The Neo-Nazi movement of 2024: It smells like the Ku Klux Klan of 1924
Today's white supremacist movements are growing and operating everywhere, including Iowa
A Neo-Nazi protest march a week or so ago through downtown Nashville, Tennessee, with about two dozen masked marchers shouting “Heil Hitler” and carrying flags emblazoned with swastikas should send a chill down the spines of all of us.
An organization that calls itself Blood Tribe had announced the event in an online post through a social media app that is popular with white nationalists, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported. “We are Nazis. We are white supremacists. We are white ethno nationalists. We despise Jews. We despise [n-word]s and all non-whites. And nobody is having more fun. Get involved,” the group’s leader wrote in that announcement.
The event and others like it that have begun occurring across the country have projected a stench of racism that threatens the future of our democracy.
It is not, however, anything new for America. It is reminiscent of the white supremacy movement in America in 1924, exactly one hundred years ago.
The Ku Klux Klan was at its peak of power, after joining forces with the Prohibition movement to achieve passage of the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) in 1920. It had happened almost before America realized what was happening. The Klan’s power base was focused in rural America and the South – the same regions, generally, that have become the core of support for MAGA/red-state America today.
A sure way to become a governor: Get the Klan to support you
By 1924, the Klan was on the verge of taking control of both the national Republican and Democratic parties. Hundreds of delegates to the two presidential nominating conventions that year were Klan members or supporters. The governors of three states had been elected with Klan support, and the soon-to-be governor of Indiana had ties to the Klan and was a close friend of one of the top Klan operatives in the country, D. C. Stephenson; more about this disgusting excuse for a human being later. It was the Klan’s peak of power in America.
The pro-Klan and anti-Klan forces in both parties were nearly equal. A bitter clash between the two forces emerged when the anti-Klan factions sought to inject statements critical of the Klan into the platforms of both parties at the nominating conventions that summer. The pro-Klan factions sought to prevent that from happening.
In the Republican Party, the fight over the Klan would be settled before the convention started. In the Democratic Party, it played out on the convention floor with a nationwide audience in what was the first national political convention to be broadcast on the radio.
The backdrop for all of this was a particularly odd presidential election year; perhaps unique. Both parties would emerge with relatively weak candidates on the ticket — at least compared with other years, then and now.
Republican Calvin Coolidge had succeeded to office following the death of President Warren G. Harding. Coolidge’s major asset may have been that he said little and did little, thus offending few. Moreover, the economy was running strong, although virtually unattended, in the mid-1920s. The Republican nomination was his for the asking, even though he was the antithesis of what would be expected of presidential candidates a few years down the road.
On the Democratic side, two Goliaths of the party clashed for the nomination, but both faced obstacles that they were not able to overcome. Still, the battle between Governor Al Smith of New York and William G. McAdoo of California, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and the son-in-law of former President Woodrow Wilson, ran on and on – for an all-time presidential convention record of 103 ballots. Fifty-seven men and one woman from 34 states and the District of Columbia received votes for the nomination before Smith and McAdoo both withdrew.
The nomination fell to John W. Davis, who had nibbled at their heels from the first ballot. Davis was an obscure West Virginia lawyer whose top government posts had been as a one-term member of the House of Representatives and ambassador to Great Britain. Davis chose Governor Charles W. Bryan of Nebraska, as his running mate. It was a pairing of a little-known and a lesser-known politician. Bryan’s political career grew mostly from the fact he was the brother of three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. It was a relationship that got him both to the governorship of his home state and the national Democratic ticket.
Coolidge’s vice-president pick was also unexpected, a Chicago lawyer and banker, Charles G. Dawes, who had held some appointed positions of political consequence, but never had held elective office. Capitalizing on Coolidge’s lack of unpopularity and names that few people knew on the Democratic side, the Republicans easily won the election with almost a 2-1 margin in the popular vote and more than 70 percent of the electoral vote.
Al Smith: a trifecta of things the Klan did not like
In the end, however, the lengthy maneuvering for the Democratic Party nomination in 1924 was less significant nationally than the Klan’s effort to grab control of both parties.
On the Republican side, a convention fight over the proposed inclusion of the anti-Klan plank in the party platform was avoided at the last minute when Klan supporters effectively blocked the anti-Klan resolution from getting to the floor. The same kind of pre-convention maneuvering began among the Democrats, but it did not work.
Klan delegates were well positioned for a floor fight having united in favor of McAdoo over Smith because Smith was three things the Klan did not like: a Roman Catholic, an opponent of Prohibition, and the son of an immigrant. Anti-Klan delegates, meanwhile, coalesced to propose a statement in the Democratic platform specifically condemning the Klan’s violence. The vote was close, but the Klan delegates succeeded in blocking the resolution.
The Klan thus prevailed in both parties, preventing their organization from being openly and officially criticized for its violent racist activities. At no other time in American history has a secret racist organization dedicated to violence exercised so much political power.
The rallying cry: 100 percent American
The Klan in America originated in the 19th century targeting mostly African Americans, but by the end of the century, it was all but inactive outside the deep South. Its reawakening began in the late teens of the 20th century, as organizers refocused their hatred more broadly, adding Jews, Catholics, and immigrants, as targets of hatred in addition to African Americans. The rallying cry was “100 percent American.” It worked, perhaps beyond anything they had imagined.
By the mid-1920s the Klan had 5 million members, roughly one of every five white males in America. But it was the kind of men who joined the Klan as well as the number that proved the key to the Klan’s emerging power. The membership included doctors, lawyers, judges, ministers, college professors, business executives, and a wide range of political office holders; they were middle- and upper-class white Protestants who were known and respected in their communities.
“I’ve got the biggest brains. I’m going to be the biggest man in the United States.”
Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson of the Indiana Klan fit in really well. Indiana was the de facto national capital of the Klan with one in three of its white male adults belonging to the Klan, most of them recruited by Stephenson. Stevenson was so good at recruiting that he was put in charge of Klan recruiting for at least seven and perhaps as many as 23 Northern states. He grew wealthy by taking a cut of initiation fees from all the new members he recruited, by selling Klan paraphernalia to members, and by taking payments from officeholders and seekers who craved the Klan's support for their own purposes. He also had visions of high political office – like President of the United States. His braggadocios were unlimited in scope. An example: “I’ve got the biggest brains. I’m going to be the biggest man in the United States.” Yet another parallel between the 1920s and the 2020s.
But Stephenson was also a drunk and a forceful, vicious womanizer. Madge Oberholtzer, an attractive, 28-year-old employee of the Indiana State Department of Education, in charge of a literacy program, met Stephenson at the inauguration of Governor Edward L. Jackson in January 1925. Stephenson had literally put Jackson in office with Klan support. In April, Stephenson, 33, and his thugs kidnapped Oberholtzer at gunpoint and took her on Stephenson’s private train to Chicago. There, Stephenson raped, tortured, and murdered her. He used his teeth as his murder weapon. Although she survived to tell her story on her deathbed, she died of a staph infection resulting from the numerous gashes Stephenson had inflicted across her body.
Stephenson was convicted of murder and served 31 years in prison. But he wasn’t through yet. He was angered when Governor Jackson refused to commute the prison sentence. Stephenson responded by making public his lists of public officials who had accepted payments from the Klan. The nationwide publicity resulting from the prosecutions of public officials who had taken bribes, and the sensational Stephenson murder trial, virtually destroyed the Klan in Indiana and put the national Klan on a downhill track from which it would never recover.
The 1924 Democratic convention did leave a couple of important progressive marks on the American political landscape that would grow and shape the country for years beyond.
First, Franklin D. Roosevelt emerged from the shadows of his fight against polio and paralysis, which had taken him out of the limelight as a rising star of the Democratic Party three years earlier. His first major post-paralytic speech was his nomination speech for his fellow New Yorker, Governor Smith at the 1924 convention. It was a classic speech and a model of political oratory that put him on a fast track to Democratic Party leadership for the future. Four years later, he would nominate Smith again and Smith would become the party’s presidential candidate. The following year, FDR would be elected to succeed Smith as Governor of New York, and the rest is history.
Second, a major gender barrier was broken as women, for the first time, joined in delivering presidential nomination speeches at the Democratic Convention in New York in 1924. Izetta Jewel, a widely known actress and women’s rights activist, seconded the nomination of John Davis and Abby Crawford Milton seconded the nomination of McAdoo. Milton had been the first president of the Tennessee League of Women Voters and was a pivotal figure in the Tennessee Legislature’s ratification of the 19th Amendment, the 36th and final state needed to give women the right to vote.
But now, a century later, the rise of Neo-Nazism threatens to become a major white supremacy force in the national arena once again. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified more than 500 such organizations — hate groups — operating in all 50 states in 2022 in their annual report of hate groups in America, which came out a month ago.
Two of them, the National Alliance and Patriot Front, operate statewide in Iowa.
The National Alliance traces its roots back to Alabama’s racist Governor George Wallace in 1970. They are not nice people. The SPLC recalled that the group’s founder “once described how he hoped to lock Jews, ‘race traitors,’ and other enemies of the ‘Aryan’ race into cattle cars and send them to the bottom of abandoned coal mines.”
Patriot Front grew out of the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia Unite the Right rally that President Trump declined to criticize. The group’s manifesto calls for America to become a white ethnostate. It views non-whites, immigrants, and refugees as threats to America’s future. In 2022, Patriot Front began attacking LGBTQ+ supporters as well. It also has destroyed memorials across the country that have honored victims of police violence and murals that depict black historical figures, LGBTQ pride, Hmong culture, and Chicano culture, the SPLC has reported.
The Neo-Nazis of 2024 may still be relatively small in number, but that is how the Ku Klux Klan started its rebirth in the late teens of the 20th century. The Neo-Nazi and related movements are growing, and are no less threatening than the Ku Klux Klan of a century earlier. The goal today as it was in 1924 is to take over and make over America.
This is eye-opening and terrifying. Thank you, Arnold.
Yeah, the Klan helped the drys enact prohibition, and the drys helped the Klan to grow its power base.