Making Sense of the Second Ku Klux Klan
Nancy MacLean’s newly reissued Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 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, 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 to 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 suggested 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 have pointed out, were backward-looking traditionalists fearful of elites. Yet not all are in agreement. Others have shown that the organization attracted, and was led by, well-networked Protestant elites comfortable in both urban and rural settings. One important study 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, have noted the organization “attracted its share of ordinary, naïve, gullible citizens.” A few have 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.”
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, 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 maintain 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 involving 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, 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.” 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 in New Jersey employed black musicians to lead a Klan parade in 1926. For his part, 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 between 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 “swamped 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 “the 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 in 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”: “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.” 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 the ways 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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