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MAKING SENSE OF THE SECOND KU KLUX KLAN  
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Chad Pearson
December 22, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Understanding the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early
twentieth century gives insight into the roots of today’s
reactionary activists and policymakers. _

Ku Kluz Klan imperial wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, pictured c. 1925,
wrote a favorable article about Booker T. Washington the same month
that the second Klan formed., HUM Images / Universal Images Group via
Getty Images

 

Nancy MacLean’s newly reissued _Behind the Mask of Chivalry
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three decades after its original appearance, is guaranteed to interest
a new generation of scholars and activists seeking to understand the
second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, the hyperpatriotic white
supremacist Protestant organization that counted between two and six
million members by the mid-1920s, and the broader history of organized
reactionaries in America. Best known in liberal circles for her
best-selling 2017 book about post–World War II conservative thinkers
and policymakers, _Democracy in Chains
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MacLean first earned admiration for her exploration of this earlier
right-wing organization. Evidence of why her prize-winning book has
aged well over the last thirty years and why Oxford University Press
decided to republish it is obvious: numerous instructors continue to
assign it, countless historians cite it, and the best Klan scholars
have given it well-deserved praise. It is, according
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another subject expert, historian Thomas R. Pegram, “the best-known
and most influential single book on the 1920s Klan.” And its value
isn’t only to academics: the book helps us understand some of the
roots of today’s reactionary activists and policymakers.

 

The 2024 edition, identical to the 1994 book except for a new
eight-and-half-page preface, offers brilliant insights into the
Klan’s activities — how members organized, why they achieved
acceptability in many quarters, and why their reprehensible activities
still matter today. MacLean paints a vivid picture of the period that
triggered the Klan’s rebirth, noting the expansion of big business,
the outbreak of class conflicts, resistance to burdensome Jim Crow
laws, and women’s push for greater personal freedoms. The Klan
responded to these developments with poisonous racism, nativism,
antisemitism, and sexism as well as strident calls for working-class
subordination to social and economic “betters” and demands for
strict moral uprightness.

Formed in the Atlanta area in late 1915 under the leadership of
Alabama-born former Methodist preacher William Simmons, the second
Klan, inspired by the initial iteration of the post–Civil War Klan
that officially went away in the wake of federal prosecutions in the
early 1870s, achieved national influence in the post–World War I
years. Every state in the union had Klan chapters by 1924. Growth was
especially impressive in both Southern states like Alabama, Oklahoma,
and Texas and Northern and Western ones like Indiana, Ohio, and
Oregon. Members wore regalia, held weekly meetings, won positions in
local, state, and national governments, organized marches in numerous
downtowns, burned crosses in parks and on hilltops, and, most
dreadfully, kidnapped, whipped, and sometimes tarred and feathered a
diversity of victims.

For generations, Klan scholars have debated the reasons for its
growth, its primary goals, and the organization’s class makeup.
Early interpretations
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that the Klan attracted lowbrow reactionaries from small communities,
and that these ignorant men generally joined out of intense feelings
of nativism and racism. Members, scholars
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pointed out, were backward-looking traditionalists fearful of elites.
Yet not all are in agreement. Others have
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organization attracted, and was led by, well-networked Protestant
elites comfortable in both urban and rural settings. One
important study [[link removed]] notes
that the organization provided important networking opportunities for
upwardly mobile men, and that these Klansmen left a lasting legacy of
bigotry. Most agree that top Klan leaders were relatively well-to-do.

