite, fraternite” but rejected it for that of the Cordeliers Club (officially named Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), “liberte, egalite, justice”, dropping equality as unacceptable in the Jim Crown South. This was despite the fact that he himself opposed Jim Crow, because service to Capital outweighed principle.
On 8 September 1892, The Youth’s Companion published the liturgy and ritual for the adoration of the flag.
“At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute -- right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.”
The ritual here is described as the Bellamy Salute, and if you enter that term in an image search online, you’ll find dozens of images of it being performed, mostly by schoolchildren.
Frances’ text for the oath was soon altered to: ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all’, which placed the symbol on an equal footing to that which it symbolized.
Also, over the years and decades, the Bellamy salute came to be performed with the right arm extended palm down, as one can easily see in those afore-mentioned image searches.
Other pledges to the flag
As a matter of historical note, I should point out that there were two other pledges recited in some places contemporaneously with that of Frances Bellamy. One composed by educator and Union veteran George Balch, it read: “We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag!” Its use by the Grand Army of the Republic, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and schools in New York state ended in 1923 at the decision of that year’s National Flag Conference.
From 1906 to 1915, the DAR used a pledge to the flag which read, “I pledge allegiance to my flag, and the republic for which it stands. I pledge my head my hand, and my heart to God and my country. One country, one language and one flag.”
People’s Party’s first national election
In 1892, the People’s Party national ticket was headed by former Union general and recent U.S. Representative from Iowa’s 6th District John B. Weaver and former Confederate major and ex-attorney general of Virginia James G. Field.
To realize why this combination seemed ideal at the time, you have to keep in mind that, in addition to the fact that these men were similarly inclined politically, this was a period of strong desire to heal the wounds of the War of the Rebellion, with the organization of the United Confederate Veterans and the resurgence of the postbellum Grand Army of the Republic, the counterpart for Union veterans. The party’s first choice for front-runner had been Bishop of Louisiana and former Confederate lieutenant general Leonidas K. Polk, but he had died that 11 June.
The principles of the People’s Party were declared in the Omaha Platform, so-called after the city where its nominating convention was held in July that year, which included calls for an eight-hour workday, direct elections of Senators, a graduated income tax, abolition of national banks, civil service reform, rural free delivery of mail, and government control of all the nation’s railroads and telecommunications systems.
The Weaver-Fields ticket won the popular and electoral of four states outright—Idaho, Nevada, Nebraska, Colorado—plus one electoral vote each in the states of Oregon and North Dakota, in the latter also receiving a plurality of the popular vote. Its electoral vote total was 22, with a popular vote count of 1,041,028. However, the party did pick up seats in down ballot races on the state, county, and local levels.
The election signaled the beginning of the dissolution of the Nationalist Clubs as an independent entity, at least on a national level. Those left operated as separate groups until 1901, when the clubs remaining joined the Socialist Party of America at its formation.
Interim between presidential elections
Between 1892 and 1896, a divide began to form within the People’s Party between the Fusionists led by party chairman Herman Taubenack, who advocated abandoning the Omaha Platform for one based on “bitmetallism” (which advocated a currency backed by both gold and silver), and the more radical Mid-roaders, led by none other than Thomas Watson. In the end, the national party not only reaffirmed support for the original tenets of the Omaha Platform but added advocacy for muncipal control of utilities.
1896 presidential elections
In 1896, the People’s Party voted to back political outsider William Jennings Bryan, who had been nominated by the Democratic Party with shipping magnate Arthur Sewell as his running mate, with the provision that he make Mid-roader Thomas Watson his vice presidential running mate. What happened was the Bryan actually ran with two separate running mates, as he neither explicitly rejected Sewell nor endorsed Watson.
In the South, the party had more success at the state and local level by partnering with Republicans against the Democrats. In no state was this more prominent than in North Carolina, where black Republicans and Populists joined together in a coalition that lasted 1894 through 1900 and controlled the state government from through 1898. In that, it was reminiscent of Virginia’s racially-integrated left-wing Readjuster Party (led by two former Confederate officers, no less, William Mahone and Harrison Riddleberger) which controlled that state’s government 1877-1883.
The sorry end of USA’s first People’s Party
The elections of 1896 delivered Bryan’s first failure at running for president and also signaled the end of the People’s Party as a major independent force in national politics. Its gains began rolling back, and though it nominated candidates for President of the United States in 1900 (Wharton Baker) and in 1904 and 1908 (Thomas Watson), it did not do so in 1912.
The power of the Populists and their Republican allies, the coalition referred to by their opponents as the Fusionist Party (not to be confused with the same-named faction within the People’s Party) fell apart after the Fusionist government of Wilmington was overthrown in a violent coup by right-wing white supremacist Democrats in 1898. The insurrectionists also massacred three hundred black citizens and destroyed the entire black business section of the city.
With these and other similar events before him, former integrationist and left populist Thomas Watson blazed a trail later followed by former New Deal civil rights Democratic turned neo-Confederate arch-segregationist George Wallace. While Jim Crow gained strength in his native South and regional alliances beween Populists and Republicans collapsed, Watson looked at the weather vane and saw which way the wind was blowing.
