Across the South and much of the West, the agrarian crisis fuelled the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan. Feeding off popular discontent across the American heartland and supercharged by a highly incentivized recruitment system, membership in the Klan surged from a few thousand in 1919 to as many as 4 million by 1924 – one in six, the Klan claimed, of the eligible white male population.
