Chapter Text
"Now, again, context matters," he says. "I reached America in late 1931. The Great Depression was still the single most important thing going on, and America, where it had started, was among the worst hit. America had emerged from World War One as a newly-minted world power that, thanks to wartime loans to the Allied Powers - it had gone from a mostly rural nation with an industry that lagged behind Europe, to owning 30% of the world's gold reserve. The 1920s saw America revel in its newfound wealth, with some even believing poverty to be a solved problem. Then the great stock market crash popped that bubble, and unemployment in the nation rose to 25%. Quite the shock to the system, obviously. At the same time, the alcohol Prohibition of 1920 was still in full swing at the time, which came across as downright bizarre to the less puritanical Europe."
"For all the good it did," I say. "People kept drinking, they just did it illegally."
"Oh, drinking alcohol was legal. Making and selling it wasn't," he corrects, "outside of religious or medical purposes. Hence, a flourishing of questionable priests with 'sacramental' wine, and pharmacists prescribing 'medicinal' whiskey to treat just about anything. That's before even getting into some places not even bothering to enforce the prohibition in the first place, as the federal government left enforcement to the States." He grins slightly. "People also exaggerate the Prohibition's ineffectiveness. In truth, alcohol consumption went down by a third nationwide, comparing the years before prohibition to the years after it. You are right, however, that a lot of people spent the intervening years selling it illegally; in fact, the Great Depression could be said to have killed the Prohibition, since the need for alcohol-based tax money proved to be a great motivator for a financially-desperate government.
"Until then, however, the money was going to organized crime, which flourished like never before. And that brings us to the two organizations that largely defined the situation in Chicago at the time. Tell me," he smiles, "what do you know about the Cosa Nostra?"
"It literally means 'our thing'. It's what the Sicilian Mafia calls itself. One of the first modern organized crime gangs, it flourished in America during the Prohibition under such leaders as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. They're still powerful today in a lot of places. They tend to avoid petty crimes like muggings or burglaries - the real money is in getting people to keep paying over time, I suppose."
"It is," he nods. "It's why organized crime involves so many loan sharks. To go into a bit more detail, the Cosa Nostra traces its origins to the 19th century. When Italy annexed Sicily in 1860, a lot of land that was previously owned by aristocrats and the church was sold to thousands of capitalists instead. The local police was in no way, shape or form equipped to handle the sheer amount of disputes it was suddenly facing, so wealthy landowners took to hiring bandits as mercenaries to handle those disputes. The resulting criminal groups got increasingly organized over the decades, developing their own hierarchy, tradition, and rules that may or may not be enforced depending on the context. When some members of this Cosa Nostra emigrated to America, they maintained the organization - and when Prohibition came, that organization found the perfect opportunity to make a fortune." He pauses and chuckles. "The late 20s actually saw a massive suppression of the Cosa Nostra in its native Sicily; Mussolini cracked down on the organization. Whether out of sheer pettiness, political calculus, or both, I couldn't tell you.
"The second organization, now: What do you know about the Ku Klux Klan?"
Now this is a subject I feel confident about. "The original version was founded in late 1865, following the American Civil War. It largely consisted of former Confederates who were determined to keep black Americans out of politics - especially in States with a black majority, such as South Carolina and Mississippi. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, thanks to Union troops protecting the integrity of the electoral process, there was an initial wave of elected black officials. From 1865 to the 1870s, the Klan sought to eliminate them through terrorism. The Klan chapter of Pulaski, Tennessee alone murdered over a thousand people in the run-up to the 1868 election. In North Carolina, the government was actually overthrown by the Klan. The same thing happened in Georgia, then six years later in Louisiana. In the end, the federal government essentially gave up, and the Jim Crow Laws were instituted to keep the black population in a state not that far removed from slavery. The Klan itself waned in power after its victory.
"Then, in 1915, the movie Birth of a Nation came out, giving an utterly mythologized version of the first Ku Klux Klan. It inspired the second incarnation of the organization - the burning crosses, the ghost costumes, and so on. The second Klan had wider goals than the first one - it wanted to ensure the supremacy of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men in America, and so committed acts of terror against not only black people, but also Catholics, Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans, labor unions… At its height in the mid-20s, the group counted a significant percentage of the US population among its members and was a political powerhouse. The organization lost some power and prestige in 1925, however, when D.C. Stephenson, the Indiana Grand Dragon - and I can't believe they used such ridiculous names - was convicted for the murder of a woman who'd turned down his advances. A white woman, obviously, since why else would people care?" I roll my eyes.
