San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
S.A. Klan paper sparked 1920s controversies
I was wondering if you have ever heard of a paper printed in San Antonio called the American Forum. I’ve talked to several people about it, and they’ve never heard of it. There aren’t many pages to the one I have. Maybe some pages are missing, but I doubt it. It’s probably just a thin paper originally. I got (a copy) from an ephemera dealer who didn’t want to sell it at one of his shows. It’s just history in my opinion. Stanley Frost is mentioned on the front page. He also wrote a book about the KKK. Was he related to the Frost family of San Antonio?
— Allen Shelton
This was the weekly newspaper of the local Ku Klux Klan, which printed a mix of national and local stories to promote the organization’s views and events. You have a copy of an issue published Jan. 24, 1924, about midway through the paper’s run.
As proclaimed on the front page, the Forum was “Recognized by the Great Titans as the Klan Paper for Provinces Four and Five, Realm of Texas, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” (“Great Titans” headed areas that might comprise multiple counties, and “provinces” were equivalent to counties.) According to Library of Congress catalog information, the paper is thought to have been published first in 1923, probably starting with the Feb. 24, 1923, issue, and the latestknown issue was dated
Sept. 24, 1924. Original copies are kept in the Texas State Library in Austin, and there are microfilm copies in the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin and Angelo State University in San Angelo. Circulation figures are not available; but its Dallas counterpart, the Texas 100 Percent American, published from 1922 to 1924, claimed to reach 18,000 readers per issue.
Both papers were published during the apex of the group’s social and political influence in the state. By the early 1920s, the organization was backing political candidates, sometimes whole winning slates, especially in Northeast Texas. This second wave of a secret society founded after the Civil War was founded in 1915, with a boost from the popular movie about Reconstruction, “Birth of a Nation.” Using paid recruiters in a system similar to multilevel marketing, the new Klan first emerged in Texas in 1920.
“The old-time Klan,” Ramon Coffman says in “A Child’s Story of America” — a syndicated feature published in the San Antonio Express, Oct. 21, 1924, “was a society of white men (whose) purpose was to keep the Negroes from running things. … Various methods were used to keep them from voting.” The re-emergent Klan, as stated in this issue of the American Forum, professed “patriotic loyalty to the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, advocacy and upholding of the tenets of the Protestant Christian religion, absolute supremacy of the man in control of this government … white supremacy, limitation of immigration and protection of womanhood.” In keeping with nativist sentiments, Catholics are referred to as “Romans” and Jews as “Hebrews.”
Support of advertisers
The paper was not free with Klan dues — starting with an initiation fee of $10, plus yearly dues and charges for purchase or rental of robes and other paraphernalia — but cost $2 for a yearly subscription. It was well-supported by local advertisers — gas stations and auto-repair shops, as well as furniture, grocery, hardware and shoe stores. Many were small businesses, but some were prominent local concerns: Clifton George Motor Co. (with a Ford logo in the ad), Draughon’s Business College and Fomby’s Clothing Co. are represented.
San Antonio was behind Dallas and Houston in numbers, but the organization — operating here as Klan No. 31 — was sufficiently wellestablished to rent premises in Beethoven Hall at 403 S. Alamo St. and to sponsor an annual rodeo from 1922 onward. It was common for Klan chapters to perform charitable work to burnish their reputation; in 1921, three local men called on San Antonio’s Protestant Orphans Home with a cash donation and a letter signed by the Klan.
Another common practice was for local chapters to stage large, public initiation ceremonies with food and drink; a typical “barbecue” in San Antonio cost 25 cents a head and “naturalized” hundreds of new “citizens of the Invisible Realm.”
The Jan. 24, 1924, Forum, promotes one of these events, a “cowboy contest” or rodeo, set for Jan. 24-26, 1924, produced by Fred Beebe, a promoter of national reputation, and staged at the San Antonio Speedway, a private facility “five miles out Pleasanton Road” that was outside the city limits but could be reached by streetcar and shuttle buses.
The “three-day, threenight event” — cowboy contest by day, “Karnival” by night — was supposed to start with a parade of Dallas
Klan members, who had chartered a special train and would arrive the morning of Jan. 24, 1924, and expected to walk through city streets to arrive at local Klan headquarters, bulking up the organization’s visible presence as well as event attendance.
In Dallas, they had been allowed to hold an initiation in Fair Park, and there was a “Klan Day” at the 1923 Texas State Fair.
San Antonio was different. The City Commission, led by Fire and Police Commissioner Phil Wright, refused the request for a parade permit — submitted not by the Klan but by an agent of the rodeo producer — out of concern for public safety. A city ordinance prohibiting the wearing of masks on city streets was cited; although the rodeo agent said there would be no Klan regalia or signs, the commissioners determined that “the public generally would know that the rodeo (was) a Klan benefit affair, and animosity might be stirred that would give rise to fights and bloodshed,” and the request was denied.
Wright had run on the People’s Ticket the previous spring, against the Klanbacked Citizens’ Ticket, whose candidates had been touted in the American Forum, a copy of which successful mayoral candidate John Tobin had waved
from the stage of the Grand Opera House, citing its front-page support of his opponent and declaring his intention to run for the office of mayor “to take it out of the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.” Although the Citizens’ Ticket denied affiliation with the Klan, the damage was done, and the Klan paper was central to the organization’s failure at the ballot box.
Same address
In 1924, the Forum was held responsible for another political failure. John E. “Jack” Elgin, a perpetual candidate who ran alternatively as a Democrat, independent or Republican, blamed the Klan paper for his defeat in that year’s Republican gubernatorial primary. He sued the Forum — also naming 20 men he said were the local Klan’s leadership and therefore responsible for the paper. Elgin asked for $200,000 in damages, citing as libel the Forum’s assertion that he had been supported by the black-and-tan faction of the Republican Party (Black Republicans and those who favored an integrated party).
The Klan’s lawyers countered by claiming that the Forum was an independent corporation with no legal connection to Klan No. 31. However, the Jan. 24, 1924, copy invites readers to buy their Klan rodeo tickets at the paper’s offices … at 403 S. Alamo, the same address leased by the Klan. And among the 20 men named by Elgin’s suit were several who appear as advertisers in this issue, which proclaims itself “the Klan paper.” Elgin dropped his suit, indicating that the Klan may have settled with him.
That election was at least as consequential for the Klan as it was for Elgin: Dallas Klansman Felix D. Robertson lost the governorship to Miriam “Ma” Ferguson. The following year saw local Klans, including San Antonio’s, lose members to internal squabbling over conflicts among the national leadership. Statewide, according to the Handbook of Texas, the organization’s membership shrank from 150,000 in 1922 to 2,500 in 1928.
The interviews in the Outlook, a weekly magazine, that are described on the front page of this issue of the American Forum, were done by journalist Stanley Frost with the
Klan’s national leader, Dr. Hiram Wesley Evans. They probably related to Frost’s book, “Challenge of the Klan,” published later in 1924.
Frost, a respected journalist who worked for Detroit and New York newspapers and published in national magazines, wrote other books on social and political issues. According to his obituary in the New York Times, June 15, 1942, he was born in Oberlin, Ohio, graduated from Berea College in Kentucky and died June 14, 1942, at home in Richmond, Va. He does not appear to have had any connection with San Antonio.