How many kkk members were there in the 1920s

In the s, the Klan moved in many states to dominate local and state politics. The Klan devised a strategy called the "decade," in which every member of the Klan was responsible for recruiting ten people to vote for Klan candidates in elections.

In the Klan succeeded in engineering the elections of officials from coast to coast, including the mayors of Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon. In some states, such as Colorado and Indiana, they placed enough Klansmen in positions of power to effectively control the state government. His passionate speech at the Klan's recruitment session convinced townspeople to support a recolution to condemn the Klan.

Discover the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst who helped bring down gangsters and break up a Nazi spy ring in South America. Her work helped lay the foundation for modern codebreaking today. I n the summer of , hundreds of wildfires raged across the Northern Rockies. Nearly all of the marchers wore pointed hoods, but their faces were clearly visible.

In part, that was because officials would sanction the parade only if participants agreed to walk unmasked. But a mask was not really necessary, as most members of the Klan saw little reason to hide their faces.

After all, there were millions of them in the United States. Most Americans today likely think of the Ku Klux Klan as an organization whose heyday came in the civil-rights era of the s and s, and of its members as lower-class white Southern men—ones who concealed their identities while waving the Confederate flag at pro-segregation rallies, burning crosses on the lawns of their enemies, or brutalizing their innocent victims. Others are perhaps familiar with the Klan of the s and s, which was a white and distinctively Southern terrorist organization composed of men who tortured and murdered people under cover of darkness in an effort to undermine the political and economic freedoms accorded to formerly enslaved people during Reconstruction.

But the Klan was easily at its most popular in the United States during the s, when its reach was nationwide, its members disproportionately middle class, and many of its very visible public activities geared toward festivities, pageants, and social gatherings.

In some ways, it was this superficially innocuous Klan that was the most insidious of them all. Packaging its noxious ideology as traditional small-town values and wholesome fun, the Klan of the s encouraged native-born white Americans to believe that bigotry, intimidation, harassment, and extralegal violence were all perfectly compatible with, if not central to, patriotic respectability.

Simmons decided to revive the organization in the fall of A resident of Atlanta, Simmons worked for a fraternal benefit society called the Woodmen of the World, and he already belonged to more than a dozen clubs and churches.

But he had dreamed for years about founding a fraternal order himself someday, and with D. On Thanksgiving night, after riding with about 15 other men in a rented tour bus to a large granite formation outside of the city known as Stone Mountain, Simmons lit a wooden cross aflame and announced the rebirth of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

It had attracted just a few thousand members by the spring of , when Simmons hired Mary Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke as publicity agents and promoters for the group. It claimed more than 1 million members by early Internal squabbles and power struggles led to the ouster of Simmons from his leadership post later that year, and he was replaced by a dentist from Texas named Hiram Evans.

You can be a part of this exciting work by making a donation to The Bill of Rights Institute today! Make your investment into the leaders of tomorrow through the Bill of Rights Institute today! Learn more about the different ways you can partner with the Bill of Rights Institute. The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exist in a free society. Whereas the original KKK was a violent, racist organization born in the post Civil War South, the modern Klan was driven by somewhat different concerns.

Many white, lower middle-class, Protestant Americans in the North and Midwest were fearful that immigrants were changing traditional American culture, and they responded with anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. The revival of the Klan was inspired by Birth of a Nation , director D. The movie was one of the most controversial films ever made and was based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Simmons and a few friends burned a cross on Stone Mountain near Atlanta to signal the revival of the Klan as one of many fraternal groups, but it harkened to an earlier Ku Klux Klan that often fought violently against rights for freed African Americans in the post-Civil War Reconstruction South.

In a scene from the film Birth of a Nation , Klansmen capture Gus, played by a white actor in blackface. The film is considered one of the most controversial of all time and is credited with igniting the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan during the s and s. As KKK membership grew into the millions by the early s, the money poured in. It supported the recently enacted national prohibition on alcoholic beverages and opposed labor unions, immigration, and foreign entanglements such as the League of Nations.

