Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [78]
A vicious struggle for leadership of the Klan continued well into 1923, played out perhaps most clearly over the issue of the WKKK. Fighting for support, both Simmons and Evans attempted to bolster their positions within the Klan by appealing to women. In March 1923, Simmons appointed Bessie Tyler head of a short-lived women’s Klan group, the Kamelia; Evans retaliated by founding the Women of the Ku Klux Klan which numbered perhaps half a million members by 1925.
Eventually, in February 1924, Doc Simmons was bought off, agreeing to cede all his rights over the Klan to Evans for $145,000. Edward Clarke, facing charges of mishandling church funds, transporting liquor and white slavery, briefly fled the country; Bessie Tyler, already suffering from ill health, died later that year.
Evans saw the Klan not as a money-making venture, but as a political party with five million potential voters. He encouraged Klansmen to elect local officials, congressmen, governors and senators and led a procession of 40,000 hooded Klansmen down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in August 1925.
The man who had engineered Evans’s takeover was the energetic and unscrupulous Grand Dragon of Indiana, David Stephenson, known as Steve. After helping oust Simmons, Stephenson claimed as his reward the lucrative position of head of promotion in twenty-three Northern states. Under his regime, from 1923 recruitment standards fell and meetings were held monthly, not weekly, eroding the cohesive spirit Tyler and Clarke had worked so hard to instill. Membership continued to grow, complained a Pennsylvania Klan leader to Evans, “but the old spirit wasn’t there.”
Stephenson’s main area of influence was Indiana, where perhaps a third of the male population were Klansmen who proudly walked the streets in their robes with their hoods thrown back to show their faces. Klansmen had elected Indiana’s governor and both its senators as well as most of its local officials; there was no county that did not have its own Klavern (local branch). On parade nights policemen directed traffic in their robes.
Steve had grown rich and powerful since his appointment as Indiana’s King Kleagle in 1921, traveling everywhere in an airplane and wearing a purple robe like the one favored by Simmons. He established a band of vigilante policemen called the Horsethief Detectives who broke up “petting parties” and raided bootleggers, all the while acting as his own private police force; he created an elaborate network of spies who kept him informed of everything that went on in Indiana.
Concerned, like Simmons and Evans, with the role women might play in tightening Klan control, Steve formed a society called the Queens of the Golden Mask made up of Klan wives and daughters. These women planned Klan functions like fundraisers and picnics, lobbied schools to get rid of non-Klan-sympathizing teachers and organized consumer boycotts; they also acted as informal “poison squads,” spreading rumors about people who opposed the Klan and gathering information that the power-hungry Stephenson might find useful. During the 1924 elections Stephenson distributed cards to voters reading “Every criminal, every gambler, every thug, every libertine, every girl ruiner, every home wrecker, every wife beater, every dope peddler, every moon-shiner, every crooked politician, every pagan papist priest, every shyster lawyer, every K. of C., every white slaver, every brothel madam, every Rome-controlled newspaper, every black spider is fighting the Klan. Think it over. Which side are you on?”
But despite his professions of morality Stephenson was everything he pretended to abhor, except Catholic: crooked to the core, a violent, hard-drinking abuser of women. He held wild, drunken orgies in the mansion and on the yacht he had bought with Klan money. In 1924 a secret Klan trial found him guilty of attempted rape and banished him from the organization, but he refused to accept the ban.
In early 1925, Stephenson turned his attentions to Madge Oberholtzer, the wholesome twenty-eight-year-old Superintendent of Public