K. K. K
The Ku-Klux-Klan

the formidable K. K. K. has been making headlines again these days. In Illinois, in Herrin, a real pitched battle took place between its supporters and the police. There were nine dead, among them one of the regional leaders of the formidable association, the local sheriff, his deputy, and twenty wounded.

Precisely these days, a happy coincidence made me come across an article by Mr. Ernest Duvergier of Hauranne, published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1868,
talking about the election of General Grant and giving very curious details about the Ku-Klux-Klan, then in its infancy, but whose trial runs were already very audacious. It was the day after the Civil War. The country was still in full swing. The Southerners, defeated, were looking for revenge on the political terrain. They supported the candidacy of the Democrat Seymour, former governor of New York, against that, truly national, of General Ulysses Grant, the victor of Richmond, candidate of the Republicans. The Ku-Klux-Klan became their auxiliary. Rapidly, it acquired a great development, counting more than fifty thousand members in the State of Tennessee alone. Its agents, always masked, quick as lightning, were elusive, seeming to emerge from the ground and re-enter it at a mysterious sign. Anticipating the designs of their adversaries, they knew how to thwart them.
"If the governor of Arkansas," writes M. Duvergier de Hauranne, "frightened by the power of the Klan, had ten thousand rifles brought for his local militia, a hundred men masked or smeared with soot and armed to the teeth would embark on the quay of Memphis, in broad daylight, and would go to seize, on the Mississippi, the boat which carried this precious merchandise; they returned to the city without being disturbed and without anyone daring to recognize them. Assassinations were frequently committed without the culprits ever being caught, and the public voice attributed these mysterious acts of vengeance to the fearsome Ku-Klux-Klan."
As we can see, the misdeeds of the Ku-Klux-Klan have not changed much since 1868... That they took place at that time, while the passions aroused by the Civil War were still barely extinguished and the United States, still in the ferment of youth, was seeking its way, could be understood. But today, when the Union has achieved prodigious prosperity and is at the head of civilization and progress, it is completely incomprehensible.
It is a bit as if, in France, the famous gang of Chauffeurs, born of the excesses of the Revolution, were still operating...

ANDRÉ MÉVIL.