Robert Evans, Katie, and Cody dissect the second Ku Klux Klan as a $25 million multi-level marketing pyramid scheme disguised as a fraternal order. They detail how PR agents Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clark expanded recruitment to 850,000 members through "Klan vacations" in Kokomo, Indiana, which served up to 200,000 people with cross-burning fireworks and baseball games against "aliens." While generating massive profits from robes and knives, the group also orchestrated the Oregon Outrages lynchings before collapsing due to internal corruption and Hiram Stevenson's murder conviction. Ultimately, this financial exploitation of bigotry foreshadows modern MLM structures, proving the KKK was as much a business venture as a terrorist organization. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
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You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
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Hey, everybody!
I'm Robert Evans, and this is yet again Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Now, today, we are on part two of our series on the KKK.
Part two.
Part two.
My guest with me as with part one, Katie and Cody.
Hey.
Hello.
The stuff news how much network of.
That's the one.
That's the one.
Here we are.
So, how you guys doing still?
Still got a cold.
Still good?
I'm still doing well.
Still happy?
It's two days after you heard our last episode, but it's just minutes after we recorded the last one.
But in those minutes, we've grabbed us a Dorito or three.
There are so many Doritos in here, and they are interesting.
They're delicious, I mean.
How do you guys like the Tapatillo ones?
That's spicier than I expected.
Because that's spicier than Tapatillo is.
Yeah, I like it.
It's got a real kick if that's what you're looking for.
Tapatillo is my go-to sauce.
I like it, Crystals.
I grew up with crystals, hot sauce.
Crystals too.
You know who would not have liked Tapatito Doritos?
KKK.
I was going to say the KKK.
Oh!
I was hoping that was a seamless transition.
Seamless transition to the KKK.
Well, then we should keep talking about Tapatillo.
I was hoping for another reason to not like the KKK.
So in part one, we talked about the original Klan, which was a terrorist organization that started as a bunch of drunk frat boys pretending to be ghosts and turned into a murder gang.
Interesting.
Headed by a former rebel general.
Funny how that works.
Part two, we're going to talk about the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, which was an order of magnitude larger than it was in the 1860s and a hell of a lot weirder.
This is not going to go where you think it's going to go.
This is a weird story.
You keep saying that.
And it's hard to imagine.
I'm super excited.
Because it's already weird.
It's already weird.
Our grand magis and our, you know, queens.
No, there's no queens in the middle.
There's no queens in the KKK.
No.
Imperial Emperor.
There are some King Kliegels in this one.
I don't know what a Kliegel is.
I do.
It doesn't matter.
It has to do with the Communists.
The Grand Kagles.
The Grand Kegels came later.
We're not part of the Klan.
They did come later.
That was a move that I saw.
That was very good, Cody.
That was very witty.
Wowie.
We're going to check out for the rest of the episode.
You know what?
Just dial tone for the rest of it.
You guys got your dose of comedy.
You guys want to go get a drink?
Thanks for stopping by.
Thanks for stopping by.
All right.
Here's the episode.
In 1919, a pamphlet started circulating amongst the townships and villages of the American countryside.
On its front was a drawing of a Klansman on a rearing steed.
The title was The Ku Klux Klan, Yesterday, Today, and Forever.
The Flyer's purpose was to announce the glorious rebirth of the KKK.
It opened up by defending the first Klan.
The Ku Klux Klan, the Invisible Empire, was the great idea, that's capitalized, of American Reconstruction.
We say American Reconstruction for the reason that all America was affected by Reconstruction influences.
It actually says unfluences.
I guess that's a spelling, error.
Well, with the racists.
Is this what the president models his tweets after?
I was going to say, like, more capitalizing in the words and, like, getting some words wrong.
The South, most of all, yes, but nevertheless, all is capitalized.
For the great threat, great threat is capitalized, to the white race that loomed on the horizon of the South would have spread through the entire nation had not the white robe of the Ku Klux Klan kept unrevealed those courageous and devoted hearts that were consecrated to saving the Anglo-Saxon civilization of our country, protecting the homes and well-being of our people, and shielding the virtue of womanhood.
The original Ku Klux were not outlaws, all caps, or moral degenerates, all caps, nor did they perpetuate outlawry, which is a great word we don't use enough.
Oh, I really like outlawry.
This is the Klan, and they're terrible, but I really like them.
We can take a look at that.
Satisfying word to say.
They were men of moral and social standing, and their leaders were men of sterling character and unquestioned culture.
They reverently bowed to the soul of real law, all caps, and swore to enforce its principles of justice, protection, and the pursuit of happiness.
Their strong arm fought valiantly for the preservation of the integrity of the race against the cruelty of base, unjust, and tyrannical legislations and insufferable conditions.
No joke, I feel like that's formative literature for a Trump like he grew up reading this.
He's definitely got some better words in there.
I think his dad might have.
That's a good idea.
I mean, his dad did.
There's rumors that he was in the Klan during this.
Oh, see?
I mean, like, this is the kind of...
They've got drafts of these things laying around the Trump household when he was a kid.
Well, if they got the moral degeneracy in there, really.
He was waiting for that.
Although, I got to promise, this is not going to go where you're thinking.
Okay.
Now, I read a book for this episode two, The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon.
I want to advocate reading both of the books for this podcast because they're both good, but Linda Gordon's book is really special.
It is almost unbelievably dense.
I've rarely in my life encountered so much information from so many different sources consolidated into a single book of this size.
I'm just kind of in awe of the amount of work she must have put into it and like how it's really good.
We're only using fractions of it for this episode, but it is a fantastic book.
So I really recommend giving it a read if you're interested in the history of American radical right-wing extremism.
Now, this book claims that the second KKK's rise was directly inspired by the release of a movie, Birth of a Nation, in 1915.
Birth of a Nation was a fanciful story about the first KKK and how they saved white women from rape happy freedmen.
It was the first film ever shown at the White House.
Woodrow Wilson fucking loved it, saying, quote, it is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.
Maybe America's worst president if you're getting this guy's opinion on it.
What with the whole Nazism and that thing that he just said?
What with a lot of things?
William Joseph Simmons, a doctor from Atlanta, a Spanish-American war veteran and minister, was a huge fan of the movie.
When he got back from serving garrison duty during the war, he drifted around a number of jobs, showing no aptitude for anything, and joined 15 different fraternal orders.
Now, today frats are just something that a chunk of college kids do, but back in the day, there was very little going on, and most men were in a fraternal order of some type.
Many were in multiple.
It was an extremely popular way to have something to do and feel like part of a community.
Community is important.
Very important.
Simmons was desperate for a community, but none of the groups he joined fit the bill.
He was a fan of Birth of a Nation, and he'd been inspired by the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man falsely accused of rape and murder.
None of them fit the bill.
They weren't quite evil at all.
Inspired by the lynching of is not like, boy, that lynching really inspired me.
He's like, what about it?
Simmons started reading about the original Klan.
He bought a copy of the original KKK prescript, mixed in a little bit of Masonism, and tried to start up his own fraternal order, essentially cosplaying as the Ku Klux Klan.
Simmons' KKK was just as racist as the original, but was also differently bigoted.
It ranted against, quote, the hairy claw of Bolshevism, socialism, syndicalism, IWWism, and other isms.
IWW is the International Workers of the World, a very influential group of unions.
Yeah.
He believed that these forces were, quote, seeking in an insidious but very powerful manner to undermine the very fundamentals of the nation.
Yeah.
First Letter in Nations capitalized.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, we're getting into the good stuff.
Yeah.
I knew this was going to be right into the vein for you.
So when the KKK had last written, socialism had not really been a buzzword in America.
Marx and Engels had only published the Communist Manifesto in like 1848, and shit traveled slowly back then.
Social democratic parties were starting to become a thing in Europe by the late 1860s, but most of the U.S. was off doing its own thing.
The assassination of William McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist in 1901 really helped to pour gas on that whole fire.
Simmons started advertising for KKK2, this time it's Klanier, in 1915.
Fully reloaded.
Yeah, fully reloaded.
Or electric boogaloo.
You know, you pick your own.
You pick your own sequel title.
KKK Harder.
You know, whatever.
There's options.
In his promotional materials, he described it as, quote, a classy order of the highest class, capitalized.
No.
A classy order of the highest class.
Man.
No roughnecks, rowdies, nor yellow streaks.
Real men whose oaths are inviolet are needed.
His oaths are inviolet?
Inviolet.
Invioled.
Yeah, they're not going to break their oaths.
Classy men of a higher class.
Very good class.
Very classy, but class.
Classiest men.
It was not exactly an instant hit.
Only a few dozen people signed up at first.
Simmons went out of his way to find a few very old former Klansmen to join.
He proclaimed himself the Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and started holding meetings.
Now, unlike the original Klan, they didn't start off doing anything out in the world.
This was just a place where grown men went to engage in weird-ass, quasi-magical rituals with other masked men.
It was LARPing.
LARPing as the KKK, who were themselves LARPers.
Getting really deep in here.
It's getting really meta.
Yeah.
Circle, circle.
Circle, circle.
Circles inside of circles.
Exactly.
Now, in order to codify some of these rituals and establish standards for his new organization, Simmons published the KKK's holy book in 1915.
You guys want to guess what it was called?
The Klanomicon, the tome of the Martian demon.
Clanaronomy.
Hobgoblin.
What is it?
The Chloran.
The Chloran.
What?
Mine was closer.
You lyrn.
That's real.
That's so bad.
That's amazing.
You can find the whole Chloran online.
It's beyond parody.
I know.
It is beyond parody.
Everything about this episode is beyond parody.
I can't tell you how excited I am.
He's literally jumping out of his seat as he said that.
Now, yeah, again, you can read it for yourself if you decide that is an experience that will spark joy in your life.
It is online.
I'll put the link in the thing.
It's all there.
Now, the Kloran promises education in character, spelled with a K and no H, honor and duty.
Not spelling, though.
Not definitely not spelling.
Never been one of the KKK's strong points.
To give you some info on the organization's founding principles, I would like to read y'all the Ku Klux Creed.
Crazy.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Of course it's spelled with a fucking K.
We, the Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, reverentially acknowledge the majesty and supremacy of the divine being and recognize the goodness and providence of the same.
We recognize our relation to the government of the United States of America, the supremacy of its constitution, the union of states thereunder, and the constitutional laws thereof.
And we shall ever be ever devoted to the sublime principles of a pure Americanism and valiant to the defense of its ideals and institutions.
We avow the distinction between the races of mankind as same has been decreed by the Creator, and we shall ever be true to the faithful maintenance of white supremacy and will strenuously oppose any compromise thereof in any and all things.
Decreed by the Creator.
Decreed by the King.
Citation needed.
One of the things that is pointed out in the fantastic Linda Gordon book, The Second Coming of the KKK, is that this was not radical at the time.
The KKK was speaking very much to the majority of white Americans.
And that is very important for everything that comes next.
The ideology of this group is not fringe in any way, shape, or form.
They are preaching to the choir.
They are not radicalizing people.
And that's critical.
No one's getting radicalized here.
Everyone's a white supremacist?
Well, I'm going to start a white supremacy group.
Right.
Now, about two-thirds of the Kloran is made up of incredibly dense, utterly preposterous ceremonies.
I'm going to read a quick and random excerpt from the Klan's naturalization ritual, aka their induction of new members, so you can have an understanding of the special tenor of this nigh-unreadable tome.
Cody, you look so excited.
I'm ready.
I'm going to read all the titles.
So, starting off, we have the Clad speaking.
With a K?
With a K.
Yeah, K-L-A-D-D.
Worthy aliens from the world of selfishness and fraternal alienation, prompted by unselfish motive, desire the honor of citizenship in the invisible empire and the fellowship of clansmen.
To which the Klexter responds, Has your party been selected with care?
To which the Clad responds, these men are known or vouched for by Klansmen in Clonclave Assembled.
The two K's at the Cloud Corners?
The Klexter responds, Have they the marks?
The Klad asks, or says, The distinguishing marks of a Klansman are not found in the fiber of his garments or his social or financial standing, but are spiritual, namely a chivalric head, a compassionate heart, a prudent tongue, and a courageous will, all devoted to our country, our clan, our homes, and each other.
These are the distinguishing marks of a Klansman.
Oh, faithful Klexer.
And these men claim the marks.
The Klexter next says, What if one of your party should prove himself a traitor?
To which the Klad says, he would be immediately banished and disgraced from the invisible empire without fear or favor.
Conscience would tenaciously torment him.
Remorse would repeatedly revile him, and direful things would befall him.
The Klexter asks, Do they know all this?
The Klad says, All this they now know, they have heard, and they must heed.
Klexter says, Faithful Clad, you speak the truth.
Gonna be a lot of K's.
Gonna be a lot of K's going on.
Bunch of dorks.
Bunch of real dorks.
It's not even that racist.
Like, there's a little bit about white supremacy in there, but it's mostly just really dense nonsense rituals.
And then you sprinkle in a little dash of racism here and there, like you do with cilantro.
The Rise of Fraudulent Universities00:04:57
Yeah, just to get him salivating a little bit.
Yeah.
Now, the first two-thirds or so of the Kloran are made up of frustrating, stupid rituals, how you open and close meetings, etc.
Then at the end of the book, Simmons wrote a lecture.
It reads like a particularly bad DD source book written by a racist.
Here's him describing the South prior to the rise of the first clan.
Ignorance, lust, and hate, all capitalized, seized the reins of the state, capitalized, and riot, rapine, and universal ruin reigned supreme.
