Hiram Wesley Evans

Hiram Wesley Evans (1881–1966) was Imperial Wizard of the "second" Ku Klux Klan from 1922 until 1939.

The second Klan, often called the KKK of the 1920s, was established by failed minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and William J. Simmons in 1915 on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. The first KKK (1865-1869) existed to oppose Reconstruction and maintain white control over former slaves in the regions of the former Confederate States of America.

The second Klan was also anti-African American, but it had a much wider agenda than the first. A nativist group, it was anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-labor union, and anti-socialist. It was also supportive of the temperance movement and alcohol prohibition, which it pledged to enforce.

Evans was a 32nd degree Mason who boasted of having helped re-elect Coolidge, of having secured passage of strict anti-immigration laws and of having checked the ambitions of Catholics and others intent on "perverting" the nation.

Evans' books include The Menace of Modern Immigration (1923), The Klan of Tomorrow (1924), Alienism in the Democracy (1927) The Rising Storm (1929), and The Klan Fights for Americanism. Evans' writing ended as the fortunes of the Klan faltered and then imploded by 1930. Evans later betrayed the rest of the KKK members when, in 1939, he sold the clan's mailing list, thereby revealing all members of the KKK.

Sources

• Hiram Wesley Evans from the Handbook of Texas Online
• Alexander, Charles C. The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965.