Answer:
The Ku Klux Klan, founded in the late 1860’s, experiences three major surges in popularity promoting ideals such as white supremacy, white nationalism, Nativism, anti-immigration, and anti-communism.
The first era of Ku Klux Klan experienced a rise in popularity in the late 1800’s with the intent of overthrowing Republican state governments in the South and ensuring that newly-freed southern African Americans did not vote. In 1871 their membership was oppressed by federal law enforcement (1871 Ku Klux Klan Act signed by President Grant to combat the KKK and other white supremacy groups).
The second Ku Klux Klan group flourished nationwide in the 1920’s on the platform of pro-prohibition and anti-Catholicism and anti-Jewish feelings. They experience a diminished population in the late 1920’s (around the time of the Great Depression; a time of mass American economic hardship).
The modern-day third wave of the Ku Klux Klan came about in the late 1950’s opposing the civil rights movement. Current membership, as of 2016, amounts to an estimated 3,000-6,000 active members.
Answer:
Although the KKK had reemerged in the South in 1915, it wasn’t until after the end of World War I that the organization experienced a national resurgence. Membership in the KKK skyrocketed from a few thousand to over 100,000 in a mere ten months. Local chapters of the KKK sprang up all over the country, and by the 1920s, it had become a truly national organization, with a formidable presence not just in the South, but in New England, the Midwest, and all across the northern United States.
The members of the Ku Klux Klan were mostly white Protestant middle-class men, and they framed their crusade in moral and religious terms. They saw themselves as vigilantes restoring justice, and they used intimidation, threats of violence, and actual violence to prevent African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, liberals, and progressives from attaining wealth, social status, and political power.
KKK members wore elaborate costumes with distinctive white hoods to mask their identities, and held nocturnal rallies to plot acts of terror and foment hatred against people deemed not “truly” American—basically, anyone who was not white and Protestant. The activities of Klansmen ranged from issuing threats and burning crosses to outright violence and atrocities such as tarring and feathering, beating, lynching, and assassination.
The revival of the KKK in the early twentieth century reflected a society struggling with the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Klan chapters in major urban areas expanded as many white Americans became bitter and resentful about immigration from Asia and Eastern Europe. Klansmen complained that these immigrants were taking jobs away from whites and diluting the imagined “racial purity” of American society. Given that the country had been populated by immigrants from the beginning, such ideas of racial purity were complete myths.
Explanation:
