On a chilly night in the spring of 1934, a 27-year old lawyer and future member of Congress named Robert F. Jones took a ride out to Henry Tapscott’s farm a few miles east of Lima, Ohio. Surrounded by around 1,000 armed men wearing black hoods, robes, and pirate hats emblazoned with a white skull-and-crossbones, he knelt on one knee, put his hand on a Bible, and swore fealty to the Black Legion, a fascist organization dedicated to eliminating African Americans, Jews, and Catholics from the nation, and to violently taking over the United States government. Once Jones had been initiated, the Legion deployed its impressive — and terrorist — electoral machinery to twice elect him Allen County prosecutor on the Republican ticket. He would go on to serve four terms in Congress beginning in 1939. Only when Jones was nominated to the Federal Communications Commission in 1947 was it dramatically revealed that he’d been a member of the terrorist, white supremacist group.
Today, the Black Legion, and Jones’ role in it, remains a largely missing link in the history of U.S. fascism. It’s well-known that during the 1930s Louisiana Senator Huey Long and Detroit-based “radio priest” Charles Coughlin both flirted with fascism and had followers in the millions. We know that overt Nazi sympathizers flocked to join the Silver Shirts in California, and that in 1939, more than 20,000 people filled New York’s Madison Square Garden in an infamous pro-Hitler rally organized by the German American Bund. To all that we can add the story of the Black Legion and Robert Jones, further underscoring the long, often underground history of anti-Catholic, anti-Black, antisemitic fascism in the United States, and its chilling echoes in Congress.
The Black Legion was a spinoff of the so-called Second Ku Klux Klan, which flourished in the 1920s, fusing anti-Catholicism and antisemitism with anti-Black racism. Strongest in the North — with 500,000 members in Ohio alone — it fell apart by the decade’s end in the face of internal scandals and public denunciations. A doctor in Bellaire, Ohio, named William Shepard founded the Black Legion in 1924. He painted KKK robes black and added pirate imagery and an even greater obsession with militarism and secrecy. By 1935 the Black Legion had grown to hundreds of thousands of members nationwide, largely in the Upper Midwest but spreading to at least 21 states. No one really knows how big it was.
The Black Legion engaged in vigilante terror: its members beat people up viciously, burned down businesses, terrorized those who defected or refused to join, and killed people, white and Black. In Detroit the night of May 25, 1935, for example, Legion members randomly chose an African American man to kill, Silas Coleman. They lured him out into to the country, shot him up, and left his body in a sinkhole pond.
Soon after its founding, a glum, fishy, and somehow charismatic Lima plumber named Virgil Effinger took over the Black Legion from Dr. Shepard. Effinger called himself the “Major General” and spouted vicious hate — threatening, for example, to release poison gas into synagogues and typhoid into Jewish neighborhoods to kill all Jews in the United States. He told one informant he was plotting to take over the National Guard and use it to seize Washington, DC. At its peak in the mid-1930s an estimated 5,000 white men (and a few women) in Lima had joined the Black Legion — around one in five adult white men in the city. Its initiates included the city’s mayor, chief of police, chief of detectives, and a state legislator, as well as county prosecutor Jones.
In May 1936, the Black Legion burst into national news when a Detroit prosecutor, himself a former Legion member, charged 22 of its members with the murder of a white Works Progress Administration worker named Charles Poole. As the Detroit case unfolded and nine men were swiftly convicted of murder, the chief inspector for the Michigan State Police announced that the Legion was responsible for at least 50 murders in Michigan alone. Malcolm X’s father had been found dead in Lansing in 1931, and his family believed that the Legion killed him.
In August, Detroit prosecutors charged Effinger with criminal syndicalism and possession of grenades. But Robert F. Jones, the Lima prosecutor, refused to extradite him from Ohio to Michigan. Effinger promptly disappeared; a nationwide manhunt ensued. He hid out in plain sight at home for 15 months (local authorities, themselves Legion members, admitted they knew where he was) until he finally turned himself in to police headquarters. Jones then conceded to Effinger’s extradition but never, during all the Legion’s years-long reign of terror in Allen County, charged Effinger or anyone else in the county for any of the Legion’s known crimes. Eventually, the Detroit cases against Effinger fell apart. He never spent a day in jail.
In the face of the Poole trial and dozens of other prosecutions in Michigan, Toledo, and elsewhere, though, the Black Legion swiftly collapsed. The evidence suggests that individual members simply faded into the woodwork, afraid of criminal charges. Its rapid institutional collapse didn’t mean that its members suddenly eschewed their racism, antisemitism, or desire to overthrow the U.S. government, though. It appears they simply didn’t want to go to jail.
As news of the Black Legion spread, fear of rising fascism in the U.S. rippled through the media, the government, and popular culture. Orson Welles wrote an episode about it for his radio series “The Shadow.” Hollywood produced two films, including Black Legion (1937) starring Humphrey Bogart. “This monstrous organization is not just a grim excrescence on American life,” The Nation magazine warned at the time of the trial, “but something that has been built into the structure of American business and politics.”
