Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [70]
Nothing in Simmons’s original aims would have jarred with a large proportion of “native-born” Americans at the time. He was simply expressing values that, to many, represented their existing ideas about their place in the world. Nor was he explicitly advocating violence against other races, although the use of the name, Ku Klux Klan, was in itself provocative. Evidence suggests that instead of using feathers for tarring and feathering miscreants Simmons would have preferred them to adorn a splendid head-dress that he could have worn at the head of a procession. What he loved was the Klan’s regalia, its secret ceremonies, grandiose titles and arcane rituals, all devised by him, and his own position as leader of the movement. In the Kloran (the Klan book of ritual), Simmons described his role, that of Imperial Wizard, as “a wise man; a wonder worker, having power to charm and control.”
Although Simmons inducted ninety-two members in the first two weeks and by 1920 had about three thousand followers in the Atlanta area, he was vague and impractical and had little idea of how to mold or expand his “invisible empire.” Noticing Simmons’s administrative difficulties, in June 1920 a young Klansman introduced Simmons to his mother-in-law, Bessie Tyler. The charismatic, determined Tyler had been married at fourteen and left widowed, with a baby, a year later. She and her lover, Edward Clarke, then formed the Southern Publicity Association. Despite the fact that in 1919 Clarke and Tyler had been arrested inebriated and in a state of undress in a house owned by Tyler, they had previously promoted the Anti-Saloon League (the driving force behind the Prohibition movement) as well as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Soon their most important client was the Ku Klux Klan.
Clarke and Tyler had no compunction about using the Klan for their own personal financial gain; Tyler later admitted that she was in it for the money. In return for 25 percent of the fees collected from new Klan members, Clarke invested $7,000 of his own savings into putting the Klan on to the kind of profitable, business footing being used all over America by traveling salesmen. He divided the country into nine regions ruled by Grand Goblins and placed a King Kleagle in each state to oversee a troupe of local Kleagles, or Klan agents.
Each new Klansman who signed up paid $10. The Kleagle who had recruited him kept $4 and sent $6 to his King Kleagle; the King Kleagle kept $1 and sent $5 to his Grand Goblin; the Goblin kept 50 cents and sent the remainder to Klan headquarters in Atlanta where Clarke and Tyler pocketed $2.50 and put $2 into the Imperial Treasury. The members’ requisite white robes and hoods, intended to resemble the ghosts of the Confederate dead, cost an additional $6.50 and were soon being made in factories run by Clarke.
Within less than a year of Tyler and Clarke being hired, over a thousand Kleagles were actively pursuing new members all over the United States. By 1923, when nationwide membership was approaching the million mark, the Klan’s annual income was $3 million—comparable to that of the Capone-Torrio organization in Chicago at the same time.
The Klan made a point of presenting itself as a force for social cohesion and improved morality and integrating itself into a community’s daily life. An elderly woman from Indiana who was interviewed in the 1980s by the historian Kathleen Blee remembered that “the good people all belonged to the Klan” in her youth and described it as a positive social force. Her testimony was, however, somewhat disingenuous (no doubt unwittingly) because in practically the same breath as she denied that the Klan was xenophobic she commended it for