When was kkk most powerful

This was no mere religious rite. As the children and their parents moved toward the clergyman, they were enveloped by 50 men in white robes. They were the children of the Ku Klux Klan, and It was just the beginning of the terror that would take place that night. The cross burned out, but the In December , the U. Senate passed a federal anti-lynching bill for the first time.

The significant milestone is preceded by at least failed attempts since to pass any bill or resolution mentioning lynching in Congress.

These attempts to outlaw lynching peaked If you only read F. Scott Fitzgerald, you might get the impression that everyone during the s flouted Prohibition and got away with it. During the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred over 18 hours from May 31 to June 1, , a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses in the predominantly Black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The event remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Waxman at olivia.

Klansmen march down Broadway in Long Branch, N. By Olivia B. Get our Health Newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest health and science news, plus answers to wellness questions and expert tips. Please enter a valid email address. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now. An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up.

Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time.

The war also brought an abrupt end to housing construction. Black migrants sought living quarters where they could find them, often in neighborhoods formerly the preserve of working-class whites. White resentment at having to share housing and public space and jobs with African Americans flared into riots in East St.

Louis , Washington, D. In a grotesque way, these riots paralleled Wilson administration policies. Self-appointed upholders of community values used vigilante tactics to intimidate, coerce, and stigmatize those they felt threatened their "way of life. As with the Washington, D. Tulsa police arrested the man. A white crowd, a lynch mob in the estimation of Tulsa's large black community, gathered outside the jail.

Several months before a similar crowd had lynched a white suspect. What chance, blacks wondered, would a young black man have? To stave off a lynching a group of armed blacks drove to the jail and volunteered to help guard it. The authorities refused their offer. The blacks returned to their section of the city. Shortly afterward, a rumor of an impending attack on the jail impelled them to return.

Again the police refused their help. But some whites in the crowd demanded that they disarm. They refused. One white moved to take a black man's rifle by force.

There was a shot; a white man fell dead. Blacks beat a hasty retreat to their cars. Whites milled about. They they ran home to get weapons and, in largely uncoordinated bands, headed off to "Run the Negro Out of Tulsa.

All through the night and into the morning thousands of white Tulsans invaded the black section of the city as smaller bands of blacks, some of them WWI veterans, fought to defend houses, businesses, and churches. By the time the governor ordered in the National Guard, the shooting was over. The entire black community was a smoldering ruin. Hundreds were dead, most of them black. Thousands had fled the city, all of them blacks. The Guard took hundreds into "protective custody," all of them black as well.

No white was arrested. The commission was created seventy-five years after the riot. A collection of upwards of one hundred photographs of the riot is available at a University of Tulsa site. As they had with other race riots, newspapers across the country condemned the violence and lawlessness. The failure of city and state authorities to mount any sort of an investigation, much less bring criminal charges against anyone, conveyed a different message.

Unsurprisingly, Tulsa was a major center of Klan influence in the s. There is, however, no evidence of direct KKK involvement in the riot. No one in the crowd outside the jail wore its regalia. Further, once the shooting started, no one did either. The riot was a spontaneous expression of hate.

Instead of inciting or organizing the violence, the Klan simply benefitted in its aftermath as untold numbers of white participants subsequently joined and supported the "Invisible Empire. Labor militancy in the immediate postwar years supplied another source of social unrest and upheaval. During the war the Wilson administration had imposed peace, via arbitration. Union membership grew. Wages, however, did not keep pace with inflation.

This left workers determined to seek substantial hikes, once wartime restrictions lifted. It left unions determined to hang on to their gains in membership and influence. It left many employers determined to return to the status quo ante bellum. The speed with which the Wilson administration dismantled wartime controls and institutions made this contentious situation far worse.

First, the administration cut war orders. This threw many out of work. Next, it rapidly demobilized the Expeditionary Force. This threw millions into the job market. Then it ended government arbitration. This left labor and management to their own resources in a series of showdowns.

One of the first was in Seattle. There shipyard workers struck for higher wages. Management had no choice but to refuse since the representative of the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board, Charles Piez, threatened that he would cut off their supply of steel if they offered amounts above previously established wage levels. His interference infuriated both the 35, Metal Workers who were on strike and most of the rest of organized labor in the region.

The Federation agreed. On February 6, at in the morning local time, 60, workers went on strike. This was the first "general strike" in American history, and it fed fears of a "Bolshevik" uprising across the country. The Seattle strikers shut down the entire city. They permitted electrical workers to provide power to hospitals and other critical facilities; they granted similar "exemptions" to sanitation workers to protect the public health. But, for several days, nothing moved in or out of Seattle without the approval of an ad hoc strike committee.

Anna Louise Strong, a member of the committee and principle author of its history of the strike, dismissed the idea that the strike was revolutionary in intent. But, good radical that she was, she also pointed to its revolutionary potential:. And yet, while no revolution occurred and none was intended, the workers of Seattle feel themselves, because of their experience, in the position of men who know the steps by which an industrial revolution occurs. An editorial in the Union Record , two weeks after the strike, discusses the workers' government just arising in Belfast, and draws comparison with the Seattle general strike.

Quiet mass action, the tying up of industry, the granting of exemptions, until gradually the main activities of the city are being handled by the strike committee. The violence comes, not with the shifting of power, but when the 'counter-revolutionaries' try to regain the power which inevitably and almost without their knowing it passed from their grasp. Violence would have come in Seattle, if it had come, not from the workers, but from attempts by armed opponents of the strike to break down the authority of the strike committee over its own members.

That fact should prove that neither the strike committee nor the rank and file of the workers ever intended revolution. Strong and her union comrades refused to accept the popular verdict that the strike failed. No such doubt remained for the leaders of the great Steel Strike of It failed completely and unequivocally. So did the Boston Police Strike and the vast majority of other tests of strength. During the war and immediate postwar period the Wilson administration made an unprecedented effort to impose a narrow, intolerant, religiously-based, and racist notion of Americanism.

It succeeded all too well. Even George Creel, chair of the Committee on Public Information, bemoaned "the mad rumors that swept the country," the "persecution" of the Nonpartisan League, and the actions of some State Councils of Defense "that would have been lawless in any other than a 'patriotic' body.

It meant, as he acknowledged but only as regrettable excesses, empowering local elites to dictate conditions in their communities. Race riots provided a grotesque parallel. Labor militancy, on the other hand, challenged this sort of Americanism directly. The Steel Workers organized immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

William Z. Foster, soon to run for president as the candidate of the American Communist Party, led the strike. Seattle workers comforted themselves with the dream that, although they had not gained any material concessions from the General Strike, they now knew "the steps by which an industrial revolution occurs. So did the ratification of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. Like the activities of the volunteers of the Wartime Training Camp Commission, who chaperoned dances and patrolled the grounds outside and who successfully pressured local authorities to shut down "red light" districts, Prohibition was morality on the march.

Alcohol was a prolific source of domestic violence, crime, and poverty. Drunkenness was a sin. And the liquor interests were the agents of the Devil. More specifically, saloons were the source of political corruption in the nation's cities. Tammany and other "machine" politicians held court in the "backrooms" of saloons. They traded drinks for votes, or so the Anti-Saloon League long maintained.

Congress authorized a wartime prohibition in the name of conserving grain. This provided the Prohibiton activists with the final boost they needed to gain ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition brought an abrupt end not only to saloons but to innumerable local contests over the sale of alcohol. As in Worcester, Massachusetts, voters in numerous communities routinely had decided whether or not to grant licenses for the sale of liquor.

The contests were often very close. The sale of alcohol had been a matter of state and local politics in which "majority rule" had prevailed. In many cases, as in Worcester, the "license" question pitted Protestants against Catholics, native-born against immigrants, Republicans against Democrats. In the South, of course, the battles were within the Democratic Party. There the argument for Prohibition, in addition to religious appeals, pointed to the supposed menace of black males having access to alcohol with all the attendant dangers that would allegedly pose to the chasity of white women.

The amendment meant that the views of the "Drys" would prevail even in communities where the "Wets" constituted a majority. Women's suffrage, like Prohibition, rode to victory on the wave of wartime Americanism. The connections between the two reform movements were numerous and profound.

Initially, in the s, both supported anti-slavery and equal rights for blacks. The connection with Temperance, however, remained firm. By the s, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was an important part of the women's suffrage movement.

Founder Frances Willard endorsed southern white justifications of lynching, making the point that the best way to protect white women from black rapists was to prohibit the sale of liquor. At the same time, the WCTU was one of the few white-led organizations which welcomed the participation of African-American women.

Wells sought to force Willard to retract her claim that black men represented a threat to white southern women, but Willard would not. Further, even Susan B. Anthony, an abolitionist in the s and a friend of Wells, refused to speak out against lynching.

The division between the woman's rights movement and civil rights for African Americans which began in the postwar years widened even further through the s and beyond. The ties between suffrage and prohibition strengthened. By the s too both Prohibition activists and women's suffrage proponents had discovered the "immigrant menace. Put an end to the saloon by adopting Prohibition and reduce the relative power of the immigrant voter by enfranchising the "old stock" woman were allied solutions.

There was little reason not to. Militant Americanism complemented their standard arguments. And there were powerful reasons to attach their reforms to calls for Americanism. Women's suffrage suffered less in the long run from the association since first and second generation immigrant women gained the vote at the same time as "old stock" women.

Not so Prohibition which was unequivocally a great victory for white Protestant evangelicals, celebrated by them as such and resented as such by others. Warren G. Harding promised "normalcy, not nostrums. He pardoned Eugene V. Debs, who had run against him as the candidate of the Socialist Party while in prison for opposing the draft. Historians give Harding little credit for restoring traditional notions of limited government, a major injustice given the shambles the Wilson administration had made of republicanism.

It was the Harding administration which moved back towards an explicitly Lockean understanding of national identity. The new administration could afford moderation because the wartime and postwar battles were over. Labor had been reduced to licking its wounds. Union membership would decline over the course of the decade, despite the strong economy. Left-wing political parties had only fragmentary support and were locked in increasingly bitter battles among themselves.

White supremacy had reasserted itself in blood in the nation's cities. Immigration restriction designed to favor "Nordic" groups was a foregone conclusion. Why, we need to ask, was the taste of victory like that of ashes to so many "old stock" white Protestants?

Given this string of successes from legislative halls to city streets, why did so many feel so endangered? Immigration restriction, Prohibition, the race riots, all reinforced the Wilson administration's attempts to settle once and for all the matter of who was entitled to claim to be a "real" American. So did the equation of political radicalism and "alien" anarchists and "Bolsheviks" during the Red Scare.

So did the decisive defeat of organized labor in the strikes of Why was this not enough? Why did millions respond to the Klan's call for "Nordic" Americans to reclaim their patrimony? Who had taken it? The blacks run out of Tulsa?

Sacco and Vanzetti, convicted of murder in Massachusetts? The immigrant steel workers defeated in ? To make some sense of this puzzle we need to take a two-pronged approach. One is to recognize the Pyrrhic nature of several of these victories.

Labor militancy had been truly defeated. Almost a full generation would pass before it would revive. So too with left-wing politics. But Prohibition proved a hollow victory almost from the start.

Nor did restriction satisfactorily reduce the role of Catholics, Jews, and first- and second-generation immigrants in American public life. The complementary approach is to recognize the deep satisfactions Klan membership afforded. They also flocked into the "Invisible Empire" to enjoy the satisfactions of imposing their views upon their neighbors, of holding office in an "exalted" realm, of reveling in the fellowship of "Klannishness.

Let us turn first to the fears, frustrations, and resentments which Evans so successfully articulated. Prohibition belongs at or near the top of the list. As the graph above shows, arrests under the Volstead Act reached an all-time high in The previous peak, , had also been a presidential election year.

But, as the number of arrests went up, the amount of illegal liquor seized continued to decline. How can we reconcile the data? Federal agents and state and local police arrested more people in than in , 10, more or One possible explanation was that the government was winning its battle against liquor trafficking.

If many of the large dealers had been shut down, and the government had turned its attention to mopping up the small producers, the data would make sense.

This, however, was not the case. Al Capone's empire in Chicago, detailed here by the Chicago Historical Society, was merely the most notorious of the large-scale criminal rings nationwide which defied Prohibition, often with the assistance of local police and prosecutors. Why then did arrests skyrocket in presidential election years? A cynical explanation might be that the Coolidge administration was seeking to show its ongoing commitment to Prohibition.

Worse than the inability of the state, local, and federal authorities to enforce Prohibition was the distain expressed by the young and the "Smart Set. Mencken notably called them. Reed in which he excoriated Prohibition advocates as "fanatics. The statutory reformer has a single and invariable method of procedure.

He magnifies the wickedness and sufferings of mankind and attributes them all to the object of his special malediction. Witness the Prohibition propaganda. Its literature blazed with assertions that all vice, crime, poverty, and human agony were directly chargeable to the Rum Fiend. He was the devil incarnate who produced virginal incontinence, marital infelicity, theft, arson, rape, robbery and murder. His remorseless hands, holding the white throat of innocence in an iron grasp, were dragging myriads of unfortunates to untimely graves and condemning them to the fires of an endless perdition.

