Roaring Twenties

Second KKK: Membership, Power, and Political Influence

The second Ku Klux Klan was the largest fraternal organization in America at its 1924–25 peak. It claimed four to eight million members and exerted political influence far beyond its numbers. In Indiana, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, and Oklahoma, the Klan chose governors and intimidated Catholic, Jewish, and Black Americans with impunity. The full story of how it rose is told in The Rise of the Second Klan: 1915 to 1924; the story of its collapse is in The Decline of the Klan in the Late 1920s.

The Membership Numbers

The membership claims of the second Klan are a source of enduring confusion. The Klan itself, at its 1924–25 peak, claimed between four and eight million members. The NAACP and the journalistic establishment assumed the lower figure.

Modern historians have re-examined the rolls. The best estimate is that the Klan had between 1.5 and 2 million paid members at its peak, with another 2 to 4 million on the rolls as inactive or honorary members. Even at the lower figure, the second Klan dwarfed every other American fraternal order. The Elks had about 800,000 members; the Odd Fellows about 1.5 million. The Klan’s 1.5–2 million paid members was comparable to a political party with about 3–4 percent of the adult population in active membership.

The membership base was broader than the first Klan’s. The second Klan was a national, white, Protestant organization, with members in every state. Its strongest memberships were in the South (Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas), the Midwest (Indiana, Ohio, Illinois), the West (Oregon, Colorado, California), and the Border States (Texas, Oklahoma).

Demographics: A Middle-Class Movement

The second Klan was, in its social composition, strikingly different from the first. It was, in fact, a middle-class movement, drawing heavily on small-town merchants, farmers, schoolteachers, clergy, bankers, doctors, and lawyers, with a substantial contingent of urban workers.

It was also a family movement. The Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), founded in 1923, had a peak membership of perhaps 500,000. The men’s and women’s Klans often shared meeting halls, and the WKKK’s Bible-study groups were integral to the Klan’s local power.

The Klan was unusually ecumenical in its Protestantism. It drew members from Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Disciples of Christ churches in roughly equal numbers. The single theological test was hostility to Catholicism; everything else was secondary.

The Klan as a Business

The second Klan was, structurally, a business. The membership fee was $10 — about $170 in today’s money — of which the local Klan Klavern (chapter), the state organization, and the national office in Atlanta each kept a portion. With 1.5–2 million paid members, the national income is estimated to have exceeded $30 million a year by 1924.

The Klan also made money from robes, regalia, and ritual materials. The famous white robe with the conical hood was sold to members at inflated prices; the margin went to the Imperial Palace. Local Klan Klaverns paid rent on their meeting halls, often to Klan-owned or Klan-friendly landlords.

But the empire was also riddled with corruption. The Imperial Palace was a financial disaster, draining more than it earned. Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans feuded constantly with state-level Grand Dragons over the division of revenues.

Political Power in the States

The Klan’s political power in the 1920s was concentrated in state and local elections. The Klan was a disciplined voting bloc in close elections, and its endorsement — or its opposition — could swing tight races.

Indiana was the Klan’s most powerful state. In 1924, the Klan helped elect Edward L. Jackson as governor. The Indiana Klan ran the state legislature in 1925–26. The Grand Dragon of Indiana, D. C. Stephenson, was, briefly, one of the most powerful men in the state. The full Indiana story is told in The Decline of the Klan in the Late 1920s.

Oregon was another Klan stronghold. In 1922, the Klan helped pass the Compulsory Education Act, designed to drive Catholic parochial schools out of business.

Colorado was a third. The Klan was a major force in the 1924 election of Clarence J. Morley as governor. Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Georgia all had powerful Klan organizations. The Texas Klan, with the support of Imperial Wizard Evans, controlled the state Democratic Party in the mid-1920s. The Oklahoma Klan was implicated in the Osage murders of 1921–26.

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. The most famous is the case of Madge Oberholtzer, a 28-year-old Indiana schoolteacher who in 1925 was kidnapped, raped, and killed by D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana. The Stephenson case is the single most important event in the Klan’s collapse, told in full in The Decline of the Klan in the Late 1920s.

The Klan was also responsible for the Osage Indian murders in Oklahoma in 1921–26, in which at least 24 members of the oil-rich Osage tribe were killed for their oil rights. The Klan’s violence in Indiana against Catholic communities in 1923–25 led to the burning of Catholic churches. The lynching of Black Americans continued at a steady pace through the 1920s. The NAACP recorded at least 30 lynchings a year. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which would have made lynching a federal crime, passed the House in 1922 but was blocked in the Senate by Southern Democrats.

The Women of the KKK

The Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), also called the Klavan, was founded in 1923 at the suggestion of Imperial Wizard Evans. The WKKK was organized parallel to the men’s Klan, with state organizations, local chapters, and a national leader. The first national leader was Miss Lulu Markwell of Indiana.

The WKKK had a peak membership of perhaps 500,000 — about a quarter of the men’s Klan. Its members were overwhelmingly the wives and daughters of male Klansmen. The WKKK organized Bible studies, charity drives, and — in cooperation with the men’s Klan — surveillance of Catholic, Jewish, and Black communities.

The WKKK had its most prominent public moment at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden, where the women’s auxiliary held its own Klavem on the convention floor. The relationship between the Klan and the women’s suffrage movement is examined in Women’s Suffrage and the 19th Amendment.

The Klan in National Politics

The Klan’s influence in national politics was less direct but still substantial. The Klan could usually count on roughly a third of the Democratic and Republican memberships in Congress for votes on immigration restriction, Prohibition, and anti-Catholic measures. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 were Klan political victories. The 1928 defeat of Al Smith was, in Klan eyes, the culmination of years of work. The Smith story is told in Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover: The Republican Decade.

The Klan was a major political force in 1920s America — but a force whose power was concentrated in the states and the Protestant churches rather than in Washington. Its political heirs would be the McCarthyite movement of the 1950s and the Christian Coalition of the 1980s. The Klan did not survive the 1920s, but the political style it pioneered did.

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