Nativism received its most spectacular boost from the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. Originally an organization dedicated to terrorizing emancipated African Americans and their white Republican allies in the South during Reconstruction, the KKK branched out during the 1920s to the North and West. In addition to blacks, the new Klan targeted Catholics and Jews, as well as anyone who was alleged to have violated community moral values. The organization consisted of a cross section of native-born Protestants primarily from the middle and working classes who sought to reverse a perceived decline in their social and economic power. Revived by W. J. Simmons, a former Methodist minister, the new Klan celebrated its founding at Stone Mountain, Georgia, near Atlanta. There, Klansmen bowed to the twin symbols of their cause, the American flag and a burning cross that represented their fiery determination to stand up for Christian morality and against all those considered “un-American.” People flocked to the new KKK. By the mid-1920s, Klan membership totaled more than three million men and women. Tens of thousands of members outfitted in white sheets and pointed hoods openly paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the route of presidential inaugurations. Not confined to rural areas, the revived Klan counted a significant following in D. C. Stephenson’s Indianapolis and Ossian Sweet’s Detroit, as well as in Chicago, Denver, Portland, and Seattle. Rural dwellers who had moved into cities with large numbers of black migrants and recent immigrants found solace in Klan vows to preserve “Native, white, Protestant supremacy.”
The phenomenal growth of the KKK in the 1920s probably resulted more from the desire to reestablish traditional values than from sheer hostility toward blacks. In the face of challenges to traditional values, a changing sexual morality, and the flaunting of prohibition, wives joined their husbands as devoted followers. Protestant women appreciated the Klan’s message condemning abusive husbands and fathers and the group’s affirmation of the status of white Protestant women as the embodiment of virtue. In the post-suffrage era, the Klan also provided its female members with an incentive to vote by encouraging them to counteract the influence of newly enfranchised Catholic, Jewish, Latina, and African American women.
See Documents 21.3 and 21.4 for two perspectives on the KKK.
Like the original Klan, its successor resorted to terror tactics. Acting under cover of darkness and concealed in robes and hoods, Klansmen burned crosses to scare their victims, many of whom they beat, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. To gain greater legitimacy and to appeal to a wider audience, the Klan also participated in electoral politics. The KKK succeeded in electing governors in Georgia and Oregon, a U.S. senator from Texas, numerous state legislators, and other officials in California, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Oklahoma. Politicians routinely joined the Klan to advance their careers, whether they shared its views or not. For example, Hugo Black, a Klansman from Alabama, won election as U.S. senator and was appointed to the Supreme Court, where he accumulated a distinguished record as a progressive jurist.