The Rest Is History - 656. The Ku Klux Klan: Birth of a Nation (Part 3)

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

How did the second incarnation of the clan, born in Georgia in 1915, grow into a seemingly indomitable nation-wide fraternal organisation, numbering millions? Who were its new targets? And, with the Klan’s momentum seemingly unstoppable and an election on the horizon, would their appalling violence be publicly condemned? Join Tom and Dominic as they chart the second rise of the violent, tyrannical, Ku Klux Klan…. _______ Advertise with us: [e-mail] To read our new newsletter, sign up here: therestishistory.com/newsletters Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠restishistory.com⁠ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Whether it's with your besties or date night,

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Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be. This winter, stay warm. Tap the banner to order your groceries online at voila.ca. Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. We, the Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, reverentially acknowledged the majesty and supremacy

of Almighty God, and recognize His goodness and providence through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Recognizing our relation to the government of the United States of America, we shall ever be devoted to the sublime principles of a pure Americanism and valiant in the defense of its ideals and institutions. We avow the distinction between the races of mankind as decreed by the Creator. And we shall ever be true to the maintenance of white supremacy and strenuously oppose any compromise thereof. We appreciate the value of practical fraternal relationship among men of kindred thought,

purpose and ideals. And we shall faithfully devote ourselves to the practice of an honorable clannishness that the life of each may be a constant blessing to others. None silver, said Anthar, done in the orlic of His Majesty, the Emperor of the Invisible Empire. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan In the Imperial Palace In the Imperial City of Atlanta Commonwealth of Georgia United States of America

This is the 29th day of November Ano Klan 56 So that Dominic was no laughing matter Because it was the creed Spelled with a K of the Ku Klux K as published in the Kloran, again spelt with a K, which was the Constitution and Laws of the Ku Klux Klan Inc instituted in 1922.

And, I mean, it starts off sounding quite normal and it ends up sounding like something from, I don't know, Star Wars Return of the Phantom Menace or something. And you know the single worst thing about it? Non-silber, said Antha. I mean, what the hell is that? Well, it's apparently it's a mixture of Latin and God. Gothic. And you can't go mixing Latin and Gothic. Well, surely an Ostrogoth might have spoken a mixture of Latin.

I don't think so. I mean, you're either speaking one or the other. Come on, make your mind up. Yeah, there's so much to unpack there, actually. Now, last week when we were talking about the clan, we were talking about a paramilitary group that was born in the Reconstruction South, so in the 1860s after the American Civil War. And its purpose was to restore white supremacy in the beaten states of the Confederacy. But, I mean, you said that. was from 1922, that particular issue, edition of the Cloran. So we moved forward a couple of generations. And this is a completely different and truly extraordinary story. So we are in the years of the First World War and afterwards. And this is the story of the second incarnation

of the clan. It was born in Georgia in 1915. And it could not be more different from the first clan. There is a lineage, but they are very different beasts. They're both racist still. They're both racist, of course, but racist in different ways. I think that's something that people often overlook. So their targets are slightly different. So this is not a secretive paramilitary group. This is a fraternal association with between 2 and 5 million members, very public members as well. So is this one more like, say, the Masons than it is the original Ku Klux Klan?

Much more like the Masons. And we will actually tease that out in this episode. The links between the clan and the Masons. The masons, by the way, were very resentful of the clan coming along and trying to poach its members and were discussed the relationship today. Its greatest popularity, the second clan, was not in the South. It was in the north and in the Midwest. It was in basically the future rust belt of Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Illinois. It was a product not of slavery in the Civil War, but of advertising and mass entertainment.

Absolutely, you said it's still racist. It is still racist. It's very much committed to white supremacy. Those words, white supremacy, are in that creed with a capital K that you read out at the beginning. It copies the hood and the robes from the first clan, but its targets are not, by and large, African Americans, although sometimes they are. But by and large, they are white, Catholics and Jews. They are immigrants and bootleggers. So very different kinds of people.

Because we said it's about wasp supremacy, perhaps, rather than white supremacy. Exactly right, exactly. Now, I already said it's not secretive. It operates in broad daylight. It has adverts in newspapers and magazines. It organizes parades. It organizes massive picnics, barbecues. It appears at state fairs.

Its leaders are an absolutely bizarre group of people. So the first clan was by and large led by local landowners in the south or former Confederate offices and things, the leaders of the second clan are advertising men, marketing men, and this bizarre collection of kind of fraudsters. And its members are small businessmen, they are farmers, and very heavily represented Methodist clergymen, a really important part of the second clan. It even has a women's division which campaigns for greater women's rights, which may kind of strike a lot of listeners as bizarre, including women's political rights. And there is still a lot of vigilante violence with the second clan, and we'll talk about that. But at its peak, it wields

enormous political influence. So in the mid-1920s, the second clan had governors running Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Colorado and Texas. I mentioned Oregon. In Oregon, in the mid-1920s, the majority of all public elected officials are members of the clan. In Colorado, the clan's peak, there was only one city in Colorado, Colorado Springs, that was not run by the Ku Klux Klan. So its rise and fall is an absolutely bizarre story and a brilliant window into 20s America. And it's got some of the sort of strangest and sort of shadiest characters that we've ever done on the rest is history. We should talk about the link with the first clan.

So let's get into that. And before we do that, I should say, as always when we do American history, but basically because there are so many American historians, there's an enormous historiography of this kind of stuff. So there's some brilliant books, which I've relied on by people like David Chalmers and Linda Gordon, Thomas Pigram. The trouble is they all disagree with each other. So that's something of a scholarly minefield. So I've tried to pick my way through it as best I can. But everybody agrees that basically the second clan starts with a novelist. I said it was born of entertainment and it is. I mean, that's such a so striking, isn't it? Because Gone with the Wind, Margaret

Mitchell's novel, plays a similar role. It's a novel that then inspires a film. And this is the same story, kind of what, 20 years before? Yes, exactly. A novel actually about the same kind of thing, really. So the novelist this time is a man called Thomas Dixon. Dixon was born in North Carolina in 1864. His father was a local Baptist minister and a landowner and a slaveholder. And both his father and his uncle were clan members when he was young.

And Dixon said later that his earliest memory was a clan parade through the village streets in Shelby, North Carolina when he was five. He also claimed to remember an incident when a woman came to their house. She was the widow of a Confederate soldier. And she said a black man had attacked and raped her daughter. And to help her, the clan hanged this man publicly in the town square. This is the story that Dixon tells anyway, whether this actually happened. It's a different matter.

Anyway, Dixon, he grows up in North Carolina. He's an unbelievably tall man. He's kind of six foot six or something. crazy. He's really tall. He's a brilliant student. He goes to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which was then the outstanding graduate school in the country. And he studied politics. And he became friends with a young man from Virginia who was in his class called Woodrow Wilson. Both of them really interested in politics. Wilson obviously does incredibly well at it. Dixon also starts off doing really well. He becomes a local legislature in North Carolina

when he's just 20, when he's actually too young to vote, he has a seat in the legislature. So he's like William Hague. Yes. Your friend, William Hague. Big fan of the rest of his history, William Hague. That's all I'm going to say. Great man. Yeah, big fan.

