Deliverance Ireland

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), or simply "the Klan", is the name of three distinct past movements in the United States that had advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, anti-immigration, and, especially in later iterations, Nordicism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism,  historically expressed through terrorism aimed at groups or individuals whom they opposed.  All three movements had called for the "purification" of American society, and all are considered right wing extremist organizations.

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The first Klan flourished in the Southern United States in 1869 and died out in1871.  It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South during the Reconstruction Era, especially by using violence against African American leaders.  With numerous chapters across the South, it was suppressed in 1871, through federal law enforcement.  Members made their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be terrifying, and to hide their identities.

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The second group was founded in 1915, and flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, particularly in urban areas of the Midwest and West.  It opposed Catholics and mostly Jews , especially newer immigrants, and stressed opposition to the Catholic Church.  This second organization adopted a standard white costume and used similar code words as the first Klan, while adding cross burnings and mass parades.

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The third manifestation of the KKK emerged 1952, in the form of small, local, unconnected groups that use the KKK name.  They focused on opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, often using violence and murder to suppress activists.  It is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League puts total Klan membership nationwide at 3,560 while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6,000 members total.

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The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent references to America's "Anglo-Saxon" blood, hearkening back to 19th-century nativism.  Although members of the KKK swear to uphold Christian morality, virtually every Christian denomination has officially denounced the KKK.

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Overview: Three Klans

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First KKK

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The first Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, sometime between December 1865 and August 1866 by six former members of the Confederate army as a fraternal social club inspired at least in part by the then largely defunct Sons of Malta, from which parts of the initiation ceremony were borrowed, with the same purpose: "ludicrous initiations, the baffling of public curiosity, and the amusement for members were the only objects of the Klan."The name is derived from the Greek word kuklos (κύκλος) which means circle.

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According to The Cyclopædia of Fraternities (1907) "Beginning in April, 1867, there was a gradual transformation.  The members had conjured up a veritable Frankenstein.  They had played with an engine of power and mystery, though organized on entirely innocent lines, and found themselves overcome by a belief that something must lie behind it all—that there was, after all, a serious purpose, a work for the Klan to do."

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Although there was little organizational structure above the local level, similar groups rose across the South and adopted the same name and methods.  Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement during the Reconstruction era in the United States.  As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans.  In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were successfully enforced in prosecuting and suppressing Klan crimes.

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The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives. It seriously weakened the black political establishment through its use of assassinations and threats of violence; it drove some people out of politics. On the other hand, it caused a sharp backlash, with passage of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of "restoring order, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling blacks to exercise their rights as citizens."[27] Historian George C. Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded by the Democratic leaders of the South. He says:

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the Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses; its lack of central organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists. More fundamentally, it declined because it failed to achieve its central objective – the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South.

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Second KKK

 

In 1915, the second Klan was founded in Atlanta, Georgia.  Starting in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of using full-time paid recruiters and appealed to new members as a fraternal organization, of which many examples were flourishing at the time.  The national headquarters made its profit through a monopoly of costume sales, while the organizers were paid through initiation fees.  It grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity.  Reflecting the social tensions pitting urban versus rural America, it spread to every state and was prominent in many cities.  The second KKK preached "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality and better enforcement of prohibition.  Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti-Catholicism and nativism.  Its appeal was directed exclusively at white Protestants; it opposed Jews, blacks, Catholics, and newly arriving Southern European groups such as Italians.  Some local groups threatened violence against rum runners and notorious sinners; the violent episodes generally took place in the South.

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The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure.  At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15.2% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men.  Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1931.  It finally faded away in the 1940s.  Klan organizers also operated in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan in 1926-28, where Klansmen denounced immigrants from Eastern Europe as a threat to Canada's British heritage.

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Third KKK

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The "Ku Klux Klan" name was used by numerous independent local groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.  During this period, they often forged alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama.  Several members of KKK groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963.  Today, researchers estimate that there may be 150 Klan chapters with upwards of 5,000 members nationwide.

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Today, many sources classify the Klan as a "subversive or terrorist organization".  In April 1997, FBI agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and conspiring to blow up a natural gas processing plant.  In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the Klan to be a terrorist organization.  In 2004, a professor at the University of Louisville began a campaign to have the Klan declared a terrorist organization in order to ban it from campus.