Numerous community studies have stressed the way local conditions,
including corruption in politics, various expressions of vice, and
upticks in crime rates attracted members. Some have stressed that the
Klan focused on recruiting true believers with its reactionary creed;
others, as historian David J. Goldberg illustrates in a review essay
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“attracted its share of ordinary, naïve, gullible citizens.”
A few
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underscored the organization’s racist ideas and violent actions.
Others have emphasized that the organization was primarily interested
in controlling the behavior of fellow whites, insisting that they
embrace proper moral codes by remaining faithful to their spouses and
avoiding alcohol. While not denying the organization’s racial and
religious intolerance, such scholars have nevertheless claimed that
the organization drew on Progressive Era reform traditions, especially
prohibition. They were, as one scholar put it, “intolerant reformers
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The Reactionary Populism of the Petty Bourgeoisie

Building on decades of scholarship and years of research into primary
source documents, MacLean focuses chiefly on the Klan’s activities
in Athens, Georgia, though her points apply beyond this region. Above
all, she maintains that middle-class people in Athens and beyond,
anxious about race, gender, and class-related challenges, built a
durable movement that espoused what she characterizes as
“reactionary populism.” Like the populists of the 1890s, the 1920s
Klan, at least in Athens, consisted mostly of small businessmen,
yeoman farmers, and downwardly mobile landowners, those who felt
squeezed by forces from below and above. They were, she writes,
“trapped between capital and labor,” distressed by the growing
influence of organizations like the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and appalled by the rebellious
spirit shown by young women.

MacLean explores how its membership, consisting mostly of middle-class
churchgoing family men, confronted questions related to class, gender,
race, and morality. “The Klan’s varied attacks on African
Americans, Jews, and immigrants in fact,” she explains, “converged
on a common core goal: securing the power of the white petite
bourgeoisie in the face of challenges stemming from modern industrial
capitalism.” Her reactionary populist interpretation echoes a
statement put forward by Sam Darcy in the _Daily Worker_ in 1927.
The various Klan messages, he explained
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were designed to “appeal to the economic interest and social
priggishness of the petty bourgeoisie of the South.”

In MacLean’s telling, significant sections of the respectable middle
classes joined and participated in the Klan partially in response to
the numerous class conflicts that erupted in the nation immediately
after World War I. The more than four million strikers in 1919 —
coal miners, longshoremen, steelworkers, sharecroppers, and even some
police officers — alarmed growing numbers of small business and
property owners. “A middle-class man inclined to fear,” she
writes, “could see in the events of 1919 the nightmare of the
republic’s founders come true: growing economic inequality had bred
concentrated power above and below a great mass with little stake in
society.”

This middling group lashed out at those above and below them. Klan
members opposed the rising power of Wall Street and the growth of
chain stores as well as labor unrest, an increasingly defiant African
American community, and rebellious teenage girls. They recruited
lawyers, businessmen, and especially ministers; together these men
condemned vice and uncompromisingly disdained Catholicism, Communism,
and Judaism. They loathed Catholics because Klansmen believed that
they prioritized the Pope over the nation’s republican institutions.
Klansmen expressed antisemitic views because they assumed that Jews
“had a ‘stranglehold’ on finance and thereby the whole
economy.” This was a view, she believes, that was embraced by
numerous Populists in the 1890s, though a point that some historians
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is exaggerated.

 

MacLean does a fine job prioritizing the Klan’s target list, noting
that threats from below, including radical organizing, working-class
struggles, and the spread of Marxist ideas represented, in members’
minds, the “foremost threat to the republic.” Such fears naturally
frightened many conservatives and elites following the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution. Klansmen believed the successful revolution was part of a
Jewish conspiracy, another way the organization expressed its
antisemitism. Left-leaning Jews, Klan members observed with
trepidation, were also active in Marxist organizations at home; these
radicals built solidary with African Americans and promoted what
Klansmen derisively called “negro equality.”

MacLean draws important connections well beyond Athens and the nation
itself. Her final chapter is on the rise of European fascism, which
coincided with the Klan’s growth. Any account, she writes, that
“fails to consider” the Klan in the context of growing far-right
movements in places like Italy, Germany, and Spain “is bound to
yield a limited understanding of its place in history.” She explains
that the Klan’s spokesperson spoke favorably about the anti-labor
actions taken by fascists in Italy and Germany. And we learn that
anti-Klan activists, including members of Oklahoma’s Farmer-Labor
Union, warned of the parallels between Italian Fascists and domestic
Klansmen.

