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Publicity & Politics. Under Simmons, the Klan drifted along for four years, collecting a membership of a few thousand people (using such come-on slogans as "a high-class order for men of intelligence and character," and "a classy order of the highest class") and a small treasury. Then, to breathe greater life into the organization, Simmons hired Edward Clark Young, a press-agent who specialized in fund raising, and Young's partner, a well-to-do widow named Elizabeth Tyler. Young set forth the Klan's goal in terms of Christian morality v. sin. The enemies of America, the Klan proclaimed, were booze, loose women, Jews, Negroes, Roman Catholics (whose "dago" Pope was bent on taking over the U.S.), and anybody else who was not a native-born white Protestant Anglo-Saxon. Many churchmen across the nation acclaimed the Klan's program, and in the South especially, Methodist and Baptist clergymen lent the K.K.K. massive support. It was not long before it blossomed into a mighty nationwide organization that claimed to number in its hooded ranks about 4,000,000 members.
As a political force, the Klan was incredibly effective. It was a key issue in the 1924 and 1928 presidential conventions and campaigns, as well as in hundreds of local elections. Klan organizations elected judges, mayors and other city officials, sheriffs, state legislators, and even some Governors, Senators and Congressmen. Many politicians joined the K.K.K. out of fierce conviction, others merely in order to survive. Alabama's Hugo Black became a member, but he quit in 1925, a year before he was elected a Democratic U.S. Senator; in 1934, after F.D.R. named him to the Supreme Court, Black repudiated racism and religious intolerance on a nationwide radio speech.
Klanonyms. Klansmen appeared as self-appointed judges, juries and executioners. They resumed the reign of terror against Negroes. They tarred and feathered men and women—white and black—whom they suspected of illicit sexual relations, and lynched, mutilated or lashed hundreds of others. They tortured Jewish shopkeepers, whom they accused of massive international financial conspiracies; they published a spurious Knights of Columbus "oath" that portrayed Roman Catholics as villainous conspirators against the U.S. Their bedsheets became robes emblazoned with ornate embroidery, and they invented a whole new thesaurus of Klanonyms. There were the Kleagle and the Klabee, the Kladd and the Klaliff, the Klectoken and the Klexter, the Klig-rapp and the Klokan, the Klokard and the Kloncilium, the Klonklave and the Klonvokation, the Kloran and the Kla-rogo, the Klorero and the Kludd.* In the Klan Kalendar, the days of the week were named Dark, Deadly, Dismal, Doleful, Desolate, Dreadful and Desperate; the weeks of the month were Woeful, Weeping, Wailing, Wonderful and Weird, and the months Bloody, Gloomy, Hideous, Fearful, Furious, Alarming, Terrible, Horrible, Mournful, Sorrowful, Frightful and Appalling.