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First Klan: 1865–1871

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Six Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, during the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War.  The name was formed by combining the Greek kyklos (κύκλος, circle) with clan.  The group was known for a short time as the "Kuklux Clan". The Ku Klux Klan was one of a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, which included the Southern Cross in New Orleans (1865) and the Knights of the White Camelia (1867) in Louisiana.

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Historians generally classify the KKK as part of the post-Civil War insurgent violence related not only to the high number of veterans in the population, but also to their effort to control the dramatically changed social situation by using extrajudicial means to restore white supremacy.  In 1866, Mississippi Governor William L. Sharkey reported that disorder, lack of control, and lawlessness were widespread; in some states armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will.  The Klan used public violence against black people and their allies as intimidation.  They burned houses, and attacked and killed black people, leaving their bodies on the roads.

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At an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting to a national headquarters. Since most of the Klan's members were veterans, they were used to such military hierarchy, but the Klan never operated under this centralized structure.  Local chapters and bands were highly independent.

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Former Confederate Brigadier General George Gordon developed the Prescript, which espoused white supremacist belief.  For instance, an applicant should be asked if he was in favor of "a white man's government", "the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights."  The latter is a reference to the Ironclad Oath, which stripped the vote from white persons who refused to swear that they had not borne arms against the Union.  Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became Grand Wizard, claiming to be the Klan's national leader.

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In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments, people such as Tennessee governor William Gannaway Brownlow and other "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags".  He argued that many southerners believed that blacks were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues.  One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."

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Despite Gordon's and Forrest's work, local Klan units never accepted the Prescript and continued to operate autonomously.  There were never hierarchical levels or state headquarters.  Klan members used violence to settle old personal feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore general white dominance in the disrupted postwar society.  The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership:

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Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own.  Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.

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Historian Eric Foner observed:

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In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy.  Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society.  It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.

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To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks.  The Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a "reign of terror against Republican leaders both black and white. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions."

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Activities

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Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks.  Many of them operated in small towns and rural areas where people otherwise knew each other's faces, and sometimes still recognized the attackers by voice and mannerisms.  "The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night."  The KKK night riders "sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious blacks.  Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously."

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The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen's Bureau workers.  When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in society.  Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks.

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"Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites."  Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside.  They drove successful black farmers off their land.  "Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault."

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Klan violence worked to suppress black voting, and campaign seasons were deadly.  More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868.  Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for President Grant's opponent.  The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact.

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In the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1,222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock.  By the November presidential election, Klan intimidation led to suppression of the Republican vote and only one person voted for Ulysses S. Grant.

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Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties.  Freedmen's Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen's beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies.

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Milder encounters also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry:

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One of these teachers (Miss Allen of Illinois), whose school was at Cotton Gin Port in Monroe County, was visited between one and two o'clock in the morning on March 1871, by about fifty men mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long white robe and his face was covered by a loose mask with scarlet stripes.  She was ordered to get up and dress which she did at once and then admitted to her room the captain and lieutenant who in addition to the usual disguise had long horns on their heads and a sort of device in front.  The lieutenant had a pistol in his hand and he and the captain sat down while eight or ten men stood inside the door and the porch was full.  They treated her "gentlemanly and quietly" but complained of the heavy school-tax, said she must stop teaching and go away and warned her that they never gave a second notice.  She heeded the warning and left the county.

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By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease.  Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way to avoid prosecution for freelance violence.  Many influential southern Democrats feared that Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to turn against it.  There were outlandish claims made, such as Georgian B. H. Hill stating "that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain."

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Resistance

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Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized "the anti-Ku Klux".  They put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks formed their own defense in Bennettsville, South Carolina and patrolled the streets to protect their homes.

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National sentiment gathered to crack down on the Klan, even though some Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan really existed, or believed that it was a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors.  Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.

In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Scott convened a Congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. They accumulated 12 volumes of horrifying testimony.  In February, former Union General and Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act).  This added to the enmity that southern white Democrats bore toward him.  While the bill was being considered, further violence in the South swung support for its passage.  The Governor of South Carolina appealed for federal troops to assist his efforts in keeping control of the state.  A riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse were reported, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.  The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed President Ulysses S. Grant to suspend habeas corpus.

