Height of the second KKK (jan 1, 1915 – jan 1, 1925)

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KKK: Secret society that first undertook violence against African Americans in the South after the Civil War but was reborn in 1915 to fight the perceived threats posed by African Americans, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews. (pp. 471; 691)


The 1920s saw a nationwide resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist group formed in the post–Civil War South. Soon after the premiere of Birth of a Nation (1915), a popular Hollywood film glorifying the Reconstruction-era Klan, a group of southerners gathered on Georgia’s Stone Mountain to revive the organization. With its blunt motto of “Native, white, Protestant supremacy,” the Klan recruited supporters across the country. KKK members did not limit their harassment to African Americans but targeted immigrants, Catholics, and Jews as well, with physical intimidation, arson, and economic boycotts.

At the height of its influence in the early 1920s, the Klan counted more than three million members and wielded considerable political clout, particularly at the local level. A typical example was the small town of Monticello, Arkansas, where in the first half of the decade, the mayor, city marshal, half the city council, the sheriff, the county clerk, tax assessor, and treasurer, and eleven of fifteen male teachers were all Klan members. From small-town leaders to President Woodrow Wilson, who effusively praised Birth of a Nation, the Klan enjoyed broad support among native-born white Protestant Americans for a decade. Klan activism lent a menacing cast to political debate, as its members defined “one hundred percent Americanism” to include white racial purity, Protestantism, prohibition of alcohol, conservative sexual mores, and immigration restriction — the Klan avidly supported both the Eighteenth Amendment and the Immigration Act of 1924.

The Klan declined rapidly after 1925, owing to a wide range of factors: internal factionalism and economic mismanagement, the waning of the postwar antiradical and antiblack furor, and the achievement of immigration restriction. But its rise was part of an ugly trend that began before World War I and extended into subsequent decades. The Klan’s popularity demonstrated the continued appeal of white supremacy, nativism, and Protestant Christian superiority to large numbers of Americans. Those prejudices would long outlive the Klan, and could be observed at the highest stations of American life. The most famous industrialist in the country, Henry Ford, espoused racist and anti-Semitic views. Ford used his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to rail against immigrants and warned that members of “the proud Gentile race,” meaning non-Jews, must arm themselves against a Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination. Challenged by critics, one of whom demanded that Ford choose between “democracy which is based upon equality and cooperation” and “Nazism which is based upon slavery and repression,” the car-maker issued an apology in 1927. But with his paper’s editorials widely circulated by the Klan and other groups, the damage was done.

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