Mary Elizabeth "Bessie" Tyler (b. July 10, 1881, near Atlanta, Georgia; d. Sep. 10, 1924, Altadena, California) was an Atlanta public-relations professional who, starting in 1920 along with Edward Young Clarke, helped to turn the initially anemic second Ku Klux Klan into a mass-membership organization with a broader social agenda. She is not the same person as Elizabeth Tyler, daughter of US President John Tyler.
Tyler, born Mary Elizabeth Cornett, was first married at age 14 or 15, and then abandoned, and later married multiple times. Likely names of her husbands were Manning (married 1897), Owen C. Carroll, Tyler, and Stephen Grow (married 1922). In the 1910s, she was active in the "better babies" movement as a volunteer hygiene worker. With Clarke, she formed the Southern Publicity Association, which promoted temperance and public health causes such as the Anti-Saloon League and Red Cross. Like Clarke and the second Klan's initial organizer William Simmons, Tyler was active in fraternal organizations—in her case, in a women's auxiliary called the Daughters of America.
Starting in 1920, Tyler and Clarke were extremely successful in building the organization of the Klan and in promoting a broader agenda for it, including temperance, anticommunism, antisemitism, and anticatholicism. They did well for themselves financially, pocketing 80% of every new klansman's initiation fee, all the while investing in businesses that manufactured Klan robes and paraphernalia.[1] Tyler owned the Searchlight, the Klan's newspaper. She built a large classical-revival house on fourteen acres in downtown Atlanta; the house is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
The Klan was organized in the fashion of a fraternal organization, and to embarrass it, its opponents alleged that the men Clarke and Simmons were mere figureheads, and the woman Tyler its real leader. Clarke and Tyler's sexual relationship was not a well kept secret, and Tyler's wife May sued him for divorce on grounds of desertion. In 1919, Clarke and Tyler were rousted out of bed by Atlanta police and arrested on charges of disorderly conduct. They initially gave false names. Notwithstanding the Klan's temperance activities, they were fined for possessing whiskey. Their sexual relationship was in tension with the prominent role played by the purity of white womanhood in the organization's foundational mythology, which revolved around the real-life figure of Mary Phagan and the film The Birth of a Nation, which featured the fictional martyr Flora Cameron. In 1921, the Columbus Enquirer-Sun and the New York World published articles accusing Clarke and Tyler of financial and sexual misconduct. An internal power struggle ensued within the Klan, and as a result Tyler was forced out of the Klan in 1923, Clarke left the country to escape charges under the Mann Act, and power shifted to Hiram Evans.
Tyler, who was overweight, developed arteriosclerosis and moved to Southern California. She died in 1924 and was buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery.