HOW IT STARTED
According to the story which has lived south of the Mason and Dixon line since those post-bellum days, a group of youths cooling their heels in a law office one May evening in 1866 organized a society for a good time. If anyone had suggested to them at that time that five years later a committee of congress would devote thirteen volumes to a history of their "movement" and pass a law to suppress it, or that before the child of their wits was fully grown it would have developed into a terrorizing "hobgoblin" sheeted for lawlessness, they would have thought it a jest.
When their mere joke had become a grim joke, neighbors who feared it found in its name "Ku-Klux" the suggestion of a clicking rifle. But the name itself was proposed by its charter members in Tennessee as a derivative of the Greek word "Kuklos," meaning a circle. From "Kuklos" to "Ku-Klux" was an easy transition. The "Klan" followed because these youthful students of Greek had an ear for the alliterative.
From the Pulaski law office the society migrated to a haunted house on the outskirts of the village. Its members found their first source of amusement in initiation rites. They named their chief officer a Grand Cyclops and their vice president a Grand Magi. Other officers were the Grand Turk, or marshal; a Grand Exchequer or treasurer, and two Lictors.
WORE WHITE MASKS
The only germ in their constitution from which the "Imperial Wizard" Simmons of the twentieth century Klan could breed his present organization was the promise of absolute secrecy. For his copying years later, the first Klan also contrived a disguise. It consisted of a white mask, a tall cardboard hat, a gown or robe, and for the night riding excursions, a cover for the horses' bodies and mufflers for their feet.
Only after the Pulaski organization had entertained itself for many nights did the phenomenon present itself which was to make the Klan a weapon in the progress of post-war reconstruction. It was the discovery that the African negro was twice as fearful of mysticism and mystery as the white man. It taught the white men of Tennessee and neighboring states that they had a means of their own of preventing what they considered political mismanagement and social insolence in the control by northerners and freedmen of the state government.
BECOMES MILITARY ORGANIZATION
The Pulaski riders made themselves popular. Young men of neighboring towns organized brother Klans. When southern society found itself a Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall, it grasped the Pulaski idea as the means for pulling itself up again. The Klan became a military organization, with the purpose of keeping order among the negroes by intimidating them. Mysticism in the order grew. Humor grew with it, and by the time the states of the north discovered that the south had an organization which was in purpose a society of regulators, the young southern war veterans were donning their white robes and cardboard hats with a human skull and two thigh bones as the symbols of allegiance.
The oath which the grand cyclops administered has been preserved in southern diaries and documents. It was taken in a solemn manner as the knights were grouped amid the bones. The oath follows.