Hiram Wesley Evans (September 26, 1881 – September 14, 1966) was an American white supremacist who was Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist hate group, from 1923 until his resignation in 1939. Trained as a dentist, Evans left that profession to pursue Klan leadership, ultimately becoming the organization's most influential figure during its peak period of national growth in the 1920s.
A native of Alabama, Evans attended Vanderbilt University studying dentistry. He operated a small, moderately successful practice in Texas until 1920, when he joined the Klan's Dallas chapter. He quickly rose through the ranks and was part of a group that ousted William Joseph Simmons from the position of Imperial Wizard, the national leader, in November 1922. Evans succeeded him and sought to transform the group into a political power.
Evans had led the kidnapping and torture of a black man while leader of the Dallas Klan, but as Imperial Wizard, he publicly discouraged vigilante actions for fear that they would hinder his attempts to gain political influence. In 1923, Evans presided over the largest Klan gathering in history, attended by over 200,000, and endorsed several successful candidates in 1924 elections. He moved the Klan's headquarters from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., and organized a march of 30,000 members, the largest march in the organization's history, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Evans's efforts notwithstanding, the Klan was buffeted by damaging publicity in the early 1920s, partially because of leadership struggles between Evans and his rivals, which hindered his political efforts.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression significantly decreased the Klan's income, prompting Evans to work for a construction company to supplement his pay. He resigned his position with the Klan in 1939, after disavowing anti-Catholicism. He was succeeded by his chief of staff, James A. Colescott. The next year, Evans faced accusations of involvement in a government corruption scandal in Georgia; he was fined $15,000 after legal proceedings.
Evans sought to promote a form of nativist, Protestant nationalism. In addition to his white supremacist ideology, he fiercely condemned Catholicism, trade unionism, and communism, which he associated with recent immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. He argued that Jews formed a non-American culture and resisted assimilation although he denied being an anti-Semite. Historians credit Evans with refocusing the Klan on political activities and recruiting outside the South; the Klan grew most in the Midwest and industrial cities but this political influence and membership gains he sought were transitory.
Early life and education Evans was born in Ashland, Alabama, on September 26, 1881, and moved to Hubbard, Texas, with his family as a child. The son of Hiram Martin Evans, a judge, and his wife, Georgia Evans, the younger Evans graduated from Vanderbilt University. Shortly after, he became a dentist, receiving his license in 1900. He married Ellen "Bama" Hill in 1923; they had three children together.
Evans established a small, moderately successful dentistry practice in Downtown Dallas that provided inexpensive services. Rumors later arose that his dental qualifications were "a bit shady." A Protestant, Evans attended a church belonging to the Disciples of Christ denomination. He was also a Freemason. Evans described himself as "the most average man in America." Of average height and somewhat overweight, Evans was well dressed, a skilled speaker, and very ambitious.
Initial Klan activities Conceived by its founders as a continuation of the Reconstruction-era Klan (controversially linked to General Nathan Bedford Forrest), the revived Ku Klux Klan had been established in Atlanta in 1915. Leading up to his involvement in the Klan, Evans had a significant personal involvement in Freemasonry. He was initially raised in Dallas Lodge No. 760 in July 1907 under the Grand Lodge of Texas. Evans was involved in both York Rite (including the Masonic "Knights Templar") and Scottish Rite freemasonry. Evans was raised to the Thirty-Second Degree at the Dallas Consistory in April 1913. He was also a member of the Shriners, having joined the Hella Temple at Dallas in April 1911. Within the York Rite, Evans was a Past Master of Pentagon Lodge No. 1080 in Dallas. Bertram G. Christie, the founder of the Dallas Klan in 1920, was also a mason and met with Evans and a few of his fellow masons belonging to the Pentagon Lodge in March 1921, such as George K. Butcher.
The following month, Evans was involved in his first Klan vigilante activity when he took part in the flogging and branding of Alex Johnson on April 1, 1921. According to a contemporary report in the Denton Record-Chronicle, Johnson was a "Negro bus boy" who was being investigated by the police after he had been discovered in the room of a white woman guest at the hotel."Masked men at Dallas take Negro Bellboy, give him flogging and brand him with 'KKK' across forehead", Denton Record-Chronicle (1921)
Evans left his dental practice so that he could dedicate all his time to the group. In 1921, he was elected as "exalted cyclops", a recruiting position sometimes referred to as kleagle, in the Dallas Klan No. 66. When he was elected, the Dallas Klan had recently received a "self-ruling charter" from the Atlanta-based leadership and was the group's largest chapter. The same year, Evans was appointed to the position of "great titan" (executive) of the "Realm of Texas" and proceeded to lead a successful membership drive for the state's Klan.
Evans initially supported violence against minorities, remembering a lynching he witnessed as a child. With the Texas Klan, he sought to create "black squads" to attack minorities. He joined several Klan members in kidnapping and torturing a black bellhop and etching the letters KKK into his forehead with acid, ostensibly because they suspected he was involved in pandering prostitutes. Atlanta-based leaders pressured Evans to curb racial violence in Dallas; around then, the Texas Klan had received significant negative publicity after castrating an African-American doctor. Although Evans was not morally opposed to violence against minorities, he publicly condemned vigilante activity because he feared that it would attract government scrutiny and hinder potential Klan-backed political campaigning. The change of stance led the leader of the Houston Klan to accuse him of hypocrisy. Although Evans later took credit for a decrease in lynchings in the Southern United States during the 1920s, several Klan members claimed that he surreptitiously encouraged and presided over acts of violence against minorities.
In 1921, Evans was assigned to oversee the Klan's national membership drive at the behest of their publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke. In 1922, the group's leadership made Evans the "Imperial kligrapp", a role similar to national secretary, in which capacity he oversaw operations in 13 states. He received a base salary of $7,500 and traveled throughout the country, regularly meeting with local Klan leaders.
Early national leadership In 1922, Evans joined a group of Klan activists, including Tyler, Clarke, and D. C. Stephenson, in a "coup" against William Joseph Simmons, the group's leader. They deceived Simmons into agreeing to a reorganization of the Klan that removed his practical control; Simmons said that they had claimed that if he remained the Imperial Wizard of the Klan, discord would hamper the organization. Evans gained power and was formally ensconced as Imperial Wizard of the Klan at a 1923 "Klonvokation" in Atlanta, Georgia. Although a legal battle between Evans and Simmons ensued, during which time Simmons was the Klan's titular "emperor," Evans retained control of the Klan. He initially said that he had been unaware of a pending coup until after he was selected. However, by the end of their feud, he described Simmons as the "leader of Bolshevik Klansmen betraying the movement" and later expelled the former leader.
As the leader of the Klan, Evans advanced a form of nativist, white supremacy that cast Protestantism as a fundamental part of American patriotism. To Evans, whiteness and Protestantism were equally valued and sometimes conflated: he said the Klan supported the "uncontaminated growth of Anglo-Saxon civilization". He maintained the belief that white Protestants had the exclusive right to govern the US because they were the descendants of the early colonists, whom he described as fleeing Europe for the US to escape its societal bounds. He admitted that many Klan members were of rural, uneducated backgrounds but argued that power should be given to "the common people of America." In a pamphlet entitled Ideals of the Ku Klux Klan, Evans described the Klan as follows:
This is a white man's organization. This is a gentile organization. It is an American organization. It is a Protestant organization.
Under Evans, the Klan supported a mixture of right-wing and left-wing political positions, which were described by Thomas Pegram of Loyola University Maryland as "too much of a patchwork to be considered an ideological system." Klan literature spoke highly of politicians such as Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, and Grover Cleveland. Evans borrowed numerous concepts from the writings of Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, American writers of the period who promoted eugenics and scientific racism, and he attempted to cast his platforms as if they were based on science. Evans attacked immigrants by arguing that they would promote ideologies such as anarchism and communism, were threats to national unity, and were involved with bootlegging during Prohibition. He considered immigrants "ignorant, superstitious, religious devotees" intent on earning money in the US before retiring to their homelands. However, he supported immigration of whom he deemed "Nordic."
Evans also argued against miscegenation, and Catholic and Jewish immigration on the grounds that they were threats to genetic "good stock," a racial division that was widely supported among white Americans. Evans believed the Catholic Church sought to take control of the US government; he also questioned American Catholics' loyalty to their country, writing that they were subject to their priests, and, as such, to the entire Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Pope. In other writings, he expressed fears that the Catholic Church, in alliance with Jews and non-white Protestant groups, was becoming increasingly active in politics and thus blurring the separation of church and state.
Under Evans's leadership, the Klan became active in Indiana and Illinois, rather than focusing on the Southeast, as it had done in the past. It also grew in Michigan, where 40,000 members, more than half its total, lived in Detroit. It became characterized as an organization prominent in urban areas of the Midwest, where it attracted native-born Americans competing for industrial jobs with recent immigrants. It also attracted members in Nebraska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington.
Evans appointed Stephenson, his early collaborator, as kleagle and Grand Dragon of Indiana. The relationship between the two leaders quickly became acrimonious; Stephenson clashed with Evans over the distribution of membership fees and became embittered after Evans refused to help fund the purchase of a school in Indiana. Although Stephenson believed Evans had deliberately thwarted his attempt to purchase the school to limit his power, Evans unexpectedly promoted Stephenson to Grand Dragon of the "northern realm" in July 1923.
Historian Leonard Joseph Moore of McGill University contends that Evans paid particular attention to the Indiana Klan out of financial self-interest since it was the largest state branch.