The Ku Klux Klan was born during Reconstruction, but by 1915, there was only one member left- William Joseph Simmons. He had trouble recruiting new members, so he hired professional fundraisers Mary Tyler and Edward Clarke. They managed to draw five million new members between 1920 and 1925 by expanding the organization’s mission, because racism against black Americans wasn’t enough.
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So Clarke and Tyler divided the country in eight regions and sent out 1,000 agents to identify the focus of bigotry and fear in their assigned areas: labor-union organizers and communists in the industrial north, Asians on the west coast, Jews and Catholics almost anywhere.
They began to expand the Klan’s mission, stirring hatred against these groups.
The two also tapped into Americans’ anger at accelerated social change. They wanted to channel the disapproval of the media that mocked tradition, the rebellious attitude of young people, the immodest behavior of women, and, of course, jazz.
Having relatively few adherents in cities, the Klan adopted several attitudes popular in rural areas. They helped enforce Prohibition and they denounced motion pictures.
Almost everywhere they found a public yearning for a golden past, where they remembered an America free of foreign influences. Millions were drawn to the Klan’s policy of “America for Americans” as well as its sometimes violent enforcement of fundamentalist Protestant values.
But it didn’t last. While the Klan is still with us, membership fell rapidly after 1925. Read about the campaign to build the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s at the Saturday Evening Post. -via Damn Interesting
Source: neatorama