Selling Hate: Marketing the Ku Klux Klan

By Dale W. Laackman

Selling Hate is a fascinating and powerful story about the power of a southern PR firm to further the Ku Klux Klan’s agenda. Dale W. Laackman’s uncovered never-before-published archival material, census records, and obscure books and letters to tell the story of an emerging communications industry—an industry filled with potential and fraught with peril.

The brilliant, amoral, and spectacularly bold Bessie Tyler and Edward Young Clarke—together, the Southern Publicity Association—met the fervent William Joseph Simmons (founder of the second KKK), saw an opportunity, and played on his many weaknesses. It was the volatile, precarious terrain of post–World War I America. Tyler and Clarke took Simmons's dying and broke KKK, with its two thousand to three thousand associates in Georgia and Alabama, and in a few short years swelled its membership to nearly five million. Chapters were established in every state of the union, and the Klan began influencing American political and social life. Between one-third and one-half of the eligible men in the country belonged to the organization.

Even to modern sensibilities, the extent of Tyler and Clarke’s scheme is shocking: the limitlessness of their audacity; the full-scale and ongoing con of Simmons; the size of the personal fortunes they earned, amassed, and stole in the process; and just how easily and expertly they exploited the particular fears and prejudices of every corner of America. You will recognize in this pair a very American sense of showmanship and an accepted, even celebrated, brash entrepreneurial hustle. And as their story winds down, you will recognize the tainted and ultimately ineffectual congressional hearings into the Klan's monumental growth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780820360218

Dale W. Laackman

DALE W. LAACKMAN is an award-winning television producer, director, and writer turned historian and author whose long career includes positions at WGN-TV and Tribune Entertainment Company. He lives in suburban Chicago.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This is not a Klan book.

There have been many books written about the history and the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Its violent, clandestine past has been well chronicled.

This is a book about selling . . . about marketing . . . about public relations . . . and about journalism.

The product just happens to be the Klan.

This is a story of two brilliant marketing executives who, in the early days of the twentieth century, used their collective genius to spread hate across the United States. The year 1920 saw a combustible mix of socioeconomic conditions, events, and personalities that may never occur again. Edward Young Clarke Jr. and Elizabeth Bessie Tyler understood their opportunity and seized it. Their reward was unbelievable treasure. Their place in history lies solidly in the halls of infamy. Their legacy is not a proud one. They could have sold any product. Instead, they chose profit over principle. Their methods and strategies were ground breaking; the plan was all encompassing; their execution was seamless and decisive.

This is a cautionary tale. Communications professionals have an obligation to conduct their business responsibly. Their power to persuade is considerable. The public needs to be wary of both message and motive. I am reminded of a powerful image I first saw as a young advertising major in college. Assigned reading for my Introduction to Advertising course was The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. The cover illustration on my paperback edition showed a barbed fishhook buried in a gleaming, fresh red apple. The message was clear.

PROLOGUE

Thursday, November 25, 1915: Thanksgiving Day in Atlanta, Georgia.

As days go, it had been fairly typical for late autumn in the heart of the U.S. South. The U.S. Weather Bureau recorded a high temperature of sixty-three, and the low would reach forty-three degrees. There was no precipitation reported.¹ The bold heading on the front page of the November 25 Atlanta Constitution read, Husband Slays Wife and Then Shoots Self after Attending Play at Theatre.

Another article announced, Baghdad Almost in Grip of British Forces. The ancient Babylonian capital was a part of the Central Power’s Ottoman Empire. At World War I’s end Britain and Gertrude Bell would create the new nation of Iraq. World War I was in its second year. Earlier in the year the British ship Lusitania had been sunk by a German U-boat, killing 128 Americans. Woodrow Wilson strove to remain neutral. The United States would not send troops to France for nearly two more years.

There was the little matter of Pancho Villa. United States–Mexican relations were strained and tension was high. The Mexican revolutionary general bristled at the United States aiding the effort to defeat him. The Constitution article on Thanksgiving Day filed from Nogales, Arizona, told of U.S. troops massing against Villa’s men on the Mexican border. In three months, on March 9, 1916, Villa would stage one of the most daring invasions of U.S. soil. At 4:20 that morning he raided and burned the city of Columbus, New Mexico, killing eighteen U.S. citizens. Gen. John J. Pershing and six thousand troops would be dispatched to find and capture Villa. Pershing would never defeat the elusive general.

