Freakonomics

By the 1920s, a revived Klan claimed eight million members, including President Warren G. Harding, who reportedly took his Klan oath in the Green Room of the White House. This time around, the Klan was not confined to the South but ranged throughout the country; this time, it concerned itself not only with blacks but also with Catholics, Jews, communists, unionists, immigrants, agitators, and other disrupters of the status quo. In 1933, with Hitler ascendant in Germany, Will Rogers was the first to draw a line between the new Klan and the new threat in Europe: “Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini,” he wrote. “Looks to me like it’s the Ku Klux that he is copying.”

The onset of World War II and a number of internal scandals once again laid the Klan low. Public sentiment turned against the Klan as the unity of a country at war trumped its message of separatism.

But within a few years, there were already signs of a massive revival. As wartime anxiety gave way to postwar uncertainty, Klan membership flourished. Barely two months after V-J Day, the Klan in Atlanta burned a 300-foot cross on the face of Stone Mountain, site of a storied rock carving of Robert E. Lee. The extravagant cross burning, one Klansman later said, was intended “just to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is back on the market.”

Atlanta had by now become Klan headquarters. The Klan held great sway with key Georgia politicians, and its Georgia chapters included many policemen and sheriff’s deputies. Yes, the Klan was a secret society, reveling in passwords and cloak-and-dagger ploys, but its real power lay in the very public fear that it fostered—exemplified by the open secret that the Ku Klux Klan and the law-enforcement establishment were brothers in arms.

Atlanta—the Imperial City of the KKK’s Invisible Empire, in Klan jargon—was also home to Stetson Ke

Stetson Ke

Because Ke

Writing did not come easily to Ke

What drove Ke

So Ke

In Atlanta, he started hanging around a pool hall “whose habitués,” as he later wrote, “had the frustrated, cruel look of the Klan about them.” A man named Slim, a taxi driver, sat beside him at the bar one afternoon. “What this country needs is a good Kluxing,” Slim said. “That’s the only way to keep the niggers, kikes, Catholic dagos, and Reds in their place!”

Ke

That prompted Slim to whip out a Klan calling card: “Here Yesterday, Today, Forever! The Ku Klux Klan Is Riding! God Give Us Men!” Slim told “Perkins” that he was in luck, for there was a membership drive under way. The $10 initiation fee—the Klan’s sales pitch was “Do You Hate Niggers? Do You Hate Jews? Do You Have Ten Dollars?”—had been reduced to $8. Then there was another $10 in a

Ke

Before long, Ke

“Klansman, do you solemnly swear by God and the Devil never to betray secrets entrusted to you as a Klavalier of the Klan?”

“I swear,” Ke

“Do you swear to provide yourself with a good gun and plenty of ammunition, so as to be ready when the nigger starts trouble to give him plenty?”

“I do.”

“Do you further swear to do all in your power to increase the white birth rate?”

“I do.”

Ke

As a Klavalier, Ke

Consider lynching, the Klan’s hallmark sign of violence. Here, compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, are the decade-by-decade statistics on the lynching of blacks in the United States: