freakonomics

Kennedy couldn’t wait for the first Klan meeting after the show hit the air. Sure enough,
the Klavern was in distress. The Grand Dragon tried to run a normal meeting but the rank
and file shouted him down. “When I came home from work the other night,” one of them
complained, “there was my kid and a bunch of others, some with towels tied around their
necks like capes and some with pillowcases over their heads. The ones with capes was
chasing the ones with pillowcases all over the lot. When I asked them what they were
doing, they said they were playing a new kind of cops and robbers called Superman
against the Klan. Gangbusting, they called it! Knew all our secret passwords and
everything. I never felt so ridiculous in all my life! Suppose my own kid finds my Klan
robe some day?”
The Grand Dragon promised to expose the Judas in their midst.
“The damage has already been done,” said one Klansman.
“Our sacred ritual being profaned by a bunch of kids on the radio!” said the Kladd.
“They didn’t put it all on the air,” the Grand Dragon offered.
“What they didn’t broadcast wasn’t worth broadcasting,” said the Kladd.
The Dragon suggested they change their password immediately, from “red-blooded” to
“death to traitors.”
After that night’s meeting, Kennedy phoned in the new password to the Superman
producers, who promised to write it into the next show. At the following week’s Klan
meeting, the room was nearly empty; applications for new membership had fallen to zero.
Of all the ideas that Kennedy had thought up—and would think up in the future—to fight
bigotry, his Superman campaign was easily the cleverest and probably the most
productive. It had the precise effect he hoped: turning the Klan’s secrecy against itself,
converting precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery. Instead of roping in
millions of members as it had just a generation earlier, the Klan lost momentum and
began to founder. Although the Klan would never quite die, especially down South—
David Duke, a smooth-talking Klan leader from Louisiana, mounted legitimate bids for
the U.S. Senate and other offices—it was also never quite the same. In The Fiery Cross:
The Ku Klux Klan in America, the historian Wyn Craig Wade calls Stetson Kennedy “the
single most important factor in preventing a postwar revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the
North.”
This did not happen because Kennedy was courageous or resolute or unflappable, even
though he was all of these. It happened because Kennedy understood the raw power of
information. The Ku Klux Klan was a group whose power—much like that of politicians
or real-estate agents or stockbrokers—was derived in large part from the fact that it
hoarded information. Once that information falls into the wrong hands (or, depending on
your point of view, the right hands), much of the group’s advantage disappears.