The Ku Klux Klan of the present is not the one of the Reconstruction period in any sense. It has taken over the name, the garb and much of the high-sounding ritual. But it has a new motive and a new psychology. The old Klan was sectional; the new is national. The old was anti-Northern and anti-negro; the new is anti-alien, anti-negro, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. The old met a certain emergency and was then disbanded by compulsion of the Federal government and the action of its own leaders; the new has expanded from the character of a fraternal society to that of a nation-wide propaganda movement, has entered politics, and become one of the leading political issues of the campaign of 1924. In other words, its real ancestors are: not the Ku Klux Klan of the south in 1866–71, but the Know-Nothing Party of the 50’s and the A. P. A. of the 90’s. The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915 in Atlanta, Ga., by William J. Simmons, a former Protestant minister of strong convictions, intense if narrow intellect, and great interest in the organization and spreading of fraternal orders. For five years it grew slowly and inconspicuously, during the period of the war and for two years thereafter; in June 1920 it had about five thousand members and was in financial straits. At this juncture it was taken up by Mr. Edward Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who had had experience in the new technique of propaganda. Under their skilled hands the Klan at once grew with astounding rapidity; paid organizers entered state after state, organized “Klaverns,” and reaped great profits for themselves and for the heads of the organization. But the commercial motive, while probably strong in a few persons, was in no sense important in the actual membership of the Klan and their acts. “Its official documents indicate that the Klan originally was a purely fraternal and patriotic organization, one of the hundreds of similar secret societies throughout the country.”[72] The New York World investigated the Klan in 1921, and a Congressional investigation followed in October of that year, but both served rather to advertise than to harm the organization. It spread rapidly throughout the Union, claiming at one time as many as four million members, elected senators and governors in a few instances, and in several became the outstanding issue of state elections, sponsored or was accused of innumerable acts of mob violence, ranging from warnings to certain persons to discontinue their bootlegging or immorality, up to beatings, tar-and-feather parties, and the notorious Mer Rouge murders of 1922 in Louisiana.