Klan members and leadership disliked Wall Street and big business in general, and chain stores in particular. Unlike the early Klan or the Klan of the s , the s Klan, although founded in the South, was not exclusively southern. It boasted support nationwide, primarily in the Midwest.

In , more than 40 percent of all Klan membership could be found in just three states Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois , but the Klan also secured significant support in Maine, Colorado, and Oregon where it helped ban Catholic schools.

It enjoyed a small-town base but also appealed to big-city Protestants, with large chapters in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and Indianapolis. In the South, most members were Democrats. In the North such as in Indiana , most were Republicans, though Milwaukee had a fairly large Socialist membership. Of course, the Klan was much more than a social group or a business network. Their inability to keep these proclivities hidden from the membership undoubtedly weakened the KKK.

What is striking in this regard is how long this process of disillusionment took. The Klan's inability to become a part of the political party system, except for brief periods of time in a few scattered states, as a result, does not mean its import was trivial. Clearly we must heed Evans' claim that one has to understand the Klan and the "half conscious impulses" it expressed in order to understand the public life of the s. Had the Steel Strike of with its communist leadership succeeded, had the Red Scare crackdown on leftwing political movements been less thorough, had the bombings of continued into the s, had Klan leadership been bent on political power rather than personal gain, had, in short, conditions been more favorable to the emergence of the KKK as a political party, it might well had succeeded.

As it was, the Klan exerted significant influence. This was true in many localities where Klan members effectively "policed" their communities.

They might object to a theater showing "immoral" pictures or warn an alleged wife beater to desist or pressure a school committee to crack down on a "liberal" teacher or ban a particular book.

Klan influence was felt in many political races where a reputed "Klan vote" put one or another candidate in office. Here the secrecy of the Klan could work to enhance or to diminish its role.

Unlike other "blocs," candidates could not be sure of the size of a "Klan vote. Its greatest impact, perhaps, was upon the "spirit of the age. Nonetheless the Klan and the "impulses" it articulated did much to define the spirit of the twenties.

One way of capturing this is to pay attention to ways in which Klan pronouncements echoed themes sounded more broadly in the culture. The most obvious of these is eugenics. The Klan claimed "to speak for the great mass of Americans of old pioneer stock.

Their "remarkable race character," passed on to their descendants, "made the inheritance of the old-stock Americans the richest ever given to a generation of men. Evans' initial formulation in "The Klan's Fight for Americanism" was intentionally vague:. There appeared first confusion in thought and opinion, a groping and hesitancy about national affairs and private life alike, in sharp contrast to the clear, straightforward purposes of our earlier years.

There was futility in religion, too, which was in many ways even more distressing. Presently we began to find that we were dealing with strange ideas; policies that always sounded well, but somehow always made us still more uncomfortable. Finally came the moral breakdown that has been going on for two decades.

One by one all our traditional moral standards went by the boards, or were so disregarded that they ceased to be binding. The sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and finally even of our right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us. Those who maintained the old standards did so only in the face of constant ridicule.

Historians have difficulty taking such laments seriously save when made by fellow intellectuals, such as Joseph Wood Krutch. His The Modern Temper painted a similar picture of the loss of "clear, straightforward" purpose, of "futility" in religion, of the collapse of traditional morals.

Krutch, the sort of "deracinated" intellectual Evans and the Klan scorned, had no solution, other than resignation, to offer. Evans and the Klan did. For Krutch, the loss of purpose arose inexorably out of scientific research. Darwinism was a triumph of the random, a compelling argument against the belief that a beneficient Deity ruled over all. The more scholars knew about the origins of the Bible, the more they compared religious and mythological systems from around the world, the more difficult it became to hold to the faith of one's fathers.

