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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Brian over there. And this is stuff you should know. About vile racist jerks, boo boo me, you jerk. I stole my jacket.

Yeah. So, Chuck, do you remember when we did our two part episode on The Simpsons? And one of the first things I said was like, I didn't want to record because all I wanted to do is sit around and research The Simpsons for the rest of my life. Sure, I felt basically the opposite way about researching the Klan, like I didn't want to record because I didn't want to research the Klan anymore.

Yeah. It wasn't a fun one. No. Well, here's my personal history here in regards to the clan is and now this will be peppered throughout a little bit because I grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Oh, that sounds familiar. Which is very, you know, some of the early days of the second wave of the clan, which, you know, we'll get to all this garbage in this episode. But Stone Mountain was kind of one of the large national seats and one of the leaders of the clan in Stone Mountain had kids.

There was either kids or grandkids that went, I guess had to be grandkids that went to my elementary school, that the Venables. And I was like, you know, I heard about the Venables and I knew about their story and that his granddad was the grand wizard and like, it scared the crap out of me, rightfully so. I was scared.

And then I got older and I was like, these are just dumb cars playing rednecks. And then I got a little older still.

And I was like, well, that's not fair either. And I tried to start in my life. Look at things through the lens of minority peoples, even though you can't, you know, as a as a white man. But you can do your best to walk a mile in someone's shoes and see what it might be like. Then I was like, I can't dismiss it as rednecks playing because they killed people and lynched people. And it was a fear, a feared group to black people and, you know, all kinds of other minorities, as we'll see as they as they kind of progressed.

But I felt it was dismissive to say they're just a bunch of dumb rednecks and don't give them that power. So, you know, it's just interesting to sort of go through that evolution as a kid growing up in the south who no doubt in my lineage and ancestry have horrible things that happened in the Deep South that I had to rectify as like, you know, just because I'm related to great, great, great, great grandparents who probably did awful things.

Mm hmm.

Does it mean that I am that person or. You know.

No, not at all. Not at all. You certainly aren't that person at all, I can attest.

But you have to come to terms with it as someone who is the opposite of those people for sure.

And I think it is wise of you and very thoughtful of you to be like, no, I can't just, you know, use, I guess, white privilege to dismiss the Klan because it does kind of infringe on, like, the impacts that they've had on people of color in the United States for sure. I think that's very insightful. At the same time, yes, the Klan are dumb redneck cost players. They're just ones who will also get whipped up into into violence and carry out horrific acts.

So they're dumb redneck cause players who you really have to keep an eye on and then break the back of his organization by putting them in prison whenever they do something like that or start to. Yeah.

And as we see through their history, depending on when it was in which sort of iteration, because there's there's been at least three some were more violent and dangerous than others and some were sort of like playing rednecks. Yeah. Not to you know, of course that doesn't excuse it.

It's just like a fun social club or anything like that. But it is fairly interesting. But I'm ready to be done with this as well. So let's let's do it.

Yeah. The thing that kind of strikes me about the Klan the most is they the Klan enjoys its largest popularity when America's feeling its most racist. Yeah. And usually America feels its most racist at times when the the rights of minorities or anybody who's not basically white Protestants are being advanced in society.

It's not an accident. Right. But then the Klan always, always oversteps because America may be racist in America. Might be I can't even say why America is definitely based on white supremacism or white supremacy and enforcing that the but the the the taste for violence and the willingness to, like, kill people of color just for being people of color is not a mainstream thing, fortunately. So the Klan has always been on the fringe and always will be on the fringes.

It's just hopefully eventually society will learn its lesson. Like, you know, advancing the rights of people of color doesn't mean that there has to be some spasm of anti minority sentiment that inevitably leads to violence carried out by groups like the Klan. I really hope we get to that point rather than just keeping existing trapped in the cycle, you know, and I think we will I think we are approaching that eventually.

I don't know when it will be, but I, I feel like with each of these cycles that we go through, there's less and less people who react horribly the next time or the next time or the next time. So that. Eventually, that reaction will just kind of fizzle out. That's my hope. Yeah, and it's also interesting, I watched the documentary. It wasn't really it's sort of like a several part news show from this British might have been a BBC crew that about the modern clan just from a couple of years ago during like the Ferguson uproar in Missouri.

And he went undercover because he was a British guy who was interviewed. He when he went in deep with the Klan there for seven months.

And it's interesting to see the just the scattered ideology. And that kind of is a bit of a hallmark of the Klan period through their history, is it seems like there's never been a very codified thing of this is who we are, because there's people in this documentary that are like, you know, three of the members were arrested for plotting to kill a black man. And the people they talked to, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, they're outmanned.

We're not into that. We don't want to commit violence against black people and we're not even bigoted. We're just a superior race who are white separatist. But we don't want to you know, we might burn a cross for our ceremonies, but we're not doing bombings and lynchings and we're not down with that at all.

But you also get the feeling that behind closed doors, they're probably like, hey, but wish those guys would have been able to carry that murder out. Right.

