MINORITY ANTI-KLAN PLANK DEFEATED BY ONE VOTE
New York City (JFK+50) The Associated Press reports that "the Democratic platform will not single out the Ku Klux Klan* by name" nor will it "contain a Wilsonian plank on the league of nations."
These decisions were made on Sunday morning, June 29, 1924, after a "ten-hour continuous session in which some of the most disorderly scenes in convention history were enacted."
Things got so heated that police had to be called in to quiet down disorderly delegates.
The final vote on the KKK minority plank fell just one vote short of passage.
*According to David Pietrusza, the KKK of the 1920s came about because of "cultural conflict and modernization." While the KKK of the Reconstruction years was a Southern phenomenon, the 1920s saw the Klan including "white, middle-class Protestant Americans from the North & Midwest." There was a strong backlash against recent immigrants from Southern & Eastern Europe which resulted in anti-Catholicism & anti-Semitism.
SOURCES
"Anti-Klan Plank Beaten By One Vote," The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., June 29, 1924, Chronicling America, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/
"The KKK in the 1920s," by David Pietrusza, Bill of Rights Institute, www.billofrightsinstitute.org/