"You've done your research," he smiles as he raises an eyebrow.
"I wrote some about the KKK in college. One thing I hoped you could shed light on, though: How did the Chicago Klan diverge so much from the rest of the organization? The second Klan espoused hardline Protestantism. They were very vocal about their support for Prohibition. And yet in Chicago, klansmen were smuggling alcohol willy-nilly. I expect hypocrisy from greedy evil men, but I also expect some degree of internal consistency from fanatics."
"Excellent question! The oversimplified answer is that Bobby Smiles happened." He leans back in his chair. "The son of a preacher from one of the wealthier Chicago neighborhoods, Bobby grew up with connections, respectability, and money. His father was a local leader of the Klan's revival in the 1910s, and Bobby eagerly followed in his footsteps. Now… Are you familiar with the Tulsa Massacre?"
"Yeah. Tulsa, Oklahoma had a financially successful black district that even got nicknamed 'Black Wall Street'. And if there's one thing racists can't stand, it's the idea of the people they hate actually succeeding. So in 1921, a mob of angry white people - many of them deputized - burned the neighborhood to the ground and killed hundreds of people. They even used airplanes to drop dynamite on the neighborhood. So of course, to this day white racists insist that black poverty is the result of black laziness."
He nods. "To Bobby Smiles, Tulsa was an inspiration. He believed that the financial destruction of the Klan's enemies could bring wealth and fortune to its members. He began acting as an impromptu banker to the Illinois Klan, buying up struggling and outright failing Chicago businesses, and then using Klan muscle to destroy their minority-owned competitors. Between 1922 and 1929, these operations made him a wealthy man indeed, and he kept enough of that money trickling down to his subordinates to ensure their loyalty - while keeping most of the money invested in the fast-growing stock market. Holding the Klan's purse strings and developing his connections in Chicago high society, it was easy for him to become the leader of the Illinois branch in 1927, and continue his work of turning it into a profitable enterprise."
"There's always money to be made in exploiting an underclass."
"Sadly correct. Bobby Smiles' men may have started out, as you say, as 'fanatics', but over the years they realized that they also liked money quite a bit. Between 1927 and 29, the Illinois Klan continued its 'gangsterization' process - loan sharks, protection rackets and other such practices were outright cribbed from the Cosa Nostra, whom the Klan found itself fighting for territory. The Klan had the advantage of superior political and law enforcement connections, while the Mafia - largely controlled by Al Capone at that juncture - had the advantage of deriving spectacular profits from bootlegging. Bobby Smiles probably wanted to seize his own share of that market for years, but faced an ideological roadblock due to the Klan's support of Prohibition.
"Then the Great Depression came. Like most people involved with the stock exchange, Smiles lost a lot of money - but far less than he let his fellow klansmen believe he'd lost. He smelled opportunity. As his men found themselves losing the material comfort they'd grown accustomed to, he convinced them that in the chaos of the depression, bootleggers were among the only people still making fortunes, and that if the situation was left unchecked, men like Al Capone would soon control the economy. He argued that a decade of prohibition, despite the best efforts of the police and the Klan, had only driven alcohol consumption underground. He went on to argue that every dollar the Klan didn't make by engaging in its own bootlegging operation would be a dollar that went instead to criminally violent Italian Catholics. In short, he convinced his fellow Klansmen that they had a not the right, but a moral duty to engage in the painful sacrifice of bootlegging, in order to protect society from evil bootleggers."
"I can't believe they swallowed that crap." I go pale, concerned that my sudden swearing was over the line, but he doesn't seem to react to it.
"You'd be surprised what people will 'swallow' when it gives them an excuse to do what they already want to. This is true of good, honest, intelligent people, so it should be no surprise that it's even truer of klansmen. By this point, these were men who desperately wanted money, and Smiles was giving them an excuse to break their own rules in order to get that money. And so, over the two years that followed, the gang wars of Chicago escalated further as the Klan sought to displace the Cosa Nostra as the city's premier bootlegging operation.