November 25, 1915, was Andrew Carnegie’s eightieth birthday. By the time of his death, at eighty-four, the steel magnate would give away over $350 million, much of it to build libraries across the country. The sports page previewed Georgia Tech’s year-ending football game at Grant Field against archrival Alabama Polytechnic Institute. In 1960 Alabama Poly’s name would be officially changed to Auburn University.

The Civil War had ended just fifty years earlier, and Reconstruction had kept hated federal troops in the South until only thirty-eight years prior to 1915. Confederate veterans still walked the streets, now in their seventies and eighties. Memories of William T. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and march through Georgia were still fresh in the minds of many Georgians. Yet Atlantans still celebrated the national Thanksgiving holiday proclaimed in 1863 by the Republican Union commander in chief, Abraham Lincoln.

A notice in the Constitution announced Thanksgiving Dinner at the Winecoff Hotel from 12:00 to 6:30 p.m.: Roast young, Georgia Turkey, chestnut dressing, cranberry sauce, candied sweet potatoes, fancy appetizers, and desserts. Good food—Good service—Good music, all for the princely sum of $1.00. Advertisements in the November 25 edition give a snapshot of life in 1915 Atlanta. Dr. E. G. Griffith’s Gate City Dental on Alabama Street featured crown and bridge work for $4.00, painless extractions for $0.50, teeth filled for $1.00, and a complete set of teeth for $5.00. Davison-Paxon-Stokes announced a sale of Paradise Plumage— feather trimming for women’s hats—a bunch of ten for $1.95 (regularly $3.50). A. O. and Roy Donettoo offered a $75.00 complete funeral with twenty-five separate items.

At the Georgian movie theater you could see "the graceful actor Hobart Henley in The Phantom Fortune, a Broadway Universal Feature." At the Grand, Dustin Farnum starred in The Gentleman from Indiana.²

But the events of the day were of little concern to William Joseph Simmons.

For months he had planned an excursion and ceremony that would not be reported in the November 25 Atlanta Constitution. Yet the consequences of this event would resonate in print—and history—for many years to come. On October 16 Simmons and thirty-three other men had applied for a charter from the State of Georgia and Fulton County, Georgia. The charter was for a fraternal, patriotic, secret, not-for-profit organization. In 1915 dozens of similar private clubs operated in Georgia. Fully four years before the enactment of Prohibition, Georgia was a dry state, though the Georgia legislature had provided that members of such clubs could keep liquor in their lockers and drink it on the premises. These organizations had come to be known as bottle clubs.

As was the custom with fraternal orders, most had elaborate initiations, secret handshakes, intricate hierarchies, and lavish uniforms. Simmons’s organization was no different. He had been a member of at least a dozen fraternal societies. What was different was the name affixed to the charter—The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.³

On that Thanksgiving evening Simmons had rented a travel bus, and he and fifteen others headed for Stone Mountain at twilight. Stone Mountain today is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Georgia, described as the world’s largest exposed piece of granite. Skeptics say larger examples exist and that Stone Mountain is a quartz monzonite dome, therefore not technically granite.⁴ Only sixteen miles east of Atlanta, it affords views from up to thirty miles on a clear day.

The mountain reaches a height of 825 feet above the ground surface and is nearly five miles in circumference at the base. Its post–Civil War history boasts a quarry that supplied building materials for the gold depository at Fort Knox, the foundation of the Lincoln Memorial, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, and the Panama Canal.⁵

Visitors today can golf, camp, and hike at the Stone Mountain theme park. They can also take a cable car ride to the summit, view laser and fireworks shows, and boat on Stone Mountain Lake.⁶ That it has the world’s largest bas-relief carving imbedded in its north face, the brainchild of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1912, is the mountain’s claim to fame. Funds were raised and a young sculptor was commissioned to design a memorial to Confederate war heroes. Gutzon Borglum envisioned a massive carving featuring Gen. Robert E. Lee.

