The Salability of Anti-Catholic Activities.

 A fierce spirit of intolerance is being invoked in the United States. It resembles markedly the spirit that characterised the Nationalist campaign during the recent elections and which still manifests itself in the shape of attacks on Catholic institutions, and demands for the inspection of convents, etc. In the States intolerance was first directed against Negroes; now it is, under skilled direction, being fanned against Catholics and Jews. Mr. Charles P. Sweeney, who took a leading part in the New York "World's" exposure of the Ku Klux Klan, the modern counterpart of the earlier Know Nothing movement, contributes a powerful article on the latest phases of it to the "Nation," from which we take the extracts that follow. The Ku Klux Klan is always with us in some form or other. It has its roots in ignorance and bigotry,  and is fostered by people with interested motives. In other words it pays some people. So far as Catholics are concerned its activities can only end in one way. The violence of its attacks upon the Catholic Church will cause many in the excitement to examine the merits of it. The Catholic Church courts and is benefited by earnest inquiry. The reaction, when the falsity of the charges is discovered and the meanness of the motives which prompted them is revealed, will be all to the good to the Church. In reading the following extracts it should be remembered that the Ku Klux Klan started as an association to exploit the color question. Its promoters recognised that there are a lot of haters in every country and set out deliberately to exploit them. There are dollars in in for some people. Mr. Sweeney writes: — 

"Thanks to the New York 'World,' the country has been informed in a general way of the organisation of the Great American Fraternity. Newspaper readers know by this time that the circle of master bigots who developed the Ku Klux Klan, sensing the possibilities of a political application of masked terrorism, have developed a super-organisation of haters, aiming to combine the membership of a dozen different groups and committed to the proposition that this shall be a free country for all except Roman Catholics, Jews, Negroes, persons born in foreign countries, and progressive and liberal-minded Americans even if they fall into the otherwise persecution-exempt class of 'native, white, Protestant.' Already the Klan has been denounced by the leading Masons of the country for an unwarranted linking of the Masonic Fraternity with the Ku Klux in the prospectus of the new organisation. But this means nothing to its promoters. They will proceed through the country organising towns, cities, countries, and States. . . . In Texas the Ku Klux Klan has become the instrument of a new Negro enslavement, for it is employed in forcing black men to work and pick cotton at rates they would not accept if the decision were left to themselves. Throughout the South and South-West the Negro population lives in constant fear of the hooded bands of night-riders. Everywhere, South, North, East, and West, where the Klan has planted the fiery cross of the Invisible Empire, Roman Catholics and Jews are the intended targets, while on the Pacific Coast the Japanese are included among the objects of 100 per cent. American vigilance.
 

Law Ridiculed.

"The law may as well not exist. It is flouted and laughed at. In States where Klan organisation has reached its highest point the administrators them selves are Klansmen. Murders, kidnappings, floggings, threats— they are almost daily occurrences. But a judge who denounces the night-raiding mobs is the exception. A sheriff, Bob Buchanan, at Waco, Texas, with courage enough to stop a masked parade and demand the names of the paraders, is shot and then made the victim of removal proceedings sponsored by the most influential citizens of his county. A Klansman, in Birmingham, Alabama, who kills a Catholic priest in cold blood on his own doorstep, is acquitted at the 'trial' amidst the plaudits of the mob. A city council in the same 'Birmingham the Beautiful,' considering an ordinance forbidding masked parades on the public streets, is terrorised in its own chamber into defeating the measure. Members of a board of education in Atlanta, Georgia, demurring at voting for a resolution to dismiss all Catholics employed as public school teachers, receive letters threatening their lives. A Mayor in Columbus, Georgia, who refuses to remove a city manager who has proved efficient and capable, finds his home dynamited; the city manager, 'a blue-bellied Yankee,' is driven from the city. A Roman Catholic church at Naperville, Illinois, is destroyed by an incendiary fire two hours after a monster Klan midnight initiation in the neighborhood."
It is not surprising in these days to learn that it is a woman who is the heart of the whole business. Mrs. Bessie Tyler, who, with E. Y. Clarke, and William Joseph Simmons, has capitalised ignorance, hatred and violence in the United States, has courage beyond the ordinary. We are told that:
"As a matter of fact the first idea of Simmons, Clarke and Mrs. Tyler did not comprehend selling anti-Catholicism. They believed the phrase 'white supremacy' to be the mainspring of the pro motion, at least in the South — and they did not dream in the beginning of anything but a purely Southern organisation. But the face of things changed as one after another of the Atlantans who believe the Pope to be the head of a conspiracy to unseat Congress and toss the President into the Potomac were admitted into the mysteries of Klannishness.
 

