In March, Simon J. Levien of The Crimson authored a piece on Harvard’s historical association with the Ku Klux Klan. The piece opens with a description of a cross burned on campus in 1952, as told through Black alumnus J. Max Bond Jr. ‘s perspective. Immediately, I was reminded of the cross burned in front of Drew House in 1979, later found to have been perpetrated by a Black resident. This was (at least) the second cross burned on campus; in 1957, students burned a cross to protest the construction of Chapin Hall. While both incidents certainly have strong implicit associations, with no concrete ties to Ku Klux Klan sentiment, I was left wondering: how did Amherst students feel about the Klan?
Though it is difficult to ascertain what might have happened behind the scenes, the majority of articles printed in the Student during the early twentieth century were decidedly in opposition to the Klan and its tactics. However, on April 21, 1924, the same year that Harvard students posed in “bright white sheets, pointy hats, and cut-out eye holes,” the Amherst Student published an article on a member of the KKK who had come to campus.
C.W. Louis, who “stands high in the councils of the Klan” gave an informal talk at Delta Kappa Epsilon house (now Plimpton) at the invitation of the Lord Jeff board. According to the article, he “commented favorably on a cartoon referring to the Klan.” This quote is likely referring to these five lines in the March 1924 issue of Lord Jeff, a campus humor magazine:
View the comment in context here. I could write an entire blogpost on the history of the Lord Jeff, the student publication that “revived the humor and campus-interest genre in 1920, running until 1935,” but note that the majority of the “humor” engages with racist and/or sexist stereotypes and caricatures including Amherst’s own Dwight Newport, as seen below.
For those not keeping up with Klan activity in 1924, this comment seems entirely unremarkable among other more overt offenses; I missed it on my first search through the issue. But Emporia, Kansas, was allegedly home to a 500-member chapter of the Klan. In 1923, a Klan-supported candidate was elected mayor of Emporia, and in 1924, a Klan-supported candidate was vying for the gubernatorial seat.
The connection between Voliva and the Klan is slightly more muddy. Wilbur Glenn Voliva, the self-proclaimed “World’s Richest Holy Man” and general overseer of Zion, Illinois, was a proponent of the flat Earth theory and in 1922 prophesized a war in which “England and the United States will succor the Jews from the ravages of all other people.” In 1923, he and the citizens of Zion created a radio program “heard quite regularly, not only up and down the Atlantic coast, even in midsummer, but last winter, under the most favorable conditions, they were heard clearly and distinctly in remote parts of Canada, in California, Alaska, Mexico, Cuba, Central America, and on ocean steamers far out on the Atlantic.”
The only explicit connection to the Klan I have come across is a 1922 op-ed in The Capital Journal based in Oregon:
Returning to Amherst, though, I wanted to know more about this incident. Springfield was a hotbed of KKK activity, but it is difficult to find anything about individual members. Curious as to why the “informal talk” was held at Deke house, I first turned to the Amherst College Fraternities Collection and the Delta Kappa Epsilon album in the Amherst College Class Albums Collection in the hopes of finding material related to the event. I found nothing of the sort, though; not even a mention in the minutes for the months preceding the event. This is one of the difficulties of doing archival research, especially when dealing with difficult or controversial topics. It is possible that Amherst’s connections to the KKK run much deeper than this one speech, but records of those connections may have been intentionally obfuscated. Just because there is no record of a person or event does not mean that they did not exist and the event did not take place. However, the lack of information is slightly encouraging; Harvard’s KKK chapter was well-represented in the archives.
My next step was then to examine the editorial board of the Lord Jeff, who had apparently invited C.W. Louis to speak. Robert Elliott McCormick ‘24, editor-in-chief of the Lord Jeff, was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. His name appears only a few times in the minute book and is almost exclusively relegated to records of attendance.
As the only DKE member of the editorial board, it appears that McCormick was the main instigator of the event. How many other students may have participated or been swayed by Louis’s remarks is unknown.
Also unknown is how Jewish and Black students responded to the event. There were four Black students on campus at the time of C.W. Louis’s visit: William Montague Cobb, Will Mercer Cook, Benjamin Jefferson Davis, William Henry Hastie. All were members of the class of 1925; a fifth, George Winston Harry appears to have left in the 1922-23 academic year. The exact number of Jewish students on campus is unclear, but as Professor Wendy Bergoffen writes, “Jewish students found Amherst a lonely and isolating place during the interwar years.” Both groups of students were excluded from fraternities like and including Delta Kappa Epsilon. Did they not feel safe enough to speak out? Did they speak out, but were they silenced in the press and in the archives? These silences can be maddening, but also revealing.
It may be impossible to know the full extent of KKK sentiment at Amherst in the 1920s. Given the lack of published material, however, it is unlikely that it ever reached the height of that of Harvard. Even still, this incident serves as a reminder that racism at Amherst did not disappear at the turn of the century; it simply took on a new form.
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