The highest form of cultured society was thrust down and its noble neck was forced under the iron heel of pernicious passion, who yielded a potent scepter of inquisitorial oppression, and the very blood of the Caucasian race was seriously threatened with everlasting contamination.
I would have been a pretty good clan leader back in the day.
Yeah, you really would.
I got that voice down.
I know it.
Don't explore that too much.
No, because I'm not afraid of the spoiler alert, but we're about to get to an Evans.
Oh, really prominently here.
Yeah.
An important thing to realize about the 1920s Klan is that while they were racist, they were first and foremost a social order.
Their meetings probably weren't any more racist than the average Masonic meeting at the time.
We have minutes from a lot of individual clavern meetings.
Individual groups are called a clavern.
And many of them never...
Because they were so cool.
Because they were so cool.
Linda Gordon points out that many of them never even brought up racial subjects other than in like passing.
So the second clan was racist, but not more racist than mainstream society.
It didn't stand out.
Now, Simmons ran the clan for five years, and as with every other endeavor in his life, he was bad at it.
During his reign, the group had only one public outing, a march at a veterans parade that included 20 black men he paid to put on robes in order to pat out his numbers.
Like, whatever you do, do not take this off.
Not take this off.
Oh, my goodness.
But there's a point, like, it's not the racism isn't the focus, because he's clearly like, well, I just want us to look big.
Right, right.
I want my club to be cool.
I want everybody to show up in my cool club.
That's very cool.
Very cool.
So he did make enough money to buy Baptist Lanier University in Atlanta because it was heavily in debt, and he tried to turn it into a whites-only university for racists.
25 people enrolled, and it went bankrupt.
So, Simmons was forced to go looking for help.
Fraud universities, huh?
Fraud universities.
So, Simmons is going to bankrupt the KKKs in severe debt.
He's got to go find help.
And he found it when he met two veterans of the fairly new PR industry, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clark.
They ran a publicity agency that had already helped the Anti-Saloon League on its rise to prominence.
Clark's dad had been a Confederate colonel and owned the Atlanta Constitution, an influential newspaper.
Elizabeth was his wife.
She'd grown up poor and married at 15.
And if you ignore the whole helping to found the KKK of it all, she's a pretty inspiring feminist story.
It's hard to ignore that other part.
It's really hard to ignore the clan part.
Here's the second coming of the KKK.
Quote: The team saw a lucrative client in Simmons' new clan group.
The minute we said Ku Klux, Tyler recalled, editors from all over the United States began literally pressing us for publicity.
By 1920, she and Clark had convinced Simmons that they could grow his new Klan, that it had national potential.
To realize that potential, it had to multiply its bigotry.
The alleged threat from black people would not reverberate among northerners at a time when so few African Americans lived outside the Southeast.
So Simmons hired them, signing a contract that gave Clark and Tyler an astonishing 80% of any revenue they brought in from new recruits.
Since Simmons had got nowhere with his new organization, he undoubtedly thought that he had nothing to lose in giving them four-fifths of anything they could bring in.
Tyler and Clark became, in practice, head of the Klan for two years.
Now, they turned Simmons into a polished speaker.
Engendering and exploiting fear, he would warn that degenerative forces were destroying the American way of life.
These were not only black people, but also Jews, Catholics, and immigrants, the big city dwellers who were tempting Americans with immoral pleasures, sex, alcohol, and music, notably jazz.
Yeah, yeah.
Interesting choice of music there.
You got it.
Interesting choice of music.
We're almost to the big reveal.
Very excited.
Like the original Klan, the second KKK used newspapers to stoke the buzz around their organization.
Simmons would give exclusive interviews where he came across as super suave and cool, and the clan's membership would grow.
Newspapers ran advertisements that included KKK application forms.
Press releases ran like rain on front pages of the nation.
By the summer of 1921, the new KKK reported a membership of 850,000.
Now, this is almost certainly an exaggeration, but the real number was surely in the hundreds of thousands.
Incredible growth over roughly a year of PR blitzes.
And this is where it gets fun.
The story sort of splits.
One half is the tale of the various assaults and murders and attempted political coups by Klansmen over the next several years.
And the other story, the bigger story, is the tale of the Klan's true purpose.
It was an MLM, a multi-level marketing scheme.
It was a pyramid scheme.
The KKK, the second KKK, it was a motherfucking pyramid scheme.
Oh, I'm so excited.
Incredible Growth Over One Year00:04:08
I love it.
I'm waiting for you to literally read a headline.
Yeah, the dapper KKK.
There's a shitload of those.
I'll bet.
Yeah.
Now, we're going to talk about how the Klan became a pyramid scheme.
But first, we're going to talk about some things that are legitimate products and services.
The products and services that advertise on this show and/or content platform.
I did it.
Buy Doritos.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Joining the Klan Costs Big00:14:40
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back!
We just had a handful of Tapatio Doritos, which are spicing our way through this tale of racism and profiting off of racism.
So, grifting racists?
What?
Grifting MLMs in the far right?
I am appalled.
I mean, surprised.
I'm going to leave right now because I'm so surprised.
I've had a great Harvard paper called Hatred and Profits Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan.
I'm going to quote from that now.
Great.
The organizational structure of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, designed by the Propagation Department, was a hybrid that combined features of other fraternal orders with a multi-level marketing firm with two distinct sets of reporting hierarchies that operated more or less independently.
One hierarchy was made up of the clan's members from the lowliest rank and file to the highest leadership.
This hierarchy corresponds to the social club aspect of the clan, the arm that intimidated blacks and foreigners and attempted to influence political outcomes.
In addition, however, there was a nearly invisible parallel hierarchy of clan recruiters organized like a modern multi-level marketing firm, which represents the financial arm of the clan.
This highly incentivized sales force was responsible for recruiting new members to the clan and almost all of the financial rewards accrued to either the handful of top leaders or the individuals in this auxiliary hierarchy.
It was a money-making scheme made up by PR Hack.
This is fascinating.
Yeah, it's fucking wild, right?
I hate so many emotions and some of them conflict with each other.
This is amazing.
It's a great scam.
Yeah.
It's an objectively great scam.
An effective scam.
Yeah.
Take note.
Clark and Tyler, the PR agents who made the KKK great again, brought in more than $850,000 in their first 15 months.
That is roughly $10 million in modern money in slightly over a year.
Now, Simmons got a much smaller cut of this, but he still got rich.
They even gave him a 25 grand bonus, which was like $300,000 for him.
Good for him.
He really put in the work.
It was like six years, you know?
Sign the paper.
Sign the paper.
Now, this money came from a variety of places, which I will get to in a second, but it's important to know that Simmons, Clark, and Tyler were all pushed out by like 1922.
Simmons was bought out, and another new guy named Hiram Evans was made the Imperial Wizard.
