The Chicken Farm and the KKK

Here we have the Gazette complaining that a gambling joint between Hobart and Gary is operating openly and suggesting that, since local law enforcement can't or won't close it down, perhaps the KKK should step in.


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Hobart Gazette, Aug. 3, 1923.

The Klan's "taking a hand" would be done outside the law and involve violence or at least the threat of violence (as one essay puts it, the Klan's "controversial methods" of suppressing vice included "late night visitations, tar-and-feathering, and applying a razor strap to the back"[1]).

The article above gives the location of the gambling joint as "near Gary, on the Chicago road" — that is to say, Old Ridge Road. Previously I had the impression that the "chicken farm" was somewhere closer to Lake Station, but I may have misunderstood. Or maybe "chicken farm" was a slang term for any gambling joint?


Meanwhile, in unrelated news, our favorite plumber, Charles Lee, was vacationing at Kuntz Lake, more commonly spelled Koontz.

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The previous day's News mentioned Valparaiso University's financial troubles and the possibility that the Klan might "take a hand" there as well, but not violently.


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Hobart News, Aug. 2, 1923.

Ultimately this plan came to nothing. It was an odd episode in the history of Valparaiso University, covered in detail by the late Dr. Lance Trusty in "All Talk and No 'Kash': Valparaiso University and the Ku Klux Klan," Indiana Magazine of History 82, no. 1 (1986): 1-36.[2]

The right-hand column contains some good news about President Warren G. Harding's health. But we know that isn't going to last.


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[1] Jerry L. Wallace, "The Ku Klux Klan in Calvin Coolidge's America," Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation (website), July 14, 2014, https://www.coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-ku-klux-klan-in-calvin-coolidges-america/.
[2] This article can be read at http://www.jstor.org/stable/27790947.