THE HISTORY of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States is not a continuous one; there were three distinct periods of Klan activity:
The first Klan was organized in Tennessee in 1867, and quickly evolved into a terrorist organization of hooded nightriders who fought Reconstruction in the South. Opposed by the federal soldiers who occupied the former Confederacy until 1877, that early Klan soon faded away.
The most recent Klan emerged in the 1960s as a way to oppose racial integration and the Civil Rights movement. Today it has been pretty well bankrupted by civil lawsuits, but some of its members march on.
The Klan of the 1920s had the same name, the same hooded costumes, and the same burning crosses as the others, but it wasn't just an anti-black organization; most of its negative energies were aimed at recent immigrants, Roman Catholics, and Jews. An organization of white Protestants who supported prohibition and "100% Americanism," the '20s Klan often attracted the leading citizens of a community.
This '20s incarnation of the Klan also might have been the first demonstration of the power of Hollywood. D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was the first blockbuster epic, and cinematic historians credit it with many innovations. It was also extremely racist. Based on The Clansman, a work by Thomas Dixon, the film portrayed the KKK as heroic defenders of virtue and order during Reconstruction. The movie's popularity made the Klan more than historic trivia. In 1915, William Joseph Simmons met with 15 other men on Stone Mountain in Georgia to form the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
In ways, by serving as a business and social organization steeped in ritual, the reborn Klan resembled the secret-society lodges (Masons, Odd Fellows, Woodsmen, etc.) that were a fixture of American life then. And there was money to be made by selling memberships and literature (like the Kloran) to a revived Klan. The $10 annual membership fee was a klecktoken and $8 of that went to the national organization.
The Klan was also a political machine that got its own candidates in charge of several states, including Colorado. Klansmen would pack both Republican and Democratic caucuses, support their candidates at elections, and then enjoy the power and patronage that came with electoral victories.
Given its emphasis on enforcing Prohibition and its opposition to immigrants and Catholics, the Klan generally had more success infecting the Republicans; Democrats were softer on Prohibition, and Catholics and immigrants were a major Democratic constituency.
THE KLAN'S best known Colorado leader ("Grand Dragon") was John Galen Locke, a Denver physician who headed the state's largest klavern with headquarters on the second floor of the Brown Palace Hotel. He began recruiting members in 1921. In 1923, Benjamin Stapleton became mayor of Denver with Klan support, and during those years, Klan organizers (kleagles) scoured the state, enlisting new members to form new klaverns.
The Klan's power was demonstrated in the state elections of 1924. Its candidate, Republican Clarence Morley, won the governorship, and his KKK membership was no secret: "Not for myself, mind you, do I wish to run, but for the benefit of the Klan. We must clean up the statehouse and place only Americans on guard."
Klansmen were also elected to the U.S. Senate, the state legislature, and a host of local offices. On the state level, they weren't able to accomplish much, on account of a legislative coalition of Democrats and disaffected Republicans, and they soon fell from power.
There were Klan chapters scattered around the state, and Frémont County had one of the most active, according to the 1981 book Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado by Robert Alan Goldberg.
He notes that the Colorado Klan wasn't monolithic. The Denver klavern engaged in boycotts and occasional violent intimidation. In Grand Junction, it wasn't much more than a fraternal organization, and in Cañon City, it was something of a progressive force in city government, organizing against the "old guard" to pave the streets, add parks, and build new schools.
The Klan promoted itself as a way to promote patriotism and "100% Americanism." It was Protestant and opposed to crime, especially violation of prohibition. In Central Colorado, there weren't many Jews or African-Americans to pick on, and so most Klan energy was directed against Italian immigrants, since they were Roman Catholics who drank wine (one of Morley's campaign planks was to outlaw sacramental wine).
The Klan was strong in Denver and Pueblo. Even though Colorado Springs, then as now, was a Republican bastion, the Klan made little headway there -- its principled Republican leaders, and its newspaper, attacked the Klan relentlessly.
As for Cañon, Goldberg concludes, "The positive and negative impact of the Ku Klux Klan was most clearly visible in Cañon City. Klan leaders, aided by their religious, political, and fraternal connections, mobilized a diverse coalition in support of a conventional program of civic reform and improvements.... The Klan bank and newspaper were attempts to decentralize economic and opinion-making power. The triumph of reform, however, was as dependent on anti-Catholicism as good citizenship.... The bigotry upon which the Klan fed did not vanish with the last fiery cross."
In 1925, a Baptist minister from Cañon City became Colorado's leading Klansman, the Grand Dragon. But by then, the Klan was already in decline.
Its shadow, however, lingered into the 1930s, according to Goldberg, and even into the "1940s when Catholic voters suffered occasional harassment from ex-Klan poll watchers. As late as the 1950s, the stores of some merchants remained off limits to Catholics. The tensions of the Klan period left scars in the minds of older residents that have not healed to this day."