He'd been hired as a recruiter initially, but once he was the Imperial Wizard, he was able to fire Clark and Tyler, which he did.
So, the people responsible for actually getting the second KKK off the ground weren't around for most of what happens next, but they set all of this into motion and they got rich off of it.
The KKK would have died with Simmons indebted and disgraced, but that is distinctly not what happened.
These two PR Wunderkins had created an incredible profit-making model, one that would act as a cash spigot for a bunch of greedy racists and con millions of Americans in the process.
So, tale is old as time.
Tale is old as time.
First off, here's how the clan was organized.
This is from that Harvard paper.
Quote: The Grand Wizard or Emperor served as the nominal chair of the body, with the Imperial Wizard acting as the chief executive and aided by a 15-member Imperial Clonsilium.
These included the Klalif, first vice president, the Clazic, second vice president, the Cloquard, lecturer, the Klud, chaplain, the cligrap, secretary, the clayby, treasurer, the clad clayby, the clad conductor, the clarago, a tin man inner guard, the clester, the outer guard, the clonsel, general counsel, the nighthawk, courier, and the four clokan, auditors.
These individuals were responsible for keeping the clan's books, providing in-house legal advice, and serving as a clan cabinet.
Did you like plug racism into like a random letter generator?
And just like, what?
Some of those aren't even based off of real world.
What is a cligrap?
What's a cligrap?
Like, clalif, okay.
Like, you clearly got a muscle in the game with the cloran.
What the fuck is a clud?
Or I'm still stuck on the clayby.
The clay.
The kleby.
The clay.
I'm also ashamed to share an initial with this.
K has been ruined for me.
Yeah.
You only got one K, though.
You only got one K. If you were the KKK, you'd have like a shitload of K's.
Right.
Klady.
Absolutely.
Klady Cole.
Klady Kloh.
Klady Cole.
Yeah.
No, and that's still one shy.
And I don't even want to go down that path anymore.
Back to the story.
The Klan's worldwide operations were split up into several realms, one for each state, each run by a grand dragon.
Why did they call them states?
Why did they call them states?
I don't know, man.
At the bottom of the organization were the ghouls, organized into claverns, which were headed by exalted cyclopses.
This is nuts.
This is nuts.
You say exalted cyclops.
Those are the ghouls.
Exalted cyclops.
The exalted cyclops heads a clavern.
Yeah.
No, like gnomes.
Like, so, like, why would you just like say you were ghouls?
We're ghouls.
We're ghouls.
We're the ghouls.
We're the ghouls.
Ghouls make up a clavin.
Ghouls make up a clavern.
They're the rank and file of the clansmen.
Sorry, I'm sorry.
And they're headed by a grand cyclops.
This is absolutely more than I ever wanted to know.
Exalted Cyclops.
These are like a few things I'm never going to forget.
Yeah.
And I'm not happy about it.
Yeah, no, it's stuck there forever now.
Yeah, if you think about the KKK as a political or militant organization, outside of the silly names, this structure makes sense.
But once you understand the financial dimensions, well, it becomes very clearly a pyramid scheme.
Quote, clan members generated an enormous amount of revenue.
Each ghoul paid a $10 initiation fee, equivalent to $110 in $2011.
$6.50 to buy an official clan robe, which costs roughly $2 to make, an annual membership fee of $5, an imperial tax of $1.80, and Klansmen were also encouraged to purchase other clan-sanctioned merchandise, including swords, Bibles, helmets, dry cleaning, and life insurance.
Joining the Klan was not a cheap undertaking.
Using the numbers above, the first year of membership cost $2,330, roughly $250 in 2011 dollars.
And subsequent years were $6.80, approximately $75 in 2011 dollars.
At its peak in 1924, the Klan conservatively generated annual revenue from all sources of at least $25 million, equivalent to $300 million in current dollars.
Only a small portion of this revenue was required to fund basic operations.
It was a fucking pyramid scheme.
Yeah.
It was.
It was a racist pyramid scheme.
But I'm sorry, the dry cleaning was that for the ropes?
For the ropes, yeah.
Okay.
You got to keep those white robes clean.
Yeah, yeah.
You ever worn a white robe, Katie?
It's gonna.
I haven't.
You know, I really haven't ever worn a white robe.
I can make some assumptions about it, though.
Yeah.
The problems that come from wearing a white robe.
You drink your coffee once.
You drink coffee once.
You like bloody up somebody with white.
It shows everything.
Especially racist.
Were the swords like branded?
It was like...
Yeah.
Yeah, they were branded.
Of course, they were branded.
Sorry, what a foolish question.
I apologize.
This economic growth was possible thanks to an enormous sales force, started in 1921 by our PR friends and soon over a thousand people strong.
Each Grand Dragon, the state clan heads, got $2.50 out of each $10 membership fee.
Members also paid a $1 yearly tax, which went to the Grand Dragon.
$0.50 of every $6.50 clan robe went to him as well.
So the Grand Dragons make bank, and so did the sales force.
The U.S. is split into nine domains, with a goblin in charge of recruitment for each.
The goblin hires a King Kliegel who hires a bunch of Kliegels, the regular grunt sales force of the Endeavor.
They made $4 off of each membership.
The remaining $3.50 was sent up the recruiting structure with the person in charge of sales in the state, the King Kliegel, getting a dollar.
The regional sales overseer, a great goblin, got 50 cents.
The national sales overseer, an imperial kliegel, got $1.25.
And the two most powerful men in the Klan, the Imperial Wizard and the Grand Wizard, split 75 cents.
But they were doing that for the whole country.
Kliegels were paid for recruiting new members.
And once someone joined, none of the ongoing revenues went to the sales force.
So, for the big cheeses, the ongoing revenue is where it's at.
So the sales force gets a cut of the initial whenever you recruit someone, and then the big cheeses get anything else that they buy.
So the Invisible Empire sold robes, flags, dry cleaning services, candy, every kind of thing imaginable.
I'm going to quote again from the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan.
Quote, a Kluxer's nifty knife, every word in that is spelled with a K, which was described as a, quote, real 100% knife for 100% Americans.
Wow.
Could be bought for $1.25.
A member could buy a brooch for his wife, a zircon-studded fiery cross.
A larger cross that a man could wear on the watch chain he displayed across his chest cost $2.90.
For only $5, you could get, allegedly, a 14-karat gold-filled ring with a 10-karat solid gold clan emblem on a fiery red stone.
Also for sale were phonograph records and player piano rolls with clan songs.
Advertisements for this merchandise appeared in newspapers across the country and in flyers at large clon vacations.
The clan's for-profit life insurance plan claimed $3 million worth of policies in 1924.
A dubious figure.
It claimed to provide burial insurance as well, but the service never actually materialized because it was a scam.
Now, the KKK also offered a spectacular vacation getaway.
I found an ad from sometime.
It's not enclavation.
It's well, just you wait.
