Grandpa Did What?!?!

One day, when we were discussing our new book club reading list, of which one selection was about the Ku Klux Klan, my aunt said offhandedly, “Oh yeah, Daddy joined the Klan. But then he realized he didn’t agree with what they were doing and quit. Mommy made dresses for us girls out of the white robes.”

WHAT?!?! Nooooo!

How can this be? And how is it possible I’ve never heard it before?

Mind you, I don’t mind uncovering a scoundrel in my research. For example, I included a brief photo story about my 2^nd great-granduncle Franklin Wilberforce Thornton, who spent time in San Quentin prison, in my book What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy. (I will admit, though, that I was just as glad he wasn’t a direct ancestor.)

And my American family tree roots go deep enough to include both southern plantation slaveholders and Quakers who migrated West in protest of slavery.

• Black Lives Matter in Genealogy Too
• Thornton Family History Lost & Found
• How and when to find a common ancestor

I’m here to learn about history, not to rewrite it.

But now my Indiana farm born-and-raised Grandpa Hankins may have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan???

It hits differently when it’s someone you knew!

 

Take family stories with a grain of salt

OK, hold on, slow down — is it even true? And is it good news or bad news? Bad if he joined? Good if he quit? Both? Neither?

Remember, it’s important to not take family stories at face value. They may be completely true, or there may be a kernel of truth in them. Then again, they may be pure poppycock. (I don’t think I’ve ever said “poppycock” before, it just popped into my mind. I’ve never had Poppycock popcorn before, either, but now I want some!) In this case it was something that just, um, popped up out of nowhere. It didn’t sound likely to me, but I couldn’t just say “that can’t be true” and let it go, either.

Fortunately I love playing detective! Here are some cases in point:

• Playing Detective: Grandma’s Birth Certificate (Why did Grandma Hankins say she was born somewhere that I think she wasn’t?)
• What’s a photo without the story? (Where is that giant beach hotel located in the background of my Grandma Thornton’s “bathing beauty” photo?)
• How and when to find a common ancestor (Am I related to Henry Clay the Statesman, like my Great-Grandma Clay said I was?)
• Mom’s Boxes Part 8: The Gangster Hideout (Did my grandparents really buy a gangster’s hideout to live in because it was cheap and no one else wanted it?)

If grandpa were on trial, he (hopefully) would be considered innocent unless and until proven guilty. So we’ll see what happens.

 

The investigation begins

I had never in my whole life heard this story before and I couldn’t have been more surprised when my aunt dropped the Klan bomb. But I also couldn’t just ignore my aunt just because I knew him as a nice guy. I immediately Googled “KKK Indiana” and found this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Klan.

And this chilling photo:

Grandpa grew up in Muncie, Indiana! And in 1922 he would have been 24 years old.

Is he in this photo?!?!

Surely not, I thought, but I needed to know more.

 

The First and Second Klans

I didn’t even know there was a First and a Second Klan. I knew about post-emancipation white robes, Grand Dragons, cross burnings, and lynchings, of course. And about modern-day white supremacy groups. And, by now, I know the difference — that the First Klan (mid-1800s) operated as a clandestine paramilitary group that utilized night riding, beatings, and murders, whereas the Second Klan (early 1920s) operated openly, held public parades, functioned as a “fraternal lodge,” and aimed to dominate local and state politics.

This song — Your Friendly Liberal Neighborhood KKK — was written by June Reizner (aka Bernie Cross) and recorded in 1965 by The Mitchell Trio, featuring the familiar face and voice of John Denver, who replaced Chad Mitchell. It is categorized as political satire and it captures my understanding of the Second Klan perfectly. The Klan’s goals were whitewashed (so to speak) to the point of being socially acceptable to even otherwise-nice folks. The Klan promoted itself as a “100% American” organization, targeting immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and Black Americans. (Um, sound familiar?)

It was pure serendipity that Julie Bestry sent me the song without knowing what I was writing about at that very moment!

 

 

The Second Klan was not exclusively located in Indiana, of course, but Muncie — where my grandpa grew up! — was the epicenter of the Klan’s resurgence in the 1920s — when my grandpa was a young man!

