Exploring the KKK's 1920s Resurgence

Tantor Audio, a division of Recorded Books, presents The Second Coming of the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, by Linda Gordon. Narrated by Joanna Perrin. Introduction. 100% Americanism. A July 4th picnic in Kokomo, Indiana, held in 1923, was the town's event of the decade, a lollapalooza of a carnival. Some said 50,000 came, while others said 200,000. No doubt a wild exaggeration, but one that reflected the celebratory mood. Reserved train cars brought in people from throughout Indiana and nearby states. This giant gathering made its participants feel part of something vast. patriotic and noble a celebration of americanism the food was so plentiful it required several rows of tables each extending the distance of a block in addition to the heaps of casseroles and desserts that women brought the organizers provided five thousand cases of pop and near beer fifty five thousand buns and six tons of beef not to mention the two hundred and fifty pounds of coffee and twenty five hundred pies To entertain the kids, organizers had set up a children's area with games and sports. Grown-ups could watch a six-round boxing match, a boys'singing quartet, circus performers, and an evening film, then known as a talkie. An airplane circled overhead, with a huge white cross flashing from the bottom of the fuselage, while an acrobat performed daredevil feats on its wings. Another Indiana mass powwow advertised like this. Big barbecue, 20 brass bands, high tight wire walking, 100 feet in the air, wild bronco busting, outlaw horses, imported Texas cowboys, national speakers, 200 horsemen, evening fireworks, illustrated parades, visit Valparaiso University, the sand dunes, see the Calumet region. These quintessentially American celebrations were Ku Klux Klan affairs. held frequently during the peak of its power in the nineteen twenties if we are to understand this second coming of the clan we must surrender some of our preconceptions about it those come mainly from the first ku klux klan established after the civil war as a secret fraternity with the aim of reimposing servitude on african americans after the end of slavery its tools were lynchings torture and other forms of terrorism designed to inhibit any challenge to white supremacy. It had never entirely disappeared, but faded somewhat after achieving its goal, electoral disfranchisement and economic subjugation of black people. The second Klan, as it has been called, took pride in its namesake and its commitment to white supremacy, but it differed significantly from its parent. It was stronger in the North than in the South. It spread above the Mason-Dixon line by adding Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and bootleggers to its list of enemies and pariahs, in part because African Americans were less numerous in the North. Its leaders tried to prohibit violence, though they could not always enforce the ban. Unlike the first Klan, which operated mainly at night, meeting in hard-to-find locations, the second operated in daylight and organized mass public events. Never a secret organization, it published recruiting ads in newspapers, its members boasted their affiliation, and it elected hundreds of its members to public office. It was vastly bigger than the first Klan, claiming, in what was almost certainly an exaggeration, 4 million to 6 million members. It owned or controlled about 150 magazines or newspapers, two colleges, and the Cavalier Motion Picture Company. dedicated to countering Hollywood's immoral influence. Most important, the 1920s Klan's program was embraced by millions who were not members, possibly even a majority of Americans. Far from appearing disreputable or extreme in its ideology, the 1920s Klan seemed ordinary and respectable to its contemporaries. At many of its events, elected officials spoke. Its members included both the well and the poorly educated, professionals, business people, farmers, and wage workers. but lower middle class and skilled working class people formed its core constituency. In addition to providing fraternalism and sisterhood, it conferred prestige on its members and delivered business networking opportunities. For these reasons, many joined in the hopes of raising their social and economic status or identity. Thus, membership in the clan could appear to offer a route into the middle class. Although it claimed to represent the soul of America, its prestige rose from its exclusiveness. During its relatively brief period of strength, its members were proud to belong. The Klan built a politics of resentment, reflecting but also fomenting antipathy toward those who it defined as threatening Americanism. To understand its strength, we need to notice which groups it identified as enemies. By blaming immigrants and non-Protestants for stealing jobs and government from true Americans, it stayed away from criticism of those who wielded economic power. Devoted to a business ethic, revering the pursuit of profit as confirmation of individual independence and manliness, the Klan respected men of great wealth and considered their social position earned and deserved. Instead, it blamed elites. typically presented as big city liberal professionals secular urbanites who promoted cosmopolitanism and were thus insufficiently patriotic and looked down on clanspeople as stupid and or irrational and or out of step with modernity this disrespect for the clan only intensified its hostility and sense of righteousness simultaneously the clan denounced corruption which it considered a uniquely big city and non-protestant phenomenon and complained especially that big city governments and police were venal and lazy these klan targets were always racialized its anti elitism focused on jews all of whom appeared in klan talk either as snobbish overeducated effete professionals or money-grubbing merchants out to fleece innocent consumers thus large populations of urban poor and working-class Jews did not exist in Klan social analysis. Political corruption it blamed on Catholics, the Irish and Italians especially, and here too the Klan did not acknowledge the masses of non-Protestant working-class people who were as much fleeced by corruption as were Klan members. In the last few decades, that understanding of elites, albeit with less anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism, has once again become common in political rhetoric. Today's anti-elitism provides insight into the popularity of the Klan and illustrates particularly the difficulty of placing it on a conventional left-right spectrum. True, Klan's people typically preached distinctly right-wing principles, such as anti-communism, though concern about political radicals played only a minor part in its diatribes. Of course, bigotry has long been characterized of the right. But Klan anger was also directed at what it considered immorality. This resentment did not always coincide with actual economic insecurity. Some Klansmen felt their economic position slipping, but others were upwardly mobile. Racial and religious bigotry may have been provoked by economic anxiety, but also arose from independent, long-standing American traditions. Goading members into racial and religious anger, might not have worked without pre-existing prejudices. Also challenging a neat left-right distinction is the fact that most traditional conservatives denounced the Klan out of fear that mass social movements could lead to dangerous mob rule. Many ministers in mainstream Protestant denominations similarly denounced Klan's people's evangelical and occasionally fundamentalist theology as the symptom of a primitive, ignorant mindset. Further blurring the left-right distinction was the Klan's endorsement of some progressive causes. However opportunist these endorsements, the Klan argued for more aid to public schools and welcomed the Woman Suffrage Amendment. Status anxiety, another diagnosis of the Klan's appeal, saturated Klan rhetoric, notably in the chorus of fake news stories about how Catholics and Jews were taking over government. Its claims to be losing status and respect is not easily proved or disproved. We lack both historical evidence for anxiety and parameters for measuring it. Moreover, Klan rhetoric about the threat to American values also suggests a more immediate cause, the skillful demagoguery of leaders. The enthusiasm they engendered did not come exclusively from pre-existing grievances. Because enlarging itself was the Klan's highest priority, it fielded scores of traveling speakers who delivered the message that the country faced a total crisis of morals, government, and religion. They deployed hyperbole and allegations of terrifying conspiracies to bring in more members and described themselves as part of a team committed to rescuing the country from its internal enemies. Clan speakers, many of whom were ministers skilled in stirring listeners, drew hundreds and occasionally thousands into membership. Attending lectures was then a standard leisure time activity. That speakers stood to profit personally, as we will soon see, gave them further motivation to hone their rhetorical skill. We cannot afford to underestimate the power of this rhetoric in building the mass social movement that was the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. As sociologists Kathleen Blee and Alberto Malucci remind us, we should understand those grievances as not only intensified, but actually produced by this social movement. Examining the Klan opens a window into a less familiar 1920s, a decade often called the Roaring Twenties. It has been represented through the flapper, who drank, smoked, danced, and wore short skirts. Through the hot new consumer culture, the birth of commercial radio, and the decade's most important new product, automobiles, the number of cars on the road, 7.5 million by 