About seventy members of Congress were faithful to the hooded order, by the Klan’s tally. It had sympathetic governors in Georgia, Alabama, and California. John C. Walton, the Oklahoma governor who had declared open war on the Klan, was facing impeachment from a legislature dominated by the Invisible Empire. After Black residents were butchered in Tulsa, after a Jewish merchant was stripped and beaten to a pulp in the same city, after a bootlegger was killed at his home in Ardmore and the vigilantes found not guilty, after Klan “whipping squads” were unleashed, the governor had put the entire
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