Elizabeth Tyler (KKK organizer)

Mary Elizabeth "Bessie" Tyler (July 10, 1881 - September 10, 1924) 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.

Biography

Early life

Mary Elizabeth Cornett was born on July 10, 1881.

Activism

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. Clarke and Tyler's sexual relationship was not a well kept secret, and Clarke'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 Wesley Evans. Tyler moved to Southern California.

Personal life

She 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). She was overweight and developed arteriosclerosis.

Death

She died on September 10, 1924 and was buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery.

References

• Henry Peck Fry, The modern Ku Klux Klan, Small, Maynard, 1922
• Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: a history, McFarland, 2010
• Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: racism and gender in the 1920s, University of California Press, 2009
• Kevin Boyle, The Not-So-Invisible Empire, New York Times, Nov. 27, 2011
• National Register of Historic Places, reference number 05001598; scans available at http://www.buckheadheritage.com/node/61

References