page_title: Hiram Wesley Evans
section_title: Early national leadership
hierarchical_section_title: Hiram Wesley Evans / Early national leadership
caption_attribution_description: English: This image is a faithful digitalization of an advertisement of a KKK "State Parade" to be held on November 19, 1926 in Wichita, Kansas, and stating Hiram Wesley Evans was scheduled to give address at the rally.
context_page_description: Hiram Wesley Evans was the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an American white supremacist group, from 1922 to 1939. A native of Alabama, Evans attended Vanderbilt University and became a dentist. He operated a small, moderately successful practice in Texas until 1920, when he joined the Klan's Dallas chapter. He quickly rose through the ranks and was part of a group that ousted William Joseph Simmons from the position of Imperial Wizard, the national leader, in November 1922. Evans succeeded him and sought to transform the group into a political power.
  Evans had led the kidnapping and torture of a black man while leader of the Dallas Klan, but as Imperial Wizard, he publicly discouraged vigilante actions for fear that they would hinder his attempts to gain political influence. In 1923, Evans presided over the largest Klan gathering in history, attended by over 200,000, and endorsed several successful candidates in 1924 elections. He moved the Klan's headquarters from Atlanta to Washington, DC, and organized a march of 30,000 members, the largest march in the organization's history, on Pennsylvania Avenue.
context_section_description: In 1922, Evans joined a group of Klan activists, including Tyler, Clarke, and D. C. Stephenson, in a "coup" against William Joseph Simmons, the group's leader. They deceived Simmons into agreeing to a reorganization of the Klan that removed his practical control; Simmons said that they had claimed that if he remained the Imperial Wizard of the Klan, discord would hamper the organization. Evans gained power and was formally ensconced as Imperial Wizard of the Klan at a November 1922 "Klovokation" in Atlanta, Georgia. Although a legal battle between Evans and Simmons ensued, during which time Simmons was titular "emperor," Evans retained control. He initially said that he had been unaware of a pending coup until after his selection. However, by the end of their feud, he described Simmons as the "leader of Bolshevik Klansmen betraying the movement" and later expelled the former leader.
  As leader of the Klan, Evans advanced a form of nativist, white supremacy that cast Protestantism as a fundamental part of American patriotism. To Evans, whiteness and Protestantism were equally valued and sometimes conflated: he said the Klan supported the "uncontaminated growth of Anglo-Saxon civilization". He maintained that white Protestants had the exclusive right to govern the US because of their descent from early colonists, whom he described as fleeing Europe for the US to escape its societal bounds. He admitted that many Klan members were of rural, uneducated backgrounds but argued that power should be given to "the common people of America." In a pamphlet entitled Ideals of the Ku Klux Klan, Evans described the Klan as follows:
  This is a white man's organization.
  This is a gentile organization.
  It is an American organization.
  It is a Protestant organization.
  Under Evans, the Klan supported a mix of right-wing and left-wing political positions, which were described by Thomas Pegram of Loyola University Maryland as "too much of a patchwork to be considered an ideological system." Klan literature spoke highly of politicians such as Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, and Grover Cleveland. Evans borrowed numerous concepts from the writings of Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, American writers of the period who promoted eugenics and scientific racism, and attempted to cast his platforms as based in science. Evans attacked immigrants by arguing that they would promote ideologies such as anarchism and communism, were threats to national unity, and were involved with bootlegging during Prohibition. He considered immigrants "ignorant, superstitious, religious devotees" intent on earning money in the US before retiring to their homelands. However, he supported immigration of whom he deemed "Nordic."
  Evans also argued against miscegenation and Catholic and Jewish immigration on the grounds that they were threats to genetic "good stock," a racial division that was widely supported among white Americans. Evans opposed Catholicism because he believed that the Catholic Church sought to take control of the US government; he also questioned American Catholics' loyalty to their country, writing that they were subject to their priests, and, as such, to the entire Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Pope. In other writings, he expressed fears that the Catholic Church, in alliance with Jews and non-white Protestant groups, was becoming increasingly active in politics and thus blurring the separation of church and state.
  Under Evans' leadership, the Klan became active in Indiana and Illinois, rather than focusing on the Southeast, as it had done in the past. It also grew in Michigan, where 40,000 members, more than half its total, lived in Detroit. It became characterized as an organization prominent in urban areas of the Midwest, where it attracted native-born Americans competing for industrial jobs with recent immigrants. It also attracted members in Nebraska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington.
  Evans appointed Stephenson, his early collaborator, as kleagle and Grand Dragon of Indiana. The relationship between the two leaders quickly became acrimonious
caption: Advertisement for a KKK rally to be held on November 19, 1926, in Wichita, Kansas, at which Evans would speak[28]
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