Pod Insights The Rest Is History 656. The Ku Klux Klan: Birth of a Nation (Part 3) About this episode 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….
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Transcript 13,133 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:17 Tom Holland? We, the Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, reverentially acknowledge 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.
2:03 Tom Holland? 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 honourable clannishness, that the life of each may be a constant blessing to others. Non silber, said Anthar, done in the arlec of his majesty, the Emperor of the Invisible
2:48 Tom Holland? 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 twenty-ninth day of November, Anno Clan fifty-six. So that, Dominic, was no laughing matter, because it was the creed, spelt with a K, of the Ku Klux Klan, as published in the Chloran, again spelt with a K, which was the Constitution and Laws of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., instituted in nineteen twenty-two. And, I mean, it starts
3:30 Tom Holland? 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 Anthar. I mean, what the hell is that? Well, it's apparently it's a mixture of Latin and Gothic. And you can't go mixing Latin and Gothic.
3:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, surely an Ostrogoth might have spoken a mixture of Latin.
3:53 Tom Holland? I don't think so. I mean, you're either speaking one or the other. Come on, make your mind up.
3:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's so much to unpack there, actually. Now, last week, when we were talking about the Klan, we were talking about a paramilitary group that was born in the Reconstruction South, so in the eighteen sixties, 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 nineteen twenty-two, that particular issue, edition of the Chloran. So we move 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, the second incarnation of the Klan. It was born in Georgia in 1915,
4:39 Dominic Sandbrook? and it could not be more different from the First Klan. There is a lineage, but they are very different beasts.
4:44 Tom Holland? They're both racist still.
4:45 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 two and five million members, very public members as well.
5:03 Tom Holland? So is this one more like, say, the Masons than it is the original Ku Klux Klan?
5:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Much more like the Masons, and we will actually tease that out in this episode. The links between the Klan and the Masons. The Masons, by the way, were very resentful of the Klan coming along and trying to poach its members, and we'll discuss the relationship today. Its greatest popularity, the Second Klan, 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
5:49 Dominic Sandbrook? with a capital K that you read out at the beginning. It copies the hood and the robes from the First Klan, 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.
6:10 Tom Holland? Because we said it's about WASP supremacy, perhaps, rather than white supremacy.
6:15 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
6:31 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 officers 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.
7:15 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, and 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
7:57 Dominic Sandbrook? that, I should say, as always, when we do American history, but basically because there's 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 Lynda Gordon, Thomas P. Ingram. 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.
8:26 Tom Holland? 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?
8:38 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan parade through the village streets in Shelby, North Carolina, when he was five. He also claimed to remember a, 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 Klan
9:19 Dominic Sandbrook? hanged this man publicly in the town square. This is the story that Dixon tells anyway. Whether this actually happened is a different matter. Anyway, Dixon 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 wins, becomes a local legislature in North
10:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Carolina when he's just 20, when he's actually too young to vote. He has a seat in the legislature.
10:07 Tom Holland? So he's like William Hague?
10:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
10:09 Tom Holland? Your friend William Hague?
10:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Big fan of the rest is history, William Hague. That's all I'm gonna say.
10:14 Tom Holland? Great man.
10:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, big fan. Now, he can't stick at 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 lost cause of the Confederacy and about the evils of Reconstruction.
10:37 Tom Holland? He claims to oppose slavery, doesn't he?
10:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
10:40 Tom Holland? But it's, as someone who opposes slavery?
10:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
10:43 Tom Holland? Kind of posture.
10:44 Dominic Sandbrook? It's exactly that.
10:45 Tom Holland? Goes all in.
10:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
10:57 Tom Holland? That's why, that's why I mentioned it.
10:59 Dominic Sandbrook? So then he decides, unlike me, he decides to try his hand at writing novels. And he wrote a novel in nineteen O two called The Leopard's 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 nineteen O five, he wrote another book called The Klansman, Klansman with a C, not a K. So he's made an interesting choice there.
11:29 Tom Holland? Well, that's because he's been to a top graduate school. So he knows how to spell.
11:33 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Camerons 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 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.
12:19 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 herself 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 a hundred thousand copies. Dixon made it into a play and he cast himself in the lead.
13:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Didn't you not do that when you were a student? Did you not cast yourself?
13:05 Tom Holland? I did, yes.
13:06 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
13:15 Tom Holland? Well, he could play Jack and the Beanstalk. He'd be good in that.
13:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, he could play the Beanstalk.
13:19 Tom Holland? Go into panto.
13:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I suppose so. Anyway, um, the play was banned in some cities for causing public disorder. There were reports that after performances, white mobs would go rampaging through the streets, that there would be a kind of spike in lynchings and whatnot. The Washington Post in nineteen oh six 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, just sort of took this stuff. A lot of people were very shocked by it. So then along came
14:02 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 twenty five percent 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
14:42 Dominic Sandbrook? long running feature film with a long narrative that goes on over twelve 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 hundred thousand dollars, The Birth of a Nation. It was released in February nineteen fifteen. Even the soundtrack was groundbreaking because it has lots of classical music, most obviously Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries, 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
15:26 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 enormous crowds. So three million people in New York City saw this film.
15:39 Tom Holland? So Dixon's absolutely quids in with his quarter of the profit.
15:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. They make loads of money from this film. And at the end, there are stories that basically when the Wagner is playing and the Klan 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 and 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.
16:11 Tom Holland? 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.
16:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
16:22 Tom Holland? Both basically promoting this kind of fantasy of the of the Civil War and its aftermath.
16:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
17:00 Tom Holland? I suppose also the potency of presenting yourself as an underdog in such a situation.
17:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
17:06 Tom Holland? 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.
17:13 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
17:20 Tom Holland? Completely, yeah.
17:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, as with the novel, the film provoked enormous controversy at the time. Civil rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, organized 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.
17:59 Tom Holland? And is that because he's mates with Dixon? Or because he's interested in the topic, or?
18:04 Dominic Sandbrook? I think it's probably three things. One, it's a massive, it's a, 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,
18:45 Dominic Sandbrook? a veritable empire of the South to protect the Southern country. So it's quoting Wilson here, you know, approvingly, 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
19:28 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan. 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, you know, where the Klan 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.
20:08 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan back in the day and all of this kind of thing. Simmons fancies himself as an adventurer and he, at the age of eighteen, 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 nondescript and uninteresting. Or he looks like a country doctor. He looks like a really,
20:51 Dominic Sandbrook? really mediocre country doctor. Okay. So he tried his hand, as Dixon had, at the church and he became 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 a garter salesman. There's a lot of salesmen in this story.
21:20 Tom Holland? Brilliant. To ladies or to men?
21:23 Dominic Sandbrook? I think to ladies, surely?
21:26 Tom Holland? Hmm.
21:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Anyway, Simmons, this guy with his glasses, he finds his vocation eventually in the 1910s. He is a fraternal organizer. Now fraternalism is absolutely central to this story and lots of people may be like, what is this? Fraternalism is basically about clubs and hobbyist groups and associations of 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 neighborhood 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?
22:08 Tom Holland? No, we're, we're, we're a clubbable people. We have, you know, with our love of carrier pigeon racing and
22:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but
22:16 Tom Holland? all that kind of thing.
22:17 Dominic Sandbrook? What decade are you in?
22:19 Tom Holland? Well, I'm in the 1920s.
22:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I guess so, maybe. I think, I think there's probably more drinking in Britain.
22:25 Tom Holland? That's true, but, but, you know, sports clubs and
22:28 Dominic Sandbrook? I suppose so. Anyway, six million Americans by the turn of the 20th century had joined club fraternal orders, as they're called.
22:36 Tom Holland? Yeah, I mean, okay, so the difference between us and America.
22:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
22:40 Tom Holland? We are less keen on clubs with mad names.
22:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, yeah, so you rightly say the club that you would join is a pigeon fancying club or a crown green bowls club. You wouldn't join a club called the Knights of Pythias or something.
22:54 Tom Holland? I, do you know, I would, but I suspect most people wouldn't.
22:58 Dominic Sandbrook? You still can, and you haven't. You have not joined such a club.
23:00 Tom Holland? Is it still going?
23:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Almost certainly. Are you a member of the Odd Fellows?
23:05 Tom Holland? No.
23:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Are you a member of the Freemasons? I suppose you wouldn't say if you were.
23:08 Tom Holland? Uh, no, not, but you're right. I wouldn't say if I was.
23:11 Dominic Sandbrook? You hesitated and that was, I thought, fuck, give you away. Are you a member of the ancient order of united workmen?
23:15 Tom Holland? Yeah, of course, we all are. I mean, who isn't?
