"Who Pays the Klan?"

At Oklahoma City, Nominee Smith said: "The other day ... a woman went in to the national [Republican] committee in Washington and meekly walked up to the man in charge and said: 'I want some literature on Governor Smith. I want the non-political kind.' And he brought her downstairs, put her in an automobile and took her over to an office where a paper is published called The Fellowship Forum which, for a number of years, has been engaged in this senseless, foolish, stupid attack upon the Catholic Church. ..."

Nominee Smith was obviously referring to an investigation by the arch-Democratic New York World (TIME, Sept. 24). It was a reference broadly made, because:

1) It was not to the office of "the national committee" that the investigator went. She went to the office of Col. Horace A. Mann, Southern campaigner appointed specially by Nominee Hoover, an office purposely far removed from the Republican National Committee (though financed by it).

2) The investigator and Col. Mann had flatly contradicted each other as to whether his office or she herself first suggested going to The Fellowship Forum. The World's cry: "Who pays the Klan?" was no more valid than Col. Mann's cry: "Who arranged this frame-up?"

Chairman Work of the Republican National Committee protested: "If Governor Smith values the truth, he should withdraw the reckless innuendo that the Republican National Committee engages in religious propaganda."

Col. Mann protested: "I have already denounced this story as a falsehood. . . . The truth is that this paper [the World] or the Tammany national organization, sent a female detective to my office . . . an attempted frame-up. . . ."

Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans of the Ku Klux Klan also issued a statement:

"Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party, neither any individual or corporation, has ever directly or indirectly furnished a single dollar to the Klan. . . . The Klan seeks no political preferment and has no political affiliations."

He said all Klan money came from within the Klan--from dues and "Klectokens" (initiation fees).

He continued: "For years we have been fighting to preserve Americanism. . . . The Klan has been for years publicly fighting Mr. Smith by the widest possible dissemination of the truth. . . ."

When the Smith Special arrived at Newton, Kan., it found a newsboy at the station distributing, free, copies of the Fellowship Forum which announced: "Roman Catholic Clerical Party opens big drive to capture America for the Pope.

"Romanist or Protestant rule of nation depends on Presidential election."