Ku Klux Klan Secrets Exposed

To the old Ku-Klux Klan which rode through the south in the days following the civil war the new Ku-Klux Klan is a relative only in name.

It is not tied by blood. It holds the same position to its southern aristocratic forbear as an imposter in social life does to some illustrious gentleman of the same name of whom he claims to be a descendant.

The old Ku-Klux Klan was a historical development. The new is a man's contrivance. The old Ku-Klux Klan movement was an outcome of conditions that prevailed in the southern states after the war. The present Klan, apparently, is an outcome of a group of men's desire to make money.

Widespread, spontaneous, popular, the movement of 1866 grew out of a disordered society, not as a "movement" at all at first, but as a scheme for having fun, a source of amusement among a group of young, full-blooded southern men to puzzle outsiders. Its use as a weapon against the stranger in the old south came later.

The "stranger" was the northern carpetbagger. To the south he was the pestilence that follows war. He was the blunderer who entered the land whose social customs were unknown to him, in a year when the fabric by those social customs was in need of mending.

NO RELIGIOUS TEST

When southern society seized the Ku-Klux Klan as an instrument with which to resist there were only two classes, carpet-bagger and unruly negro, against which it operated. To join the ranks of the white-robed horsemen, there were no qualifications of religion. The Klan made no mention of Jew or Catholic. Its purpose was to restore order, not to fan prejudice, and therein lies the difference between the old Klan and the present Klan which makes the latter a maverick.

The first unit of the horseback riding knights was founded in the village of Pulaski, Tenn., with the same motive for its organization as the old-time college hazing society. Its members were young men who had come back from the war, poor, exhausted, discouraged, and bored with the tameness of a country town.

HOW IT STARTED

According to the story which has lived south of the Mason and Dixon line since those post-bellum days, a group of youths cooling their heels in a law office one May evening in 1866 organized a society for a good time. If anyone had suggested to them at that time that five years later a committee of congress would devote thirteen volumes to a history of their "movement" and pass a law to suppress it, or that before the child of their wits was fully grown it would have developed into a terrorizing "hobgoblin" sheeted for lawlessness, they would have thought it a jest.

When their mere joke had become a grim joke, neighbors who feared it found in its name "Ku-Klux" the suggestion of a clicking rifle. But the name itself was proposed by its charter members in Tennessee as a derivative of the Greek word "Kuklos," meaning a circle. From "Kuklos" to "Ku-Klux" was an easy transition. The "Klan" followed because these youthful students of Greek had an ear for the alliterative.

From the Pulaski law office the society migrated to a haunted house on the outskirts of the village. Its members found their first source of amusement in initiation rites. They named their chief officer a Grand Cyclops and their vice president a Grand Magi. Other officers were the Grand Turk, or marshal; a Grand Exchequer or treasurer, and two Lictors.

WORE WHITE MASKS

The only germ in their constitution from which the "Imperial Wizard" Simmons of the twentieth century Klan could breed his present organization was the promise of absolute secrecy. For his copying years later, the first Klan also contrived a disguise. It consisted of a white mask, a tall cardboard hat, a gown or robe, and for the night riding excursions, a cover for the horses' bodies and mufflers for their feet.