He it was who filled the jails and penitentiaries with pitiable creatures who otherwise would have stood resplendent as pillars of the state and ornaments of society. The reformer cried aloud: "Amend the Constitution, pass the Volstead statute and in the twinkling of an eye evil will vanish! Close the saloons and the jails will empty themselves; cries of poverty will be turned to songs of joy; childish wailings to melodious laughter; drunken blows to fond caresses; and hatred be transmuted into tenderest love.

Highwaymen will give up their bludgeons and become ministers of justice. Thieves will no longer 'break through and steal'! The legal revolution occurred, but the moral miracle did not come off according to schedule. Men still go philandering, and sometimes maidens listen to their amorous wooings. The fashionable swain, bottle on hip, is received in polite society. He presses his flask to the lips of a girl whose pre-Volstead mother would have scorned a boy with liquor-tainted breath.

The fires were put out in the furnaces of the distilleries and breweries, but were lighted under ten thousand illicit stills. Moonshining became a profitable trade, bootlegging a dignified profession, rum-running a romantic calling.

An army recruited from elevator boys, taxi drivers, bell hops, soda fountain girls--every occupational class from hod-carriers to church sextons--is engaged in the retail traffic. Colored gentlemen drive Pierce Arrows and dusky maidens sport the furs of the arctics. And who, pray, are the customers? The answer is, everybody who wants a drink and that "everybody" embraces hundreds of thousands of women in homes from which, prior to the Reformation, liquor was banned and barred. Other thousands are boys who, under the old regime, would have understood that their safety depended upon the exercise of self-restraint, but who now seem to rely upon the law for protection, and yet regard the breaking of the law as a pastime, and guzzling liquor from a hip flask as an enviable prank.

A vast multitude of men who formerly reverenced the law now deliberately and avidly conspire for its breach. The leprosy of hypocrisy has become epidemic. Half-drunken legislators enact dry laws and celebrate the achievement in moonshine. Judges sometimes let us hope rarely impose merciless sentences and anaesthetize their human sensibilities in bootleg.

Police officers, sheriffs, constables, and bailiffs, their breaths reeking with rot-gut, drag to jail an occasional victim selected as a sacrifice to public clamor. But not one out of a thousand violators is ever arrested or prosecuted.

Meanwhile the Prohibition force revels in blackmail, subornation, venal immunities, treachery, fraud and crime promotion, revolting practices inseparable from the spy system. Tyrannous acts are of hourly occurrence. In violation of the Constitution, the homes, the business houses, baggage, vehicles, and persons of citizens are indiscriminately seized and searched. In , in a single judicial district, more than eight hundred out of one thousand searches were illegally made.

But all the while the great tide of traffic proceeds. Two years after Reed's jeremiad the American Bar Association added its voice. It passed a resolution calling for repeal on the grounds that Prohibition undermined respect for the rule of law. The A. But Senator Reed included it among his list of statutory reforms advanced by "fanatics":. The amendment was passed. What then? What became of the promised "disappearance of crime, the regeneration of politics, the moral purification?

Per contra, the dresses are a little shorter, the flapper is a little flappier, the hair-bobber becomes more opulent, and the cigarette vendor enjoys a boom. These fortuitous conditions may be the result of the new freedom, or mere coincidences. I venture not to say. Just as many disgruntled with the inability of law enforcement officials to make Prohibition work turned to the Klan with its promise to make local communities dry, many women flocked to the Women of the Klu Klux klan as a way of exercising the sort of moral influence on public life promised by the vote.

The Women of the KKK, that is, carried into the s a particular strain of suffragist argument. It combined an assertion of woman's equality with an endorsement of woman's traditional roles. It justified women's participation in politics on the grounds that they would raise its moral tone. It appealed to women who had grown up in the Victorian Era or immediately thereafter and had defined themselves in terms of its ideals.

And membership was not limited to the poor and uneducated on society's fringes. Mainstream, middle-class Americans donned the white robes of the Klan too. Doctors, lawyers and ministers became loyal supporters of the KKK.

In Ohio alone their ranks surged to , Even northeastern states were not immune. In Pennsylvania, membership reached , The Klan remained a clandestine society, but it was by no means isolated or marginalized. In the s, the Klan moved in many states to dominate local and state politics.