At a time when fascism began to take off in Europe during the second
part of the 1920s, the Klan experienced a steep decline in membership.
While many historians attribute this to negative publicity and several
noteworthy internal scandals — including cases
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high-ranking members’ marital infidelity, alcohol consumption,
mismanagement of funds, and a case of rape and murder — MacLean
points out that the organization lost members because it had achieved
many of its goals. By the mid-1920s, the labor movement was mostly in
retreat, and groups like the NAACP had far fewer members nationally
and no functioning chapter in Athens. And the 1924 National Origins
Act severely restricted immigration. MacLean writes, “On most
fronts, Klansmen could feel, if not triumphant, at least relieved by
mid-decade.” Of course, this was not the entire end of the story:
the 1930s saw a resurgence of right-wing organizing, including renewed
mobilizations by the Klan, in the face of a powerful labor movement.

Yet MacLean’s analysis of the nature of the Klan’s racism as well
as her interpretation of members’ views of large businesses leaves
something to be desired. Indeed, her belief that reactionary populism
is the best way to describe the Klan works in many contexts but not
all of them. Rather than reacting with discomfort and rage to the
dynamics of modern industrial capitalism, many Klansmen were staunch
champions of it.

First, one cannot discuss the Klan, especially its activities in the
South, without confronting the question of racism, and MacLean offers
the necessary context of the virtual omnipresence of white supremacy.
No area in society, including housing, schooling, criminal justice,
and employment, was untouched by abhorrent Jim Crow laws. None of this
was acceptable to African Americans. An emboldened black population,
politicized at least in part by the democratic rhetoric surrounding
World War I, provoked bigoted responses from whites and triggered
widespread Klan growth.

Yet MacLean fails to provide a coherent account of the Klan’s
oftentimes inconstant approach to the “negro problem.” In some
sections she notes, correctly, that Klansmen embraced a type of racism
that served businessmen’s control and exploitation aims. The most
persuasive anecdote comes from the horse’s mouth, Imperial Wizard
William Simmons. Speaking in front of a boisterous crowd in a Decatur,
Georgia, courthouse in 1921, Simmons thundered that the Klan was
determined to ensure that “niggers get in their place and stay in
their place.” Presumably, second-wave Klansmen, like those during
the Reconstruction period
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had clear conceptions about “their place”: in workplaces during
their waking hours; in segregated communities when not working.
MacLean shows a clear grasp of the relationship between capitalism and
racism: “The subordination of African Americans, after all,
undergirded the entire Southern economy.”

Yet she offers contradictory statements, suggesting that Klansmen
“saw themselves as an army in training for a war between races,
should that prove necessary to perpetuate the United States as ‘a
white man’s nation.’” Simmons’s successor, Hiram Wesley Evans,
in MacLean’s description, comes across as a hard-core racial
exclusionist. Evans, she maintains, “agreed that different races
could never share the earth in peace.” But, of course, there were
plenty of peaceful interactions between whites and non-whites in the
North and South. So what was it? Did Klansmen believe in removing or
eliminating African Americans? Or did they demand the presence of
black people, acknowledging their economic value to the white business
classes? Needless to say, the Klan’s own statements were often
contradictory. These contradictions have to be interrogated carefully.

To her credit, MacLean recognizes that most Klansmen did not see
themselves preparing “for an imminent race war with people of
color.” At a time when many African Americans in the South sought to
escape racist outbursts generated by groups like the Klan for greener
pastures in Northern cities, MacLean recognizes that Southern
“planters sometimes came to believe things had gone too far.” This
is what sociologists call the “repression paradox
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Too much repression in the form of hangings, whippings, or even
intimidating marches convinced black laborers to flee, depriving
owners and managers of adequate labor. For this reason, not all elites
supported the Klan.

