4. Although only short-lived, the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, promoting a nativist agenda in defense of white Protestants, enjoyed a peak membership in the millions during the 1920s
Following the release in 1915 of The Birth of Nations, glorifying the first Klan and its objectives, the second Ku Klux Klan was founded the same year by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, Georgia. Reflecting contemporary nativist concerns, the new organization expanded its racialist beliefs to include an anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic platform. Unlike the first and third iterations of the KKK, the Second Klan chiefly sought to “protect the interests of white womanhood” from religious and ethnic deviancy. Approximately two-thirds of the Klan’s lecturers at this time were Protestant ministers, adopting during this time a uniquely religious twist on its ideology.
Supportive of Prohibition, the Second Klan rapidly grew in response to societal fears of moral impurity in the face of Jewry and non-Protestant values. Achieving a nationwide membership by the mid-1920s, centered on the American Midwest, the Klan at this time was a predominantly urban organization. Reaching a peak membership of approximately four million in 1924 – roughly fifteen percent of the eligible American population – in Indiana almost one in five white women were participants. Attempting to infiltrate mainstream political movements and insert a nativist agenda, the Second Klan rapidly declined by the end of the decade in the face of journalistic exposés and scandals relating to their brutal tactics.