1920, reached 23 million by 1929. And cars were implicated in the alleged immorality because they provided not only mobility, but sexual privacy for so many young Americans. The Klan thrived by exaggerating these stereotypes of cultural license. and its claim that the country was being led to moral depravity expanded its following. But these carefree and edgy images sometimes obscure the fact that the vast majority of Americans did not participate in that roaring culture. While Jay Gatsby's crowd was dancing the Lindy Hop, actual voters supported President Harding's promised return to normalcy, never mind the unprecedented corruption of his administration. His successor, silent Cal Coolidge, combined stodgy respectability with an ideology that the business of America is business, leaving predatory capitalism entirely unregulated. And his successor, Herbert Hoover, once a hero of wartime relief, stubbornly opposed government action and as a result found himself presiding helplessly over a disastrous economic depression. The Ku Klux Klan supported these presidents. It's politics. remain stream. It may seem peculiar to label the KKK a social movement, since the better-known movements have been on the political left, such as civil rights and feminism. But almost any of the many scholarly definitions of social movement require recognizing it as such. True, many social movements lack central organization. Many have no top-down leadership. Many do not engage in electoral politics. But many do. all of these things. I think of social movement as a cluster concept, meaning that it may share some, but not necessarily all, of many characteristics. These include the active participation of large numbers, acting to produce social change through challenges to elites, developing strong solidarity and reshaping identities, and using strategies and tactics beyond the standard state-governed channels, such as electioneering and lobbying. Such movements may be built from the top, even operated as businesses, but once they evoke large-scale grassroots identification and participation, they can become social movements and may even escape the control of their founders. The second clan waned as rapidly as it arose and by 1926 had but a fraction of its peak strength, though it continues today. But many social movements, good and bad, are short-lived. Moreover, although internal rivalries and moral scandals repelled many Klan members, their movement won significant victories. Federal immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws, passed by some 30 states, institutionalized a significant part of the Klan agenda. Immigration restriction installed the same hierarchy of desirable and undesirable populations that the Klan promoted. The Klan's greatest achievement may have been its influence on political consciousness, its redefinition of Americanness, and thereby of un-Americanism. would long continue to influence the country's political culture. Precisely because the second Klan was so mainstream, examining it also reveals continuing currents in American history, currents at times rising to the surface, at other times remaining subterranean. Developed during a resurgence of this conservative populism, this book reflects its contemporary context and is meant to do so. It rests on scholarly research. but like all scholarship, it reflects the politics of its time. In my discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, I am not neutral, and like all historians, I cannot and do not wish to discard my values in interpreting the past. Moreover, in my interpretation of the 1920s, I could not avoid the influence of later developments, such as European Nazism and fascism in the 1930s, and neo-Nazis, McCarthyists, and Tea Party. and Trump supporters. As a result, the question of fascism lurks not far beneath the surface of this investigation, and I will address it briefly at the end of the book. Besides the fact that I am one of those the Klan detested, a Jew, an intellectual, a leftist, a feminist, a lover of diversity, no doubt, also informs this book. I am offering an interpretation, not a scholarly monograph. But my goal in this interpretation is to understand, not to conduct an argument or mount an attack. Readers in search of ringing denunciations of the clan's evil may be disappointed. As a student of social movements, I am less interested in condemnation than in explanation. Explaining requires that the historian avoid cheap shots and try to understand why perfectly reasonable people supported the clan. Because the Klan was the biggest social movement of the early 20th century, and because its ideas echo again today, examining it in order to grasp its attractions seems worthwhile. In what follows, I consider the Ku Klux Klan's methods of recruitment, the satisfactions it brought to its members, and the deep structures of its ideology. Its allures were manyfold. They included the rewards of being an insider, of belonging to a community, of expressing and acting on resentments, of participating in drama, of feeling religiously and morally righteous, of turning a profit. Chapter 1. Rebirth. Two media events and one lynching catalyzed the eruption of the second Ku Klux Klan. First came the film, Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. as the adaptation of Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel, The Klansman. The film showed newly freed slaves rampaging, aiming to rape white women, with the collusion of northern carpetbaggers. In it, the first Ku Klux Klan stars as the defender of white womanhood. The film reached a large audience, including President Woodrow Wilson, who showed it at the White House, the first time any movie was shown there, and praised it effusively. It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true. Second, later in 1915, came the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish Atlanta businessman falsely accused of rape and murder. Then, two publications contributed. In 1920, Henry Ford published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and distributed half a million copies. A forgery The Protocols claimed to be the minutes of a late 19th century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their drive for global domination through control of the world's finances and press. Then Ford went on to publish a 91-article series, The International Jew, The World's Problem, in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. These articles constituted an extended anti-Semitic rant along the same lines as The Protocols. One of the film's viewers was Atlanta physician William Joseph Simmons, a southern racist Spanish-American war veteran, though one who never saw action. His unit reached Cuba only after the war ended, turned self-proclaimed minister. Hired as an itinerant preacher by a Methodist Episcopal church, he was promptly fired for inefficiency, a trait he duplicated in the Klan. Afterward, he drifted among occupations. Garter Salesman teacher and paid organizer for a number of fraternal orders. Seemingly addicted to joining organizations in search of a livelihood, he belonged to several churches and 15 different fraternal orders. He decided to create his own fraternal group. Inspired by Birth of a Nation and the Leo Frank lynching, Simmons began studying up on the first Klan. He later claimed that the idea came to him in a mystical vision in 1901, but if so, he did not act on it for 14 years. He got a copy of the original Klan's prescript and used it, as well as Masonic rites, as a basis for a new ritual. It repeated, the first Klan's chorus of hatred and fear of African Americans, arguing that no new environment could ever overcome their hereditary handicap. His propaganda also reflected the anti-radical hysteria of the World War I era. Startling and indisputable facts, he claimed, showed that the hairy claw of Bolshevism, socialism, syndicalism, IWW-ism, industrial workers of the world, and other isms, are seeking, in an insidious but powerful manner, to undermine the very fundamentals of the nation. Governmental actions, framing and executing anarchist immigrants Sacco and Bensetti, and deporting more than 500 immigrant citizens accused of disloyalty, created a model for the Klan's fight to exclude the wrong kind of people from belonging in America. In 1915, Simmons advertised inviting men into a new Ku Klux Klan, which he characterized as a classy order of the highest class. No roughnecks, rowdies, nor yellow streaks. Real men whose oaths are inviolate are needed. He managed to gather a few dozen joiners, including several elderly men who had been members of the first clan. He appointed himself the Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. But like the fraternals he knew, his group developed rituals. but no plan of action. Simmons seems to have been somewhat delusional. Among his fabrications was a claim to have been a secret investigator for the federal government during the war, a boast that brought U.S. Secret Service agents to investigate. He maintained a few years later that this experience led him to plan a secret service of 50,000 Klansmen who would act as moles, reporting to him on immoral behavior. in every community in the United States, behavior the Klan could then correct. He made a disastrous move in buying the financially struggling Baptist Lanier University in Atlanta, which then promised to admit only real Americans. Each state would build its own building, and poor students would be admitted gratis. Only 25 enrolled. Forced into bankruptcy, he had to sell it. Proving not much of an organizer, in five years, Simmons managed to collect only a few hundred Klansmen. Moreover, his principles proved weak. Needing an income in his application to register his new Ku Klux Klan, he labeled it a private bottle club, thus evading prohibition. He never even produced a roster