Claim:
The Ku Klux Klan held a march and rally at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, which was known from that point on as the "Klanbake."
Rating:
False ( About this rating? )
The anticipated opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 19, 2024, prompted the revival of misinformative internet memes claiming that 100 years earlier, the Ku Klux Klan marched outside the 1924 Democratic convention in New York City in full, hooded regalia to make their white-supremacist presence known.
This example was posted on X on Aug. 17:
(@its_The_Dr / X)
"The Democrat National Convention of 1924 that ran from June 24 - July 9 was referred to as the 'Klanbake,'" the caption of a photo of Klansmen burning a cross outdoors read. "The reason for the name was over half of those attending were Ku Klux Klan members. Another reminder of what party are the true racists."
Another example was posted on Aug. 18:
(@Lillibullero11 / X)
Although very loosely based on real historical events, however, these memes were largely false, beginning with the images, neither of which had anything to do with the 1924 Democratic convention in New York. One shows an unrelated KKK event that took place in Chicago three years earlier; the other shows KKK members marching in a funeral parade in Madison, Wisconsin .
Though historians confirm there was a strong Klan presence among the delegates at the 1924 convention (more about which below), it is not true that the KKK marched or held a rally at the convention. And though it's also true that a lone newspaper columnist jokingly labeled the convention the "Klanbake," the label didn't stick until 75 years later when retrospective articles about the convention began appearing in the early 2000s.
What Happened at the 1924 Democratic National Convention
The 1924 Democratic National Convention, which lasted an unheard-of 16 days and required 103 ballots for delegates to agree on a nominee, holds the record as the longest continuous presidential nominating convention in United States history.
It was also one of the most controversial. The Democratic Party was deeply divided, with one of its two main candidates — New York's Irish Catholic Gov. Alfred E. Smith — representing the so-called "urban" faction of the party and the other, former U.S. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, representing rural interests. McAdoo's constituency was anti-League of Nations, pro-Prohibition, anti-immigrant and pro-Ku Klux Klan. Smith's was the opposite.
Attesting to the growing influence of the KKK in American politics at the time, a platform plank favored by Smith supporters that condemned the Ku Klux Klan by name went down to defeat after a raucous debate that degenerated into fisticuffs. On the 103rd ballot, the delegates finally nominated a dark-horse candidate named John W. Davis, who, in contrast to his GOP counterpart, Calvin Coolidge, would take a strong stand against the KKK during the presidential campaign (and Coolidge would win the election by a landslide).
Despite the fact that the Klan had sunk its tendrils just as deeply into Republican Party politics (an anti-KKK platform plank similar to the one rejected by Democrats met the same fate at that year's Republican convention), the extent of the organization's control over that year's Democratic convention came to be exaggerated over time.
Did the Klan actually hold a march or rally at the 1924 Democratic convention? There's no credible evidence that they did.
It's well documented that Klan members were present inside the convention (as many as 300 delegates were card-carrying Klansmen, according to Arnold S. Rice's The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics ) and aimed to influence its outcome, but Snopes found no mention of Klan marches or rallies at or near Madison Square Garden in contemporaneous press coverage, or in history books recounting the event.
There is another version of events holding that a large KKK rally was held not in New York, but in New Jersey, to celebrate the defeat of the anti-Klan platform plank:
In Madison Square Garden, New York City, from June 24 to July 9, a dispute during came up revolving around an attempt by non-Klan delegates, led by Forney Johnston of Alabama, to condemn the organization for its violence in the Democratic Party's platform.
But Klan delegates defeated the platform plank in a series of floor debates.
To celebrate, tens of thousands of hooded Klansmen rallied in a field in New Jersey, across the river from New York City. This event, known subsequently as the "Klanbake", was also attended by hundreds of Klan delegates to the convention, who burned crosses, urged violence and intimidation against African Americans and Catholics, and attacked effigies of Smith.
There's a grain of truth to this less dramatic version of events, according to which the Klan held a rally in New Jersey that was in some way connected with the convention. The city of Long Branch (which is not "across the river," but further down the shore from New York City) was indeed the site of a massive, multistate Ku Klux Klan gathering scheduled for the Fourth of July. In fact, it was billed as the largest Klan gathering ever, though actual attendance fell short of the projected 50,000 Klansmen and family members. Although attendees were kept abreast of the political drama unfolding at Madison Square Garden, the "Tru-State Klorero" wasn't convened for that purpose, according to The New York Times:
Twenty thousand members of the Ku Klux Klan and their relatives celebrated Independence Day here with demonstrations against Governor Smith of New York and his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President.
