On 1 June 1965, a federally funded investigator filed a memo with his paymasters in Washington, DC, detailing the intelligence that he had been able to glean on the contemporary Ku Klux Klan. As might be expected, the memo correlated spikes in the pattern of Klan recruitment with perceived threats to the South's segregated way of life. The Supreme Court's Brown decision of 1954 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act a decade later had both had such an effect, the investigations revealed, but it was 1964's Freedom Summer that had led to the greatest upsurge, with some two thousand Klansmen becoming active as a direct consequence in Mississippi alone.Footnote ¹ As the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) coordinated the civil and voting rights efforts of northern volunteers and indigenous activists into a successful grass roots campaign during that summer, it was met with a visceral tide of daily Klan-sponsored violence, intimidation and brutality that culminated in racially motivated homicides: the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, which were to become notorious symbols of southern white supremacy, and the murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, whose cadavers were only recovered because the Mississippi River was being dredged in search of the remains of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, and whose deaths failed to generate similar publicity.Footnote ²

Given those circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that federal investigations into the Ku Klux Klan were announced in 1965. What remains extraordinary, however, is that the announcement of those investigations was met with opposition – in writing – from COFO veterans. On 7 April 1965, seven residents of Canton, Mississippi collectively signed a letter stating, “We, as individual staff members of [COFO] protest the proposed investigation of the KKK.” What is more, they did so because they believed that the investigation would serve “no purpose but to intimidate the members of the KKK.”Footnote ³ In the same week, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose James Bevel had served as a senior COFO strategist and whose leader, Martin Luther King Jr., had himself been the target of two Klan bombings, made it equally clear that it, too, opposed this investigation of the Klan.Footnote ⁴

The collective hostility of those Freedom Summer veterans to a federal investigation of the Klan can only be explained as the culmination of a long-running process. Over a period of five decades, from the formal establishment of the Klan's second phase in 1915 until that call for a federal investigation of what was, by then, the third phase of Klan activity fifty years later, civil rights activists and Klansmen were engaged in an ideological battle over the true meaning of Americanism and un-Americanism. Each side claimed not only that it represented the finest tradition of Americanism, but also that its opponents personified un-Americanism. Taken in isolation, that contest was deeply polarizing but not especially complex; in its full historical context, however, it was positioned at the nexus of a number of the era's most pressing debates and developments. In particular, that same period witnessed the institutionalization of the term “un-American” over which both sides battled, as a series of federal investigating bodies were established first to define and then to investigate activities and organizations that came under un-Americanism's aegis.Footnote ⁵

Although ideas of un-Americanism had percolated through national life since the Revolutionary era, its use was often haphazard and subjective, with little consensus over its precise meanings. The establishment of formal committees at the heart of the federal government promised to bring a surety to the previous uncertainties that had surrounded meanings and definitions of the term, and certainly gifted them the loudest public voice on the subject. Indeed, the near monopoly on the public discourse surrounding un-Americanism that those committees developed had a substantive material effect on any groups or individuals who were engaged in battles over relative Americanism and un-Americanism, for, in practice, it swiftly became clear that they, too, were incapable of operating in an objective manner. When Congressman Martin Dies sought to begin his tenure as chairman of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (SCUA) with a renewed search for a precise definition of un-Americanism in 1938, for example, it was to the leaders of such conservative groups as the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Daughters of the American Revolution to whom he turned.Footnote ⁶ It was a bias that was the result of more than simply the political views of a majority of the Congressmen who served on those Congressional investigatory committees, for it also reflected the signal efforts that such rightward-leaning organizations made in the interwar period to assume the mantle of guardians of Americanism and, therefore, to identify themselves as the definers and diviners of un-Americanism. Despite continued protestations from liberal organizations that they, too, were wholly American in character and outlook, their voices went largely unheard in Washington and they remained liminal to the central debates over un-Americanism.Footnote ⁷

