The Daily Alaska Empire

Texas Finishes the K. K. K.
(New York World.)

Another step in the fading of the Ku Klux Klan appears in the defeat of Senator Mayfield in Texas. The run-off primary shows that Representative Tom Connally has beaten him by an overwhelming majority. Thus disappears from Washington the Senator who, with the possible exception of Jim Watson of Indiana, has owed most to the Klan. Its Imperial Wizard boasted that in 1922 the Klan "put Mayfield over." His defeat now is a logical sequel of the defeat of the Fergusons two years ago, and Mr. Connally calls it a repudiation of the Klan "for all time."

In this blow against the Klan and all that it represents we see part of the reason why the best Democratic elements in many Southern States are insistent this year upon party regularity. In Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and other parts of the South, as in Indiana, Colorado and other Northern States, the decent citizenry is just struggling free of the Klan menace. The bigotry and intolerance which gave the Klan its strength are the same bigotry and intolerance which keep up the whispering campaign against Gov. Smith, which are responsible for three-fourths of the narrow-minded clericalism projected into politics, and which would make the campaign a religious fight if they could. Patriotic Southerners are against this. Under other circumstances, men like Gov. Moody with intense dry convictions might bolt the Presidential nominee. But Gov. Moody and thousands like him know that this would simply be fighting the battle of intolerance that they would simply be helping to restore the Klan, or something like it, to power. The struggle against bigotry in the South has been going on for years.

With the fight so largely won, there can be no backward step this fall.