*At least 30,000 Ku Klux Klan members march on Washington, August* *8, 1925*
*(Alamy)*

By the Editors

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.

One hundred years ago, the Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington.

On August 8, 1925, some thirty thousand Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. Nearly 90 percent of the delegations came from northern states, according to A Fever in the Heartland, Timothy Egan’s history of the Klan in the 1920s.

The Washington Post gave the demonstration glowing coverage. “White-Robed Klan Cheered on March in Nation’s Capital,” read the Post’s front-page headline. The accompanying story began, “Phantom-like hosts of the Ku Klux Klan spread their white robe over the nation’s most historic thoroughfare yesterday in one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.” Deep into the account, the Post said, “Even those who differ with the philosophy of the Klan were free in praising the great parade.”

The story had little else to say about the KKK’s “philosophy.”

By this point, a resurgent Klan had about five million members in America. The previous summer, the KKK had constituted the “most powerful single bloc” at the Democratic National Convention, accounting for “nearly a third of all delegates,” Egan writes.

That convention became known as the “Klanbake.”

Despite the Klan’s strength among Democrats, its warm reception in the nation’s capital, and its surging popularity in both North and South, Egan casts blame for the march on the Republican president at the time: Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge “had neither the energy nor the stomach to take a stand” against the Klan’s demonstration, the author insists.

But Egan ignores a speech the president gave less than two months after the Klan’s march. Addressing the American Legion Convention in Omaha, Nebraska, Coolidge called for unity among Americans, whatever their ethnic background. “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine,” said Coolidge. “No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.”

Coolidge went further still. America could achieve “harmony and tranquility,” the president said, only when we “all realize that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language.”

The president elaborated: “If we are to create on this continent a free Republic and an enlightened civilization that will be capable of reflecting the true greatness and glory of mankind, it will be necessary to regard these differences as accidental and unessential. We shall have to look beyond the outward manifestations of race and creed.”

Coolidge concluded, “Divine Providence has not bestowed upon any race a monopoly of patriotism and character.”

President Coolidge’s Omaha speech served as a “pointed rebuke to the Klan,” former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke says. Yet this address, one of the most enlightened of the age, rates no mention in Egan’s book.

Nor does Egan bother to discuss other parts of Coolidge’s record—a record that led Schmoke to call the thirtieth president “one of the country’s early civil rights pioneers.”

Calling on Congress to pass federal legislation “against the hideous crime of lynching,” Coolidge declared that the constitutional rights of Black Americans “are just as sacred as those of any other citizen.” He added, “It is both a public and a private duty to protect those rights.”

During the 1924 election year, Coolidge gave the commencement address at Howard University, a historically Black institution in Washington, D.C. That summer, when a man named Charles Gardner wrote Coolidge to complain that the Republican Party might nominate a Black man for a congressional seat in New York, the president issued a bracing response. Coolidge said he was “amazed to receive such a letter.” Noting the noble service of Black Americans during the Great War, he wrote:

They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.

The Chicago Defender, a major African American newspaper, did not miss the importance of Coolidge’s action. The paper ran this front-page headline: “Cal Coolidge Tells Kluxer When to Stop.”

Shortly thereafter, Coolidge wrote a letter of support to the president of the National Negro Business League, Robert R. Moton. A New York Times headline noted, “President Again Declares His Intention to Safeguard [Black Americans’] Constitutional Rights.”

Coolidge wrote these letters—and made sure to publish them—in August 1924. This is a period when Timothy Egan alleges that the president signaled he would “make no trouble” for the Klan.

Four months after the KKK’s march on Washington, Coolidge delivered his annual message to Congress. In it, the president endorsed “the principle of broadest tolerance.” America’s institutions, he said, should guarantee “the full right to liberty and equality before the law without distinction of race or creed.”

Coolidge concluded: “Bigotry is only another name for slavery. It reduces to serfdom not only those against whom it is directed, but also those who seek to apply it. An enlarged freedom can only be secured by the application of the golden rule. No other utterance ever presented such a practical rule of life.”

The Klan and Coolidge: Birth of a Smear

A Playground, Not a Fortress