The basis for the fears of the Freedom Summer volunteers, then, was that the task of investigating the Klan in 1965 had fallen to just one such committee, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). It was a body that had repeatedly proven itself to be more at ease targeting civil rights activists than Klansmen as un-American, and those veterans' fears were predicated on the assumption that judgement on the extent of the Klan's un-Americanism would, in the final analysis, come from a committee with a long history of supporting the very system of Jim Crow segregation that Freedom Summer had been designed to destroy, and which the Klan had sworn to uphold: by 1965, HUAC had exhibited entrenched right-leaning political credentials for generations, and the committee and its predecessors had been under the direct control of four southern segregationists, two of whom, in the words of COFO partners the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had been “avowed white supremacists” from the main Freedom Summer target state of Mississippi, and were “declared enemies” of the association.Footnote ⁸ What is more, by 1965 HUAC had investigated civil rights activism on nine separate occasions, but had declined to investigate the Klan. To such activists, then, it appeared that the long contest over the Klan's claims to Americanism would not be decided by analysing that organization's violence and terrorism, but had in essence already been decided by the selection of the investigating agency. What becomes clear from the evidence, however, is that whilst the Klan was publicly declared to be an avowedly “100% American” organization at the start of this fifty-year contest, by 1965 even the jaundiced eye of HUAC was openly proclaiming it to be the personification of contemporary un-Americanism.

It was in September 1921 that the second Klan was first called to account before a Congressional committee, when Massachusetts's US Congressman Peter F. Tague submitted a resolution for the House Rules Committee to investigate the version of the organization that had been revivified and incorporated by “Colonel” William Simmons in 1915. In a clear indication of Simmons's confidence in the Klan's Americanism, and, equally importantly, his confidence that such claims would receive a positive reception amongst Washington's political class, his response to Tague was revelatory. Rather than shunning a close inspection, Simmons wrote personally to President Warren G. Harding, the US Attorney General and all serving Congressmen individually to “plead for” and “welcome such an investigation.”Footnote ⁹ Simmons had always proclaimed the Klan to be a purely American operation at the very heart of the nation's historical endeavours. “We, the American people,” he wrote in an essay that sought to explain the Klan's appeal and importance in language that consciously echoed the nation's founding documents,

Americanism, Simmons concluded in terms that reflected a growing contemporary fascination with social Darwinism, was facing extinction. The only way to reverse such a downward trajectory, he believed, was to support his organization as the embodiment of heroic Americanism.Footnote ¹⁰

When the Committee on Rules opened its brief hearings on the Klan on 11 October 1921, Simmons came fully prepared to turn the hearings into a platform from which he could not defend but, in essence, advertise his organization. In so doing, he chose to place the Klan's avowed ideology of “100% Americanism” at centre stage. Crucially, Simmons sold that Americanism to his audience with a veneer of objective specificity and practised authority that belied an underlying imprecision and bluster, drawing heavily upon the printed matter of Constitution and Bible, as well as more imprecise notions of patriotism, law and order, civilization, and the shared heroic past of which he was so fond. Closer inspection, however, reveals that he was also reliant upon the lack of clarity that ran through the public's perception of what, precisely, Americanism entailed: Simmons' contemporaries were probably certain that they each understood Americanism, but were probably equally certain that they could not pin down what scholars have referred to as the “protean” and “remarkably supple” concept to a precise definition.Footnote ¹¹ Amidst such intellectual ambiguity, Simmons's frequent yet bland assertions of what were often circuitous arguments and recurring motifs amounted to a campaign that Emile Coué would have recognized as one of routine repetition and autosuggestion.Footnote ¹² Thus, for example, the Klan's “100% Americanism” was circularly described as a programme to “conserve, protect, and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles, traditions, and ideals of a pure Americanism,” and one of the organization's many pamphlets, A Sacred Duty – A Precious Privilege, defined the Klan's patriotism as an “uncompromising standard of pure Americanism.” When Simmons was pressed by Illinois Congressman William A. Rodenberg on how the Klan's desire for white supremacy would be achieved in practice, he answered only that a such campaign “would be in keeping with the principles of Americanism, or, in other words, it would be done in a patriotic and just way.” Patriotism, justice and law and order were often repeated, but never interrogated. Symbols held sway, such as the Stars and Stripes flag that the Klan's ordinances declared had to be present at the opening of any local “klonklave” meeting, draped over an altar.Footnote ¹³ Finally, he outlined plans to spend $150,000 on a partnership programme with Atlanta's Lanier University, which boasted the distinctive feature of a compulsory course on “the fundamentals of pure Americanism,” and which had designed all other courses in such a way as to make “plain” their relationship with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Thus Simmons was not only wrapping his Klan in the ideas and ideals of Americanism, but was proclaiming the organization to be so well versed in its minutiae that it could oversee its teaching at the university level.Footnote ¹⁴