That seems to have been a transition that kind of went in the 70s, started in the 70s, I believe. But there's like a a different public face to the Klan or they tried different like, well, OK, well, that everybody hates the Klan. What if we what if we explain it like this, right? What if we put it like this in society? It's like, no, that's a nice try. Yeah. It's not going to work.

All right. Should we get into this and the origins. Yeah.

So so like you said, there have been three iterations of the Klan and this the first iteration of the Klan started out as they think, basically a social club made up of disgruntled Confederate Veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. And this group of veterans got together at a time where there was a real trend, a craze basically for secret societies in the nineteenth century, apparently in the the late 90s, up to the 1930s, is called the golden age of paternalism, where something like a third of American men were members of a secret society or something based on like actual real ancient secret societies like the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians.

These are just kind of fake ones that gave you a reason to, like, leave the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays and go like, you know, have whiskey down at the the Moose Lodge. We kind of get that feeling. Yeah. And groups like the Moose and the Elks and the Knights of Columbus, they all grew out of that. And in fact, Woodmen of the World Insurance is called that. It's kind of a weird name if you think about it.

But Wordman of the World was a secret society from the nineteenth century and they would sell their members insurance policies, and that's where that insurance came from. So this is kind of like the context of where the Ku Klux Klan originally came from in the nineteenth century, this crazier trend for secret societies.

Yeah, and by all accounts, it was started on Christmas Eve, like you said, in Polaski in 1865 by six men, Calvin Jones, Richard Reid, Frank McCord, John Kennedy and John Kessler. I think. And then, believe it or not, the final guy's name was Jim Crow.

No. James Crow, no.

Yeah. In Polaski, Tennessee. And they they were sort of based on this one of those secret groups called the Sons of Malter. But it seems like it was more inspired by because they weren't around by the time the Civil War ended. But they definitely sort of kind of cribbed some stuff from from the mountains as far as and this is the whole thing with the secret societies like outfits and costumes and rites and initiations and dumb names of leadership that you make up.

It's all a big part of it. I have never understood the desire me and not just obviously the clan is clearly not interested in that. But any fraternal group like that, I just including fraternities in college, I just I never got it.

Yeah. That Sons of Malta you mentioned seem to have been directly impactful. I don't know if there are members who are who were from the Sons of Malta or how they heard of it. But the Sons of Malta and then another group called the KU Close, Adolphine and both of them seem to have been party, cruise or cruise from Mardi Gras in New Orleans. And then the Sons of Malta somehow made their way up. To Boston, and that's where they really kind of got hold, where it got popular, I guess, but neither one of those were were racist groups, from what I could tell.

And from also what I could tell, the Ku Klux Klan wasn't necessarily intended to be a racist terrorist political organization, at least at first. But shortly after they formed in 1865 66, the federal government passed the reconstruction acts. And reconstruction definitely deserves its own episode. Really want to do one or two on reconstruction at some point. But when they they passed that act, that that kind of changed or gave focus to this what may have been like just kind of a group of racist people and turn them into a racist political terrorist organization.

Now, they had something to do besides meet at the Moose Lodge, and that was to enforce white supremacy in the Deep South through acts of violence and intimidation and terror techniques. And that was the first incarnation of the Klan. And they spread really quick from Tennessee down to Georgia and other neighboring states, thanks in part to personal visits for organizing by a guy named Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who is not a great guy.

Yeah, he was there a lot of complications with that guy. We'll get to him in a sec. But the name KKK or Ku Klux Klan, they think might have. And there's no again, it's been such a sort of willy nilly organization as far as having a national sort of codified presence that there's not even like a website that I saw that you can go to.

It's all regional, man, but those are some terrible Web sites. They're pretty bad comic sans everywhere. They're pretty bad when there's like a black background in, like, pink fonts and stuff like that spewing racist bigotry and ideology.

It's pretty bad.

Yeah, I wanted to, like, throw my laptop out the window at one point, but they think it might have derived from the Greek word kykoos's quite close.

Mm hmm. Which was basically denotes what people thought were like the natural cycles of government or types of government. Yeah. That a civilization could have, which is pretty hardy, if you think about it for the KKK. I mean, of course, political philosophy that dates back to the the third century B.C. that the Greeks it's really something but close is what it Cuchillo lost is what it was sort of translated as in modern and not the modern era. But back then and clan with a K like what I saw was it was originally Ku Klux one word and then Klan with a C.

Mm hmm. And they think that may have come from maybe Scottish clans. They play Scottish music sometimes. Yeah. At their rallies. But that's not affirmed either. But eventually I think that C was replaced with a K, it became KKK and these lodges started popping up all over right after the Civil War because kind of like you said, once a minority gets a little bit of freedom, there's a bit of an uprising and Klan membership. And that's what happened from the first iteration is like there we have these enslaved people that are now free.

We need to basically intimidate them into feeling like they still have no freedoms, even though the law says different. Right. So one of the first things they did was, you know, when when reconstruction came along and all of a sudden there were, you know, black people in the south could hold political office or be judges or all this like this was like flipping a switch as far as the South is concerned. And like I said, it laser focused like the aims of the Ku Klux Klan, and that they now took up an intimidation and terrorism campaign against black people in the South, against Republicans in the South.