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In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation.  The Ku Klux Klan Act was used by the Federal government, together with the Enforcement Act of 1870, to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution.  Under the 1871 Klan Act, after the Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve, Grant issued a suspension of Habeas Corpus, and stationed Federal troops in nine South Carolina counties.  The Klansmen were apprehended and prosecuted in federal court. Judges Hugh Lennox Bond and George S. Bryan presided over the trial of KKK members in Columbia, South Carolina during December 1871.  The defendants were sentenced to five years to three months incarceration with fines.  More African Americans served on juries in Federal court than were selected for local or state juries, so they had a chance to participate in the process.  In the crackdown, hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned.

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End of the first Klan

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Although Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and that he could muster 40,000 Klansmen within five days' notice, as a secret or "invisible" group, it had no membership rosters, no chapters, and no local officers. It was difficult for observers to judge its membership.  It had created a sensation by the dramatic nature of its masked forays and because of its many murders.

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In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist organization".  It issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina.  Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan's costume for anonymity, to hide their identities when carrying out independent acts of violence.  Forrest called for the Klan to disband in 1869, arguing that the Klan was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace".  Historian Stanley Horn argues that "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment".  A Georgia-based reporter wrote in 1870 that, "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux".

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In many states, officials were reluctant to use black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised.  When Republican Governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, it added to his unpopularity. Combined with extensive violence and fraud at the polls, the Republicans lost their majority in the state legislature.  Disaffection with Holden's actions led to white Democratic legislators' impeaching Holden and removing him from office, but their reasons were numerous.

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Klan operations ended in South Carolina and gradually withered away throughout the rest of the South, where it had gradually been faltering. Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions.

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Foner argues that:

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By 1872, the federal government's evident willingness to bring its legal and coercive authority to bear had broken the Klan's back and produced a dramatic decline in violence throughout the South.  So ended the Reconstruction career of the Ku Klux Klan."

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In the mid-1870s, new groups of insurgents, local paramilitary organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs, emerged, continuing to intimidate and murder black political leaders.  The White League and Red Shirts were distinguished by their willingness to cultivate publicity, working directly to overturn Republican officeholders and regain control of politics.

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In 1882, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional.  It ruled that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend to the right to regulate against private conspiracies.  It recommended that persons who had been victimized should seek relief in state courts, which were entirely unsympathetic to such appeals.

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Klan costumes, also called "regalia", disappeared from use by the early 1870s.  The Klan disappeared for decades.  By 1872, the Klan was broken as an organization.  In 1915 William Joseph Simmons held a meeting to revive the Klan in Georgia; he attracted only two, aging former members.  All other members were new.

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Second Klan: 1915–1944

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Refounding in 1915

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In 1915 the film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologising and glorifying the first Klan and its endeavors.  The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta, with fifteen "charter members".  Its growth was based on a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, prohibitionist and anti-semitic agenda, which reflected contemporary social tensions, particularly immigration and industrialization.  The new organization and chapters adopted regalia featured in The Birth of a Nation.

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Director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan.  His film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr.

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Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the standardized white costume and the lighted cross, are derived from the film.  Its imagery was based on Dixon's romanticized concept of old England and Scotland, as portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott.  The film's influence was enhanced by a purported endorsement by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner.  A Hollywood press agent claimed that after seeing the film Wilson said, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Historians doubt he said it.  Wilson felt betrayed by Dixon, who had been a classmate.  Wilson's staff issued a denial, saying he was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it."

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The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons on top of Stone Mountain.  It was a small local organization until 1921.  Simmons said he had been inspired by the original Klan's Prescripts, written in 1867 by Confederate veteran George Gordon, but they were never adopted by the first Klan.

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Goals

 

The Second Klan saw threats from every direction.  A religious tone was present in its activities: "two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers," says historian Brian R. Farmer.  Much of the Klan's energy went into guarding "the home;" the historian Kathleen Blee said its members wanted to protect "the interests of white womanhood."  The pamphlet ABC of the Invisible Empire, published in Atlanta by Simmons in 1917, identified the Klan's goals as "to shield the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood; to maintain white supremacy; to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism; and by a practical devotedness to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles and ideals of a pure Americanism."

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Organization

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The founder of the new Klan, William J. Simmons, joined twelve different fraternal organizations.  He recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, and consciously modeled the Klan after fraternal organizations.

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Klan organizers, called "Kleagles", signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and received KKK costumes in return.  The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials.  When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a huge rally, often with burning crosses, and perhaps presented a Bible to a local Protestant preacher.  He left town with the money collected.  The local units operated like many fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.