Simmons's attempts to cast the Klan as the progenitors and protectors of Americanism were, however, as contested as the very notion of Americanism itself. Much of the drive for the Rules Committee investigation of Simmons's Klan had come from a series of exposés of the organization in the New York World newspaper, which paid particular attention to the Klan's alleged proclivity for extra-legal violence, and which provided a far more accurate analysis of the Klan's nativistic appeals to anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism than Simmons was willing to risk. It was that extremism which, in the words of Dartmouth College sociology professor John Moffatt Mecklin in 1924, portrayed the Klan not as “100% American,” but as “alien to American life, a cancer eating its way into the vitals of society,” and “as thoroughly un-American.” As for Simmons's concept of Americanism, Mecklin dismissed it as full of “factitious mental symbols that often have little or no correspondence with reality.”Footnote ¹⁵ It was from inside the Rules Committee's hearing, however, that both the Klan's interpretation of Americanism and its claims to be the ideology's gatekeeper were most savagely eviscerated. In a sustained attack, William Monroe Trotter, a veteran of the founding of both the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, led off a series of progressive proponents of greater civil rights who appeared at the hearings on behalf of the National Equal Rights League of Colored Americans (NERL). The League's view of the Klan was clear, for Trotter stated unequivocally, “We hold it is un-American,” and he sought to dismiss its construction of Americanism by drawing on both the long-held absolutes of the doctrine and the peculiarities of the immediate postwar United States. In terms of the former, Trotter and the litany of African American speakers who followed him took on the Klan's claims to Constitutional loyalty and good government, framing the organization as one which interfered with the right to personal liberty of all citizens, and was therefore “a menace to … constitutional rights.”Footnote ¹⁶ Religious worship and broad tolerance were at the forefront of the NERL's take on Americanism, as was the fine citizenship and loyalty of those African Americans who were denied entry to the Klan wholesale, but who had responded loyally to America's need in the World War. African Americans were committed to the importance of law and order, the NERL argued, and maintained the right of all citizens to receive protection under the Constitution.Footnote ¹⁷

In terms of the particular circumstances and context of 1921, Trotter skilfully picked up upon the analysis of New York's Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, which had been chaired by Empire State Congressman Clayton R. Lusk and had reported its findings the previous year, and sought to use them to his advantage and to the detriment of the Klan. Lusk had been strongly influenced by the Red Scare that had begun in 1919, and by the perception of an increase in the radicalism of immigrants arriving on American shores from nations with undemocratic governments and traditions, which combined to rouse fears that a percentage of the population was not wedded to the United States' ideals of constitutional republicanism, but was instead in thrall to a foreign power.Footnote ¹⁸ Trotter adeptly equated the loyalty of Klansmen to the treachery of those in foreign thrall in a move that was designed simultaneously to erode the Klan's claims to Americanism, reposition the group as un-American, and highlight the comparative loyalty of churchgoing, law-abiding, constitution-respecting African Americans. The Klan's secrecy, allied to its attempts to govern through terror and coercion, effectively rendered it a “government-usurping organization,” Trotter proclaimed, and Simmons was really attempting “to set up a superstate, private and invisible,” which operated in an “undemocratic” manner that was “entirely inconsistent with free institutions.” The Klan was an organization that sought “to exercise the functions that properly belong to the Government,” he concluded, and to intimidate US citizens with armed violence and coercion.Footnote ¹⁹ Trotter's view was endorsed from an unlikely source, the testimony of a former “klan kleagle” from New York, C. Anderson Wright. Performing the role that would later be defined by HUAC as that of a “friendly witness,” Wright confirmed under committee questioning that it was the purpose of the Klan to “weld all of this organization into a body that would all vote one way” under the instruction of the Imperial Wizard, and to “gain control” of democratic institutions by seeking to “put their own men in office.”Footnote ²⁰

Trotter and his confrères were careful to articulate their own stance as one that operated firmly within the bounds of a limited, accommodationist approach to civil rights change, in a bid to neuter any suggestions of their own radicalism.Footnote ²¹ Nonetheless, Simmons was not ready to cede the Klan's claims to Americanism, and certainly not to an organization of African Americans, however much they tried to position themselves as accommodationists. On the third day of the hearings, he beseechingly asked the chairman how “any man can presume to state to the world … that this is an un-American or anti-American organization?” – a theme to which he returned in his final summing up.Footnote ²² Importantly for the Klan specifically, and to an understanding of the trajectory of un-Americanism's history more generally, reaction to the Rules Committee hearings appeared to confirm Simmons's view.Footnote ²³ The committee failed to recommend any Congressional action against the Klan, and, although precise numbers remain murky, estimates place its membership at between 4 and 5 million by 1924, and, crucially, report a rise of as much as 20 percent in response to Simmons's testimony. Equally importantly, that support came not from the margins but from the very centre of the mainstream political process. Support for the organization was clearly in evidence in electoral contests at both local and state levels, and it is testament to the Klan's national appeal that delegates to both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 1924 were minded to vote down resolutions that had been specifically designed to curtail and counter its activities.Footnote ²⁴