The Republicans at the time were a much different party than they are today and that they were into the idea of big government to support and enforce social justice. And then years later, around the turn of the last century, Williams Jennings Bryant was a candidate who was a Democrat who basically ran on the Republican platform of big government to enforce social justice. And then later on, it was cemented by FDR as a big kind of transition or switch basically of ideologies between the parties.

But at the time, if you were a Republican, you were probably if you're in the South, you were probably for equal rights for black citizens and. You were a target of their intimidation campaigns as well, big time, because not only were they kind of battling these politicians, but voter intimidation was a very real thing and voter suppression. And they would they would murder people like hundreds, maybe thousands of people in the south, especially Louisiana. Reports ahead of the 1868 election were that they murdered people for intimidation and literally to keep them from voting.

Yeah, dude, there was one town called Opelousas, Louisiana, town of 25000. So it was pretty big. It was the county seat of the parish and Cameron Parish. But in two weeks, 200 people were murdered around the 1868 election, 200. That's 14 people a day in this town of 25000 people, all because of terrorism carried out by the KKK.

Yeah, and Ed helped us put this together. And Ed is keen to point out, and I think we should do, is that a lot of what the Klan has always tried to do is is lead their groups by fear. And you still see that today, not only through the Klan, but other groups like fear of, you know, that the immigrants are going to take your job or fear of this, fear of that. And back then, it was fear of these enslaved people that are now free, rising up, you know, and and getting revenge.

And that didn't happen. Like even though slavery happened, like once black Americans earn their freedom, they did not all of a sudden say, oh, yeah, well, payback time, we're angry.

We're going to come after you. They were happy to be freed and just to try and live as regular people with rights in society. And that wasn't the message that the Klan was putting out. They were like, you need to be afraid of them, even though there are no accounts of that happening. It was just black people trying to be regular, normal people.

Right. And the other problem with that kind of thing is it's like when somebody does stuff like this, when they carry out a terror campaign, it makes people wonder, like, geez, well, what are the other people do to deserve this? Well, the other people didn't do anything to deserve this. And that's that's what's called the false balance or balance fallacy, where the idea that there's you know, there's problems on both sides or there's good people on both sides, it's like no, sometimes one side is the problem.

Basically one hundred percent of the problem. And I think that was really important to point out. And for us to point out to that there was nothing that the the Klan was defending against except white supremacy and blacks, black suppression, the suppression of rights among black people. That was it. It's as despicable as it sounds. There was nothing gallant or good about it. There is nothing honorable about it. And in fact, they were so violent and so criminal and so despicable that within three years of their founding, the grand wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who we mentioned earlier, issued his one and only basically executive orders grand wizard saying we have to disband and burn all of our stuff because this has gotten out of hand.

That's how violent they had become and how despicable their acts had been.

Yeah. Forrest Gump namesake.

Yeah, he was like I said, he was a pretty controversial remains a controversial dude in that he was one of the generals of the Confederacy and he was in charge when the Fort Pillow massacre happened, which was something we can get into in detail, maybe in a short stuff, maybe. But essentially, you know, hundreds of largely black soldiers who had given up and surrendered were just massacred on this day at Fort Pillow. And he was known as a brilliant general, the Wizard of the Saddle, which is what he was called because he was a Calvary guy.

And that later became, you know, the kind of gangsta that for the Klan as far as the grand wizard, they kind of stole that from their gang. But he. He seemed to be a vile man, but then later in life, like he said, became disillusioned with the Klan, some people said it was just because he didn't think they were organized enough. Some people said it was because he thought they got too violent. But in Memphis, late in life, he gave this big speech about, you know, basically trying to hold up the black man and give them jobs and put them in positions of important positions in our government and to make them doctors and lawyers.

So I don't know if it was a change of heart. There's been a lot of controversy since since then about like, should we honor this guy more, you know, or talk about, like, his entire life up until that moment?

No, I think it's like he he deserves to have, like, his like it all spread out on the table. But I feel like once you oversee, like, a massacre of of unarmed black soldiers came over, see, like a white supremacist terrorist group, that's pretty tough to come back from, even though I mean, it is definitely worth noting, I think fair to note that he did have at least something of a change of heart, at least publicly.

I saw that he wrote to, I think, the governor of Tennessee or somewhere and offered to help destroy white vigilantes who were harassing black citizens because he thought it was uncalled for. So, yeah, he was a a a unusual person over the span of his life. But he still did some pretty horrible stuff, of course.

And, you know, this pops up any time there's a debate over whether they should strip the name from this or that, you know, because there's plenty plenty of stuff named for him.

There is a high school in Jacksonville, Florida, that was named Nathan F. Nathan B. Forrest High School until 2014.

