Klamath people

“ In these settlements they gave women for marriage on both sides, so as to make relationship between them, which would keep long and everlasting peace periods. The Klamath Indians would take Hoopa men for slaves and give their own men for slaves, but at all times these were of the low birth and slave class that was given in this manner, and never of the wealthy class. ”

“ Kalm failed, however, to recognize the public liberty, commercial enterprise and secular education which in New England and other colonial communities gave the people the advantage over the habitans and French Canadians generally. Instead, the spirit of materialism that was a distinguishing feature of the active, enterprising English colonists, must have grated on the susceptibilities of a student like Kalm, and prevented him from doing impartial justice to the strong qualities of a rising nation. ”

“ Those dark days of the Reconstruction period rapidly followed the horrors of civil war, and the reign of the carpetbagger began, goading the people to desperation. For their protection the younger and more reckless men of the community now formed a secret society, which masqueraded at night in grotesque and grewsome character called the Ku Klux Klan. ”

“ Indeed, as Americans we not only have the right to organize under the law and in keeping with the [Pg 39] law, but far more than that—in the exercise of that right the Klan is positively committed to vouchsafing the same right to any other class of people on the American continent who desire to organize themselves for patriotic, social, fraternal or religious purposes. ”

“ They had disowned ray father, because he had married my mother. But Killamah went to them. Sometimes she crawled like the great bear, on her hands and knees. Sometimes she walked. Killamah's moccasins were cut—when Killamah stepped, there was red on the Great Whiteness. For three days Killamah crawled and walked, and then she saw the Indians. They were poor—the women were cold and sick, and there was little food. But Killamah wa,iited just one buckskin to wrap around her and die.
"They set the dogs on her and cried 'Shame!—a half-breed! She is half-white! Go back to your white people! ”

“ It has been pointed out in many hostile criticisms that the Semitic race is excluded from membership in the Klan. It is not true, for instance, that the Klan has set up arbitrary barriers to the admission of the Hebrew; but it is true that the orthodox Hebrew has established around himself barriers that preclude his admission into the organization.
The orthodox Jews are perhaps the most exclusive people in the civilized world. Their racial pride exceeds the pride of any nation or any land. They have a right to be proud in view of all their history. ”

“ Clem had a peculiar theory with regard to his own rights and those of the class to which he considered that he belonged. He always held implicitly and sometimes explicitly that gifted people live under a kind of dispensation of grace; the law existing solely for dull souls. What in a clown is a crime punishable by the laws of the land might in a man of genius be a necessary development, or at any rate an excusable offence. ”

“ Every secret society, enterprised with a political end in view, must, in the nature of the case, prove unpopular with the masses of those who wield the franchise, and in not unfrequent instances, as we [Pg 174] have anticipated, be deprehended by the very individuals, or parties of individuals, whom they seek to succor. In the instance of the Klan, these conditions were felt with peculiar weight; inasmuch as the people among whom it was domiciled cherished, beside this common feeling, a natural aversion to such influences in politics, derived from their ante bellum experience ”

“ Verse 10
The righteous shall be glad - They shall see that God does not abandon his followers to the malice of bad men. The rod of the wicked may come into the herttage of the just; but there it shall not rest. Calmet thinks that this is a prediction of the destruction of the Chaldeans, in consequence of which the Jewish people became highly respected by all the surrounding nations. But it may be applied more generally to the enmity of the wicked against the righteous, and how God counterworks their devices, and vindicates and supports his own followers. ”

“ Careful investigation leads to the conclusion that he overshoots the mark in both cases. It is an error to suppose that the entire male population of the South were Ku Klux, or that even a majority of them were privy to its secrets and in sympathy with its extremest measures. To many of them, perhaps to a majority, the Ku Klux Klan was as vague, impersonal and mysterious as to the people of the North, or of England. ”

“ Then indeed, it follows that we Americans, as a people, need to help ourselves first of all. As a people and a nation we are face to face [Pg 27] with dissolution. In the Ku Klux Klan we have an institution designed to help in the stupendous task of saving ourselves from failing and falling.
We Americans as a peculiar people face extinction upon our own soil. Let me be fully understood. I do not wish in the least to appear sensational. I wish only to state a few simple facts which should be apparent to any American who investigates, ever so briefly, the true condition of his country. ”

“ These slave children are the kind that are mostly the Indians that are left today, and trying to make themselves and the white man believe that they know the true legends of the Klamath Indians, when in truth they do not know, and what they do know, such as not being allowed in certain places, and their birth and so on, they deny to the whites so as to hide their once low standing. ”

“ If Gordon and, with more emphasis, Lilienblum predicted the ruin of all the dreams of the ghetto, it was because, having been wrenched from the life of the masses and out of traditional surroundings, they judged things from a distance, and permitted themselves to be influenced by appearances. Blinded by their bias, they saw only two well-defined camps in Judaism—the moderns, indifferent to all that constitutes Judaism, and the bigots, opposed to what savors of knowledge, free-thinking, and worldly pleasure. They made their reckoning without the Jewish people. ”

“ All this and more the fiery cross of the Ku Klux Klan conveys to the Klansman. It means the supreme agony of love through the sacrifice of life, to the end that freedom and democracy may be secured to all mankind forever. ”

“ In this way the Klan gradually realized that the most powerful devices ever constructed for controlling the ignorant and superstitious were in their hands. Even the most highly cultured were not able wholly to resist the weird and peculiar feeling which pervaded every community where the Ku Klux appeared. Each week some new incident occurred to illustrate the amazing power of the unknown over the minds of men of all classes. ”

