The Daily Worker

"We Were All Stealing"

The old Biblical saying that honest confession
is good for the soul is today truer than ever. This
truth is particularly timely in the present graft,
corruption, and thievery crimes being revealed in
the Klan investigation now proceeding in Washington.
One of the star witnesses before the Senate Committee
looking into the election of Mayfield from
Texas frankly confessed, as a Klan member of the
innermost ring, that "we were all stealing." The
witness declared under oath that the Imperial Wizard
Evans had his little graft also. At least $25,000
were spent in "educating" the Texas voters to
write in the name of Mayfield in the last Senatorial
contest. Representative Upshaw, one of the
self-appointed guardians of the morals of the
House, was shown to have been in the pay of the
Klan and one of the ardent prohibitionists of the
Klan for Congressional services rendered.
We welcome the evidence adduced which substantiates
the estimate we have been making of
the Klan. The Communists have never for a moment
seen in the Klan, as an organization, anything
but an extra-legal agency of the reactionary
interests, an integral part of the vast and
complicated strike-breaking machinery of the capitalist
class having its ramifications in the government,
in the church, in the press, in the schools.
All the noise made by the cyclopes, wizards, emperors,
kleagles and ambassadors has never deceived.
We have always viewed the excitement about
honesty, pure Americanism, unadulterated womanhood,
and other impotent abstractions and vagaries
peddled by the masked gangman as merely
smoke screen behind which the vilest of crimes
against the best working class fighters were hidden,
as an organized effort to mislead and divide
the masses of this country in their struggle for
better working and living conditions.
Yes, "we were all stealing," is a timely confession
for the Klan authority to make when caught
red-handed. When hooded honesty confesses about
stealing a little, it is as clear as broad daylight
that only a fraction of the truth has been allowed
to escape, and that stealing has been going on
wholesale by the Klan the country over.
Especially instructive to the workers and farmers
is the outright refusal of the Senatorial Committee
to delve into the connections between the
Klan and Congressman Upshaw. There is no
mystery about the fact that no official body, no
Congressional sub-committee has ever dared examine
the relations between government officials and
the Klan. Neither capitalist party dares make an
honest, fearless investigation of the Klan, because
the democratic and republican parties are both
closely tied up with the Klan in many states. Is
any better proof needed to show that the government
secretly is aiding and abetting the Klan outrages
while it pretends to oppose it?