.
>> Did the Klan actually march at the 1924 convention? There’s no credible evidence that they did. It’s well
documented that there was a Klan presence at the convention aimed at influencing its outcome (as many as 300 delegates were card-carrying Klansmen, according to Arnold S. Rice’s
The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics), but we found no mention of Klan marches or rallies at or near Madison Square Garden in contemporaneous press coverage (including that of the
New York Times, which published daily reports on the convention’s progress), nor in history books recounting the event.
However, there is a grain of truth to the less dramatic version of the claim, which holds that the Klan held a convention-related rally in New Jersey. The city of Long Branch (which is not “across the river,” but further down the shore from New York City) was the site of a massive, multi-state Ku Klux Klan gathering scheduled for the Fourth of July. It was billed as the largest Klan gathering ever, though actual attendance fell short of the projected 50,000 Klansmen and family members. Although they hadn’t convened for that purpose, attendees were kept abreast of the political drama unfolding at Madison Square Garden and reacted accordingly, the
New York Times reported:
> The event which drew men, women and children of the hooded order from all New Jersey and Delaware and from Eastern Pennsylvania had been announced as a Tri-State Klorero, the purpose of which was to demonstrate the patriotism of the Klansmen and their devotion to the cause of good government. Before the day’s program had proceeded an hour, however, scores of men and women, and many children encouraged by their elders, had pounded to a battered pulp an effigy of Governor Smith, which the Kloreans were invited to attack at three baseballs for a nickel. <
Anti-Smith outbursts aside, the Klan event was “largely a picnic,” the
Times reported, “with no features of unusual importance.” Indeed, most of the day, leading up to the obligatory cross burning ceremony after dark, was taken up with standard KKK activities...
... There is no reason to suppose, in fact, that the overlapping timings of the Klan gathering and the Democratic National Convention were anything other than coincidental. The convention got underway, as scheduled, on June 24. Had it lasted four days (which was, and still is, the average length of presidential nominating conventions), it would have been over by June 28th. No one, least of all the planners of the so-called Independence Day “Klorero,” could have predicted that the convention would continue through the Fourth of July and beyond. The events were
unrelated.
... What’s interesting about every version we were able to find of this claim, however, is that
not one of them was published before 2000. During the entire 76 years between 1924, when the convention took place, and 2000, when it was first asserted that it was popularly known as the “Klanbake,” there appear to have been
no published mentions of that “fact” at all.
The results of our research tracked those of historian Peter Shulman and freelance journalist Jennifer Mendelsohn, who
reported in the
Washington Post in March 2018 that in all the contemporaneous press coverage of the convention, the word “Klanbake” appeared only once — as an editorial joke — and would not used again in that context for more than seven decades:
> While the Klan presence at the Democratic convention was significant, it was not enough to control the proceedings. Yet members of the Invisible Empire were not exactly invisible. On June 25, 1924, the second day of the convention, a reporter for the young tabloid New York Daily News published a breezy, joking announcement from the Democratic convention hall in Madison Square Garden declaring that the “Klanbake steamed open at 12:45.” <
An exhaustive search of contemporary newspapers, digitized and microfilmed,
including papers published by the Klan itself, found not a single instance of another publication, including the
Daily News, ever using this term again during their coverage of the convention or its aftermath.
In the decades that followed, neither the lone book nor scholarly articles about the convention referenced this supposedly well-known “nickname,” nor do any of the most-respected histories of the Klan. Yet today, this moniker has emerged as widely known shorthand for the convention — shorthand that conveys the mistaken message that Democrats were the party of the Klan in the 1920s.
... The Klan’s impact on the Republican Party was noted in press coverage of the time as well. In the same vein as the
Daily News had quipped that the Democratic convention was a “Klanbake,”
TIME ran a 23 June 1924
report on a failed attempt by a Republican faction to include an anti-KKK plank in the party platform which referred to the Republican National Convention by the nickname “Kleveland Konvention.”
Shulman says the unchecked spread of the “Klanbake” meme illustrates the perils of putting partisanship before accuracy:
n an age of the internet, it’s really easy for a initial embellishment to snowball into both an apparent authoritative fact as well as a partisan bludgeon. We should resist that temptation, be skeptical of partisan and ideological uses of history, and correct the record whenever a story doesn’t check out. <<
Long Branch is new info though. I know exactly where Long Branch is. It's not even near New York --- let alone freaking Wisconsin.