"I had been following the whole affair with curiosity since before even my trip to the USSR. Abott Wallez had often railed against America, which he saw as a morally suspect nation full of gangsters and Protestants. Considering how I had become persona non grata with my previous social circle by that point, I was eager to get out of Belgium again and find a new investigation, and so this seemed as good a time as any to go to America. In a move that lacked wisdom and subtlety, I actually mentioned in an interview my desire to write an exposé about the Chicago gangsters before my ship left Brussels; by the time my ship reached Chicago, Al Capone and Bobby Smiles both knew I was coming.
"I didn't exactly have a reputation for crime-busting, obviously. I was, however, a famous journalist, and I imagine both sides found themselves reminded of Grover Hall, whose series of anti-Klan editorials had earned a Pulitzer in 1928. They knew that the balance of power between them could be affected by shifts in public opinion. And so, when I reached the train station, there was already a limousine waiting there to take me to Al Capone. We had dinner at his luxury residence."
"What were your impressions of the man?"
"In some ways, he uncomfortably reminded me of many rich, powerful men I'd met in Belgium and the Congo. However, he also dripped menace in a manner I hadn't previously encountered - a cultivated skill, I believe. He acted in a friendly enough manner, congratulated me on my Pulitzer, and unsubtly suggested that as fellow Catholics we ought to work together against the sort of men who wanted our kind driven out of the New World. He offered to help me investigate all the dirty deeds of the Ku Klux Klan and expose Bobby Smiles for the greedy, bloodstained hypocrite that he was.
"I told him - not without anger - that I'd come to Chicago to tell the truth about the gang wars, not to help crown a gangster king. Another rookie mistake on my part. Capone… Capone mocked my words. He told me the 'truth' was just the fancy name of the lie that worked best, and that the 'truth' of the Klan would see people like me hanging from a noose as race-traitors. And when I got to my hotel, and stopped to really think about it… It seemed to me that I'd bungled things up. I had been too honest."
"Isn't honesty the cornerstone of our job?"
"We have to be honest with what we write. But in both the USSR and the Congo, I'd had to rely on endless trickery to actually get to the truth - and then on a legal misdirection to get it published. With Capone, I'd gotten angry and expressed enmity out loud, sinking most future opportunities to actually investigate him. I resolved to be sneakier on future opportunities.
"As it would happen, the next opportunity presented itself on the day that followed, when I was invited to a business meeting with Bobby Smiles."
"I have to wonder how he sold his men on that. I can't imagine that a Belgian Catholic who had famously decried the colonial abuse of black men by whites was their favorite person."
"True… but I had also famously decried the USSR, and the union-busting Ku Klux Klan hated communists practically as much as it hated black people. Besides, even fanatical bigots have often been noted as happy to make exceptions for an individual - for 'one of the good ones' - while maintaining their mistreatment of the group at large.
"Al Capone had an undercurrent of menace. Bobby Smiles, in contrast, was perfectly polite, outwardly friendly, always trying to put one at ease while conducting negotiations like a friendly chat. There were moments in the conversation when I had to remind myself I was dealing with a dangerous crime lord.
"He managed to almost sound innocuous when he probed the subject of my Catholicism. I told him that a man who hadn't so much as gone to the confessional for the better part of a year could hardly be called a Catholic."
"...Not exactly the most ironclad definition I've ever heard. Did he actually buy that?" I pause. "Actually, do you consider yourself a Catholic? I mean, I know you were raised as one, but with everything that happened, I'd been wondering…"
I pause, wondering if I've gone too far. He just gives an enigmatic smile. "I'm afraid I'd rather keep my doctrinal positions to myself. I don't think any expertise I may have on investigative reporting, world affairs or international crime translates into any form of theological expertise."
"Y-yes, my apology…"
"None needed. And as for the other question… Smiles didn't need to buy it, as you say. He merely needed to be able to sell me to his associates as a Belgian (that is, West European, and practically French) who had turned away from the Roman Catholic Church, rather than a Catholic Belgian (that is, a foreigner, and practically German)."
I nod. "It still feels odd to me that the Klan was anti-German at that stage. I mean, Hitler rose to power two years later."
