The Fellowship Forum was an anti-Catholic publication that was mostly read by white, Protestant fraternalists.[1] Historian Thomas R. Pegram has described the publication as a "Klan allied masonic journal".[2] The link between Masons and the Klan was first announced in the Fellowship Forum.[3] After the Klan hired the Southern Publicity Association to increase the organization's membership in the 1920s, Fellowship Forum readership increased—from 1,000 readers in 1921 to a circulation of over one million by 1927. The paper has been described as "an integral part of the resurgence of the KKK among white Americans in the 1920s."[4]
The first issue of the Fellowship Forum was published on June 24, 1921 by the Independent Publishing Company,[5] in Washington, DC.[6] The founders of the paper, who were both Masons, called it "The World's Greatest Fraternal Newspaper." Its stated mission was to disseminate "religious and patriotic doctrines."[7] When Justice Harlan Stone was nominated to the United States Supreme Court during the Prohibition era the Fellowship Forum wrote that he had a "fine record" and had been "very active in the enforcement of Prohibition laws" as Attorney General.[8]
Notes
edit- ^ MacLean 1995 p. 7
- ^ Pegram 2011 p. 154
- ^ Dumenil 2014 p. 259
- ^ Gonzalez & Torres 2011 p. 205
- ^ Fox 1997 p. 194
- ^ The Fellowship Forum. 2019. OCLC 10618489. Retrieved Dec 17, 2019 – via Worldcat.com.
- ^ Gonzalez & Torres 2011 p. 205
- ^ Hamburger 2009 p. 423
References
edit- Dumenil, Lynn (2014). Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-5383-0.
- Fox, William (1997). Lodge of the Double-headed Eagle: Two Centuries of Scottish Freemasonry in America's Southern Jurisdiction. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1-61075-243-5.
- Gonzalez, Juan; Torres, Joseph (2011). News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-84467-942-3.
- MacLean, Nancy (1995). Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509836-5.
- Pegram, Thomas R. (2011). One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 978-1-56663-922-4.
- Hamburger, Philip (2009). Separation of Church and State. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-03818-9.