1923 – Women of America! . . Outline of the Principles and Teachings [of] the Women of the Ku Klux Klan

Little Rock, Arkansas, 1923. Pamphlet. Very good. Women of America! The Past! The Present! The Future! Outline of the Principles and Teachings: Women of the Ku Klux Klan by Robbie Gill and Mary G. Witt. Little Rock, Arkansas: Imperial Headquarters Women of the Ku Klux Klan, 1923. 16 pages. Staple-bound within a tan card cover featuring an image of a woman carrying a torch and KKK shield. The Tip of the lower right front cover is missing, and a split is beginning at its base; otherwise in nice shape with almost no wear.

The 1920s brought on a renewal of interest in the Ku Klux Klan; however, the organization that rapidly grew to perhaps as many as five million members and then just a rapidly decreased in size to less than 50,000 had little if any relationship to the post-Civil War gangs of former Confederates who fought to deny freedmen their civil rights. Although it professed a connection, it was actually a money-making scheme concocted by William Joseph Simmons, an avid mystical fraternalist who hired two marketing experts, Edward Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, to lead a “Propagation Department,” who became the “real creators” of a second, reincarnated Klan. Through a system of paid recruiters, known as kleagels, they raised millions of dollars and spread a belief system, not based on anti-black rhetoric, but grounded in temperance, Protestantism, law and order, and most importantly, Americanism.

In fact, its white members felt so confident that American blacks "knew their place" in society, that its members emphatically pledged “THAT THE NEGRO SHOULD BE PROTECTED in every way possible and [to] readily fight for their Constitutional rights” and prevent their exploitation by “papist’ Catholic and “avaricious” Jewish immigrants, seeing those groups as real threats to the U.S. Constitution and American life.

Although membership was strong in the South, it was, perhaps, even more robust in the Midwest, Mountain States, Pacific Northwest, and major Eastern cities and metropolitan centers across the country. Although membership correlated strongly with the Democratic Party, many Republicans became members as well, and the Klan claimed to have elected just as many Republican Governors, Senators, and Representatives as it did Democrats.

This pamphlet successfully launched the Klan’s recruitment effort to attract “pure 100%” white, Protestant women into its ranks. It begins with a discussion of why they were important contributors to the well-being of America and the importance of offering them a place at the Klan’s table. It also announces that its “Paramount Principles” were to keep America First, promulgate Benevolence to all with malice to none, bring women into an “order of clannish fidelity” to the country, and promote the best interests of local communities, states, and the nation, especially through control and growth of a “Free Public School System.”

. (For more information, see the most unbiased work regarding the Klan in the 1920s, Wallace’s “The Ku Klux Klan in Calvin Coolidge’s America” at the Calvin Cooledge Presidential Foundation website.)

A rather scarce historical pamphlet documenting the Klan's successful effort to recruit mainstream American women. At the time of listing, another example is for sale in the trade.

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