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Simmons initially met with little success in either recruiting members or in raising money, and the Klan remained a small operation in the Atlanta area until 1920.

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Moral threats

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The second Klan grew primarily in response to issues of declining morality as typified by divorce, adultery, defiance of prohibition, and criminal gangs in the news every day.   Secondly, it was a response to the growing power of Catholics and American Jews and the accompanying proliferation of non-Protestant cultural values. By the mid-1920s the second Klan had a nationwide reach, with its densest per capita membership in Indiana.  The Klan became most prominent in cities with high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, as rural Protestants flocked to jobs in Detroit, and Dayton in the Midwest; and Atlanta, Dallas, Memphis, and Houston in the South. In Michigan, close to half of the state's 80,000 Klansmen lived in Detroit.

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Though members of the KKK swore to uphold American values and Christian morality, and at the local level some Protestant ministers became involved, no Protestant denomination officially endorsed the KKK.  The Klan was repeatedly denounced by the major Protestant magazines, as well as by all major secular newspapers.  Historian Robert Moats Miller reports that "not a single endorsement of the Klan was found by the present writer in the Methodist press, while many of the attacks on the Klan were quite savage." He finds, "the Southern Baptist press condoned the aims but condemned the methods of the Klan."  Miller found not a single Protestant publication that gave the KKK "complete and open support." National denominational organizations never endorsed the Klan, but they rarely condemned it by name.  Many nationally and regionally prominent churchmen did condemn it by name, and none endorsed it.

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Rapid growth

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In 1920 Simmons handed the day-to-day activities of the national office over to two professional publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke.  The new leadership invigorated the Klan and it grew rapidly.  It appealed to new members based on current social tensions, and stressed responses to fears raised by defiance of prohibition and new sexual freedoms.  It emphasized anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant and later anti-Communist.  It presented itself as a fraternal, nativist and strenuously patriotic organization; and its leaders emphasized support for vigorous enforcement of prohibition laws. It expanded membership dramatically to a 1924 peak of 1.5 million to 4 million, which was between 4-15% of the eligible population. By the 1920s, most of its members lived in the Midwest and West. Nearly one in five of the eligible Indiana population were members.  It had a national base by 1925.  In the South, where the great majority of whites were Democrats, the Klansmen were Democrats.  In the rest of the country, the membership comprised both Republicans and Democrats, as well as independents. Klan leaders tried to infiltrate political parties; as Cummings notes, " it was non-partisan in the sense that it pressed its nativist issues to both parties."  Historian Rory McVeigh has explained the Klan's strategy in appealing to members of both parties:

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Klan leaders hope to have all major candidates competing to win the movement's endorsement.  The Klan's leadership wanted to keep their options open and repeatedly announced that the movement was not aligned with any political party.  This non-alliance strategy was also valuable as a recruiting tool.  The Klan drew its members from Democratic as well as Republican voters.  If the movement had aligned itself with a single political party, it would have substantially narrowed its pool of potential recruits.

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Religion was a major selling point.  Baker argues that Klansmen seriously embraced Protestantism as an essential component of their white supremacist, anti-Catholic, and paternalistic formulation of American democracy and national culture.  Their cross was a religious symbol, and their ritual honored Bibles and local ministers. No nationally prominent religious leader said he was a Klan member.

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Economists Fryer and Levitt argue that the rapid growth of the Klan in the 1920s was partly the result of an innovative marketing campaign. They also argue that the Klan leadership focused more intently on monetizing the organization during this period than fulfilling the political goals of the organization.

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Prohibition

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Historians agree that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over prohibition.  The historian Prendergast says that the KKK's "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation".  The Klan opposed bootleggers, sometimes with violence.  In 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas.  The national Klan office was established in Dallas, Texas, but Little Rock, Arkansas was the home of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. The first head of this auxiliary was a former president of the Arkansas WCTU.  Membership in the Klan and in other prohibition groups overlapped, and they often coordinated activities.

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Urbanization

 

A significant characteristic of the second Klan was that it was an organization based in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in both the North and the South.  In Michigan, for instance, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, where they made up more than half of the state's membership.  Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class whites who were trying to protect their jobs and housing from the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who tended to be Catholic and Jewish in numbers higher than earlier groups of immigrants; and black and white migrants from the South.  As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods created social tensions. Because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the U.S. Midwest.  The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.

