Not including the modern era, the Klan would rise to prominence three more times at different points in the twentieth century after the first wave during Reconstruction. The second wave of the Klan emerged during the 1920s. The 1920’s Klan was a nativist movement whose anti-Black rhetoric appealed to all who saw Black people as less than white. In other words, 90% of white America. (And, honestly, almost all of America that was neither Black nor white.)
The fact that the Klan was a white supremacist patriarchy did not stop women of the time from “pouring into” the group. The Women of the Ku Klux Klan had their own costume of skirted robes and organized their own activities. The repression of other women has long been a path to power for women in a patriarchal system. Even a century later there are too many white, American, women who will sacrifice to the patriarchy to maintain the system of white supremacy.
Recruiters, who got a percentage of the fees of those they recruited, used heavy marketing to expand the Klan’s rosters. This was inspired, in part, by the brilliant propaganda of a D. W. Griffith’s repulsively racist Birth of a Nation. The film, set before and after the Civil War, romanticizes the enslavement of African Americans, depicts us as both abusive and submissive to the whims of corrupt carpetbaggers, while lionizing Klan death squads as the savior of white purity.
The movie went on to gross $18 million (about 50 million today). Part of what made the film so powerful may have been that Griffith, the son of a Confederate officer, was filming reality as he saw it. After viewing the film, based on a book written by an old classmate, liberal racist President Woodrow Wilson claimed Birth of a Nation was, “…like writing history with lightning … my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” It is mostly accepted that viewing it was enough to inspire “Colonel” William Joseph Simmons, who made his living by selling memberships in fraternal organizations, to revive the Klan in a new, much more violent, image.
Showing his own flair for marketing Simmons first official act as a Klansman was to climb to the top of a local mountain and set a cross on fire. The story goes that in Georgia he drew two guns, a pistol and a revolver, and a cartridge belt from his coat and arranged them in front of him before sinking a Bowie knife into the same table saying, “Now let the N—–s, Catholics, Jews and all others who disdain my imperial wizardry, come out!” Appealing to folks uncomfortable with the shifting nature of America from a rural agricultural society to an urban industrial nation the 1920s Klan’s marketing was an immediate and raging success. By the end of 1921 the roster of the Invisible Empire topped 100,000 giving Simmons, at $10 a head (tax-free), a huge financial boon.
The majority of Klan members in the 1920s were mainstream, middle-class white Americans. The Klan promoted white supremacy through Christian fundamentalism and devout patriotism, a tactic still popular with a certain type today. White collar workers like doctors, lawyers and even ministers devoted themselves to the Klan north and south. The Klan of the 1920s was not marginalized. It was more of an open secret society.
Like most organizations of its type, the ultimate goal of the Klan was power. In pursuit of this power the Klan actively sought to increase its membership using a strategy called “the decade”. It was a two-pronged approach in which the Klan first encouraged its membership to run for office. Once the candidates were in place every member of the Klan was then responsible for recruiting ten people to vote for them in elections. To say it was successful is an understatement.
By 1924 the Klan owned the mayors of Portland Maine, Portland Oregon and those of many towns and cities in-between. In some states, many above the Mason Dixie like Colorado and Indiana, the Klan ran the entirety of the state government. Just Ohio was home to 300,000 Klan members while Pennsylvania claimed 200,000. By 1925 the Klan was able to gather twenty-five thousand members to parade down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in a striking visual that disturbs to this day. This was arguably the height and breadth of the Klan’s power as during this time the Invisible Empire had anywhere between four and seven million members and spanned multiple states south and north.
Speaking of disturbing visuals, the 1920s Klan followed the tradition of arson, land theft, and the rape, lynchings, shootings, and torture of Black people. But now its victims included Jews, Catholics, Mexicans, Asians, and not yet white enough immigrants. Plus, of course, the “immoral” and men and women who were “traitors” to their race- or to their gender. Its expanding list of violations worthy of punishment grew to include bootlegging, graft, owning or being in a night club, roadhouse, or speakeasy, pre- and extra-marital sex, and the violation of the Sabbath.
An Alabama divorcee was flogged for remarrying while a Georgia woman was lashed for “immorality”- both mobs led by ministers. In Oklahoma, the whip was applied to girls caught riding unchaperoned with young men and in California women were tortured for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ministers, sheriffs, policemen, mayors, politicians, and judges who were not active participants in the violence ignored it. Few were arrested, much less convicted.
Even a series of articles in the New York World in 1921 about the corruption of the Klan failed to halt its rising popularity. In fact, following more articles on the violence of the Klan which inspired a Congressional hearing, membership went up. Simmons is quoted to have said, “It wasn’t until the newspapers began to attack the Klan that it really grew. Certain newspapers also aided us by inducing congress to investigate us. The result was that congress gave us the best advertising we ever got. Congress made us.”
Then, in 1925, Indiana Klan leader D.C. Stephenson was found guilty of the murder of a young white woman. Her death was a result of her rape. In 1927, a court battle between the Pennsylvania Klan and the rest of the Invisible Empire aired all the dirty laundry. Witnesses revealed acts of terror and violence against white people, the only people who mattered to the American court system. Tales of beatings, kidnappings, and murder caused the judge to throw the case out which was a defeat for national Klan leader Evans. It was the beginning of the end for the Klan.
As is the case with all self-appointed morality police, eventually scandals clearly illustrated both the hypocrisy of the Klan and underscored the Klan’s ineptitude when it came to curing the social ills it named. Meanwhile, as usual, dire predictions of America’s collapse at the hands of immigrants and other “others” failed to arrive. By the 1930s the second wave of the Klan had grown mostly dormant, Florida being the exception. Until the third-wave Klan of the Civil Rights era.
Sources
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-klan/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-worst-thing-about-birth-of-a-nation-is-how-good-it-is
https://daily.jstor.org/history-kkk-american-politics/
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/stephenson/stephensonaccount.html
https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/Ku-Klux-Klan-A-History-of-Racism.pdf