By the time Klansmen next appeared before a Congressional investigatory committee, the SCUA in 1939, there were signs that their claims to Americanism were being diluted, and that the idea of un-Americanism had been further formalized and, indeed, deeply politicized. Dies had used the SCUA to push his own personal political agenda to such an extent that the committee was widely perceived to be an anti-New Deal mouthpiece, and Dies himself was clearly wedded to a view of un-Americanism that equated it with political activity on the left of the spectrum.Footnote ²⁵ The decision to investigate Klansmen therefore appeared to run contrary to the Texas Congressman's political instincts. Crucially, however, that decision should not be understood as having been motivated by a desire to protect the civil rights of the Klan's opponents, for the Klan itself was only investigated as collateral damage from a probe that was aimed at the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization that was essentially directed by a foreign power that was soon to be a wartime enemy of the United States. It was through their close scrutiny of the Bund that Dies's investigators came across the possibility of collusion between the Bund and the Klan, which was by that time haemorrhaging membership to such an extent that it was looking at a wide variety of means of stemming such losses. Even Dies, it seems, could not ignore the rise of a pro-Nazi propaganda and organizational network within the United States at a time in which fascism was proving such a clear, bellicose threat to other Western democratic nations. When information came to light that the Klan was planning a joint rally with the Bund, it raised concerns that such a union had – at least in theory – the potential to create what amounted to a united front of fascism within the United States, and one that would centre round an organization brazenly controlled by a foreign power.Footnote ²⁶

Dies's primary investigator, Richard Rollins, was alive to the many ironies such a union evoked, for he noted that the Klan's “all-American boys sound as if they have been using an English translation of the swastika protocols” as they prepared for the mooted meeting at Camp Nordland, New Jersey in August 1940.Footnote ²⁷ As later testimony before the committee revealed, even Klansmen themselves were involved in internal battles over whether or not the Americanism of the Klan could – or indeed should – survive an alliance with the un-Americanism of the Bund. The Reverend A. M. Young, a former Grand Kaliff of the New Jersey Klan, for example, explained to the Dies Committee that he had requested clearance from his superior in the Klan for the joint meeting with the Bund. As Young recounted it, “He said: ‘You don't expect an un-American group like that to let the Klan have its meeting ground when you know we call ourselves the No. 1 patriotic order of America, and I still insist we are …’.”Footnote ²⁸ Others seemed equally unconvinced: a crowd of 50,000 had been estimated by the Klan, but fewer than three thousand attended.Footnote ²⁹ Ultimately, Dies appeared similarly uninterested in Klan activities, for his first end-of-year report devoted less than one percent of its findings to the organization.Footnote ³⁰

The wartime moment that pushed Dies into an otherwise unwanted exploration of Klan activities was also responsible for providing a watershed in the wider history of un-Americanism, for it presaged an increase in the strength and depth of rhetoric from individuals and organizations on the political left who interpreted the increase in patriotic fervour and sacrifice associated with a war against fascism as a catalyst: they began a sustained and open challenge to what was felt to be the right's monopoly over the public discourse of un-Americanism. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, progressive voices became damning not just of the continued prevalence of rightward-leaning groups' definitions of un-Americanism, but also of the continuation of HUAC's investigatory powers that some believed to have been justifiable in wartime, but which were certainly thought to have no place in peacetime. Indeed, it is telling that it was only through an audacious act of political legerdemain in the final months of the war that Mississippi's John Rankin was able to sustain HUAC, by using the House's arcane rules to turn what was still a temporary committee into a standing one without a full considered House debate. Liberal dissent on the House floor noticeably increased, with Massachusetts's John McCormack openly decrying Rankin's actions and New York's Emanuel Celler launching into an eighteen-part satire on Congressional un-American investigations that included asking was it un-American “for the mockingbird, the accepted bird of Mississippi, to go on mocking?” California's Jerry Voorhis, who, like McCormack, had served on an earlier un-American committee, was equally damning. With an eye on the obvious politicization of un-Americanism, Voorhis stated that he feared that certain people “might seize such a committee as a convenient method of attempting to identify the honest political views of political opponents with un-American activities.”Footnote ³¹ This was not, however, a totemic swing: Voorhis may have been sufficiently moved by the conservatism and flawed methods of the Dies committee to dissent from one of its annual reports, but he nonetheless remained loath to dismiss the Klan outright. He was uncertain where to “catalogue” the secret organization in terms of its un-Americanism, admitting that it was a question that still aroused “violent debate. For even as it wraps the flag about itself and vows to combat all the nation's enemies,” he concluded, “it will undermine the basic institutions of democracy by taking the law into its own hands, employing intimidation, and spreading religious or racial prejudice.”Footnote ³²