As the now unchallenged leader of the People’s Party, Watson steered it into support for anti-black, anti-immigration, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish causes. Since the Dems in the South had already cornered the market on these, entropy took over until there was no People’s Party ticket in 1912, and its convention in 1913 proved to be its last. Watson’s record did, however, help him win election as U.S. Senator from Georgia in 1922.
Frances Bellamy in the late 1890s
By 1897, Frances Bellamy had degenerated to the point of writing in The Illustrated American #394, Vol. 22, No. 9: “Democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth.”
Further in that same essay, he writes “There are races more or less akin to our own whom we may admit freely…But there are other races [Irish, Jews, southern Europeans], which we cannot assimilate without lowering our racial standard, which should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes.”
This point-of-view came out of the racist ideology Nordicism popular in the late 19th among those of “Teutonic” or “Nordic” descent in Northwestern, Northern, and Central Europe, North America, and Australia, one which viewed those of Ireland, the Mediterranean countries, the Balkans, and the Russian Empire as lower races.
That Bellamy did not entirely subscribe to the ideology is demonstrated in a piece he wrote in the next volume of the magazine.
In The Illustrated American #414, Vol. 23, No. 3, Bellamy wrote a defense of black suffrage and condemned efforts in Louisiana at the time (1897) to abridge that right and to deny blacks and their children an education and the right to uplift themselves.
Equality
Edward Bellamy made one last foray at extending his ideas with the publication in 1897 of the book Equality, sales of which were comparitively modest vis-à-vis Looking Backward. At least Edward was not as afraid of the word ‘equality’ as was his cousin Frances.
Picking up at the end of the story in Looking Backward, the novel has only a bare-bones story and is more Bellamy expounding in his ideas and visions which include motor and air cars, video calls, television, women’s rights, and vegetarianism, the last of which has become universal, at least in America.
His thoughts on women’s rights had been strongly influenced by his former correspondence with Mde. Blavatsky, who died in 1891.
The same year this new novel was published, the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth established what was meant to be a socialist colony in the State of Washington near the hamlet of Edison. They named their endeavor Equality after Bellamy’s new novel. It and its daughter colony Freeland established on Whidbey Island folded in 1906.
Nationalism (national socialism) in Austria
While Bellamy societies sprang up in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Netherlands, Bellamy fans in Central Europe adopted a different route to organize around what they perceived to be his ideas.
In 1893, laborers, apprentices, and trade unionists in Austria upheld their German-speaking nationalism in the country against non-German-speaking members of the Austrian workforce by forming the German National Workers’ League. The league was also distinctly anti-capitalist. A decade later, in 1903, group members reorganized as the German Workers Party in Austria. In May 1918, the party renamed itself as the German National Socialist Workers Party.
The Birth of a Nation
Now, let’s review a better known story about how another American political movement developed out of a novel, especially after that novel developed into one of the single-most ground-breaking (in terms of production techniques, many still used today) films of all time when it was produced as well as the first blockbuster after its release.
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan organized in 1915 at Stone Mountain, Georgia, was neither a continuation nor a revival of the postbellum terrorist organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Rather, it was a costume roleplay of that earlier similarly named organization as featured in the blockbuster movie released that year. Nearly two-and-a-half decades before 1939’s Gone With the Wind graced theaters with a more genteel and romanticized version of the odious “Lost Cause”, 1915’s The Birth of a Nation celebrated the postbellum Ku Klux Klan as heroes.
Appalled at a play version of Stowe’s novel at the turn of the century, the nationally-renowned lecturer and former Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon decided to share his own version of “alternative facts” through the medium of fiction. Dixon’s father had been a Ghoul (rank-and-file member) in the postbellum Ku Klux Klan and his maternal uncle was the Grand Titan of the “Dominion” in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.
The Uncle Tom of the plays, by the way, is the one familiar to most Americans, regardless of race. In the novel, Uncle Tom is, by contrast with that mistaken popular notion, a stand-up guy who dies for that. To put it simply, the “actual” Uncle Tom was anything but an “Uncle Tom”.
Dixon’s intitial response came in a series of novels, often referred to as the Ku Klux Klan trilogy, though they are not a single story. In 1902, he published The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900. In 1905, it was The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. The final act came in 1907 with The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire.
Dixon highly admired the charisma and speaking ability of Eugene Debs, but that did not stop him from penning another trilogy aimed at socialism.
The second installment of his Klan trilogy proved the most popular after Dixon turned it into a play called “The Clansman”. Performances shattered attendance records. Hollywood pioneer D.W. Griffith turned the play into the ground-breaking The Birth of a Nation, ground-breaking because of its length (3 hours, huge even now and much more so when the average film was about 20 minutes); its artistic and techinal aspects many of which continue to this day; and its being the first movie shown in the White House to Dixon’s good friend Woodrow Wilson. It was released in January 1915.
