This was how, in a vaulted ballroom to rival Versailles, I met at Klankrest many of America’s leading citizens. Under the strictest secrecy came judges, senators, bankers, union bosses, industrialists and financiers, some of them already committed to our cause, others curious to discover what the Klan actually meant to do for them. A few, I suspect, watched the social wind, wondering how profit might be made by association with this new political force. Mr Clarke impressed them as an educated gentleman of the old tradition, while no one could fail to be charmed by Bessy Mawgan. My attendance, I was told, showed how unprejudiced in actuality the Klan was. ‘We don’t attack individuals. Only those who declare themselves our enemies are our enemies,’ Mr Clarke explained to a puffy-featured individual called Samuel Ralston, an Indian politician, I gather (though he did not look it). Klan votes sent him as a Senator to Washington the following year. I wonder how many liberals would have voted Sitting Bull into the House of Representatives! Ralston was not in my view anything more than an opportunist. He was openly rude when I tried to interest him in my methods of raising crops under massive glass roofs in permanently controlled weather conditions. Anyone who genuinely had his people’s interests at heart would have known what I meant. However, I had been overheard by a huge, shambling individual, some six foot four inches tall, bulky and wearing one of those loosely fitting dinner suits often favoured by the elephantine (who seem to believe they must wear clothes they can grow into). About thirty-five, with mild, boyish features, he beamed at me a little vaguely and, smoothing back his untidy blond hair, asked if I were an engineer.
‘An experimental scientist.’ I smiled back up at him. ‘My business is inventions.’
He was eager to talk. ‘I’m no good here.’ He apologised for himself. ‘These brawls give me the eagers, I’m afraid.’ His huge hand enfolded mine. He was John ‘Mucker’ Hever, he said, living mainly on the West Coast these days. He specialised in oil technology but as we talked it quickly emerged his enthusiasm was for the cinema, ‘I love everything about the movies, don’t you?’ For over an hour we discussed the charms of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, our mutual liking for Griffith’s films, our fury at the people who had plotted the failure of Intolerance. I found his company far more enjoyable than that of the mainly pompous, self-important individuals attracted to Klankrest by ‘the powerful smell of cabbage’, as Mrs Mawgan put it. Hever knew nothing at all of politics, he said. His interest in the Klan seemed simply romantic and he had contributed, I suspect, in order to obtain the robes and pretend he was ‘the little Colonel’ of the movie. Unusually for an American he was familiar with many European directors, including Grune and Murnau. In fact his taste was rather broader than my own. At last Mrs Mawgan drew me away from ‘Mucker’ Hever to introduce me to Judge O’Grady of somewhere called Tarheel (possibly Tower Hill) which to this day I am unable to find on any map. It seems to me now that he was an imposter, one of many agents, private and Federal, then making it their business to spy on the Klan. Evidently he had succeeded in ingratiating himself with Eddy Clarke, for they were on very friendly terms. If Eddy Clarke had a weakness it was a tendency to trust too many people. Of a naturally agreeable disposition, he was perhaps a little over-confident, unable to accept with real conviction the meanness and cunning of some who surrounded him.
The final part of my evening was perhaps the most interesting, spent with an important newspaperman, originally born in Sacramento but presently on a North Carolina paper, who had written a book conclusively proving Abraham Lincoln was shot on the direct orders of the Pope. Thanks to Griffith I had seen John Wilkes Boothe kill the President then make his wild leap from the Ford’s Theater box to the stage, hobbling to freedom on a broken leg. ’Sic semper tyrannis!’ he had cried in expert Latin. That alone was proof of the enormous power over human minds wielded by Rome. The journalist spoke of the Secret Treaty of Verona, the determination of the Black Pope, General of the Jesuit Order, and the White Pope of the Vatican, to crush democracy. Five presidents assassinated, he said, and all on the orders of the two popes. The Papacy was heavily indebted to the Rothschilds. Roman Catholics were infiltrating Japan, steadily gaining power with the intention of turning a yellow tide against the United States. Already Californians were feeling the effects of a Japanese invasion. These secretive and baleful little people multiplied rapidly. They were the advance guard of the Jesuits’ Oriental armada. ‘The tools sometimes change,’ he told me, ‘but the tactics never do. Will we have our Sir Francis Drake ready when our turn comes?’ His arguments, backed by his evident erudition, made sense of apparently inexplicable events, especially the large number of US presidents who met violent deaths. Many involved in the Lincoln plot were never brought to book. The instigators of course remained in Rome, continuing to send everything needed for further disruption, including guns and ammunition-belts inscribed with the Papal Arms, personal gifts to the so-called Knights of Columbus, the Knights of the Golden Cross. I was to find these facts of great use on my tour.
At dawn, March 15th 1922, Mrs Mawgan and myself took a closed car to the suburb of Smyrna, quietly boarding a royal blue Pullman and thus avoiding unwelcome publicity or revealing my connection with Klankrest. We were on our way to Portland, via Kansas City, Denver and Salt Lake City, almost 2,700 miles from East to West and by far the longest single journey I had ever undertaken. I was excited, thoughtful, and grateful for the luxury, thoroughly enjoying the Escape of Railway Travel in the amusing company of Mrs Mawgan. With the build and general appearance of the Baroness von Ruckstühl she combined something of the disposition of Mrs Cornelius. Mrs Mawgan taught me her native Music Hall songs, also, but could not render them in the lively fashion of my Cockney thrush. In the Club Car we joined other passengers to sing Meet Me In St Louis, Louis, Shine On Harvest Moon, Sweet Adeline and Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven. I still greatly miss the comfort and good fellowship of those old American Club Cars where strangers met and chatted or entertained one another, just as in Imperial Russia, while the huge articulated 2-6-6-2 locomotives dragged us over deserts, prairies, mountains and swamps, through endless forests and down deep tunnels, steady, relentless and confident. They are all gone now. The grey forces have nationalised American passenger trains, I hear. Just as in England, they have become dirty, without character, unromantic and unreliable. They do not even have a Pullman for private rent any longer. Thousands of Indians and pioneers died, millions of labourers sweated, and scores of financiers risked their all to ensure the progress of the great Iron Horse. Now their sacrifice is meaningless. I often wonder if matters might have been different had Russia succeeded in her hopes of colonising America. San Francisco would still be St Petersburg. Instead St Petersburg is a miserable town in Florida where Jewish matrons eat blintzes and herring and sweat poison into the humid air. Why did they drain one swamp merely to create another? I still dream of America as the New Byzantium. Slavic bastion of our Orthodoxy. If Slavs had made a nation only in the West and North, with their own Tsar and their old Law, neither Hitler nor Hirohito would have dared go to war.