Now, he can't stick to anything. He becomes a lawyer, then he becomes a Baptist minister. He becomes an evangelical speaker, and he's brilliant at that. Does that for a while. Then he decides to become a public lecturer, and he goes around giving lectures about the South and about the loss cause of the Confederacy and about the evils of reconstruction. He claims to oppose slavery, doesn't he? Yeah.

But it's as someone who opposes slavery, kind of posture. It's exactly that. It goes all in. Yes. Why I, as a Remainer, think Brexit was the best thing that ever happened. That's exactly what it is. I'm very familiar with that particular line of journalistic activity. I know you are.

That's why I mentioned it. So then he decides, unlike me, he decides, to try his hand at writing novels. And he wrote a novel in 1902 called The Leopard Spots, which was an account of reconstruction in which he basically was saying, a leopard can't change its spots. And by that, he meant African Americans can't change their spots either, as in, you know, once a slave, always a slave, as it were.

And then in 1905, he wrote another book called The Clansman, a Klansman with a C, not a K. So he's made an interesting choice there. Well, that's because he's been to a top graduate school. So he knows how to spell. Yeah, that's it. I should have thought of that. So the Klansman, the subtitle is a historical romance of the Ku Klux Klan.

And basically, it's a terrible book. It's the story of two families, the Cameron's and the Stonemans. One fights for the north, the other fights for the south. The hero is called Ben Cameron. He fought for the South, and he ends up leading the local clan. And he's in love with a lovely pouting maiden called Elsie Stoneman, who unfortunately is from the bad family. Because her father, Austin Stoneman, is an evil Republican, a radical.

He's plotting to hand over the South to a massive mob of African-American rapists. That's basically the story. As this might suggest, the Klansman is an intensely racist book. And the racism is not a sort of bug. It's not a side thing. It's the essence of the story. The racism runs right through it. The most famous scene in it is where Ben's sister Flora is being menaced by this crazed black freedman,

who wants to rape her and she throws us off off a cliff. And anyway, Ben and his pals put on their white robes and their hoods and they ride off to exact revenge and to redeem the South. Now, even at the time, a lot of people saw this as a very shocking book. You know, they thought it was incendiary, outrageous, a distortion of history and all of this. It was massively popular. It sold 100,000 copies. Dixon made it into a play, and he cast himself in the lead.

Didn't you not do that when you were a student? Did you not cast yourself? I did, yes. The parallels are uncanny. Well, the thing is, people used to say of him, he'll never make it as an actor because he's too tall. He's so tall that people can't take him seriously on stage. He could play Jack and the Beanstalk. He'd be good in that.

Well, he could play the Beanstalk. Going to Panto. Yeah, I suppose so. Anyway, the play was banned in some cities for causing public disorder. there were reports that after performances, white mobs would go rampaging to the streets, that they would be a kind of spike in lynchings and whatnot. The Washington Post in 1906 wrote an absolutely savage article about the play.

The play does not possess even the merit of historical truth. It excites the passions and prejudices of the dominant class at the expense of the defenseless minority. In the present condition of the public mind in the South, it's a firebrand, a council of barbarity, in fact, a crime. So it's not true that at the time people, you know, sort of took this stuff. A lot of people were very shocked by it. So then along came the most brilliant cinema director in America, a man called D.W. Griffith. Hollywood, remember, is just a

couple of years old at this point. Now, Griffith is from Kentucky. His father had also served in the Confederate Army, and he shared Dixon's view of the Civil War and Reconstruction. And he basically bought Dixon's play, and he said, I'm going to make it into a film. He offered Dixon 25% of the profits, and the result was probably the most influential and important feature film that has ever been made. Wow, that is a high claim. The foundational film in the history of cinema. The first true long-running feature film with a long narrative that goes on over 12 reels,

so it goes on for between two or three hours, depending how quickly you project the film, because it's an old-fashioned kind of silent film. It cost what was then a record $100,000, the birth of a nation. It was released in February 1915. Even the soundtrack was groundbreaking because it has lots of classical music. Most obviously, Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyrus, which plays as the Ku Klux Klan are charging out in their white robes and hoods. And film historians generally agree,

this is the film that establishes the template for so much that follows. It's the film that prefigures. I don't know, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben Hur, gladiator, the Lord of the Rings and so on and so forth. It's transformative in the way that people make movies. It attracted an enormous crowd, so 3 million people in New York City saw this film. So Dixon's absolutely quits in with his quarter of the profit. They make loads of money from this film. And at the end, there are stories that basically when the Vargas is playing

and the clan are riding out, waving their swords to overpower the kind of mobs of freedmen and to redeem the South for white supremacy. There were stories that audiences would be on their feet. There would be people cheering and sobbing. I mean, don't forget, it's the first time anybody has ever seen anything remotely like this. So they are blown away by it. It is amazing that the two great epics of American cinema in the first half of the 20th century, this and gone with the wind, are both basic.

promoting this kind of fantasy of the of the civil war in its aftermath. It is. It is incredible, isn't it? Well, it tells you something about American culture. I mean, that's not all American culture is, of course, but it tells you about the appeal of the lost cause myth, how deeply it's embedded by this point. And how in a very urban society that's become the crucible of modernity, how this appeal to a kind of backward-looking, nostalgic, pastoral, you know, frankly, and intensely

racist view of history, how that appeals to people. The nostalgia is a really important element of it, I think. I suppose also the potency of presenting yourself as an underdog in such a situation. Yeah. Because, you know, if you're the underdog and you cast yourself as oppressed, then you are entitled to inflict violence. And violence is always cinematic. Yeah, agreed.

Agreed. I mean, both of these, in both films, there's a sense of victimhood, isn't there? We are the big victims in all this. Completely, yeah. Now, as with the novel, the film provoked. enormous controversy at the time. Civil rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the NAACP, organised protests and boycotts. Some northern cities did try to ban it, but it was a massive success. So it was the biggest grossing film until gone with

the wind. It's up there with Avatar and Titanic and the other kind of all-time box office blockbusters. And it had the implicit endorsement of the most powerful man in the country, because Dixon's mate, Woodrow Wilson, is now president. And he agreed to a private, White House showing of the birth of a nation, it became the first film ever to be shown in the White House. And is that because he's mates with Dixon? Or because he's interested in the topic? I think it's probably three things. One, it's a massive, it's a cultural landmark in a way that no film up to this point has ever been. Number two, it's because he's friends with Dixon. And number three, it's because he's passionately interested in the material. So Wilson's own book,

Don't forget Woodrow Wilson had been an academic. His own history of the American people is quoted in the film. In the kind of, you know, they have title cards because it's a silent film. So these words, adventurers swarmed out of the north to cousin beguile and use the Negroes. The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the southern country. So it's quoting Wilson here. you know, provingly, his book.

And Wilson, the line that's attributed to him, it is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true. So this is what you always read that Wilson said. Actually, that quotation didn't appear until the 1930s after Wilson was dead. But some historians say, it's a phrase that Wilson did use, history written by lightning. He used it in other contexts.

And it sounds like the kind of thing he would have said. Anyway, Dixon was thrilled that Wilson had given it his approval. He wrote to Wilson a few months later, This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic southern voters. And he's not necessarily wrong because, as we shall see, you know, the film does play a part in the creation of a second clan. Because one of the people who goes to see the film is another southerner called William Joseph Simmons. Now, Simmons is a generation younger than the people we've been talking about. So he's from Alabama.

