Hooded Progressivism

Jesse Walker has a fantastic article at Reason,"Hooded Progressivism: The secret reformist history of the Ku Klux Klan." The article shows that the 1920s KKK were largely progressivist, nativist nationalists, with hotbeds in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, not exclusively the South, and rather mainstream.

It begins:

It didn't take long for America's first blockbuster feature film to produce its first creepy fan subculture. Right before the Atlanta debut of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, an epic that glorified the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, William Joseph Simmons and 11 others celebrated Thanksgiving by burning a cross atop Stone Mountain and declaring the KKK reborn. A week later, on December 4, 1915, they received a charter from the state of Georgia for their new organization, dubbed The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc.