Daily News Says KKK Not Power in N.C. Politics, Sept. 27, 1925

Klorero Says Klan Has Small Following. . . Seems No Further Reason for Taking Organization Seriously in This State. . . Not Power in Politics

Greensboro Daily News

Raleigh, Sept. 27—Friday’s fizzle of the “fiery cross” moves all and sundry statesmen, scribes and clerics hereabouts who have found it necessary at time to take note of the Ku Klux Klan, to observe that the invisible empire is not to be seen because it is so shrewd and well organized, but because there is nothing to see.

It’s possible that the Daily News count of the parade was not correct. Watchers at other points on “the line of march” say that down the principal street there was an off-shoot which never joined the paraders again. When they reached the capital and turned to the left there were by working at all angles never got beyond 566.The revised estimate may be right, but they are not impressive. This was the grand Klorero, but it turned out to be a punk parade by the bunk bridge.

There seems no further reason for the klan seriously. It might be able to get through enough mummies and hooded hoppers together to go out and beat some trifling black or some blockading white. But no longer does anybody need to take the klan seriously as a political organization, secret or otherwise. Either the membership has been busy separating itself from its money to be spent on the bunk business to put out any more for parades or kloreroes, or ship. Certainly the next legislature that comes here to offer bills unhooding it and exposing its members ought to be dignified and for all time knocked into a knocked hat.

This information has come late, but it is here. The klan did a fine job of publicity while the collecting was good and once it seemed to have about 75 per cent of the Wake county bar association in its membership. Locally it was blowing it all the funerals of prominent men and cutting didoes at the close of the commitment. It was long on dead ones. Recently that has been eliminated. There hasn’t been a klan genuflection at any recent first class funeral.

The klan got a great deal of joy from its supposed aid in beating Josiah William Bailey for governor. Undoubtedly it does receive a great deal of credit for turning many votes against Mr. Bailey. But at that there had been no big cleaverage between the grand officer and “my terrors” who put up for the bunk. The klan did have some votes last year, Albert, it was very uncertain what to do with them in the general election. For a time it flirted with Coolidge and glorified Governor Brewester of Main, another Republican, but before the campaign was over it was courting the state democracy and getting all that it could from the dominant party.

Hereafter anti-klansmen can lie down every night without one particle of worry over the klan. The fact that it has gone into the religious business, has snorted about teaching the Bible in the public schools, and is aggressively renouncing the evolutionists, is not going to hurt. For a time the klan was playing smash with the Baptist organization; but on hears no more from Baptist publications about klan pastors who are more interested in klanhood than in the robes of the righteous.

The klan, of course, has kept alive by the abuse that it received. Because it made so much noise, it was credited with nearly all the night crimes committed by boobs in their nighties. There will be less of that now, because the klan isn’t there. It wasn’t here the other night and it was called here by order of Imp Wizzes, Grand Dragons, Kluds, Duds and Scrubs. It has come and gone, has shown its strength, rather its weakness, and left everybody without any reason for making further warfare on it. It had been evident for one year that the klan was gone. Its characterless politics last year proved that. It was beaten every time it showed itself. In the present religious unhappiness with its quarrel of liberalists and literalists, the literalists are terribly disadvantaged by having the klan as their secret ally.

The klan can be severely alone from this time forward and many of its unwilling advertisers who felt it unnecessary to apprise the state of its hold-up on politics and religion, can just dismiss it from their minds. And they can do that without kissing the toe of the pope, joining the modernites, or glorifying “Jews and niggers.”

From page 3 of The North Wilkesboro Hustler, Oct. 6, 1925. Sorry for the "N" word but this was written by a newspaper editor 100 years ago.

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