A new Ku Klux Klan arose in the early 1920s, a less violent but equally poisonous descendant of the terrorist Klan begun in the 1870s South. This “second Klan” flourished above the Mason-Dixon Line by targeting Catholics, Jews and people of color as a threat to America’s destiny.  It had major successes, with four-to-six-million members, including 1.5 million women, approximately 150 newspapers, and the support of many evangelical ministers. It elected eleven governors, forty-five members of Congress, and thousands to state and local positions. The 1924 immigration control law enacted the Klan’s racial hierarchy by setting very low quotas on immigrants of “undesirable” ethnicities.

As historian Linda Gordon demonstrates, the second Klan’s bigotry differed only in intensity from that of millions of other WASP Americans.  Klan membership was not only respectable but even conferred prestige, offering an entrée into the “middle class” for many members.   Never secret, this Klan recruited openly, using newspaper ads, ministers, traveling lecturers, and college fraternities. It staged extravagant mass “Americanism” pageants in a vain effort to compete with the attraction of the movies, a new form of entertainment designed, it charged, to undermine Americans’ morality.

The Klan’s melding of evangelical Protestantism with racial bigotry represents a continuing undercurrent in American history. Its recruitment, demagoguery, as well as the community solidarity it provided may offer insight into today’s mobilizations of angry bigotry.