 |
| Photo courtesy of Shorpy.com |
On the crest of the hill the crowd saw the rambling stream
of forty-six cars filled with 250 people puttering along Lee Highway with a
Ford with DC plates at the lead. The cars had gathered at the Chain Bridge and
made their way towards Cherrydale. Onlookers
had not turned out at this late hour to see the usual civic or patriotic parade
and the lead car carrying a “huge fiery cross” told them tonight would be
different. As the cars pulled into the center of town, the white robed
contingent piled out of the vehicles to walk by foot holding signs that said
“We were here yesterday, we are here today and we will be here forever” and
“Our officers are sworn to do their duty”.
This was the Ku Klux Klan’s first major march in the DC area
and everything about the evening was chosen carefully for a spectacle of white
protestant institutional power to everyone gathered. This would begin the Klan’s nadir of power as
tens of thousands of men and women in DC and the close-in suburbs would flock
to the organization. In Arlington alone, the Klan would claim, later in 1922,
that “practically every male voter in good standing is a member”. This was boastful swagger, but the fact that
the claim could be made with a straight face proves the unnerving reality that
Arlington was a Klan town.
As the parade pulled into Cherrydale, the men alighted from
the cars and one of the photographers in the crowd snapped a photograph of one of
the cars in the parade. It is probably a Buick with a DC plate and a Maryland
plate. The number 590 on the DC plate tells us that the driver was someone of
prominence since the lower number plates were reserved for important people in
the community.
Above the driver side of the car was a small badge that read
“Motor Corps H.D.L M.D.”, which signified the driver was a member of the Home
Defense League in Maryland. DC
Commissioners formed the Home Defense League during World War I to serve as
back up for the chronically under-manned and under-equipped DC police force
during the strains for war. After the war, the Home Defense League continued as
a citizen force made up of “public-spirited and patriotic men” that enforced
traffic regulations and serve the police in times of crisis. During the war,
most fraternal organizations formed units including many African Americans.
Prominent auto dealers in DC worked to form the Motor Corps within the Home
Defense League to serve as a rapid response group for police.
On January 25, 1919 a story appeared in the Washington Post
declaring a “supposed maniac” had attacked three women in the city. Two women were
shot and one was strangled during a daylong rampage by an unnamed man. The
police force went into full alert and called out the Home Defense League for
assistance. Evidently, the Home Defense League did not come through during the
crisis and a month later, police held a reorganization meeting. Coming out of
this meeting was a new Home Defense League that had dropped the “dead wood”
from the organization.
In June 1919, the director of the Home Defense League called
members to action after an anarchist bombed the home of Attorney General Palmer
in DC. The notice in the paper asked members to report suspicious persons and
All statements and literature that
is in any way un-American should be forwarded to police headquarters, giving
names and addresses of persons handling same.
The “dead wood” purged during the reorganization had freed
the Home Defense League to take on the role of enforces of the conservative
order. During this time, many white Protestants joined conservative
organizations fighting to preserve the social order against blacks demanding civil
rights, immigrants fighting for a new political order, and radicals working to
win a fairer economy. Many of these organizations were dominated by important
Protestant small businessmen that sought an idyllic orderly society with their
caste on top.
In July 1919, whites in DC formed mobs along Pennsylvania
Ave. as news spread that a black man had been questioned by police for sexually
assaulting a white woman, but police released him after finding no evidence.
The whites marched into Southwest DC and began days of rioting quelled only by
rain and cavalry. Unlike many race riots of 1919, DC blacks fought back and
formed bands of armed men confronting mobs of whites with violence. The Home Defense League actively participated
in the riots and was implicated in at least two murders. A black rioter had no doubt which side they
were on when he gunned down two Home Defense League members in a gunfight at 9th
and M, NW.
Shortly after the riots, the Home Defense League
strengthened their organization by forming a Motor Corps led by prominent auto
dealers in the city. The Motor Corps pledged to be ready at a moment’s notice
to provide assistance to the police. Led by W Pearce Rayner, a local
businessman and anti-socialist crusader, the Motor Corps became the backbone of
law and order in the city.