23:18 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Pythias and shake hands with the bloke who sells insurance in Monroeville, Idaho, a place I've just made up.
23:40 Tom Holland? I want to go on a voyage in an ancient galley to Britain.
23:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, nobody from Idaho is ever gonna do that.
23:47 Tom Holland? No, I suppose not.
23:48 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 American War, which he barely featured at all. He joins lots of churches, different Baptist churches. He loves it, he can't get enough of this.
24:05 Tom Holland? Is this like fraternities in universities?
24:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, they have stupid Greek names, don't they?
24:10 Tom Holland? 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.
24:19 Dominic Sandbrook? I think so. Simmons's favourite fraternity, or whatever they're called, fraternal organisation, is called the Woodmen of the World, and that was founded in Nebraska.
24:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 was 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, like 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
25:14 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Wagner's 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
25:58 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 at this hotel and he has hired a sightseeing bus and they all get on this bus.
26:17 Tom Holland? Americans hate buses.
26:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, they refused to get on.
26:22 Tom Holland? Yeah.
26:22 Dominic Sandbrook? They said it was too cold and they wouldn't come. And so they missed out on the launch of the second clan. 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 bloke carved on the 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 as a pilgrimage. Anyway, that didn't exist back then. Simmons has built an altar on the top of the mountain, made stones, and he's made a cross of pine boards, and he's drenched the cross with kerosene, and he sets it alight so there's a burning cross. And as he puts himself
27:04 Dominic Sandbrook? under a blazing fiery torch, the invisible empire was culled from its slumber of half a century.
27:10 Tom Holland? God. I mean, that really is Star Wars.
27:13 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, 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.
27:30 Tom Holland? So it's fantasy creating reality?
27:32 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 organisation. A classy order of the highest class.
27:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Who wants, would you like to join a classy order?
27:50 Tom Holland? Oh, that sounds really classy.
27:51 Dominic Sandbrook? And for men of intelligence and character. So basically, in the next few years, a dribble of people joined this organisation. It's not even really a white supremacist organisation, or rather, it's white supremacist in the sense that, you know, a lot of these fraternal organisations 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.
28:20 Tom Holland? I think if you're, if you're, if you're taking the name and dressing up as people who were a racist organisation, I think, I think that's baked in.
28:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course. Yes. Nobody who joins this organisation says, actually, I felt like, I felt like the North had a point in this war. Yeah, but 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.
28:56 Tom Holland? Are there any ladies at this point?
28:58 Dominic Sandbrook? No.
28:59 Tom Holland? So he can't, so his garter selling business, no opportunities. I see that's a missed opportunity there.
29:05 Dominic Sandbrook? So anyway, what then transforms his prospects? 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.
29:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Sort of great panic about Bolsheviks, about labour 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 organisation organised 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 capitalise on what would seem like a very promising kind of mood, so people are very anxious about the enemy within.
30:10 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, you know, a generic 1920s newspaperman. He's a little bit flashy, he's a little bit of a dilettante.
30:55 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
31:37 Dominic Sandbrook? And they specialised 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.
32:01 Tom Holland? So they're coming from a particular political standpoint, which is clearly is something that they hold to be true if they were meeting at a eugenics.
32:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm.
32:11 Tom Holland? Conference.
32:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Though eugenics is very popular in the 1910s in America, very popular. They're a political place which seems a bit odd to us now and a bit kind of cranky and a bit on the fringe, but and I suppose there was a slightly fringe element to it. There it's 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 Klan. And it's a very good deal for them. They will take full control of publicity and marketing and stuff.
32:54 Dominic Sandbrook? And in return, out of every dollar, they and their recruitment team will take home 80 cents.
33:01 Tom Holland? Wow, that is a good deal.
33:03 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 approached the Klan as a sales and marketing operation. The Klan 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're brilliant 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.
33:43 Tom Holland? So mad names is part, absolutely part of the marketing.
33:46 Dominic Sandbrook? It's part of the marketing. That's why they don't believe in the 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.
33:57 Tom Holland? Of course he is.
33:59 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 this is going to be a test at the end. Uh, each realm has its own sub-manager who is called the King Kleagle. And he has a set of local salesmen who are called the Kleagles.
34:20 Tom Holland? Oh, it's like something from the Wizard of Oz.
