Was the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920’s an Extremist Movement

Between June of 1920 through October of 1921, it is estimated at much as 85,000 men joined the Ku Klux Klan. Although the Klan was the strongest in the midwest and the midsouth, it was a nation wide epidemic. Klan members fed off of Xenophobic, a fear of foreigners. Klan members believed that every Catholic in public life, no matter what position they held in society, must be watched carefully. “The modern Klan added an anti-Semitic element. ” Klan theoreticians believed that the Jews were not only unproductive, there were also un-American.

Jew Movies Urge Sex and Vice,” the Klan title screamed like an echo from Ford’s Dearborn Independent. The position of woman in the humanities of the Klan was expressly conventional. The Klan believed in protection of women because they thought women could help in the “shaping of America”. Even though they believed so strongly in woman protection, this came at a costly price: violence. Although the victims of the “masked nightriders” were often men, the enemies of “pure womanhood” were both men and women. The women were refereed to as “fallen women”.

Outsiders were a threat to traditional American values David C. Stephenson was a very highly regarded men for his grouping competence, gossip of multitudinous sexual thoughtlessness and inebriating parties quickly led to controversy in association the government and domestic Klan dominator. Madge Oberholtzer affirmed that Stephenson forced her to drink with him, ultimately demanding her at gunpoint to a train. In the confidential department he attacked her and sexually raped her. After this incident, she took a catastrophic overdose of drugs, dying a few weeks later.

She had time to recite the complete incident to the prosecuting attorney, one of the infrequent officials Stephenson could not command in Marion County. Stephenson reacted by unveiling his “little black box,” thus revealing records incriminating numerous highly placed Klan-backed authoritative as evildoers, furnishing documentation of their wrongdoing of office. The Klan discovered its bureaucratic authority desiccating, its association relinquished by the thousands. Stephenson’s contravention of the metaphorical battle for simplicity, innocence, womanhood, and temperance was excessively substantial.

The civil authority of the Ku Klux Klan began to degenerate overall. By 1944, with the bureaucratic government demanding for the reimbursement of back taxes on Klan proceeds for the successful 1920’s, continuing civil administrators conventionally disorganize the Ku Klux Klan. Long dead was the Klan of the 1920’s, but their attempt to brutalize mankind still leaves their mark on history as a great American tragedy just as Hitler’s aspiration of Anti-Semitism in Europe. The KKK’s actions were not conducted civilly but by brutal and extreme force that is why they were considered a extremist movement.

III- Klan meetings getting broken up Coben concluded that the Klan members of the mid-1920’s were not any more barbarous than other native, white, middle-class Protestant males. The Klan’s highest destination incorporated of protecting the dominant Victorian philosophy and the investment these defended. All contemporary investigations that has considered the personality of Klan members has concluded that Klansmen composed a cross zone of the local native white Protestant male residents, excluding the intensely top and bottom socioeconomic levels of that population.

Essentially every Klan applicant for state and local service fascinate to this patronage—Klan and non-Klan—with assurance to diminish or abolish those statistics of quality blemish which endangered the house and family: infringement of Forbiddance, particularly, but likewise drug violation, “prostitution, gambling. Political corruption, traffic violations, and Sunday blue-law office”. The Klan attempted to encounter all “forces of evil, which attack the American home. ” “Threaten the purity of women,” declared at commentary in the Fiery Cross, Indiana’s Klan newspaper, were businessmen who occupied female clerks.

Powerful enticement was held for Klan membership. Abundant numbers of men wanted to join the Klan. The Klan extended a more obvious prejudice, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism, as well as immediate cooperation in politics to members. Likewise, the primary mission of these other orders favored those of the Klan in respects more significant than sacramental and organization. Universally, the Klan battled to conquer the ability of business and professional nobility, except in some small towns. Klansmen were consolidated in middle white-collar employment and betwixt small businessmen.

The Klan encompassed infrequent members of axiomatic denomination. Klansmen commonly had lived in their colony longer than nonmembers had; generally at least ten years prior to joining the order, however they tended to be younger. The prosperous anti-Klan forces were led by members of the Rotary Club, restricted to representatives of the city’s economic organization, top administrators of its other businesses, and its most fortunate retail merchants. The Rotary obtained aid from the Kiwanis Club. Household and emporiums of questionable Klansmen in Boston were torpedo with cement block and granite.

Ten thousand Klansmen congregated near Carneige, just outside of Pittsburgh, on August 25, 1923, to spectator an initiation featuring an address by Imperial Wizard Hirams Evans. When they attempted to progress back to the massively Catholic, immigrants, and black town, a gang stood in their course. A huge fight rang out, and many Klansmen laid their seriously wounded, while hundreds more only suffered only minor injuries. The remaining klansmembers turned and ran. Some Klan engagements were violated up by deadly shotgun firings.

Boston police stopped a Memorial Day procession of 4,000 Klansmen by streaming waiting cars continually through the entire parade line. I personally like the way that the yes author David H. Bennett argued his case. He seemed to use more documentation’s of what really happened in the 1920’s. The no author, Stanely Coben just did not seem to pursue me into his way of thinking. Mr. Coben tried to convey the Klan as some kind of religion that they were just keeping sacred when in all actuality they were just on a mission of self destruction. .

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