So too with the collapse of traditional morals. They had rested upon a biblical foundation, as interpreted by middle-class Victorians. With the Bible in doubt, with Victorian an epithet, and with middle-class verities shattered by the war, a new generation set out to find new rules. Krutch could, and did, bemoan these developments. He even speculated that "more primitive" societies, ones not so "palsied over with doubt," would likely come to the fore.

He too, that is, saw a loss of American vitality in these developments. Krutch cared deeply about ideas. Darwinism might undercut one's belief in a "clear and straightforward" purpose in human life, but that did not change its scientific validity.

The "higher criticism" in Biblical Studies might challenge one's faith, but one could not ignore the evidence. Nor could one categorically deny the right of a new generation, dismayed by the carnage of WWI and its aftermath, to question received wisdom.

Hence the pessimism of The Modern Temper. For Evans, as we have seen, convictions trumphed ideas. Truth lay not in science, much less in historical investigations. It lay in "race instincts. There was an kind of eugenics of ideas. Nordic Americans have learned, he wrote:. With most of the plain people this conclusion is simply based on the fact that the alien ideas do not work well for them.

Others went deeper and [have] come to understand that the differences in racial background, in breeding, instinct, character and emotional point of view are more important than logic.

So ideas which may be perfectly healthy for an alien may also be poisonous for Americans. Similarly, although immigrants might use the same words as patriotic Nordic Americans, they could rarely, if ever, achieve genuine Americanism.

Not only was there a spiritual crisis, according to Evans, there was an economic one as well. Hence the declining birth rate of Nordic Americans. Who were these "strangers"? Evans did not specify. Related was the claim that "they" dominated American politics. This was due to the bloc system of voting:. Every kind of inhabitant except the Americans gathered in groups which operated as units in politics, under the orders of corrupt, self-seeking and un-American leaders, who both by purchase and threat enforced their demands on politicians.

The most important instance of this was the opposition to McAdoo in the Democratic National Convention which Evans decried as a Catholic plot to take over the Democratic Party, one barely foiled by the Klan. As a consequence of these usurpations, "the Nordic American today is a stranger in large parts of the land his father gave him. As a simple statement of fact, this was wildly incorrect.

But it was true, as Klan recruiters kept reminding potential members, that Irish Catholics and others who were not "real" Americans dominated city government in Boston, New York, and other major cities. Irish Catholic women dominated the ranks of school teachers, their brothers the ranks of the police.

Little wonder, Klan spokesmen charged, that Catholics had enjoyed such success keeping Bible reading out of the schools or that bootleggers openly flouted the Volstead Act. Who were "they"? Who had stolen the Nordic Americans' patrimony?

First and foremost, "they" were Catholics. The "Roman Church" is "fundamentally and irredeemably, in its leadership, in politics, in thought, and largely in membership, actually and actively alien, un-American and usually anti-American. This, like the Klan's appropriation of eugenics, sounded a theme broadly heard in American public life.

William Robinson Pattangall, defeated Democratic candidate for governor of Maine in , ran on a platform sharply critical of the Klan. He later admitted that he had seriously underestimated the salience of anti-Catholicism.

The most valid of all the charges the Klan brings against the Roman hierarchy is that secretly it does not accept the American principle of the separation of church and state, but furtively goes into politics as a church and attempts to use its spiritual hold on its members as a means for political control. The Forum had, in its preceeding issue, August , sponsored an "impartial discussion of the Americanism of the Roman Catholic Church" and its reporter who most frequently wrote critically about the KKK, Stanley Frost, warned in the June issue that Al Smith's "inevitable" defeat, should he gain the nomination, would likely lead to the creation of a "Catholic Party" modelled on those of Europe.

Similar discussions of the "Catholic influence" upon American politics filled the newspapers and magazines of the s. When not Catholic, "they" were often Jews. Interestingly, Evans steered clear of some anti-Semitic stereotypes. They could not become real Americans, however, because centuries of persecution had engrained in them a congenital inability to feel patriotism.