I'm going to hand you the ad, Katie, and you can describe it to the readers.
You know, it's from sometime in the 20s, Duke University, which is where I found this hosted.
Didn't know exactly when.
And it talks about, you know what?
I'm just going to describe this ad, Katie.
All right.
To all the clans and clansmen of Texas.
And then there's like a little image that says, Cool Coast Camp, the healthiest road to the coolest summer.
Are all those words spelled with a K in Cool Coast Camp?
Yes, every single one that you could imagine.
And the coolest summer.
Cool Coast Camp.
The healthiest road to the coolest summer.
Do you want me to read some of this things?
Yeah, you'll get into a little bit of that ad copy while I. Greetings.
We, the Grand Dragons of the Realm of Texas and the great Titans of the five provinces in Texas, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, hereby officially endorse the annexed proposition of Klansman C.T. Gilliam of San this is an announcement.
Realm of Texas.
The Realm of Texas.
Really into that.
He proposes to give a high-class service to the Klansmen of Texas at a minimum cost.
Yeah, right.
It goes on.
I'm getting this back to you.
I want a knife that says 100% knife.
You know what it is?
It's like one of my favorite things.
You have to guard against it being like part fork.
You don't know.
You don't ever know.
You don't know.
You don't know.
It doesn't have that vacation.
You don't know what it's cutting.
The clan would have hated Swiss army knives.
They would have hated a Swiss army.
Because Swiss Army knife, that's like race mixing for tools.
No, no, no.
They're going to threat to knife civilization.
Now, the Cool Coast Camp ad is a really fun document to read.
For one thing, it brags repeatedly and pointedly about how much shade their beaches have.
Because everybody's really white.
And they can't stand the sun.
Guess what it recommends as the most sensible thing to wear?
A cheap.
A big Mexican sombrero.
Oh, my God.
What?
Is that the like?
Those are the exact words?
Those are the exact words.
Big Mexican sombrero.
Wow.
Oh.
There is no shortage of bigotry in the ad, but it is kind of the classic, wholesome mainstream 1920s American bigotry as opposed to what we would expect from the clan today.
I'm going to read, for example, a section titled The Family that's sort of advertising this camp to the rest of the family.
Wonderful mothers, this camp, spelled with a K, is deeded to you.
So cool, so restful.
No work whatsoever, no drudgery, no worry.
The fiery cross guards you at nights, and an officer of the law with the same Christian sentiment guards carefully all portals.
Beautiful daughter, a beautiful camp needs beautiful ornaments.
No dust to avoid.
Shades natural and shades artificial to keep away the freckles.
Cool with a K. In every way, the time of your life in all caps.
Put a bug in daddy's ear and hug him tight.
He will let you come.
The sentiment reflected through humanity by the rays of the fiery cross makes you as safe at our camp as at home in mother's arms.
Mother's arms is capitalized too.
The prize of a concrete Lizzie.
No idea what that is.
I have no idea.
Is that okay?
I bet someone out there listening to the music.
No, the only thing with a C that's spelled with a C. I'm so disappointed.
I don't know what the fuck a concrete Lizzy is, but it's...
Concrete Lizzie.
That was the prize given any person who could find a more wonderful spot in America.
That...
Is this a sex thing?
Yes.
Yes, Cody.
It's a fucking thing.
They were all fuck guys in the KKK.
Wow.
A concrete Lizzie.
Oh, I concrete Lizzie in this day and age.
Oh, no.
All right.
Yeah.
Well.
Cool.
At a low cost.
At an affordable cost.
At a low cost.
Yeah.
It's affordable cost because Texas' coast is kind of shitty.
The realm of Texas.
The Realm of Texas does not have a nice coast.
Speaking as a Texan, don't go to Galveston.
All right.
That wasn't a concern.
Yeah.
Good, good.
The KKK recognized that children represented an incredible potential market so far untapped by the powers of commercial racism.
They opened three auxiliary groups for children.
The junior KKK, starting in 1923, was literally just a child's version of the KKK.
Targeting Children for Profit00:07:36
One new junior KKK chapter announced its opening by blowing a horn and lighting a cross and the letter J on fire.
Whoa.
For junior.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
For young girls, there was the Tri-K Club.
Club is spelled with a K. Modeled after popular sororities at the time.
Now, there was plenty of racism in the Tri-K.
Historian Christina DuRocher described the central message of their propaganda as, quote, white girls should remove themselves from contact with all blacks, a passive way of preserving white supremacy.
But the Tri-K Club was first and foremost a social club.
I found an illustrated collection of the KKK sheet music on Google Books because internet, and it included the ritual of the Tri-K Club, which seems like it was probably patterned off the Kluran.
It includes a pledge song of this racism sorority.
I'm going to read just the first verse, which is all I could find.
We pledged you our friendship true through happiness and tears.
The tie that binds our hearts to you will hold throughout the years.
Beneath this flag that waves above, this cross that lights our way, you'll always find a sister's love in the heart of each Tri-K.
Oh.
I got no.
This is good for girls.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Burning Cross is a little weird.
Yeah.
It was just a bright.
It's a bright cross.
The Bright Cross didn't say burning.
It's not burning.
Yeah.
You don't know why it's lit up.
It's just illuminated in flame.
Yeah.
It's weird how prescient you saying that is about to be.
Now, Hiram Evans, who ousted the PR people at the end of 1922 and became the next Imperial Wizard, still wanted to make money.
But he was also someone for whom straight-up racism was a huge part of the appeal.
Here's the second coming of the KKK.
His first career as a dentist might seem modest.
One of his rivals liked to call him a tooth puller, and he took advantage of the impression, calling himself the most average man in America, so as to normalize the Klan.
His short, plump stature added to his everyman image.
In fact, he was capable of serious violence.
In Dallas, where he joined the Klan in 1920, he had organized black squads that kidnapped and tortured at least one black man.
Dallas, by the way, used to be known as the most racist city in America around this time, the city of hate.
And it was actually a really cool story.
The Dallas Morning News crippled the Klan in that city by having reporters find where their meetings were and take down notes of all of the license plates they saw to like figure out which elected members and who was in the Klan and like published that shit.
Like the Dallas Morning News did a lot of damage to the KKK.
Docs, Docs, Docs the fucking fascists.
Yeah.
Did a great job.
So yeah, Dallas Morning News is anti-faw, I guess.
Now, Evans decided that the Klan should be more than an MLM.
It should be a political party.
He moved the KKK's headquarters to D.C. and established a magazine, Fellowship Forum, that was not explicitly tied to the KKK, but existed to further its political aims.
The Fellowship Forum built itself a standing for pure Americanism.
There were also in a number of the documents I read the sentiment America First, which I apparently came from the KKK before it became the center of Charles Lindbergh's organization.
You found that on a lot of their documents.