He grew up in a world where the clan is quite a distant memory. He grew up in a world where the South has been to use the jargon redeemed for white supremacy. So black rights have been eroded and reconstruction is long gone. His father was a doctor and his father died when he was young and he idolized his father. And he would tell stories, rose-tinted stories about how his father had been in the clan back in the day and all of this kind of thing. Simmons fancies himself as an adventurer, and he, at the age of 18,

enlists to fight in Cuba, in the Spanish-American War. But he arrives too late to see action, and he therefore has to invent a fantasy world in which he had fought bravely and all of this kind of thing. Actually, if you Google him, he looks like a sort of a small town lawyer from Northamptonshire.

He looks just unbelievably not. nondescript and uninteresting. Oh, he looks like a country doctor. He looks like a really, really mediocre country doctor. Okay. So he tried his hand as Dixon had at the church, and he became a Methodist preacher in the sort of the backwoods of Alabama and Florida. But he was useless.

He got into debt. And in fact, the church kicked him out in 1912 for, and I quote, inefficiency and moral impairment. I don't really know what that means. No one knows what that means. But anyway, not good. He then inevitably became.

I'm a garter salesman. There's a lot of salesmen in the story. Brilliant. To ladies or to men? I think to ladies, surely. Anyway, Simmons, this guy with his glasses, he finds his vocation eventually in the 1910s. He is a fraternal organiser. Now, fraternalism is absolutely central to this story.

And a lot of people may be like, what is this? Fraternalism is basically about clubs and hobbyist groups. and association to various kinds. So because America is a country of immigrants and newcomers, it's also a country of clubs. They love a club and the association and a neighbourhood community group and all of the kind of things that we in Britain, by and large, I think sneer at and turn up our noses at. Do you not think, Tom? No, we're a clubbable people. We have, you know, with our love of carrier pigeon racing and rolls and all that kind of thing.

decade are you in? Well, I'm in the 1920s. Yeah, I guess so, maybe. I think there's probably more drinking in Britain. That's true, but, you know, sports clubs and all that kind of. Anyway, six million Americans by the turn of the 20th century had joined club fraternal orders, as they're called. Yeah, I mean, okay, so the difference between us and America, we are less keen on clubs with mad names. Yeah. Yeah, so you rightly say the club that you would join it's a pigeon fancying club or a crown green bowls club. You wouldn't join a club called the Knights of Pithyass or something. Do you know, I would, but I suspect most people wouldn't.

You still can, and you haven't. You have not joined such a club. Is it still going? Almost certainly. Are you a member of the odd fellows? No. Are you remember the Freemasons? I suppose you wouldn't say if you were.

No, I'm not, but you're right. I wouldn't say if I was. You hesitated and that was, I thought fuck you away. Are you remember the ancient order of United Workman? Yeah, of course, we all are. I mean, who isn't? So all of these clubs were set up, and they basically appealed to you because you're a respectable person. You want to be respectable.

You want a network. You're a patriot. You like your fellow men. You want to join the Knights of Pithias and shake hands with the bloke who sells insurance in Monroeville, Idaho, a place I've just made up. I want to go on a voyage in an ancient galley to Britain. Well, nobody from Idaho is ever going to do that. No, I suppose not. So Simmons joins 15 of these groups.

He joins, I think it was too many. He joins the Masons. He joins some veterans groups from the Spanish-D-American War in which he barely featured at all. He joins lots of churches, different Baptist churches. He loves it. He can't get enough for this. Is this like fraternities in universities? Well, they have stupid Greek names, don't they?

Is it kind of offering the same kind of thing, the sense? that, you know, it's not just about meeting people, but also giving each other, you know, scratching each other's backs and things. I think so. Simmons's favorite fraternity, or whatever they're called, fraternal organization, it's called the Woodmen of the World. And that was founded in Nebraska. That was founded in Nebraska in 1890.

And it was inspired by the idea of pioneers hewing wood. I mean, it sounds rubbish. And he raises to become a colonel in the woodmen. So that's why people. call him Colonel Simmons. He allows people to think that he's called a colonel because there is heroism in the Spanish-American War. Actually, no, he's a colonel because it was a made-up title from the woodmen of the world. And so he basically was a district manager, that regional sales manager. And he has the idea of launching his own fraternal organization to make money.

This is basically going to be the reborn clan. And he claimed that as a young man or as a boy, he'd had a vision of Klansmen and horseback kind of riding across his bedroom wall. But this is almost certainly rubbish. What probably happened was he saw this film and he thought, God, people love this. You know, when the Vagnes playing and everyone's dressed up in their white robes, there are people in the audience sobbing with joy. I should found a club and get them all to dress up like this. And I reckon I could make a lot of money.

And he was hit by a car one day. He spent three months, basically, laid up in bed. During those three months, he decided to make up the rules for this new group, and he copyrighted them. The fact that he copyrighted them says to me, he's only interested in one thing, which is cash, which is getting money out of this. Anyway, he goes to all his former, you know, all his other clubs that he's a member of, and he persuades some of his friends, about two dozen of them, to join his new group.

And he says, meet me at Thanksgiving Eve at the Piedmont, hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. So they meet this hotel, and he has hired a sightseeing bus. And they all get on this bus. Americans hate buses. Well, some of them refused to get on. They said it was too cold, and they wouldn't come. And so they missed out on the launch of the second plan.

And they head out to the city on this sightseeing tour bus to Stone Mountain, which is outside Atlanta. And today, Stone Mountain is notorious. It's the Confederate Rushmore, because some would put a bloke carved on the side. side of the mountain. Pictures of Jefferson Davis, I think, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. So if you're a kind of lost cause person, you go there at a pilgrimage. Anyway, that didn't exist back then.

Simmons has built an altar on the top of the mountain, most stones, and he's made a cross of pine boards, and he's drenched the cross with kerosene, and he sets it to light, so there's a burning cross. And as he put it himself, under a blazing, fiery torch, the invisible empire was cold from its slumber of half a century. God. I mean, that really is Star Wars. It is, yeah, but the thing is,

the original clan never burned crosses. This is made up. This was made up by Dixon in his book, by Dixon in his novel. And then Griffith turns it, puts it on screen in the birth of a nation, and people think, God, that looks brilliant.

And that's why this bloke, Simmons, has copied it. So it's fantasy-creating reality. It is. It's total cosplaying. It is complete cosplaying. And a week later, he puts an advert in an Atlanta,

newspaper. This gives you a sense of the seriousness of this organization. A classy order of the highest class. Who was, would you like to join a classy order? Oh, that sounds really classy. And for men of intelligence and character. So basically, in the next few years, a dribble of people join this organization. It's not even really a white supremacist organization, or rather, It's white supremacist in the sense that, you know, a lot of these fraternal organizations in somewhere like Georgia, if they appeal to white men, you can bet your bottom dollar that most of those white men will be white supremacists because it's so common. I think if you're taking the name and dressing up as people who were a racist organization, I think that's baked in. Of course. Yes.