No Jew, no matter if he and his descendants lived in the U. The Jew's. This is particularly true of the Western Jew, those of the stocks we have known so long. Their separation from us is more religious than racial. When freed from persecution these Jews have shown a tendency to disintegrate and amalgamate. We may hope that shortly, in the free atmosphere of America, Jews of this class will cease to be a problem.

Not so with "the Eastern European Jews of recent immigration. Evans' anti-Semitism was mild compared to that voiced by Henry Ford who turned his Dearborn Independent into an organ for the most vicious and irresponsible accusations. Published first as articles in the Dearborn Independent and then in four volumes, The International Jew attributed all of the nation's ills and every feature of modern life of which Ford personally disapproved to a Jewish conspiracy. This was an old argument by the time Evans made it.

He traced the declining birthrate of "old stock" Americans to the increase in immigration. Immigrants, he argued, undersold American labor. Desiring to protect his "American" standard of living, the "old stock" American had fewer children.

Walker's argument was at the core of the fear of "race suicide" expressed by Madison Grant and others in the s and s and at the core of the eugenics movement. In Evans' version of it, which was perfectly orthodox, the Nordic American could "outwork" any other race but he could not overcome the alien's ability to "underlive" him. Evans quoted Madison Grant to the effect that "the mere force of breeding" of these "low standard peoples" would inevitably displace the Nordic.

This led Evans to an apocalyptic prediction:. We can neither expel, exterminate nor enslave these low-standard aliens, yet their continued presence on the present basis means our doom. Those who know the American character know that if the problem is not soon solved by wisdom, it will be solved by one of those cataclysmic outbursts which have so often disgraced -- and saved! In the final analysis, "they" proved to be anyone whose view of America did not correspond to the "racial instincts" of the Nordic American as expressed by the Klan.

As Paxton pointed out, none of these propositions were original to the fascist agitators of the interwar period. They were literally "in the air," as their appearance throughout the developed world demonstrates quite clearly.

So, even as Evans claimed to be seeking to articulate the "half conscious impulses" of the Klan's membership, he was sounding changes on very familiar themes. Why, we need to ask, did these changes on these themes resonate so clearly and so loudly for so many? Why, that is, were so many "Nordic Americans" so aggrieved? MacLean puts considerable stress upon the economic upheavals occasioned by the war and the postwar recession. Wartime inflation had eaten away at the purchasing power of the average consumer.

Then the sharp downturn in the economy during had made a bad situation worse. Yet, the Klan grew most rapidly during the early years of the s boom, in and This does not mean that economic stress was not a factor, merely that it cannot by itself explain the growth of the Klan.

Paxton, looking at European fascisms, emphasizes the fear of a left-wing revolution. Certainly the United States experienced such a fear, the Red Scare that accompanied the postwar wave of strikes and of bombings.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer warned of potential Bolshevik plots to overthrow the government. In a article in The Forum magazine, he wrote:. My information showed that communism in this country was an organization of thousands of aliens who were direct allies of Trotzky. Aliens of the same misshapen caste of mind and indecencies of character, and it showed that they were making the same glittering promises of lawlessness, of criminal autocracy to Americans, that they had made to the Russian peasants.

How the Department of Justice discovered upwards of 60, of these organized agitators of the Trotzky doctrine in the United States is the confidential information upon which the Government is now sweeping the nation clean of such alien filth. The Justice Department staged a nationwide series of raids on December 31, and arrested thousands of supposed revolutionaries.

Most turned out to be innocent of anything worse than having a last name which suggested foreign birth. But Palmer did succeed in convincing many that a Bolshevik uprising was imminent. In this he had much help. Newspapers reported rumors as fact and editorialized stridently against "Reds" and "anarchists. The leadership of William Z. Foster in the great Steel Strike of further impressed the image of Bolshevik-led revolution on the popular imagination.