of members, and his liquor sales were not profitable. His Klan conducted only one public action at a veterans parade in 1919, and a photo of his group in that parade turned out to show 20 African Americans he had paid to dress up in sheets. By 1920, his small new group had stagnated. The Klan became a power by shifting to a less parochial and more strategic approach, which Simmons developed under the influence of some experienced PR people, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clark. Their business, the Southern Publicity Association. was already in the Klan's network because it had contracted to promote the prohibitionist Anti-Saloon League. Their partnership was a cross-class alliance between the social top and bottom. Clark's father, who had been a Confederate colonel, owned the Atlanta Constitution and occupied a central position among Atlanta's power elite. Clark's brother managed the paper. Edward Clark had received a fine education but seems to have been a laid-back young man, a dabbler, never a hard worker, accustomed to a privileged life. He held a sinecure as religion editor for the paper, but soon tired of the work. His life changed when he met Bessie Tyler. From a poor family of six children, barely educated, married at 15, a mother at 16, soon widowed, she exhibited unusual ambition and would become one of the country's most powerful. and influential women, and one of the very richest. The team saw a lucrative client in Simmons'new clan group. The minute we said Ku Klux, Tyler recalled, editors from all over the United States began literally pressing us for publicity. By 1920, she and Clark had convinced Simmons that they could grow his new clan, that it had national potential. To realize that potential, it had to multiply its bigotry. The alleged threat from black people would not reverberate among northerners at a time when so few African Americans lived outside the southeast. So Simmons hired them, signing a contract that gave Clark and Tyler an astonishing 80% of any revenue they brought in from new recruits. Since Simmons had gotten nowhere with his new organization, he undoubtedly thought that he had nothing to lose in giving them four-fifths of anything they could bring in. Tyler and Clark became, in practice, head of the Klan for two years. Some historians cite only Clark in discussing their work for the KKK, revealing what I suspect is an unconscious assumption that the woman would naturally play only a secondary role in the business. They turned Simmons into a polished speaker. Engendering an exploiting fear, he would warn that degenerative forces were destroying the American way of life. These were not only black people, but also Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The big city dwellers who were tempting Americans with immoral pleasures, sex, alcohol, and music, notably jazz. Only a fusion of racial purity and evangelical Christian morality could save the country. But the old Klan's white supremacy over blacks was no longer up to the task. Only the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, a.k.a. 100% Americans, could save the country. The Anglo-Saxon is the type man of history. To him must yield the self-centered Hebrew, the cultured Greek, the virile Roman, the mystic Oriental. The second clan took off by melding racism and ethnic bigotry with evangelical Protestant morality. Clark and Tyler used several modern techniques. They offered newspapers private interviews with Simmons, who turned out to be a charming and eloquent spinner of his propaganda. They placed advertisements that included membership application forms in newspapers. They sent out press releases that tied the Klan to any remotely relevant news story. They offered free memberships to ministers, presented to each as a rare honor. By January 1921, they had allegedly trained and deployed over a thousand recruiters. By that summer, they claimed 850,000 new members. A contemporary observer estimated, The Klan's growth at 100,000 new members a week. These were probably exaggerations, but they convey contemporary observers'amazement at its exponential growth. The team also turned this new fraternal order into a serious moneymaker through dues and the sale of regalia. Simmons got a $33,000 home in Atlanta, known as Klankrest, two expensive cars and a bonus of $25,000. $300,000 today. He also purchased the Peachtree Creek Civil War Battleground, sacred to the Confederacy, planning to build a university there, another of his unrealized fantasies. Tyler and Clark profited handsomely, too, allegedly taking in more than $850,000 in their first 15 months on the job. By late 1921, Some of the new Klan members were complaining about this profiteering, while other leaders objected to Simmons'morals. Never a hard-line social purity man, he liked horse races and prize fights, and his partying was making him a noticeable drunkard. Two regional Klan leaders, Hiram Evans from Texas and David Stevenson from Indiana, came to see Simmons as an obstacle to further development. So together with Tyler and Clark, They executed a coup. They deceived Simmons into accepting the title emperor, but ceding control. They had to buy Simmons out for $140,000 since the Klan was legally his wholly owned business. When he realized that he had been ousted, he started another fraternal order, Knights of the Flaming Sword. Klan's people loved medieval martial titles, which flopped. then still another racist group, the white band, but died in obscurity in 1945. These early leadership conflicts presaged the rivalries that would terminally undermine the Klan by the end of the decade. Hiram Evans became the Imperial Wizard in November 1922. A man of boundless vision, ambition, and confidence, Evans hailed from Alabama but grew up in Texas. Like Clark, he was well-born, the son of a judge. Unlike Clark, he was well-educated, at Vanderbilt. His first career as a dentist might seem modest. One of his rivals liked to call him a tooth-puller, and he took advantage of this impression, calling himself the most average man in America. So as to normalize the Klan, his short, plump stature added to his everyman image. In fact, he was capable of serious violence. In Dallas, where he joined the Klan in 1920, he had organized black squads that kidnapped and tortured at least one black man. In 1921, recognizing his aggressive leadership, Clark and Tyler asked him to take charge of membership recruitment, offering him a guaranteed base salary of $7,500 plus commissions. In return, after becoming Imperial Wizard, he fired them. They had made the Klan a national force, and he had no further need for their services. Certainly, no need to give them their astounding 80% of Klan revenue. Still, Tyler and Clark continued to profit from the KKK. opening a realty business to handle Klan properties in Atlanta. As Klan boss, Evans became a reformer. He imagined the Klan as a political party and made electoral politics his top priority. To accomplish this, he made the Klan fully national, moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., and sold the Atlanta Imperial Palace to the Catholic Church. He held up ex-presidents Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. as Klan heroes. He hired professional speechwriters and attorneys and established numerous publications. One of them was a stealth magazine, Fellowship Forum, designed to promote pure Americanism among those who shy away from the mention of the Ku Klux Klan. Acknowledging the need to purify the Klan, he tried to combat drinking and other moral infractions among members, threatening sinners with expulsion. He denounced violence and revised the oath to make recruits swear to uphold the law. He urged members to avoid using their masks when not participating in formal rituals. In the hopes of cleansing the Klan of corruption, he put recruiters on salary rather than commission. He urged recruiters to investigate potential members more carefully. Some complied. The La Grande Oregon Klan Minutes listed those rejected. Howard Grove, Part Indian. Roy Clapp. for bankruptcy too many times. William Snell, for living with a woman not officially his wife. Alonzo Dunn, character and affiliations questioned. But the pressure to grow the clan and the opportunity for leaders and salesmen to enrich themselves often militated against compliance with this reform. Evans may have been naive about management. Observing the oratorical skills of Indiana clan leader David Stevenson. Another young man on the make, Evans made him the chief recruiter for seven states. This turned out to be a major mistake. With a vast and open field for profit and power, Stevenson became a rival to Evans, and his criminal activity contributed to the Klan's decline. I'm a nobody from nowhere, really, but I've got the biggest brains, he boasted. I'm going to be the biggest man in the United States. But Stevenson was a fraud. several times over. He claimed to be the millionaire son of a wealthy businessman and to have earned a decoration for bravery in World War I. In fact, he was the son of a Texas sharecropper. His education at a parochial school ended with the eighth grade, and his stint with the Army was as a recruiter in Iowa. He boasted of owning wholesale coal supply and auto accessory companies, but in fact worked as a salesman for someone else's coal company. He married at least three women, drank heavily, got into fights, beat his wives, and attempted to rape several other women. Stevenson was, however, a lively speaker. As a teenager in Oklahoma, he had been attracted by the famed socialist Oscar Ameringer and got a job with the Socialist Party newspaper. He was drawn not to socialist ideas but to Ameringer's style, which entailed selling his politics like a vaudeville pitchman. From him, Stevenson learned how to work a crowd at Klan events. An enterprising publicist, he turned the Indiana Klan newsletter, The Fiery Cross, into a newspaper and gathered 900 boys to sell it throughout the Midwest, claiming to reach 300,000 readers. He grew the Klan enormously. In southern Indiana, some 23% of native-born white men joined. He developed a mystique around his leadership by not allowing his subordinates to use his name, so the rank-and-file Klansmen knew him only as the Old Man. in that position he too made himself millions and acquired a mansion in atlanta a summer home and a luxurious yacht that he kept on lake erie but despite wealth and authority stevenson could not tame his out-of-control drinking and aggression which would ultimately undermine the whole organization what all these founders shared was respectability however much they exaggerated or lied they passed as honorable citizens and that was key to the Klan's success. It was not secret because it did not need to be. It remained legal and reputable. Local KKKs were often listed in city directories, along with sewing clubs and agricultural societies, as sociologist Kathleen Blee put it. In Danuba, California, the Klan recruited through an advertisement in the high school annual. In Kokomo, Indiana, the Daily Tribune announced Klan meetings in its front page What's Doing column. The Johnson County Indiana Fair designated a Klan Day, during which all shops and offices were to close at noon. In some towns and cities, a significant proportion of residents were members or belonged to members'families. Many spoke of their Klan membership with pride, and scholars who interviewed Klan members decades later found that most of them remained unashamed because they did not consider it a hate group. The Klan's ordinariness, which arose in part from its dog-whistle methods, that is, singing different tunes to different populations, and in part from sheer duplicity, maximized its influence. Some Klan's people in some locations preferred to hide their membership, but none felt the need to hide their agreement with its agenda. That the Klan produced whites-only and Protestants-only sociability did not make it exceptional, because most Americans socialized in segregated spaces. Some contemporary 1920s critics made the erroneous assumption that merely exposing the Klan would isolate and shrink it. That folly was demonstrated when in 1921, the New York World newspaper published a series of investigative reports on the KKK by a disaffected former Klansman, including an official list of its recruiters. The articles were syndicated and published simultaneously in newspapers throughout the country. The reporters and editors expected these revelations of KKK bigotry and vigilantism to put an end to its revival. Instead, they generated a large increase in its membership, signs of the any-publicity-is-good-publicity effect and of the welcome its ideas received. Similarly, opponents generated congressional hearings about the Ku Klux Klan, conducted by the House Committee on Rules in 1921. This, too, grew the Klan. As its spokesman, Simmons presented the KKK as a benign fraternalist and nativist organization, nativism, a.k.a. anti-immigrationism, being completely respectable. The hearings concluded that no action was required. As a journalist for Colliers wrote, Congress, by failure to act, gave Simmons a chance to say that it had put its stamp of approval on the strange new order. When Simmons returned to Atlanta, calls began pouring in from all over America for the right to organize clans. Simmons told a journalist that, We worked 24 hours a day trying to meet the demand. In other words, testimony that liberals would find appalling appealed, by contrast, to many Americans. Many contemporary scholars and critics, such as Frank Bond, Clarence Darrow, Frank Tenenbaum, and William Allen White, branded the Ku Klux Klan an aberration, an outlier in the national political culture. In that understanding, they shared, ironically, a key Klan-ish idea, that one, and only one, ideology was truly American. For most of these critics, that was liberal individualism. This premise led them to diagnose the Ku Klux Klan's rise as the inane hysteria of uneducated, lowbrow hicks, abu boizi, and branding Klansmen as backward, uneducated, isolated from culture, provincial, Insane, busybodies, believers in ghosts, gullible, shabby of mind, social deviants, and representative of the lower classes, critics were expressing a snobbish disdain often repeated in urban elite responses to populism. The liberal New Republic magazine echoed this disdain, even suggesting that people joined the Klan because of the monotony and boredom of small-town life. Klan's people simply ricocheted. that disdain, condemning the immoral vices and mixed cultures of the metropolis. More accurately, but equally disdainfully, the renowned Southern historian Francis Butler Simpkins called it an authentic folk movement. Scholars also condemned the Klan as an example of the irrationality of the crowd, a theme developed in the 1960s by historian Richard Hofstadter. He identified a paranoid style in American mass politics. which he identified with its reliance on conspiracy theories, as in the Klan's allegations of secretive Catholic and Jewish plots to take over the United States. Popular writers also mocked Klan's people's conformity. Novelist Sinclair Lewis regularly made fun of the Klan type. George Babbitt, in his 1922 novel Babbitt, gave birth to a common noun that describes a close-minded, narrow-minded conformist. whose interests and ethics were confined to his business world. Just as he was an elk, a booster, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. In his 1926 Elmer Gantry, Lewis specifically ridiculed the evangelical and racist beliefs of his hero. Writing in 1967, historian Kenneth Jackson disproved the small-town hick thesis by showing the Klan's great strength in the cities. Studying nine cities between 1915 and 1930, he showed that 50 percent of active Klan's people were urbanites and 32 percent lived in the country's largest cities. There were at least 50,000 Klansmen in Chicago, 38,000 in Indianapolis, 35,000 in Philadelphia, and the same number in Detroit, for example. Others have since shown that in many states, Klan per capita membership was larger in cities than in smaller places. The condescending diagnoses of the Klan's popularity by its critics ignored how many other elites and intellectuals shared its worldview. The Klan's favorite term for the whites they approve of, Nordic, probably came from Columbia and Yale-educated lawyer Madison Grant, a distinguished exponent of scientific racism. His 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, raised an alarm about the new non-Nordic immigrants, such as Italians and Jews. He recommended requiring that these unfavorable races be kept segregated in ghettos. Woodrow Wilson and many in his administration regularly voiced anti-Semitic opinions. American colleges and universities have been systematically applied quotas to Jewish applicants. As Jewish immigrants began to achieve academic success, Columbia's medical school reduced its proportion of Jewish students from 47 percent in 1920 to 6 percent in 1940. Congressional debate on the immigration restriction bills of the 1920s referenced the deplorable fact that 80 to 90 percent of the undesirables were Jews. As H. L. Mencken pointed out, if the Klan is against the Jews, so are three-quarters of the good clubs. Antikatholicism was not confined to the Klan either. A weekly newspaper from Missouri, The Menace, devoted specifically to Antikatholicism, had a circulation of 1.5 million. Populist Southern politician Tom Watson used tested and proved Antikatholicism to win. The Sons and Daughters of Washington, referring to George, not the location. Various Protestant newspapers, immigration restrictionist groups, and politicians. The list of Catholic haters included many organizations, politicians, and media across the nation. The bigoted Hearst newspapers were then the largest media conglomerate in the world. Frank Baum, a Klan opponent who published in the American Journal of Sociology, wrote of The Dangerous Theory. that anyone over 21 can vote intelligently, and lamented that Barbaric and totally illiterate Negro slaves, directly after their emancipation, were permitted to vote and sit in the state legislatures, and that millions of peasants, mostly illiterate and possessed of not the slightest background of political experience, have been invited to join us and hastily receive all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Clan race thought mirrored the principles of eugenics accepted in the 1920s as state-of-the-art science. Resting on Lamarck's mistaken genetics, eugenical theory assumed that socially acquired characteristics could be inherited. From this pseudoscience, it logically followed that those of northern European ancestry ruled because they were superior and deserved to rule. Leading eugenists such as Madison Grant and Harvard Ph.D. Lothrop Stoddard led the campaign to encourage greater fertility among the superior class and to discourage fertility. among the inferior class, and their definitions of these classes were identical to the clans. Many universities and colleges required students to study eugenics. Every biology textbook of the period included a chapter on eugenics. The National Education Association formed a Eugenical Practices Committee. Thirty states passed eugenical compulsory sterilization laws. In short, there was nothing aberrant in the Klan's racial hierarchy. Chapter 2. Ancestors. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s had six ancestors, each of them long embedded in American history. Each of them contributed one of the Klan's six main... We hope you enjoyed this preview. To continue listening to this audiobook on Google Play Books, Use the link in the video description.

