“Don’t ya know that ever’ time a boy baby is born in a Cath’lic’ fam’ly they take and bury enough am’nition fer him to kill fifty people with!”
Such thinking “is part of the state of mind that accounts for the amazing growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the old Hoosier commonwealth; that enables Indiana to compete with Ohio for the distinction of having a larger Klan membership than any other state. It helped make possible the remarkable election results of last fall, when practically every candidate opposed by the Klan went down in defeat.”
This article was written in the patois of the day (a highly readable form of Yankee English) by Lowell Mellett (1886 – 1960), hardy journalist and son of Indiana. Millett is primarily remembered for his W.W. II days serving at the helm of the U.S. government’s Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP).
