KU KLUX KLAN: A Keynote Speech

The City of Dallas was the scene of the Texas State Fair. One day of Fair was devoted to the Ku Klux Klan. From 75,000 to 200,000 (according to the persuasion of the estimator) assembled wearing little red “100% American” buttons. Dragons, Klabees and Cyclopses were present in robes of gold, purple, scarlet. And Imperial Wizard H. W. Evans made a keynote speech. Said he:

“The streams of population that have been and are pouring in upon us are age old in racial character and capacity. We are the melting pot. Into it has been poured, almost promiscuously, every dross ingredient of citizenship that the earth produces, the good and the bad.

“If this nation is to continue its chartered course and obtain its des-tiny there will have to be a harmonious assimilation … It means intermarriage upon a basis of physical, mental and moral equality. We already have at least three powerful and numerous elements that do now, and forever will, defy every fundamental requirement of assimilation.

“First there is the Negro, ten and a half million in number, about a tenth of the whole population. They have not, they cannot attain the Anglo-Saxon level. Both biology and anthropology prove it … The records, authoritative and unemotionally scientific, show the Negro to be specially susceptible to tuberculosis and alarmingly vitiated by veneral infections . . . There could never be intermarriage between the whites and blacks without God’s curse upon our civilization.

“Another absolutely unblendable element is the Jew … He has been a wanderer upon the face of the earth . . to him patriotism, as the Anglo-Saxon feels it, is impossible. Persecution has been his lot. . . . As a race the Jews are law-abiding. They are physically wholesome stock. . . . They are a family people, reverently and eugenically responsive to God’s laws in the home. But their homes are not American. . . .

“No nation can long endure that permits a higher temporal allegiance than its own Government. The hierarchies of Roman and Greek Catholicism violate that principle . . . Do you realize, my friends, that the illiteracy of Europe is practically confined to Catholic countries? . . . Is it unfair to suggest that Catholicism, if not actually desiring that condition, thrives upon ignorance?”