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| The Ku Klux Klan, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. |
Between World War I and World War II many New Jersey residents became enamored of, sympathized with, and participated in a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. While exact membership and numbers are difficult to ascertain (as all Klan researchers acknowledge),[1] there is significant evidence of Episcopalian cooperation with and sympathy for the organization in the state.
After the racist film Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, spinning the myth of an unjust Civil war and Reconstruction, and casting the Ku Klux Klan as the noble defender of the South, several individuals were inspired to reinvigorate the Klan. This movement hit New Jersey in earnest around 1920, and the Klan grew dramatically there for the next several years.
Conjectural Episcopal Involvement
Hundreds of thousands of residents of New Jersey either formally joined, collaborated, or sympathized with the Klan. Though detailed documentation is sparse, in many municipalities the sheer number of participants in Klan rallies and events suggests the likelihood of some Episcopalian involvement.
For instance, “in Flemington, it was common for the Klan to have as many as 800 marchers in full regalia in parades on Main Street.”[2] As it was such a small town, it is very likely that some Episcopalians participated. Similarly, the Klan was so popular in Red Bank that there had to be Episcopalians involved:
In March 1925… the Red Bank Business Men’s Association decided to hold a “popularity contest” for local organizations… the month-long contest ended with the fire department in first place with 100,286 votes, followed by the Klan with 76,845. The Knights of Columbus and the Ladies’ Hebrew Society came in third and fourth, respectively.[3]
At this time, “the Rutgers Klan attracted a sizable number of New Brunswick’s white, native-born, protestant community. The Daily Home News estimated that nearly 500 members attended the group’s first outdoor meeting.”[4] This would certainly have included some New Brunswick Episcopalians.[5] Also during this period Bernardsville News reporting suggested that the overwhelming “majority” of residents, numbering in the many thousands, in the vicinity of “Basking Ridge, Bernardsville, Liberty Corner, Millington, Far Hills, Bedminster and Peapack-Gladstone”[6] joined a Klan Easter Sunrise Service on April 17, 1927 at Sunset Hill in Somerset County. As there was a very great density of Episcopal Churches in this area it would seem likely that at least some of the participants were Episcopalian.[7] And in another instance of likely association, The Rev. Paul Fenton of St. Luke’s, Metuchen was reported as having conspicuously attended the funeral of likely Klan member Edwin Smith,[8] along with many attendees who came robed in Klan garb and who performed various Klan ceremonies during the funeral.[9]
Episcopal Collaboration
But beyond conjectural involvement, there is evidence of actual Episcopal involvement and collaboration with the Klan as well. In 1925 the Ministers Association of Plainfield, New Jersey, which included priests from Grace (Episcopal) Church, Plainfield,[10] collaborated with the Klan on efforts to curb showings of Sunday movies.[11] In 1924 the Civic Church League, a pan-Protestant organization of Asbury Park, worked hand-in-glove with the Klan to attempt to discredit the mayor over an alleged indiscretion at a party.[12] “There seemed to be close coordination between the pronouncements of the Klan and Asbury Park clergy, as the ‘orgy’ was simultaneously damned from Protestant pulpits across the city.”[13] New Jersey historian Walter Greason believes that Episcopal clergy were intimately involved.[14] But regardless of whether that was so, as one of the main Protestant churches in town, it is likely that some parishioners at least from Trinity Church, Asbury Park, the largest White Episcopal congregation, were involved in these actions of the Civic Church League. In 1925 priest at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, Bloomfield was openly supportive of the Klan,[15] and during this period “every white church” in Atlantic City hosted Klan rallies.[16] This would include the Episcopal congregations at the time: St. James’ Church, Church of the Ascension, All Saints’ Church, and possibly the Good Shepherd Mission.
