Klan members showed up in churches on Sunday mornings to donate money and they ran charity drives. They threw Christmas parties for orphans and raised money to build Protestant-only hospitals. They made efforts to fight supposed Catholic influence in public schools by donating American flags and Bibles.
They created special Klan rites for wedding ceremonies, christenings, and funerals. They ran candidates for hundreds of state and local offices, and Americans elected countless Klan members as mayors, school-board and city-council members, sheriffs, and state legislators. Klan officeholders in particularly prominent and powerful positions included Governors Edward Jackson of Indiana and Clifford Walker of Georgia, as well as U.
For every Klansmen who joined for the opportunity to bully, threaten, and beat blacks, immigrants, and adulterers, there were dozens attracted by these sorts of avenues for communal and civic engagement, for forging business and political connections to other middle-class white people, and for the chance to be publicly proud of being white, Protestant, and a native-born American.
None of which is to suggest that the ideology of intolerance or the racist violence was separable from the forging of community, the charity work, the pride, or the political activism. On the contrary, it was all of a piece, and even Klan members who came to the organization mostly because friends and neighbors encouraged them to do so saw the appeal of white supremacy and understood full well how the appearance of Klansmen in regalia struck fear into large numbers of their fellow Americans.
One factor that helped bring down the Klan was a growing recognition that that fear was legitimate. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge both opposed the Klan, and as the years went on a growing number of public officials and prominent citizens who had joined the Klan as its numbers increased in the early s turned against the organization as it became clear that they had cast their lot less with a salutary fraternal society than with a conspiracy that countenanced sadists and fanatics.
Ultimately, the march in Washington, D. By the end of the decade, its numbers had dwindled practically into insignificance. Rather, it went into decline mostly because of its own self-destructiveness, the fierceness and constancy of its opponents, and changing socioeconomic and political contexts that deprived the Klan of much of the energy that had given it life.
Klan leaders notoriously oversaw local and state chapters as dictators and stole funds from organizational treasuries, and the stream of members who left in frustration became a flood by the end of after the conviction of David Stephenson, the leading Klansmen in Indiana, for murdering a young woman he had also brutally raped.
Perhaps most important in bringing down the Klan was that the vision of an America decaying from foreign ideologies, dangerous immigrants, and moral rot never came into being. Sign in Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? You could not be signed in.
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This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. View Metrics. Email alerts Article activity alert. Just as quickly as the Klan rose in membership and influence, however, it collapsed. There were many reasons. Others were repulsed by its violence or its hypocrisy. The organization claimed to stand for morality, but its leaders provided the worst possible examples.
For example, Edward Y. Then, with millions of dollars rolling in, infighting for control grew fierce, and Klan founder and Grand Wizard Col.
William Simmons found himself ousted by Houston dentist Hiram W. In April , however, the year-old Stephenson forced his aide, year-old Madge Oberholtzer, onto a Chicago-bound train, where he assaulted and raped her.
She attempted suicide, but her death a few weeks later was ruled to have followed from infection of the wounds Stephenson had inflicted on her. A jury found Stephenson guilty of rape, kidnapping, and second-degree murder.
The Klan imploded after that. Although popular anti-Catholicism flourished in when Catholic New York Governor Al Smith unsuccessfully ran for president, the second Klan had long since declined. Its revival after World War II was related to opposition to the growing civil rights movement. Compared to the original Ku Klux Klan, which existed only in the South, the s Klan was centered in the.
He believes religiously that a betrayal of Americanism or the American race is treason to the most sacred trusts, a trust from his fathers and a trust from God. He believes too that Americanism can only be achieved if the pioneer stock is kept pure. Racial integrity is a very definite thing to a Klansman. It means even more than good citizenship, for a man may be in all ways a good citizen and yet a poor American, unless he has racial understanding of Americanism, and instinctive loyalty to it.
Americanism, to the Klansman, is a thing of the spirit, a purpose and a point of view, that can only come through instinctive racial understanding. It has, to be sure, certain defined principles, but he does not believe that many aliens understand those principles, even when they use our words in talking about them. In short, the Klansman believes in the greatest possible diversity and individualism within the limits of the American spirit.
The burning fiery cross was lit by William Joseph Simmons, an Atlanta man who, Hudson says, was a failure before he came up with the idea to revive the Klan, a group that had disappeared decades before. Simmons planned the ceremony in strange detail:. And by the way, the order of the laws of the Ku Klux Klan. But that original group was a band of racist vigilantes who terrorized freed blacks and their supporters in the Reconstruction Era South. This new Klan turned into something very different.
The Klan had returned with a new message.
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