Summary of Event
On Thanksgiving night in 1915, William Joseph Simmons led a group of twelve friends up to Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia, and before a burning cross swore them in as charter members of a secret fraternal organization dedicated to the ideals of racial purity and traditional morality. “The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc.” was chartered as a new fraternal order by the state of Georgia on December 4. Simmons, its “Imperial Wizard,” had served in the Spanish-American War as a private in an Alabama regiment; he was not trained for any career and was a member of numerous fraternal clubs.
Membership in the Klan cost a ten-dollar fee and the price of a white robe. Recruitment coincided with the Atlanta showing of a new film by D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the first Ku Klux Klan in the turbulent Reconstruction era after the Civil War. That original Klan had risen in the beaten South, and its goal had been to continue to “keep the Negro in his place”—in the fields and subordinate to whites. It was founded in 1866 by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who disbanded it in 1871.
Conditions in the United States after World War I were conducive to the sort of thinking to which the Klan appealed. Returning doughboys were full of the extreme patriotism born of victory. They were greeted by the “Roaring Twenties,” America’s exuberant celebration of the truth of her “manifest destiny.”
To the Klan, this exuberance seemed to undercut the old American morality. Moreover, blacks also returned from the war proud of their own distinguished service and filled with high expectations in peacetime. The hopes of America’s blacks at the time were not very different from the dreams of the newly freed slaves that had called forth the original Klan.
In addition, the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant profile of America’s population was changing. Whereas earlier immigrants had come primarily from Protestant Northern Europe, early twentieth century immigrants were mostly Italian, Irish, and Polish Catholics, Russian and Slavic Jews, and Asians. The Klan saw its role as that of the guardian of the old moral values in a radically changing American environment.
The new Klan objected to Catholics, perceiving their loyalty to a foreign pope as conflicting with their loyalty to the United States. Jews were similarly accused of an un-American devotion to their ancient beliefs. Asians, like blacks, suffered from the fault of looking “different.” These groups became the targets of the Klan’s literature of denunciation.
Members of the Klan about to depart a Virginia suburb after a rally, 1922 (Courtesy of Voice of America via Wikipedia Commons)
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Beneath the rule of the Imperial Wizard, the Klan was arranged nationwide in eight “Domains,” each under a “Grand Goblin.” Each state was a “Realm” under a “Grand Dragon.” Realms were divided into “Provinces” under “Great Titans,” and Provinces into local Klans, each under an “Exalted Cyclops.” The Imperial Wizard appointed a cabinet of twelve “Genii” and an assistant called the “Emperor.” For his new Klan, Simmons had borrowed not merely the name but also the titles and secret language of the original Klan. These Klan features, as well as the costume, manual (the “Kloran”), ritual, and philosophy, were designed by Simmons as early as 1911.
The Klan’s progress was slow, and Simmons did everything, even mortgaging his house, to keep his effort alive. In 1920, he contracted with Edward Young Clarke’s Southern Publicity Association to build membership. Clarke was given the title of “Imperial Kleagle.” Admittedly motivated only by hope of profit, Clarke and his partner, Elizabeth Tyler, soon discovered that they were most successful in recruiting when they emphasized the racial and religious “threats” to traditional American values posed by Catholics, Jews, blacks, and aliens. A membership sales force employed the concept of “pyramiding,” with each officer receiving a portion of every ten-dollar membership sold by his team. The pair’s plan of making the Klan prominent in the national press resulted in a great increase in Klan membership around the country; membership was estimated variously from two to five million by 1924.
The Klan was strongest in the South, in Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia; Atlanta was its “Holy City.” It also had remarkable numbers in Oregon, Colorado, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and was especially strong in Indiana. All strata of white male society could be found among its members, from Ph.D.s and state governors to rural and urban rowdies. There was much in the Klan’s program that represented the feelings of Americans in the 1920’s, a fact illustrated by the vicious, non-Klan-related race riots in Chicago and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1919, and by the sharp increase in lynchings of blacks in the same year.
In the beginning, the Klan’s activities consisted of nighttime violence against individuals or the threat of violence by means of parades as demonstrations of potential force. Actual violence was perpetrated by only a small minority of the millions of members. It is interesting to note that most Klan violence was directed not at blacks but at whites whose morals displeased the local Klan: men who the Klan alleged were unfaithful to their spouses, women who allegedly wore short skirts or “petted” in cars, and any white person who “fraternized” with blacks or patronized Jewish businesses.