Yeah, 2014. There was a high school named after the basically the founder of the Ku Klux Klan in Jacksonville, Florida. They should just name all the high schools in Florida. Tom Petty, high school. Is he from Florida? From Gainesville? I didn't know that. Yeah, the big time music scene down there back then. OK, what happened to the music scene? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe there still is one who else came out of Gainesville at that time?

Uh, the Don Felder, the guitar player for the Eagles, was Tom Petty's guitar teacher. Hmm. And then, like Leonard Skinner, hung out in Jacksonville. And I think the Allman Brothers, they were making guys, but they hung out down there, too. It was the. OK, should we take a break? Sure. All right. Let's take a break. I didn't think Tom Petty and the Allman Brothers would make a appearance in the Klan episode.

Yeah, but they did. And we'll be back right after to talk about the enforcement acts.

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All right, the enforcement acts, yes, this is basically when the federal government stepped up starting in 1870 and said, you know what, we can't count on these states, especially in the south. And we should point out and Ed, Ed makes a good point in pointing out that like there was racism all over the country, always has been. There have been Klan groups all over the country, but in the South, it was in the government, it was in the courts.

It was in the school systems like it was nowhere else in the country. Right. So the federal government said we can't count on these southern states to do the right thing and to have real investigations and prosecute people and to protect black citizens. So we're going to pass the enforcement act that basically says we can go in there and we can kind of take care of business on our own if we have to. Yeah, and take care of business.

They did. General Grant, Ulysses Grant, who was then President Grant, had an attorney general named Amos Ackerman. And this guy is awesome, is awesome. So one of the heroes of this story, he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

He doesn't. Now, that's pretty lame. Wikipedia, it's bad.

He's a Georgia boy, too. Yeah. Yeah, he is. So this guy ended up the attorney general under Grant, and he basically used everything at his disposal from forming like basically the prototype of the FBI to to getting federal troops and getting martial law declared down in South Carolina to oversee the presidential election down there, like all sorts of different stuff, everything he had, he would throw at the Klan and ultimately kind of broke the back of that first Klan that combined with Bedford Forrest.

I don't know why you have to see both of those names, but you just kind of do that. Combined with his executive order to disband the Klan, the first Klan went away very, very quickly, actually.

Yeah. And it's hard to tell how big it was at its first peak. Some people say maybe a half a million people, but like you said, it faded out pretty quickly.

And, you know, we'll talk about when the Klan fades out, you know, it doesn't really go anywhere as far as these people go. It's not like everyone all of a sudden was awesome and not racist. It just means the formal Klan just lacks membership.

Basically, I don't know. I think I think when when suddenly like the for the federal government and like, you know, maybe your senator or your representative or you hear the president talking smack about this group that, you know, you used to think was pretty cool. But all of a sudden you realize that the rest of the country thinks you're a backward dummy for looking up to these Klan members. It can kind of it can kind of make people self reflect a little bit, you know.

So I wonder how many people do change their minds or have historically over over the course of this? Not necessarily like, well, I'm not racist anymore, but I think that that's that's a possibility that somebody can reflect like that or at the very least, the next time they're not going to participate or agitate or join in. You know, I don't know. No, I saw did you see that meme of the dude in, I think Indiana or Illinois?

I can't remember. He's I believe in a wheelchair and he's at a Black Lives Matter rally. He's holding a sign that says, I'm sorry I'm late. I had a lot to learn. And he apparently was I don't know if he was racist, but he was certainly not in favor of Black Lives Matter. And I guess started reading about it and looking into it and doing his research and had a complete change of heart and showed up at one of their rallies in support of them, which was pretty cool.

Have you seen that? I have not seen that. So it is I mean, it can't happen. Like, people's sentiments about this kind of stuff can change. And I feel like when people are like, oh, I'm in favor of of keeping other human beings down for really no reason whatsoever, except they don't look like me. I feel like that. That's like a there's a lot of room for improvement that can happen in that in that sense, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm I'm sure individuals have changed like that. I wish it was en masse.

Um, there were other violent racist groups when the Klan was not as popular during that period. They just didn't have they didn't have that sort of unified look.

Well, so, yeah, let's talk about that. Look, if you're if you're ready to go, you want to. Yeah. I mean, you can thank D.W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon Jr. for that.

Yeah. Because prior to this, the the Klan did not really look like what you would think. They they wore masks and hoods and, you know, disguises and they tried to disguise their voice. Apparently sometimes they would pretend that they were the ghosts of Confederate soldiers coming to terrorize black families, fooling absolutely no one. But they they didn't wear necessarily what you would think of is like the Klan today. And like you said, that strictly came from D.W. Griffith and I guess Dixon Thomas Dixon, to a lesser extent, but griffeth, like really put it up there for everybody to see with the birth of a nation.

Yeah. Birth of a Nation was a movie based on a play that was based on a book from Thomas Dixon Jr. He published The Clansmen with a C. Colen, a historical romance of the Ku Klux Klan and where they were depicted as heroic, heroic, sort of noble Christian warriors. And that became a play that was a little bit more popular. And then D.W. Griffith based the movie on that play. And it was, you know, this is where you saw crosses burning and this is where you saw those white pointed hoods and horses with robes on them as poor, poor horses.

