The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) first emerged in 1865 and was a white supremacist organization that terrorized African Americans, but gradually lost support during the 1870s due to the passing of the Congressional Ku Klux Act that used heavy penalties and military force to suppress the KKK. However, during the 1910s and 1920s, the KKK experienced a national resurgence and recruited approximately five million people, whereby they highly idealized Protestantism and used popular social theories of the 20th century, like Social Darwinism and the Red Scare, to propagandize the purity of the white race and to gain support. In December 1925, Hiram Wesley Evans, the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, wrote a newspaper article in New York’s The Forum called “The Klan: …show more content…
The Red Scare was a movement in response to the communist Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, which was the belief that immigrants such as Jews and Eastern Europeans brought alien ideologies like socialism and communism to America that would be harmful to American democracy. The Red Scare was an American campaign during the 1920s designed to wipe out the spread of communism in the U.S. by spying on their own citizens, restricting immigration from communist countries, and deporting hundreds of immigrants. Hiram Evans argues, “We believe that all foreigners…would become a part of us, adopt our ideas and ideals, and help in fulfilling our destiny along those lines, but never that they should be permitted to force us to change into anything else.” Evans reflects the ideology of the KKK and shows that the KKK fought to defend American civilization against the invasion of immigrants in the U.S. that carried alien ideas to that of American values like socialism, communism, and cosmopolitanism and would force Americans to adopt these ideas that would destroy the unity, purity, and superiority of White American society. The idea of immigrants bringing socialism or communism that was harmful to Americanism and American democracy is significant because the KKK’s revitalization came at the time when the first Red Scare happened after World War One. Therefore, the KKK harnessed the fear in American society whereby they propagandized that immigrants would “force us to change” by tearing down the American standard of living, forcing Americans out of all competitive labour, creating labour strikes, and would corrupt the public opinion with subversive ideas. The KKK gained mass support from its idea of maintaining the purity of the White race because it came at a time where the American