The Harper’s cartoon was accompanied with a small article in 1874. In this section, you will read excerpts from the article. They are broken up into chunks with a quick check for understanding after each section.

WORSE THAN SLAVERY

A band of wild and desperate young men, maddened with whisky and torn by demonic passions, is the governing power in Texas and Alabama, Georgia, and even Kentucky. Masked, armed, and supplied with horses and money by the Democratic candidates for office, they ride over the country at midnight, and perpetrate unheard-of enormities. They rob, they murder, they whip, they intimidate.

  1. What group is this passage describing?

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    This group is describing the Ku Klux Klan and the White League.Close Pop Up

  2. How does this passage describe the group?

    Interactive popup. Assistance may be requiredClick for a possible answer These men are terrorizing people, robbing, murdering, and whipping them as they ride around “maddened with whisky and torn by demonic passions.”Close Pop Up

  3. How much power does this group have and who are their supporters?

    Interactive popup. Assistance may be requiredClick for a possible answer The article claims that this group is the real governing power in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky and is strongly supported by the Democrats.Close Pop Up

  4. Bias check: What political party do you think the people who run Harper’s Weekly support?

    Interactive popup. Assistance may be requiredClick for a possible answer Based on Harper’s Weekly’s  explicit statement that the KKK is supported by the Democratic candidates for office, it probably supports the Republicans—which it did. Although that does not mean that the facts weren’t true. Southern Democrats were the primary supporters of the KKK and Klansmen often terrorized white Republicans as well as African Americans.Close Pop Up

Yet no man, white or black, dares to denounce them. If a colored man ventures to tell of some frightful assassination which he saw in the dim midnight, he is himself dragged from the prison where he had been placed for safety and slaughtered, as happened recently in Tennessee, with horrible mockeries. If a United States official becomes conspicuous in politics, he is carried into the woods and shot, as at Coushatta. In Alabama and Louisiana the bands of young ruffians patrol the country by day as well as night, shooting down Republican voters.

  1. What happened to anyone who tries to stop the KKK or speak out against it?

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    Anyone who speaks out against the group gets killed.Close Pop Up

Nor does any Southern paper in Georgia, or Alabama, or Texas, and scarcely in Tennessee, [try] even to [report] the murderers or the violators of the laws; or if any Northern journal, … calls for the suppression and punishment of the lawless crew, it is at once placed under the ban of the secret associations. Such journals (exclaims the Austin Daily Statesman) "are more to be hated than the rattlesnake." Harper’s Weekly has been especially marked in this way, and its sale is forbidden by no unmeaning threats to the booksellers of Austin. The White Leaguers are resolved that the power of a free press shall never be felt in the South, and hope to pursue their career of crime unimpeded by the voice of humanity or reason.

  1. Groups of men in masks riding around killing people would be front page news today. How did Southern newspapers report on it?

    Interactive popup. Assistance may be requiredClick for a possible answer According to this article, they did not report it they feared retaliation from the from the organizations.Close Pop Up

  2. How did the Austin Daily Statesman, a paper that would eventually become the Austin American Statesman that is published today, regard journals like Harper’s that spoke out against the KKK.

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    The paper hated those journals more “than the rattlesnake.”Close Pop Up

  3. What does this article state about freedom of the press in Austin during this time?

    Interactive popup. Assistance may be requiredClick for a possible answerThe article states that Austin and elsewhere in the South did not have true freedom of the press because people were afraid of what would happen if they reported on the KKK and the White League. Close Pop Up

Reflection: The headline for this article was “Worse than Slavery,” which also appears in the cartoon you analyzed in the previous section. Why does it say that?