Klan didn't exist in 1908 anyway.
Liar
It was started in 1866 as a Gentlman's club. Nice way of putting it. They were created to try and stop the Reconstruction started in 1866 that the Republicans in power in Washington had started. They were against making Blacks equal to Whites.
Need some corrections here. 1865 versus 1866 is not a long time but it was started in 1865 as a joke social club. That's why it has all the silly K-alliteration (klan, klavern, kleagle etc). It was a college-fraternity type prank group. Within a short time though the name and the mysterious dressings were taken over by neighboring vigilante groups -- that would be the 1866. And it was one of dozens of similar such groups around the South, local and regional, usually secretive, such as the "Knights of the White Camellia" and the "Society of the White Rose". One of them, the "White League", was the instigator in the event memorialized in the monument in New Orleans that was the first one to be taken down recently in the Lost Cause monument removals.
But these were formed
before Reconstruction began and before Republicans arrived in the South. Their common mission was in a broad sense "keeping order" in the chaos of postwar chaos, which in their case always included white supremacy
in that order. This is also reflected in some of the groups' names, e.g. the "Heroes of America" (South Carolina), the "Knights of the Black Cross (Mississippi), the "Knights of the Red Hand", the "Knights of the Rising Sun" (Texas 1868) the "Knights of the White Carnation" (Alabama) and directly addressing the white supremacy thing, the "White Line" of Mississippi and the "White Brotherhood" of North Carolina.
Indeed the 1915 reincarnation of the defunct Klan by Simmons was officially called the "
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" and took some of its first members from the "Knights of Mary Phagan", a vigilante group that had lynched her accused killer Leo Frank. This was always a social force that saw itself as a "chivalrous" keeper of the social order --- meaning the old traditional social order of course.
So it's a common misconclusion to presume they were formed to "oppose Republicans" but the fact is they were already there when Republicans and Reconstruction arrived, and they saw the infiltration as one more (two more) influences to resist. In many ways these groups, commonly formed and/or populated by ex-Confederate soldiers, were in their mind continuing a war they didn't want to concede.
Anyway that Klan --- the original one --- was extinct by the middle of the 1870s, so when "Birth of a Nation" depicted Klanners in robes it was hearkening back to lost stories of a Lost Cause. It was also dressing it up with burning crosses, which the first Klan never did. That was purely a movie affectation. From that film sprang the re-formation of the Klan, late in the same year of 1915.
They started out backing the Democratic Party but during the New Deal, they bailed and started supporting the Republican Party that had more or less changed position with the old Democratic Party. During the late 50s and early 60s was when the first hints of getting rid of the Jim Crowe Laws and Practices. During that time, there were many, many lynchings, burning alive, beating to death and more.
Actually that terrorism had started immediately after the Civil War, due to the sudden upset of the old social order in that slaves were now free. They would often be beaten for having the temerity to walk into town or inquire about a job or making eye contact. There was
rampant terrorism among the postwar chaos, including at least one case where a victim was skinned --
skinned, and the carcass hung as warning to other blacks. Our history books kind of "forget" to describe the degree of this chaos but these are the elements that would form dozens of white supremacy groups of the time.
It's all a little too convenient, and a little too façile, for these message board wags to paint a simplistic picture of "oh well, they were Democrats and they didn't like Republicans so they killed them" and keep one's message board post to a short paragraph, but the reality is far FAR more complex than that and has to do with social factors that cut way deeper than political parties.
What many don't remember is that the first Civil Rights were started by the Republicans, mainly, Ike. Kennedy and Johnson expanded on it. But somewhere in history Ike's roll has been left out.
Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman and Roosevelt all made inroads in their time, timidly at first owing to the social resistance to it. The only
Southern POTUS of the first half of the 20th Century, Wilson, regressed it -- which also anticipates the analysis of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in that it was opposed by Southerners regardless of party and supported by everybody else regardless of party. In the same way Wilson the opposer of civil rights was a Democrat (as were Thurmond, Wallace et al) but their opponents pushing for civil rights (Humphrey, Kennedy, Johnson et al) were also Democrats; they just weren't from the South.
The KKK will always claim to be whatever Party that suits them. Criminals really don't have a Party Affiliation. Outside of being criminal. We spend way too much time trying to use nicey nicey labels for them. They aren't nice and they are just criminals.
Exactly. Well said.
Historian Elaine Franz Parsons described (the first Klan):
>> Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime
guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. <<