Some said 50,000 came, while others said 200,000. No doubt a wild exaggeration, but one that reflected the celebratory mood. Reserved train cars brought in people from throughout Indiana and nearby states. This giant gathering made its participants feel part of something vast. patriotic and noble a celebration of americanism the food was so plentiful it required several rows of tables each extending the distance of a block in addition to the heaps of casseroles and desserts that women brought the organizers provided five thousand cases of pop and near beer fifty five thousand buns and six tons of beef not to mention the two hundred and fifty pounds of coffee and twenty five hundred pies To entertain the kids, organizers had set up a children's area with games and sports.

Grown-ups could watch a six-round boxing match, a boys'singing quartet, circus performers, and an evening film, then known as a talkie. An airplane circled overhead, with a huge white cross flashing from the bottom of the fuselage, while an acrobat performed daredevil feats on its wings. Another Indiana mass powwow advertised like this. Big barbecue, 20 brass bands, high tight wire walking, 100 feet in the air, wild bronco busting, outlaw horses, imported Texas cowboys, national speakers, 200 horsemen, evening fireworks, illustrated parades, visit Valparaiso University, the sand dunes, see the Calumet region. These quintessentially American celebrations were Ku Klux Klan affairs.

held frequently during the peak of its power in the nineteen twenties if we are to understand this second coming of the clan we must surrender some of our preconceptions about it those come mainly from the first ku klux klan established after the civil war as a secret fraternity with the aim of reimposing servitude on african americans after the end of slavery its tools were lynchings torture and other forms of terrorism designed to inhibit any challenge to white supremacy. It had never entirely disappeared, but faded somewhat after achieving its goal, electoral disfranchisement and economic subjugation of black people. The second Klan, as it has been called, took pride in its namesake and its commitment to white supremacy, but it differed significantly from its parent. It was stronger in the North than in the South. It spread above the Mason-Dixon line by adding Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and bootleggers to its list of enemies and pariahs, in part because African Americans were less numerous in the North.

Its leaders tried to prohibit violence, though they could not always enforce the ban. Unlike the first Klan, which operated mainly at night, meeting in hard-to-find locations, the second operated in daylight and organized mass public events. Never a secret organization, it published recruiting ads in newspapers, its members boasted their affiliation, and it elected hundreds of its members to public office.

It was vastly bigger than the first Klan, claiming, in what was almost certainly an exaggeration, 4 million to 6 million members. It owned or controlled about 150 magazines or newspapers, two colleges, and the Cavalier Motion Picture Company. dedicated to countering Hollywood's immoral influence. Most important, the 1920s Klan's program was embraced by millions who were not members, possibly even a majority of Americans. Far from appearing disreputable or extreme in its ideology, the 1920s Klan seemed ordinary and respectable to its contemporaries.

At many of its events, elected officials spoke. Its members included both the well and the poorly educated, professionals, business people, farmers, and wage workers. but lower middle class and skilled working class people formed its core constituency.

In addition to providing fraternalism and sisterhood, it conferred prestige on its members and delivered business networking opportunities. For these reasons, many joined in the hopes of raising their social and economic status or identity. Thus, membership in the clan could appear to offer a route into the middle class. Although it claimed to represent the soul of America, its prestige rose from its exclusiveness.

During its relatively brief period of strength, its members were proud to belong. The Klan built a politics of resentment, reflecting but also fomenting antipathy toward those who it defined as threatening Americanism. To understand its strength, we need to notice which groups it identified as enemies.

By blaming immigrants and non-Protestants for stealing jobs and government from true Americans, it stayed away from criticism of those who wielded economic power. Devoted to a business ethic, revering the pursuit of profit as confirmation of individual independence and manliness, the Klan respected men of great wealth and considered their social position earned and deserved. Instead, it blamed elites.

typically presented as big city liberal professionals secular urbanites who promoted cosmopolitanism and were thus insufficiently patriotic and looked down on clanspeople as stupid and or irrational and or out of step with modernity this disrespect for the clan only intensified its hostility and sense of righteousness simultaneously the clan denounced corruption which it considered a uniquely big city and non-protestant phenomenon and complained especially that big city governments and police were venal and lazy these klan targets were always racialized its anti elitism focused on jews all of whom appeared in klan talk either as snobbish overeducated effete professionals or money-grubbing merchants out to fleece innocent consumers thus large populations of urban poor and working-class Jews did not exist in Klan social analysis. Political corruption it blamed on Catholics, the Irish and Italians especially, and here too the Klan did not acknowledge the masses of non-Protestant working-class people who were as much fleeced by corruption as were Klan members. In the last few decades, that understanding of elites, albeit with less anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism, has once again become common in political rhetoric.

Today's anti-elitism provides insight into the popularity of the Klan and illustrates particularly the difficulty of placing it on a conventional left-right spectrum. True, Klan's people typically preached distinctly right-wing principles, such as anti-communism, though concern about political radicals played only a minor part in its diatribes. Of course, bigotry has long been characterized of the right. But Klan anger was also directed at what it considered immorality.

This resentment did not always coincide with actual economic insecurity. Some Klansmen felt their economic position slipping, but others were upwardly mobile. Racial and religious bigotry may have been provoked by economic anxiety, but also arose from independent, long-standing American traditions.

Goading members into racial and religious anger, might not have worked without pre-existing prejudices. Also challenging a neat left-right distinction is the fact that most traditional conservatives denounced the Klan out of fear that mass social movements could lead to dangerous mob rule. Many ministers in mainstream Protestant denominations similarly denounced Klan's people's evangelical and occasionally fundamentalist theology as the symptom of a primitive, ignorant mindset. Further blurring the left-right distinction was the Klan's endorsement of some progressive causes. However opportunist these endorsements, the Klan argued for more aid to public schools and welcomed the Woman Suffrage Amendment.

Status anxiety, another diagnosis of the Klan's appeal, saturated Klan rhetoric, notably in the chorus of fake news stories about how Catholics and Jews were taking over government. Its claims to be losing status and respect is not easily proved or disproved. We lack both historical evidence for anxiety and parameters for measuring it.

Moreover, Klan rhetoric about the threat to American values also suggests a more immediate cause, the skillful demagoguery of leaders. The enthusiasm they engendered did not come exclusively from pre-existing grievances. Because enlarging itself was the Klan's highest priority, it fielded scores of traveling speakers who delivered the message that the country faced a total crisis of morals, government, and religion.

They deployed hyperbole and allegations of terrifying conspiracies to bring in more members and described themselves as part of a team committed to rescuing the country from its internal enemies. Clan speakers, many of whom were ministers skilled in stirring listeners, drew hundreds and occasionally thousands into membership. Attending lectures was then a standard leisure time activity. That speakers stood to profit personally, as we will soon see, gave them further motivation to hone their rhetorical skill.

We cannot afford to underestimate the power of this rhetoric in building the mass social movement that was the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. As sociologists Kathleen Blee and Alberto Malucci remind us, we should understand those grievances as not only intensified, but actually produced by this social movement. Examining the Klan opens a window into a less familiar 1920s, a decade often called the Roaring Twenties.

It has been represented through the flapper, who drank, smoked, danced, and wore short skirts. Through the hot new consumer culture, the birth of commercial radio, and the decade's most important new product, automobiles, the number of cars on the road, 7.5 million by 1920, reached 23 million by 1929. And cars were implicated in the alleged immorality because they provided not only mobility, but sexual privacy for so many young Americans. The Klan thrived by exaggerating these stereotypes of cultural license. and its claim that the country was being led to moral depravity expanded its following. But these carefree and edgy images sometimes obscure the fact that the vast majority of Americans did not participate in that roaring culture.

