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Robinson, Watson, Indiana

Watson
Indiana’s senior senator, Jim Watson, was up for re-election in 1926, along with Robinson, and the Klan felt indebted to Watson for helping Earle Mayfield of Texas get into the Senate. Mayfield had been challenged in the Senate, and Watson had kept quiet at all the proper times. The instructions from Atlanta were that the Klan should go down the line for Watson, and leading local Klansmen, plus the mayors of Indianapolis and Evansville traveled to Washington at Klan expense to talk it over.

The hooded legions of Indiana were willing to vote for a fellow Klansman, but the Democrats and anti-Watson Republicans, led by Grand Dragon [Walter F.] Bossert, refused to violate their political consciences to vote for just a friend. When Bossert was squeezed out, Klansmen from the northern part of the state were mad. Hiram [Wesley] Evans himself made a quick trip to South Bend to forestall the revolt. The candidate of the dissidents was former state Prohibition director, Judge Charles [John] Orbison [(1874–1933)] [member of the Indianapolis Klan], who led Indiana's Klan Democrats, but Evans got him out of the way by making him a national vice president of the Klan. The Republican state chairman [Clyde Allison Walb (1878–1945)] tried to define the election issue for Klansmen and uninitiates alike by declaring that "international bankers on Wall Street" were operating throughout the state to throw the election to the Democrats and the secret power manipulators of Europe. An investigation by the U. S. Senate elections subcommittee found no traces of Wall Street and instead presented a rollicking story of Klan politics and intrigue. For a whole day, former South Bend Cyclops, [Hugh Finlay] "Pat" Emmons [(1882–1949)], kept his listeners and the press amused as he commented wryly on Klan doings, including the story of how the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire had to go to bed in his La Salle Hotel [in South Bend] room while his trousers were being pressed for that evening’s meeting. Watson and Robinson won re-election to the Senate, but it cost the Klan thousands of members.

KKK in politics

 * Check this book:




 * Congress: Hearings on the KKK


 * The Klan helped elect sixteen members of the U. S. Senate. Nine of them were Republican:
 * Republicans

 Rice W. Means, Colorado ✔️  Lawrence C. Phipps (1862–1958), Colorado ✔️  Frank B. Willis (1871–1928), Ohio ✔️  Daniel F. Steck (1881–1950), of Iowa ✔️  Frederick Steiwer (1883–1939), Oregon ✔️  Arthur Raymond Robinson (1881–1961), Indiana

From Time magazine November 2, 1925: "The New Man. Arthur R. Robinson is only 44. He is an Indianapolis attorney, a 'good Republican' but of no particular political importance. He is said to be a good orator. Against him politically is the fact that he supported Governor Jackson in the last election and so, justly or unjustly, he is considered a 'Klan man."



 James Eli Watson (1864–1948), Indiana  John W. Harreld (1872–1950), Oklahoma  William B. Pine (1877–1942), Oklahoma ✔️


 * Democrats

 Sam Ralston, Indiana
 * Rest from the South

 Earle Mayfield, Texas ✔️  Hugo Black, Alabama ✔️  Tom Heflin, Alabama ✔️  William J. Harris (1868–1932), Georgia  Lawrence Tyson (1861–1929), Tennessee <li> Frederick M. Sackett (1868–1941), Kentucky</ol>


 * Members of the Senate

<li> Theodore G. Bilbo, Mississippi <li> Robert C. Byrd (D), West Virginia <li> Joseph E. Brown <li> John Brown Gordon (D), the U.S. Senator for Georgia, was a founder of the KKK in his home state of Georgia.[15] <li> Rufus C. Holman, Oregon <li> Earle Mayfield, Texas <li> Rice W. Means (R), Colorado <li> John Tyler Morgan (D), Alabama <li> Edmund Pettus, Alabama</ol>


 * In the 1926 Oregon election, the Ku Klux Klan, under the auspices of The Oregon Good Government League, helped Frederick Steiwer (1883–1939) win the Republican primary by spreading word that it was supporting the reelection of his opponent, Senator Robert N. Stanfield (1877–1945). The effort was fueled by White Supremacist (anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic) groups in Oregon in support of the state's Compulsory Education Act, enacted in 1922, mandating public education; and would have taken effect in 1926; but the Supreme Court, in 1925, struck it down in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.








 * link

<li> Eckard V. Toy, Jr., "The Ku Klux Klan in Tillamook, Oregon," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, LIII (1962), 60-64 <li> David M. Chalmers, "The Ku Klux Klan in the Sunshine State: The 1920's," Florida Historical Quarterly, XXXXII1* (1964), 209-215 <li> Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan (New York, April 1965).</ol></ol>




 * ; ISBN 978-1-6116-8366-0;.


 * Republican Party Platform of 1920 (available from the American Presidency Project of the University of California, Santa Barbara ).


 * James D. Robenalt, “The Republican president who called for racial justice in America after Tulsa massacre: Warren G. Harding’s comments about race and equality were remarkable for 1921” Washington Post June 21, 2020

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