It was as a means to head off the mounting criticism facing un-American investigatory committees that one of Rankin's committee appointees, Dakota's Karl E. Mundt, chose to embark upon a search for a consensual definition of un-Americanism. To his credit, Mundt included known progressives in his trawl of “100 outstanding Americans,” but, to his chagrin, his research did more to highlight the ongoing contested nature of un-Americanism than it did to uncover any definitional unanimity. Indeed, it became clear that a substantial part of the animus directed at investigatory committees stemmed from a sense that they were interpreting the term unsatisfactorily, and with too great a political bias. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, argued that the Dies committee encroached on Americanism's fundamental rights to such an extent that she associated it “with European secret supervision such as the Gestapo,” and posited her view that it was un-American to foster a climate that left any citizen in fear of its government unless he or she had committed a crime, whilst the habit of presuming the guilt of witnesses was inimical to Constitutional Americanism. Other progressive figures, including John P. Lewis and Harold Ickes, echoed the former first lady's views, whilst Henry Wallace was unequivocal. “[Y]ou will understand that a man with my attitude,” he began, “would inevitably look upon a Congressional committee on un-American activities as being definitely un-American itself except perhaps in time of war.” Even Mundt was left having to admit a fundamental problem that fuelled the ongoing contested nature of un-Americanism: the concept itself was relative and not absolute. Despite the submissions that he had received from the full range of the political spectrum, Mundt could only conclude that the committee must come to a view on

Where progressives such as Roosevelt and Ickes plumped decidedly for the former, the committee's conservatism drew it inexorably toward the latter.Footnote ³³

Elsewhere, leftist groups who believed themselves to have been disenfranchised by HUAC's proclivity for seeking advice on un-Americanism from the political right increased the volume of their counternarratives. By the late 1940s, for example, the Congress of Industrial Organizations had begun to oppose the conservative stance of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) – and the privileged platform that it received from committees such as Dies's – with a concerted campaign against the subjectivity of un-Americanism committees. Ever since HUAC's temporary creation in 1938, the CIO had believed that the committee was spearheading a politicized and “reactionary” drive against the rights of both workers and civil rights activists, by interpreting un-Americanism in deeply conservative terms. By 1948, an organization had been established with the dedicated goal of ending any contest or confusion over the deployment of the un-Americanism tag, which it believed could be accomplished in one single step: the abolition of HUAC. Again, the makeup of this “Committee of 1,000” is instructive, for it was not driven only by liberal intellectuals such as Archibald MacLeish and Harlow Shapley, but also by progressive politicians such as Helen Gahagan Douglas and Frank Porter Graham. Their collective statement of intent was as clear as the organization's motives. Quoting Walter Gellhorn, it believed that HUAC had proven itself unwilling “to tolerate those whose estimates of current problems do not match its own,” and that the Americanism enshrined by the Bill of Rights could only be protected with HUAC's abolition.Footnote ³⁴

It was within that macro-contest over un-Americanism – and with a rising volume of liberal objections to the conservative status quo – that the micro-contest surrounding the Klan's claims to Americanism was finally played out. Not surprisingly, the privileged platform afforded to HUAC as a national voice in the hunt for un-Americanism caused the committee to become the fulcrum of dissent and protest. Indeed, there was a considerable cross-pollination between those who were active in the campaign against HUAC and those who were civil rights activists. That was not least because of the evolution of a civil rights movement that was proving itself to be astutely aware of the capital to be gleaned from adopting Americanism's symbols, language and ideals for its own purposes. By the 1950s, it was actively and deliberately presenting itself as an American force representing truly American values, aided by the presence of other progressives who simultaneously campaigned against HUAC for its reckless use of un-Americanism.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, as the NAACP's Clarence Mitchell explained it in 1950, Americanism itself was at threat from the apparent existence of “an amorphous code” by which those seeking to “promote social progress” could effectively be labelled “un-American.”Footnote ³⁶ “We believe in the working practicability of the American ideal,” one NAACP worker noted in pointed reference to HUAC, as the association worked on producing a twelve-page pamphlet, NAACP: An American Organization, complete with a rippling Stars and Stripes on the cover and the Pledge of Allegiance on the first page.Footnote ³⁷