Klan leaders Simmons, Clarke, and Tyler claimed that the twenty-one-day exposure of Klan violence by The New York World and its affiliate newspapers around the nation in September, 1921, actually was the catalyst that caused membership to burgeon. Indeed, the immediate reaction to the publicity was that more than two hundred applications for local chapters poured in, some on facsimile forms reprinted in the newspapers. In its series, The New York World enumerated 152 separate Klan outrages. Klan defectors provided information about forty-one floggings, twenty-seven tar-and-featherings, five kidnappings, forty-three persons forced to leave their towns, one case of branding with acid, and four lynchings. Most of the reported vigilante violence occurred in Texas between February and July, 1921. In addition, The New York World published an article divulging that Clarke and Tyler, known to have reaped great profits from their Klan activities, had in 1919 been implicated in a morals scandal, the police records of which had somehow disappeared.
Equally productive of new memberships was the publicity gained from the congressional investigation of the Klan in October, 1921. The Klan was thus in the headlines consistently for two months. Rowland Thomas, the writer of The New York World’s exposé, reviewed his case against the Klan and gave evidence about the Klan’s religious and racist publications. He further presented proof that Simmons had boasted of having governors, members of Congress, and other officials in the “Invisible Empire” and under his orders. The last witness was Simmons himself, who for three days boldly denied that any of the violent acts were committed by Klansmen. Still, The New York World noticed that in three cases (in Mobile, Alabama, Pensacola, Florida, and Beaumont, Texas) Simmons had suspended or disbanded local chapters that had been accused of flagrant wrongdoing. He charged The New York World with being a stronghold of Jewish opinion. After the investigation, Simmons was able to assert, “Congress made us.”
Significance
Under Hiram Wesley Evans, who seized the leadership of the Klan in 1922 and forced the departure of Simmons and Clarke in 1924, the Klan renounced violence and worked at gaining power in the open political arena by campaigning and influencing legislation. The relocation of its offices to Washington, D.C., in 1925 was celebrated by a parade of forty thousand white-robed men and women down Pennsylvania Avenue. Thenceforth, the Klan emphasized the less controversial elements of its program and campaigned for education, donations to Protestant congregations, and morality.
Evans’ plan was to distance the Klan from its many atrocities, such as that in August, 1922, when two farmers who had spoken out against the Klan were mutilated and murdered at Mer Rouge, Louisiana. Klan violence against Jews, blacks, and those allegedly involved in “vice” reached a high pitch that nearly plunged Oklahoma into civil war from 1921 to 1923. Finally, Governor John Walton installed martial law in the state, but he was soon removed from office. The Klan rejoiced.
Other events continued to show the Klan in a bad light. In March, 1925, David C. Stephenson, a Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan who had become notoriously rich and powerful through his Klan activities, was convicted of murder when a woman died after being tortured and raped by him. His life sentence ended with his release after thirty-one years. In 1927, Evans entered a lawsuit against a group of seceding Pennsylvania Klansmen. In the ensuing courtroom battle, the Klan’s “dirty linen” was divulged by secessionist witnesses and even by Simmons. One witness revealed the burning to death of an oil-doused Texan while hundreds of hooded Klansmen watched.
These and numerous other Klan outrages dominated headlines for months on end. By the end of the 1920’s, the accumulation of Klan outrages took an inevitable toll on the Klan’s popularity, effectiveness, and viability. When Evans announced in 1928 that the Klan would no longer use masks, it was too late to save the “hooded empire.”
The Klan’s entry into party politics proved damaging to the organization. Much infighting among Klansmen for nominations resulted. In some cases, however, the Klan could boast of having helped the election of an entire pro-Klan Republican slate. In 1924, the state of Oregon passed a compulsory public education bill that had been sponsored by the legislature with Klan backing. The measure effectively outlawed the existence of parochial schools and was one of the Klan’s most notable successes. In the same year, the Klan helped elect eleven governors and sixteen members of Congress. After exercising great influence in the presidential election of 1924 and helping to defeat Alfred E. Smith in 1928, the Klan’s importance and membership precipitously declined; by 1930, membership was down to between thirty and fifty thousand. Most observers thought that the decline was caused by the uninspiring ineptitude of the Klan’s leaders in the open arena of political life.
Although Klan literature continued to attack Catholics, Jews, blacks, and foreigners, the Klan in the 1930’s shifted its focus to assaulting communism and keeping blacks from voting. The Klan was never again the force in American life that it had been in the 1920’s. In 1939, Evans sold the Klan to James A. Colescott, a veterinarian from Indiana. In 1944, the Klan was dissolved in lieu of payment of $685,000 in back taxes.
The Klan experienced sporadic revivals in later years, but it was always in splintered ineptitude and disrepute. Ultimately, Americans became disgusted with the Klan as an extremist group that trampled upon the freedom and rights of all Americans. Similarly, the Klan’s false position as defender of the nation’s morals was exposed by the greed and immorality of certain of its leaders.