They have no idea I know what they're doing. It makes you feel to drag the horses into this show. Oh, I wish they wouldn't. But, you know, what we know is sort of the look of the Klan was fully put forth by D.W. Griffith on screen. I was kind of curious because I know he was a huge, huge name in Hollywood and a pioneer in Hollywood and was a founding partner of United Artists with Chaplin and Mary Pickford.

And I think Douglas Fairbanks maybe.

But I was curious about both those guys, like, were they super racist or was this just a movie to them? And Dixon was supposedly really racist, although he supposedly denounced bigotry in the wake of this sort of new Klan that was created. I had a harder time finding out what D.W. Griffith was all about. He never apologized for anything.

And he seems to have sort of escaped scrutiny in some ways. So in his lifetime, I think so. But I'm not really sure because I didn't have time to really do a deep dive into whether or not, like, he believed the stuff or he was like, I'm going to make a salacious movie that's going to be super controversial and get banned and get me a lot of attention, but. The you know, whether his heart was in it or not, the impact that his movie had.

Oh, yes, astounding. It was like, imagine if when Star Wars came out all of a sudden, like Jedi schools popped up in real life and like they would form together and go out and run for office is like Jedi is basically sweet. We need a third party, right? Yeah, the Jedi Party.

But imagine if those Jedi guys were like virulent racists who were dedicated to suppressing the rights of minorities. What do you think about that? It's much less good. It's much less good. And that's yeah. That's kind of what happened. It's good point. Yeah.

But based on this movie, it was a popular movie that kicked off with what's considered the second wave or second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan and gave us all of that, the symbolism, the grandiose look and feel and just kind of like gave it this almost legend that really didn't exist because the first Clayne was never like that. They were a bunch of hooded, murderous thugs who would ride around on horseback at night and set people's houses on fire. They didn't look anything like that.

Yeah. So, yeah, you can say, you know, the resurgence in interest of the Klan almost squarely at the feet of D.W. Griffith and then only because it wasn't as popular to a lesser extent, Tom Dixon's feet, not Tom Dickson, the great, great lighting designer. Tom Dickson, the racist author.

Yes, Thomas Dixon Jr., I think. Right? Yeah. In fact, the birth of a nation with a part of it was filmed in the neighborhood. I lived in L.A. and Loose Feliz right there where I remember where we shot the driving around stuff for the Toyota commercial. Yeah.

Can I just say one of my favorite things you're going to say is, well, we're driving. Yes. You didn't look to the right and you started to pull through a crosswalk and this lady with her husband and like three kids, like, I think smack the hood of the Prius, that we were filming it and like, yelled at you and you'd, like, yell back at her and shook your fist like you got, like, match. You did you did in every way except physically shaking your fist.

But you got in like a shouting match with some pedestrian while we were filming a Toyota commercial.

It was quite a shouting match.

It was very brief. She she way overreacted.

Oh, totally.

No, no, I'm not saying you were in the wrong, but it was just it reminded me of everything I hated about living in L.A. I think one moment was like, how bad this lady over.

Yeah, that was fun. That was a great, great memory. Yeah. But Birth of a nation was filmed, like, right down the street from there. Part of it, my favorite movie theater in L.A. The Vista was right on this corner and also the movie theater that doubled as Detroit for True Romance for the karate kung fu theater. The beginning. But yeah, like right out there in front of that big, like, convergence of five streets and apparently like some of the huge, like marching scenes from birth of a nation we're filming right there.

Oh, boy.

Anyway, um, this second birth of the clan, a lot of it can be credited also to the actions of William J. Simmons, who was inspired from the movie, and in 1915 went to the top of Stone Mountain here in Georgia and burned a cross inspired by a movie.

Yeah, well, important to get that across and the hate in the previous clan, like. Sure. You know, it was all still there. But James Venable, who I mentioned earlier, who I went to school with his grandkids, he was a kid on top of the mountain with William Simmons at the time. Oh, yeah. And he was up there and I think with his uncle. And this was kind of looked at as sort of one of the first meetings of the newly reborn Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s to 20 years.

Yeah.

So in addition to having, like a much more unified look and I guess design ethos. Sure. The this version of the Klan, the second version of the Klan seemed more organized. At least they were organized enough to actually become a political force, not just in support of, you know, say, the Democrats at the time or in support of just whatever local judge was known to be a racist. And, you know, they they would they would support him and intimidate voters against him.

They would actually put forth candidates who were members of the Klan and publicly members of the Klan, probably most famously, Robert Byrd, a senator from West Virginia, was a Klan member and like never backed away from the Klan at any point. There were other Southerners, like from Georgia who were senators, I mean, who were also southerners from Georgia, who were from the Klan. Some representatives, lots and lots of local officials like the Klan would.

Actually, they became something of a political force as well. Yeah, I mean, the local thing is really was a big deal because it could be and, you know, politics, we all get worked up over national politics as well. We should. But if you really want to see a difference in your life day to day, local politics is where it's at. And, you know, county commissions and school boards and boards of directors like that on the local level is really where the Klan could get in there on a more low key basis and do a lot of damage so that, you know, they had official uniforms.

Now, they had official ranks and titles. They were still sort of like, hey, we're just a fraternal order. And that's kind of all we are. But at the same time, they expanded their ethos. And it wasn't just black people anymore. It was they were antisemite. They were anti Catholic. They were against communists. They were against anything that wasn't white. And all of this was sort of under the banner of, hey, what we really are, because, you know, they would also like train out pedophiles and stuff like that.

What they said they really were were patriots and heroes and good Americans. Right. Which sounds very familiar these days. It really does.

This this this version of the Klan very much reflects the kind of white supremacist B.S. that you see today in America, where it's it's very much spread across different groups that that are kind of held together by this thread that, you know, white people are losing ground and they need to make it back up through whatever whatever we need to do that. That really seems to reflect a bit. Also the fact that there are crazy nut jobs in Congress today who hold white supremacist values to basically publicly really bears a striking resemblance to the second resurgence of the Klan.

Yeah, who I mean, we should point out, again, like white, Christian, white, Protestant, Christian. Right. It's important. Seem to be the only thing that was that was OK. Like anything else, like anti Catholic, anti Jew, anti everything except white, Protestant, Christian.

And so like this is the largest popularity of the widest popularity of the Klan. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that they may have had around the mid 1920s, as many as four million members spread across the US. And it wasn't just in the South. I mean, there were plenty in industrial cities in the north. There were plenty on the West Coast, plenty in the Midwest. Indiana was known as a stronghold of the Klan. And I read that as many as half a million had half a million members, which would have been a third of the population of white men in Indiana at the time.

Wow. In the 1920s. So you might ask, like, why was everybody in the Klan just in the same way that the reconstruction gave, I guess, purpose to the Klan? Massive waves of immigration that had started in the late 19th century to the United States was making America generally racist. And they were easily whipped up by things like you're going to lose your job to all these immigrants. Yeah, like it was very much based on local grievance grievances, like whatever the local fear was.

And a lot of times you're right, that was immigrants coming into the town and taking your jobs or black men marrying white women or whatever they felt the local thing was that would be most effective at recruiting kind of was what they kind of honed in on. The mystique of it all was very, I think, intoxicating to a lot of these people. Yeah. And still is in that documentary. It's amazing to see these people two years ago talking about.

Clearly, that's an important thing for them, like getting dressed up, meeting together in the woods and burning across, riding around at night on your night or midnight rides in your car, putting up flyers under the under the cloak of darkness there. It's like cosplay. It really is. They're they're playing like they're in some important club. It's interesting that the women in this documentary, all of them said, well, you know, this isn't the kind of thing I probably would have been into, but it really improved my marriage when I got on board.

And and joined. And now my husband and I have something to talk about. We have commonalities. And you hear this and you're just like crawling out of your skin at it, seeing this marriage, which is clearly just, you know, a male dominant marriage. And, you know, but if he if you'll join my clan or if you like my football team, we'll finally have something in common. Right. And I love football, so I don't want to throw football on the bus.

So, yeah. So, I mean, it makes sense. Like if you don't have much of an identity or you are looking for something to give your life purpose, like a group or a club, especially one that's, you know, in some looked up to by some people, I can really give your life a real shot in the arm, you know, I guess in good ways.

I mean, those there are so many great clubs, right. Where people that feel like their big sister. Yeah. But I mean, it is interesting that so much of it in this documentary at least seems to come from that mystique in that wanting to belong to a group. And I'm just this one guy. He was like, you know, I'm just a landscaper. And I was just out partying. And now now I have focused. I have something to do.

I've got these brothers. So one of the one of the things you mentioned was the midnight rides and going out at midnight, and one of the one of the reasons they do that is because the Klan has always thrived on anonymity like they they don't. I mean, that's not to say that they don't show their face in public. Some of them do, but plenty of them don't. And that there's strength in that. And one of the reasons that they would ride at night was because it afforded that much more anonymity, even if they weren't particularly anonymous and that, you know, their neighbor, who they were terrorizing, probably recognize their voice.

But the fact that they their face wasn't shown, there was plausible deniability to that.

Well, speaking of Anonymous, though, in this documentary, Anonymous outed this one group in Missouri. Yeah. They got shut down and they put their all their information on the web. Well, and it showed a little bit of the video with the guy and the Guy Fawkes mask and the the the computerized voice or whatever.

Right. Saying, you know, we're coming after you, we're going to put your names online. And it was fairly interesting doing God's work.

That's actually. Yeah. For real. And that's actually like a traditional anti Klan tactic that groups like the NAACP or the Anti Defamation League used back during this time when the Klan was at its peak popularity in the 1920s. They would bribe people to get their hands on a membership list. They would send in people to infiltrate, to get their hands on a membership list, and then they would publish it. And now all of a sudden their anonymity and the strength that's afforded by the anonymity is gone.

