When the Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington in August 1925, H. L. Mencken was stationed at the Treasury Building, taking notes with the rest of the press.
Before them unfolded a remarkable sight: thousands of Klan members and their families, many from the North, filling the most important street in Washington from the Capitol to the White House. It was a defiant and chilling exhibition of power; this was, after all, a time when hundreds of public officials on the local, state and even national levels were elected with known Klan sympathies -- or even, in some cases, were unabashed members.
The implications of the Klan's swaggering about the nation's capital were not lost on Mencken, a long-time and outspoken opponent of the organization. Yet this is what he wrote in his story for The Evening Sun:
"Pennsylvania led the van, and, in fact, dominated the whole parade. After two hours its host were still passing. They marched proudly, and showed a lurid fancy in their investiture. The men of Sam D. Rich, of Pittsburgh, were clothed in robes faced with scarlet, and wore mitres of the sort affected by patriarchs of the Greek rite. They had their wives with them -- fat, amiable gals mainly, with their make-ups dripping from the ends of their noses. The men of Johnstown wore trench hats; those of Holidaysburg bore muskets. Altoona was led by a Klan intellectual in horn-rimmed spectacles. . . .
"So they marched past, rank after rank -- the beauty and chivalry of Kutztown, Kunkletown, Kratzerville, Kleinfeltersville, Schwenkville, Houtzdale and Hamburg. The Klan gown was only the beginning of their attire. Over it some wore the cloaks of Spanish grandees of the sixteenth century and some the robes of Shinto high priests. One platoon was in green baldrics emblazoned with vermilion crosses; another wore huge special shakers bespattered with gilt stars. The example of the Moose has not gone for naught in the mining towns. There is a rising taste for elegance there, and it showed itself brilliantly in today's parade."
On and on Mencken wrote in like manner, disemboweling the Klan with controlled derision and sharp detail. Perhaps some journalists presented their distaste for the parade in a straightforward and outraged tone (and understandably so), but not Mencken, who saw the Klan members for what they were: petty and cowardly and abysmally ignorant. One of the parade's leaders was an "imperial profligate" whose uniform "was a mass of glittering gems, the love-offering, no doubt, of his lieges sweating on foot behind him. He acknowledged the huzzahs of the rabble with graceful sweeps of the left hand. A regal fellow, and much happier in patriotic work, you may be sure, than he ever was in the lime and cement business."