 

Yet readers may nevertheless find themselves confused by MacLean’s
unwillingness to explore the meaningful distinctions between the
paternalistic and exploitative forms of racism, on the one hand, and
the hateful and murderous types, on the other. Klansmen undoubtedly
believed in white supremacy, but they nevertheless had many nonhostile
interactions with African Americans. MacLean does not investigate, for
example, the relationships Klansmen developed with conservative black
elites in both religious and secular contexts. After all, Klansmen in
numerous parts of the nation donated money to black churches, met with
advocates of black businesses like Marcus Garvey, and one chapter
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New Jersey employed black musicians to lead a Klan parade in 1926.
For his part
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Imperial Wizard Evans wrote a very favorable article about Booker T.
Washington, the pro-segregation and anti-labor union college head who
died in November 1915, the very same month and year that the second
Klan formed. Washington, like the Klansmen, demanded that black people
accept Jim Crow laws and capitalist norms.

Indeed, we must not lose sight of racism’s economic foundations as
well as the Klan leadership’s determination to ensure that African
Americans remained a reliable source of labor. To achieve this basic
goal, the leadership cultivated cross-class feelings of racial
superiority, collaborated with conservative black leaders, and ensured
that African Americans lived in fear — but not too much fear. Very
simply, Klansmen with business interests, like landowners, wanted a
stable labor force, not one eager to leave. MacLean helps us make
sense of the dimensions of racism but, like other scholars and civil
rights organization spokespersons, does an inadequate
job distinguishing
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behavioral and structural forms of it.

Elite Organizing and the Long History of Vigilantism

While MacLean’s analysis of the Klan’s class makeup seems mostly
correct, she overstates the organization’s hostility to big
business. The most important robber barons did not join the group, but
plenty of privileged members in communities around the nation,
including influential economic and political elites, did. Some Klan
leaders bragged about appealing to the most prominent citizens. For
example, a few months after William Simmons made a major recruitment
push in late 1920, he was
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with letters from all sections of the county, many of them from men
who stand high in the affairs of the nation, and some of them from
leaders in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, expressing
their belief in the true aims and purposes of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Klansmen, for example, spoke highly of Henry Ford, the wealthy and
powerful antisemitic auto manufacturer.

Klansmen generally sided with businessmen during industrial disputes,
and they showed gratitude for their stances on several moral
questions. Philadelphia Klansman Paul Winter, for instance, honored
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largest industrial groups in the country” for their work in pushing
for prohibition laws. And Klan intellectuals saw wealth accumulation
as an unmistakable sign of white supremacy. Lothrop Stoddard, a
Klansman and prolific author of books popular with racists, made this
point explicitly
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1922: “The amount of wealth amassed by the white world in general
and by Europe in particular since the beginning of the nineteenth
century is simply incalculable.” Presumably, Stoddard did not
believe that his Klan comrades had to settle for small business
ownership and petty bourgeois status.

Most importantly, traveling organizers known as Kleagles first
targeted the wealthiest residents of the various communities during
recruitment visits. These were typically not the Fords or the
Rockefellers but were nevertheless part of local ruling classes.
According to the words of a Klan critic from 1924, organizers sought
out the “best citizens
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“the banker and merchant of the Chamber of Commerce.” That
Kleagles organized from the top down challenges the idea that the Klan
was a truly populist organization. Did fat cat bankers see themselves
as “reactionary populists?”

Maybe they did. Or maybe they just wanted others to perceive them in
this light. Whatever the case, the Klan was hardly the first
anti–labor union organization to use populist language to hide its
class interests. Two decades earlier, the Citizens’ Industrial
Association of America (CIAA), consisting of employers, bankers,
lawyers, religious leaders, politicians, and anti-union workers,
emerged to battle the “labor problem” and promote the open-shop
system of industrial relations. They conducted their political,
extralegal, and public relations work under the motto “For the
Protection of the Common People
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Decades later, Imperial Wizard Evans, echoing the language employed by
this earlier generation of cross-class anti-labor activists, promised
to help the “common people” reestablish “control of their
country.” The CIAA’s use of populist rhetoric, its oath of
secrecy, occasional vigilante attacks on labor unionists and leftist
activists, and successes in building branches in regions throughout
the country call into question MacLean’s statement that the Klan
“was the first national, sustained, and self-consciously ideological
vigilante movement in American history.” It simply was not.

