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Evangelizing Klansmen, Nationalizing the South: Faith, Fraternity, and Lost Cause

Religion in the 1920s Klan* Kelly J. Baker

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37916

“We, the Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, reverentially acknowledge the majesty and supremacy o f the Divine Being.”—The Ku Klux Kreed (1916)'

The language o‘־ f symbolism is the language o f soul.”— William J. Sim- mons (1923)2

All o‘־ f Christian Civilization depends upon the preservation and upbuilding of the White Race.”— Ideals o f the Ku Klux Klan3

The second Ku Klux Klan began with a dream. William J. Simmons, a de- frocked Methodist minister, fraternal organizer, and eventual Imperial Wizard of the Klan’s Invisible Empire, claimed that his reinvention started with an aus- picious vision on a hot summer night in Alabama.4 While gazing out his window, Simmons “caught sight of something mysterious and strange in the sky.” A “row of horses seemed to be galloping across the horizon,” and their riders were distinct “[w]hite-robed figures.” As the clouds scattered, “a rough outline of the United States appeared as the background.” Simmons looked on as each “big problem” in “American life” shifted across the celestial map. The horses and their riders remained a part of the troubling tableaux. Simmons “fell to his knees and offered a prayer to God.”5

In his prayer, he promised to “solve the mystery of the apparitions he had seen in the sky” and vowed to build “a great patriotic fraternal order” as “a memorial to the heroes of our nation.” The heroes of his vision were the

*Many thanks to Edward J. Blum and Chris Baker for their excellent suggestions and revisions and to Mike Altman who encouraged me to think more about the Klan's evan- gelicalism.

1William J. Simmons, Kloran (5th ed; Atlanta: Ku Klux Press, 1916), 2. 2Idem, The Klan Unmasked (Atlanta: Wm. E. Thompson, 1923), 101. 3Ku Klux Klan, ‘ideals of the Ku Klux Klan,” (Atlanta?: s.n., 1925?), 3. Archives

and Special Collections, Ball State University Archives, Muncie, Ind. 4William J. Simmons founded the second incarnation o f the Klan, and he composed

the Kloran, the fraternal manual, and several books defending the Klan, including The Klan Unmasked (1923). However, he was eventually ousted from leadership in January of 1924 when the dentist Hiram Wesley Evans became the second Imperial Wizard of the order. For this article, I rely heavily on Simmons’ hopes for his order and his crafting o f the early image of the national order.

5Winfield Jones, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: The Toscin Publishers, 1941), 76.

PERSPECTIVES IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES262

members of the first Ku Klux Klan (1865-1870).6 Simmons felt that these Southern Klansmen triumphed against the evils of Reconstruction in the South by affirming white supremacy and racial order, though he did want to distance his Klan from its predecessors tendency to employ vigilante violence. For Simmons, the first order saved the South from the horrors of racial equality, destruction of the white home, and the emasculation of white Southern men. Now, the nation proved to be in similar peril, and America needed a new gener- ation of defenders. These religious visions coupled with a memory of those first Klansmen led Simmons to create the second Klan (1915-1930), a fraternity ded- icated not only to white supremacy and social order but also nationalism and religious faith.

While borrowing some of the costumes and symbols from the original Klan, Simmons imbued his fraternity with Protestantism in Klan rituals, cos- tumes, position papers, manuals, oaths, news magazines, and books to bolster a new movement of white Protestant men.7 The 1920s Klan crafted a nostalgic vision of the Reconstruction South, in which heroic Klansmen saved white southern ways of life against the supposed threat of African Americans, and this regional vision expanded to encompass the nation. Much like the Reconstruc- tion Klan saved the South, the second Klan hoped to save America’s white, Christian civilization.8

Historian Charles Reagan Wilson notes the one key difference between the first and second Klan appears in this emphasis on religion. He argues that the “second Klan was less Confederate and more Christian in its symbolism that the earlier group.”9 The first Klan was an organization intimately bound to the Lost Cause, a mythology which “white southerners” created a “religion out of their history, with beliefs, creeds, myths, symbols, rituals and organizations that nurtured an authentic religious system of southern culture.”10 The 1920s Klan seemed more removed from Wilson’s rendering of “the religion of the Lost Cause,” a powerful combination of Confederate memory, evangelical Protes- tantism, and dedication to white superiority."

While Wilson is correct that Christian faith is a much more prominent component of the second order than the first, this does not mean that Simmons’ Klan abandoned Lost Cause religion. Rather, Simmons reinvented the Recon- struction Klan as the symbol for southern identity and southern victory after the Civil War. By emphasizing that the Reconstruction order saved the South, Simmons and other Klan leaders were able to distance themselves from the