In September 1925, a month after some 30,000 hooded Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the largest Klan rally in Washington's history, the satirical weekly Judge declared the Ku Klux Klan effectively dead. What remained, the editorial argued, was a fraternal dress-up order, no more threatening than the Shriners. The Klan was at the peak of its power.
The piece, titled "The Klan is Dead, Long Live," Etc. and written by associate editor William Morris Houghton, described an organization that had taken its operation public — robes, parades, hot-dog concessions, press photos on the Capitol steps. This was proof that the KKK was no longer a threat, said Morris. It is just one more "dress-up order" alongside the Shriners, the Tall Cedars, and the Veiled Prophets — fraternal clubs for grown men who, in the writer's words, have "forgotten how to play naturally."
Judge, founded in 1881, was among the country's leading satirical weeklies. The New Yorker would launch that same year and eventually help kill it; the magazine went monthly in 1932 and folded in 1947. This editorial was the mainstream, urbane take, the kind a well-read American in 1925 was likely to read.
The New York Times had made the same call three years earlier. Its November 21, 1922 profile of a 33-year-old Bavarian agitator named Adolf Hitler reported that "several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected." Eleven years before the Reichstag fire, the paper of record was already its readers the demagogue did not mean it.
The 1920s Klan really had commercialized. Pageantry really had eclipsed the secret midnight raid as the public face. Spectacle was how the second Klan grew to roughly four million members, elected governors and senators, dominated state legislatures in Indiana and Oregon, and reshaped national politics. The violence did not stop. Lynchings and Klan-affiliated terror continued through the decade.
A hundred years on, the platform the second Klan ran on in the 1920s — restrict immigration to defend a Christian white nation, suppress Black political power, control what is taught in schools — has moved into mainstream Republican politics. Florida banned AP African American Studies. The Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County decision gutted the Voting Rights Act, and Republican-led states have tightened voter ID laws and purged rolls ever since.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson openly identifies as a Christian nationalist. Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on the largest deportation operation in U.S. history and is carrying it out. The 1920s Klan platform, repackaged as common sense.
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