Many men went to Cleveland hoping, trying to put an anti-Ku Klux Klan plank in the Republican platform. They had prepared a plank which read thus:
This party pledges itself and its candidates to stand inflexibly for government by due process of law and against all groups, open or secret, which attempt to take the law into their own hands. If its candidates are elected, this party gives assurance that no act of theirs will render aid or comfort to any organization based on prejudice or discrimination against any citizens for reasons of race, color, or creed.
R. B. Creager of Texas, a friend of the late President Harding, was one of the leaders of the movement. He declared that the Klan proscribed:
20,000,000 Foreigners
16,000,000 Catholics
10,000,000 Negroes
4,000,000 Jews
50,000,000 people
It was a glaring indictment. It carried the inference that the party which opposed the Klan could win the support of half the people in the country. But the Republican Party was unpersuaded. It chose to temporize and inserted a plank of no particular meaning:
The Republican Party reaffirms its unyielding devotion to the Constitution and to the guarantees of civil, political and religious liberty therein contained.