Nobody who joins this organization says, actually, I felt like the North had a point. point in the Civil War. Yeah, of course, by definition, it's going to appeal to people of a particular kind. However, there's no sense that they're going to start riding around and lynching people. They're just basically dressing up and mouthing gibberish to each other. And basically, Simmons attracts about 90 members and he spends most of his time trying to sell them life insurance. Are there any ladies at this point?

No. So his gartes are selling business. No. No opportunities. I see that's a missed opportunity there. So anyway, what then transforms his prospect? In 1917, the United States enters the First World War. And there's a huge sort of search of patriotism, but also anxiety.

Great fears of subversives and socialists and immigrants and radicals and whatnot. And this is going to culminate in 1919 in the first great red scare. Sort of great panic about Bolsheviks, about labor unions, about strikes, all of this kind of thing. Simmons makes a very feeble attempt to cash in on this. There was a thing called the American Protective League, which was basically sponsored by the federal government, a sort of volunteer organization, organized by the Department of Justice, to spy on subversives, German spies in our midst. Simmons went along and said, we'd like to help. And they said, you're too small, you're just a joke of an outfit.

We don't need you. So we get to 1920, the war is over. and Simmons has still failed to capitalize on what would seem like a very promising kind of mood. So people are very anxious about the enemy within. And his clan, you know, at the most he's got a couple of hundred members, probably fewer than 100 hardcore members in Georgia, maybe a few in Alabama. And in desperation, he goes to see some PR people. And this is a couple called Edward Young Clark and Elizabeth Tyler,

and they ran a firm called the Southern Publicity Association. So just on these two characters, Edward Young Clark came from Atlanta, his father had been a Confederate Colonel. He worked in newspapers for a while, and then he went into PR. And Clark is unusually in this story, he's quite a well-educated man. He wears kind of glasses. He looks like a kind of newspaperman from a generic 1920s newspaper man. He's a little bit flashy, he's a little bit of a dilettante. So there's Clark. And then there's Mrs. Tyler, who is his partner. They had met bizarrely at a eugenics event in Atlanta. And Mrs. Tyler is a real character.

She came from a very poor family. She got married at 15. She's had a first child at 16. She'd been widowed. She'd had several more marriages and divorces. She's universally described as a large and forceful woman who always dresses in black. Like a sort of a sturdy southern version of Queen Victoria. That's exactly it.

She's very smart, by the way. I mean, they're very good at this PR business. They became a team, both in the boardroom and the bedroom, and they specialized in slightly dodgy political campaigns that were very fashionable in the 1910s. So if you're running a eugenics campaign, Clark and Mrs. Tyler are the people who will sell your campaign for you. Do you want to run an anti-immigration campaign? Get them on board. Do you want to promote the anti-saloon league?

they're your people. This is how Simmons met them. So they're coming from a particular political standpoint, which is clearly is something that they hold to be true if they were meeting into eugenics conference. Though eugenics is very popular in the 1910s in America. Very popular. They're at a political place which seems a bit odd to us now

and a bit kind of cranky and a bit on the fringe. And I suppose there was a slightly fringe element. to it. It's the place where enthusiasts go, you know, people who you find up yourself talking to them in the pub and their eyes slightly glaze over and then an hour passes and they've been talking constantly about their pet enthusiasm. So in 1920, they struck a deal with Simmons to promote the clan. And it's a very good deal for them. They will take full control of publicity and marketing and stuff. And in return, out of every dollar, they and their, they and their, they and their recruitment team will take home 80 cents. Wow, that is a good deal. He'll get 20 and they'll

get 80. And Simmons says, well, if you can really bring in new people, then fine, because he's not bringing in any new people. So he's laughing if they can really make it work. And actually, he is laughing because they are brilliant at it. And they approach the clan as a sales and marketing operation. The clan is a business, Simmons is the owner, he's hired them, they have only one job, and that is to get new customers, and they have Brinens at it. And the historian Linda Gordon, as she puts it, what they design is an aggressive state-of-the-art sales operation. So here's how it works. They divide the United States into nine regions, and they call them domains. So mad names is absolutely part of the marketing. It's part of the marketing. That's why they don't believe in their names.

They're doing it purely as a marketing exercise. There are nine domains. And each one is headed by a regional manager who is called the Grand Goblin. Of course he is. And each domain consists of obviously several normal states, but they're called the realms. And each realm has its own sub-manager. I hope it's just going to be a test at the end. Each realm has its own sub-manager who is called the King Cleggle. And he has a set of local salesmen who are called the Cleegals.

Oh. It's like something from the Wizard of Oz. And Clark from the PR team, he runs the wholesale operation. He is the Imperial Cleggle, and he reports to Simmons, the owner, who is called the Imperial Wizard. So it really is like the Wizard of Oz. Do you think the Wizard of Oz was making play with all this? I don't know, actually. I hadn't thought of that.

Maybe I'd have to look into it. So the Cleegals are basically salesmen. Their job, they're recruiters. And Clark and Tyler recruit them from other fraternal groups. Specifically, the masons. But how do they know the masons? Because they are in that world. And Simmons is in that world.

They know loads of people who are masons. Is he a Mason? Yes. Simmons is a Mason. Yes. Right. Okay. So they go to see, they go to Masons.

And they basically have a little quiet word with some maces. They say, hey, we'd like to make a little bit of money. This is an organization very like the Masons. If you recruit people, you will keep a lot of the money because you will. So, Tom, imagine you wanted to join the Ku Klux Klam. You would have, imagine I was recruiting you. you would have to pay me a $10 fee, and that would be called a kleck token. A clect token.

Right. So you would pay me your clec token. And of your clect token, I would keep $4 out of the 10. I would give $1 to the King Cleggle. And I would give 50 cents to the Grand Goblin. Right. And of the rest of the money, William Simmons, the owner, gets $2. and Clark and Mrs. Tyler get $2.50.

So basically, you have just joined, and we have all profited enormously. A pyramid scheme. It's a pyramid scheme. Yeah. Because the bosses, the people at the top make the most money. But every member is allowed to recruit other members. So there's an incentive. So once you've joined, you could go to James Holland.

And you could recruit him and get to recruit his friends, and you would keep 40% of his KLEC token. I'd be a winner. You would be a winner. You'd be an important person in the community, and you'd be doing your bit for the United States of America. And I'd have a great title. You would.

You'd rise to be the Grand Goblin. So now you've paid your collect token. What happens to you? This is what happens. I would invite you to the lodge, to the Clavern. You would kneel in prayer before a burning cross. So they've devised this mad ritual. They've made this up because they think it's fun.

And this is Mrs. Tyler and... Yeah, with... Simmons, basically. And Simmons. You would kneel in a circle of other clansmen who'd all be in their white robes. You would swear an oath of allegiance. You'd promise to uphold the flag in the Constitution. You would promise to defend free public schools.

We'll explain why later on. You'd defend free speech, separation of church estate, individual liberty, and inevitably white supremacy. And what is what is white supremac is called white supremacy? Yes. You read that out right at the beginning. The phrase white supremacy. Of course, yes.

But as we will see, white supremacy has a very particular meaning. It's not just about skin color. It's also about religion. You would be given your outfit. This is a special, there's the white robe within the insignia, which is a kind of Prussian cross. There is a sash. There is the helmet with the cone. And there's also a red tassel.