“ The tribe of Clallams, as they are usually called by the residents of Washington Territory—by the neighboring Indians named S'klal ́am, and denominated by themselves Nūs-klái yūm—inhabit the southern shore of Fuca Strait, from about the Okĕho River on the west, to Port Townshend on the east, bordering in the first direction on the Makahs, sometimes called Classets (the Klaizzart of Jewitt) , a tribe of the Nootka family who inhabit Cape Flattery, and in the other on the Chemakum, like themselves a branch of the Selish, though a yet more remote one. ”

“ It seemed to be the intent of the orders of the Ku Klux Klan everywhere throughout the South, to impress upon the people, the fallacy of attempting to entertain any opinion inimical to those put forth by the Klan. The attacks of the Klan were first directed to such of the people as were bold enough to declare themselves unionists and republicans. Scourging, banishment or murder were the measures adopted to enforce silence, and these terrible agents proved fully potent to accomplish the end. ”

“ Men of the character of the majority of those who composed the Klan do not disregard their own professed principles and violate self-assumed obligations without cause. We have seen that the Klan was in the main composed of the very best men in the country—peaceable, law-loving and law-abiding men—men of good habits and character—men of property and intelligence. ”

“ Like all pastoral people, the Kalmuks live frugally, because their wants are few, and their nomadic life is unfavourable to the growth of a liking for luxuries. They live chiefly upon milk and butter, with tea for their favourite beverage. ”

“ I desire to reiterate with emphasis that the Klan is a purely American organization assembled around the Constitution of the United States, to safeguard its provisions, advance its purposes, and perpetuate its democracy. This definition of the Klan in its organization necessarily carries the idea of exclusiveness. All men without respect to race, color and religion may not be organized into a democracy. Democracy can not be established by outside pressure. It is something which must be developed in the individual consciousness, and is of very slow growth. ”

“ As a nomadic people they have great contempt for the Sarts, who represent the town dwellers of the tribe. The Kalmucks are a Buddhist and Mongolian people who originated in a confederacy of tribes dwelling in Dzungaria, migrated to Siberia, and settled on the Lower Volga. From thence they returned late in the 18th century to the reoccupation of their old ground in Kulja under the Chinese. The Turkoman is the purest form of the Turk element, and his language is the purest form of the Turkish tongue, which is represented at Constantinople by a comparatively mongrel, or mixed, dialect. ”

“ The Genii, Hydras, Furies, Goblins and Night Hawks were staff officers. The gradation and distribution of authority was perfect. But for one source of weakness, the Klan, under this new organization, was one of the most perfectly organized orders that ever existed in the world.
As we shall see presently, it was vulnerable and failed because of the character of its methods. Secrecy was at first its strength. It afterwards became its greatest weakness. As long as mystery was conjoined with it, it was strength. When masks and disguises ceased to be mysterious, secrecy was weakness. ”

“ And now are coming the two great works of emancipation,—the emancipation of the slaves and of the serfs, and what is bringing them about? Humanity alone in its freedom of action. You see, this Herr Sonnenkamp lived in quite another world than mine, and yet my life,—Ah, wait a minute, wait, I cannot say more now."
After a while, Clodwig began again,—
"This Sonnenkamp is another proof to me, our civilization has the same defects as religion; it also gives no definite moral laws; it is not a complete, not the true civilization." ”

“ Third—The Klan raises the issue of race, setting the Keltic, Teutonic and Latin races against the Jewish and the Yellow races; while the main question for all the workers is the industrial freedom of all the workers of all races. ”

“ The Klamath Indians never had a chief like the other large tribes but were ruled by these men and women of such births that became members of the order.
Another system is the “half married” one, the woman taking her husband to her house to live with her. By this marriage she is the absolute boss of the man and has complete control of all the children. She has the power to correct her husband in all his actions and can send him out to hunt, fish or work just as she deems proper, he being a slave to her, as they usually both belong to the class that are slaves. ”

“ The reason why everybody here has taken so keenly to the Klan is due to the fact that years ago the Jews and Roman Catholics formed a liaison with the liquor interests and have had politics in this city throttled, and it is our intention to whip and rout them at the polls when the next election comes around in 1922. ”

“ In spite of the fact that ever since the beginning of the American colonies, in the war of the revolution and in other national crises, great Jews have helped to make the United States what it is today, the Ku Klux Klan recruits misguided members on the representation that it has found a scheme to drive the Jews out of the country. ”

“ The members of Ku Klux Klan are nowadays inclined to consider that their order comprehended all that took shape in resistance to the Africanization of society and government during the Reconstruction period. As one ex-member said: "Nearly all prominent men—ex-Confederates—in all the Southern states were connected in some way with the Klan." This is true only indirectly. Nearly all white men, it may be said, took part in the movement now called the "Ku Klux Movement." ”

“ The Klan, organized to protect and advance the cause of our native institutions, is therefore exclusive in the restriction of its membership to white native-born Americans. We believe that only one born on American soil, surrounded by American institutions, taught in the American schools, harmonized from infancy with American ideals, can become fully conscious of what our peculiar democracy means and be adequately qualified for all the duties of citizenship in this republic. ”

“ But if alien populations are permitted, as in the past, to flood our land, colonize in our great cities, and propagate their kind with such amazing rapidity, while only native-born Americans continue to till the soil and propagate their kind in an appallingly decreasing ratio, then our country is lost and everything the fathers strove to build for posterity will sooner or later be wiped out. We do not in the least seek to hide the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is making a last stand for America as the home of Americans and Americanism. ”