John’s post about Scott Roeder and mine about militant extremists have led me down Memory Lane to those thrilling days of yesteryear – er, yesterdecade — when I spent a lot of time talking with members of the Ku Klux Klan.
That odd episode began one morning in the early 1970s – in 1973, I think – when my Texas Tech officemate, Albert Karnig (now president of Cal State – San Bernardino) walked in and announced that he had just watched the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan being interviewed on the “Today” show. This was surprising, for the Klan at that time was still an underground organization, not prone, as in its later, airbrushed David Duke incarnation, to showing its face in the light of day. In the finest Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland (“Let’s put on a musical!”) tradition, Karnig and I immediately decided that it would be just a dandy idea to get ourselves to Indiana and have a chat of our own – all in the name of social science — with the Grand Dragon himself.
In record time, Karnig somehow made telephone contact with Bill Chaney, the Grand Dragon, a jovial-seeming fellow who proclaimed that he and some of the boys would sure enough be happy to talk with us. We coaxed our dean into providing some travel support, made airline reservations, and booked ourselves into the Holiday Inn at the Indianapolis airport. (Chaney had insisted on the Holiday Inn, a chain that he noted approvingly was headquartered in Memphis, a locale he much revered – we didn’t ask why, because we figured we already knew .)
The night before we were to make our visit, Chaney called Karnig and asked whether we were planning to take any photos. “Oh, no, no, we wouldn’t do that,” Karnig said reassuringly. “That’s too bad,” Chaney replied, “because me and the boys were looking forward to putting on our robes and having you get some good pictures of us.” So we rounded up a camera and off we went.
The visit went very well, except for one tense episode when an interracial couple walked into the Holiday Inn lobby while we were sitting there with three or four Klansmen. Fortunately, our about-to-be-interviewees managed to restrain themselves, though if looks could have killed it would have been a bloody scene.
On that visit, we completed lengthy individual interviews with ten or so Klan members. We had them respond to batteries of items from attitude scales of various sorts (on which most of them turned out – surprise! – to have extreme views) and we also did a lot of unstructured probing of their life experiences, outlooks, etc. They seemed to get a kick out of being interviewed by the “professors,” and several of them brought their young children along; the kids, clad in miniature Klan garb, took even more delight in being photographed than their daddies did.
Some of the interviewees – certainly including Chaney — were quite genial. One, however, was openly hostile and, without making overt threats, left no doubt in our minds that he would like to do us harm.
Our overall impression was that our interviewees were of two types. Some, like the openly hostile one I just mentioned, seemed dangerous, and aggressively so. They were haters who were determined to act upon their hatreds, and some of them undoubtedly already had done so. Others, it seemed to us, if they had been in a different setting, might have ended up in a run-of-the-mill fraternal organization rather than the Klan; they were small-town racists not fundamentally unlike millions of others..
That visit lasted a couple of days. We asked whether we could make a return visit to talk with more of the members, and Chaney readily agreed.
Over the next few months, we made either two or three more visits – each less successful than the one before. The novelty effect of being interviewed seemed wear off for the Klansmen, and the whole process took its toll on the two of us, too. Moreover, suspicions were growing that we might be up to no good. For one thing, Karnig is “ethnic-looking,” and the Klansmen figured that he might well be a Jew. (He’s not. It never occurred to them that they were worried about the wrong member of our little research team.) Moreover, at that point the FBI had thoroughly infiltrated the Klan; one estimate was that half of the Klan’s members were actually FBI agents. We weren’t FBI agents, of course, but some of our potential interviewees figured otherwise, and pretty soon we couldn’t find anybody else who was willing to talk with us. So we called it quits, went back to West Texas, packed our notes and photos away in boxes, and went about our business. We never tried to put any of this down on paper. We simply put it behind us. And over the years, the boxes of notes and photos got lost, so literally nothing has ever come from this experience except our increasingly dim memories of it.
But that last sentence puts me in mind of a story I cannot resist telling about our last trip to Indianapolis. Unfortunately, it demonstrates — as if any further demonstration were required — my ineptness as a researcher.
On our penultimate visit, I discovered that Chaney had a taste for bourbon. Acting on that knowledge, I determined that it would be an appropriate component of our research methodology for me, on our next visit, to come bearing a gift, in hopes of loosening his tongue on some issues about which he had previously been reluctant to speak. On the last evening of the visit, I produced said gift, much to Chaney’s delight. He immediately began to sample its contents and invited me to join him. It was an offer I could not refuse under the circumstances, and as he continued to increase his sample size, I continued to accompany him. We drank late into the night.
Early the next morning, I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone in my room at the Holiday Inn. It was Chaney, in a highly agitated state. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to forget everything I told you last night. Some of what I said could get us both killed.” At which point my only response, which was totally honest, was “Don’t worry, Bill. I don’t remember a word you said.”
(POSTSCRIPT: Chaney himself was an FBI informant. In the labyrinthine politics of the Klan, all the various factions that were competing for supremacy were spilling secrets about one another to the FBI; Chaney ultimately won out over his competitors in that struggle. He was later convicted of firebombing an Indianapolis-area business.)