While Jay Gatsby's crowd was dancing the Lindy Hop, actual voters supported President Harding's promised return to normalcy, never mind the unprecedented corruption of his administration. His successor, silent Cal Coolidge, combined stodgy respectability with an ideology that the business of America is business, leaving predatory capitalism entirely unregulated. And his successor, Herbert Hoover, once a hero of wartime relief, stubbornly opposed government action and as a result found himself presiding helplessly over a disastrous economic depression.

The Ku Klux Klan supported these presidents. It's politics. remain stream. It may seem peculiar to label the KKK a social movement, since the better-known movements have been on the political left, such as civil rights and feminism. But almost any of the many scholarly definitions of social movement require recognizing it as such.

True, many social movements lack central organization. Many have no top-down leadership. Many do not engage in electoral politics.

But many do. all of these things. I think of social movement as a cluster concept, meaning that it may share some, but not necessarily all, of many characteristics.

These include the active participation of large numbers, acting to produce social change through challenges to elites, developing strong solidarity and reshaping identities, and using strategies and tactics beyond the standard state-governed channels, such as electioneering and lobbying. Such movements may be built from the top, even operated as businesses, but once they evoke large-scale grassroots identification and participation, they can become social movements and may even escape the control of their founders. The second clan waned as rapidly as it arose and by 1926 had but a fraction of its peak strength, though it continues today.

But many social movements, good and bad, are short-lived. Moreover, although internal rivalries and moral scandals repelled many Klan members, their movement won significant victories. Federal immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws, passed by some 30 states, institutionalized a significant part of the Klan agenda.

Immigration restriction installed the same hierarchy of desirable and undesirable populations that the Klan promoted. The Klan's greatest achievement may have been its influence on political consciousness, its redefinition of Americanness, and thereby of un-Americanism. would long continue to influence the country's political culture. Precisely because the second Klan was so mainstream, examining it also reveals continuing currents in American history, currents at times rising to the surface, at other times remaining subterranean.

Developed during a resurgence of this conservative populism, this book reflects its contemporary context and is meant to do so. It rests on scholarly research. but like all scholarship, it reflects the politics of its time. In my discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, I am not neutral, and like all historians, I cannot and do not wish to discard my values in interpreting the past.

Moreover, in my interpretation of the 1920s, I could not avoid the influence of later developments, such as European Nazism and fascism in the 1930s, and neo-Nazis, McCarthyists, and Tea Party. and Trump supporters. As a result, the question of fascism lurks not far beneath the surface of this investigation, and I will address it briefly at the end of the book. Besides the fact that I am one of those the Klan detested, a Jew, an intellectual, a leftist, a feminist, a lover of diversity, no doubt, also informs this book. I am offering an interpretation, not a scholarly monograph.

But my goal in this interpretation is to understand, not to conduct an argument or mount an attack. Readers in search of ringing denunciations of the clan's evil may be disappointed. As a student of social movements, I am less interested in condemnation than in explanation.

Explaining requires that the historian avoid cheap shots and try to understand why perfectly reasonable people supported the clan. Because the Klan was the biggest social movement of the early 20th century, and because its ideas echo again today, examining it in order to grasp its attractions seems worthwhile. In what follows, I consider the Ku Klux Klan's methods of recruitment, the satisfactions it brought to its members, and the deep structures of its ideology. Its allures were manyfold.

They included the rewards of being an insider, of belonging to a community, of expressing and acting on resentments, of participating in drama, of feeling religiously and morally righteous, of turning a profit. Chapter 1. Rebirth. Two media events and one lynching catalyzed the eruption of the second Ku Klux Klan.

First came the film, Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. as the adaptation of Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel, The Klansman. The film showed newly freed slaves rampaging, aiming to rape white women, with the collusion of northern carpetbaggers. In it, the first Ku Klux Klan stars as the defender of white womanhood. The film reached a large audience, including President Woodrow Wilson, who showed it at the White House, the first time any movie was shown there, and praised it effusively.

It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true. Second, later in 1915, came the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish Atlanta businessman falsely accused of rape and murder. Then, two publications contributed.

In 1920, Henry Ford published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and distributed half a million copies. A forgery The Protocols claimed to be the minutes of a late 19th century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their drive for global domination through control of the world's finances and press. Then Ford went on to publish a 91-article series, The International Jew, The World's Problem, in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. These articles constituted an extended anti-Semitic rant along the same lines as The Protocols. One of the film's viewers was Atlanta physician William Joseph Simmons, a southern racist Spanish-American war veteran, though one who never saw action.

His unit reached Cuba only after the war ended, turned self-proclaimed minister. Hired as an itinerant preacher by a Methodist Episcopal church, he was promptly fired for inefficiency, a trait he duplicated in the Klan. Afterward, he drifted among occupations. Garter Salesman teacher and paid organizer for a number of fraternal orders. Seemingly addicted to joining organizations in search of a livelihood, he belonged to several churches and 15 different fraternal orders.

He decided to create his own fraternal group. Inspired by Birth of a Nation and the Leo Frank lynching, Simmons began studying up on the first Klan. He later claimed that the idea came to him in a mystical vision in 1901, but if so, he did not act on it for 14 years. He got a copy of the original Klan's prescript and used it, as well as Masonic rites, as a basis for a new ritual.

It repeated, the first Klan's chorus of hatred and fear of African Americans, arguing that no new environment could ever overcome their hereditary handicap. His propaganda also reflected the anti-radical hysteria of the World War I era. Startling and indisputable facts, he claimed, showed that the hairy claw of Bolshevism, socialism, syndicalism, IWW-ism, industrial workers of the world, and other isms, are seeking, in an insidious but powerful manner, to undermine the very fundamentals of the nation.

Governmental actions, framing and executing anarchist immigrants Sacco and Bensetti, and deporting more than 500 immigrant citizens accused of disloyalty, created a model for the Klan's fight to exclude the wrong kind of people from belonging in America. In 1915, Simmons advertised inviting men into a new Ku Klux Klan, which he characterized as a classy order of the highest class. No roughnecks, rowdies, nor yellow streaks. Real men whose oaths are inviolate are needed.

He managed to gather a few dozen joiners, including several elderly men who had been members of the first clan. He appointed himself the Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. But like the fraternals he knew, his group developed rituals.

but no plan of action. Simmons seems to have been somewhat delusional. Among his fabrications was a claim to have been a secret investigator for the federal government during the war, a boast that brought U.S.

Secret Service agents to investigate. He maintained a few years later that this experience led him to plan a secret service of 50,000 Klansmen who would act as moles, reporting to him on immoral behavior. in every community in the United States, behavior the Klan could then correct. He made a disastrous move in buying the financially struggling Baptist Lanier University in Atlanta, which then promised to admit only real Americans.

Each state would build its own building, and poor students would be admitted gratis. Only 25 enrolled. Forced into bankruptcy, he had to sell it. Proving not much of an organizer, in five years, Simmons managed to collect only a few hundred Klansmen. Moreover, his principles proved weak.

Needing an income in his application to register his new Ku Klux Klan, he labeled it a private bottle club, thus evading prohibition. He never even produced a roster of members, and his liquor sales were not profitable. His Klan conducted only one public action at a veterans parade in 1919, and a photo of his group in that parade turned out to show 20 African Americans he had paid to dress up in sheets.

By 1920, his small new group had stagnated. The Klan became a power by shifting to a less parochial and more strategic approach, which Simmons developed under the influence of some experienced PR people, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clark. Their business, the Southern Publicity Association. was already in the Klan's network because it had contracted to promote the prohibitionist Anti-Saloon League. Their partnership was a cross-class alliance between the social top and bottom.