"True, but until he did, Germany was yet another non-Anglo-Saxon country from where a wave of immigrants was diluting the American racial purity so valued by the Klan - and an exporter of alcoholic beverages besides. If you look at the history of American racism, you'll notice it keeps expanding the definition of 'white' to include more ethnicities whenever failing to do so would turn white people into a minority. Hence why the French, Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles, and so on, were all considered non-whites at some point, and then allowed to join the club eventually.
"But to get back to Smiles: He walked the conversation through my work with the USSR and the Congo. With the former, I allowed myself to ramble a bit about the horrors of communist Russia. With the latter, I ranted about the hypocrisy of the Catholic missions. Smiles commiserated, and expressed the notion that this was a poignant demonstration of the tragedy that inevitably resulted from the white and black races meddling in each other's affairs rather than staying where they belonged. I expressed as much agreement as I could with a straight face."
"Smiles doesn't strike me as the sort of man who was opposed to colonial ventures."
"Very probably not, indeed. Certainly I've never heard him criticize America's own colonial ventures in the Philippines. But he didn't have any money invested in the African colonial empires, and it was a way of presenting things that he knew would be palatable to his men. Next, he asked me about my meeting with Al Capone. I told him Capone was obviously a gangster and that I'd declined working with him."
"Not exactly a lie."
He chuckles. "I'm not convinced that there is much of a moral distinction between an outright lie and a technical truth told for the purpose of misdirection, but, indeed, it wasn't a lie. Anyway, Smiles told me that if I wanted to write about the evils of Al Capone and his gang, he could provide me with ample information about their activities, testimonials from their victims, and protection from what he claimed were inevitable assassination or at least intimidation attempts.
"I told him that I would appreciate all of those things, but that they would not suffice - that my readers already knew Capone was a brutal gangster. I added that to make for a truly interesting exposé, I would need more of a story - not just a villain, but the heroes who opposed him as well. I told him that beside the evils of the Mafia, I also needed to write as much as could be safely divulged about the heroes who fought it. I told him that Birth of a Nation had done awe-inspiring things with its iconography, and that I believed I could similarly inspire my readers with tales of modern-day white knights battling the evils of society."
I gaze at him with undisguised admiration. "I'm honestly kind of amazed you were able to pull that off. I'm not sure I'd have managed not to punch him."
"I'll admit I was tempted to do just that, but I was trying to take the long view. As should you," he says, and I reflexively straighten up. "Imagine yourself dealing with a powerful man who operates in the shadow of the law to commit great evils. It may be tempting to tell him exactly what you think, but what good will that do? Sometimes, self-control, restraint, and, yes, some manipulation, are required in order to position yourself where you can expose the truth."
I find myself reminded of his short tenure in General Alcazar's army. I wonder - if a warmongering dictator offered to make me a colonel, what would I do? Outright reject his offer? Accept it and try to disable the machinery of war from within? It's hard to imagine.
"My apologies," he quickly adds. "You're here for an interview, not for an old man's attempts to tell you how to do your job."
"I don't mind some tips from a veteran," I assure him. "But… it worked, didn't it? Smiles let you inside the Klan."
"Gradually, over the course of the following months. I attended the Klan's church meetings. I saw their extremely over-dramatic ceremonies. I witnessed a number of acts of intimidation - against bar owners who sold liquor purchased from Capone rather than Smiles, against businesses owned by Jews and blacks, against non-whites getting into relationships with whites - Illinois had repealed its anti-miscegenation laws fairly early compared to most of the country, back in 1874. By and large, those intimidation jobs involved merely the threat of violence - when violence itself was intended or at least expected, I wasn't invited at that stage. After all, it was not as if the Klan trusted me.
"The first exception came during the Slift strike. Slift owned one of the biggest meat-processing plants in the Chicago area, and with unemployment being so high, management felt it could safely reduce wages and increase working hours - after all, vast swathes of people were desperate for a job, any job. Slift's workers, spearheaded by what was left of their labor union, refused to take this sitting down, and proceeded to fortify themselves in the factory, not letting anyone or anything in or out until their demand for better wages was met. Slift's top management were desperate to reopen quickly, as every day the factory was closed was cutting into their profits, and so they came to Bobby Smiles. The agreement they came to had Smiles buying 15,000 of Slift's shares at less than market price, and management agreeing to fire several dozens of non-WASP workers and give their jobs to the relatives of klansmen - precisely the sort of deal Smiles was fond of making. Given my established anti-communist credibility, I was allowed, encouraged even, to be there when Smiles' men showed up to break up the strike, which they blamed on 'reds', 'foreign agitators' and 'Jews'." He looks chagrined. "I managed to sneak a warning to the strikers a day ahead of the attack, but I don't think it made any difference. It was brutal, and Smiles' men were better armed. Three men died, nineteen were injured."