By 1924 creative differences forced Borglum off the project. He went on to another large sculpture, Mount Rushmore in the Badlands of South Dakota. The Stone Mountain project continued under Augustus Lukeman and now featured Lee, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and Gen. Thomas Stonewall Jackson. The Confederate memorial was ultimately completed in 1970 and measures 90 by 190 feet. The surface covers an area of three acres, the size of about three football fields.

The dedication ceremony in 1970 was attended by a standing U.S. vice president, Spiro Agnew—an odd decision for a monument to leaders of a rebellion against the federal government. The mountain had become a symbol of slavery and segregation, so much so that it was mentioned in Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream Speech on August 28, 1963, when he said, Let Freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Certainly Dr. King had in mind Joseph Simmons and his fifteen adherents.⁷

On that chilly November evening in 1915, there were no miniature golf courses or laser shows. Simmons could not take a cable car ride to the top or gaze on the Confederate heroes. All that lay ahead of him was a cold rock dome with a steep trail to the summit.

William Simmons’s choice of Stone Mountain was certainly dramatic and, possibly, symbolic. Lashed atop his rental bus was a tall pine cross that the group solemnly carried to the crest of this barren slab of rock. Simmons’s followers dutifully covered the cross with excelsior and soaked it with kerosene. They gathered sixteen boulders, presumably one for each of those present, and formed a crude altar, on which rested a U.S. flag and an unsheathed sword.

Bathed in the blaze of the fiery cross, the sixteen dedicated themselves to American principles, the tenets of Protestant Christianity, and the eternal maintenance of white supremacy. Simmons described his new order as The World’s Greatest Secret, Social, Patriotic, Fraternal, Beneficiary Order . . . a High Class Order for Men of Intelligence and Character.

Simmons read a passage from the Bible. Romans 12 drips with the necessary platitudes associated with a fraternal and beneficial organization. It is not known if Simmons read the entire chapter that night, but these verses summarize the intended tone: Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it is possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. . . . Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.⁸ With that the Invisible Empire was born. Few Atlantans took notice of the orange glow in the distance.⁹

Within four years Simmons’s Klan would be near extinction, with only a few thousand loosely organized members. Yet just five years later, in 1924, thousands of Klansmen would boldly march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.; active Klan chapters would operate in all forty-eight states; the Klan would be powerful enough to influence state and national elections; and the ranks would swell to four to six million—nearly one in every three eligible men in the United States.

This uniquely American drama was played out by a fascinating cast of characters—a charismatic true believer, an amoral flim-flam man, a tough-as-nails single mother, an idealistic whistleblower, and a poetic crusader. It is a tale of violence and terror, of spectacle and sex, of hatred and hypocrisy. And, behind the scenes, it is also a story of misguided genius and unbridled greed.

CHAPTER 1

TRUE BELIEVER

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Belief creates the actual fact.

—WILLIAM JAMES

The thing always happens that you really believe in, and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

—FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

William Joseph Simmons was a good Calvinist.

Calvinists believe in original sin, sometimes called total depravity. All men are born sinful. There’s nothing you can do about it. They also believe in unconditional election, a condition also known as predestination. Some men are predestined into everlasting life. They are called the elect. Romans 8 tells Protestants that God already knows the outcome of the choices men make, and God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

William Simmons knew God had a very important plan for his life.

He was born on May 6, 1880, in Harpersville, Shelby County, Alabama, to a country doctor named Calvin Henry Simmons and his wife, Lavonia David Simmons. Little is known about Simmons’s early life, including his formal education. By his own assertion he intended to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the medical profession. Simmons claimed to have completed some premedical training at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, but researchers have not been able to find his name in the records there.¹

Since medicine was not in the cards, Simmons next considered a career in the army. Throughout U.S. history a tried-and-true path to success came through the military. Heroes have long been revered in American society. As Simmons approached his eighteenth birthday, the United States was a nation at peace. That was about to change.