The event which drew men, women and children of the hooded order from all New Jersey and Delaware and from Eastern Pennsylvania had been announced as a Tri-State Klorero, the purpose of which was to demonstrate the patriotism of the Klansmen and their devotion to the cause of good government. Before the day's program had proceeded an hour, however, scores of men and women, and many children encouraged by their elders, had pounded to a battered pulp an effigy of Governor Smith, which the Kloreans were invited to attack at three baseballs for a nickel.
Anti-Smith outbursts aside, the July 4 Klan event was "largely a picnic," the Times reported, "with no features of unusual importance." Indeed, most of the day, leading up to the obligatory cross-burning ceremony after dark, was dedicated to standard KKK activities:
There were speeches, Klan weddings and baptisms, and a parade through the streets of Long Branch of 4,000 hooded men and women, who were escorted through the city by two motorcycle policemen.
There is no reason to suppose that the overlapping timing of the Klorero and the Democratic National Convention was anything other than coincidental. The convention began, as scheduled, on June 24. Had it lasted only the expected four days (which was, and still is, the normal length of a presidential nominating convention), it would have been over by June 28. The Klan affair had been scheduled for July 4. No one, least of all the planners of the so-called "Independence Day Klorero," could have predicted the convention would last long enough that it would coincide with the Fourth of July and beyond.
Klorero aside, the record does show that the Klan was actively involved within the convention, lending apparent plausibility to the claim it was popularly known as the Klanbake. We find this asserted by many sources, including conservative author Bruce R. Bartlett, who wrote in his 2008 book, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past :
It's worth remembering that the Klan was probably at the peak of its political power within the Democratic Party in 1924. Indeed, its presidential nominating convention that year was so heavily dominated by it that historians often refer to it as the "Klanbake" convention.
Origins of the 'Klanbake'
That said, Klanbake isn't just a trope circulated among conservatives. The progressive magazine Mother Jones echoed the claim in 2016:
1924: Known as "the Klanbake," the longest convention in history (16 days) pits the Ku Klux Klan-backed William Gibbs McAdoo against New York's Catholic governor, Al Smith, in Manhattan. After a plank condemning the Klan is nixed from the platform, 20,000 Klansmen — including some delegates — celebrate in New Jersey by burning a cross and throwing baseballs at an effigy of Smith.
And this reference is from a syndicated article published in 2012:
1924: The New York convention, also known as the "Klanbake," was the longest continuously running convention in U.S. history, with delegates taking from June 24 to July 9 to pick a candidate. The Ku Klux Klan, which was beginning to gain a foothold, had a strong presence at Madison Square Garden, which infuriated some attending Democrats.
Crucially, however, not one of these references was published before 2000. In fact, during the entire 76 years between 1924, when the convention took place, and 2000, when it was first reported that the 1924 convention was popularly known as the Klanbake, there appear to have been no published mentions of that "fact" at all.
Historian Peter Shulman and freelance journalist Jennifer Mendelsohn reported in The Washington Post in March 2018 that a search of all the contemporaneous press coverage of the convention they could find yielded only one instance of the word "Klanbake" — as an editorial joke — and would not used again to refer to the 1924 convention for another seven decades. They wrote:
While the Klan presence at the Democratic convention was significant, it was not enough to control the proceedings. Yet members of the Invisible Empire were not exactly invisible. On June 25, 1924, the second day of the convention, a reporter for the young tabloid New York Daily News published a breezy, joking announcement from the Democratic convention hall in Madison Square Garden declaring that the "Klanbake steamed open at 12:45."
An exhaustive search of contemporary newspapers, digitized and microfilmed, including papers published by the Klan itself, found not a single instance of another publication, including the Daily News , ever using this term again during their coverage of the convention or its aftermath.
In the decades that followed, neither the lone book nor scholarly articles about the convention referenced this supposedly well-known "nickname," nor do any of the most-respected histories of the Klan. Yet today, this moniker has emerged as widely known shorthand for the convention — shorthand that conveys the mistaken message that Democrats were the party of the Klan in the 1920s.
When the term "Klanbake" finally did reappear in print in connection with the convention (which happened for the first time in the March 8, 2000, edition of the New York Daily News, the same publication in which it had originally appeared), it was in the form of the assertion that "newspapers" (plural) had started applying the nickname while the convention was still in session. But again, we've found no evidence that the nickname was used in that context prior to 2000 in any publication other than the New York Daily News itself.
