Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan

by Nancy MacLean

it won new members for the church and "brought back to the Master" many lapsed Christians as well.

They attended a service of the Young Harris Memorial Church en masse and in full regalia to make a donation in praise of the minister's work "in winning souls for Jesus Christ."

Winning Souls

"The trouble with the Roman Catholic Church," explained an article in the Klan press by Warren Akin Candler, bishop of the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church, was "that it seeks to be both a church and a political party."

Founded Emory in Atlanta and theolgy

As a site of debauchery, the Imperial Palace of the Klan rivaled some of the motion picture sets its representatives so habitually rebuked. The national chaplain of the Klan, Caleb Ridley, a well-known Atlanta minister and Prohibitionist, was arrested in 1923 for driving while intoxicated. Imperial Wizard Simmons, according to numerous people in a position to know, drank heavily, relished

pornography, and regularly patronized prostitutes. His assistants E. Y. Clarke and Mary Elizabeth Tyler, the masterminds of the Klan's growth after 1920, were once arrested together, inebriated and in the flesh, during a tryst in a hotel.

Klan in fact staked its bid for power on its value as a tool for restoring "traditional" values. Purity campaigns became the core of recruitment drives in localities around the country.

A postwar moral panic paved the way for the growth of the Klan in Clarke County. It was not the first time local residents had worried about alcohol, gambling, and prostitution; agitation over such issues had a long history in Athens as elsewhere in the nation.

Athens Daily Banner summarized the common diagnosis in 1921: "The tendency of the times toward disorder and crime and revolution and unrest" had a taproot: "disregard for authority both parental and governmental." "Bolshevism and socialism and all the radical isms rampant" were the harvest of lenient parenting. The return of the state's authority would "have to start in the home"; parents must "compel obedience and

Reverend M. B. Miller, in addition to serving as the Klan's Exalted Cyclops, was also the minister of the First Christian Church.

Klan was therefore, as one speaker put it, "violently opposed to birth control."

Klan championed suffrage for Protestant white women.

candidly announced that genuine democracy would impede the Klan's goals. "The Nordic can easily survive and rule," Evans explained, "if he holds for himself the advantages" secured by his forefathers. His supremacy would be lost, however, "if he surrenders those advantages" to immigrants and their children. The "Klansman's Creed" thus declared, "I believe my rights in this country are superior to those of foreigners."46 African Americans and immigrants were thus the most immediate and aggrieved victims of what by the Klan's own admission was a wider attack on democracy conducted in defense of property and privilege.

One of the masterminds behind the spectacular growth of this male fraternal order in the early 1920s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Tyler. Here, she poses while reading its publication The Searchlight.

view of Clayton Street in downtown Athens, where the Klan had its local headquarters in the late 1920s.

First Christian Church, whose minister and his assistant served as exalted cyclops and kligrapp of the Athens Klan at mid-decade and helped to lead the city's social purity crusade.

Flight from the Clarke County area, which depleted the black farm population by more than half, in fact peaked in the years of these vigilante attacks. By October of 1923, Georgia blacks

north at the rate of 1,500 a week;

the "unrest" and "exodus" resulting from the attacks proved sufficient to widen the private breach among whites into a quasi-public split. On the initiative of Judia Jackson Harris of the Athens Teacher Training and Industrial Institute and the local Interracial Committee, a few prominent residents denounced what the most forthright among them, a white female t...