 

Some facts of the case:

• The book club selection in question was A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan. I hadn’t yet read it when my aunt and I were talking about Grandpa, and I didn’t yet know that much of the action takes place in Muncie, Indiana.
• The period of time when “everyone” was joining the Second Klan in Indiana was 1922-1925. According to the book, The Klan had control of everything — local businesses, law enforcement, government. Joining the Klan seemed to many to simply be the patriotic thing to do.
• Although the Second Klan did keep membership records, most of the Indiana records were destroyed after the trial of Grand Dragon (and convicted rapist and murderer) D. C. Stephenson in 1925. Many Klan members didn’t actually quit, but simply fell away after that.
• My aunt is an unreliable witness. Meaning, she wasn’t there at the time, and wouldn’t swear in court to any particular memories of her own. She was born in 1938 and the family left Indiana for New Mexico in 1945 when she was 7. (I got the impression the dress making happened in Indiana.) She said it was something she had been told, presumably by one or both of her parents. The fact that she doesn’t trust her own memory is what makes her “unreliable”. But it also speaks to a possible kernel of truth in the story.
• I asked a genealogy cousin (a distant cousin I had not grown up knowing who still lives in Muncie) and she had not heard of any stories like this in her branch of the family. But then, neither had I.

Deciding factors?

George Dewey Hankins (1898-1974) was an interesting fellow. Grandpa would have been 24-27 years old in 1922-1925. He left high school early, returning to a regular classroom as an adult — a very unusual thing to do at the time — to graduate at age 28 in 1927. He didn’t marry until age 32.

I’ve already written a couple of posts about him, including this one:

• Mom’s Boxes Part 5: The Old Man of the Mountains

And there are several more posts about him that I could — and may yet — write.

At first I thought maybe he did join when everyone else did, like my aunt said, without knowing, really, what the Klan was all about. But the more I learned, the more I realized he would have had to pay money and take an oath to join, neither of which sounded like what I knew of him. In 1925 it cost $10 to join, and $6.50 for the white robe, for a total of $16.50, which is the equivalent of around $311 today. That’s a lot for someone who spent most of his adulthood wearing a ponytail because he didn’t want to pay for haircuts!

Another thing about Grandpa is that he kept records. He wrote a diary and tracked his expenses. My brother has all of that documentation, and we found nothing at all about the KKK. He has written about other strong opinions, and it seems to us that he would have written about the Klan if he had felt strongly about joining, or about not joining, or about joining and then quitting, for that matter. Although it’s possible he did not record his Klan thoughts or expenses, or got rid of the evidence later, I think it’s more likely that it never happened.

What we did find, meanwhile, are records indicating that Grandpa was homesteading in Colorado during that time. People in Colorado joined the Klan, too, but there is no evidence that he was among them.

I do think it’s possible that many of the adult white men in his life were members, though, even if only briefly. There seems to have been a good deal of peer pressure involved.

Finally, although I haven’t found photographic evidence yet (I’ll be keeping an eye out when I get back to working on photos), I would not at all put it past him to have obtained Klan robes for cheap or free for Grandma to make dresses out of for their three little girls. Times were hard, and they did, after all, buy a gangster’s hideout to live in, because it was cheap and no one else wanted it!

• Mom’s Boxes Part 8: The Gangster Hideout

 

The verdict

I’ve ruled that George D. Hankins is not guilty of joining the Klan due to insufficient evidence that he did.

If he did join, and if he did quit after realizing what they really stood for, the only way I can understand it is to think of today’s Republicans who are decidedly not MAGA. They may have voted for Trump the first time, but then realized, “Nope. This is not what I signed up for.”

 

Case closed?

So, although the case has been closed, much like the crime cases on TV, and as with all genealogy research, it is subject to being re-opened if future new compelling evidence comes to light. If it does, I will update this blog post.

 

Have you ever had a family story that you weren’t sure was true?

Did you investigate and were able to prove or disprove it?

Please share with us in the comments below!