was necessary precisely in order to protect democracy. They
believed that true democracy sprang from the virtue of a white,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant civilization, and they wanted to protect it
against alien subversion.

One of the main "protectors" of white American civilization was the Ku
Klux Klan. The original Klan had thrived in the deep South immediately
after the Civil War. In 1915, it underwent a revival. Inspired by the
migration of Afro-Americans from the South into the North and West as
well as by the gigantic immigration of South and East Europeans, the
Klan, beginning in Georgia, rapidly spread beyond the South into a
national movement. Confidently believing in the superiority of its own
democratic way of life, America had thrown open its doors to the hungry
and oppressed of Europe. American society took pride in being the world's
great melting pot. However, many old-stock Americans did not view their
society as being a cultural amalgam, and they expected that the new
European immigrants, as well as the Afro-Americans, would want to be
assimilated into their society as it already existed. When they promised
the newcomers freedom and equality, many of these Americans were offering
these benefits expecting that the immigrants would adjust and conform.
They did not believe that the values and life style of foreigners were
equal to their own, and therefore they did not want to grant the
outsiders the freedom to "pollute" American society with alien cultures.
When it became evident that American Negroes as well as many of these new
immigrants were not able to be absorbed into white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant America as easily as had been expected, many ardent patriots
became panic-stricken over the future of the American way of life. This
sense of terror drove them to take extreme action in its defense.

The invisible empire of the Ku Klux Klan was the most militant and best
organized of several defenders of this kind of American patriotism. It
built its power on a series of appeals which had deep roots throughout
American life. During the 1920s, anti-Semitism was widespread, and many
respectable hotels and clubs were closed to Jews. Discrimination against
foreign-born Americans was prevalent. Many patriotic and artistic
societies were exclusively for native-born Americans. Discrimination
against Afro-Americans was a national phenomenon, but in the South it was
an orthodox social and political creed.

The revi