Roaring Twenties

The Decline of the Klan in the Late 1920s

The second Ku Klux Klan collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen. By 1930, the organization that had filled Madison Square Garden with 55,000 robed marchers in 1924 was a marginal sect, repudiated by mainstream Protestant ministers, abandoned by mainstream politicians, and overwhelmed by a series of scandals that began with the Stephenson case in Indiana. The story of the rise is told in The Rise of the Second Klan: 1915 to 1924, and the story of the peak is in Second KKK: Membership, Power, and Political Influence.

The Stephenson Scandal

The collapse began with D. C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana. Stephenson was a 34-year-old former newspaper circulation manager from Dudley, Indiana, who had been the Klan’s chief organizer in the state and, by 1925, the most powerful Klan figure outside the Imperial Palace. He had built the Indiana Klan into a state political machine that had elected Edward L. Jackson as governor in 1924.

In March 1925, Stephenson attended a political dinner in Indianapolis where he met Madge Oberholtzer, a 28-year-old schoolteacher and former head of the Indiana library commission. He abducted her the next day, took her to Chicago, and — over the next several days — raped her repeatedly and bit her. She was finally released and taken home, where she died on April 14, 1925, from a botched abortion performed during her captivity. On her deathbed, she named Stephenson as her attacker.

The trial, in May 1925, was a sensation. Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The conviction destroyed the Indiana Klan and triggered a wave of resignations across the country. Governor Jackson was tried and acquitted in 1926–27, but his political career was over. The Indiana Klan collapsed almost overnight; the Imperial Palace in Atlanta tried to distance itself from Stephenson, and the national Klan hemorrhaged members. Stephenson was released in 1950 and died in 1966.

The Conventions Get Smaller

The 1924 Madison Square Garden rally had been the Klan’s public high point. The conventions that followed got steadily smaller. The 1925 Atlanta convention was a subdued affair. The 1926 Kansas City convention drew perhaps 10,000 members. The 1927 Houston convention was smaller still. The 1928 Atlanta convention was held in a private venue, not a public arena. The 1929 Chattanooga convention drew a few hundred.

The decline in attendance was matched by a decline in revenue. The Imperial Palace was a financial disaster, draining more than it earned. The Klan’s newspaper chain collapsed. The state-level Grand Dragons stopped sending their dues to Atlanta. By 1930, the national Klan was effectively bankrupt.

The 1928 Election: Al Smith and the Catholic Question

The 1928 presidential election was the second great blow to the Klan. The Democratic nominee was Alfred E. Smith of New York, a Catholic, a product of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and a “wet” — an opponent of Prohibition. The Klan saw Smith’s candidacy as an existential threat to everything it claimed to defend.

The Klan’s anti-Smith campaign was the most virulent it had ever run. It distributed literature claiming that Smith would take orders from the Pope, that his election would mean the end of public schools, and that Catholic neighborhoods would be filled with papal agents.

The campaign backfired. Many Protestant ministers — including many who had been the Klan’s most reliable allies in 1924 — refused to endorse Smith’s opponent, Herbert Hoover, on the grounds that the Klan’s anti-Catholic campaign was un-Christian. The Federal Council of Churches issued a statement repudiating the Klan. The Baptist and Methodist churches, in particular, distanced themselves from the Klan in 1927–28.

Hoover won in a landslide, taking 58 percent of the popular vote and 444 electoral votes. Smith carried only Massachusetts and Rhode Island among non-Southern states. The story of the 1928 election is told in Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover: The Republican Decade.

The Moral and Legal Backlash

The moral backlash against the Klan began before the Stephenson case and continued for years after. By 1925, the liberal Protestant establishment — the Federal Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, the major Baptist and Methodist bodies — had begun to distance itself from the Klan. The story of the broader Protestant-Catholic-Protestant politics of the period is told in Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover: The Republican Decade.

The Catholic Church had been politically mobilized by the 1928 campaign. Catholic voters in the North turned out at unprecedented levels. The Knights of Columbus and other Catholic organizations built political networks that would be central to the New Deal coalition of the 1930s. Jewish organizations — the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Congress — had been documenting Klan violence since 1920 and now stepped up their legal challenges.

The NAACP had been documenting lynching and Klan violence throughout the decade. By the late 1920s, the NAACP had grown to about 60,000 members and was a national force. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was reintroduced in every Congress from 1922 onward; it passed the House again in 1934 but was blocked in the Senate by Southern Democrats until the 1960s.

The literary exposure of the Klan was also significant. Winifred Black’s novel A Stone Came Rolling (1925) was a thinly veiled account of the Stephenson case. Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman was now widely seen as propaganda for white supremacy. The parallel African American cultural response — the Harlem Renaissance — was also gaining strength.

The Great Depression’s Final Blow

The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed were the final blow. The Klan’s membership was concentrated in the middle class — small merchants, clerks, schoolteachers, and skilled tradesmen — and this group was hit hard. Many former Klansmen could no longer afford the $10 annual dues. Local Klaverns folded. The Imperial Palace in Atlanta was foreclosed upon and sold at auction in 1935.

The 1930 census would later show that the Klan’s membership had collapsed to a few thousand active members in scattered states. By the late 1930s, the national Klan was effectively dormant. A small third Klan would emerge in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the Civil Rights Movement, but it would never approach the size or political power of the second Klan.

The Klan’s 1944 tax-exemption revocation by the Internal Revenue Service was a final legal blow. The IRS ruled that the Klan’s tax-exempt status — which it had enjoyed as a fraternal organization — should be revoked because of its use of violence and intimidation.

The Legacy of the Decline

The decline of the second Klan was, in retrospect, a story of a mass-membership hate group that outgrew its founders and outran its finances. The Stephenson scandal exposed the hypocrisy of a movement that had claimed to defend Protestant morality. The 1928 election demonstrated that the Klan could no longer deliver the votes it had promised. The moral backlash from mainstream Protestantism stripped the Klan of religious legitimacy. The Great Depression destroyed the financial base of the middle-class Klansmen.

The Klan’s political heirs would emerge again and again over the next century: the McCarthyite movement of the 1950s, the John Birch Society of the 1960s, the Christian Coalition of the 1980s. None would be a Klan; all would adopt some of the Klan’s tactics and rhetoric. The second Klan’s collapse is a permanent reminder of how a democracy can be threatened by movements that organize within it, and how those movements can be defeated.

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