The Knights of Mary Phagan
In 1913, the Knights of Mary Phagan formed after the teenager of the same name was found strangled in the basement of the Atlanta, Georgia, factory managed by one Leo Frank, a Jewish-American from Texas. Frank was convicted of the murder later that year and sentenced to be hanged. After his series of appeals ran out in August 1915, the last to the U.S. Supreme Court, Gov. Slaton commuted his sentence to life imprisonment based on evidence not available at trial.
One of those most vigorous in denunciation of Slaton’s decision was Thomas Watson, former leader and two-time presidential candidate of the former People’s Party, which dissolved that same year. Watson had represented the State of Georgia’s 10th District in Congress as a member of the Farmers’ Alliance 1891-1893 and advocated poor black and poor whites struggle together toward their mutual betterment.
Enraged at the clemency, the Knights of Mary Phagan stormed the jailhouse where Frank was held in Milledgeville, took him from his cell, and brought him to Marietta where they lynched him. It was an action which former Farmers Alliance Representative and future Democratic Senator Watson had outspokenly favored.
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
That November, on the night of Thanksgiving Day, the former Knights of Mary Phagan met under the leadership of Alabama native William Simmons to form the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the shadow of Stone Mountain in Georgia, on the outskirts of the eponymous town.
Dixon had been enraged at Frank’s lynching and was even more so that the newly created group was anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant rather than just anti-black, famously declaring in 1923, “The Klan assault upon the foreigner is the acme of stupidity and inhumanity. We are all foreigners except the few Indians we haven’t killed.”
That same year (1923), the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan ran their own candidates in the municipal elections of the cities of Memphis and Chattanooga, even campaigning for the votes of Afro-Americans by pointing out the different foci of their hate (anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic), and, at least in Memphis, even tried to convince blacks there to form their own allied but separate group.
Though his outrage at the Knights was mitigated slightly by their shared hatred of socialism, Dixon resented that they had copied rituals and costumes from his novels, plays, and the film, features which hadn’t been part of the postbellum terror organization but were invented for his stories as an exercise in artistic license. In the original organization, for example, rank-and-file members were called Ghouls not Knights, cross-burnings were not a practice, and dark robes were worn as camouflage and disguise rather than white robes as a public uniform.
Curiously, Simmons named the manual he wrote for his organization the Kloran, a portmanteau of Klan and Koran, though he doubtlessly would have been as Islamophobic as he was Judaeophobic if there had been more Muslims in America at the time.
In addition to Dixon’s novels, plays, and the film, the other major source contributing to the culture and operation of the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was the White Caps of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The White Caps were a movement rather than an organization, vigilantes claiming to enforce Christian morality in their community, beginning in Indiana in 1887 and spreading rapidly.
Although sporadic incidents of racist nature occurred as well as anti-trade union actions, most activity remained intra-community enforced against other whites perceived to violate norms of the community, and even a few groups of black White Caps existed that enforced the same moral codes in their own community.
After Simmons hired a couple of marketing executives and the Knights of the KKK adopted “Americanism” as their foremost ideal, the group spread across the country. Their banner was not the Southern Cross of the Confederate Army of Tennessee but the Stars & Stripes of the USA.
National socialism in the German Weimar Republic
Remember that the novel Looking Backward and Bellamy’s ideas therein had such wide popularity in what was then the German Empire that Kautsky and Bebel felt compelled to denounce them vociferously on numerous occasions.
After the Great War (World War I), a locksmith named Anton Drexler formed a group he first proposed be called the German Socialist Workers Party, one embracing a folk nationalism with economic socialism, anti-Semitism, and anti-international capitalism. In the end, the descriptor “Socialist” was dropped, and the German Workers Party came into being in 1919.
The following year, 1920, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party and membership restricted to those of “pure Aryan descent”. Austrian-born Adolf Hitler became its leader in 1921.
Upon the party coming to power in the Reichstag, the left element in the party led primarily by Ernst Rohm of the Sturmabteilung (SA, or Brownshirts), pushed for a second revolution that would be socialist and anti-capitalist. Many Social Democrats and Communists even joined the NSDWP in anticipation of this happening (where they became known as the “Beefsteak Nazis”; brown on the outside, red on the inside). The party’s “leftist” element was largely eliminated in the Night of the Long Knives purge of the party in 1934, though its ideology survives within neo-Nazism as the trend called Strasserism.
Further changes to F. Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance
In 1924 at the xenith of the US flag-bearing Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’s hooded Americanism, Bellamy’s oath was changed to ‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ The emphasis had now switched from one in which the symbol and the symbolized had equal billing to one in which the symbolized, the Republic, is almost an afterthought and the symbol, the Flag, is all.
In 1954, at the height of yet another Red Scare, the Knights of Columbus successfully lobbied Congress to alter the text to ‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ Frances Bellamy, a firm believer in the absolute separation of church and state would have been appalled had he still lived.
It was, however, the fulfillment of a quote often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis but which is actually more a paraphrase of several statements by Eugene Debs that, “If fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”. Only this time, instead of coming from a vigilante organization of self-proclaimed guardians of Americanism, it had come with the official imprimatur of the U.S. government.