Episcopal-affiliated politicians cooperated with the Klan as well. T. Frank Appleby of Asbury Park, a Republican Congressman from a New Jersey Episcopalian family,[17] openly accepted the political support of the Klan during his campaigns.[18] Even more directly, Basil Bruno, a politician from Long Branch, New Jersey with some Episcopal affiliation,[19] “introduced the Klan’s ‘Bible in Schools’ legislation” in the New Jersey General Assembly.[20]
Episcopal Sympathy
More than overt links to the organization, however, it is clear that New Jersey Episcopalians during this period sympathized with the Klan and with many of its stated beliefs.
In 1926, renowned women’s health advocate, and Episcopalian, Margaret Sanger spoke at a KKK meeting at the Klan compound in Elkwood Park, Wall Township.[21] “While there is no evidence that she held membership in the Klan, she embraced some of the tenets of the eugenics movement, including ideas on who should and should not reproduce.”[22]
Woodrow Wilson, now well known for his persistent racism[23] and embrace of the racist “Birth of a Nation” ideology,[24] worshipped at times at St. James, Long Branch, a fact which was long-celebrated by the parish in its accounts of its history.[25] Long Branch was a hotbed of Klan activity in the 1920s, and it does not seem accidental that St. James, Long Branch is one of the Episcopal buildings in the state that was decorated with swastika tiles for decades after that period.[26] Similar tiles still adorn the primary meeting space at the Diocese of New Jersey headquarters in Trenton, New Jersey.[27]
Elsewhere “down the shore,” interviews with Asbury Park residents[28] suggest that Trinity, Asbury Park fell into decline in the mid-20th century, following the local disintegration of the Klan, in part, as a result of its racist attitudes, only to be rescued and revived by the gay community in the 1970s and 1980s: “Black Asbury Parkers built their own Episcopal Church on the other side of town because of the segregation of Trinity [Episcopal] and the church’s refusal to allow Black congregants. As a result, that church flourished while Trinity foundered.”[29] This development fits the pattern of “White flight” racism that led to decline in many historically White urban Episcopal churches in New Jersey, as is being documented by the Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review.[30] Refusal to live alongside, let alone worship with, Black Christians was commonplace among White Episcopalians in the mid-20th century.
That “Klan adjacent” White racism was a typical feature of Episcopal leadership of the diocese in the 20th century can be seen in a number of ways. Nelson Burr, the celebrated church historian[31] who served regularly on the Standing Committee of the Diocese of New Jersey, seems to have held reactionary views.[32]
To his mind, influxes of non-Anglo “stock,” as he called it, into the state represented an obstacle to the growth and success of the diocese. He was joined in this opinion by fellow prolific historian Walter Herbert Stowe, who served for concurrent decades as a priest in the Diocese of New Jersey and as the editor of the Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church.[33]
Stowe actually allowed the publishing of Klan sympathetic articles in HMPEC during his tenure as editor.[34] Moreover,
it is hard to think of Bishop Banyard [himself] as anything other than reactionary as well when he is best remembered in the diocesan bicentennial history by David R. King[35] as having railed against what Banyard called “ultra-liberal extremism, the aberrations, the actions, behavior and questionable pronouncements of our Clergy and lay leaders on the National, Diocesan and local levels.”[36]
Banyard was instrumental in promoting the “White flight” mission of the diocese during this time, which prioritized mission support for White suburban churches and shifted funding away from urban churches. The process of funding the building of Christ the King, Levittown (now Willingboro) involved both pulling funds from Black churches,[37] and excited collaboration with Levitt corporation developers, whose recent development across the river in Pennsylvania was the location of highly publicized KKK cross-burnings to keep out potential Black residents.[38] Reporting on these events was widespread at the time, and diocesan officials had to know that they were active participants in what was clearly a Klan-enforced, racially segregated development. Moreover, “Rev. Dr. William Ridgeway, the long-serving priest of St. Wilfrid’s, Camden was publicly and openly Nazi-sympathetic” and hosted Nazi-sympathetic speakers.[39]
Aífe Murray, who conducted interviews in the Hillsdale, New Jersey region,[40] summed up some of the dynamics that led to Klan affiliation as follows: “It has been said that the Pascack Valley did not like Catholics and some, to get ahead professionally and avoid a consumer boycott, joined the town’s Episcopal Church. Others took it a notch up and joined the Klan.” It would appear that in the imagination of those involved, that the Episcopal Church was similar enough in terms of associations and appearances that it could be considered just a step removed from the Klan on a spectrum of social affiliations.