In an email, Shulman told Snopes that no new evidence had come to light that lends credence to the Klanbake memes and reiterated that the memes misrepresent the extent of the Klan's influence over both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in that era:
The influence of the Klan on Republicans was much quieter but no less significant, as the 1920s Klan appealed to a much wider swath of the country than the earlier Klan of the 1860s had, or the Civil Rights Era Klan would later.
Unsurprisingly, the Klan's impact on the Republican Party was also noted in press coverage of the time. Just as the Daily News had quipped that the Democratic convention was a Klanbake, Time ran a June 23, 1924, story in which the Republican convention was referred to as the "Kleveland Konvention."
Shulman says the unchecked spread of the Klanbake meme illustrates the perils of putting partisanship before accuracy:
[I]n an age of the internet, it's really easy for a initial embellishment to snowball into both an apparent authoritative fact as well as a partisan bludgeon. We should resist that temptation, be skeptical of partisan and ideological uses of history, and correct the record whenever a story doesn't check out.
Finally, there are a lot of resonances between 1920s America and the country today. We have a lot to learn from those who stood up to religious, ethnic, and national bigotry then, and a lot to learn from those who found the Klan distasteful but who kept quiet or put political aspirations above moral ones. And that isn't a partisan story.
But it's a cautionary tale worth sharing.
Sources:
Bartlett, Bruce R. Wrong On Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ISBN 9780230600621.
Clark, William. "Liberals Aren't Liking this Newly-Discovered Photo of the 1924 Democrat Convention." BestConservativeNews.com. 20 September 2017.
Cowan, Joseph A. "Pat's Swig Peps His Patter." New York Daily News . 25 June 1924.
Davies, Gareth and Zelizer, Julian E. (editors). America at the Ballot Box: Elections and Political History . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. ISBN 9780812291360.
Dotinga, Randy. "Democratic National Convention: A Wild Ride in 1924." The Christian Science Monitor . 6 September 2012.
D'Souza, Dinesh. "Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party - The Evidence." HillarysAmericaTheMovie.com. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Franklin, Teryl. "Old KKK Photo from Madison Mischaracterized by Conservative Author." Wisconsin State Journal . 30 September 2017.
Grossman, Ron. " When Chicago Welcomed KKK." Chicago Tribune . 23 January 2015.
Kalb, Deborah (ed.). Guide to U.S. Elections . Washington: CQ Press, 2015. ISBN 9781483380384.
Maeder, Jay. "Dark Horse, Dark Rider Democratic National Convention, June-July 1924 Chapter 28 Part Two of Two." New York Daily News . 8 March 2000.
Mendelsohn, Jennifer and Shulman, Peter A. "How Social Media Spread a Historical Lie." The Washington Post . 15 March 2018.
Murphy, Tim. "Donald Trump's GOP Convention Will Be Nuts. But a Least It Won't Be Known as 'the Klanbake.'" Mother Jones . July/August 2016.
Murray, Robert Keith. The 103rd Ballot: The Legendary 1924 Democratic Convention that Forever Changed Politics . New York: Harper Collins, 2016. ISBN 9780062656346.
Rice, Arnold S. The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics . Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1962. ISBN 9781500412241.
Rosenbaum, Emily. "Democrats: Baltimore to Barack." Tribune Newspapers . 2 September 2012.
Shafer, Jack. "1924: The Wildest Convention in U.S. History." Politico . 7 March 2016.
Shapira, Ian. "No, Dinesh D'Souza, that Photo Isn't the KKK Marching to the Democratic National Convention." The Washington Post . 26 September 2017.
Slayton, Robert A. Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith . New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. ISBN 9780684863023.
Asbury Park Press. "Klan Plans Great Seashore Outing." 2 July 1924.
Library of Congress. "Democratic National Political Conventions 1832-2008." 26 August 2016.
The Minneapolis Star . "Klan Festival in New Jersey." 4 July 1924.
The New York Times . "Klan Rally Vents Anti-Smith Feeling: Klorero Crowd Cheers Marksmen Throwing Balls at Governor's Effigy." 5 July 1924.
TIME . "Ku Klux Klan: Kleveland Konvention." 23 June 1924.
Wisconsin Historical Society . "Photograph: Ku Klux Klan Parade." 5 December 1924.
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