In the late 1890s the United States was itching to enter the colonial arena. European powers had long held lands in South America, Africa, and the Far East. U.S. industrialists longed to operate in a mercantilist system that would provide raw materials and markets. It all began innocently enough. The United States began to focus on human rights abuses by the Spanish government in nearby Cuba. President William McKinley hoped for a diplomatic solution, but public favor for war was fanned by a journalistic corps intent on military action and newspaper sales.

How long are the Spaniards to drench Cuba with the blood and tears of her people? . . . How long shall old men and women and children be murdered by the score, the innocent victim of Spanish rage against the patriot armies they cannot conquer? . . . How long shall the United States sit idle and indifferent?²

On February 15, 1898, the U.S. Navy battleship Maine blew up in the harbor of Havana, resulting in the death of 266 American sailors. To this day it is not certain if the damage was done by Spanish forces or by some accident. Americans were positive of the former. A hesitant President McKinley received a declaration of war on April 23, 1898. Secretary of State John Hay would call the following ten-week conflict a Splendid Little War.

The navy was prepared for war. The army was not. With only twenty-eight thousand active troops, whose last significant action had come against the Plains Indians, a call went out for fifty thousand additional men. A nation hungry for adventure responded with more than two hundred thousand, both volunteers and mobilized state National Guard units.³

William Joseph Simmons was one who answered the call. The First Alabama Volunteer Infantry was organizing in Mobile in May 1898. Freshly turned eighteen, Simmons was there. Patrick McSherry’s A Brief History of the 1st Alabama Volunteer Infantry provides an interesting saga. The unit was composed of 48 officers and 941 enlisted men under the command of Col. E. L. Higdan. Simmons, William J. is found on the roster as a private in Company B, the Wheeler Rifles out of Florence, Alabama. The Alabama Volunteers trained quickly and intensely. Eventually they were stationed in Miami, Florida.

There was glory to be found in battle. No one knew that as well as the extremely ambitious Theodore Roosevelt. An architect of the navy’s preparedness as undersecretary of the navy, Roosevelt resigned and assembled a volunteer unit known as the Rough Riders. By the middle of June, Roosevelt was in Tampa, ready to embark for Cuba. On July 1 he led the assault on San Juan Hill that would eventually propel him to the presidency.

The First Alabama was not so fortunate. They reached their embarkation point, Camp Cuba Libre in Jacksonville, on August 13, 1898, the day the Spanish and the United States agreed to an armistice. Since there was no longer a need for their services, the regiment requested to be relieved from service. The soldiers returned to Birmingham, Alabama, and were given pay and a thirty-day furlough. According to McSherry, money and time off proved a recipe for disaster. There were several bloody affairs, including drunken fights and bayonet wounds, with one private shooting another to death. The men of the First Alabama were officially mustered out on October 31, 1898, in Birmingham. During its existence the First Alabama recorded the deaths of one officer and fifteen enlisted men, all from disease. A total of thirty-two soldiers were listed as deserters. McSherry concludes that the regiment proved more dangerous to themselves and to other U.S. citizens than the military forces of Spain.⁴ For young William Simmons, the experience apparently dulled any expectations of a military career.

As it turns out, a talent William Simmons did possess was with the spoken word. He was a spellbinding speaker. Soon he gravitated to the Protestant ministry, where sermon giving is central to worship. For approximately ten years Simmons was in the employ of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The denomination was an offshoot of the Methodist Episcopal Church.⁵

English theologian John Wesley founded Methodism in the eighteenth century. He was appalled by slavery, and when the Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in 1784, it officially opposed the institution. But there were congregations in the U.S. South controlled by wealthy plantation owners. In Georgia a controversy arose in the early 1840s concerning a Methodist bishop, the Reverend James Osgood Andrew. Reverend Andrew owned two slaves. The church conference voted to remove Andrew from his office unless he freed his slaves. The dispute led Methodists in the South to break off and form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1844.⁶ At the conclusion of the Civil War, freed blacks left the church to begin their own Methodist denomination, leaving the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, exclusively white.⁷