Who stopped the Black Legion? Many of those with the mandate to do so looked the other way. Local and state officials across the Midwest, as well as in Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice, and even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew in meticulous detail about the Legion but chose not to take it on. Many, including Hoover, even squashed prosecutions of the terrorist group. In Washington, DC, the politics were thick. “Why doesn’t the federal government take action?” asked labor journalist George Morris in a 1936 pamphlet about the Black Legion. “The answer is clear. If the investigation were carried beyond Michigan it would reach into the Southern states where the K.K.K. is strong and where Roosevelt has his main base of support. Arising during an election year, the issue was simply shelved.”
Arrayed on the other side were all the people who did try to uphold the law and stop the Legion. Senator Elmer A. Benson of Minnesota and Rep. Samuel Dickstein of New York introduced a resolution calling for its investigation. Prosecutors in Detroit, Toledo, and elsewhere bravely pressed charges. Courageous reporters and editors took on the Legion in the local and national press. All over the country, thousands of individuals chose to speak privately about the Legion to FBI agents, postal inspectors, local authorities, and investigators from the Ohio legislature and its relief agency, or write to Hoover and members of Congress, however fruitlessly, putting themselves at potential risk from the Legion. In Michigan, Communists staged a protest rally.
People stepped up in Lima, too. Dozens defected from the Legion in the years before the trial and turned informant. Others, such as Lima farmer William Smith, heroically refused to join. Brutally beaten by the Legion at Tapscott’s farm in 1935 when he said no to initiation and then talked back to Effinger, Smith went to the papers and publicly denounced his kidnapping and assault. Lima’s Jews, Catholics, and Black residents, for whom survival was resistance, kept their independent institutions alive and flourishing amid a sea of hate. It’s also useful to reflect on the impact of the New Deal. By mid-1936, when the Legion collapsed, white working-class men were beginning to benefit extensively from its programs, and may have felt less aggrieved, less angry, and less in search of scapegoats.
Rep. Robert F. Jones’ membership in the Black Legion didn’t get national attention until June 1947, when President Harry S. Truman nominated him to serve on the Federal Communications Commission. The day before his confirmation hearing before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, someone tipped off Drew Pearson, the famous muckraking columnist, that Jones had been a member of the Black Legion. Pearson denounced Jones on his syndicated radio show that night and dispatched his trusty new assistant — Jack Anderson, who would much later inherit Pearson’s column — to round up witnesses in Lima and bring them on the train to the Senate hearing.
The next day, Pearson took the stand first. He argued that a known racist, antisemitic, anti-Catholic fascist had no business regulating the U.S. airways. He produced a 1938 affidavit in which Effinger swore that Jones had been af Legion member. Pearson said Jones’ father had been a well-known Klan recruiter and had introduced his son at KKK meetings as “the youngest member of the Ku Klux Klan.” Glenn Webb, an inspector at a Lima Westinghouse plant, testified that he’d personally witnessed Jones being sworn into the Black Legion. Frank Barber, the sheriff of nearby Beaverdam, said he himself had administered Jones’ oath of fealty.
Rep. Jones, on the stand, denounced Pearson’s “unmitigated lies.” He declared he’d always supported Jews and Catholics. He produced Jews and Catholics who testified that Jones loved Jews and Catholics, and that they, in turn, loved Jones. A longtime African American operative for the Lima Republican Party testified that Jones was not a Black Legion member and that the congressman had always come through for Lima’s Black community.
Over a total of three hearings in late June and early July, Jones’ confirmation hearing swiftly degenerated into a circus. One of Pearson’s witnesses announced that he was only testifying because he was angry that Jones had denied he was a member, and that he was fine with Jones otherwise. Sheriff Barber stated that he himself was still a proud member of both the Black Legion and the KKK, and that he thought Jones would make a great president “if he lived up to his oaths,” but that Jones had voted against old-age pensions and the “working man.”
Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover assigned one of his top lieutenants to quickly dig up dirt on the witnesses. Republican Sen. Owen Brewster of Maine, the subcommittee’s chair, revealed that Barber had been jailed for shooting someone, and had escaped from an insane asylum where he had been committed after beating his wife. Another of the witnesses had confessed to forging his employer’s checks. Effinger, for his part, had been convicted of contempt of court. To top it off, Brewster produced a new affidavit, signed the day of the second hearing, in which Effinger changed his tune and swore that Jones had never been a member of the Black Legion.
As the hearings remained in the headlines, the challenge to Jones’ nomination swiftly collapsed. Pearson’s reputation was besmirched for rushing witnesses forward without adequate research, and the Senate subcommittee approved Jones’ appointment 3-0. Both its Republican members had been elected with the help of the Ku Klux Klan. The third was a rightwing Democrat who had opposed the New Deal.
Rep. Robert F. Jones, of course, was not alone in his politics. We know that Congress has been chock full of actual Klan members; 16 U.S. senators and 75 representatives allegedly belonged in 1924. But Jones himself has disappeared from history, along with the bedrock of white supremacist fascism in Lima to which he owed his seat — although historians have investigated the Black Legion’s activities in Michigan. As we once again face rising fascism in the U.S., we can pay renewed attention to his story, and understand it as part of a long, continuous line of hate that’s as American as apple pie. It’s not just a coincidence that Rep. Jim Jordan, a diehard supporter of Donald Trump and a defender of the January 6 insurrection, today represents the same congressional district in Ohio as did Robert F. Jones.