[h=3]
Read it and weep, Popeye.
Second KKK[/h] In 1915, the second Klan was founded in Atlanta, Georgia. Starting in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of recruiting (which paid most of the initiation fee and costume charges as commissions to the organizers) and grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions of urban industrialization and vastly increased immigration, its membership grew most rapidly in cities, and spread out of the South to the
Midwest and
West. The second KKK preached "One Hundred Percent Americanism" and demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality and better enforcement of
prohibition.
Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti-Catholicism and nativism.[SUP][3][/SUP] Its appeal was directed exclusively at white Protestants.[SUP]
[20][/SUP] Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses and carried out other violent activities. The violent episodes were generally in the South.[SUP]
[21][/SUP]
The second Klan was a formal
fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.[SUP]
[22][/SUP] Klan organizers also operated in
Canada, especially in
Saskatchewan in 1926-28, where members of the Klan attacked immigrants from
Eastern Europe.[SUP]
[23][/SUP]