Reminisce: Klan shows its strength in Lima

The Invisible Empire could be seen all over Ohio in the 1920s, rallying in their robed and hooded thousands at Indian Lake on the Fourth of July or gathering in their hundreds for initiation ceremonies beneath fiery crosses in Perry Township farm fields and on the Pioneer Picnic Grounds in Elida.

On Sundays, Klansmen in full regalia presented donations to ministers whose sermons provided the approved answer to the uniform sermon topic: “The Ku Klux Klan – Friend or Foe, Which?” One Lima church announcement in August 1923 promised “a fair and impartial discussion of this great movement.”

Reborn near Atlanta in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan found fertile ground for its brand of “Americanism” (if the Americans were white Protestants of Northern European extraction) north of the Ohio River in the early 1920s.

On a summer day in early August 1923, the Klan demonstrated its newfound strength in Lima.

“Thirty-seven hundred Allen County men, according to organizers, were admitted to membership in the Ku Klux Klan Saturday night at the Lima Driving Park (current site of Memorial Hospital), following one of the most impressive parades and demonstrations ever seen in Lima,” the Lima Republican-Gazette wrote August 5, 1923. “Tongues of flame from 16 fiery crosses, shooting off red, white and blue, cast a weird illumination over the scene as the candidates knelt and took the oath which ‘naturalized’ them as citizens of the invisible empire.”

According to a report in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “Robed Klansmen throughout the day did traffic duty on all principal roads and highways entering the city itself and at all railway and traction stations. The procession was led by a robed Klansman carrying the Stars and Stripes. There were twenty bands. The procession left the driving park at 7:30 and circled through the business section. After, the parade and initiation ceremony was held. Then there were formal memorial services for Mr. Harding (President Warren G. Harding died August 2, 1923.)” A preacher from the United Brethren Church of Delphos presented the history of the Klan at the rally.

The Gazette reported that “Most of the marchers kept their masks in place but others, indifferent to the stares of spectators, turned them up and faced the world. One corps of women’s auxiliary, unmasked, took part in the parade. Bursts of applause greeted the paraders as they passed various spots along the line of march where sympathizers had gathered, but for most part the parade passed through a wordless throng, which lined the streets and watched without comment.”

Although Klan leaders estimated the crowd at 100,000, the newspaper wrote, “other observers” put it at between 30,000 and 40,000.

Whatever the number, the reborn Klan’s growth in the Midwest had been remarkable. The Klan, wrote Timothy Egan in his book, “A Fever in the Heartland,” sold itself as a “Main Street guardian against immorality, immigrants and their foreign faiths, and African Americans who were rebelling against Jim Crow.” The guiding principle of this new Klan, wrote Egan, “was the superiority of the white, Protestant, native-born Americans over everyone else.”

It was a message welcomed in the Midwest. Klan leaders, like the charismatic charlatan and high-order hypocrite D.C. Stephenson in Indiana, “didn’t need to create resentments – their recruitment pitch fit the times,” Egan wrote. According to the author, Stephenson realized “you didn’t have to lead a man to hate, just show him the way and he’d do it on his own.”

By early fall of 1921, rumors surfaced the Klan was organizing in Lima. It was more than a rumor. After Lima Mayor Frank Burkhardt ordered “an exhaustive investigation into the reported formation of a Ku Klux Klan in Lima,” a Klan representative assured the mayor “that the Klan never had and never would resort to, or countenance, violence,” the Gazette wrote September 23, 1921.

“The way to win over the Heartland,” Egan wrote, “was with a wholesome Klan, a Klan of family and faith and Midwestern values.” And one way to spread the word on this new, wholesome, faith-based Klan was from the pulpits of Protestant churches, with ministers rewarded for positive messages.

“Two members of the Ku Klux Klan, visiting the Christian Missionary Alliance Church, handed the Rev. H.G. Grove $25. A note enclosed said the Klan approved the minister’s preaching,” the Gazette reported February 4, 1923.

A little more than two weeks later, the Lima News reported that Rev. G.M. Baumgardner, of Epworth M.E. church, received $10 from the Klan for his sermons promoting “100 percent Americanism.” At the end of August 1923, the Troy Daily News reported, Baumgardner “resigned his pastorate (at Epworth) to take a position as a lecturer for the Ku Klux Klan, having been a frequent speaker for the Klan meetings during the last year.” Baumgardner had once been a pastor in Troy.

At its peak in the 1920s, according to the web site Britannica.com, the Klan had more than 4 million members nationally “and profits rolled in from the sale of its memberships, regalia, costumes, publications and rituals.” In September 1921, a man visiting Lima from Atlanta told the Gazette that “Ponzi, as a get-rich quick scheme fades into insignificance when lined up with the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.” Unlike Italian con man Carlo Ponzi, many Klan leaders held public office at all levels of government, including in the Indiana statehouse.

In the mid-1920s, Allen County and the region seemed to be in the thrall of the Klan. On the Fourth of July 1925, the Gazette reported, a crowd “estimated at from 40,000 to 60,000 persons” gathered near Russells Point” to listen to Klan speakers. “Several thousand Klansmen and their families from Lima and vicinity were declared to have been in attendance,” the newspaper wrote, adding that, “following a basket lunch in the evening,” a “large class of candidates were received into the order.”

Other classes of candidates were “naturalized” at ceremonies on Perry Township farms, at Lima’s McCullough Park and Elida’s Pioneer Picnic Grounds. Pandora, Columbus Grove and Spencerville, among others, were the sites of ceremonies. On September 9, 1923, the Beaverdam reporter for the Gazette noted that “The Ku Klux Klan had a demonstration here Wednesday night. Two large crosses were burned on the square.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center web site, “A series of sex scandals, internal battles over power and newspaper exposes quickly reduced the group’s influence.” Among the scandals was the November 1925 conviction of Stephenson in the death of an Indianapolis woman, who was kidnapped and sexually attacked.

On September 2, 1930, the News reported the Klan had sponsored an all-day outing at McCullough Park. “It was the first event of its kind staged by the Ku Klux Klan in four years,” the News wrote. “For the first time in Lima the members marched unhooded.” Hooded or unhooded, the Klan disappeared from local headlines.

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SOURCE

This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.

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See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce

Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].