Oh, like the Inca. Like the Inca, yeah. That surprised me. And then there's a sort of mask, which is the kind of cloth that hangs down over your face. Now, you might say, could I make my own costume like the original clan did? Oh no. Oh no. Not at all. And Dominic, as part of the costume, a garter by any chance. Yes. It's a sash. Maybe you can repurpose garters as sashes. So the costume costs Clark and Mrs. Tyler $2 to manufacture, but they charge you $6 as further $6.50. That is the American dream. So now you've joined and you are a member of the Clavern and you're

You're at the foot of the great ladder of Clancraft. And if you advance through the ranks, you can go from being a Klansman to a knight chamelea, to a knight of the great forest. Again, badly spelled two hours. That's Forrest with two hours because it's named after Nathan Bedford Forest. Oh, of course. Yeah, the General, the Confederate General who was the war criminal. Exactly.

War criminal. And then you can rise to become a knight of the Midnight Mystery. Who wouldn't want that? The head of the Clavern is the exalted Cyclops. and above him are the officers of the invisible empire. And these are, there's the imperial wizard at the top. And then below him are the three great claliffs. And then there's the great clabby.

There's the great grab. There's the great clod. And the great knight hawk. They are having a laugh. And every week, your clavon will have a clonclay. A cloncliffe. I mean, honestly. And every month, you know, if you keep going, every month, you'll be able to go to the clonverse.

And when you want to initiate a new member, you will have a converse. No, clonvocation. No, no, no, no. No. If you have given yourself away there, you don't know the difference in a conversation and a clonvocation. No, I don't. That's because I'm an undercover agent. You've outed yourself there.

You're almost certainly a Catholic. What's going to happen to me now? Because a conversation is when you initiate a new member. But the National Convention is the clonvocation. Now, what do you actually do when you have a conclave? Basically, you just sit around reciting this mad babble. And then you sing some Protestant hymns. And basically you spend a lot of time networking.

That's what you spend most of your time doing. Here is the regional sales manager for this. Here is the local sheriff. Here is so-and-so who's a very leading attorney in Des Moines, Iowa, or whatever. So like the masons. Yes, exactly. There's no doubt whatsoever. It gave people a genuine sense of community. So David Chalmers in his book, Hooded Americanism, says, you know, you're living in some two-bit place in the middle of nowhere, and you are, you know, the deputy sales organizer or whatever.

And this gives you a chance to live out this incredibly rich and exciting in her life. You know, you might one day get to meet the great clod. That's really exciting. And it's brilliant. Now, that said, there is a dark side to the clan. And we've, for all the sort of laughing at the great clallif or whatever, there is definitely a dark side. And this is what we'll come to. Because what Clark and Mrs. Tyler realized, they're very good PR people and salespeople,

but they realize that basically the way to attract people is to find out what and whom they really hate. Oh, it's kind of Elon Musk like. Right. Because America in the early 20s is a very anxious place. very heady sense of social and cultural change, political change as well, and a lot of people don't like it. And so Clark and Tyler draw the line very starkly. They say on the one side, there are decent men and women of the clan who are standing up for 100% Americanism. And on

the other, there is a group of sinister subversives who are plotting to undermine everything America stands for. And Dominic, why don't we take a break? And then when we come back, we will find out who those subversives are and how far the clan. is prepared to go to destroy them. This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society, and it's Tabby and Dominic here from the book club, Gollhanger's latest show. Now, Tabby, as you know,

there are some books that you read once, but there are others you especially return to again and again. And those second kind of books, they really deserve to last, don't they? That's what the Folio Society does. They are an independent, employee-owned publisher based in London. Every book is produced with specially commissioned beautiful artwork and a specially commissioned introduction

that puts the story in its context. Folio Society publishes the books we love from Bronte to Dickens, from Margaret Atwood to Tom Holland. The books can feel like works of art in their own right. They're built around the text, the stories that last in books that are made to last. If a story matters, keep it properly. Find it at foliosociety.com slash the book club. That's foliosociety.com slash the book club.

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Blake panting, ultimate soldier. Chicago, all right? The best of the best stories now with even more from Hulu. Amazing. Have it all with 3-1 Disney Plus. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the rest of history. So before the break, we promised you that all this networking and barbecuing and great cludding and stuff would be taking a dark turn.

So Dominic, what is this dark turn and where does it take us? So let me just set the context for the dark term. The second clan was relaunched in about 1920, and it was a staggering success. So by about 1921, it is attracting 100,000 members a week and turning over $25 million a year. Now, some historians question those figures. They say actually the clan, they're pretty, their accounts are a mess. A lot of people probably aren't paying their dues. But even so, the growth is extraordinary.

And actually, once we start to talk about what kind of people join, then we'll be able to see who the enemy. is our. So the people who join, initially they're people who are already members of other fraternal organisations. So the masons, first of all, a Klegel arrives in a new town and he would approach the masons first and get their membership lists. How does you do that? I thought the masons kept their membership lists top secret. Because he goes to the lodge, he shakes people's hands. So they become a Mason themselves? And then they... Yeah, they're often the masons themselves. The Klegals are often recruited from the masons. Right. Would you like to make a bit of extra money? That's how it is.

they will often hold the first clan meetings in Masonic halls or in Oddfellow's halls or Woodman's halls. And in some places, as many as three out of four members of the clan were already Mason's. So it's like you go to the masons on Tuesday. Would you like to go to another thing on Thursday? Yeah, why not? And you get a special costume. You can have the privilege of paying $6.50 for the special costume. Also, if you recruit some other people, you can make a bit of money.

I mean, it's a reminder of how boring life must have been. in the 1920s. I guess so. If this is your idea of fun. Yeah. Talking about people who are boring, and I hope this doesn't defend some of our listeners. The second largest clan constituencies

among Methodist ministers. So there were some esturess that 40,000 Methodist ministers became clan members. And some of them rose to be as high as exalted cyclopses or grand dragons. And what do you think the appeal is for them? The clan is echoing everything

that a Methodist minister says and believes in about drink, about Catholicism, about America, about clean living, all of this kind of stuff. The clan basically, Clark and Mrs. Tyler, adapt the clan's message so that it exactly mimics what Methodist ministers are telling their congregations politically and socially. So the way it will work is this. When the clan arrive in a town, they will approach the local minister, the local Methodist minister, and they will say to him, would you like free membership of the clan for life, this new group?

And also, if they think he's a particularly promising customer, they will offer him the title of a clod. Who wouldn't leap at that? Yeah, I know. Bonkers. And a clod is the local chaplain of the Clavern. Of course. And then once they've done that,

on Saturday nights, they would hold a parade down Main Street in a town, ideally on horseback or in a Model T car. So horseback is very exciting. Model T car is very exciting in a different way because it's so modern. and they will light a cross outside the town, ideally on a hillside, a great spectacle. Then by arrangement with this Methodist minister, on Sunday at the service, which is probably

going to be very busy, because as you rightly say, there's nothing else to do in the 1920s, they will march silently into church halfway through the service in their robes, and then they will present the minister with a donation of $30 or $40 towards the church. And the minister will then say to his congregation, this is all prearranged, he'll say, God, these are absolutely fantastic people. What a brilliant organisation this is to give the money to the church. I think we should all join.