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In the medium-size industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts in the 1920s, the Klan ascended to power quickly but declined as a result of opposition from the Catholic Church.  There was no violence and the local newspaper ridiculed Klansmen as "night-shirt knights". Half of the members were Swedish American, including some first-generation immigrants.  The ethnic and religious conflicts among more recent immigrants contributed to the rise of the Klan in the city.  Swedish Protestants were struggling against Irish Catholics, who had been entrenched longer, for political and ideological control of the city.

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For some states, historians have obtained membership rosters of some local units and matched the names against city directory and local records to create statistical profiles of the membership.  Big city newspapers were often hostile and ridiculed Klansmen as ignorant farmers.  Detailed analysis from Indiana showed the rural stereotype was false for that state:

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Indiana's Klansmen represented a wide cross section of society: they were not disproportionately urban or rural, nor were they significantly more or less likely than other members of society to be from the working class, middle class, or professional ranks.  Klansmen were Protestants, of course, but they cannot be described exclusively or even predominantly as fundamentalists.  In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.

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The Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long.  Membership in the Klan turned over rapidly as people found out that it was not the group they wanted.  Millions joined, and at its peak in the 1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population.  The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan's decline.

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The distinctive white costume permitted large-scale public activities – especially parades and cross-burning ceremonies while keeping secret the membership rolls.  Sales of the costumes provided the main financing for the national organization, while initiation fees funded local and state organizers.

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The second Klan embraced the burning Latin cross as a dramatic display of symbolism, with a tone of intimidation.  No crosses had been used as a symbol by the first Klan.  Additionally, the cross was henceforth a representation of the Klan's Christian message.  Thus, its lighting during meetings was often accompanied by prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism.

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In his novel The Clansman Dixon invented the notion that the first Klan had used fiery crosses. Film director Griffith brought this image to the screen in The Birth of a Nation. Simmons adopted the symbol wholesale from the movie.  The symbol has been associated with the Klan ever since.

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Women

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By the 1920s, the KKK developed a women's auxiliary, with chapters in many areas.  Its activities included participation in parades, cross lightings, lectures, rallies, and boycotts of local businesses owned by Catholics and Jews.  The Women's Klan was active in promoting prohibition, stressing liquor's negative impact on wives and children.  Its efforts in public schools included distributing Bibles and petitioning for the dismissal of Roman Catholic teachers.  As a result of the Women's Klan's efforts, Texas would not hire Catholic teachers to work in its public schools.  As scandals rocked the Klan leadership late in the 1920s, the organization's popularity among both men and women dropped off sharply.

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Political role

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The members of the first Klan in the South were exclusively Democrats.  The second Klan expanded with new chapters in the Midwest and West, and reached both Republicans and Democrats, as well as men without a party affiliation.  The KKK state organizations endorsed candidates from either party that supported its goals; Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans to make common cause in the Midwest.

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The Klan had numerous members in every part of the United States, but was particularly strong in the South and Midwest.  At its peak, claimed Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas.  The Klan also moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it opposed Catholics.

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In Indiana, members were American-born, white Protestants and covered a wide range of incomes and social levels.  The Indiana Klan was perhaps the most powerful Ku Klux Klan in the nation. It claimed over 30% of white male Hoosiers.  In 1924 it supported Republican Edward Jackson in his successful campaign for governor.

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Catholic and liberal Democrats—who were strongest in northeastern cities—decided to make the Klan an issue at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City.  Their delegates proposed a resolution indirectly attacking the Klan; it was defeated by one vote out of 1100.   The leading candidates were William Gibbs McAdoo, a Protestant with a base in the South and West where the Klan was strong, and New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic with a base in the large cities.  After weeks of stalemate and bitter argumentation, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise candidate.

 

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In some states, such as Alabama and California, KKK chapters had worked for political reform.  In 1924, Klan members were elected to the city council in Anaheim, California.  The city had been controlled by an entrenched commercial-civic elite that was mostly German American. Given their tradition of moderate social drinking, the German Americans did not strongly support prohibition laws—the mayor had been a saloon keeper. Led by the minister of the First Christian Church, the Klan represented a rising group of politically oriented non-ethnic Germans who denounced the elite as corrupt, undemocratic and self-serving.  The historian Christopher Cocoltchos says the Klansmen tried to create a model, orderly community.  The Klan had about 1200 members in Orange County, California.  The economic and occupational profile of the pro and anti-Klan groups shows the two were similar and about equally prosperous. Klan members were Protestants, as were most of their opponents, but the latter also included many Catholic Germans.  Individuals who joined the Klan had earlier demonstrated a much higher rate of voting and civic activism than did their opponents. Cocoltchos suggests that many of the individuals in Orange County joined the Klan out of that sense of civic activism.  The Klan representatives easily won the local election in Anaheim in April 1924.  They fired known city employees who were Catholic and replaced them with Klan appointees.  The new city council tried to enforce prohibition.  After its victory, the Klan chapter held large rallies and initiation ceremonies over the summer.