"You talked about that at length in your exposé once it was finished, but you didn't write anything at the time it happened. I imagine that was one of the harder parts of infiltrating the Klan."
"It was. Especially since I did write about it at the time. In fact, I spent those months writing highly elogious stories about the Klan."
"...You did?"
"Of course. Smiles was taking a risk bringing me in, but that didn't mean he trusted me much. I frequently saw small signs of break-ins from the men he had checking my hotel room. I made certain to always leave for them to find half-finished papers where I railed against the evils of the Sicilian Mafia and the communist corruption of the labor unions while glorifying the Ku Klux Klan's efforts at protecting American civilization from them, presenting Smiles himself as a humbly heroic figure who had done his best to uphold public morals and Prohibition, and was now continuing the fight for decency in the only way he could, even at the cost of his public image." He grins. "While I do not generally condone the destruction of the written word, I'll confess to taking immense pleasure in burning every single one of those drafts once the charade was over."
Again, I cannot quite hide the admiration on my face. "Ha! Well-played. But… didn't you have to also take real notes during that time? You spent the better part of a year in Chicago. I don't imagine you kept everything you wanted to write inside your head."
"Indeed. But the papers I meant for Smiles' men to see were strewn over my work desk or gathered in highly visible binders around it; my real notes, written in shorthand, were actually hidden. I don't believe they ever found them."
"That explains why they eventually started trusting you enough to show you the nastier parts of their operations."
"True. But in the meanwhile, I also had a few other encounters. Despite my Klan protection, Capone's men did manage to get me into a car at one point for a second meeting. Given I'd been spending all my time since our first one in the company of Bobby Smiles and his men, it's no surprise that the undercurrent of menace was even clearer this time around."
"So what did you do?"
"As I told you, sometimes, to get to the truth, an investigative reporter must get tricky and deceitful." He pauses, and says simply: "I told him the unvarnished truth."
"...What?"
"I told him that I was pretending to be receptive to Smiles' ideology in order to win his trust and learn all I could about the Klan before exposing it to the world."
I can't help it. I laugh out loud. I'm a bit embarrassed by it, but he just grins.
"Yes, that was Capone's reaction as well. I also asked him if he knew of any police officers I could trust not to be in the Klan's pocket."
Once again, I can't help but laugh. "You asked a mob boss who in the police you could trust against his rival." It's clever, of course, but the absurdity of the whole thing still gets to me.
"Indeed. I'd also asked Smiles who he trusted in the police. And one name came up in both conversations."
"I'm guessing you mean Eliot Ness."
"Yes. Now, I want to be clear," he says: "The Untouchables is well-made and enjoyable, but it's not meant to be historically accurate. For starters, Ness and I only met a couple of times. We didn't have that kind of close working relationship. Still, we exchanged pointers. He was in charge of fighting Capone's bootlegging operation, and was frustrated by his inability to take action against Smiles - no matter how many officers Capone was bribing, the Klan's protection came from higher up."
"What sort of impression did Ness make on you?"
"A fairly positive one, actually. Ness was a rare case of an actual honest cop - maybe not to the paragon-like extents showed by fiction, the man certainly drank no less than most people did during the Prohibition - but he actually cared more about getting his job done than about flexing his power and lining his wallet, which in Chicago, and right after the Congo, felt like a breath of fresh air."
"...I think that describes the bulk of the police just about everywhere. Flexing power and lining wallets."
"You're probably right, but I was not quite that cynical at that age. Regardless, Ness also favored - and in some cases pioneered - a number of cutting-edge policing techniques. Two-way radios on police cars, the use of modern forensic techniques to build legal cases, the creation of an internal affairs section to uncover crooked cops… I was impressed. Enough to write an article about it during the last leg of my stay in America, but that came later. For now, I mentioned to Ness the names of some of the cops I knew effectively worked for Smiles, in some cases as outright members of his Klan."
