page_626 < previous page page_626 next page > Page 626 Around the turn of the century the Klan, and the Confederate ''lost cause" generally, took on a retrospective romantic appeal for southerners that had been lacking amid the suffering immediately after the conflict. This appeal was greatly stimulated by Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel, The Clansman, and D. W. Griffith's 1915 motion picture based on it, Birth of a Nation. The second Klan was born in that environment in 1915, which encouraged the superpatriotism of World War I. After the war its membership and geographic range expanded dramatically. During its heyday in the early 1920s this Klan numbered over 3 million members nationwide, and it won political power in Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and a number of other states. Unlike its predecessor it was mainly an urban phenomenon, reflecting the demographic changes in the nation. It drew members and leaders from all ranks of white society, but chiefly from lower-middle-class people, largely religious fundamentalists who felt threatened by a national drift away from the small-town Protestant culture they had grown up with. The 1920s Klan fed on a variety of frustrations and fears: fear of the immigrants who were entering the country in large numbers, of communists and other radicals spawned by the Russian Revolution, of blacks who were moving into northern cities in increasing numbers, of Jews and Catholics who were rising in the economic and social order, and of labor unions demanding a larger share of the pie for their members. Some of these Klansmen resorted to violence as in the days of old. But, in a membership exceeding 3 million, the vast majority were nonviolent. They marched in parades, paid dues, and bought regalia (this Klan was, for some of its organizers, a financial bonanza). They voted for Klan-endorsed political candidates and attended rallies where crosses were burned. (The original Klan did not burn crosses; the idea seems to have originated in Dixon's novels.) The organization dwindled away in the late 1920s, the result of its own legal, financial, and political excesses, though a remnant persisted until its final disbandment in 1944. Only two years later the third Klan emerged. It was fueled by the fear of communism abroad and at home, but the civil rights movement provided its major stimulus. Organized in many parts of the country, it is primarily southern- and urban-based. Membership is still drawn disproportionately from undereducated people with relatively low social and economic status. The peak in membership came during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, when it approached seventeen thousand. The modern Klan is small, chronically fragmented, and prone to internal conflict over matters of policy and personal rivalry. Groups differ in their readiness to embrace violence. Some have accumulated substantial arsenals and have even manufactured and sold weapons to raise funds. They have sometimes forged alliances with like-minded organizations, as happened in 1979 when North Carolina Klansmen briefly formed a United Racist front with the state's tiny Nazi party. Klansmen have also had ties to such white supremacist organizations as the National States' Rights party, the Aryan Nations, and the Skinheads. For all their power to make newspaper headlines, the three Klans historically failed to accomplish their major objectives. The first did not end southern Reconstruction in the 1870s; that was more nearly the work of organized rioters and Red Shirt campaigners. The second did not significantly deflect the nation's progress toward a pluralistic, democratic society in the 1920s. And the major effect of the third on the civil rights movement was to hasten the triumph of that cause when the Klan's violence helped mobilize public support for passage of landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. David Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3d ed. (1987); Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (1971); Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (1987). ALLEN W. TRELEASE See also Civil Rights Movement; Lynching; Reconstruction. Â < previous page page_626 next page >