William Joseph Simmons was born on May 6, 1880 at Harpersville in Shelby County, Alabama, one of eight children of Calvin Henry Simmons and Lavonia (David) Simmons. His father was a physician, farm owner, and sometime mill operator in Shelby and Talladega counties. Simmons's aspirations for a medical career were disrupted in his early teens by his father's death.
In 1898, after brief and uneventful service in an Alabama volunteer regiment during the Spanish-American War, he enrolled in Southern University at Birmingham, but after a few months decided to enter the ministry in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
Licensed to preach at the age of nineteen, he spent the next thirteen years riding the circuit in rural districts in Alabama and northern Florida.
In 1912, when he was assigned to another "backwoods" district instead of the church of his own he had demanded, he quarreled with his bishop, and the Alabama Methodist Conference suspended his ministerial license. Simmons then moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he became a representative for various fraternal orders, particularly the Woodmen of the World, in which he quickly rose to the rank of colonel (district manager).
This was a boom era for adult fraternal orders in America, and he was soon earning a handsome personal income. In 1915, while hospitalized in Atlanta as a result of an automobile accident, he sketched plans for his most ambitious fraternal project - a new order to be called the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
His father had been an officer in the original Ku Klux Klan in Alabama during the years after the Civil War. Like many other Southern children, Simmons had heard ghostly tales of this secret society, whose acts of terrorism and intimidation were credited with defeating the Radical Republican scheme for black dominance of the South, and the romantic image seems to have taken a special hold on his imagination.
In the fall of 1915, with thirty-three Atlanta acquaintances he had enlisted, he formally "revived" the Klan in ceremonies atop nearby Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving night. Shrewdly timing his publicity to coincide with the Atlanta opening of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith's overtly racist and pro-Klan motion picture, Simmons soon signed up more than a hundred members.
In the summer of 1916 the state of Georgia granted a permanent corporate charter for the "Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc. ," officially described as a "patriotic, military, benevolent, ritualistic, social and fraternal order. "
But despite his earlier success as a fraternal organizer, he evidently had little notion of what his new Klan's purpose should be. By 1920 it numbered no more than 6, 000 members concentrated in Atlanta, Birmingham, Mobile, and a few other cities of the Deep South. In June of that year Simmons secured the sales talent his Klan had been lacking when he formed a contract with the Atlanta-based Southern Publicity Association, run by Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, two talented, if unscrupulous, promoters.
Realizing the opportunities inherent in the tense political and social climate of the post-World War I years, Clarke and Tyler transformed the rather nebulous principles of Simmons's Klan into a militant creed of "100 percent Americanism. " The Klan thus became a secret superpatriotic society, an intractable foe of Roman Catholics, Jews, political radicals, "uppity" Negroes, and foreign immigrants, as well as of dishonest politicians, bootleggers, libertines, and modernist theologians. It quickly spread through the South and into every part of the nation, enrolling several hundred thousand members in a period of eight or nine months and committing numerous acts of terrorism.
This violence prompted a Congressional investigation in October 1921, but the hearings were rambling and inconclusive. Simmons, as "Imperial Wizard, " testified at length, eloquently and sometimes tearfully maintaining that the Klan was a law-abiding organization which worked in behalf of patriotism, Protestant religion, and racial harmony.
Thereafter, while the Klan continued to grow at an astonishing rate and ultimately enrolled more than two million members, Simmons's power and influence within it dwindled steadily. While accumulating a sizable personal fortune from the Klan, mainly from the two dollars he received of each ten-dollar initiation fee, he relinquished more and more executive authority to the money-hungry Clarke.
In the fall of 1922 Simmons and Clarke faced a revolt led by national secretary Hiram W. Evans of Texas, David C. Stephenson of Indiana, and several other state leaders who wanted to make the Klan a well-organized, well-financed national political organization. Yielding to their pressure, at the Klan's first national convention, held that year in Atlanta, Simmons handed over the Imperial Wizardship to Evans and assumed the essentially powerless title of "Emperor. "
The new regime soon severed all ties with Clarke and the Southern Publicity Association, and thereby effectively isolated Simmons, who tried to fight back by creating first a women's counterpart to the Klan and then a second degree for Klansmen who would owe allegiance only to him. Evans and his associates blocked both moves by court action and by forming the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. Simmons countered with suits of his own. The resulting legal tangle and power struggle were not resolved until early 1924, when the Klan settled with Simmons for $90, 000 in cash plus the deed to the "Imperial Palace, " a large residence on Peachtree Road in Atlanta owned by the Klan and occupied by Simmons.
In exchange Simmons resigned from the organization and gave up all copyrights on Klan literature and paraphernalia. Simmons subsequently tried to organize two new patriotic and white-supremacy orders, first the Knights of the Flaming Sword and then the Caucasian Crusade. Neither project succeeded, but the hapless Simmons at least had the satisfaction of seeing the Ku Klux Klan fall apart.
Wracked by internal disorders and scandals, and thwarted by public hostility, it ended the decade with fewer than 100, 000 members. Little is known of Simmons's life after the 1920's. He continued to reside in Atlanta, supporting himself and his family on the remainder of his Klan settlement plus occasional lecture fees. Much of the time he seems to have been in poor health. In the spring of 1941, now almost forgotten, he entered the Veterans Administration Hospital in Atlanta, where he died four years later of heart disease.
The man who had brought into existence the mightiest secret society in American history was buried in simple ceremonies at Luverne, Alabama.
He was famous for organizing the second Ku Klux Klan. Initially portraying itself as another fraternal organization, the Klan was opposed to the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who were mostly Jews and Roman Catholics essentially and anybody else who was not a native-born Anglo-Saxon or Celtic Protestant.
Simmons was likable and well meaning, and he made an impressive personal appearance. A two-hundred-pound six-footer who wore pince-nez spectacles, he had gray eyes, light red hair, a prominent nose, square chin, and a powerful speaking voice with which he indulged his penchant for florid oratory.
He was married to Bessie. They had one son, Kirk.