The Overall Picture
The evidence suggests that overt support of, or membership in, the Klan among Episcopalians in New Jersey was more modest than among, say, Methodists, though, as we have seen, it appears that there is solid evidence to suggest sympathy with many of the Klan’s perspectives and attitudes among Episcopalians. The White members of the (mostly White) Episcopal Church, not only generally viewed their church as a White church essentially by and for those of British heritage,[41] but also shared many of the Klan’s racist views. As stated by Bilby and Ziegler, anti-immigrant anxieties, anti-Black racist beliefs, and affinities for eugenic ideology “were quite common at the time, even in progressive and academic circles” and “aligned with the Klan’s views.”[42]
Where Episcopalians likely most dramatically took exception was over the vaudevillian antics, populist fervor, and vigilante rhetoric that typified the Klan public persona.[43] It was a similar division over emotive style and approach to decorum that produced the Anglican-Methodist split, and can perhaps partly explain why the Klan was clearly more openly popular with Methodists than Episcopalians. Nevertheless, Episcopalians in many parts of the Garden State sympathized with, collaborated with, and likely participated in the Ku Klux Klan.[44] Even after overt support for the Klan had waned in New Jersey,[45] many Episcopalians continued to hold racist beliefs similar to those espoused by the Klan, and failed to remove racist symbolism from diocesan and parish buildings that continued to intimidate non-White visitors.[46] Unfortunately, outright, wholesale rejection of racist Klan ideology still cannot be said to be universal among Episcopalians in New Jersey.[47]
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
Especially since the Klan made such a public point of its work to bring to justice those responsible for the murder of Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall, Episcopal priest of St. John the Evangelist, New Brunswick. Bilby and Ziegler, The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 32.
Pruszinski, “‘White Flight’ and Mission in the Diocese of New Jersey,” DNJRJR (October 1, 2024): https://dionj-racialjusticereview.blogspot.com/2024/10/white-flight-and-mission-in-diocese-of.html, who draws on the following sources for these conclusions: Re: Burr, see Work Projects Administration, Inventory of the Church Archives of New Jersey: Protestant Episcopal, 63. Stowe voices a number of concerns of this kind in Walter Herbert Stowe, “Immigration and the Growth of the Episcopal Church,” HMPEC 11 (1942): 330-61. While Burr was publishing with the WPA on New Jersey, it is hard to know how much he influenced the work generally, or how much his perspective was simply typical among the researchers. For example, someone (probably not Burr) working on the WPA New Jersey material at this time, as described in Bilby and Ziegler (The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, 150), wrote that citizens of mixed-race Gouldtown, New Jersey “refuse to accept a Negro status but cannot be classified as whites.” See also the Federal Writers’ Project, New Jersey: A Guide to Its Present and Past (New York: Viking, 1939), 637. Bilby and Ziegler see this as evidence of racist concerns over “mongrelization.”
If anything, this cursory summary of readily available documentation suggests the necessity of further, more detailed, research into the available archival print-news records available, cross-checked against parish and diocesan records to better determine the scope of Episcopal involvement in the Klan. Local churches must look carefully into this history and reckon with it. Some places to start: research library accessible digitally archived newspaper searches on “Klan,” “Episcopal,” and “Jersey;” checking Somerset county cross-affiliations (including those noted in Buck & Mills, If These Stones Could Talk, 259-60, 276); checking Palmyra/Riverton area cross-affiliations as the Klan was active here, see e.g. https://rivertonhistory.com/2023/02/; checking all shore community cross-affiliations, especially from Atlantic City northward; examination of Rutgers University’s Bernard Bush Collection on the Klan (this will involve combing through their physical files).
