After the Great War: Nativism And The Ku Klux Klan

A Revitalized Klan.

Immigration restriction was not the only visible symptom of nativism during the 1920s. The decade also witnessed the revival of the long-dormant Ku Klux Klan, founded during Reconstruction to intimidate African Americans newly freed from slavery. In 1915 William J. Simmons reorganized the fraternal order in Atlanta, Georgia, and hailed its mission as the defense of "comprehensive Americanism." Following World War I the newly organized Klan spread across the United States. Membership increased rapidly, mushrooming to 4.5 million in 1924, when the organization reached it zenith. Unlike the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan, which targeted its violence primarily against African Americans and their scarce white allies in the South, the resurgent Klan of the 1920s broadened its geographical scope and expanded its list of enemies. The Anglo-Saxon-glorifying, white supremacist organization lashed out at immigrants,...

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