The second generation KKK has a hilarious story of how it rose and fell. The Klan was pretty much dead until the mid-1910s, when Birth of a Nation came out. The film basically created "Klan-Mania", especially after Woodrow Wilson held one of the film's first screenings at the White House, making the film super trendy. Wilson even endorsed the film's take on Reconstruction and the KKK (describing it as "history written with lightning"), after seeing it, giving the narrative of the film extra credibility.
It spawned "Klan Mania", as people in the South formed new chapters of the Klan in the wake of the film's release, which quickly organized into a national network. One chief difference in the second generation KKK (not present in the first incarnation of the KKK but carried over to later revivals) was that it expanded it's list of hated subjects from just blacks to include Jews and Catholics, along with anti-prohibitionist supporters and loose women; especially loose women who consorted with blacks and drank.
Not just poor racists joined but also wealthy elites and political officials, as the KKK became a social club for the politically connected to join. It's where the cliched "Good Old Boys Club" came into being and that in a lot of towns and cities which were controlled by the Democrats, you couldn't even get elected dog catcher unless you were a part of the Klan. To the extent that you had shit like Harry Truman being a KKK member, as he had to join the Klan just to be able to have a political career and quickly abandoned said membership once he garnered enough political power to do so without any retribution from the KKK for leaving.
The Klan ultimately fell due to a sex scandal where one of the national leaders of the KKK got caught kidnapping, raping, and murdering a woman. The sordid details of the crime (which included him holding her prisoner as a sex slave, biting her flesh like an animal as part of his demented idea of foreplay, and other degrading sexual violations) and the revelation that the top brass of the KKK were secret drunks (in spite of the image of them being 100% anti-drink) and sexual deviants who whored around in private, decimated the Klan's public image of being "protectors against degeneracy" they presented publicly. Adding to this, the leader in question outright DOXED every known Klansman in his state, releasing their names to the press as retaliation for the Democrat governor basically told him to fuck off when he begged said governor to void his conviction via pardon.
The scandals and the fallout decimated the second generation KKK, which never fully recovered from the scandal.
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