Yet, through all of this, the Klan did not grow. The American Legion did. Legion members played active roles in breaking strikes in ; the Klan did not. It was after the left had been effectively demolished that the "Invisible Empire" came into its own. Again, this is not to suggest that Paxton is mistaken. He wishes to explain why some fascist movements succeeded in gaining power, something the KKK never even approached doing.

Paxton's analysis of European fascisms raises a related, and very important, question. Fascist movements in Europe fed off the perceived weakness of established conservative parties. Where those parties were strong, as in Great Britain, fascist movements did not attrack mass followings. In the United States, however, the Klan grew prodigiously despite the demonstrated ability of the Republican Party to govern according to a conservative agenda.

This perceived strength of the Republicans, as I noted above, undoubtedly played a major role in preventing the Klan from establishing itself as a permanent part of the party system. But it does not appear to have inhibited its growth. When not turning towards Europe during the interwar years, historians of the second Klan turn back towards the first. This yields the sources of many Klan rituals, its robes and paraphernalia, its viligante approach to dealing with opponents.

This research establishes the importance of Thomas Dixon's romanticized view of the Klan in works like The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman in popularizing the mythology of Reconstruction as a period of misgovernment, corruption, and tyranny. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation , and of Woodrow Wilson's endorsement of the movie as "history written with lightning. Comparisons of the first and second Klans yield a great many differences, as well. The first Klan sought to put newly freed blacks back in "their place," i.

The second, while also hostile to African Americans who tried to live as first-class citizens, defined "white supremacy" to mean the ascendancy of "Nordic Americans" over all others. The members of the first Klan were overwhelmingly Protestant but anti-Catholicism formed no part of their movement.

Nor did anti-Semitism. Nor did nativism. The first Klan fixated entirely upon the immediate issues of Reconstruction. Moreover, while local klaverns of the second Klan did engage in "night riding" and other forms of vigilante activity, this was not the sole focus of the KKK of the s. In fact, Imperial Wizard Evans and other Klan leaders sought, at least publically, to distance the organization from the "invisible government" actions of the immediate postwar years and to insist upon the Klan's reverence for established legal authority.

The first Klan, in short, was a paramilitary organization; the second was not. Still another important difference is the second Klan's insistence upon "Americanism. The second attracted support from all sections and from women. Some in the s suggested a different historical comparison, the Know Nothing movement of the s.

Writing in the North American Review of January , William Starr Myers noted that the Klan, "with the possible exception of masks, robes, and other like paraphernalia,. The Know Nothing party. It had a grip, pass words, secret signs, and much of the ritual that has proved so attractive to the average American citizen, whether the object of an organization be fraternal, social, political, or religious.

It was organized in opposition to the naturalization of foreign immigrants, then first coming to the United States in large numbers, and also opposed to the activities and spread of the Roman Catholic Church. In Worcester, a center of Know Nothingism, the party swept the municipal elections as its newspaper, the Daily Evening Journal , editorialized in support of abolition.

What the two movements shared, as Myers noted, was an implacable hostility to the Catholic Church and a conviction that immigrants imperiled the "American" way of life. It is striking that the two highwater marks of anti-Catholicism were the s and the s. Both movements adopted prohibiton as a central rallying cry. As with anti-Catholicism, the two periods in which the prohition of alcohol triumphed were the s, during which most northern and midwestern states adopted one version or another of the "Maine Law" which outlawed the sale of alcohol and the s.

This relates to a further similarity. Both movements promoted themselves as dedicated to the reform of American life as a whole. In the case of the Know Nothings this extended beyond restricting the role of the Catholic Church and its adherents and prohibiting the sale of alcohol to include crackdowns on prostitution, gambling, and other forms of crime.

It included campaigns for reading the Bible in public schools. In all of these it anticipated the second Klan. Are these parallels significant? Do they point to similarities beyond the programmatic? Might they point to a way of making sense of both movements? I will argue that the answer to all of these questions is yes. At the heart of this argument is an insight of Alexis deTocqueville. What keeps a great number of citizens under the same government is much less a reasoned desire to remain united than the instinctive and, in a sense, involuntary accord which springs from like feelings and similar opinions.

