The Klan was a local fraternal organization in the 1920s. 

When Jim Thorpe historian Jack Sterling mentioned that the Ku Klux Klan was once a major fraternal organization in Carbon and Schuylkill Counties during the 1920, I was amazed. He said that he had heard stories of how they functioned much as the dozen other local fraternal organizations by collecting money for charity and performing public service projects. 

Piqued by this revelation, I asked him if there was anything else he could uncover. After contacting an elderly uncle, Sterling wrote, “He remembers hearing about the Klan and has a memory of cross burnings on top of Hauto Mountain when he was young. He had two older brothers who were working for LC&N at that time in the forestry department. My uncle remembers his brothers being very angry about the cross burnings. I'm not sure if it was because it was the Klan, or because they were foresters and this stuff threatened to start a forest fire.” 

How could the Klan have been both a fraternal organization oriented toward service and charity, while also being known as the poster club for American terrorism? 

The answer is that what is called the Ku Klux Klan in today’s media, are a variety of largely unaffiliated groups that have adapted the KKK styling, but are not part of a central organization. As an organization, the KKK hasn’t existed for over fifty years. Yet, their “ghost riders in the night” reputation has identified their hooded white robes as an icon of fear, and a talisman for acts of bigotry and vigilantism. 

Insurgencies and terrorism, we see it in America’s current civil war in Iraq; we saw it in our own Civil War. With the Civil War over and Lincoln assassinated, the victorious Union sent agents – called Carpetbaggers, and recruited sympathizers from the South – called Scalawags, to oversee Reconstruction. 

Winning the peace turned out to be more difficult than winning the war. Most notably, in the winter of 1865-66, Confederate Army veterans met in Pulaski, Tennessee to organize a resistance to the Reconstruction. The group’s goal was to intimidate the Carpetbaggers, Scalawags and freed blacks—initially using cross burnings and ghostly hooded, white-robed nightriders to induce a superstitious state of fear. It’s leader was a former slave trader and Confederate Army General, Nathan Bedford Forrest. 

Although the Klan leadership disowned violence, elements of the organization became violent. This led to pursuit of the Klan by federal troops and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which ceased Klan activities. 

The Klan was gone and nearly forgotten for nearly 45 years when D.W. Griffith’s Civil War epic silent film, Birth of a Nation, was released in February 1915. The highly successful movie glorified the Ku Klux Klan at a time when anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-immigrant feelings were running strong. 

This led Georgia politician and publisher Thomas E. Watson and William J. Simmons to call a meeting on top of Georgia’s Stone Mountain in 1915, to create a second Klan. 

Its principals were to: protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of the Confederate soldiers, to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, to aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity with the laws of the land. 

The imagery of the burning cross, which had not existed in the original Klan, was introduced in The Birth of a Nation. The film, borrowed the concept from Scottish clans, who had burned crosses as a method of signaling from one hilltop to the next. 

This second Klan was organized as a corporation. It would make its profits by creating local fraternal chapters and profiting from the sale of memberships, uniforms and skimming from their collection of charitable contributions—easy to do since as a secret society, records were not open for inspection. 

Following World War I, the returning troops seemed to flock to the plethora of fraternal organizations. Through aggressive organizing, the new Klan received a large share of this market and profited as it roles swelled in to an estimated four to six million members in 1924. 

Led by F.W. Atkins, the new Klan set up offices in Pennsylvania in 1921. Soon there were Eastern and Western branches. Rejected by Pennsylvanians because of their Southern background, they hired Pennsylvanians to canvass for new members. The Klan organizers got into trouble, were arrested, and jailed. They used the jailing to publicize themselves as martyrs. They soon had chapters in the major cities of the state, including Philadelphia and Scranton. 

As Klan membership expanded, Atkins became greedy and wanted to keep the money that he was sharing with the head Klan office in Atlanta. When he failed to accomplish this, he left with the Klan’s Pennsylvania treasury, between $25,000 and $50,000, and its membership rolls. 

Joseph Shoemaker, A. L. Cotton, Sam Rich, and Morris Freeman took over the Pennsylvania Klan leadership. They began an anti-Catholic crusade that attracted the ”Pennsylvania Dutch” to the Christian fraternity. 

The Klan survived and grew its Pennsylvania membership to a reported 260,000 in 1923. Sam Rich was charged by his boss, D.C. Stephenson, with not reporting 60,000 memberships and pocketing the initiation money. Rich forced Stephenson to resign. 

The Klan grew rapidly on the post WWI spirit of Americanism that it tooted at its meetings and in its literature. With its large membership and financial influence, it began to support candidates or appose candidates. It is best known for having help defeat Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith in the 1924 Democratic National Convention. Klan members became public officials in the state governments of Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas. 

Klan membership in Pennsylvania peaked in 1925 at approximately 300,000, and then crashed to a bare 4,279 in 1930. A combination of factors including: corruption and infighting within and across Klan chapters, the use of violence by some Klan members, and the onset of the Depression which made it difficult to afford Klan membership dues. On the national scene, the Grand Dragon of Indiana’s conviction of a rape and horrific murder caused fraternal Klansmen to leave the organization. 

Klan officials created legions of disaffected members by being irresponsible with the secret society’s finances. For instance, when the State organization agreed to finance a local picnic and demonstration but never paid the bill, it was up to the local membership to pass the hat to pay for the event. 

The second KKK often expressed a genuine desire for political and social reform. Klansmen were advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. 

In 1939, the second Klan was sold to James Colescott, who during WWII led the Klan in active support of the Nazis. In 1944, the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott was forced to dissolve the second Klan in 1944. 

After WWII, white supremacist groups emerged, some of which rekindled the name of the KKK. In general, these are cells, similar to al Qaeda, and not a centrally controlled organization as was the prior incarnations of the Klan. Some of these cells have been associated with acts of violence, particularly during the 1960s and 70s Civil Rights Movement.