The Atlantic Monthly

Articles from The Atlantic Monthly

The Modern Klan (Atlantic Monthly, 1922)

An Atlantic Monthly article by LeRoy Percy (1860– 1929), a well-off planter who had successfully fought the spread of the KKK into Washington County, Mississippi. This article explains how the Klan operated in 1922. Their wide-spread appeal is also discussed.

One of the strangest aberrations in American life since the war is the growth of the Ku Klux Klan. In the North that organization, when considered at all, has been thought of as a colossal buffoonery, a matter unworthy of the time or thought of intelligent folk; and indeed for the average American, with his common sense and his appreciation for the ridiculous, any other attitude of numbers would seem unlikely…The Klan excludes from membership Negroes, Jews, Catholics and foreign-born, whether citizens or not. In its own phrase, it is the only Gentile White Protestant American-born organization in the world. It is secret… When asked if he is a member, the custom is for a good Klansman to evade, more rarely to reply in the negative, but in any event not to avow his membership.


Click here to learn about the origins of the term Jim Crow.

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Remembering the American Dead (The Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

Always stationed to the most forward field hospitals during America’s five major campaigns, a former W.W. I nurse penned this moving reminiscence that recalled her experiences tending to the soldiers who slowly died in the army hospitals. Haunted by the memories of these dying boys, she asked her readers as to whether they feel the world has kept the promises made to those who sacrificed so much: is the France they died to protect a better place? is the country that demanded they fight a better place?


Click here for clip art depicting the nurses of World War One.

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Letters from the Dying (The Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

Printed five years after the war, an American nurse published these letters that were dictated to her in France by a handful of dying American soldiers; equally moving were the grateful responses she received months later from their recipients:

I am glad and thank God he had such a quiet, peaceful death. It is a very hard thing for a mother to realize she cannot be with [her son] in his last moments…I am proud to give up my only boy to his country, and that alone is a great consolation.

This is just a segment from a longer article; to read the six page memoir in it’s entirety, click here.

Click here for clip art depicting the nurses of World War One.

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Post-War Diary (Atlantic Monthly, 1928)

Printed posthumously, the attached article was written by British Lieutenant Colonel Charles A Court Repington (1858 – 1925) as he recalled his conversations with French Field Marshals Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929), Joseph Joffre (1852 – 1931) and a number of other French statesmen about the First World War during a series of chats that took place in the autumn 1924.

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Virginia Woolf Reviews E.M. Forster (Atlantic Monthly, 1927)

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) had her say regarding the novels of E.M. Forster (1879 – 1970):

There are a many reasons which should prevent one from criticizing the work of contemporaries… With a novelist like E.M. Forster this is specially true, for he is in any case an author about whom there is considerable disagreement. There is something baffling and evasive in the very nature of his gifts.

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The KKK Popularity in Indiana (Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

Don’t ya know that ever’ time a boy baby is born in a Cath’lic’ fam’ly they take and bury enough am’nition fer him to kill fifty people with!

Such thinking is part of the state of mind that accounts for the amazing growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the old Hoosier commonwealth; that enables Indiana to compete with Ohio for the distinction of having a larger Klan membership than any other state. It helped make possible the remarkable election results of last fall, when practically every candidate opposed by the Klan went down in defeat.

Written by Lowell Mellett (1886 – ?), hardy journalist and son of Indiana. Millett is primarily remembered for his W.W. II days serving at the helm of the U.S. government’s Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP).

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