34:23 Dominic Sandbrook? And Clark from the PR team, he is the, runs the whole sales operation. He is the Imperial Kleagle and he reports to Simmons, the owner, who is called the Imperial Wizard.
34:34 Tom Holland? So it really is like the Wizard of Oz. Do you think the Wizard of Oz was making play with all this?
34:40 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't know, actually. I hadn't thought of that.
34:41 Tom Holland? Yeah.
34:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Maybe I'd have to look into it. So the Kleagles are basically salesmen. Their job, they're recruiters and Clark and Tyler recruit them from other fraternal groups. Specifically the Masons.
34:54 Tom Holland? But how do they know the Masons?
34:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Because they are in that world, they, and Simmons is in that world. They know loads of people who are Masons.
35:01 Tom Holland? Is he a Mason?
35:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, Simmons is a Mason. Yes.
35:03 Tom Holland? Right, okay.
35:04 Dominic Sandbrook? So they go to see, they go to Masons and they basically have a little quiet word with some Masons. They say, hey, we're trying to make a little bit of money. This is an organisation 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 Klan. You would, imagine I was recruiting you. Um, you would have to pay me a $10 fee and that would be called, that would be called a kleck token.
35:31 Tom Holland? A kleck token, right.
35:32 Dominic Sandbrook? So you would pay me your kleck token and of your kleck token, I would keep $4 out of the 10. I would give $1 to the King Kleagle and I would give 50 cents to the Grand Goblin.
35:47 Tom Holland? Right.
35:48 Dominic Sandbrook? And of the rest of the money, William Simmons, the owner, gets $2 and Clark and Mrs Tyler get $2.50.
35:57 Dominic Sandbrook? So basically, you have just joined and we have all profited enormously.
36:01 Tom Holland? A pyramid scheme.
36:02 Dominic Sandbrook? It's a pyramid scheme.
36:03 Tom Holland? Yeah.
36:04 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 collect token.
36:22 Tom Holland? I'd be a winner.
36:24 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
36:30 Tom Holland? And I'd have a great title.
36:31 Dominic Sandbrook? You would. You could 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 clavon. 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.
36:49 Tom Holland? And this is Mrs. Tyler and?
36:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, with Simmons, basically. 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 and state, individual liberty and inevitably, white supremacy.
37:13 Tom Holland? And what is, what is white supremacy? Is it called white supremacy?
37:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, they use the phrase, you read that out right at the beginning, the phrase, white supremacy.
37:21 Tom Holland? Of course, yes. Yeah.
37:22 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 with an insignia, which is kind of Prussian cross. There is a sash. There is the helmet with the cone and there's also a red tassel.
37:39 Tom Holland? Oh, like the Inca.
37:40 Dominic Sandbrook? 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?
37:52 Tom Holland? Oh, no. Oh, no.
37:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Not at all.
37:56 Tom Holland? And Dominic, is part of the costume a garter by any chance?
37:59 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
38:15 Tom Holland? That is the American dream.
38:18 Dominic Sandbrook? So now you've joined and you are a member of the clavon and you are at the foot of the great ladder of clan craft. And if you advance through the ranks, you can go from being a clansman to a knight camellia, to a knight of the great forest.
38:33 Tom Holland? Again, badly spelt, two Rs.
38:35 Dominic Sandbrook? That's forest with two Rs because it's named after Nathan Bedford Forrest.
38:39 Tom Holland? Oh, of course. Yeah, the general, the Confederate general who was the war criminal.
38:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, war criminal. And then you can rise to become a maybe a knight of the midnight mystery.
38:47 Tom Holland? Who wouldn't want that?
38:48 Dominic Sandbrook? The head of the clavon 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 clalifs. There's the great clabby, there's the great grab, there's the great, the great clud.
39:15 Dominic Sandbrook? And the great nighthawk.
39:16 Tom Holland? They are having a laugh.
39:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And every week your clavon will have a clonclave, a clonclave.
39:22 Tom Holland? I'll be honest.
39:23 Dominic Sandbrook? And every month, you know, if you keep going, every month you'll be able to go to the clonverse. When you want to initiate a new member, you will have a clonversation.
39:33 Tom Holland? No, clonvocation?
39:35 Dominic Sandbrook? No, no, no, no, don't. If you have given yourself away there, you don't know the difference in a conversation and a clonvocation.
39:42 Tom Holland? No, I don't. That's because I'm an undercover agent.
39:45 Dominic Sandbrook? You've outed yourself there. You're almost certainly a Catholic.
39:47 Tom Holland? What's going to happen to me now?
39:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 clonclave? Basically, you just sit around reciting this mad babble and 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.
40:22 Tom Holland? So like the Masons.
40:24 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 inner life. You know, you might one day get to meet the great Kludd. That's really exciting. And it's brilliant. Now, that said, there is a dark side to the Klan. And we've all for all the sort of laughing at the great Klaff 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,
41:08 Dominic Sandbrook? but they realized that basically the way to attract people is to find out what and whom they really hate.
41:16 Tom Holland? Oh, so it's kind of Elon Musk like.
41:18 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan 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.
41:43 Tom Holland? 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 Klan is prepared to go to destroy them.
41:57 Speaker 02 There we are getting a statement from Number Ten on that flight with 350 passengers on board.
42:06 Speaker 03 The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.
42:13 Speaker 04 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.
42:19 Speaker 05 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.
42:24 Speaker 03 Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!
42:38 Speaker 06 We would need to understand the policy context.
42:40 Speaker 03 All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
42:48 Speaker 07 A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?
42:53 Speaker 03 Yes.
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43:41 Tom Holland? Hello everyone, welcome back to The Rest Is History. So before the break, we promised you that all this networking and barbecuing and great cluttering and stuff would be taking a dark turn. So Dominic, what is this dark turn and where does it take us?
43:55 Dominic Sandbrook? So let me just set the context for the dark turn. 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, 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 enemies are. So the people who join, initially, they're people who are already members of other fraternal organisations. So the masons, first of all. A Kleagle arrives
44:38 Dominic Sandbrook? in a new town, and he would approach the masons first and get their membership lists.
44:42 Tom Holland? How does he do that? I thought the masons kept their membership lists top secret.
44:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Because he goes to the lodge, he shakes people's hands.
44:50 Tom Holland? So they become a mason themselves, and then they...
44:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, they're often masons themselves. The Kleagles 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 Oddfellows halls, or Woodman's halls. And in some places, as many as three out of four members of the clan were already masons. 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 pay the, have the, 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.
45:23 Tom Holland? I mean, it's a reminder of how boring life must have been in the 1920s.
45:28 Dominic Sandbrook? I guess so.
45:30 Tom Holland? If this is your idea of fun.
45:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Talking about people who are boring, and I hope this doesn't offend some of our listeners, the second largest clan constituency is among Methodist ministers. So there are some estimates that 40,000 Methodist ministers became clan members, and some of them rose to be as high as, as, as exalted cyclopses or grand dragons.
45:50 Tom Holland? And what do you think the appeal is for them?
45:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan for life, this new group? And also, if they think he's a particularly promising customer, they will offer him the title of a clud.
46:33 Tom Holland? Who wouldn't leap at that?
46:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I know, bonkers. And a clud is the local chaplain of the Klavon.
46:38 Tom Holland? Of course.
46:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And then, once they've done that, on Saturday night, 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 thirty or forty dollars towards the church. And the minister will then say to his congregation, this is all pre-arranged. He'll say, God, these are absolutely fantastic people.
47:23 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
47:41 Tom Holland? Is there in any way a dark side?
47:43 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, you know, respectable, middle-class people. They are doctors, they are accountants, they're dentists, they're artists, they're vets, they're 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.
48:20 Dominic Sandbrook? The Klan are brilliant at tapping the cultural anxieties of Protestants in the 1920s, the things that annoy them: dance halls, Hollywood, immodest clothing, women's, you know, sexual behaviour, these kinds of things, and above all, drink and prohibition, which we'll come to. And the speakers and then Klan 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
49:01 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Stoddart, a real book, called The Rising Tide of Colour 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."
49:25 Tom Holland? It's very Fu Manchu, isn't it, as well?
49:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Very Fu Manchu, yeah, exactly that.
49:29 Tom Holland? Yellow peril.
49:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan are full of fear, resentment, you know, hatred of other races, that's definitely the case. Their creed, you read out at the beginning, you know, one version of the Klan'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 colour which the Creator, in His superior wisdom, has drawn." What it's talking about there is African-Americans. Black people at this
50:13 Dominic Sandbrook? point, in the South, have been reduced to subordinate status again because of the Jim Crow laws, segregation, whatnot, and the Klan is all about preserving that.
