White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan by Tom Rice

Author:Tom Rice [Rice, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-01-04T04:30:00+00:00

3.9. The Toll of Justice at the Klan-owned American Theatre, Noblesville Daily Ledger, 24 April 1924, 6.

The American Theatre would undergo a series of changes in ownership and management in 1924, but it remained a strongly pro-Klan venue. In the spring, R. E. Thompson bought a controlling interest in the theater, seemingly managing it himself for a few months, before he chose L. G. Heiny, the chairman of the Republican County Central Committee but a man with no apparent experience in film, to take over as manager.163 The American’s Klan affiliations became even more pronounced during the summer. In August, the theater advertised itself as “Unquestionably 100 per cent,” and began using its advertisements to present patriotic Klan addresses. One advertisement, appearing across the top of the page, asked, “How Strong is America? Never in World’s History, On Foreign Lands or Seas, was Uncle Sam’s Glory thrust down by any creed. Although the tide may ruffle, ships may drift astray, we’ll carry her to the highest peak and place her there to stay.”164 A further lengthy advertisement began, “To do a thing tomorrow, that should be done today, is not a pure bred Yankee, is what the people say.” In bold at the foot of the rhyme were the words “To do a thing and see it through is true Yankee Red, White and Blue – American 100%.”165 The advertisements were presenting an ideology both for the theater and its audience. The theater responded to anxieties around film morality by presenting itself as a moral purveyor of “clean pictures,” countered fears of “foreign” controlled exhibition sites by emphasizing that it was an American establishment instructing through film, and addressed concerns about the cinema buildings themselves by rearticulating a space of darkness and moral sin as a light, clean, safe area where “seats are new and comfortable.” These related points were most succinctly articulated in advertisements in the Noblesville Daily Ledger during the summer of 1924, which used the familiar three Ks to describe the American as “Kool, Kozy and Klean.”166

Despite the strength of Klan support within Noblesville and Hamilton County as a whole, within a month of adopting its more virulently pro-Klan advertisements the American Theatre closed. The Ledger reported that the theater had “not been a paying proposition for some time,” and while the theater did reopen a month later as the Palace Theatre, it was only briefly mentioned in a very small advertisement that it was the “previous American.”167 Significantly, its first advertisement promoted a forthcoming screening of Birth – still an enormous attraction within Klan heartlands – but the film was now described as the “greatest historical play ever produced” without any direct mention of the Klan. The theater no longer adopted the aggressive and blatantly pro-Klan policy of its predecessor, and by 1926 there was no listing at all in the city directory for 860 Logan Street, the former home of the American Theatre.168

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