This page quotes the Klan's own publications and leaders as evidence of method. The words in quotation marks are theirs.
What it said
The pitch fit on a lapel: "100 Percent Americanism." Around it the order stacked "Protestantism," "Law and Order," and, without embarrassment, the "eternal maintenance of white supremacy." None of those words came with a test a citizen could apply. They were a password, and the password decided who was inside.
Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave the movement its plain-folks voice in a 1926 essay, "The Klan's Fight for Americanism."
We are a movement of plain people.
In the same essay he asked that power go back to the average citizen of the old stock
, and he described that stock as a "Nordic race" under threat. The Klan's monthly mixed the altar and the flag. A 1926 Kourier article, quoted by the historian Kelly J. Baker, put it this way:
We love Jesus because He shed his blood for us, and we love the Flag because it represents the blood shed for our freedom.
The weekly Imperial Night-Hawk shows what the password meant in policy. On 29 August 1923 it printed an article credited to the Grand Dragon of South Carolina calling immigration one of the greatest perils facing the country. Under the subhead "Eliminate Foreign Press" it asked for this:
We must insist that a law be enacted prohibiting the printing of any newspaper or magazine not printed in the English language; and to require all aliens within our borders to speak English within a limited period of time.
The same page called the arrival of immigrants an "avalanche" and said America was "saturated with aliens." It counted 53,524 Hebrew arrivals against 18 departures for Palestine as if that settled something.
Who made it and why
William J. Simmons and a few followers burned a cross on Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta, on 25 November 1915 and declared a new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By the account the New Georgia Encyclopedia gives, he picked the week because Atlanta was about to open D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which made heroes of the Reconstruction Klan, and he expected the premiere to give his order "a tremendous popular boost." The film's own advertising sold that ride as a spectacle. A 1916 Allentown theater notice listed the WILD RIDE OF THE KU KLUX KLANS
among its attractions and claimed 20 Million People Have Seen It Without Adverse Criticism
(FRAME object record).
For five years the order stayed a small lodge. The change in 1920 was commercial. Simmons hired the Southern Publicity Association, run by Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, a fund-raising shop whose earlier clients had included the Anti-Saloon League and the Red Cross. They built a sales force. A recruiter, called a Kleagle, collected a $10 initiation fee, the Klectoken, kept a cut, and passed the rest upward through state and regional managers to Clarke, Tyler, and Simmons. Clarke styled himself "Imperial Kleagle." A salesman paid per signature has a reason to inflate every number he reports, which is one reason scholars do not trust the Klan's own totals.
The product moved through channels people already trusted. Ministers could join free and speak at rallies, and meetings were often held in churches, according to reviewers of Linda Gordon's 2017 history. Families came to Independence Day "Americanism" pageants with fireworks, games, bake-offs, baseball, and baby contests. Boys had the Junior Ku Klux Klan, girls the Tri-K-Klub, and women the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. Kathleen Blee estimates about half a million women joined the women's order, roughly 250,000 of them in Indiana, which she puts at 32 percent of that state's white, native-born women. The order also ran a press: the Imperial Night-Hawk (1923 to 1924), then the monthly Kourier (1924 to 1936), plus The Fiery Cross, begun in Indianapolis in 1922, and Chicago's Dawn.
Kenneth T. Jackson's 1967 study found the movement strong in cities like Chicago and Denver, not just in small towns, and it reached mostly beyond the South. Rory McVeigh reads the Klan's papers as the reaction of white Protestants squeezed by chain stores, big manufacturers, and growing cities, who were told the cause was Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and Black Americans.
How many joined is not known. McVeigh's summary gives up to five million members in about four thousand chapters; reviewers of Gordon report four to six million; other scholars give lower numbers. This page does not pick one.
What it got right or wrong
It got its targets wrong, and it got them wrong on purpose. Membership was limited by the founding rules to white, native-born Protestants. Everyone else was cast as the threat. Calling that program "Americanism" was a theft of the word. A country of citizens does not sort them by "old stock."
The violence was real and it was crime. Whippings and other vigilante attacks were reported in the New York World's 1921 series and raised in the House hearing that October. How many ordinary members took part, rather than just attending picnics, is disputed in the scholarship. That dispute does not make the attacks smaller. It means a dues receipt is not proof that a given member held the whip.
The "law and order" promise collapsed on its own terms. In November 1925 an Indiana jury convicted Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson of second-degree murder in the death of Madge Oberholtzer, a state employee he had abducted and assaulted. A year earlier Stephenson had backed a slate that won the Indiana governorship and, by the Klan's own count, more than half the legislature. That legislature then passed little of the Klan's program, which is a useful reminder that the order's political power is also contested.
The economic anxiety McVeigh describes was not invented. Small merchants and farmers did face new pressure. The Klan's lie was in the diagnosis: it took a real grievance and pinned it on neighbors defined by church, birthplace, or skin.
A demand to censor the press by language
Start with the order's own demand. A movement that marched under the flag demanded, in its national paper, a law outlawing every newspaper and magazine not printed in English. That is a demand to censor the press of millions of Americans by language. It runs straight into the First Amendment, and it tells you what the Klan's "Americanism" would have done to the Bill of Rights if it had won.