And you just broke up a Klan chapter in your local area because nobody wants to be associated with anymore. And they probably have to make some sort of public statement about how they left, you know, or they it's all just a misunderstanding. They were never part of it.

Right. Or you're in fear of losing your job. Maybe, but that really helped break up this this version of the Klan in the 1920s and then the federal government again, if you look at these these successive waves of the Ku Klux Klan, the federal government is the one who steps in to break the back of the Klan. And they did it again, basically using the same playbook from the enforcement acts, the IRS in the 1940s. Somehow the Klan had gotten Tax-Exempt status and the IRS removed it and then sued them for back taxes equal to about ten million dollars in today's dollars.

And the Klan broke up real quick after that. So in the pocketbook, that's the. Yeah, exactly. You do. So the federal government is used a bunch of tactics to basically get rid of the Klan again. And then the Klan went away, and that was that for a while.

All right. Should we take another break here? Yes. All right. Well, man, where this is going to be a long episode giving the Klan a long episode. I know.

We'll take a break and maybe we'll just come back and sing protest songs and then call it a day.

All right. We'll be right back.

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What do explores an Army officer at a Minnesota insurance salesman have in common? They all wanted to be the first to reach the North Pole, but only one of them made it on Katlehong. Science editor at Mental Floss and host of the new podcast The Quest for the North Pole, which dives into the centuries long race to explore the Arctic, find the Northwest Passage and conquer the top of the world with a cast of daring adventurers and some pretty determined amateurs, the race to the poll reveals the human desire to solve mysteries of geography and the soul will look at the important Arctic expeditions that filled the blank spaces on the map and recognize how indigenous people made them successful.

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I'd hammer out the clan, the clan boo outerspace. What do you get that reference is that from a whole lot who best know, uh, uh, which one was that one going brothers?

Oh, no, I was thinking of the one the Christopher Guest movie. No, it was from the Coen brothers, the folk music. Movie that is escaping me right now. Oh, Oscar Isaac, yeah, yeah. Adam Driver has a really funny part where they're recording in there and he's just doing background speaking like that. Right. And Timberlake is singing about I remember going to outer space and he goes outer space.

What's the one where Harry Shearer ends up joining like a folk group at the end? Oh, yeah. That was Mighty Wind. A mighty wind. Yeah, that was another good movie. All right. Unfortunately, we have to win this up and talk about the third wave of the clan, which was the civil rights era. Um, you would think that the civil rights era clan, would it be the biggest iteration? But it actually wasn't. They were one of the more dangerous eras because they were very famous for carrying out bombings all over the south, mainly.

Yeah. Including, very sadly, the bombing in Birmingham. I think there were a hundred and thirty eight bombings over like a seven year period. But the bombing in Birmingham, where they bombed the church and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair, four young black girls were killed. And if you don't know the story, just go watch the Spike Lee documentary, Four Little Girls, because it it really does a great job of kind of retelling what an awful thing that was.

Yeah, it definitely was the most famous and most despicable, but they bombed a lot of other people, murdered a lot of other people. There's a a couple that live not too far from where my place in Florida is named Harry and Harriet Moore, whose house was bombed by the Klan on Christmas Eve. They chose Christmas Eve because they knew that their I think their older children would come home. They wanted to kill as many of them as possible. So there was a real reign of terror that the Klan was carrying out during the civil rights era in Birmingham, apparently was called Birmingham for a while because it was just so prone to being bombed, like where the the church was bombed, but also because it was where the Klan was the strongest and most politically backed up, which to the civil right leaders credit.

They said, well, then we're going to Birmingham. That's where we're going to set up shop, which is what brought Birmingham to basically the forefront of the civil rights war.

Yeah. You know, there were some other high profile events, the assassination of Medgar Evers, obviously the Mississippi Burning case. If you saw that movie again, it did a really good job of the case of those three civil rights workers in 1964 who were killed in the you know, there were still lynchings going on and there were still people in seats of power, attorneys and people on juries. And it was it was a a very, very mixed up time in this country because rights were being achieved while all this bloodshed was going on.

And like you mentioned before, it's like they're trying to hold on to this thing. That is not what America is anymore. Now, it's like America is a multicultural society and it's better off for it. Like, let's just all get on the trolley, shall we? Yeah. So the FBI, it's worth mentioning, played a dual role. Apparently, J. Edgar Hoover knew all the way back in 1965 who carried out the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, but just sat on it because he wasn't really a really big fan of civil right.

Yeah. Or the civil rights movement. But at the same time, the FBI actually did have an integral role in breaking up local Klan groups by using like COINTELPRO, that program where they would basically infiltrate and start getting people to question the leaders or start accusing each other of disloyalty and just turn a group on each other like what they did the Black Panthers, they did to the KKK to far less frequently. But they did have an impact on helping to to break up the KKK in the civil rights era as well.

Yeah, and since the civil rights era kind of two today, the Klan has really lost a lot of its membership. It has been. And then again, is not to say that any of the racism went away. It's been fractured sometimes into more dangerous groups, further alt white white supremacist groups and neo-Nazis. There have been people in power. David Duke, you know, we have to mention him. He was an actual House member from the state of Louisiana.