There was also, they just recently come out that there was talk about a wall at one of the big clon vacations they held, like a guy talking about we need a silver wall to keep out immigrants.
But he was not talking about one at the Mexican border.
He was talking about a wall of laws to stop people from like Italy from getting up to the project.
They really hated Catholics.
Yeah, yeah.
So racist, but different.
Yeah, differently racist from that.
Fundamental concepts.
Some fundamentals.
Just like list it, dress it up a little differently, put it over there.
They wanted the Mexicans because they need those sombreros.
That's right.
Exactly.
Stay in the shade when you go to the cool coast.
Oh, good God.
Soon after taking charge, Evans realized that the leader of the Indiana KKK, David Stevenson, had some potential.
He put him in charge of recruitment for seven states.
Here's that book again.
I'm a nobody from nowhere, really, but I've got the biggest brains, he boasted.
I'm going to be the biggest man in the United States.
But Stevenson was a fraud several times over.
He claimed to be the millionaire son of a wealthy businessman and to have earned a decoration for bravery in World War I. In fact, he was the son of a Texas sharecropper.
His education at a parochial school ended with the eighth grade, and his stint with the Army was as a recruiter in Iowa.
He boasted of owning a wholesale coal supply and auto accessory companies, but in fact, worked as a salesman for someone else's coal company.
He married at least three women, drank heavily, got into fights, beat his wives, and attempted to rape several other women.
But the motherfucker could talk and convince people to join the KKK.
So he stayed.
Under his leadership, 23% of the native-born white men in southern Indiana joined the KKK.
Wow.
He refused to be called by his name, going by the old man.
Stevenson made millions off of his racist downline and was able to buy a mansion and a yacht.
We'll come back to him later.
He does get his just desserts.
So he wasn't comfortable with all the lofty titles.
Just call me the old man.
Call me the old man.
The old man.
Racist man.
Yeah.
I'm going to be the biggest man in America.
Yeah.
For a good long while, in the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was everywhere.
At its height, as many as 4 million Americans, roughly 4% of the country, were members.
It is, to this day, the largest explicitly racist organization in American history, if you don't count the Confederacy.
Yeah.
4 million.
Now, the Klan did not draw in that many members by focusing on the racism up front.
It was always there, a calm backdraft in their propaganda and at every outing, but they knew you'd catch more flies with honey than with water.
Enter the Klan vacations.
These were gigantic outdoor events akin to massive state fairs or even carnivals, which they held in order to draw in new members and foster solidarity with Klan's members.
Here's how the nation described one such gathering.
On July 4th, 1923, for instance, a crowd estimated at between 50,000 and 200,000 attended a Klan picnic in Kokomo, Indiana.
The Klan vacation boasted six tons of beef, 55,000 buns, 2,500 pies, and 5,000 cases of soda.
Children had their own play center, while adults could take their pick of entertainments, including a boys' singing quartet, a talkie film, circus performers, a six-round boxing match, and a daredevil who performed aerial acrobatics on the wing of a circling plane.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
That sounds like a good fun.
Sounds like a good time.
And that was the idea.
We hold this not like we're going to try to get all the racists, but like, we'll just hold up, throw a big party for white people, and then maybe they'll want to join the Klan, and then we'll get more money.
Yeah, A thousand burgers.
They also charge admission and stuff.
They made a profit.
Of course, like $15, $20,000, which, you know, $19,23 is a shitload of money.
Yeah, they cleaned up.
And the biggest of these was in 24, had like 200,000 people show up, the largest Klan gathering ever.
And like a lot of people didn't know it was necessarily like, oh, this is like for the clan stuff.
It's like, no, I'm going to go to a fun party.
But it was like, it's the clan.
It wasn't weird then.
People met and fell in love there.
I bet they did.
That a lot of clan babies, a lot of clan vocation kitties.
Wasn't there a recent poll like about like the number of people in America who like are okay with white supremacy and neo-Nazis and stuff?
And it was about 4%.
Something like that.
I think.
Yeah, that's about right.
Like recently, like last year, there's a lot of racists.
Seems like in fucking Toronto, 23,000 people voted for Faith Goldie, an explicitly neo-Nazi candidate.
23,000 Canadians.
Yep.
So, and they're Canadians.
Things are going well.
Things are going great.
Just want like a fun barbecue to go to.
So it's thousands of buns.
Thousands of buns.
Speaking of thousands of buns.
Eds!
Neo-Nazi Vote in Toronto00:02:53
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Violence Was Not The Goal00:15:07
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
We're talking about clon vocations, the KKK's primary method of recruiting new Klansmen.
I hate these words.
There's way too many K's being set up in here.
I slightly cringe every time.
Cringe with a K?
Yeah.
Clinge.
Absolutely.
Clering.
Large cross burnings were also held at clon vocations.
But unlike the first and latter types of cross burnings that we're familiar with today, these were not primarily hateful spectacles.
So like a crossburning is like the most racist thing you can do.
These were not like they were pro-Protestant and everyone knew the Klan was anti-Catholic.
But the crossburnings were more like a fireworks show.
Like they would, they would compete to see who could build the biggest like cross, some of which were like 50 feet tall, some of which were too big to even burn.
They would like fuck up sometimes.
They would make gigantic crosses and cover them with light bulbs.
Like it was like a, look at this cool thing that we're doing.
Yeah, like Monster Truck Burning Man.
It's like burning.
A little bit of that, because they weren't like going to like black people's houses and putting them on their lawns.
Like that may have happened out in the sticks sometimes, but like the main purpose was to like entertain people.
That was the goal of the cross things.
In this context, in this context.
At a clon vacation.
At a clon vacation.
But when you're out in the wild, much more.
And it was usually.
We will be getting to that.
I will be talking about the violence and stuff.
But from what I read, cross burnings were not a huge part of the violence at that point.
Like that was more of like a showy thing that you did at the big events and the violence was the violence.
The clan did describe themselves as the army of the cross.
And I do want to really point out how much anti-Catholic bias was critical to this too, because they were super racist against Catholics as well as black people and Jews.
And I guess you're not racist against socialists.
They didn't like socialists either.
Anybody that wasn't like, yeah.
That wasn't a very specific kind of hard-carrying member of the very legitimate organization.
The Ku Klux Klan.
Yeah.
The Klansmen also played highly publicized baseball games, often against teams of people that they defined in their propaganda as aliens.
The second coming of the KKK notes, quote, the Youngstown Klan team challenged the Knights of Columbus and the Klan played Wichita's crack-colored team, the Monrovians.
The Klan lost.
Finally, in areas of Klan strength, it operated sandlock teams that played in recognized leagues, sometimes semi-pro teams.
Indiana, a clan stronghold, fielded a dozen such teams.
These leagues might play in stadiums, and the newspaper coverage might list all team members.
No secrecy here.
In Los Angeles, the clan team played a three-game charity series against a benign Brith team.