These conservative organizations found their real strength
in the suburbs, where vigilantism came in the form of a real war on the
disorder of liquor, philandering, gambling, and other vices. The strip of land
along the Potomac from Rosslyn south to Alexandria housed small hamlets built
around vice and a large swath of marshy land perfect for bootleg liquor stills.
Jackson City sat on the end of the Long Bridge where the new shiny Long Bridge
Park sits and was a sanctuary of sin. Built with so much promise as a tribute
to Andrew Jackson, the community became the District’s gambling hub and the
owners had visions of a Monte Carlo on the Potomac. Conservative citizens
formed a vigilante band and razed Jackson City to the ground. The vice simply
picked up and moved to the African American slum called Hells Bottom located roughly
at the base of the Air Force memorial.
Police raided the area regularly and found illicit liquor production on
barges along the Potomac and a booming gambling industry amid the garbage dumps
and slum. This strip of vice spread up to Rosslyn where a few gambling and drinking establishments hugged the Aqueduct bridge operating openly through legal manipulation and graft.
These vigilantes were not just concerned with vice; they
also worked to ensure that African Americans stayed in their place in the
social order and showed a willingness to turn to violence if needed. In 1897 a
crowd took a young black man out of his jail cell in Alexandria and carried him to the
intersection of Lee St. and Cameron where they cheered as a group hanged him by
a lamppost. The lynching shocked the
community and led to a better protection of African American prisoners. Nonetheless,
for decades to follow, law enforcement officials faced vigilante mobs
threatening lynching. As late as 1917, officials had to hide smuggle out a
black prisoner from a jail in Ft. Myer Heights as a mob gathered outside.
All of this led to this day in March and the Klan proudly flaunted
its numerical strength as well as institutional power in the form of a Home
Defense League badge. The Klan arrived
in Cherrydale long enough to pose with an American flag and signs reading “We
are for law and order” and “We were here yesterday. We are here today. We will
be here forever.” The signs suggested the permanency of white protestant power
while sending a warning to the “wets” that prohibition would be enforced by the
Klan.
From there the parade took a snaking route through
population centers in Ballston and Clarendon with the Klan stopping briefly in
each place to display their signs. The stops in these places were for recruiting
purposes because this was where the base of the Klan would have lived. Unlike
the later Klan of the sixties, the twenties Klan consisted of well-placed small
businessmen and tradesmen who were pillars of their community.
After this stop in friendly territory, the parade then took
a purposeful route into the territory of the Klan’s enemies. The parade turned onto Key Boulevard and
through the heart of the small African American quarter of Rosslyn. This would
be a tense moment in the parade as the Klansmen stopped briefly for reasons
left unexplained in newspaper accounts. Community members turned out in the streets to
heckle the marchers and violence seemed a distinct possibility in the cool
March night. The 1919 riots showed African Americans in the DC area that blacks
could stand up against vigilante violence and gave the community a sense of
pride as they faced such intimidation. In
some cases, the black community in Northern Virginia organized armed bands to protect
against lynching. In McLean in 1895, blacks armed with shotguns stood down a
white lynch mob outside the constable’s house as a young African American
suspect cowered inside. The Klansmen and
the black residents of Rosslyn confronted each other with this history boiling
inside.
Just as the friction between the two groups seemed headed to
physical confrontation, the parade lurched forward towards its terminus at Dead
Man’s Hollow. The Klansmen turned back to Lee Highway passing Dead Man’s
Hollow, which was a notorious hideout of highwaymen and killers located roughly
at the base of the Key Bridge Marriott’s parking garage. Here the ruffians from
Rosslyn would dump bodies and roll cash-rich farmers as they left the markets
of Washington. Did the local thugs watch
the parade warily from their roosts and did the Klansmen gaze into the woods
hoping no gunshots rang out? The spot
frightened locals after dark, so even the numerically superior Klan marched cautiously
past the hollow.
The parade was a brief moment in the struggle against
disorder by conservatives in the DC area.
As the Klan rocketed towards power, it appeared their vision of America
could be a real possibility. Internal strife and corruption would split the
Klan and Arlington would be no exception.
However, their legacy would endure in both the positive and the
negative. On the one hand racism and intolerance would persevere right up to
the days of the Nazi Party in Arlington, but
the Klan’s demands for a clean county government would also nourish the
movement that brought Arlington a more open government.
