ON THE AFTERNOON OF TUESDAY, AUGUST 7, 1923, members of the Ku Klux Klan from southeast Arkansas gathered on an athletic field at the Fourth District State Agricultural School just south of Monticello. At 5:00 P.M. they lined up their Model T Fords and drove through Monticello to boldly display their white sheets and other regalia. Large crowds gathered on the streets to see the Klansmen riding in their cars, sitting stiff-backed and staring straight ahead. As the whole community watched, Klan members drove up South Main Street and circled the courthouse on the town square. This parade produced images that were vivid and frightening.I After the parade, the Klansmen reassembled at a secret location near the town square and ate barbecue and watermelon. Seventeen Monticello men as well as others from nearby communities were naturalized into the order. It was a big day for the Klan, the first public demonstration of their presence in the southeastern section of the state. This local Klan group was exceptional in that membership lists and minutes of their weekly meetings have survived. These documents enable us to see them behind their masks, exposing their identities as well as their activities. We also have a chance to study the Klan in a small town whose population was more notable for its uniformity than for diversity. The 1920s Klan differed from both the Klan of Reconstruction and the Klan of the 1950s and 1960s. The Reconstruction Klan, a vigilante group that used force and intimidation to keep blacks from voting, was limited to southern states that were fighting Republican control. The later Klan of the civil rights era consisted of white supremacists who were similarly willing to use violence in their fight against integration in the South. In contrast, the 1920s Klan was not only a nationwide movementstronger in the North than in the South-but also less violent and more political. Its prejudices were broader, directed against bootleggers, prostitutes, gamblers, immigrants, Catholics, rebellious teenagers, and political radicals. Until recently, these Klansmen have been understood to be citizens of small, provincial towns and villages who were victims of isolation and ignorance. Harboring a deep suspicion of cities and cosmopolitan values, they were religious fundamentalists who opposed modernism. Socially, Klan members were found in lower middle-class or blue-collar occupations, and supposedly joined the organization out of resentment against blacks and immigrants with whom they competed economically.2 In short, the consensus among historians was that the 1920s Klan was a fringe group made up of marginal white men-provincial misfits whom the social changes created through modernization had passed by. They reacted against the evils of the city with its modernist values and greater economic success.3 The Klan, then, was an outburst of hatred, ignorance, and anxiety over lost status. New studies of the Klan have questioned this interpretation.4 The main weakness of the older consensus view was always a lack of evidence. Nothing very much has been known about rank-and-file Klansmen, or what the Klan sought to achieve in the early 1920s. Recent historians, however, have employed new evidence that enabled them to probe beneath the newspaper stories and to focus on Klansmen themselves and their agenda. As a secret organization, the Klan naturally left no public records. Over the years a few membership lists and minute books have surfaced for several communities scattered across the country. The most remarkable example of this kind of evidence was the discovery of almost the entire Klan membership list for Indiana, the state with the largest Klan membership in the 1920s.5 This new evidence has resulted in a changed image of the 1920s Klan, rendering it less nativist and more populist than in the traditional view.6 In a series of studies published in the 1990s, historians have depicted the Klan as a middle-class movement with a religious and moral basis, a movement that emphasized legal and political approaches to solving what they saw as a serious moral crisis in American society. …