Word: klan
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...itinerant Methodist preacher named William Joseph Simmons started up the Klan again in Atlanta in 1915. Simmons, an ascetic-looking man, was a fetishist on fraternal organizations. He was already a "colonel" in the Woodmen of the World, but he decided to build an organization all his own. He was an effective speaker, with an affinity for alliteration; he had preached on "Women, Weddings and Wives," "Red Heads, Dead Heads and No Heads," and the "Kinship of Kourtship and Kissing." On Thanksgiving Eve 1915, Simmons took 15 friends to the top of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, built an altar...
Publicity & Politics. Under Simmons, the Klan drifted along for four years, collecting a membership of a few thousand people (using such come-on slogans as "a high-class order for men of intelligence and character," and "a classy order of the highest class") and a small treasury. Then, to breathe greater life into the organization, Simmons hired Edward Clark Young, a press-agent who specialized in fund raising, and Young's partner, a well-to-do widow named Elizabeth Tyler. Young set forth the Klan's goal in terms of Christian morality v. sin. The enemies of America...
...political force, the Klan was incredibly effective. It was a key issue in the 1924 and 1928 presidential conventions and campaigns, as well as in hundreds of local elections. Klan organizations elected judges, mayors and other city officials, sheriffs, state legislators, and even some Governors, Senators and Congressmen. Many politicians joined the K.K.K. out of fierce conviction, others merely in order to survive. Alabama's Hugo Black became a member, but he quit in 1925, a year before he was elected a Democratic U.S. Senator; in 1934, after F.D.R. named him to the Supreme Court, Black repudiated racism...
...thesaurus of Klanonyms. There were the Kleagle and the Klabee, the Kladd and the Klaliff, the Klectoken and the Klexter, the Klig-rapp and the Klokan, the Klokard and the Kloncilium, the Klonklave and the Klonvokation, the Kloran and the Kla-rogo, the Klorero and the Kludd.* In the Klan Kalendar, the days of the week were named Dark, Deadly, Dismal, Doleful, Desolate, Dreadful and Desperate; the weeks of the month were Woeful, Weeping, Wailing, Wonderful and Weird, and the months Bloody, Gloomy, Hideous, Fearful, Furious, Alarming, Terrible, Horrible, Mournful, Sorrowful, Frightful and Appalling...
...Injured Image. The Klan's operations provided tidy profits for Imperial Wizard Simmons and the publicity team of Young and Tyler, but by 1924 the Klan's great days were ending. Several states invoked anti-Klan laws; others forbade the Klan to wear masks. Corruption among the bosses and internecine battles for leadership further weakened the organization. In 1926 David Stephenson, the posturing Grand Dragon of the Indiana Realm, was convicted of murder after the lower-berth Pullman-car rape of a young woman. The Indiana affair hurt the Klan image considerably more than the castrations and lynchings...