And then everybody, including the Klansmen, sing, onward Christian soldiers, and everyone's had a great time, and the townsfolk think, God, this is brilliant, these blokes have turned up with white robes, they've given all this money to the church. This is fantastic.

Is there in any way a dark side? There is exactly, and we'll come to that in just a second. But just on the people who join, some listeners may be thinking, well, this appeals to idiots, This appeals to people who feel left behind. This appeals to people stranded by change. Not so.

The historians who've done loads of work on this have shown that the people who join tend to be respectable middle class people. They are doctors, their accountants, they're dentists, their artists, their vets, their surgeons, they're all these kinds of things. And they all join, and these people have two things in common. They are white and they are Protestants.

And this brings us to the issue of the dark side. The clan are brilliant at tapping the cultural anxieties of Protestants in the 1920s, the things that annoy them. Dance halls, Hollywood, immodest clothing, women's sexual behaviour, these kinds of things. And above all, drink and prohibition, which will come to. And the speakers and then clan newspapers hammer home one message above all. America is facing an existential crisis we're being undermined by enemies within. In particular, white Protestant America is being engulfed. There's going to be a race war between Anglo-Saxon Protestants, between wasps and the rest.

And this is very common in the early 1920s. So anybody who's read The Great Gatsby, there's a character in that called Tom Buchanan. And at a point earlier in the book, he's reading this book by a guy called Lothrop Studdard, a real book called The Rising Tide of Color against white world supremacy. and Tom Buchanan says in the Great Gatsby, it's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things. It's very fu-manchu, isn't it, as well? Very fu-manchu.

Yeah, exactly that. Yellow peril. You know, it's completely of that early 20th century anxiety that the white Anglo-Saxon stock will be overwhelmed by all of these other races. So against that background, a lot of people in the clan are full of fear, resentment, hatred of other races. That's definitely the case. Their creed, you read out at the beginning,

one version of the clan's creed, as they call it. We believe in the supremacy of the white race. And it's just and right that our younger brothers should be taught to respect those lines of birth and color which the creator in his superior wisdom has drawn. What it's talking about there is African Americans. Black people at this point in the South have been reduced to subordinate status again because of the Jim Crow laws, segregation or not, and the clan is all about preserving that. But here's the thing that may surprise some listeners. Anti-black hatred is only a minor theme of the second clam. There are terrible outrages against black Americans in the 20s. The most famous is the Tulsa massacre in 1921, when hundreds of people were killed in Tulsa,

Oklahoma. Is that where the planes, where they got attacked by planes? Yes, exactly, exactly that. Tulsa had a very successful black middle class and their white neighbours basically turned on them and bombed them, supposedly. Whether they did bomb them, I mean, that's some historians still argue about that, but they might have done, put it that way. Anyway, the clan was not involved in this. And the reason for that is that the clan is most popular in states that have very small black populations. It's real targets at two other groups. And to quote the future imperial wizard, Hiram Evans, who will be talking about next time, The Negro is not the menace to Americanism in the same sense that the Jew or the Roman Catholic is a menace.

So these are the real targets, Jews and Catholics. Jews first, there are maybe three and a half million Jews in America in 1920, and they're mainly in the cities of the northeast. And this is definitely a boom period for anti-Semitism. Henry Ford of Car fame has funded the distribution of the protocols of the elders of Zion. So Henry Ford is very anti-Semitic. And Klan newspapers are very anti-Semitic. They will talk about Jewish conspiracies on Wall Street, Jewish conspiracies to abduct white girls. They talk about Hollywood being a kind of a poisonous flood of filthy Jewish suggestion. However, if you live in Indiana or Ohio or wherever, you probably don't know any Jews. You know, the Jewish population now is very small. And as a result, Jews are not a terribly plausible threat or a very satisfying target. You know, the level of hate. hatred is quite low, really. It's quite low level. But Catholics are a different proposition. There are more than 18 million Catholics in America in the early 20s. And they're much more

obviously influential than Jewish Americans are. They're a Catholic congressman. They're Catholic mayors. The governor of New York, Al Smith is a Catholic. And anti-Catholicism is very deeply rooted in American political culture. It goes back to the foundation of the American colonies, obviously, to the 17th century. There had been all kinds of nativist groups and riots in the 19th century. So there's loads for the clan to play with. There's a deep tradition that they can tap. And to quote Hiram Evans, future imperial wizard again, the Roman church is fundamentally and irredeemably in its leadership and its politics and thought and in membership, actually and actively alien, un-American and anti-American. And there are a lot of people for whom this is not news,

this is what they've always been brought up to believe. You know, they see this as being part of being American. Is there any sense of anxiety in the clan that they're dressing up as Spanish penitents from Holy Week? No, not at all. They're wearing the costumes that they associate with the first clan because they've seen them in the film. That's basically it in the birth of a nation. So the most common theme you're getting clan newspapers is that the Pope is leading a conspiracy against the United States. The clan fiery cross magazine would call him the Dego priest on the Taiba. And they claimed that he was organizing mass immigration to plunder, pillage, rape and murder, Protestant Americans.

I mean, this is rhetoric as old as old as the English settlements in the new world. As old as the English settlements and very recognizable in the 21st century, no? That there are a load of Catholics who are seeping through our borders, who are going to rape, pillage, steal, they're sending us their very worst people, all of that kind of thing. I mean, we have heard quite a lot of this in recent years. The clown would also claim that basically every time a son, this is again an old theme in anti-Catholic propaganda in America,

that every time a Catholic family has a son, sort of by tradition, the father has to donate another weapon to the local Catholic churches' stockpile of weapons with which the Catholics are going to rise up one day and overpower the Protestant authorities. I mean, this feels like something from the 1640s, wouldn't you say? Yeah, absolutely.

This feels absolutely like that. they claim that the Catholics when they are you know when they go to church swear an oath that one day they will burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive Protestants and dash their children's heads against the wall and rip open the stomachs of their women and all of this kind of thing. The clan says this is what Catholics do. This is the oath they swear. And again, so 17th century. Very 30 years war or something. Exactly. And the two practical ways in which this is, anti-Catholicism expresses itself. First of all, it's in the question of schools. So, remember we were talking about when you swore your oath to join the clan, you would have to swear to uphold free public schools. And the reason for that is that the clan does not like the idea of people going to Catholic schools. It wants them to become 100% American. And the clan thinks everybody should go to the same schools, you know, public schools, and no separate schools for

different religions. And do they think that to be 100% American, you have to be a Protestant? Yes. Oh, yeah, undoubtedly. And would this apply to Jews as well? Yes. So if a Jew converts and becomes a Protestant? I suspect yes. I think so. I mean, I don't think it's a terribly well-worked-out worldview. They don't discuss this in the convocation. I think the interesting thing about the Jews is there are stories about people so that I think it was somewhere like, I don't. where there was a small town and there was one Jewish family and they were always included in the clan. The clan was so big they had barbecues and stuff

and they would always invite the Jewish family along and people were very friendly to them and never made them feel unwelcome and all of this kind of thing. I think sometimes some of this is a little bit performative and rhetorical, but not always. I mean, I don't want to underplay the violence of the clan. Anyway, to move on from that to the other big issue.

