Similar Masonic precedents marked
the post-1915 Ku Klux Klan, which became a national US phenomenon between 1921
and 1926, drawing perhaps five million members at its height. And at this
stage, the KKK was at least as heavily devoted to anti-Catholic and
anti-immigration causes as to anti-Black racism. The Klan found its local
leadership in Masonic lodges, and especially among local clergy. In order to
appeal to Masons and other fraternal organizations, the Klan offered a rich
mythology and heraldry, with all the mystique implied by its hierarchy of
“Hydras, Great Titans, Furies, Giants, Exalted Cyclops, Terrors,” its
distinctive secret language, and an elaborate system of progressive
initiations, of signs and countersigns. (I published on this at some length in
my 1997 book Hoods and Shirts).
It’s an oddity of US political
history that histories of the mighty Klan of the 1920s pay so little attention
to the APA, which was its immediate ancestor.
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