History won't be forgotten

There are still histories that need to be written.
Unfortunately, with the passage of time, those who can tell the tale first-hand die off or move away or disappear.
And whole chunks of human existence go down some memory hole.
Driving up to Shipshewana to take an old friend to dinner last week, we passed through Ligonier. So when we got together with Andy, the old friend who had made a pilgrimage to Indiana from California in spite of nearly crippling arthritis, I mentioned what bits I’d heard of Ligonier’s Jewish history.
Andy’s Jewish in addition to being an adopted Hoosier, and he was intrigued. But I only had scraps of information in corners of my memory. I’d read that the town had a substantial Jewish population and Jewish leadership in its earliest years, but that there’s next to no Jewish population today.
Why the change? I had no clue, no history to share with Andy.
The same would be true if he’d asked me about the free black communities of Randolph County. Retired doctor and good friend Gene Gillum grew up in Randolph County and has mentioned bits and pieces about communities that existed there before the Civil War and abolition.
But today, despite valiant efforts of local historians, much of that story has been lost, not erased from the history books because they were never even on the page.
Similar lost histories echo in Jay County.
In our case, the story that’s never been adequately told is that of the Klan.
Like the rest of Indiana in the 1920s, our community got swept up in the weird mix of xenophobia, peer pressure, boosterism, and mumbo-jumbo that was the KKK.
Notice that I didn’t mention racism; that was so much a part of the landscape that it was taken for granted. Instead, in that era, the Klan targeted its brand of hate at Catholics and recent immigrants.
The first couple of decades of the 20th century in America were the great era of joining, of organizing, of forming associations. That’s the era when the stellar service clubs like Rotary, the Lions, Kiwanis, and Optimists came together. That’s when lodges like the Elks and Moose and Eagles were founded. That’s when returning soldiers from World War I formed the American Legion.
But those were the healthy forms of organizing. The Klan was cancerous.
In Indiana, it assumed all the trappings of yet another civic organization then added its own mix of bigotry, exclusionism, and corruption.
Did it exist in Jay County in the 1920s? You bet it did.
But when the state organization collapsed in scandal, those involved shed their robes and erased the story rather than be embarrassed by their own sinister foolishness.
As a kid, I remember my mother stopping for a stop light in downtown Portland and gesturing to an upstairs window in a brick building. It was there, she said, that she remembered seeing an electric sign of a burning cross, signifying the Klan’s presence here.
As if that were not enough, somewhere in one of the bundles of papers I keep telling myself I’ll donate to the Jay County Historical Society there is a yellowed clipping.
It’s from a Klan newspaper, and it denounces my grandfather — Rev. Hugh N. Ronald Sr. — by name.
It seems the Klan in Jay County was flexing its muscle, using the sort of bully-boy, brownshirt tactics that would become familiar when the Nazis came to power in Germany.
What they were doing was attending church. But they were doing it as a large body of men, and they were wearing their full regalia, including their hoods.
Imagine for a moment the frightening impact of 20 or 40 hooded men in robes sitting in the first two pews of a local church.
Then they came to my grandfather’s church.
And they were denied entry.
As the family story goes, while grandfather prepared for the Sunday service, my grandmother conveyed his simple message: You are welcome if you take off your hoods and show your faces to your neighbors.
The Klan refused. My grandfather was denounced in some rag of a newspaper. And the story has been passed down for generations.
So the history hasn’t been written, but it hasn’t been forgotten either.[[In-content Ad]]