50:23 Dominic Sandbrook? But here's the thing that may surprise some listeners. Anti-black hatred is only a minor theme of the Second Klan. 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.
50:39 Tom Holland? Is that where the planes, where they got attacked by planes?
50:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly, exactly that. Tulsa had a very successful black middle class and their, their white neighbours basically turned on them and bombed them supposedly. Whether they did bomb them, I mean, that's, historians still argue about that, but they, they might have done, put it that way. Anyway, the Klan was not involved in this. And the reason for that is that the Klan is most popular in states that have very small black populations. Its real targets are two other groups. And to quote the future imperial wizard, Hiram Evans, who we'll 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.
51:25 Dominic Sandbrook? There are maybe three and a half million Jews in America in 1920, and they're mainly in the cities of the North East. And this is definitely a boom period for antisemitism. Henry Ford, of Car fame, has funded the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So Henry Ford is very antisemitic. And Klan newspapers are very antisemitic. They will talk about Jewish conspiracies on Wall Street, Jewish conspiracies to abduct white girls. They talk about Hollywood being a sort 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.
52:05 Dominic Sandbrook? And as a result, Jews are not a terribly plausible threat or a very satisfying target. You know, the, the, the level of hatred is, 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. There are Catholic congressmen, there are 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 have been all kinds of nativist groups and riots in the 19th century. So there's loads for the Klan to play with. There's a, there's a deep tradition that they can tap.
52:50 Dominic Sandbrook? And to quote Hiram Evans, future Imperial Wizard again, "The Roman Church is fundamentally and irredeemably in its leadership, in 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.
53:12 Tom Holland? Is there any sense of anxiety in the Klan that they're dressing up as Spanish penitents from Holy Week?
53:17 Dominic Sandbrook? No, not at all. They're wearing the costumes that they associate with the First Klan because they've seen them in the film. That's basically it, in The Birth of a Nation. So the most common theme you'll get in Klan newspapers is that the Pope is leading a conspiracy against the United States. The Klan fiery cross magazine would call him the Dago Priest on the Tiber, and they claimed that he was organising mass immigration to plunder, pillage, rape and murder Protestant Americans.
53:44 Tom Holland? I mean, this is rhetoric as old as the English settlements in the New World.
53:49 Dominic Sandbrook? It's as old as the English settlements and very recognisable 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 Klan 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 church's stockpile of weapons with which the Catholics are going to rise up one day and overpower
54:31 Dominic Sandbrook? the Protestant authorities. I mean, this feels like something from the 1640s, wouldn't you say?
54:35 Tom Holland? Yeah, absolutely.
54:36 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan says, "This is what Catholics do. This is the oath they swear." And again, so 17th century.
55:03 Tom Holland? Very Thirty Years' War or something.
55:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And the two practical ways in which this 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 Klan, you would have to swear to uphold free public schools. And the reason for that is that the Klan does not like the idea of people going to Catholic schools. It wants them to become 100% American. And the Klan thinks everybody should go to the same schools, you know, public schools, and no separate schools for different religions.
55:37 Tom Holland? And do they think that to be 100% American, you have to be a Protestant?
55:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, oh yeah, undoubtedly.
55:42 Tom Holland? And would this apply to Jews as well?
55:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
55:46 Tom Holland? So if a Jew converts and becomes Protestant?
55:48 Dominic Sandbrook? I suspect yes, I think so. I mean, I don't think it's a terribly well worked out worldview.
55:57 Tom Holland? They don't discuss this in the convocation.
55:59 Dominic Sandbrook? I think the interesting thing about the Jews is there are stories about people. So I think it was somewhere like Idaho, where there was a small town and there was one Jewish family and they were always included in Klan. The Klan 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 Klan. 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 Klan would never have been so successful.
56:40 Dominic Sandbrook? So prohibition, again, very deeply rooted in America's religious history and 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 Klan in themes and in personnel. So temperance groups like the Klan 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 Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 and then the Volstead Act in 1920 that enforces it. But this is here's where you get the gift of the Klan.
57:25 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan because the Klan 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.
58:03 Tom Holland? That's what they say.
58:04 Dominic Sandbrook? But I think they're obviously they don't. If you're a Catholic, the idea of a Protestant-dominated federal government intervening
58:10 Tom Holland? Sure.
58:11 Dominic Sandbrook? in social and cultural life is it's anathema to you because it threatens your own autonomy within a world of religious freedom.