"Actually, I was wondering. Your meetings with Ness were something you could sell to Smiles fairly easily, since he was leading an anti-Capone task force. But I imagine he also had questions about your second meeting with Capone."
"He did. I told him that Capone had made threats, and strongly encouraged me to leave the American continent while I still could. Smiles assured me that his men would give me all the protection I needed. I made sure that, over the following weeks, the drafts I left for his men to find contained a lot of explosive rage directed at Capone and his gang.
"Over time, the klansmen started trusting me enough - or at least getting used to my presence - that I got to see some of their more illicit operations. On two different occasions, I managed to warn two men of impending assassination attempts from the Klan - first a black man who had married a white woman with a cousin in the Klan, second a Jewish man who'd had some success organizing Chicago labor unions. I was concerned, however, that this would eventually get the klansmen to realize I was working behind their back. As such - and noticing that they'd stopped searching my room by now - I started writing my exposé in earnest."
"How could you tell if they were searching your room?"
"Every time I left it, I'd close the windows and leave a single hair from Milou on one of the pages I'd left for them to find. With no wind, it'd still be there if no-one had come in to disturb it… and no-one was going to notice a small white hair on a white page."
"Ha, I see."
"Still, obviously I was careful to keep the real exposé well-hidden. And then, the perfect opportunity fell in my lap:
"Smiles had discovered the existence of a big independent moonshine-making operation in the outskirts of Merrillville - a fairly short drive away from Chicago, but across State lines, in Indiana. Unlike many similar operations, this one was producing moonshine with very low toxicity, and Smiles wanted it for his own. However, since he didn't have any police from that jurisdiction in his pocket, he wanted to be careful and take his time planning the attack. I overheard some of his men discussing it among themselves, so I went to Smiles myself, and told him that I wished to participate in this job. I told him I needed to experience the heroics of the Klan in person to properly convey it in my writings, and so, I ended up with a seat at the table where the job was planned. And since said planning took a while… that gave me the time to both finalize matters with my chosen publisher, and contact some people in Indiana law enforcement whom Ness trusted with this job.
"And so, on the fateful day, I was with the klansmen as they assaulted the moonshiners' compound and seized their illicit merchandise. I was also there when the police showed up and arrested them in the process of loading up the cargo, and convinced the klansmen not to resist arrest - my argument was that Smiles' lawyers could easily get them out of this by arguing that they had only tried to stop the moonshine-makers, and hadn't actually tried to sell the contraband."
"I'm pretty sure even if that had been true, such vigilantism would still be highly illegal."
"Of course. But this was the Ku Klux Klan. They were used to effectively being above the law. They had very good cause to believe the justice system would help them get away with it all. In fact, if I'd left it at that, it probably would have. Smiles was friends with judges, district attorneys, captains of industry and at least one congressman. He could have gotten his men out of this fairly easily.
"As such, I needed Smiles off the chessboard, just for a few days. I made a phone call, with my best imitation of panic. I told him that his men - his best muscle, really - had been taken by the police. I told him the police had a district attorney and one of Capone's underlings with them. Lastly, I told him that one of his men had agreed to testify regarding Smiles' role in the murder of a white man the year before in exchange for immunity." He chuckles. "As I'd hoped, Smiles panicked and left Chicago with a handful of men and a fortune in cash."
"That's a big gamble."
"It was. It could have failed, certainly. But I had asked Smiles a week earlier what he would do if Capone ever succeeded in 'corrupting' the police into turning against the Klan. He'd chuckled and given an evasive answer about how they would never catch him, so I suspected this reaction. I'll admit, though, that I was lucky again. With that said, some of the police I'd contacted through Ness arresting other Chicago klansmen that day - thanks to evidence I'd forwarded - certainly helped sell the lie.
"A few days later, while on the run, Smiles no doubt ran into some of the newspaper headlines with my article about the dark truths of the Illinois KKK, the new book I had published on the subject, or perhaps the radio talks - regardless, he realized how I had duped him, and angrily returned to Chicago, ready to fight this whole thing with his connections and wealth. Those days of absence, however, cost him dearly. By this point, my exposé was demolishing him in the court of public opinion, harming the Klan almost as much as D.C. Stephenson's conviction. It exposed the Klan's mystique and symbolism in all of their sheer ridiculousness. It painted the klansmen as violent lowlives eager to bully and murder honest hardworking Americans. It showed Smiles himself for the greedy, manipulative hypocrite that he was. It shattered the faith that much of Chicago had in the Klan in general and him in particular, making him toxic for city officials to associate with - and that in turn meant that city hall forced the police to arrest him and a large number of his men and associates. I had, by then, procured evidence or at least my personal testimonial against many of them.