He was the Grand National Grand Wizard of the Klan. And I think they started to kind of push away a little bit from the symbology of, you know, these kind of crazy symbols and the hoods and the cross burnings.

I mean, that stuff still went on on local. The state level, but I think nationally they kind of tamp that down a little bit and was like, I think it'd be better if we could just hold office, right? So rightly so.

And that's basically there's a direct thread to today, this idea where they're just trying to soft sell racism and suppression of minority rights in it, just repackage it in other ways. But it's all the exact same thing. And it doesn't matter how you dress it up, you're trying to deny the rights of other human beings. So if you say whatever you want to hold with your ideology, you know. Yeah, yeah, totally.

It's there's never been a good handle on the numbers because it has it been a super organized national thing. But they think it is down to like less than thirty thousand now. And when they do these specials and kind of go to these groups, the meetings, you know, in these towns are a number in the single digits. Sometimes it's not. Yeah, it's not like hundreds of guys getting together. And of course, there are women in there now.

I keep saying, guys, but it's largely always been men because they call them Klansmen. But these wives are getting involved as well so they can have something in common with their husbands.

Yeah, and the good thing is, is the numbers are small enough that basically local communities are strong enough to come out and chase Klan rallies, break them up, as was the case in Madison, Indiana, on Labor Day. In twenty nineteen, the Klan said that they were going to have a cookout and apparently about ten of them showed up. And the entire Madison, Indiana community, not the entire, but a significant portion of them showed up and basically chased the Klan out of the public park.

Awesome. And broke up their rally in 10 to 20 minutes. From what I read, that's that's usually par for the course. And the Klan is relegated to basically spewing hate online or, like you said, leaving flyers on people's cars. So the Southern Poverty Law Center says that they they have been tracking their decline and they think they may have plateaued, which is not good because you like to just keep seeing them decline, but they bottomed out.

In other words, the problem is, is there's no lack of other racist groups that are that are equally problematic, if not more so.

Yeah, there's one part in this new special where this kid, these two guys dressed in their robes and putting up a flag in their front yard or whatever, a Confederate flag and then one other, I guess, Klan flag. And this teenager in St. Louis comes across the street or whatever suburb they're in. And it's just like, hey, man, white power. I just want to I just want to see what you guys are all about. You know, I'm really interested in joining up and and these guys talk to them for a minute.

And it's just like it's so troubling to see this dumb kid, you know? Reaching out and all the wrong ways because he's been taught something right, you know. Yeah, and when you see this family, he's in these people's homes and there's five, six year old kids sitting around and the wife's got a cigarette and she's taking a shot of bourbon. And she got her Mountain Dew in her hand and spewing hate. And these children are sitting there and you just want like you want to run in there and steal these kids.

And they're not supposed to say that. You just did, but I just did. It's awful. Yeah, it is pretty awful. Any time you talking about hate. It's awful. And it should be it should turn your stomach. I hope it's true.

And everybody it is learning stuff almost totally. That's how. Yeah, that's how. Yes, for sure. We already did one on hate before it and we maybe we should do a redux on it. I don't know.

I got one more quick things kind of I always thought was kind of fun at on a lighter note, at baseball games. I'm not sure the history I should look that up, but a strikeout when you're keeping log is known as a K, right.

And fans have brincat signs and they hang up with the pitcher known for a lot of strikeouts.

Yeah, one for each strikeout. Yeah, one for each strikeout. They hang it up in the stands in front their seats and they have always hung that third key upside down. Yeah. As per tradition. So it never says KKK, which I think is great. Yeah.

It is a great way to go. Baseball fans sticking it to the way to go. Baseball fans. Well you got anything else. No, nothing else. If you want to know more about the KKK, go visit the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have some really good research on it, including some reads. Just like this is just just pathetic. It's kind of reassuring in some ways. If you're bothered by this, maybe that'll help. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Let me see here. I'm going to call this Ezra the podcast or.

Hey, guys, my name is Ezra, 14 years old. I've started a podcast of my own and it is inspired by your show. I'm doing a school project on my podcast, and I would love it if you could respond with a couple of your tips for beginners. My podcast is called High School is a Joke. I listen to you every day and it would mean a lot if you responded and even mentioned me in an episode. Thank you for always making me laugh to be more knowledgeable at the dinner table.

You guys are really cool and I want to let you know that you've inspired me to start my own show. Sincerely, Ezra.

That's awesome. Ezra, congratulations. You got the advice.

Well, I'll give you the advice I found is the best of all time, and that is just talk about stuff that you find interesting, because even if people aren't listening, you're still going to enjoy doing it and that'll make you keep it up. And if you keep it up, then other people start to notice and come around. And next thing you know, you'll have an audience.

That's great advice. Yeah. Stay away from the clan. It's even better advice.

Check everybody, whether you're a podcast or no steer clear of the clan, don't even talk to them. But if you want to get in touch with us like Ezra did, you can send us an email, send it off to Stuff podcast and I heart radio dotcom.

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