58:18 Tom Holland? But there must be loads of people who want to drink.
58:20 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 happened, 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 Klan, 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
59:02 Dominic Sandbrook? the Klan going. So there's a brilliant historian of the Klan in Indiana, which was his biggest state, called Leonard 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 honour of our saviour who died to save the world, bootleggers, gamblers, law violators, beware, the eyes of the Klan are watching you."
59:29 Tom Holland? So they're kind of like an unbelievably militant and violent salvation army.
59:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, I suppose. I mean, in some ways, yes, there would be a little crossover. Because the Klan believe in enforcing, you know, moral austerity, I suppose. They will send volunteer groups to join cops in crackdowns on bootleggers and on speakeasies 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 while we're making this show is dominated by Iran.
1:00:13 Tom Holland? Yeah, so they're like the morality police in Iran.
1:00:15 Dominic Sandbrook? That's exactly what they are. Over time, groups of Klansmen 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.
1:00:32 Tom Holland? So I'm going to assume from this that there are going to be loads of Klansmen who cheat on their wives.
1:00:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Because you're assuming they'll behave badly.
1:00:39 Tom Holland? I am assuming that, yes.
1:00:40 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, and I quote, 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 Mar-a-Rouge in Louisiana in 1922. There'd been weeks of fighting between the people of Mar-a-Rouge, who were accused of being bootleggers, and Klansmen from the next town along, which
1:01:21 Dominic Sandbrook? was called Bastrop. And the Klansmen kidnapped five men from Mar-a-Rouge. They dragged them out of 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 Klan 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 the overall narrative as we get into the final moments of the episode.
1:02:01 Dominic Sandbrook? So we're now in nineteen twenty one. The Clark Tyler operation has been going for a year and it has been a colossal success. The Klan has added hundreds of thousands of members, thanks to all these techniques, exploiting anxiety about prohibition, going to Methodist sermons, get basically recruiting masons, all of this stuff. The people at the top are suddenly very rich. So Simmons, this guy who was just a complete loser and a salesman and whatnot, has made the equivalent of probably eight million dollars in today's money. And the Klan has bought him to to recognize his role as the founder. They bought him a thirty three thousand dollar home in Atlanta, which he called Klan Crest. That was the name of his house. But storm clouds are gathering.
1:02:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Because some people are getting very alarmed that the Klan is out of control, that this sort of moral policing has gone too far. In September nineteen twenty one, the New York World began a long running series exposing Klan violence across the country, which was syndicated in other papers. And the reporters hoped that this would burst the Klan's bubble. There are also rumors 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 a bottle of whiskey in a seedy sex hotel.
1:03:22 Tom Holland? Was this before they became?
1:03:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Before, yes, this story comes out and they'd given false names and they were fined five dollars each for disorderly conduct. Now it's just a small thing. But the bottle of whiskey in bed together in this seedy hotel is bad. That's not Protestant values.
1:03:39 Tom Holland? But a very familiar story.
1:03:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, very familiar story.
1:03:43 Tom Holland? I mean, that's, what's his name? Jim Bakker. And Tammy Fay Bakker.
1:03:49 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klan, 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 was the, he posed as the incarnation of the old South. I'm a Southern gentleman and I formed this association to honour my forefathers.
1:04:22 Tom Holland? So like Colonel Sanders?
1:04:24 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 melodramatically raised his hand to the heavens and he called on God to forgive those who have persecuted the Klan. And then he collapsed in apparent exhaustion. Anyway, the hearings ended and the House Rules Committee agreed that the Klan had no case to answer. So they got away with it scot-free. And actually, all of this was brilliant publicity for the Klan. Even the series in the New York World about Klan atrocities, people just thought, God, this sounds so exciting. This group, they're riding around the countryside, attacking errant husbands,
1:05:07 Dominic Sandbrook? you know, intimidating Catholics, 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 Klan 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 1922, which was his Anus 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 Klan, it's got a lot of members, it's got a lot of influence.
1:05:52 Dominic Sandbrook? And if it endorses you, you know, you can do really well. So there are a 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 Klan endorsed candidates, all but one 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
1:06:32 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 those, these groups as such, that the Klan 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 Klan had been established in 1920. It had been established, really, it's a sort of lost cause of the Confederacy group. This is the genius of the Klan. They ticked different boxes in different states. So in Texas, Simmons
1:07:15 Dominic Sandbrook? went to the annual meeting of the United Confederate Veterans, and he signed everybody up. He said, "This is a, 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, a new guy as Grand Goblin, who was called inevitably, George B. Kimbrough Jr., who was an ice cream salesman from Houston.
