Klansville USA

    In class we were assigned a video and to do research on the KKK and summarize. The Ku Klux Klan was founded after the Civil War in 1866 by ex-Confederate soldiers and other Southerners opposed to Reconstruction. You can read more about the Reconstruction on my blog. Anyways, the Klan dissolved in the years of reconstruction. "Colonel" William Joseph Simmons resurrected the Klan almost 50 years later, in 1915, after seeing D. Birth of A Country, a film by W. Griffith that depicted the Klansmen as great heroes. This reminds me of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, depicting the Nazis as heroes to the nation. But through selling memberships to fraternal societies such as the Woodmen of the World, this is how Simmons made his living. It was completely horrible but smart on his part, he literally saw the Klan as a potential source of membership sales. He climbed to the top of a local mountain in his first official act, and set a cross on fire to mark the Klan's rebirth.

    The Klan went beyond only attacking blacks in its second revival, and widened its message of hate to include Catholics, Jews and foreigners. I don't understand how this works but he did this while promoting white supremacy. The Klan encouraged fundamentalism and devout patriotism. They blasted bootleggers and advocated a return to "clean living. The Klan targeted the elite by appealing to folks uncomfortable with the changing nature of America from a rural agricultural society to an urban manufacturing country. They attacked the elite and intellectuals. 

    Their message hit a thread, and in the 1920s, membership in the Klan ballooned. In about the middle of the decade figures ranged from three million to as high as eight million Klansmen for national membership in this underground group. And membership on society's fringes was not confined to the poor and uneducated. The white robes of the Klan were also worn by mainstream middle-class Americans. The loyal members of the KKK were physicians, lawyers and ministers. Their numbers rose to 300,000,000 in Ohio alone. In Pennsylvania, my home state, it even hit 200,000. 

    The Klan advanced in the 1920s to dominate local and state politics in several states. The Klan formulated a "decade," plan, in which every member of the Klan was responsible for hiring ten people to vote in elections for Klan candidates. The Klan succeeded in engineering the election of officials, including the Mayors of Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon, from coast to coast in 1924. 

    Colorado and Indiana for example. as well as other states, they placed enough Klansmen in positions of power to effectively control the state government. It was said to be known as the "Invisible Empire." All in all, the KKK's presence was felt across the country. 


Alabama newspaper editor calls on KKK to lynch Democrats - BBC News

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