SECOND COMING OF THE KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

The Ku Klux Klan had its origins in period following the American Civil War as an attempt to control freed Black slaves, when it quickly became known for its racist rhetoric and atrocities. It resurfaced in the 1920s with the same rhetoric directed largely at Jews and Catholics, but this time it was not associated with uneducated small-town mass hysteria. Liberal elite groups labelled the KKK as a superstitious folk movement, but studies in the 1960s showed that the second wave of Klan activity in the 1920s was an urban phenomenon, with a third of members living in big cities like Chicago, Indianapolis and Philadelphia. The resurgence of the KKK was kick-started by the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, admired by President Woodrow Wilson, and fuelled by publication of the virulently anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The founding fathers of the second wave, for example Hiram Evans who became Imperial Wizard in 1922, were superficially highly respectable men. Aggressive recruitment tactics tapped into latent suspicion of Catholics and Jews, many of whom had been immigrants in the 1880s fleeing from European persecution or economic hardship, and an anti-immigration stance was common to KKK rhetoric in spite of traditional American pride in the nation's open borders. Insisting on the principle of non-violence enabled the resurgent movement to recruit among groups of Evangelical Christians and temperance organisations. A further avenue of recruitment was the male bonding of fraternities with their associated rituals, and there was also an overlap with freemasonry. A popular right-wing ideology embraced by Klanspeople was that of eugenics and superior race theory. The author charts the rise and fall of the second-wave KKK, destroyed by the corruption of its leaders, and assesses its continuing legacy in American populism. 272pp, photos.