flared transiently in the cloudy political skies just before the Civil War.

Simmons kept and improved on the primal Klan’s ritual mumbo jumbo, including secret initiations and an array of officeholders with titles like Imperial Wizard, Exalted Cyclopes, and Grand Goblin. He struck an alliance with a publicist named Edward Clarke who helped devise a deft recruiting scheme. Recruiters called Kleagles signed up members for local chapters (Klaverns) at ten dollars a head. The Kleagle kept four dollars; one dollar went to the state’s King Kleagle, 50 cents to the Grand Goblin, and so on up the chain of command, with two dollars to Simmons himself.

For many native-born, white, Gentile Americans, joiners by nature, the new Klan became a special lodge, like the Elks, the Rotarians, or Woodmen of the World, for which Simmons had been a field organizer. There were four million Klansmen by 1924, according to some estimates, in a population that turned out only about thirty million voters in that year’s presidential election. So it became prudent for some politicians, President Harding included, to join the KKK or at least seek its support. According to Wyn C. Wade, author of The Fiery Cross, one of the latest books on the Klan, the number of municipal officials elected nationwide by Klan votes has yet to be counted. The organization likewise had input in the choice of more than a dozen senators and eleven governors.

The Klan’s greatest victories were in Indiana, whose Grand Dragon, purple-robed David C. Stephenson, was a gifted publicist who organized a women’s auxiliary and staged barbecues and picnics, which he visited by dropping from the sky in an airplane with gilded wings. He made enough on the regalia and literature concessions to live in princely style, with lots of clandestine booze and women available. And he endorsed a slate of state candidates that swept Indiana’s Republican Convention in 1924 and followed Calvin Coolidge to victory in the fall. Stephenson’s dreams of the future for himself included a Senate seat and perhaps even the White House.

What made these astonishing successes possible? Was the whole country gripped by a fever of hatred? Yes and no. Racism and xenophobia actually were enjoying a favorable climate. The KKK’s rebirth in 1915 coincided with the success of The Birth of a Nation, which depicted the original Klan as a necessity to save Southern civilization from barbaric blacks egged on by Radical Republican plunderers. This was not much of an exaggeration of the “official” version of Reconstruction then embalmed in scholarly histories, but D. W. Griffith’s cinematic skills burned it into the popular mind.

At the same time, a wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe troubled “old stock” Americans. In 1924 the immigration laws were rewritten specifically to keep out such indigestible Catholic and Jewish hordes, as they were considered.

Then there was the experience of World War I, in which "100-percent Americanism” was enforced by vigilante groups and by the government, armed with Espionage and Sedition acts. Following

that, the Bolshevik Revolution inaugurated a Red scare that brought a frantic search for “agitators” to arrest or deport.

All these forces predisposed potential Klan members to accept its exclusionary message without much analysis—and to overlook incidents of violence. But there was more. Thousands of fundamentalist Christians, beleaguered and bewildered by the Progressive Era victories of evolution and the social gospel—not to mention jazz, gin, and short skirts—saw the Klan as the savior of old-time religion. The KKK played to their anxiety by supporting Prohibition and the teaching of religion in the schools. Had the Moral Majority then been in existence, it might have absorbed some who instead became Klan followers.

It was the onrush of change, the shakeups brought by radio and film and the auto, that spooked so many Americans. My friend David Chalmers, author of Hooded Americanism, put it neatly to me by phone. “They couldn’t blame Henry Ford or Charles Steinmetz [the socialist engineering genius of the General Electric Company], but happily they found ‘the dago on the Tiber” instead.

But change could not be held back for long. In the mid-twenties the Klan’s strength dropped off dramatically, to 45,000 by 1930. There were many reasons. One was internal feuding among Klan leaders over control of the organization’s assets. Another was the exposure of Klan-led bombings, beatings, threats, and atrocities by courageous newspapers like the Indianapolis Times, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer-Sun. They resisted boycotts and other forms of pressure in the heart of the enemy’s country and told the truth. So did many courageous politicians who repudiated the votes of bigotry. Revelations that some Klan officials were given to liquor, loot, and lechery also defaced the “knightly” image. The biggest scandal of all sent Grand Dragon Stephenson to jail for the brutal rape of Madge Oberholtzer, a young state employee, who afterward committed suicide. Stephenson, outraged that the Indiana authorities did not set him above the law, avenged himself by squealing on his political puppets and ruining their subsequent careers.

And, over time, the second Klan was repudiated because it collided with the fundamental American values of inclusiveness and pluralism. The trouble is that it also expressed equally durable American attitudes: the ongoing quest for an unalloyed “Americanism,” the perverse pressure to conform to a single majority standard, and the tendency to substitute mob “justice” for the unsatisfying ambiguities of legal verdicts.

It seems that current historians, unencumbered by having lived through the period’s hostilities, are more inclined to explain than to condemn the Klan of the twenties. Most of its members, they suggest, were traditionbound outsiders to the emerging new urban money culture, more frightened than vicious. I am unpersuaded, even while acknowledging that “good” people can join “bad” associations out of understandable frustrations. But the Klan could not be separated from its hateful implications then,

and the Klan spirit cannot be so separated now, however prettified, sanitized, and shorn of wacky costumes and titles. Scapegoating of “the other,” assurances that “we” must safeguard our system, our heritage, and our values from “them—these notions inevitably carry implications of violence and repression.

Yet, under certain conditions, they can become widespread, unless watched and guarded against. As the evidence presented shows, it has happened. Here. And not so long ago.