William Simmons worked as a circuit minister. Owing to the rural nature of the South, preachers often had to travel from small church to small church. These communities could not financially support a full-time pastor. Methodist Episcopal Church, South, records show that 5,368 men were employed as traveling preachers in 1892.⁸ Simmons spent his time traveling the circuit to tent revivals and camp meetings. A hell-fire-and-brimstone orator, he gained a reputation as a powerful evangelist. But in 1912 William Joseph Simmons was relieved of duty by the Alabama Methodist Conference for overspending allowances and running his churches into debt.⁹

It was during his decade in the ministry that Simmons learned he was predestined by God to perform a great mission. He received an epiphany, a spiritual event arising as a sudden flash of recognition. Later he would describe that summer evening. Sitting at his window, he had suddenly seen a row of white-robed figures on horseback riding across the sky. Behind them was a rough outline of a map of the United States. He fell to his knees in prayer. Documenting it afterward, he wrote, Ere long, I clearly conceived the embryonic medium of its supply. I then and there solemnly dedicated my life and consecrated my all, to the task of maturing that medium.¹⁰

William Simmons was no stranger to the Ku Klux Klan. Dr. Calvin Henry Simmons had been a member of the original Klan. At his father’s knee he heard many tales of the Klan’s activities. His family had African American help, and they too told the young boy of terror-filled days following the Civil War.¹¹

The history of the first Klan is, in essence, a history of post–Civil War Reconstruction. In December 1865 six young men in Pulaski, Tennessee, decided to form a social club. The war had ended in April that year. The six had been officers in the Confederate army and were looking for something to do to cure their newfound boredom. A number of the six had been college men, familiar with the southern collegiate fraternity, Kuklos Adelphon. The name translates as Circle of Brothers. They simply added clan after the word KuKlos to name the club, later changing the C to K for alliterative convenience. Initially, their sport was to dress up in robes and play the part of ghosts of Confederate dead. The targets of their pranks were superstitious former slaves. The club gained new members but remained primarily relevant in central Tennessee.¹²

Washington, D.C., dictated the next move. Abraham Lincoln had formulated a benevolent process for readmitting the rebellious southern states back into the Union. Lincoln’s untimely death at Ford’s Theatre had passed the task to his vice president, Andrew Johnson. Under the plan 10 percent of each state’s 1860 electorate was required to abolish slavery, repeal secession ordinances, and settle any Confederate war debts. Blanket amnesty was given to any ex-Confederate who swore an oath of loyalty to the United States. By November 1865 all states, with the exception of Texas, had come to terms. Newly elected congressmen were ready to return to Capitol Hill.

But these southern states began enacting Black Codes, which virtually returned black citizens to a status near slavery. This open defiance of civil rights infuriated the Radical Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, whose sole ambition was to punish the once-rebellious states. In a quick series of legislative moves, Congress passed the United States’ first Civil Rights Bill and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing freedmen full citizenship. Finally, in March 1867 Congress passed the first of several Reconstruction acts. The new southern state governments were dissolved and the former Confederacy was partitioned into military districts ruled by Union generals. New elections were held, and African Americans were empowered to vote for the first time in southern history. For southern whites the world had turned upside down.¹³

It was time for the Klan to act. In April 1867 a meeting was held in Nashville’s Maxwell House Hotel to organize and bind isolated groups together. The social situation in the South had changed significantly, and the Klan’s goal was to restore the antebellum society of white supremacy. The Klan claimed to be lovers of law and order, peace and justice. They would be just the opposite.

The conference elected as their first grand wizard Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest, who represented a solid choice for leading a terrorist organization bent on the suppression of African Americans. He was a self-made millionaire who had gained his fortune as a planter, real estate investor, and slave trader. Enlisting as a private at the onset of hostilities, Forrest quickly rose to the rank of lieutenant general, commanding an elite cavalry unit. His most infamous act during the war was the massacre of more than 250 black prisoners of war at Fort Pillow, Tennessee.¹⁴

With that a reign of terror ensued. In his The Ku Klux Klan: History, Organization, Language, Influence and Activities of America’s Most Notorious Secret Society, Michael Newton describes some of the violence:

