The Ku-Klux Klan was an organization that first appeared in the South after the Civil War. The name comes from the Greek word kyklos, which means circle. The Klan as found at Pulaski, TN, in 1866, as a local group for war veterans. But many Southerners began to use the Klan to terrorize former slaves. The Klan spread rapidly throughout the ex-Confederate states. In 1867, the group was formally reorganized a the "Invisible Empire of the South" with a "grand wizard" at the head of the organization. Each realm (state) was ruled by a "grand dragon," and a "grand titan" headed each "province" (county). A "grand cyclops" ruled each "den" (local unit). During the Reconstruction period, freed Negroes, scalawags, and carpetbaggers from the North gained control of Southern state and local governments. Klansmen tried to prevent the Negroes from voting, and threatened white allies of the Negroes. They rode at night, wearing masks and white cardboard hats. They draped themselv! es and their horses in white sheets. The Klan grew more violent. Klansmen frightened, flogged, tortured, and lynched Negroes and Negro sympathizers. But the Klan was not guilty of all the crimes committed in its name. It was only one of many organizations that used disguises, secrecy, and terror against the Negroes. Finally, even the Klan's officers were eager to put an end to the organization, and they disbanded it in 1869. But the Klan did not die. In 1871, Congress passed the Force Bills, which gave the President power to suppress the Klan as a conspiracy against the government. After Southern whites regained control of their state governments, there was no longer any excuse for the Klan and it soon disappeared. A new Ku-Klux Klan was organized in Atlanta, Georgia in 1915. Klansmen burned fiery crosses and lynched people whose behavior they did not like. By the 1920s, it had broadened is scope of paranoid hatred to include Catholics and Jews as well as African Americans and saw its membership rise to five million by 1929. Revived were traditional antipathies towards Catholics (that loyalty to the Pope made them unfit Americans) and warned of their growing political and social power in America. The Klan was popular in the North, especially the Midwest, as well as the South. The Klan was particularly strong in Indiana and therefore the University of Notre Dame came under consistent rhetorical attacks. On one occasion, Klansmen arrived at South Bend to attend a Klan rally and were beaten by an angry posse of Notre Dame students. This rising tide of anti-Catholicism helps explain the vicious character of the 1928 presidential campaign in which much was made of AL SMITH's Catholicism. Few decades in American history had been so characterized by prosperity and optimism as the 1920s. Irish-Americans, with rising levels of education, income, and membership in the professions, enjoyed the good times as much as any other group. For many of them, the man who embodied their rising fortunes was Al SMITH, the boy from the mean streets of Manhattan who had risen to become a four-term governor of New York State, and in 1928, he was the Democratic nominee for President. Optimistic and jovial by nature, Irish Catholic SMITH was stunned by the cold response he received in the American Heartland. Vicious editorials and speeches by anti-Catholic demagogues hurt even more. The candidate that urban Americans saw as the epitome of the self-made man and bighearted public official was elsewhere viewed with fear as! the proponent of popery, demon rum, foreign values, and Jazz-era depravity. SMITH did not lose the election of 1928 to Herbert HOOVER solely because he was Irish Catholic, but he lost ugly and big because of it.