by Linda Gordon
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.8 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 Klan’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 Klan. Because the Klan was the biggest social movement of the early twentieth 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 manifold: 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.
Poster for the film Birth of a Nation, which did so much to build the KKK. (Everett Historical/Shutterstock)
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 Clansman.1 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.”2 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 nineteenth-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 ninety-one-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.”3
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. (See figure 2.) Hired as an itinerant preacher by a Methodist Episcopal Church, he was promptly fired for “inefficiency,” a trait he duplicated in the Klan.4 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 fifteen 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 fourteen 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.”5 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, I.W.W.ism and other isms . . . are seeking in an insidious but powerful manner to undermine the very fundamentals of the Nation.”6 Governmental actions—framing and executing anarchist immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, and deporting more than five hundred 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 ‘Rough Necks,’ ‘Rowdies,’ nor ‘Yellow Streaks.’ . . . REAL MEN whose oaths are inviolate are needed.”7 He managed to gather a few dozen joiners, including several elderly men who had been members of the first Klan.8 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 US Secret Service agents to investigate. He maintained, a few years later, that this experience led him to plan a “secret service” of fifty thousand 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.9 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 twenty-five enrolled; forced into bankruptcy, he had to sell it.10
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 twenty African Americans he had paid to dress up in sheets. By 1920 his small new group had stagnated.11
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 Clarke. 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: Clarke’s father, who had been a Confederate colonel, owned the Atlanta Constitution and occupied a central position among Atlanta’s power elite. Clarke’s brother managed the paper. Edward Clarke 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 fifteen, a mother at sixteen, 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’s new Klan 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 Clarke had convinced Simmons that they could grow his new Klan, 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 Clarke and Tyler an astonishing 80 percent of any revenue they brought in from new recruits.12 Since Simmons had got 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 Clarke became, in practice, head of the Klan for two years. (Some historians cite only Clarke 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 and 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.13 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, aka “100% Americans,” could save the country. “The Anglo-Saxon is the typeman of history. To him must yield the self-centered Hebrew, the cultured Greek, the virile Roman, the mystic Oriental.”14 The second Klan took off by melding racism and ethnic bigotry with evangelical Protestant morality.
Clarke 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.15 A contemporary observer estimated the Klan’s growth at a hundred thousand new members a week.16 (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 Klan-krest, 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 Clarke profited handsomely, too, allegedly taking in more than $850,000 in their first fifteen months on the job.17
By late 1921, some of the new Klan members were complaining about this profiteering, while other leaders objected to Simmons’s morals: never a hard-line social-purity man, he liked horse races and prizefights, and his partying was making him a noticeable drunkard.18 Two regional Klan leaders—Hiram Evans from Texas and David Stephenson from Indiana—came to see Simmons as an obstacle to further development. So together with Tyler and Clarke, 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.19 When he realized that he had been ousted, he started another fraternal order, Knights of the Flaming Sword (Klanspeople loved medieval martial titles), which flopped; then still another racist group, the White Band; but died in obscurity in 1945.20 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. (See figure 3.) A man of boundless vision, ambition, and confidence, Evans hailed from Alabama but grew up in Texas. Like Clarke, he was well born, the son of a judge; unlike Clarke, 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.21 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.22 In 1921, recognizing his aggressive leadership, Clarke 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 percent of Klan revenue. (Still, Tyler and Clarke continued to profit from the KKK, opening a realty business to handle Klan properties in Atlanta.23)
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, DC, 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.”24 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 LaGrande, 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.”25 But the pressure to grow the Klan and the opportunity for leaders and salesmen to enrich themselves often militated against compliance with this reform.
Evans may have been naïve about management. Observing the oratorical skills of Indiana Klan leader David Stephenson, 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, Stephenson 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 Stephenson 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.
Stephenson 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 Stephenson learned how to work a crowd at Klan events.26 An enterprising publicist, he turned the Indiana Klan newsletter, the Fiery Cross, into a newspaper and gathered nine hundred boys to sell it throughout the Midwest, claiming to reach three hundred thousand readers. He grew the Klan enormously; in southern Indiana, some 23 percent 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.27 But despite wealth and authority, Stephenson 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 Dinuba, 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.28 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.”29 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 Klanspeople 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.
