Roaring Twenties

The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: America’s Second Wave

The second Ku Klux Klan is one of the most disturbing political phenomena in American history. Founded on Thanksgiving night 1915 by a failed Methodist preacher on a small Georgia mountain, it grew in less than a decade into a mass-membership national organization with millions of members, hundreds of state legislators, and a convention that filled Madison Square Garden with 55,000 robed marchers. By the end of the 1920s, it had collapsed into a marginal, scandal-ridden sect. Its brief moment of power is a critical chapter in the political history of the Roaring Twenties.

A New Kind of Klan

The first Ku Klux Klan had been founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865 by six Confederate veterans. It was a Southern vigilante organization, dedicated to overthrowing the Reconstruction governments by terrorizing freedmen, their allies, and the carpetbaggers who supported them. By the 1870s, it had largely faded.

The second Klan was something different. It was founded on November 25, 1915, atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William Joseph Simmons, a former Methodist preacher, traveling salesman, and fraternal lodge promoter. Simmons was inspired by two cultural events of 1915: the release of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the controversial film that romanticized the Reconstruction-era Klan, and the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, two years earlier.

Simmons’ new Klan borrowed the trappings of the first — white robes, hoods, fiery crosses, the title “Imperial Wizard” for its leader — but its membership and its targets were different. The new Klan was, in principle, an all-white, Protestant, native-born organization. It was anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, and anti-modern. Where the first Klan had been a regional terror group, the second was a national fraternal organization with Imperial Kleagles (recruiters) and a marketing strategy modeled on the Woodmen of the World and the Odd Fellows.

The new Klan caught on slowly. In 1920, it had perhaps a few thousand members, mostly in Georgia and Alabama. Then Hiram Wesley Evans, a Texas dentist and Klan member, took over as Imperial Wizard in 1922, and the Klan’s national expansion began. Evans had studied the marketing of fraternal orders and built a sophisticated sales force. By 1924, the Klan had members in every state, a Klan newspaper in dozens of cities, and a multi-million-dollar financial operation. Its 1924 convention in Nashville, Tennessee drew 50,000 members to a parade that was, in the words of one observer, “the most spectacular political demonstration in the history of the South.”

The Klan Goes National: The 1924 Convention

The Imperial Klonvokation of 1924, held in Nashville, was a turning point. So was the Madison Square Garden rally in New York on the night of August 6, 1925. An estimated 55,000 robed members paraded up Eighth Avenue and filled the Garden; tens of thousands of New Yorkers watched from windows and rooftops. The rally was, in its organizers’ view, a demonstration that the Klan was not a Southern regional organization but a national one. The Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans gave a keynote address claiming that “the Klan is not anti-Catholic, but pro-Protestant, and not anti-Negro, but pro-white” — a distinction that has not aged well.

The 1924 convention also marked the Klan’s move into electoral politics. That year, the Democratic National Convention in New York was dominated by a bitter fight over whether to denounce the Klan by name in the party platform. The anti-Klan plank, championed by New York Governor Al Smith and his allies, was supported by the Catholic, Jewish, and progressive delegates. The plank was effectively tabled on a voice vote, after teller counts produced the famous “one-vote” margin (the exact count is reported variously in the historical record as 542⅓ to 542⅔, or roughly half a vote in the disputed teller count). The result, the political scientist J. Morgan Kousser has argued, was the deepest single division in Democratic ranks between 1868 and 1948.

The Klan claimed at least four million members in the mid-1920s. Historians now believe peak membership was between 1.5 and 2 million paying members, plus another 2 to 4 million on the rolls as inactive, honorary, or non-paying members. The total claimed — sometimes inflated to as much as 6 or 8 million — is almost certainly an exaggeration. But even at 2 million, the second Klan was by far the largest fraternal organization in the country. Its primary members were small-town Protestants — merchants, farmers, clerks, schoolteachers — in the South, the Midwest, the Border States, and the West. Membership was strongest in Indiana, Colorado, Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Georgia.

The Klan’s Nativist, Protestant Agenda

The second Klan was unusual among American hate groups in that it was not purely racist in the narrow sense. It was nativist — hostile to the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe — and sectarian — hostile to Catholics and Jews, who were seen as “outside” the white, Protestant, native-born America the Klan claimed to defend. In Indiana, the Klan was overwhelmingly anti-Catholic. In Texas, it was more anti-Mexican. In California, it was anti-Asian.

The Klan’s advocacy was grounded in the proposition that the United States was, and should remain, a “100% American” nation. The “Americanism” of the Klan was a white, Protestant, native-born identity that excluded Catholics, Jews, African Americans, Asians, and recent immigrants. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 were Klan political victories, as was the 1928 defeat of the Catholic Al Smith.

The Klan was, in some respects, a populist movement. It opposed Wall Street and the banks. It opposed the Federal Reserve as a tool of Jewish financiers. It supported the direct election of senators (achieved in 1913), the initiative and referendum, and a wider franchise for white Protestants. But its populism was inseparable from its racism, and the “friendship” the Klan claimed with the average white American was, in practice, a friendship with the average white American Protestant.

The Women of the KKK

The Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) was founded in 1923 and led by Lula Bell McCord of Atlanta. The WKKK, also called the Klavan, was one of the largest women’s organizations in the country, with perhaps 500,000 active members in the mid-1920s. Its members came from the same demographic as the male Klan: small-town, Protestant, native-born, often the wives of Klansmen. The WKKK organized Bible study, charitable work, and — according to its critics — surveillance of Catholic and Jewish communities.

The women’s Klan was a striking phenomenon. Many of the women who joined were also active in the woman suffrage movement, and the two organizations overlapped in membership in some areas. This overlap is sometimes presented as a paradox; in fact, the 1920s were a period in which women’s organizations across the political spectrum, from the NAWSA to the WKKK, were growing rapidly. The intersection of the women’s suffrage movement and the second Klan is a reminder that the politics of the 1920s were not simple.

The Klan and Politics

The Klan’s political power in the 1920s was concentrated in state and local elections rather than in presidential races. The Indiana Klan is the best-documented example. In 1924, the Klan helped elect Edward L. Jackson as governor and Arthur R. Robinson as attorney general. Indiana’s Klan ran the state legislature in 1925–26, and the Grand Dragon of Indiana, D. C. Stephenson, became one of the most powerful men in the state.

The Klan also had significant influence in Colorado (where it helped elect Clarence J. Morley as governor in 1925), in Oregon (where the Compulsory Education Act of 1922 essentially aimed to drive Catholic schools out of business), in Texas, in Oklahoma, in California, and in parts of the Border South. At the national level, the Klan could usually count on a third of the Democratic and Republican memberships in Congress for votes on immigration restriction, Prohibition, and the like.

The Klan also helped select U.S. senators in several states. In Indiana, the Klan was instrumental in defeating the Republican incumbent James E. Watson in 1928. In Georgia, the Klan-backed Senator Thomas W. Hardwick lost his seat in 1928 to the anti-Klan candidate Walter F. George, but only after a violent primary in which the Klan’s Night Hawks raided political rallies. In Louisiana, the Klan-supported Senator Huey Long would later, in the 1930s, build his own national political organization on a similar base.

Violence and the Imperial Night Hawks

The second Klan was, like the first, willing to use violence. The Imperial Night Hawks, a paramilitary organization within the Klan, conducted beatings, whippings, tar-and-featherings, and murders. Targets included African Americans, suspected adulterers, “loose” women, bootleggers, and members of opposing political factions. The 1920s saw dozens of documented Klan murders, including the burning of the Osage Indians in Oklahoma, a wave of violence against Black veterans in 1919–21, and the killing of labor organizers in the textile mills of the Carolinas.

The most famous case was the murder of Madge Oberholtzer in 1925. D. C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana, kidnapped Oberholtzer, a 28-year-old schoolteacher, took her to Chicago, and raped her repeatedly. She died of a botched abortion weeks later. Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder in 1925 and sentenced to life in prison — a sentence that was, in the political context of 1920s Indiana, an extraordinary rebuke to the Klan’s political power. Stephenson’s conviction would be the beginning of the Klan’s collapse. Read more about the decline of the Klan in the late 1920s.

The Klan and the Harlem Renaissance

The second Klan’s anti-Black program was the central fact of its existence, and the 1920s saw some of the worst racial violence in American history. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 destroyed the Black Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing perhaps 300 people and displacing thousands more. The Rosewood Massacre of 1923 destroyed the Black community of Rosewood, Florida. The American Mercury ran a story in 1924 estimating that at least 34 men had been lynched that year alone. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime, passed the House of Representatives in 1922 but was blocked in the Senate by Southern Democrats.

Against this backdrop, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a remarkable cultural achievement. The literature, music, and art of the Harlem Renaissance — the work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aaron Douglas, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and many others — was, in part, a response to the racial violence and political exclusion of the period. The Klan and the Harlem Renaissance are two sides of the same 1920s coin, and the contrast between them is one of the most important features of the decade.

The Decline: 1925 to 1930

The Klan’s collapse was as rapid as its rise. The Stephenson case in Indiana was the first major blow. The Klan’s nationally publicized financial mismanagement — the Imperial Palace in Atlanta was a financial disaster, and there were persistent rumors of embezzlement — was the second. The 1928 election, in which the Catholic Al Smith was defeated, took away the Klan’s most important issue. The Great Depression of 1929–30 made it harder to collect dues and easier to look elsewhere for explanations of national misery.

By 1930, the second Klan was a marginal organization. It would never again reach the size or influence it had enjoyed in 1924–25. By the late 1930s, the original Southern Klan was again the dominant force, and it would remain so until the 1950s and 1960s, when a third Klan would emerge in response to the Civil Rights Movement.

What the Second Klan Reveals About American Democracy

The second Klan is, in retrospect, a warning. It was a mass-membership organization that operated in plain sight, that was defended by the leading newspapers of the day, that controlled state governments, and that used the language of religion, patriotism, and family to organize terror. It was destroyed, in the end, by a combination of scandal, depression, and demographic change — not by the political system. Its legacy is the question of how a democracy can defend itself against movements that organize within it, that use its freedoms to attack its own people. That question is, sadly, still with us.

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