Then the answers. The best ones were speech. The New York World began a 21-day exposé on 6 September 1921 that at least eighteen other papers carried, and it won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Historians note that recruitment rose alongside the attention, so exposure was not a cure by itself. Walter White of the NAACP wrote to Klan headquarters posing as a would-be member and got back a letter from Clarke inviting him to organize in New York; White and James Weldon Johnson passed what they learned to Catholic and Jewish groups and to the New York police. The Chicago Defender sent two disguised reporters into an initiation. In St. Louis, the Black weekly Argus printed the 23 aldermen who would not vote on an anti-Klan resolution, by name and ward, and told readers Cut These Names Out and Save Them In Your Scrap Book
(FRAME object record). That is a free press holding officials to account at the ballot box.
The state's tools need a harder look. The St. Louis resolution asked the governor, mayor, and police commissioner to Lawfully Suppress The Ku Klux Klan Within The State Of Missouri
. Prosecuting a whipping is lawful. Suppressing an association for its views is not something the First Amendment allows, even when the views are vile, and the "lawfully" in that sentence carries a heavy load. Anti-mask statutes, such as Louisiana's in 1924, were passed to show disapproval of the Klan and, by the First Amendment Encyclopedia's account, rarely enforced. They have since been challenged on speech grounds because they reach any masked protester, not only Klansmen. When Congress held its October 1921 hearings, Simmons called the press charges slanders and the committee made no recommendations. Testimony without a statute was the restrained choice.
What ended the national order was ordinary law applied to ordinary conduct: a murder conviction in 1925, after which membership fell steeply, and in 1944 an Internal Revenue Service lien of about $685,000 for unpaid tax on 1920s income. Imperial Wizard James Colescott then dissolved the organization, saying it had to sell its assets and "go out of business." A tax bill on income actually earned is the government acting within its lane. The FRAME record sets the IWO beside this, a Communist-linked fraternal insurer that New York liquidated through insurance law after the Attorney General listed it in 1947. The same rule should cover both: enforce the law against acts, and do not reach for a regulatory lever to shut a lawful group over its politics.
Washington's own street law is part of the record too. On 8 August 1925 somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 robed members walked Pennsylvania Avenue with faces showing, because a District ordinance required it. The Washington Post the next day reported police estimates of 30,000 to 35,000. The National Mall history project says the march was meant to rebut reports of falling enrollment. They were allowed to march. That is the First Amendment doing its hardest job, and the country survived it.
Its legacy
The second Klan is the clearest American case of propaganda sold as a franchise. Its marketers came from the charity and temperance trade. Its recruiters were paid by the head. Its flags, hymns, and picnics were real, and they were the front door to a program of exclusion and, for some, terror. Rollin Kirby's 1923 New York World cartoon "Swear!" drew the Anti-Saloon League's "Mr. Dry" clasping hands with a hooded Klansman; the historian Thomas Pegram describes the real ties as informal links between some officials, so the cartoon overstates an alliance (FRAME object record). Critics used the same tools the Klan did.
The Klan's decline after 1925 had several causes acting together: leaders' scandals, above all Stephenson's; fights over money and control, including Evans pushing Simmons out in 1922; and dues income falling as recruitment slowed. Four decades later the Bureau ran a secret program against Klan groups too, and this site's page on COINTELPRO and the press explains why a vicious target did not make that method lawful. The lesson of the 1920s runs the other way as well. The record credits a free press, a jury in Indiana, and a tax assessor; it gives the rarely enforced mask bans little part. When a private group borrows the flag and the pulpit to decide who counts as American, the useful questions are the ones the Institute for Propaganda Analysis later taught: who is selling, who is paid, and what the virtue word is hiding.
Sources
- FRAME case study "The second Ku Klux Klan: selling membership as '100% Americanism'," for the chronology, the Southern Publicity Association commission system, membership estimates, the auxiliaries and press, the 1924 Indiana results, the 1925 and 1926 marches, the counter-efforts, the Stephenson conviction, the 1944 lien, and the IWO comparison. The case study draws on the New Georgia Encyclopedia; VCU's "Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan" and Scholars Compass; Hiram Evans, "The Klan's Fight for Americanism" (1926), via the American Yawp Reader; Kelly J. Baker (2017); reviews of Rory McVeigh (2009), Kathleen Blee (1991), Linda Gordon (2017) and Kenneth T. Jackson (1967); Histories of the National Mall; the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis; the First Amendment Encyclopedia; the African American Intellectual History Society; Samuel D. Brunson (Loyola University Chicago); and Cornell's guide to the International Workers Order records.
- The Imperial Night-Hawk, 29 August 1923, page 2, via the Internet Archive, transcribed on the FRAME object record.
- The St. Louis Argus, 14 October 1921, Part Two, via the Internet Archive (State Historical Society of Missouri / University of Missouri-St. Louis), transcribed on the FRAME object record.
- Lyric Theatre, Allentown, advertisement for The Birth of a Nation, The Allentown Leader, 18 March 1916, via Wikimedia Commons, transcribed on the FRAME object record.
- Rollin Kirby, "Swear!", New York World, 11 November 1923, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, as described on the FRAME object record.