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Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement1
By Thomas R. Pegram, Loyola College
The relationship between the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in support of national prohibition has been a source of controversy since the 1920s. Both the ASL and the KKK acted to enforce prohibition, the ASL through legal and political means, the KKK through grassroots political pressure and extralegal vigilante methods. Wet observers and, more recently, historians of the Klan movement claimed that the ASL cooperated with the Invisible Empire in direct enforcement of dry laws. ASL activists and prohibition historians, in turn, denied league involvement with the intolerant, occasionally violent, dry vigilantism of the Klan and instead stressed the nonpartisan bureaucratic operations of the ASL. The actual ambivalent relationship reflected shortcomings in the dry regime and in the two organizations. Ineffective enforcement pushed some ASL officials into informal ties with local Klans, while the league tolerated pro-Klan sentiments among some leaders. But extensive and persistent cooperation was not apparent.
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On the evening of June 30, 1924, Dr. E. M. Lightfoot, a Baptist minister and the superintendent of the South Carolina Anti-Saloon League, stood to address some sixty men gathered at the New Theater in the small piedmont town of Bennettsville. Two cloaked sentries guarded the doors. Each of his listeners bore a printed invitation "to become part of the nationwide movement to organize American Protestants within the folds of one great organization." Despite his salaried position with the ASL, Lightfoot was acting as a kleagle, a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan. The dry leader noted how the "silent forces" of the Invisible Empire had eliminated illegal liquor selling and other law violations elsewhere in South Carolina. He then warmly endorsed the Klan's commitment to "restricted immigration, pure Americanism, racial purity, law enforcement and organization of the Protestants to offset the organization of the Catholics and Jews," the principal enemies of prohibition, local control of public schools, and "100%" loyalty to American institutions.2 |
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Lightfoot was unprepared for the reaction of this specially chosen audience to his remarks. In sharp contrast to his previous recruiting meetings, nearly half the listeners in Bennettsville refused to rise in agreement with the general Klan principles Lightfoot enunciated, and several people offered "stirring" denunciations of the hooded order, rejecting the Klan's bigotry and vigilante law enforcement. One critic attacked Lightfoot directly for connecting the Anti-Saloon League to the Klan. "I have for years been paying annually to the Anti-Saloon league," complained this "ashamed" fellow Baptist. "If you are going to spend your extra time organizing something to sow dissension I think I had better use that money for something else." Only about ten prospective members remained in the hall as the dissenters filed out. |
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The national Anti-Saloon League, keen to dissociate its already controversial public image from that of the far more problematic Klan, swiftly acted to discipline its state officers. Informed of Lightfoot's Klan activities by an official of the Federal Council of Churches, league general counsel Wayne Wheeler, the nation's most powerful prohibitionist, immediately directed league general superintendent F. Scott McBride to curb Lightfoot's "detrimental" moonlighting. Within days, the league's efficient communication network had reminded its workers that dry success hinged on adherence to the ASL's single focus on prohibition—"this one thing"—and that the league insisted that its superintendents "withhold our public activities from organizations over whose official acts we have no control."3 Despite vigorous interest in prohibition enforcement demonstrated by Klan organizations in local communities across the nation, the ASL refused to compromise its single-issue priority, its autonomy of action, and its identity as the foremost moral and political exponent of the embattled prohibition reform. |
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