And in 1927, in Washington, D.C., the Klan played against the Hebrew All-Stars.
Newspaper coverage typically treated the Klan team like all others with no particular attention to clan politics.
Thus, baseball functioned to normalize the clan so that it could appear as a benign club, akin to the Elks, or, again, a labor union.
Wow.
KKK playing the benign Brith at baseball.
That's wild.
America's pastime.
I would never have guessed that was a thing that happened in history.
Yeah.
Now, while all this was going on, there were claverns who took to the KKK's more traditional activities, violently oppressing minorities.
A number of claverns exercised a vigilante justice.
That is an important story, which I've waited until the end to cover.
That's because I think it's important to understand what the second clan was in context.
The first clan was awful and a clear terrorist organization.
It was viewed by most Americans as a terrorist organization, at least outside of the South.
But the only real ethos of the Second Klan was making money.
The racism and bigotry was just there because in 1922 it sold.
If the same PR people that had hatched this scheme were around today, they would have made a fraternal orator that was super woke in PC because there's more money there now.
I'm sure they were racist too, but it wasn't about that.
It was about making the money.
And the Klan, again, it's important to understand, if you're going to understand the 20s, that everyone knew the Klan was racist, but everyone was racist.
Like the woke people were racist.
Our grandparents were racist.
Yeah, everybody was.
Right.
It was what is.
It was only a griff because of the money-making structure.
It wasn't like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was not considered extreme.
And not radicalizing anybody or anything like that.
Yeah.
Now, what we're going to talk about, the violent part, was extreme, and that is an important factor, but that was an ancillary thing that happened because of the original KKK's history and because a lot of racists are violent.
The violence was not primarily the goal of the organization.
It was a pyramid scheme.
Yeah.
So in the early 1920s, urban crime rose by 24% in the United States.
Klan propaganda heavily emphasized these rising crime rates and build the Klan as, like their predecessors, regulators.
Much of this crime was driven by prohibition, and prohibition was a cause that KKK firmly supported.
Also, women's voting rights.
There's a feminist angle to the Klan, too.
We're not going to get into enough of it here, but there was a women's auxiliary KKK, very popular.
Like, the Klan was, because one of the two PR people who founded this was a woman, was one of the first organizations in America to realize, like, well, women are voting now, so they have political power.
They also have more money now, so we should go after them.
We should get that fucking money.
Well done.
They did.
Put more women in the KKK.
The feminist icon.
The KKK.
Yeah.
Representation is important.
Super important.
Not just men in the Klan these days.
Yeah.
Some people even call the Klan the militant wing of the temperance movement.
Generally, Klansmen and individual claverns were willing to use violence against black people, of course, but also any other bugbear of that era's right wing.
They carried out a raid that arrested 52 bootleggers in Anaheim, got 125 people arrested in Indianapolis.
Again, bootleggers.
In the Northwest, they spent a lot of time threatening labor organizers.
One Oregon Kliegel sent out this warning.
If you are the mouthpiece of American labor in this locality warned and do not endorse the above principles, then you should be a fit subject for a vigilance committee.
I found another piece of sheet music in the KKK that puts forward this regulator depiction of the KKK.
It's titled, There's a Klansman Watching You.
Oh, no.
You guys want to sing this for me?
Cody, that's all you.
Yeah, you're right.
You did the other thing.
And also, you're the musician.
There's a class of people patriotic in their work, always on their guard, always watchful, misspelled, and alert.
They all make good citizens.
They're friends of Uncle Sam.
They fight for right with all their might.
They're called the Ku Klux Klan.
That's the verse.
Keep going, man.
You will find them out in the country.
You will find them in town.
They're as thick as bees in clover.
You can't tell when they're around.
You may think that you're gone to fool them.
Have a care what you do.
The Ku Klux Klan are always watching.
They're sure watching you.
There's a second verse that I will not do.
Wow, wow.
Wow, that was a virtuoso performance.
Let's.
Yeah.
That's how it goes.
Those are the notes.
That's the television that goes.
So where did they sing this again?
What was meeting church?
They had records.
They had records, Katie.
They had a publishing press and a record press.
My God.
So that's like, you're having a dinner party and you're like, let's put on the new Klan record.
Yeah, you guys heard there's a Klansman watching you?
The shit is fire.
Yeah.
Oregon and Oklahoma were particular centers of Klan vigilance committee violence.
The second coming of the KKK summarizes: quote, three Oregon cases known as the Oregon Outrages captured widespread press attention when night writers terrified their victims with such lynching threats.
J.F. Hale, a piano salesman, white, was accused of illicit sexual affairs, and the would-be lynchers demanded that he break off the improper relationships.
He may have also been targeted because he owed money that a Klansman was having trouble collecting.
Sam Johnson, described as part Mexican, was accused of stealing chickens and being an idler.
Arthur Burr, an African-American boot black accused of bootlegging, received the worst treatment.
Vigilantes abducted him and took him to the very crest of the Siskiyou Mountains, where they strung him up and let him down three times.
Releasing him, they fired revolvers near his feet, demanding that he leave the era permanently, yelling, can you run inward?
Though charges were brought against three groups of Klansmen, in each case, juries acquitted the culprits on the grounds that because the victims were morally bad, their vigilante punishment benefited the community.
By contrast, Oklahoma, Indiana, Kansas, and southern Illinois, locations that were as much southern as northern, experienced a great deal of actual Klan violence, whippings, tar and featherings, and lynchings.
In all four places, some degree of racial segregation was in place, and Klan violence helped to keep it in place.
In Oklahoma, Klan-provoked violence became so widespread, with a reported one flogging for every night of the year that the governor placed parts of the state under martial law.
Klan efforts got him impeached in 1923.
Oklahoma law officers sometimes handed suspects over to Klan whipping parties or even participated in the beatings.
In Kansas, Klansmen abducted an anti-Klan mayor, tied him to a tree, and laid 30 stripes on his bare back.
In Bloody Williamson, as one southern Illinois County became known, the local Klan and the anti-saloon league merged into the Williamson County Law Enforcement League, which soon became run by the Klan.
Attacks on the operators of the wide-open bars produced lethal battles in 1924 and 25, involving gunmen and the deployment of military forces, and ended by forcing the anti-Klan sheriff out of office.
These armed skirmishes killed 20 people.
So, do not want to be ignoring the violence.
Right, this is still happening.
This is not the overarching.
It wasn't the purpose.
The Klan was more about money, but also the violence was occurring within the society was fine with this.
This is not a counter-cultural act.
Again, they were acquitted generally when they were brought to trial because most people were fine with what most white people were fine with what they were doing.
Right, they're like vigilante cop figures, like taking care of business because the government's not going to do it.
So, horribly violent, but not horribly violent against the wishes of the majority of their white Protestant countrymen.
And in fact, we're kind of seen as heroes by a lot of people.
Right.