Anti-Catholic Bias.

Indeed, they changed the Klan so completely that in some States it is not considered anything but a straight anti-Catholic organisation, as, for instance, Oregon, where, in Portland, but a few months ago the Klan initiation was held in the Municipal Auditorium by permission of the city authorities. The result of the Republican primary elections in that State, fought on a straight Klan versus Catholicism basis and lost by the outspoken Klan candidates by less than five hundred votes, attests the strength the weird order has gained in the North West."
The "Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire" has urged that "the negro and the other fellow" must be kept out of social and political life.
Evidence is quoted that the Ku Klux Klan interferes with the rights of the individual and with the processes of the law. One subject, however, divides the Klan: its members are on both sides of the Prohibition question. After convicting Simmons, the "Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire," by his own public utterance of anti-Catholic bias, the writer proceeds to state that they "are mild, indeed conservative, when compared with the violence of Carl F. Hutcheson, Atlanta school commissioner, J. O. Wood, editor of the 'Searchlight,' of Walter Sims, Atlanta city councilman and Klan candidate for mayor. The first two of these are the principal promoters of the Great American Fraternity, and Hutcheson's law partner, J. A. Morris, is president. With their confreres they actually induced the Klan to boycott a certain brand of cigarettes (Camels) be cause they are made by a concern reputed to be controlled by Thomas Fortune Ryan, a Catholic. They have at tempted to intimidate the Atlanta board of education into dismissing all of the Roman Catholics employed as school teachers, to influence employers to dismiss their Roman Catholic workers, and to boycott merchants who display Roman Catholic sympathies.
 

Inspection of Convents.
 

"Wood, a Klan candidate for the legislature in Georgia, has chosen as a lead ing plank in his platform a more rigid inspection of convents and institutions conducted by religious Orders. The Klan, several weeks ago, succeeded in effecting the dismissal of a school principal in El Paso, Texas, because she is a Catholic. This writer is in possession of first-hand information concerning a conference between several of these fanatics, in which Clarke, perceiving the salability of anti-Catholic activities, proposed the very plan now revealed under the title of the Great American Fraternity. It is interesting to add that at a similar conference, some time previous, Clarke worked up his hearers with a declaration that when the Klan influence flowered its leaders would aim at the sterilisation of all male Negro children, so that the Negro would gradually disappear from the American Continent. It is equally interesting that Negroes are joining the Catholic Church for self-protection.
"Clarke denies he is back of the Great American Fraternity. Nevertheless the idea is his. And this is the idea:
"1. To organise a nation-wide sales organisation composed of members of thirteen secret orders popularly believed to be hostile to the Catholic Church.
"2. To instruct these salesmen in the business of selling effective political anti-Catholicism to their brothers in their respective lodges. This is in line with the system adopted by Clarke in 1920 for putting over the Ku Klux. At that time Clarke suddenly realised the value of representing the Klan to be 'the fighting brother' of Masonry. So he issued orders that none but men with Masonic affiliations should be employed as Kleagles, or salesmen, although Clarke himself is not a Mason, and it is well understood that he could not get into the order.
"3. To find political issues, based on opposition to the Catholic Church and to Catholics, upon which all of the thirteen secret societies might unite in a given city, county, or State.
"This idea is now a realised fact. Hutcheson and Wood, law partners until recently, had the Great American Fraternity incorporated in Georgia and set the price for membership at 5 dollars, payable in advance upon application. The only other requirement is that the applicant produce evidence that he is a member in good standing of one or other of the thirteen organisations. The fact that the most prominent Masons of the country, as well as officials of the Orangemen, have repudiated the plot as anti-American does not worry the promoters. They are out to unite in a single group of haters all the haters in the country. . . . Consequently, we may expect to read from now on of the increasing importance of religion in politics; of school teachers dismissed for their religious beliefs; of workers losing their jobs for the same reason; of boycotts of merchants for the same reason; and of repetitions North, East, and West of the crimes of ignorance and prejudice which for the past twenty years have been largely confined to the South."

Freeman's Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1850 - 1932), Thursday 7 September 1922, page 12