An attempt at American nationalism

When you read in this morning's cables that the governor of the State of Oklahoma (United States) is going to war against the Ku-Klux-Klan, you wonder if this barbaric name designates a tribe of Redskins where an invasion of locusts. Afterwards, when you are told that it is a political party, as you bat an eye at Oklahoma politics, you no longer think about it.
However, the Ku-Klux-Klan would interest you more if you knew that their movement, which extends to all the States of the Union, is nothing other than an explosion of rabid xenophobia, led by the Old Americans, Protestants and Puritans, against New Americans, non-Protestants, that is to say Jews or Catholics. If the movement succeeded, America would cease to be the America we know, the haven open to the castaways of the old world, the land of religious conciliation and international fraternity where fifty races and twenty confessions came yesterday to seek the peace that still missing in the old world. It would be no more, alas! that a closed nation, like the others
To this tolerance, the Ku-Klux-Klan, irritated by the Jews, who now number 1,800,000 in the city of New York alone, alarmed by the Catholics who number 10 million in the territory of the Union, attack with fury. It is a question of “nationalizing” the United States by first intimidation, then by expulsion, of all foreign elements. For lack of a clearer characteristic, we chose religion. Whoever calls himself a Papist or an Israelite betrays by this very fact that he has not belonged to America for many generations. Religious fanaticism drives some followers of the Ku-Klux-Klan, but official Protestant churches remain away from the movement, which acts like a secret society. The affiliates, masked and mysteriously draped in white shirts, meet at night in solitary clearings to plan the burning or pillaging that will be the subject of their next expedition.
In New York, this Protestant crusade cannot succeed. New York is half Catholic, half Jewish. But in the Eastern, Central or Midwestern States the disorders are serious enough for a government like that of Oklahoma to call citizens to arms against the new inquisitors! Thus, the wave of nationalism, raised by the war, which we saw in turn flooding Russia, Germany, Italy and today Spain, now threatens to disturb the New World, where it appears as a monstrous novelty, contradictory with the very essence of American civilization. But it is unlikely that the Irish, masters of popular politics, and the Jews, masters of finance, will allow it to develop there for long.

Maurice de Waleffe