[From "The Second Klan and Modernism"]

In the early 1920s, the Second Klan was on the other side of the culture war between Victorians and Moderns that I have been describing in recent weeks. In fact, the rise of the Second Klan was more about national identity and this cultural and moral breakdown than it was about race.

The Second Klan appealed to Old Americans descended from the founding stock – White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – who lived in small towns and rural areas in the South, Midwest and West and who supported Prohibition and traditional moral values. This is why the Klan is so reviled while gangsters who killed far more people than the Klan ever did are romanticized in shows like Boardwalk Empire.
[…]
There really was a culture war and the Klan was on the losing side. Traditional moral values really were under attack by Jews and Modernists.[…]
I’ve seen some people in the comments trying to argue that everything was fine in the Roaring Twenties because of the triumph of immigration restriction in 1921 and 1924, eugenic sterilization laws and segregation. This ignores the fact that the opponents of all these things and of the Second Klan were still rising and gaining ground in this era. Henry Ford, for example, eventually had to suspend publication of The Dearborn Independent because of opposition from Jews. The Second Klan also faced implacable opposition from mainline Protestantism and the media.
[…]
There were only a few Jewish academics like Boas in the 1920s and they were already having a deleterious effect. By the 1950s though, the American intelligentsia had become half Jewish.