What Felt Impossible Became Possible [View all]

I've spent many hours since the election reading about the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. It started the day after election day when I had hours to kill in the lobby of a Hampton Inn, waiting for a room to open up. I loaded a library archive page up on my phone, and read newspapers from a hundred years ago about the KKK and how powerful they were in the '20s.

It's not a history you learn about in school—we were whitewashing history long before the current executive orders—but the Klan in the '20s was everywhere. There will millions of Klan members across the country. People joined it like they were joining a golf club or the Elks Lodge. There was a women's auxiliary. There was the Ku Klux Kiddies, for children. Klan rallies were held across the country; thousands would turn up at fairgrounds for the marching bands and cross burnings. In 1925, the Klan even held a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. Tens of thousands strong, crowds were six deep in the streets to watch and cheer. They did it again the next year.

>snip

That was especially true at the local level, where the Klan infiltrated all walks of life. In Indiana by the mid-'20s, two-thirds of the statehouse were Republican Klansmen. The governor was Klan. And in any given town, the Klan was everywhere. The mayor, the councilmen, the cops, the prosecutors, the judges—Klan Klan Klan Klan Klan.

Of course, part of what made the Klan so insidious was you never quite knew who was a Klansmen—they wore the hoods for a reason. But also you knew. You knew not to cross them, not to question them, not to make trouble. That is, if you knew what was good for you.

Of course, thankfully, not everyone knows what's good for them.


https://dansinker.com/posts/2025-02-23-dale/