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The opposition organized, bribed a Klansman for the secret membership list, and exposed the Klansmen running in the state primaries; they defeated most of the candidates.  Klan opponents in 1925 took back local government, and succeeded in a special election in recalling the Klansmen who had been elected in April 1924.  The Klan in Anaheim quickly collapsed, its newspaper closed after losing a libel suit, and the minister who led the local Klavern moved to Kansas.

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In the South, Klan members were still Democratic, as it was a one-party region for whites.  Klan chapters were closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government.  Since disfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites around the start of the 20th century, the only political activity for whites took place within the Democratic Party.

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In Alabama, Klan members advocated better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other political measures to benefit lower-class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a political force in the state, as leaders such as J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black tried to build political power against the Black Belt planters, who had long dominated the state.  In 1926, with Klan support, Bibb Graves won the Alabama governor's office.  He was a former Klan chapter head.  He pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. Because the Alabama state legislature refused to redistrict until 1972, and then under court order, the Klan was unable to break the planters' and rural areas' hold on legislative power. Scholars and biographers have recently examined Hugo Black's Klan role. Ball finds regarding the KKK that Black "sympathized with the group's economic, nativist, and anti-Catholic beliefs.  "Newman says Black "disliked the Catholic Church as an institution" and gave over 100 anti-Catholic speeches in his 1926 election campaign to KKK meetings across Alabama.  Black was elected US senator in 1926 as a Democrat. In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court without knowing how active in the Klan he had been in the 1920s.  He was confirmed by his fellow Senators before the full KKK connection was known; Justice Black said he left the Klan when he became a senator.

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Resistance and decline

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Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan, gaining national attention.  The Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed in the early 20th century in response to attacks against Jewish Americans and the Klan's campaign to outlaw private schools. Opposing groups worked to penetrate the Klan's secrecy.  After one civic group began to publish Klan membership lists, there was a rapid decline in members. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People created public education campaigns in order to inform people about Klan activities and lobbied in Congress against Klan abuses. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership in most areas began to decline rapidly.

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Specific events contributed to the decline as well. In Indiana, the scandal surrounding the 1925 murder trial of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the KKK as upholders of law and order.  By 1926 the Klan was "crippled and discredited."  D. C. Stephenson was the Grand Dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states.  In 1923 he had led the states under his control to separate from the national KKK organization.  In his 1925 trial, he was convicted for second-degree murder for his part in the rape, and subsequent death, of Madge Oberholtzer.  After Stephenson's conviction, the Klan declined dramatically in Indiana.  The historian Leonard Moore says that a failure in leadership caused the Klan's collapse.

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Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana's Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan's stated goals. They were uninterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement.  For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power.  These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership.  More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan, or who pursued some of the interests of their Klan constituents, also accomplished little.  Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience.  When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan's behalf.

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By 1930 Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than 6,000. Small independent units continued to be active in the industrial city of Birmingham.  In the late 1940s and 1950s, members launched a reign of terror by bombing the homes of upwardly mobile African Americans.  Activism by such independent KKK groups increased as a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

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In Alabama, KKK vigilantes launched a wave of physical terror in 1927.  They targeted both blacks and whites for violation of racial norms and for perceived moral lapses. This led to a strong backlash, beginning in the media. Grover C. Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser from 1926, wrote a series of editorials and articles that attacked the Klan. (Today the paper says it "waged war on the resurgent [KKK]".)  Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for the crusade, the 1928 Editorial Writing Pulitzer, citing "his editorials against gangsterism, floggings and racial and religious intolerance."  Other newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan, referring to the organization as violent and "un-American".  Sheriffs cracked down on activities.  In the 1928 presidential election, the state voters overcame initial opposition to the Catholic candidate Al Smith, and voted the Democratic Party line as usual.

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Although in decline, a measure of the Klan's influence was its march along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928.

