654 Chapter 24 Postwar Society and Culture: Change and Adjustment
and prohibition. In 1920 two unscrupulous publicity
agents, Edward Y. Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, got
control of the movement and organized a massive
membership drive, diverting a major share of the initi-
ation fees into their own pockets. In a little over a year
they enrolled 100,000 recruits, and by 1923 they
claimed the astonishing total of 5 million.
Simmons gave his society trappings and mystery
calculated to attract gullible and bigoted people who
yearned to express their frustrations and hostilities
without personal risk. Klansmen masked themselves
in white robes and hoods and enjoyed a childish
mumbo jumbo of magnificent-sounding titles and
dogmas (kleagle, klaliff, kludd, kloxology, kloran).
They burned crosses in the night, organized mass
demonstrations to intimidate people they disliked,
and put pressure on businessmen to fire black workers
from better-paying jobs.
The Klan had relatively little appeal in the
Northeast or in metropolitan centers in other parts of
the country, but it found many members in mid-sized
cities and in the small towns and villages of midwest-
ern and western states. The scapegoats in such regions
were immigrants, Jews, and especially Catholics. The
rationale was an urge to return to an older, suppos-
edly finer America and to stamp out all varieties of
nonconformity. Klansmen “watched everybody,”
themselves safe from observation behind their masks
and robes. They persecuted gamblers, “loose”
women, violators of the prohibition laws, and anyone
who happened to differ from them on religious ques-
tions or who belonged to a “foreign race.”
The very success of the Klan led to its undoing.
Factionalism sprang up, and rival leaders squabbled
over the large sums that had been collected from the
membership. The cruel and outrageous behavior of the
organization roused both liberals and conservatives in
every part of the country. And of course its victims
joined forces against their tormentors. When the pow-
erful leader of the Indiana Klan, a middle-aged repro-
bate named David C. Stephenson, was convicted of
assaulting and causing the death of a young woman, the
rank and file abandoned the organization in droves.
The Klan remained influential for a number of years,
contributing to the defeat of the Catholic Alfred E.
Smith in the 1928 presidential election, but it ceased to
be a dynamic force after 1924. By 1930 it had only
some 9,000 members.
Creed of Klanswomenat
http://www.myhistorylab.comLiterary Trends
The literature of the 1920s reflects the disillusionment
of the intellectuals. The prewar period had been an age
of hopeful experimentation in the world of letters. But
the Progressive Era writers, along with most other
intellectuals, were beginning to abandon this view by
about 1912. The wasteful horrors of the Great War
and then the antics of the fundamentalists and the cru-
elty of the red-baiters and the Klan turned them into
critics of society. Many intellectuals deplored the 1927
execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
Italian immigrants (and anarchists) who were deprivedReadtheDocumentA Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony photographed in Kansas in the 1920s. During its peak influence at mid-decade, Klan endorsement was
essential to political candidates in many areas of the West and Midwest. Campaigning for reelection in 1934, an Indiana congressman testified,
“I was told to join the Klan, or else.”
Source: Kansas State Historical Society.