"Which is why they tried to assassinate you twice over the course of the trial."
"Yes. The trial lasted three months, and since I was the star witness, Smiles tried to have me eliminated as a desperate measure - the second time, by one of the police officers in charge of protecting me. A close shave." He doesn't go into more detail. "What I found incredible at the time was that Smiles' conviction happened within such a short interval of Capone's. The two feuding gangster kings of Chicago, convicted within a month of each other. For Chicago, this no doubt felt like a time of change."
"Wouldn't you say it was a time of change for America in general? I don't mean because of the Depression, or the New Deal the year after. I mean… you pretty much destroyed the Ku Klux Klan."
He chuckles. "I wouldn't go that far. I hurt the Klan, that much I'll grant you. I had helped weaken the Illinois branch of the organization. Public opinion of them certainly got worse. But it had already been badly damaged by D.C. Stephenson's conviction and Grover Hall's journalistic work, among many other factors. By the time I'd shown up on the scene, they were already a far cry from their purported millions-strong membership of 1925; I'd merely delivered another blow. Not even the finishing blow; you'll notice that there was an abortive attempt at reviving the Klan in the mid-1940s. The Anti Defamation League made short work of that attempt - via a fictional radio show of all things."
I don't even try to suppress my grin. "You mean, the Clan of the Fiery Cross series."
"You've heard of it," he smiles. "I've never been as much into radio serials as some, but I made an exception for that one.
"Anyway… with my exposé published and the Klan trials over, the goal I had dedicated myself to so shortly after reaching Chicago was complete. I was invited to a State function dinner - mostly city hall's attempts at distancing itself from the unpopular Klan by cozying up to me - and I gave a short and embarrassingly shoddy speech about the evils of the Klan and race-based discrimination… and as I did, it struck me how aimless I was feeling. I had come to America to get away from how directionless my falling-out with Wallez and his entourage had left me, I'd focused almost monomaniacally on taking out the biggest villain I could find in Chicago… and now I was feeling that directionlessness again."
I nod. "What about Rastapopoulos?"
"Well, I encountered him some time later, during the-"
"No, I mean… He was there. At that State function dinner."
"...He was?" He looks genuinely surprised.
"Yes. As the producer and majority holder of Cosmos Pictures, he was in Chicago at the time to buy a handful of movie theaters that Smiles had either owned or co-owned."
"That's the first I hear this," he admits. "I mean, I can easily believe it. Smiles always made sure that Birth of a Nation and other such pro-Klan propaganda works were playing somewhere in the city, and I didn't remember every single person who showed up at that dinner, or even a quarter of them. So it's possible Rastapopoulos was there. I did not, however, speak to him at the time."
"I see."
"After the dinner, however, I tried to find more causes to write about. I interviewed dozens of nonwhites, and wrote articles about the suffering and injustice caused by segregation - including an article about survivors of the Tulsa Massacre. I interviewed leaders and members of labor unions, and tried to present a balanced view of the subject. I even wrote about Eliot Ness's modern policing techniques. I still felt empty.
"I heard about the murders of many Osage natives in Oklahoma in what looked a lot like a conspiracy to seize oil money, and I had almost decided to go there… when I read a news article about India's independence movement. The memories of the Congo were still fresh in my mind, and I found myself wondering if the colonies of the Western world could free themselves from their masters. Besides, I'd spent almost a year in America by that point, and while I'd only seen a tiny fraction of it, I was already feeling restless, and I thought seeing the Orient might do me good."
He pauses. "The benefits of hindsight tell me it was very fortunate that I travelled east, but I'll admit a part of me feels guilty for not taking the time to help the Osage. America's natives suffered from colonialism at least as much as anyone has. Then again, there is no guarantee I'd have made any difference; my attacks on segregation weren't exactly endearing me to the American readership.
"And so, I was once again on a boat, this time headed toward India… with a few stops in the Middle-East on the way."