By the time of the showpiece March on Washington in 1963, the movement's strategists had proven themselves to be well practised in the art of presenting its work as fundamentally American. In an oft-overlooked speech at the start of the 1963 march, for example, Hollywood liberal Burt Lancaster opened proceedings beneath the Lincoln Memorial with carefully weighted language to note that citizens such as himself should be “forever indebted to those Americans represented by the March … for giving us so stunning an example of what America aspires to become, and for helping us to define in the middle of this dangerous century what is meant by the American Revolution,” whilst veteran civil rights organizer A. Philip Randolph told a small coterie of reporters at the day's close, “This is, and has been, a great American experience.” Not coincidentally, many of those who were involved were also at the forefront of the campaign against HUAC. A number of the signatories to a whole-page newspaper advertisement calling for the abolition of HUAC in 1959, for example, had central ties to the movement in general and to the 1963 march and its predecessor, the 1941 March on Washington Movement, more specifically, including A. J. Muste, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, Aubrey Williams and Reinhold Niebuhr.Footnote ³⁸ In that context it seemed only fitting that it was the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's John Lewis, whose radical approach to the 1963 march had to be diluted to appease its expected broader national audience, who emerged as a leading figure in the Committee to Abolish HUAC.Footnote ³⁹

It is indicative of the totemic shifts that had been forced by the pivotal positioning of those activists that, when COFO volunteers heard of the new investigation into the Klan in 1965, they did so directly from a supportive President. In what could not have been a starker contrast to the relationship that had developed between the Klan and the presidency in the early 1920s, Lyndon Baines Johnson announced in a nationally televised address on 26 March 1965 that he personally believed that the Klan ought to be investigated. As an event, it was laden with symbolism: in terms of politics in general, and racial politics in particular, here was a southern Democrat calling unequivocally for the investigation of an avowedly white supremacist organization; in terms of the battle between Americanism and un-Americanism, here was the symbolic figure of the President who, whilst announcing an investigation of the Klan, chose to do so in terms that made his own views on that group's claims to Americanism very clear. They were “the enemies of justice who for decades have used the rope and the gun and the tar and the feathers to terrorize their neighbors. They struck by night,” he noted in reference to the previous day's killing of civil rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo, “for their purpose cannot stand the light of day.” For Johnson, this was not an organization devoted to law and order, but one whose members “threaten the peace of every community where they exist.” In a conclusion that could not have been better designed to thwart any claims that the Klan might have continued to make to “100% Americanism,” Johnson declared that he knew that “their loyalty is not to the United States of America but instead to a hooded society of bigots.”Footnote ⁴⁰

It is, however, equally indicative of the extent to which the battle over the Klan's purported Americanism was still genuinely two-sided in the mid-1960s that even such an aggressively weighted presidential pronouncement was insufficient to assuage the concerns of COFO workers and SCLC members. Their fears were raised not by the Klan itself, but by the spectre of HUAC. When the committee's then chairman, the staunchly segregationist Louisianan Edwin S. Willis, proclaimed in a press release, “It is my conviction that Klanism is incompatible with Americanism,” and that he was “convinced that the South and the entire Nation will be much better off if all Klan influence is ended, once and for all,” those activists remained understandably sceptical.Footnote ⁴¹ A number of commentators in the press agreed, with the editors of the San Francisco Sun Reporter memorably stating that HUAC investigating the Klan was “like having the king rat guard the cheese bin.”Footnote ⁴²