Murders were common, and floggings more so: one victim was left crippled after he received 900 lashes on a midnight raid. In Alabama Congress documented 109 murders committed by Grand Dragon John Morgan’s knights, and that number was no doubt conservative. Klansmen burned Greene County’s courthouse, followed shortly by three schools for blacks. In Eutaw, Klan rioters killed four blacks and wounded fifty in October 1870. Georgia was worse under Grand Dragon (later Governor and U.S. Senator) John Gordon. In a three month period from August to October 1868, Klansmen killed thirty one persons, shot forty three more, stabbed five, and whipped at least fifty five, including eight floggings of 300 to 500 lashes apiece.¹⁵

Much of the Klan violence was politically inspired. Both northern carpetbaggers and freed blacks tended to vote Republican. Southern whites were overwhelmingly Democrats. Republicans, black and white, were constantly at risk. Klan threats made a significant difference in election outcomes. During the spring primary in 1868 in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, Republicans had received more than 1,100 votes. In the November election the number had slipped to 116. In Columbia County the numbers fell from 1,122 to a single vote.

Again it was time for the federal government to intervene. The Fifteenth Amendment was passed, giving the vote to all former slaves. In 1870 and 1871 Congress passed the Force Acts. These laws made it a federal offense to influence voters, to prevent citizens from voting, and to deprive one of civil rights, including life. Finally, in April 1871 a bill called the Ku Klux Act defined Klan violence as rebellion against the United States, allowing the president to declare martial law.¹⁶ President Ulysses S. Grant sent in the Seventh Cavalry to arrest and prosecute Klan terrorists. George Armstrong Custer was called in from the Indian Territories and stationed in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. (Klan activity in Elizabethtown was minimal, so Custer spent most of his time breeding horses and collecting hunting dogs.) The army intervention was effective, and organized Klan activity ceased to exist in the South.¹⁷ Imperial Wizard Forrest decreed a dissolution of the order. Organized violence was no longer necessary. But the residual effect of terror remained. Most African Americans again understood their place in southern society. The Klan would lie dormant for forty-three years.

The disputed presidential election of 1876 sealed the fate for African Americans in the South for a long time to come. The Compromise of 1877 secured twenty vital and contested electoral votes for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. The price was the removal of federal troops in the South. In 1877 the U.S. Army marched out of the former Confederacy, and Reconstruction was over.

It took little time for whites to act. Black Codes returned, as Jim Crow laws and whites regained control of state legislatures. Whites separated themselves from blacks in virtually every aspect of daily life. The antebellum socioeconomic system had been restored. Slavery was no longer legal, but it was replicated through legislative and economic control. In 1896 the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson formally validated segregation as long as it was separate but equal. Of course, it was never equal.

If God had chosen William Joseph Simmons to revive the Ku Klux Klan, he had selected a man ill prepared for the task. Simmons was a talented speaker, but, as his Methodist experience had indicated, not necessarily a gifted organizer and businessman. He needed training and found it not in the formal arena of academia but in the hard-knocks, grassroots world of early twentieth-century fraternal organizations.

The period following the Civil War could be called the Golden Age of Fraternalism. Eight hundred different fraternal organizations operated in the United States, and thirty million to sixty million people in the United States (according to the 1920 census) held membership in some fraternal group.¹⁸ Most of these organizations had their beginnings in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.

The following is a representative sampling of major fraternal organizations in the nineteenth-century United States.

The American Protective Association (1887): Two million members in 1900. Opposed Roman Catholicism. Used a patriotism theme.

Fraternal Order of Eagles (1891): Local units called aeries. Membership included many presidents and celebrities.

Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (1867): Men only. Prominent members included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy.

Ancient Order of Foresters (1832): Ritual based on Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

Free Masons (1720): Model for most fraternal groups. Influential in the formation of early U.S. government.

Knights of Columbus (1882): Catholic males eighteen and older. Answered to Free Masonry. Maltese Cross as symbol.

Knights of Pythias (1864): Based on the story of Damon and Pythias. One million members in 1920.

Junior Order of United American Mechanics of the United States of North America (1853): Two hundred thousand members in 1900. Opposed to anything non-American, including the Catholic Church.

Loyal Order of the Moose (1888): Still 1.3 million members in 1980.

Independent Order of Odd Fellows (1819): Still