1:07:47 Tom Holland? That's possibly the most American moment so far in the series.
1:07:50 Dominic Sandbrook? It is, and there's 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 organisation. So this story in Thomas Peggroom gives the story of Hope Cottage Dallas, which was a nursery and adoption centre for abandoned babies. And it had fallen into disrepair. And the Dallas branch of the Klan 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.
1:08:35 Dominic Sandbrook? This, you know, basically a nursery and a centre 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.
1:08:44 Tom Holland? It's origins.
1:08:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Their origins, yeah. And I don't think the Klan 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 Klan that saved it. So there's that side of the Klan. And because of its respectability, it does really well politically in Texas. In November 1922, the Klan not only swept the Texas State Legislature, but they elected their first avowed Klansman as a US Senator, who is a guy called Earl Mayfield, a Democrat, a fan of prohibition. They endorsed him as a native born white Protestant Gentile.
1:09:26 Dominic Sandbrook? The issue in the election in that November was the Klan and he won. And he went off to the Senate. But that respectability is not the whole picture of the Klan in Texas. Historically, Texas is a very violent state and the local Klan reflects it. In fact, in few states is the local Klan 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.
1:10:09 Dominic Sandbrook? So there was a place by the river in Dallas, which was known as the Whipping Meadow, where the Klan 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 one couple of months or something. There are claims that the Klan is organising. Tarring and feathering parties or whipping bees. You know how they have spelling bees in America? They will have whipping bees.
1:10:34 Tom Holland? I mean, if they're whipping, if they're tarring and feathering people, I mean, that's quite solid evidence, I would say.
1:10:39 Dominic Sandbrook? It's not that simple, though, because you would think to be police records, right? Court records.
1:10:44 Tom Holland? Well, there'd be people walking around with, you know, tar and feathers.
1:10:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, we'll see, 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 Klansmen themselves. Judges, sheriffs, cops, jurymen, all of these kinds of things. So I'll give you an example. This is, we'll end the episode with. A place called Goose Creek, which was an oil town just across the bay from Houston. Now, there's one evening in January nineteen twenty-three, 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
1:11:31 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Klansmen 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 her 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.
1:12:07 Tom Holland? Oh, God.
1:12:08 Dominic Sandbrook? And you said, oh, well, either we know or we don't. Well, in this case, neither of them would talk to the police. You know, they didn't, they didn't die, but they're obviously very badly injured, but they won't talk to the police.
1:12:18 Tom Holland? And just to be clear, they weren't having an affair. He'd just come round because he was a nice guy and giving fruit.
1:12:22 Dominic Sandbrook? No one knows.
1:12:22 Tom Holland? Okay.
1:12:23 Dominic Sandbrook? But obviously, the assumption is that the Klan 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 investigators 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 eighteen months, Klan vigilantes had conducted, I mean genuinely, a kind of reign of terror in this small town Goose Creek. The local people had been completely cowed into submission. The Klan had kidnapped and beaten and scourged and whipped at least twenty people in this small town
1:13:04 Dominic Sandbrook? because of alleged immorality, because they'd offended the Klan in some way.
1:13:09 Tom Holland? What happens to the Klansmen? Are they convicted?
1:13:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Uh, 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 Klan 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 Klan becomes. Because as we enter nineteen twenty-three, it is growing all the time, its momentum seems unstoppable. And a presidential election is fast approaching in nineteen twenty-four, in which the Klan is determined that it will play the part of kingmaker.
1:13:56 Dominic Sandbrook? So next time in the final episode of this series, we'll be looking at the Klan and its rise and rise in the industrial Midwest, the struggle for control of the national organisation of the Klan. And we will be recounting one of the strangest and most tragic murder scandals that we've ever done on The Rest Is History.
1:14:15 Tom Holland? 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 dot com. Otherwise, we will be back with you on Thursday. Thank you, Dominic. Bye bye.
1:14:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Bye bye.
Previous 655. The Ku Klux Klan: Terror in the South (Part 2) Next 657. The Ku Klux Klan: American Fascists (Part 4) Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