I would never admit that men form a society simply by recognizing the same leader and obeying the same laws; only when certain men consider a great many questions from the same point of view and have the same opinions on a great many subjects and when the same events give rise to like thoughts and impressions is there a society. Locke, Tocqueville held, had been wrong. To form a nation people had to share customs, habits, prejudices, traditions, a sense of commonality.

But the Founders had followed Locke. The accord among Americans was to be voluntary. Further, they explicitly barred the new national government from actively engaging in the process of building a sense of nationality. Barring the federal government from directly attempting to shape American nationality was every bit as radical an experiment as the republic itself. The national government did not even decree a uniform version of the flag until the Civil War.

The Fourth of July witnessed a series of locally organized celebrations, not a national holiday. There was no national anthem. National monuments did not exist.

There was no official language. There was no national church. There was no national school system. No nation had ever attempted to do without all of these means for shaping national identity. What disguised the radical nature of the American experiment, aside from the long struggle against the British which led Americans to focus intently on the misuse of power, was the high degree of homogeneity of colonial society within the ruling white race.

White Americans were overwhelming Protestant. Use of English was virtually universal. The market-based economy was well established so that white Americans shared basic ideas about worth, fair exchange, and the value of labor. Political participation, including officeholding, was widespread. White Americans then shared the Revolutionary experience and later the naval war with France and the War of against Great Britain. In sum, they could take for granted at least some of the features of nationality Tocqueville insisted were crucial.

There was no need to empower the government to create what already existed. By the s, however, sectional interests clearly threatened the sense of nationality Americans had assumed as a given. Tocqueville carefully detailed the differences he perceived in the "characters" of white Northerners and Southerners and questioned whether the Union could survive.

The s saw sectional divisions intensify, very much along the faultlines Tocqueville had identified. The period saw additional faultlines develop as well. Immigrants from Germany and Ireland brought differences of language, religion, and culture to the North. Know Nothings sought to proclaim an American nationality.

At the same time, Lockean principles were deeply engrained. Freedom of religion and the absence of an established church were cherished as uniquely American. This forced Know Nothings to repudiate Jeffersonian ideals of limited government even as they called for a renewed Americanism. Irish and other immigrants, for their part, proclaimed their own fidelity to "American" principles. They opposed Bible reading in the schools as a violation of the separation of church and state, to cite an important case in point.

Their insistence upon this ultimately brought upon them a papal rebuke in the form of a condemnation of "American heresies. Increasing levels of sectional hostility, corruption within the leadership of the Know Nothings, the party's inability to develop a coherent policy vis a vis slavery in the territories, and the rise of the Republican Party all contributed to the demise of the Native American Party.

Even so, the Know Nothings demonstrated the potency of an appeal to "real" Americans, those who felt that their grandfathers' participation in the Revolution and the War of gave them a special claim to American nationality. Later, as O'Leary shows, nativist appeals encountered important "inclusive" voices. The most visible "patriotic" organization of the post Civil War years, the Grand Army of the Republic, made up of Union veterans, included Irish Catholic and African American veterans in some of its local organizations.

As the GAR campaigned for flying the American flag over public schools, for example, it did not attack the Americanism of the foreign born. Postwar patriotic societies in the North made participation in the Civil War the key test of patriotism. Not until the s and early s did another broadly based nativist movement emerge, the American Protective Association APA.

Its members renewed charges of unwonted Catholic influence in public schools and urban governments. They also revived claims that Catholics owed allegiance to the Pope and did not accept the American principle of separation of church and state. In large measure this was, as Richard Jensen has shown, because the established parties channeled ethnic and cultural rivalries into electoral politics.

In the North and Midwest the Republican Party reliably upheld the interests of "old stock" Protestants, including temperance. For its part, the Democratic Party tended to attract Catholics, especially among the Irish, and other immigrants, though to a lesser extent.