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Labor and Anti-Unionism

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In southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs and opposed unions.  During the 1930s and 1940s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which advocated industrial unions and accepted African-American members, unlike earlier unions. With access to dynamite and using the skills from their jobs in mining and steel, in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham used bombings in order to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks who moved into middle-class neighborhoods.  "By mid-1949, there were so many charred house carcasses that the area [College Hills] was informally named Dynamite Hill."   Independent Klan groups remained active in Birmingham and violently opposed the Civil Rights Movement.

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In 1939, after years of the Great Depression, the Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the national organization to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician.  They could not revive the declining membership. In 1944, the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott dissolved the organization that year. Local Klan groups closed over the following years.

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After World War II, the folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan; he provided internal data to media and law enforcement agencies.  He also provided secret code words to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in episodes in which Superman took on the KKK. Kennedy stripped away the Klan's mystique and trivialized its rituals and code words, which may have contributed to the decline in Klan recruiting and membership.  In the 1950s, Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.

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Historiography of the second Klan

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The historiography of the second Klan of the 1920s can be sharply divided into two opposing interpretations, one based on elite sources and the other based on the new social history.

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Anti-modern interpretations

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The KKK was a secret organization; apart from a few top leaders the members never revealed their membership and wore masks in public.  Investigators in the 1920s used KKK publicity, court cases, exposés by disgruntled Klansman, newspaper reports, and speculation to write stories about what the Klan was doing.  Almost all the major newspapers and magazines were hostile. Published accounts exaggerated the official viewpoint of the Klan leadership, and repeated the interpretations of hostile newspapers and the Klan's enemies.  There was almost no evidence regarding the actual behavior or beliefs of individual Klansmen.  The resulting popular and scholarly interpretation of the Klan from the 1920s into recent decades, based on those sources, says Pegram, emphasized the Southern roots, and violent vigilante-style actions of the Klan in its efforts to turn back the clock of modernity.  Scholars compared it to fascism, which in the 1920s took over Italy.  Pegram says this original interpretation:

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Depicted the Klan movement as an irrational rebuke of modernity by undereducated, economically marginal bigots, religious zealots, and dupes willing to be manipulated by the Klan's cynical, mendacious leaders.  It was, in this view, a movement of country parsons and small-town malcontents who were out of step with the dynamism of twentieth-century urban America."

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New social history interpretations

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The "social history" revolution in historiography after the 1960s called for history from the bottom up, that would focus on the characteristics, beliefs, and behavior of the typical membership, and downplay claims from elite sources.  This approach was made possible by the discovery of membership lists and the minutes of local meetings from chapters scattered around the country.  Historians apply the newest techniques of methodology to test the original interpretation.  They discovered that the original interpretation was very largely mistaken about the membership and activities of the Klan.  The membership was not anti-modern, rural or rustic.  It consisted of fairly well educated middle-class joiners and community activists.  Half the members lived in the fast-growing cities; Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Denver, and Portland, Oregon, were the Klan strongholds rather than the sleepy rural areas.

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Studies using the new social history find that in general, the membership was from the stable, successful middle classes, with few members drawn from the elite or the working classes.  Pegram, reviewing the studies, concludes, "the popular Klan of the 1920s, while diverse, was more of a civic exponent of white Protestant social values than a repressive hate group."

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Indiana and Alabama

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In Indiana, traditional political historians focused on notorious leaders, especially D. C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan, whose conviction for 1925 kidnap, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer helped destroy the Ku Klux Klan movement nationwide. By contrast new social historian Leonard Moore titled his monograph Citizen Klansmen, and contrasted the sordid and intolerant rhetoric of the group's leaders with that of its much better behaved membership.  The Klan was indeed white Protestant, and was highly suspicious of Catholics, Jews and blacks who were accused of subverting the ideal Protestant moral standards. Violence was quite uncommon in the chapters.  Threats and vocational actions were directed primarily against fellow white Protestants for transgressions of community moral standards, such as adultery, wife-beating, gambling and heavy drinking.  Up to one third of Indiana's Protestant men joined the order making it, Moore argued, "a kind of interest group for average white Protestants who believed that their values should be dominant in their community and state.

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Moore goes on to say that they joined:

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because it stood for the most organized means of resisting the social and economic forces that had transformed community life, undermined traditional values, and made average citizens feel more isolated from one another and more powerless in their relationships with the major institutions that governed their lives.

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