Contrary to its traditionalist image, the Klan actively recruited women, with about half a million joining. It supported women's right to vote and work, viewing female voters as key to advancing its white Protestant agenda. Women became crucial organizers, planners, and activists for the movement.

The Klan used a repeatable playbook to infiltrate local churches. Organizers would march into a service, give a donation to the minister (often a secret member), and receive a public endorsement, effectively converting entire congregations and gaining crucial social proof.

The Klan's explosive growth was not organic. PR professionals Edward Young Clark and Elizabeth Tyler treated the organization as a product, designing an aggressive sales operation and marketing message that resonated with public anxieties, transforming a failing club into a national force.

The KKK's success was not just about violence but about creating a social movement. It hosted picnics, parades, and even circuses, embedding its hateful ideology into ordinary, taken-for-granted community life for millions of white Protestants, making it seem normal and even wholesome.

The Indiana Klan operated a highly effective political organization. It compiled detailed data on all political candidates, published approved slates in church newsletters, and organized massive get-out-the-vote efforts, successfully installing a governor and dominating the state legislature.

The Klan's popularity waned partly because it succeeded. The passage of the restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and the spread of state-level eugenics laws meant two of its central political objectives had been codified into law, making the organization itself seem less necessary to its members.

Following its demise, the KKK's violent legacy was completely sanitized by the 'Lost Cause' mythology. Academic historians and popular culture, most notably D.W. Griffith's 1915 film 'The Birth of a Nation', recast the Klan not as racist terrorists but as swashbuckling defenders of civilization, a narrative that enabled its eventual rebirth.

Contrary to the image of a fringe movement, the Klan was composed of and led by the Southern elite. Eyewitness accounts consistently identified lawyers, doctors, planters, and sheriffs as perpetrators of the violence. This highlights how extremist movements can be driven by the most powerful and 'respectable' members of a society.

While not a perfect match for European fascism—it lacked a single charismatic leader and expansionist war goals—the 1920s KKK shared key traits: a cult of victimhood, paramilitary violence, mass rituals, and a demographic base of anxious, middle-class Protestants and small businessmen.