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But have you read the biography of Bernard Baruch?

One autumn day, when I was about five or six, Harry and I were rummaging about the attic of our house. We were looking for a place to store the nuts which, like squirrels, we gathered every fall. We came across a horsehide-covered trunk which looked promising. Opening it, we found Father’s Confederate uniform. Digging deeper into the trunk, we pulled out a white hood and long robe with a crimson cross on its breast–the regalia of a Knight of the Ku Klux Klan

Today, of course, the KKK is an odious symbol of bigotry and hate, reflecting it activities during the 1920's when it acquired considerable power, particularly outside the South. I have good reason to know the character of the modern Klan since I was a target for its hatred.

But to children in the Reconstruction South, the original Klan, led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest, seemed a heroic band fighting to free the South from the debaucheries of carpetbag rule. To my brother and me the thought that Father was a member of that band exalted him in our youthful eyes.

So intent were we in our examination of those garments that we did not hear Mother’s footstep on the garret stairs. She gave us a mighty scolding and swore us to secrecy. It was really an important secret. The Klan had been outlawed by the Federal government. Large rewards were offered for the conviction of its members, and spies were scattered through the South in an effort to discover who those members were. We came down from the attic feeling we had grown a foot taller.

Harsh as were the economic effects of the war, the political effects of eight years of carpetbag rule proved more galling and lasting. Even today, when the South is prospering, the carpetbag legacy of political and racial bitterness hangs on.

The carpetbaggers maintained power largely through the control that they and their scalawag allies exerted over the vote of the Negro. This use of the ignorant Negro as a tool of oppression aggravated all the racial wounds and sores of slavery and the war. In the end it hurt the Negro most and probably set back progress in racial relations by a quarter of a century.

Through much of my childhood no white man who had served in the Confederate Army was allowed to vote–while all Negroes could vote, even through few could write their names. Our state senator was a Negro, as was the county auditor and school commissioner–although at the county level never more than a third of the officials were Negroes. Still, the declared intention of the Black Republicans in Washington was to make the state of affairs perpetual.

So oppressive was this state of affairs that even a man like my father could write a fellow veteran of the Confederate Army that death was preferable to living under such conditions. “There is one recourse when all is lost. I mean the sword,” Father wrote in a letter which was quoted by Claude Bowers in The Tragic Era. “What boots it to live under such tyranny, such moral and physical oppression when we can be much happier in the consciousness of dying for such a cause?”

The issue was to be decided by the contest for the governorship in 1876 between General Wade Hampton and the carpetbag incumbent, Daniel H. Chamberlain. I remember distinctly one Hampton mass meeting in Camden when barrels of resin were lighted at the street corners. There was a campaign chat in which we boys joined:

Hampton eat the egg
Chamberlain eat the shell
Hampton go to Heaven
Chamberlain go to Hell.

The song was all the more appealing because that was the first time I was permitted to use the word “Hell” with impunity.

In later years Father told us many stories of how Hampton carried the election in the face of a preponderant black majority. One device was to distribute tickets to a circus that was playing out-of-town on election day. Another method was to beat the carpetbaggers at their own game by capitalizing on the Negroes’ simplicity.

In those days a separate ballot box was assigned to each candidate. Most Negroes could not read the labels on the boxes but were coached to recognize the Republican boxes by their position in the line. With a crowd of Negroes around the polls, some Hampton man would fire a shot into the air. In the ensuing commotion, the Hampton and Chamberlain boxes would be switched. The Negroes would then be rushed up to vote as quickly as possible. As a result many dropped their ballots into Hampton’s box.

On another election day, when I was about ten years old, Father was absent from home, either on professional or political business–probably both, for in those times there was work for a doctor after a political rally. We heard a great din about the house. Mother became alarmed. She told Harry and me to get our guns.

We got them–one a single-barreled and one a double-barreled muzzle-loader. Mother told us to load them and to take a position on the second-floor porch.

”But do not shoot,” she cautioned “unless I tell you to shoot.”

We stood there, our hearts pounding, each with a gun almost as tall as himself, watching the crowd of colored people milling about the street. Drunk on cheap whiskey, they were on their way to the polls or to a rally.

I have a blurred memory of what happened next. I recall seeing a Negro fall from behind a tree. Suddenly everyone fled. We ran down to where the man lay to see what had happened. His head had been split as with an ax. Mother brought a basin of water and dressed the wound. I do not know what became of him, but he could not have lived long with his head as it was. Casualties of this nature were not uncommon, and it was the Negro who suffered most.

It was against the background of such happenings that we saw Father’s membership in the Klan. That membership did not reflect any love of violence or any bitterness in his natur.e Once Father was called to the deathbed of a scalawag Southerner. When Father came home he remarked that no friends or loving relatives had come to visit the dying man and how sad it was “to see men made completely callous to the call of humanity by political differences.”

Nor did Father have any prejudice against the Negro or any grudge against the North. He blamed the Civil War on the extremists of both sides who would not use reason to settle their differences. He considered Abraham Lincoln a great man who might have reunited the country had he lived.

Still, the Reconstruction rule was oppression to Father and he fought to free the South of it. It is tragic that the Negro got trapped into this struggle, which embittered race relations to this day.

Bernard Baruch – “Baruch My Own Story,” Holt & Co., New York, 1957, pp. 31-35.