In fact, many Klansmen were also Citizens’ Committee members.
Recently, historian Kenneth Barnes has shown
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coalitions of Citizens’ Committee and Klansmen (many held membership
in both) employed vigilante techniques to destroy a two-year-long
strike staged by employees of the Missouri and Northern Arkansas
Railroad between 1921 and 1923. Their hideous vigilante activities
involved drive-out campaigns, beatings, and the kidnapping and hanging
of striker Ed C. Gregor over a bridge in 1923. Northwestern Arkansas
Klansmen–Citizens Committee men did not draw tidy distinctions
between different-sized businesses; they were united by their hatred
of labor militancy and essentially served as the vigilante wing of a
railroad corporation.

It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which northwestern Arkansas
Klansmen — or Klansmen based practically anywhere else for that
matter — harbored a similar desire to launch sustained campaigns to
crush Wall Street investors or corporate heads. Their violent
anti-labor impulses were visibly much stronger. Indeed, from the woods
of Maine to the waterfronts of California, Klansmen used various forms
of political coercion and vigilante brutality, including establishing
coalitions with elected leaders, staging big marches, launching
kidnapping raids, and engaging in group beatings. The purpose was to
intimidate, defeat, and ultimately silence working-class activists and
political radicals across ethnic and racial lines.

 

Like the employer-activists in the open-shop movement, the 1920s Klan
served capitalist interests through words and deeds. In both cases,
these cross-class organizations boasted about attracting the “best
citizens.” Disproportionate numbers of middle-class people,
including owners of modestly sized workplaces, joined these
organizations mainly because they outnumbered members of the extremely
rich. White Protestant middle- and upper-class men participated and
led reactionary organizations because they wanted law and order in
their communities and authority and stability in their workplaces.

Revisiting the Second Klan in 2024

If Maclean could go back in time, she admits she would have dug
“more deeply into elite support for the Klan.” This would require
acknowledging that Klan policymakers were considerably closer to the
ruling class than to the working classes, even though the organization
recruited across class lines. Today she understands that numerous
“wealthy and powerful white Protestant men saw then (and see now)
advantages in supporting such a movement — even if they don’t
subscribe to all its ideas.”

This is not the only area she would revisit. Aware of the recent
popularity of scholarship concerned with settler colonialism, MacLean
would have taken “the analysis of Klan racism further” by
examining the displacement and genocide of indigenous peoples.
Furthermore, MacLean, identifying the power of today’s reactionary
influencers, “would home in more on the mechanics of” the colorful
Klan organizers, people who shared similarities with modern-day
right-wing media personalities like the Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson,
and the late Rush Limbaugh. Finally, MacLean would have linked the
Klan’s seemingly antiquarian rituals to gender politics. These
rituals, she writes, “had a purpose: to reassure men who were uneasy
about their standing in a changing society and culture.”

MacLean identifies many troubling signs in the years following the
release of her book. Since its publication, far-right populist
outbursts have periodically punctuated society: the rise of the
militia movement and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the emergence and
popularity of the Tea Party movement, and today’s Donald
Trump–inspired MAGA movement. MacLean wrote her new preface just
before Trump’s second electoral triumph, a sign that right-wing
populist ideas continue to appeal to large numbers of mostly
middle-class — and growing numbers of working-class — Americans.
“The men in white robes and hoods are few and far between,” she
writes, “but the beliefs, allegations, and impulses associated with
their cause are back.”

But MacLean is an optimist, encouraging readers to come to terms with
earlier right-wing formations like the Klan “to better understand
and contain its descendants in our own day.” She is correct: to
prepare to fight, and ultimately crush, today’s reactionary
populists and class enemies, we must consult books like _Behind the
Mask of Chivalry_.

_CHAD PEARSON teaches history at the University of North Texas. He is
the author of Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers
in the Long Nineteenth Century
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* US History
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* Racism
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* Ku Klux Klan
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* the South
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* the ultra right
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