Roaring Twenties

The Rise of the Second Klan: 1915 to 1924

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 that filled Madison Square Garden with 55,000 robed marchers. Its rise is the subject of this page; its peak power is detailed in Second KKK: Membership, Power, and Political Influence, and its collapse is told in The Decline of the Klan in the Late 1920s.

The First Klan and Its Suppression

The original Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865, in the last months of the Civil War. Six Confederate veterans, led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, organized the Klan to overturn Reconstruction by terrorizing the freedmen and their white carpetbagger allies.

Congress responded with three Force Acts in 1870 and 1871, authorizing federal prosecution of Klan violence. The Civil Rights Act of 1871, sometimes called the Ku Klux Klan Act, gave the President power to use federal troops against Klan members. The result was the effective destruction of the first Klan within a few years.

The Supreme Court sharply limited federal enforcement in United States v. Harris (1882), ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment let Congress punish state action but not private violence. Combined with the Compromise of 1877 — the deal that ended Reconstruction — the Harris decision left Black Americans in the South almost entirely at the mercy of lynch mobs. The first Klan was dormant by the early 1870s, but its spirit never died. Forty-three years later, on a Georgia mountain, a new version of the Klan would be born.

The Birth of the Second Klan: Stone Mountain, 1915

The second Ku Klux Klan was founded on November 25, 1915, atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William Joseph Simmons, a former Methodist preacher and fraternal lodge promoter. Simmons had spent the previous few years peddling a revived Klan, structured as a fraternal benefit society with insurance, regalia, and ritual.

Simmons and a small group of his closest associates climbed Stone Mountain in the dark, lit a fiery cross borrowed from a Scottish play, and swore an oath of allegiance. The original membership was fifteen men. The new Klan was chartered by the state of Georgia in 1917.

Two cultural events of 1915 fed the revival. The first was the release of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (originally titled The Clansman), the controversial silent film that romanticized the Reconstruction-era Klan. The second was the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 — Frank was a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta whose 1913 murder conviction, widely regarded today as a miscarriage of justice, became a rallying point for white-supremacist revival in the South.

The Simmons Years: 1915 to 1920

For the first five years, the second Klan was a small, struggling fraternal order. Simmons was a poor administrator and an even worse promoter. He borrowed heavily to build the Imperial Palace in Atlanta, the new national headquarters, and ran up debts he could not repay. The Klan was on the verge of bankruptcy when, in 1920, a pair of professional fundraisers offered to take it over. They were Edward Young Clarke, a former Atlanta newspaper circulation manager, and his wife Elizabeth Tyler, who had made their names selling war bonds for the United States government.

The Clarke Takeover and the Birth of Mass Marketing

In 1920, the Imperial Klonvokation in Atlanta transferred effective control of the Klan to Clarke and Tyler. They brought in Imperial Kleagles — commissioned recruiters on salary and commission — and gave them quotas. A recruiter who brought in two hundred new members might earn a bonus, a robe, and a promotion.

The marketing techniques were sophisticated for the time. The Klan ran newspaper ads, organized mass public meetings with cross-burnings, and used direct-mail pieces. Its most successful product was the “100% Americanism” pitch, framing the Klan as the defender of Protestant, native-born, white America against Black Americans, Roman Catholics, and Jewish Americans.

Clarke and Tyler were eventually brought down by a morals charge — Elizabeth Tyler was accused of an extramarital affair — and were forced out in 1923. The next stage of the Klan’s rise was the takeover of Hiram Wesley Evans, a 41-year-old Texas dentist who was elected Imperial Wizard in 1922, ousting Simmons in a boardroom coup. The Klan under Evans was anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, and anti-modern. He liked to say the Klan was “not anti-Catholic, but pro-Protestant, and not anti-Negro, but pro-white.”

Hiram Wesley Evans and the Texas Billion-Dollar Klan

Evans nationalized the Klan in earnest. He built a salaried staff of hundreds, ran a Klan newspaper in dozens of cities, organized the Imperial Night Hawks — a paramilitary arm — and recruited aggressively in the Midwest, the Border States, and the West. By 1924, the Klan claimed four to five million members; modern estimates put the real number closer to 1.5–2 million paid members.

The Klan’s financial empire was enormous. Membership was $10 per year, of which the local chapter, the state organization, and the national office — the Imperial Palace in Atlanta — each kept a portion. With millions of members, national income is estimated to have exceeded $30 million a year by 1924. The Klan’s robes, regalia, and meeting halls (called Klaverns) added more.

The 1924 Convention: The Klan’s High-Water Mark

The Imperial Klonvokation in Nashville, Tennessee, in the summer of 1924, was the public high point of the second Klan. Some 50,000 robed Klansmen paraded through the city. The convention produced a Klan catechism that read in part: “I believe in the eternal maintenance of white supremacy.” It also produced a wave of publicity that, for a brief moment, made the Klan seem a permanent feature of American life.

The 1924 Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden was a close second. The Democratic Party needed its Southern delegates to win the presidency; the Klan’s allies in the South demanded that the platform denounce the Klan by name. The anti-Klan plank was supported by Governor Al Smith of New York. It was defeated by a single vote.

The Klan’s rise was not a Southern phenomenon. It was a Midwestern and Western phenomenon at its peak. Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Oregon, Colorado, and California all had powerful Klan organizations by 1924. In Oregon, the Klan had pushed through the Compulsory Education Act of 1922, an attack on Catholic parochial schools. A detailed look at the Klan’s power in those years is in Second KKK: Membership, Power, and Political Influence.

The same year that the Klan filled Madison Square Garden, Langston Hughes arrived in Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance began. The two events are not unrelated: the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, a Black cultural response to the racial violence of the 1920s, and the flapper was a parallel cultural rebellion against the constraints the Klan sought to defend.

The Eve of the Fall

By the close of 1924, the second Klan had outgrown its founders and outrun its finances. Within a year, the Stephenson scandal in Indiana would expose its hypocrisy and trigger its collapse. The decline of the Klan in the late 1920s was no more sudden than its rise. The Klan’s nine-year arc — from fifteen men on a mountain to millions marching in the streets of New York — remains one of the most striking examples of mass political mobilization in American history.

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