The Klan’s moral crusade fractured communities and bred lawless opposition

Evidence

It was ironical but inevitable that the Klan crusade to purify and stabilize spread contamination and strife everywhere it went. The secrecy with which the order operated served to cloak many an act of private vengeance. With poetic justice it was held re- sponsible for crimes and cruelties that others committed in its name. Still worse, the Klan rent families, communities, and states, turning husband against wife, neighbor against neighbor, and man against man, until it compacted an opposition as lawless as itself. And while hatred bred hatred outside its ranks, the poison of corruption worked within. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1783

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s question of what happens when a manufactured threat is corrected or collapses — here the crusade manufactures its own opposition.