The other big issue is prohibition. If you took prohibition out of this story, the clan would never have been so successful. So prohibition, again, very deeply rooted in America's religious history, in Protestantism. There were groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union or the Anti-Saloon League, and there's a lot of crossover between them and the clan, in themes and in personnel. So temperance groups like the clan believed in cleaning up the cities. They distrusted immigrants. They were obsessed with threats to the American family.

and temperance groups recruited from the same pools, which is Methodists, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, these kinds of groups. And in the 1920s, prohibition has become law. The temperance groups have got their way. The 18th Amendment in 1990 and then the Volstead Act in 1920 that enforces it. But here's where you get the gift to the clan. Enforcement of prohibition is very feeble. Basically because under the Volstead Act, the federal and local authorities are meant to work

together to enforce it, but it's not spelled out exactly how they will do that. And the local authorities often aren't really interested in enforcing prohibition. They're not bothered about it. They don't think it'll work. So there's that element to it. And that annoys the clan because the clan are very pro-temperance. But also, it's well known that Catholics don't like prohibition. And that's not because Catholics particularly love drinking. It's because Catholics don't like the idea of the federal government regulating moral life. Obviously they don't. That's what they say. Well, I think they're obviously that if you're a Catholic, the idea of a Protestant-dominated federal government intervening in social and cultural life is anathema to you because it threatens your own autonomy within a world of religious freedom.

But there must be lazy people who want to drink. Yeah, but there's loads of German Protestants who want to drink. One reason prohibition gets through, by the way, is because until the 1910s, German brewers had led the opposition to it. Protestant brewers. First World War happens so no one wants to listen to a German brewer. They're obviously bad guys. And so prohibition can get through. I mean, that's a little bit simplistic, but there's an element of it. Anyway, to the clan, prohibition is existential. Will these Catholics obey the law of the land or not? Will the constitution be upheld? Will our traditional American virtues prevail? Or will people flout the law and will Catholic bootleggers get their way? And a lot of historians

actually think that prohibition is the real issue that gets the clan going. So there's a brilliant historian of the clan in Indiana, which was his biggest state called Lenin Moore. And he says he thinks this is the single biggest bond, uniting Klansmen, their commitment to prohibition. I mean, he gives us mad examples. In Seymour, Indiana, there was a huge burning cross and a sign beneath it that said, in honor of our savior who died to save the world, bootleggers, gamblers, law violators, beware, the eyes of the clan are watching you. They're kind of like an unbelievably militant and violent Salvation Army. Yes, I suppose.

I mean, in some ways, yes, there would be a little crossover because the clan believe in enforcing, you know, moral austerity, I suppose. They will send volunteer groups to join cops in crackdowns on bootleggers and on speakeas and things, especially in states where there's already a lot of vigilantism like Oklahoma or Arkansas. And over time, the remit of these moral enforcers becomes wider and wider. I mean, actually, you know, the news that while we're making this show is dominated by Iran. Yeah, so they're like the morality police in Iran. That's exactly what they are.

Over time, groups of clansmen will not just enforce prohibition. They will target, and I quote, negligent parents, defiant children and unfaithful spouses. So there are lots of accounts in the early 1920s of Klansmen beating up husbands who've deserted their wives. So I'm going to assume from this that there are going to be loads of Klansmen who cheat on their wives. Because you're assuming they'll behave badly. I am assuming that, yes. You're not wrong. You're absolutely not wrong.

And they've got a lot of that to come in the next episode. And there's some pretty, actually, some pretty awful stories of Klansmen, the sort of moral vigilantism. So in California, they kidnapped a doctor who was accused of when I called him. performing illegal operations on high school girls. Basically, he's an abortionist, I guess. They stripped him, they beat him, they hanged him till he passed out. Then they revived him and they beat him again with a rope and with a loaded gun. The most shocking example of this actually is a place called Mare Rouge in Louisiana in 1922.

There'd been weeks of fighting between the people of Mare Rouge, who were accused of being bootleggers and Klansmen from the next town along, which was called Bastrop. and the Klansman kidnapped five men from Meroge. They dragged them out their cars, they whipped them, then they tortured, castrated and murdered two of them and threw their bodies into a lake. And when the authorities looked into this,

the culprits included the local sheriff, his deputies, the postmaster, the doctor, and even the district attorney. So again, the respectable people of the parish. But because the clan had infiltrated the local jury as well, none of them was ever convicted. So that's a sign of just how dark things can get. Anyway, let's get back to the overall narrative as we get into the final moments of the episode. So we're now in 1921. The Clark Tyler operation has been going for a year and it has been a colossal success. The clan has added hundreds of thousands of members, thanks to all these

techniques, exploiting anxiety about prohibition, going to Methodist sermons, basically recruiting masons, all of this stuff. The people, put at the top of suddenly very rich. So Simmons, this guy who was just a complete loser and a salesman and whatnot, has made the equivalent to probably $8 million in today's money. And the clan has bought him to recognize his role as the founder. They bought him a $33,000 home in Atlanta, which he called Clan Crest. That was the name of his house. But storm clouds are gathering. Because some people are getting very alarmed that the clan is out of control, that this sort of moral policing has gone too far. In September 1921, the New York world began a long-running series

exposing clan violence across the country, which was syndicated in other papers, and the reporters hoped that this would burst the clan's bubble. There were also rumours spreading about Clark and Mrs Tyler that they are, despite their sales genius, they are not quite living up to their own principles. So they had been found in bed by police in Atlanta, with the bottle of whiskey in a seedy sex hotel. Was this before they became? Before, yes, this story comes out. And they'd given false names.

And they were fined $5 each for disorderly conduct. Now, it's just a small thing. But the bottle of whiskey in bed together in the seedy hotel is bad. That's not Protestant values. But a very familiar story. Yeah, a very familiar story. I mean, that's, what's his name? Jim Backer.

Yes. And Tammy Faye Backer. It's what I assume all televangelists are doing. I mean, I'd be disappointed if they weren't. And then eventually, a month or so after the New York World series, Congress held hearings on the clan, the House Rules Committee, and they got Simmons to take the stand. And Simmons actually cut a very melodramatic figure.

He wore deliberately old-fashioned clothes, a sort of frock coat and a stiff collar. And he basically posed as the incarnation of the Old South. I'm a southern gentleman and I formed this association to honor my forefathers. So like Colonel Sanders. Exactly. The KFC guy. Yes, there's a lot of that, actually.

Simmons says, sure, we have a few bad apples, but we are God-fearing, honest Americans and all this. And at the climax of the hearings, he made him out dramatically, raised his hand to the heavens and he called on God to forgive those who have persecuted the clan. And then he collapsed in apparent exhaustion. Anyway, the hearings ended. and the House Rules Committee agreed that the clan had no case to answer. So they got away with it, Scott Free. And actually all of this was brilliant publicity for the clan. Even the series in the new world about clan atrocities,

people just thought, God, this sounds so exciting. This group, they're riding around the countryside, attacking errant husbands, you know, intimidating Catholic, shouting about prohibition. This sounds great. And in the next few weeks, there are 100,000 new applications to join, supposedly every week. And the clan started to spread even further. you know, out of its base

into Colorado and Oregon and all these places. And then it grew all the way through 1920, which was its annas Mirabilis. And that autumn, it made its debut really as a political force. So it worked for, it basically endorsed candidates for governor

in Georgia, Alabama and California. And it claimed that it had elected no fewer than 75 members of the US House of Representatives. And actually, I don't think that's really an exaggeration. You know, the clan, it's got a lot of members, it's got a lot of influence, and if it endorses you, you know, you can do really well. So, the couple of examples of this.

And they're at different ends of the country. That's the incredible thing. So one of them is in Oregon. Oregon was very white, very Protestant. You know, it's the far sort of northwestern corner of America. Of clan-endorsed candidates all but won, won their seats in the Oregon Senate. They won a virtual majority in the Oregon House. the Klan candidate, a man who boasted in his campaign literature,

every one of my ancestors has been a Protestant for 300 years. This guy wins the governorship in Oregon. And on top of all that, the Klan pushed through a referendum to ban Catholic schools in the state of Oregon. Now, this measure was later thrown out by the courts. It was unconstitutional. But what a symbol of the Klan's clout in this state. in a state where there are basically no African-Americans, there are no Jews,

but the anxieties about these groups as such that the clan has this incredible clout. And then let's go to the other extreme, Texas, right, but as far from Oregon as you can get. Texas, the clan had been established in 1920. It had been established really to sort of lost cause of the Confederacy group. This is the genius of the clan. They tick different boxes in different states. So in Texas, Simmons went to the annual meeting of the United Confederate Veterans, and he signed everybody up. He said, this is an organization that will commemorate the holy and chivalric achievements of our fathers.

And he got loads of really respectable people, as one historian puts it, a who's who of business, the professions, and patriotism. And then once they've got the top people, they worked on the rest. They got a new guy's grand goblin, who was called inevitably George B. Kimbrough, Jr. who was an ice cream salesman from Houston. That's possibly the most American moments so far in the series. It is on the so many American moments. And this guy, George B. Kimbrough Jr., was brilliant at recruiting people. He would go to evangelical churches and he'd sign up the whole congregation in one go.

So by 1922, there are 200,000 Klansmen in Texas. And actually, in some respects, it's a perfectly ordinary fraternal organization. So the historian Thomas Pigram gives the story of Hope Cottage. Dallas, which was a nursery and adoption center for abandoned babies. And it had fallen into disrepair. And the Dallas branch of the clan raised $85,000 to restore it. And they presented it as a gift to the city of Dallas at the Texas State Fair. And I googled it.

It's still going today. This, you know, basically a nursery and a center for mothers and babies and all of this kind of thing called Hope Cottage. I have to say their website doesn't make a huge amount of the, um, It's origins. Yeah, and I don't think the clan would be very pleased by the way that the, because it looks a lovely organisation, very diverse, very multicultural, you know, lovely place.

I commend it to the listeners, but basically it was the clan that saved it. So there's that side of the clan. And because of its respectability, it does really well politically in Texas. In November 1922, the clan not only swept the Texas state legislature, but they elected their first avowed Klansman as a US senator, who was a guy called Earl Mayfield, a Democrat, a fan of prohibition. They endorsed him as a native-born white Protestant Gentile. The issue in the election in that November was the clan, and he won,

and he went off to the Senate. But that respectability is not the whole picture of the clan in Texas. Historically, Texas is a very violent state, and the local clan reflects it in fact in few states is the local clan so devoted to vigilantism. And there are some terrible, terrible stories. There's a black guy who was kidnapped in Dallas and is branded in acid on his forehead with the letters KKK. There's a black dentist who is kidnapped in Houston and flogged within an inch of his life. There are men who are whipped for leaving their wives.

There are lawyers who are beaten for representing black clients. Dallas is probably the worst place. So there was a place by the river in Dallas, which was known as the whipping meadow, where the clan would take people and whip them en masse. So at one point, there are claims that they've flogged 68 people in one, you know, in a couple of months or something. There are claims that the clan is organising, taring and feathering parties, or whipping bees. You know how they have spelling bees in America?

They will have whipping bees. I mean, if they're whipping, if they're tiring and feathering people, I mean, that's quite solid evidence, I would say. It's not that simple, though. Because you would think to be police records, right? Court records. Well, there'd be people walking around with, you know, tar and feathers. Well, we'll get on to this act. Because a lot of this, you see, is covered up.

It's covered up by the authorities because they're clansmen themselves. Judges, sheriffs, cops, jurymen, all of these kinds of things. So I'll give you an example. This is what we'll end the episode with. Place called Goose Creek, which was an oil town just across the bay from Houston. There was one evening in January 1923, and we're in one house, and a woman, the lady who lives there lives with her children. She's called Mrs. Harrison.

She's recently separated from her husband, and she's ill in bed. She's just an ordinary, you know, white Protestant housewife. And she's upstairs in bed. And a neighbour of hers called Mr. Armand has brought her some fruit. So he's up with her talking to her, giving her the fruit, and her children are downstairs playing with the neighbour's children who've come round. And the door crashes open and a dozen Klansmen burst in. Some of them are dressed.

They're not all dressed in robes. Some of them are dressed as clowns or in women's clothing. Mrs. Harrison and Mr. Armand were dragged outside at gunpoint. The children are kind of screaming and whatnot. The clownsmen took them away and they scourged them. They flogged them both. Then they hacked off her hair with a knife right down to the scalp. So a scalp is kind of bleeding.

And they then got a load of crude oil. It's an oil town, remember. And they poured it over his open wounds. Oh, God. And you said, oh, well, either we know or we don't. Well, in this case, neither of them would talk to the police. They didn't die, but they're obviously very badly injured, but they won't talk to the police. And just to be clear, they weren't having an affair.

He'd just come around because he was a nice guy and giving fruit. No one knows. Okay. But obviously, the assumption is that the clan thought they were having an affair. Mrs. Harrison's daughter, who was seven, who had seen this, told the county sheriff what had happened. And he took it to the district judge, and he sent in investigating. from Houston and convened a grand jury. And when they looked into it, the outsiders,

they were horrified by what they found because it turned out that for the last 18 months, clan vigilantes had conducted, I mean, genuinely a kind of reign of terror in this small town, Goose Creek. The local people had been completely cowered into submission. The clan had kidnapped and beaten and scourged and whipped at least 20 people in this small town

because of alleged immorality. because they defended the clan in some way. What happens to the Klansmen? Are they convicted? I think some of them are convicted, yeah, because there's a huge hullabaloo about it. But it takes an enormous effort by external authorities to basically break the conspiracy of silence around this. So obviously the question with the clan is, which is the true face of it? Is it the respectable people who are donating to rescue the children's home?

Or is it the reign of terror and the pouring of crude oil over open wounds? and that question becomes more and more urgent the larger the clan becomes because as we enter 1923 it is growing all the time its momentum seems unstoppable and a presidential election is fast approaching in 1924 in which the clan is determined that it will play the part of Kingmaker. So next time in the final episode of this series we'll be looking at the clan and it's rise and rise in the industrial Midwest

the struggle for control of the national organization of the clan, and we will be recounting one of the strangest and most tragic murder scandals that we've ever done on The Rest is History. So club members can hear that final episode in this series on the Ku Klux Klan right now. And if you're not a member and you'd like to be, then go to the rest is history.com. Otherwise, we will be back with you on Thursday. Thank you, Dominic. Bye-bye. Goodbye.

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