To what was doubtless the great surprise of civil rights veterans, and in what marks an epochal shift in the history of un-Americanism, HUAC went after its right-wing target with energy and accomplishment. Less surprising was that Willis was not himself the driving force behind the investigation, even though he continued to spin the story to his best advantage in the press. It was Willis's fellow southern Democrat, Charles Longstreet Weltner, who was the prime moving force, and who made it his personal mission to steer the committee to undertake an investigation of the Klan, despite the organization's long-established links to his native Atlanta, Georgia. Weltner believed that the Klan was an unequivocally un-American organization. “This is not the arcane ritual of another fraternal lodge,” he wrote. “These men are terrorists pure and simple. Their purpose is terror. Their work is terror. Their strength is terror.”Footnote ⁴³ Weltner was a second-term Congressman who represented a new breed of southern liberal: he had not only voted for the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, but had also been reelected by his white constituency thereafter. Crucially here, he also looked more favourably on the movement's claims to Americanism than on those of the Klan. Indeed, weeks before Johnson's call for an investigation of the Klan, Weltner had already pressed Willis to take on Klansmen, whom he berated from the House floor for “changing the Cross from the symbol of hope to a sign of hate,” and declared that the Klan's resurgence was happening at a “critical time for the South,” for it was when the region was “rising to our full potential; we are struggling for orderly progress; we are turning to real problems and solid opportunities.” It was at the side of another southern member of HUAC, Alabama's John Buchanan, that Weltner first called for a “thorough and detailed investigation.” “I believe I speak for a vast majority of Southerners in calling for action,” he stated.Footnote ⁴⁴

HUAC's files, which remained closed to researchers until 2001, vividly display the vigour with which its staff sought to describe the Klan's un-Americanism. From the vast range of material available, the clearest example of what they were seeking to achieve comes from the investigation of Klan activity in Mississippi, the focal point of Freedom Summer and the alleged bastion of Klan secrecy.Footnote ⁴⁵ Those initial investigations preceded the first set of open hearings and took place under the radar of the press, which remained unaware of HUAC's seismic shift and, from Life magazine to the New York Post and the Washington Post, remained uniformly dismissive.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was not until HUAC member John M. Ashbrook addressed the audience of the first day of the eventual hearings into the Klan that the sheer scale of that endeavour became clear. “10 months of hard work” had “already gone into this investigation,” he noted, “and only those of us who have been intimately connected with it have any realization of the thousands of hours of work which have gone into the staff preparation at this point.” “20,000 man hours,” no less.Footnote ⁴⁷

What the staff managed to do with those man hours is impressive, and objectively impressive, too, rather than simply relative to public expectation. Investigators found ways to bring pressure to bear on witnesses that forced them to abandon the Klan oath if they had been inducted into the organization, or convinced them to overcome their latent fears of Klan reprisals if they were simply witnesses to Klan activity. Veteran HUAC investigator Donald T. Appell, for example, became particularly accomplished at using economic pressure on Klansmen. Having ascertained that particular workplaces were fertile recruiting grounds, such as the International Paper Company (IPC) in Natchez, Mississippi, he realized that it was often possible to find ways of compelling employers to act in his favour. IPC, for example, was moved to fire suspected Klansmen because one of its main accounts was as a supplier of government paper. By July 1965, Appell received a report that the FBI was in the process of interviewing every Klansman at the Natchez plant.Footnote ⁴⁸ Sackings, Appell noted in a memo, open “‘a golden field’ to making informants,” but there was also the opportunity to set what he referred to as “a backfire” by colluding with local unions from the same plants.Footnote ⁴⁹ By 2 August 1965, Appell was able to inform fellow team-member and ex-FBI investigator John D. Sullivan, “Our list of prospective witnesses is growing to the point where the Committee will have to sit daily for a whole year in order to reach them.” Any “new prospective witness[,] rather than being an addition to the list[,] must become a substitute for someone considered to be less important to the over-all inquiry.”Footnote ⁵⁰ By September, HUAC's investigatory team had the personnel files of sixty-nine named Klansmen from IPC, five of whom had already been added to that witness list.Footnote ⁵¹ By March 1966, the evidence bank was so fulsome that the testimony of one informant was corroborated by nine other “Confidential Informants” for a single Klan-related incident.Footnote ⁵²

The bombing of COFO worker Aylene Quinn's home in McComb, Mississippi during Freedom Summer offers a vivid example of continued local segregationist support for the Klan, not least because the bombing was handled with such a lack of investigative due process and interest at the local level that the sheriff pronounced it “staged.” Equally, it displayed the strategic use to which Ashbrook's “20,000 man hours” had been put, for when one of those connected to the bombings, Paul Dewey Wilson, refused to answer questions before HUAC, Appell promptly produced a detailed résumé that included Wilson's involvement in the United Klans of America, for whom he was the Exalted Cyclops; a statement that Wilson had himself made to the Mississippi Highway Patrol; the corroborating testimony of fellow Klansmen, including one who had thrown the bomb at Quinn's house from Wilson's car; and forty-three items that had been obtained during a search of Wilson's property.Footnote ⁵³

