Part 1: Fort Scott and the Ku Klux Klan

As World War I ended in 1918 and the United States refused to join the League of Nations as part of the Versailles Treaty that ended the war, the nation turned its back on the world and entered a period of isolationism.

In the 1920 election Warren G. Harding, a Republican, was elected president on the campaign slogan of "Back to Normalcy." The first action to turn our back on the world was the Republican congress' enactment of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 which, for the first time, placed a quota on immigrants coming from foreign countries. This was followed by the Immigration Act of 1924 that permanently restricted the flow of immigrants to the United States. This embodied the prevailing theme in the nation at the time that "America was for the Americans !" During the period from 1920 to 1924 there were national strikes in the mines and railroads of the country. During the war years from 1917 to 1919 the miners and railroad workers had their pay frozen while the federal government subsidized the mine owners and railroads in order to boost production and efficiency for the war effort. With the end of the war the federal subsidies to these industries stopped, giving the mines and railroads the opportunities to increase their prices for coal and rates for hauling freight. The mine operators and railroad managers then opted for a pay cut for the miners and railroad workers. In 1916 the largest group of workers in America was employed by the railroads. The mine and railroad workers thought this was unfair for them to have their frozen wages cut while the mines and railroads could increase their profits by raising prices and cutting labor costs. The Harding administration supported the mine owners and railroad managers in this effort.

In1922 a national railroad strike was called that affected railway transportation from coast to coast. Strikes in the nation's coal mines had preceded the railroad strike in the years following the war. Fort Scott, being a railroad center, with three major railroads going through it included two round houses, two mechanical shops, and two car shops, was directly involved in the strike. More than 400 of the 700 shop men of the Frisco and Missouri Pacific Railroads went on strike in Fort Scott. All railroads employed men to fill the jobs of the striking workers. These newly hired men and the ones who remained on the job were called "scabs" and were reviled by the striking union men. Hard feelings over this strike situation haunted Fort Scott for a generation.

This national condition was fertile ground for the new Ku Klux Klan that had reconstituted itself in the South following a steady decline after the Reconstruction era ended.  Its headquarters was in Atlanta, Georgia. The new Ku Klux Klan was anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-Negro, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, anti-evolutionist, anti-bootlegger, and anti-birth control. It was pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-native American (white), and pro-Protestant. It moved rapidly into the Middle West and the South in the 1920s, enrolling five million dues-paying members and became a potent political influence in the local communities and states that it infected.

The first public awareness of Klan activity in Fort Scott was the violent incident involving a young Fort Scott man who owned a drug store in Stotesbury, Mo. He had paid some local people with no-fund checks and refused to make them good. So on June 8, 1922, about 10 p.m., while sitting in front of his store, he was attacked by 14 hooded and sheet-garbed Klansmen who were bent on teaching him a lesson about honesty.

The Klansmen didn't know he was known in Fort Scott as a skilled brawler. He fought ferociously and tore the masks from five members of the gang. These men he recognized. After holding his own for sometime, he was hit over the head with a club from behind and knocked unconscious. A neighbor slipped him away in the dark and took him to a doctor in Richards, Mo. From there he went to the sheriff's office in Nevada, where he pressed charges against the five men.

Editor's note: This article is the first in a four-part series by local historian and retired educator Fred Campbell Jr. Future articles in the series will be published as space is available.