Which was true only in the South for the original KKK.
Right.
North was not cool.
Yeah, it's a gang of racist Batman.
It's a gang of racist Batman, exactly.
And America's always loved a vigilante badass.
That's the punisher, but racist.
Right.
Yeah.
In 1925, the KKK even carried out an attack on the home of the young Malcolm X when he and his parents lived in North Omaha.
Here's a quote from Malcolm's autobiography.
It actually is how his autobiography starts.
When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska one night.
Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out.
My mother went to the front door and opened it.
Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was alone with her three small children and that my father was away, preaching in Milwaukee.
The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because the good Christian white people were not going to stand for my father's spreading trouble among the good Negroes of Omaha with the back to Africa preachings of Marcus Garvey.
My father, the Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister, a dedicated organizer for Marcus Aurelius Garvey's UNIA, United Negro Improvement Association.
With the help of such disciples as my father, Garvey, from his headquarters in New York City's Harlem, was raising the banner of black race purity and exhorting the Negro masses to return to their ancestral African homeland, a cause which had made Garvey the most controversial black man on earth.
Still shouting threats, the Klansmen finally spurred their horses and galloped around the house, shattering every window pane with their gun butts.
Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring as suddenly as they had come.
That's terrifying.
Yeah, it's horrifying.
Now, like all good and bad pyramid schemes, the Klan had to come to an end.
It was finally brought down, not by the U.S. government, because probably most of the U.S. government was fine with it, but by the incompetence, greed, and corruption of its leaders.
It's always that with these kind of far-right gangs.
Philip Fox, editor of the Imperial Nighthawk, a major Klan newspaper, was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering another Klansman he considered a rival.
Hiram Evans called it a personal affair.
Governor Ed Jackson of Indiana, a Klansman, was indicted for bribery.
Officers of the Klan Bank were also indicted for embezzlement and grand larceny.
There were countless scandals and arrests.
A fight with the FBI that led to 19 people being charged.
Members caught drinking and bootlegging and paying for back alley abortions.
They picked a fight with J. Edgar Hoover.
Not a smart guy to pick a fight with in 1924.
Really bad guy to pick a fight with in that period of time.
They did not win that fight.
The final nail in the KKK's coffin was the conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon Stevenson, who we talked about earlier, for kidnapping, raping, and murdering his secretary.
What?
Now, only the classiest high-class.
I mean, I was waiting to be like white-collar, like a tax thing or something.
No, no, yeah, like he'd be paying for like a terrible thing he did.
Well, and here's what it's actually even worse than it sounds because he did not technically murdered her.
He raped her and assaulted her, and then she killed herself.
But the jury convicted him of murder because they believed he'd ruined her.
Sure.
Which is also why she killed herself.
So it's like even worse than just because it's the 20s and it was a garbage time to exist.
Yeah, it's messed up.
But Stevenson went to fucking prison.
Did he die in prison?
I think so.
Yeah, he was convicted of second-degree murder.
Yeah.
By 1927, the KKK had gone from its high of like 4 million members to less than 350,000 active members nationwide.
Why the Klan Eventually Declined00:02:01
It never quite went extinct entirely.
Men continue wearing Klan robes and being racist up until the modern day.
But the giant money-making and political enterprise that it once was fell apart.
Are there still dues?
I don't know.
I mean, maybe in individual chapters, but there's no structure as it was.
Yeah.
There's some people that try to be that, but like, it's pretty shadows of themselves.
The legacy of the KKK, outside of its existence as an MLM and the vigilante violence it inspired, is unclear.
During its height, the KKK was extremely politically active, but there is substantial debate as to whether or not it actually influenced politics on a mass scale.
A number of Klan-backed candidates were elected, and the Klan was a massive fundraiser.
But that Harvard studies analysis claimed that the actual political achievements of the group were fairly minimal, just because those people were already going to get elected.
They weren't elected because they were Klansmen.
Everybody was fucking racist in the final.
They just happened to be in the Klan.
However, in the conclusion of the second coming of the KKK, Linda Gordon makes this note.
Some scholars and contemporary observers have seen the 1920s Northern Klan as a failure because it was short-lived and because its campaigns against Catholics and Jews did not manage to confine them to second-class citizenship.
But transience is common to most social movements.
Moreover, the Klan declined in part because it had triumphed in several respects.
State eugenics laws providing for forcible sterilization of those of defective stock spread to 30 states, and those labeled defective were typically the poor and people of color.
The biggest Klan victory was immigration restriction, and Imperial Wizard Evans repeatedly claimed credit for its passage.
I mean, it is pretty disappointing that their eventual downfall or decline was not because people started to know better or like people stood up.
Like this whole story, I'm sitting here thinking, yeah, but when is it like, oh, this person, like, there's this big altercation and people started to just, public opinion started to change.
Nope, it was.
They were fine with the racism and the vigilante murder.
Yeah.
It was the abortion thing that really back alley abortions really turned America against them.
Hooray.
Hooray.
We got through it.
Public Opinion Failed to Change00:04:50
All this stuff.
I know the wall stuff, the immigration stuff.
It's just always so fascinating.
Like, why do you think these things align with like it's even like you recognize that other people who aren't white have invented things you like, like sombreros?
Guys.
Without Mexicans, how are you going to go to the cool coast?
Somebody go to the cool coast camp, baby.
Come on.
You're going to have a bad time.
Yeah.
You're going to have a bad time at the cool coast camp.
You wouldn't have got anywhere playing the benefit in baseball.
Jesus.
That is fascinating.
That was a twist.
That was a, yeah.
And now I know what MLM is.
Multi-level marketing.
Yeah.
It's really important in the politics of today.
Yeah.
I just hadn't heard that abbreviation.
Money lives matter.
There is a direct line between the strategy behind the KKK and the strategy behind Amway, which is the source of the fortune of Bethsy DeVos.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, but we can't.
We don't have time to talk about her, though.
We don't have time to talk about her.
That segues us into the next episode.
Yeah, we will be doing another thing very soon.
Plugs.
Plugs, plugs, plugs.
Plug time.
Plug time.
Check us out on the internet.
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Twitter.com/slash some more news.
I was getting there.
Okay, it seemed like you were just like passing it off.
No, no, no.
You do it, Finnish.
You said on the internet.
That's pretty funny.
Our YouTube show, also.
Our news.
Our podcast, Even More News?
Yep, that on the Twitter.
Your personal Twitter?
It's Katie Stoll.
Mine's Katie.
Katie with the K. With the C. We'll get good at this one day.
Give them money.
Some more news, Patreon, dollars.
We would love that.
Go to there.
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You can find me on the internet at IWriteOK on Twitter.
I have a book called A Brief History of Ice.
It's not about the Klan.
It's about me putting a friend in the hospital with dangerous drugs.
It's fun.
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Everybody enjoyed it.
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You can find this show at BastardsPod.
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