s;s. Almost fifty years after the Civil War, the Klan reemerged in America. It started up in Atlanta, Georgia by a former preacher named Col. William J. Simmons (1880-1945) in 1915. It began as a patriotic, Protestant, fraternal society that went by the name of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Membership was open to native-born, white, Protestant, males. In the beginning of the second movement the enrolment was only in the thousands within the next couple of month it would grow to 100,000 members nation wide. Disgusted by anther up rise of the KKK the New York World wrote an expose defying the beliefs of the KKK (Maclean 15). In the next 4 months membership would break the 1 million mark. By the mid 20's there were over 600 secret societies and over 5 million members nation wide (Maclean 32), this was course was the highest count of the KKK.
             To define an organization of the Ku Klux Klan is an enigma of many historians. Most historians either take the side of the Ku Klux Klan (a.k.a. the KKK) or as most show how hateful and immoral the KKK were. One is not saying these ideas are wrong or right but both should be heard for one to determine the truth of what the KKK really was and really stood for. Behind the Mask of Chivalry describes how and why the Ku Klux Klan rose in popularity in the 1920s--through campaigns over issues perceived by members to threaten their middle class family values, yet always serving a larger agenda of racial hatred. W.E.B. Dubois once said "Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn to the stake is a knot, Large or small, of normal human beings and these humans at heart are desperately afraid of something". The KKK was deeply afraid of something but what and why? Maclean goes into detail of why the KKK were against the Jews because they believed that they controlled world affairs, and that white people should be ready for a ...