But the Klan was easily at its most popular in the United States during the 1920s, when its reach was nationwide, its members disproportionately middle class, and many of its very visible public activities geared toward festivities, pageants, and social gatherings. In some ways, it was this superficially innocuous Klan that was the most insidious of them all. Packaging its noxious ideology as traditional small-town values and wholesome fun, the Klan of the 1920s encouraged native-born white Americans to believe that bigotry, intimidation, harassment, and extralegal violence were all perfectly compatible with, if not central to, patriotic respectability. [...]
The Klan drew historical inspiration from the Reconstruction-era Southern past and had its headquarters in the South, but white Americans flocked to the organization all across the United States. Klan chapters could be found in cities, towns, and rural areas alike, and the organization had strongholds not only in former Confederate states like Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas, but also in Indiana, Oregon, Kansas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Ohio. Typical members were neither wealthy and powerful nor impoverished and dispossessed. Rather, they were middle-class white American men and their families: small-business owners and salesmen, ministers and professors, clerks and farmers, doctors and lawyers.
Ideologically, the Klan blended xenophobia, religious prejudice, and white supremacy together with a broadly conservative moralism. Amidst a global recession that came in the aftermath of World War I, fear and anxiety were widespread among native-born white Protestants that the country they had known and been accustomed to dominating was coming undone. They worried about an influx of eastern European immigrants who adhered to Communism and other supposedly subversive political creeds, about the seemingly growing influence of Catholics and Jews in American life, and about the migration of African Americans out of the South. The intellectual vogue for religious modernism, the expansion of political and sexual freedoms for women, and the perception that immorality, crime, and vice were all on the rise only confirmed the sense that the world was spinning beyond their control.
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