Clark's father, who had been a Confederate colonel, owned the Atlanta Constitution and occupied a central position among Atlanta's power elite. Clark's brother managed the paper. Edward Clark had received a fine education but seems to have been a laid-back young man, a dabbler, never a hard worker, accustomed to a privileged life. He held a sinecure as religion editor for the paper, but soon tired of the work.

His life changed when he met Bessie Tyler. From a poor family of six children, barely educated, married at 15, a mother at 16, soon widowed, she exhibited unusual ambition and would become one of the country's most powerful. and influential women, and one of the very richest. The team saw a lucrative client in Simmons'new clan group.

The minute we said Ku Klux, Tyler recalled, editors from all over the United States began literally pressing us for publicity. By 1920, she and Clark had convinced Simmons that they could grow his new clan, that it had national potential. To realize that potential, it had to multiply its bigotry.

The alleged threat from black people would not reverberate among northerners at a time when so few African Americans lived outside the southeast. So Simmons hired them, signing a contract that gave Clark and Tyler an astonishing 80% of any revenue they brought in from new recruits. Since Simmons had gotten nowhere with his new organization, he undoubtedly thought that he had nothing to lose in giving them four-fifths of anything they could bring in.

Tyler and Clark became, in practice, head of the Klan for two years. Some historians cite only Clark in discussing their work for the KKK, revealing what I suspect is an unconscious assumption that the woman would naturally play only a secondary role in the business. They turned Simmons into a polished speaker.

Engendering an exploiting fear, he would warn that degenerative forces were destroying the American way of life. These were not only black people, but also Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The big city dwellers who were tempting Americans with immoral pleasures, sex, alcohol, and music, notably jazz. Only a fusion of racial purity and evangelical Christian morality could save the country.

But the old Klan's white supremacy over blacks was no longer up to the task. Only the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, a.k.a. 100% Americans, could save the country. The Anglo-Saxon is the type man of history.

To him must yield the self-centered Hebrew, the cultured Greek, the virile Roman, the mystic Oriental. The second clan took off by melding racism and ethnic bigotry with evangelical Protestant morality. Clark and Tyler used several modern techniques.

They offered newspapers private interviews with Simmons, who turned out to be a charming and eloquent spinner of his propaganda. They placed advertisements that included membership application forms in newspapers. They sent out press releases that tied the Klan to any remotely relevant news story.

They offered free memberships to ministers, presented to each as a rare honor. By January 1921, they had allegedly trained and deployed over a thousand recruiters. By that summer, they claimed 850,000 new members. A contemporary observer estimated, The Klan's growth at 100,000 new members a week.

These were probably exaggerations, but they convey contemporary observers'amazement at its exponential growth. The team also turned this new fraternal order into a serious moneymaker through dues and the sale of regalia. Simmons got a $33,000 home in Atlanta, known as Klankrest, two expensive cars and a bonus of $25,000. $300,000 today. He also purchased the Peachtree Creek Civil War Battleground, sacred to the Confederacy, planning to build a university there, another of his unrealized fantasies.

Tyler and Clark profited handsomely, too, allegedly taking in more than $850,000 in their first 15 months on the job. By late 1921, Some of the new Klan members were complaining about this profiteering, while other leaders objected to Simmons'morals. Never a hard-line social purity man, he liked horse races and prize fights, and his partying was making him a noticeable drunkard.

Two regional Klan leaders, Hiram Evans from Texas and David Stevenson from Indiana, came to see Simmons as an obstacle to further development. So together with Tyler and Clark, They executed a coup. They deceived Simmons into accepting the title emperor, but ceding control.

They had to buy Simmons out for $140,000 since the Klan was legally his wholly owned business. When he realized that he had been ousted, he started another fraternal order, Knights of the Flaming Sword. Klan's people loved medieval martial titles, which flopped. then still another racist group, the white band, but died in obscurity in 1945. These early leadership conflicts presaged the rivalries that would terminally undermine the Klan by the end of the decade. Hiram Evans became the Imperial Wizard in November 1922. A man of boundless vision, ambition, and confidence, Evans hailed from Alabama but grew up in Texas.

Like Clark, he was well-born, the son of a judge. Unlike Clark, he was well-educated, at Vanderbilt. His first career as a dentist might seem modest.

One of his rivals liked to call him a tooth-puller, and he took advantage of this impression, calling himself the most average man in America. So as to normalize the Klan, his short, plump stature added to his everyman image. In fact, he was capable of serious violence.

In Dallas, where he joined the Klan in 1920, he had organized black squads that kidnapped and tortured at least one black man. In 1921, recognizing his aggressive leadership, Clark and Tyler asked him to take charge of membership recruitment, offering him a guaranteed base salary of $7,500 plus commissions. In return, after becoming Imperial Wizard, he fired them. They had made the Klan a national force, and he had no further need for their services.

Certainly, no need to give them their astounding 80% of Klan revenue. Still, Tyler and Clark continued to profit from the KKK. opening a realty business to handle Klan properties in Atlanta. As Klan boss, Evans became a reformer.

He imagined the Klan as a political party and made electoral politics his top priority. To accomplish this, he made the Klan fully national, moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., and sold the Atlanta Imperial Palace to the Catholic Church. He held up ex-presidents Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. as Klan heroes. He hired professional speechwriters and attorneys and established numerous publications.

One of them was a stealth magazine, Fellowship Forum, designed to promote pure Americanism among those who shy away from the mention of the Ku Klux Klan. Acknowledging the need to purify the Klan, he tried to combat drinking and other moral infractions among members, threatening sinners with expulsion. He denounced violence and revised the oath to make recruits swear to uphold the law.

He urged members to avoid using their masks when not participating in formal rituals. In the hopes of cleansing the Klan of corruption, he put recruiters on salary rather than commission. He urged recruiters to investigate potential members more carefully. Some complied. The La Grande Oregon Klan Minutes listed those rejected.

Howard Grove, Part Indian. Roy Clapp. for bankruptcy too many times.

William Snell, for living with a woman not officially his wife. Alonzo Dunn, character and affiliations questioned. But the pressure to grow the clan and the opportunity for leaders and salesmen to enrich themselves often militated against compliance with this reform.

Evans may have been naive about management. Observing the oratorical skills of Indiana clan leader David Stevenson. Another young man on the make, Evans made him the chief recruiter for seven states.

This turned out to be a major mistake. With a vast and open field for profit and power, Stevenson became a rival to Evans, and his criminal activity contributed to the Klan's decline. I'm a nobody from nowhere, really, but I've got the biggest brains, he boasted. I'm going to be the biggest man in the United States. But Stevenson was a fraud.

several times over. He claimed to be the millionaire son of a wealthy businessman and to have earned a decoration for bravery in World War I. In fact, he was the son of a Texas sharecropper. His education at a parochial school ended with the eighth grade, and his stint with the Army was as a recruiter in Iowa. He boasted of owning wholesale coal supply and auto accessory companies, but in fact worked as a salesman for someone else's coal company.

He married at least three women, drank heavily, got into fights, beat his wives, and attempted to rape several other women. Stevenson was, however, a lively speaker. As a teenager in Oklahoma, he had been attracted by the famed socialist Oscar Ameringer and got a job with the Socialist Party newspaper.

He was drawn not to socialist ideas but to Ameringer's style, which entailed selling his politics like a vaudeville pitchman. From him, Stevenson learned how to work a crowd at Klan events. An enterprising publicist, he turned the Indiana Klan newsletter, The Fiery Cross, into a newspaper and gathered 900 boys to sell it throughout the Midwest, claiming to reach 300,000 readers. He grew the Klan enormously.

In southern Indiana, some 23% of native-born white men joined. He developed a mystique around his leadership by not allowing his subordinates to use his name, so the rank-and-file Klansmen knew him only as the Old Man. in that position he too made himself millions and acquired a mansion in atlanta a summer home and a luxurious yacht that he kept on lake erie but despite wealth and authority stevenson could not tame his out-of-control drinking and aggression which would ultimately undermine the whole organization what all these founders shared was respectability however much they exaggerated or lied they passed as honorable citizens and that was key to the Klan's success. It was not secret because it did not need to be.

It remained legal and reputable. Local KKKs were often listed in city directories, along with sewing clubs and agricultural societies, as sociologist Kathleen Blee put it. In Danuba, California, the Klan recruited through an advertisement in the high school annual.

In Kokomo, Indiana, the Daily Tribune announced Klan meetings in its front page What's Doing column. The Johnson County Indiana Fair designated a Klan Day, during which all shops and offices were to close at noon. In some towns and cities, a significant proportion of residents were members or belonged to members'families.

Many spoke of their Klan membership with pride, and scholars who interviewed Klan members decades later found that most of them remained unashamed because they did not consider it a hate group. The Klan's ordinariness, which arose in part from its dog-whistle methods, that is, singing different tunes to different populations, and in part from sheer duplicity, maximized its influence. Some Klan's people in some locations preferred to hide their membership, but none felt the need to hide their agreement with its agenda. That the Klan produced whites-only and Protestants-only sociability did not make it exceptional, because most Americans socialized in segregated spaces.

Some contemporary 1920s critics made the erroneous assumption that merely exposing the Klan would isolate and shrink it. That folly was demonstrated when in 1921, the New York World newspaper published a series of investigative reports on the KKK by a disaffected former Klansman, including an official list of its recruiters. The articles were syndicated and published simultaneously in newspapers throughout the country.

The reporters and editors expected these revelations of KKK bigotry and vigilantism to put an end to its revival. Instead, they generated a large increase in its membership, signs of the any-publicity-is-good-publicity effect and of the welcome its ideas received. Similarly, opponents generated congressional hearings about the Ku Klux Klan, conducted by the House Committee on Rules in 1921. This, too, grew the Klan.

As its spokesman, Simmons presented the KKK as a benign fraternalist and nativist organization, nativism, a.k.a. anti-immigrationism, being completely respectable. The hearings concluded that no action was required. As a journalist for Colliers wrote, Congress, by failure to act, gave Simmons a chance to say that it had put its stamp of approval on the strange new order.

When Simmons returned to Atlanta, calls began pouring in from all over America for the right to organize clans. Simmons told a journalist that, We worked 24 hours a day trying to meet the demand. In other words, testimony that liberals would find appalling appealed, by contrast, to many Americans.

Many contemporary scholars and critics, such as Frank Bond, Clarence Darrow, Frank Tenenbaum, and William Allen White, branded the Ku Klux Klan an aberration, an outlier in the national political culture. In that understanding, they shared, ironically, a key Klan-ish idea, that one, and only one, ideology was truly American. For most of these critics, that was liberal individualism.

This premise led them to diagnose the Ku Klux Klan's rise as the inane hysteria of uneducated, lowbrow hicks, abu boizi, and branding Klansmen as backward, uneducated, isolated from culture, provincial, Insane, busybodies, believers in ghosts, gullible, shabby of mind, social deviants, and representative of the lower classes, critics were expressing a snobbish disdain often repeated in urban elite responses to populism. The liberal New Republic magazine echoed this disdain, even suggesting that people joined the Klan because of the monotony and boredom of small-town life. Klan's people simply ricocheted. that disdain, condemning the immoral vices and mixed cultures of the metropolis.

More accurately, but equally disdainfully, the renowned Southern historian Francis Butler Simpkins called it an authentic folk movement. Scholars also condemned the Klan as an example of the irrationality of the crowd, a theme developed in the 1960s by historian Richard Hofstadter. He identified a paranoid style in American mass politics. which he identified with its reliance on conspiracy theories, as in the Klan's allegations of secretive Catholic and Jewish plots to take over the United States. Popular writers also mocked Klan's people's conformity.

Novelist Sinclair Lewis regularly made fun of the Klan type. George Babbitt, in his 1922 novel Babbitt, gave birth to a common noun that describes a close-minded, narrow-minded conformist. whose interests and ethics were confined to his business world.

Just as he was an elk, a booster, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. In his 1926 Elmer Gantry, Lewis specifically ridiculed the evangelical and racist beliefs of his hero. Writing in 1967, historian Kenneth Jackson disproved the small-town hick thesis by showing the Klan's great strength in the cities.

Studying nine cities between 1915 and 1930, he showed that 50 percent of active Klan's people were urbanites and 32 percent lived in the country's largest cities. There were at least 50,000 Klansmen in Chicago, 38,000 in Indianapolis, 35,000 in Philadelphia, and the same number in Detroit, for example. Others have since shown that in many states, Klan per capita membership was larger in cities than in smaller places.

The condescending diagnoses of the Klan's popularity by its critics ignored how many other elites and intellectuals shared its worldview. The Klan's favorite term for the whites they approve of, Nordic, probably came from Columbia and Yale-educated lawyer Madison Grant, a distinguished exponent of scientific racism. His 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, raised an alarm about the new non-Nordic immigrants, such as Italians and Jews.

He recommended requiring that these unfavorable races be kept segregated in ghettos. Woodrow Wilson and many in his administration regularly voiced anti-Semitic opinions. American colleges and universities have been systematically applied quotas to Jewish applicants. As Jewish immigrants began to achieve academic success, Columbia's medical school reduced its proportion of Jewish students from 47 percent in 1920 to 6 percent in 1940. Congressional debate on the immigration restriction bills of the 1920s referenced the deplorable fact that 80 to 90 percent of the undesirables were Jews. As H. L. Mencken pointed out, if the Klan is against the Jews, so are three-quarters of the good clubs.

Antikatholicism was not confined to the Klan either. A weekly newspaper from Missouri, The Menace, devoted specifically to Antikatholicism, had a circulation of 1.5 million. Populist Southern politician Tom Watson used tested and proved Antikatholicism to win. The Sons and Daughters of Washington, referring to George, not the location. Various Protestant newspapers, immigration restrictionist groups, and politicians.

The list of Catholic haters included many organizations, politicians, and media across the nation. The bigoted Hearst newspapers were then the largest media conglomerate in the world. Frank Baum, a Klan opponent who published in the American Journal of Sociology, wrote of The Dangerous Theory.

that anyone over 21 can vote intelligently, and lamented that Barbaric and totally illiterate Negro slaves, directly after their emancipation, were permitted to vote and sit in the state legislatures, and that millions of peasants, mostly illiterate and possessed of not the slightest background of political experience, have been invited to join us and hastily receive all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Clan race thought mirrored the principles of eugenics accepted in the 1920s as state-of-the-art science. Resting on Lamarck's mistaken genetics, eugenical theory assumed that socially acquired characteristics could be inherited.

From this pseudoscience, it logically followed that those of northern European ancestry ruled because they were superior and deserved to rule. Leading eugenists such as Madison Grant and Harvard Ph.D. Lothrop Stoddard led the campaign to encourage greater fertility among the superior class and to discourage fertility. among the inferior class, and their definitions of these classes were identical to the clans.

Many universities and colleges required students to study eugenics. Every biology textbook of the period included a chapter on eugenics. The National Education Association formed a Eugenical Practices Committee.

Thirty states passed eugenical compulsory sterilization laws. In short, there was nothing aberrant in the Klan's racial hierarchy. Chapter 2. Ancestors. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s had six ancestors, each of them long embedded in American history.

Each of them contributed one of the Klan's six main... We hope you enjoyed this preview. To continue listening to this audiobook on Google Play Books, Use the link in the video description.

Transcript for:Exploring the KKK's 1920s Resurgence

Transcript for:
Exploring the KKK's 1920s Resurgence