Testimony from the bomb thrower, Ernest F. Zeeck, was heard in executive session and was never subsequently released. In this context, its signal importance lies not in the fact that it sheds light on Klan activities per se, but that it reveals what it was about the Klan's activities that HUAC perceived to be un-American. Analysis of Zeeck and other Klan testimonies suggests that there were two main tenets of Klan behaviour that the 1965 iteration of HUAC interpreted not simply as illegal, but as un-American. First, from the way in which Zeeck was carefully coached through his testimony by HUAC general counsel William Hitz, who interjected regularly and cross-referred Zeeck's recollections with written testimony from other witnesses, it is clear that, where the violence associated with the Klan was illegal, activities that were calculated to place US citizens in a state of terror were interpreted as un-American. In particular, once it was ascertained that Zeeck “never intended anybody to get hurt,” and, indeed, that the Klansmen carrying out the bombing believed – erroneously – that no one was in the house, it was clear that the only rationale for the attack was to terrify COFO workers into submission. “There were a lot of bombings in McComb and never was anybody hurt,” said Zeeck. “I assume from that,” interjected Willis, “that if there was really no honest intention to hurt a person the idea was to terrorize, to bring fright?” “Yes, sir,” responded Zeeck.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Willis testified before Congress on 14 April 1965, “Democracy cannot coexist with terror. The two are incompatible. One or the other must go.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Second, HUAC perceived the widespread Klan practice of voting en masse in order to reflect the will of either a Klan Grand Dragon or a Klavern Exalted Cyclops to be un-American, in stark contrast to the blind eye turned to similar behaviour when it was uncovered by the 1921 Rules Committee. Hitz pressed Klansman Billy Wilson, for example, when he stated that what Exalted Cyclops Ray Smith “really advocated was a vote in the Klan, because as I understand it, that was the main reason for everyone down there to be in the Klan, for the vote of the Klan … A bloc vote.” “Are you talking about the vote within the Klan, or a vote at the polls?” Hitz asked. “A vote at the polls,” confirmed Wilson.Footnote ⁵⁶

HUAC's Klan hearings lasted for forty-two days, dispersed between 19 October 1965 and 24 February 1966. In one sense, the committee's final report was not that surprising. Various Klans, it was held, were responsible for acts of criminality, ranging from violence and intimidation to violations of Internal Revenue and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) laws.Footnote ⁵⁷ More important here are the conclusions regarding the Klan not as physical violators of the law, but as purveyors of a more metaphysical un-Americanism. In that sense, HUAC's investigation of the Klan exemplified the continually contested nature of un-Americanism: even whilst being investigated, many Klaverns believed that they themselves were truly Constitutional, American organizations, and often positioned themselves as the antithesis of the un-American. In the same year that HUAC launched its investigative enquiries, for example, the Southern Knights of the KKK declared its aim to preserve the “constitution of the United States in its true and historic interpretation,” and a handbill circulated by the White Knights of the KKK listed “Twenty Reasons WHY you should, if qualified, join, aid and support the White Knights.” Number eight read, “Because it is a pro-American organization that opposes any thing, person or organization that is un-American.”Footnote ⁵⁸

By 1965, those Americans who were not Klan members failed to agree, confirming a signal shift in the understanding of contemporary un-Americanism. It was a shift that serves to highlight the subjectivity of the term and the extent to which it must be fully contextualized in order to be understood. In this particular context, it also becomes clear from the Klan's attempts to present itself as a national organization representing the values of Americanism, and the concomitant attempts of civil rights strategists to cast the secret order as the polar opposite – a sectional organization of un-Americanism – that many contemporaries were both fully aware of un-Americanism's contested nature, and, indeed, were equally aware that they were active participants within that contest. The task of civil rights strategists in that regard was significantly aided by the growing voice of progressive, leftist forces who challenged what had long been a monopoly of the political right in terms of the national narrative of un-Americanism. It was a shift that even southern whites found increasingly hard to counter. When a three-judge federal court in New Orleans convicted members of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1965, for example, those judges confirmed that a pivot point had been reached, and tellingly pointed to the most American of documents to explain the rationale that underpinned their decision to convict. The Klansmen whose case was under consideration had, in the judges' words, failed “to comprehend the chasm between their own twisted Konstitution and the noble charter of liberties under law that is the American Constitution.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The leading strategists of the civil rights movement made no such mistake.