"Selling Hate is a fascinating and powerful story about the power of a southern PR firm to further the Ku Klux Klan's agenda. Dale W. Laackman uncovers never-before-published archival material, census records, and obscure books and letters to tell the story of an emerging communications industry filled with potential and fraught with peril. The brilliant, amoral, and spectacularly bold Bessie Tyler and Edward Young Clarke--together, the Southern Publicity Association--met the fervent William Joseph Simmons, founder of the second KKK, saw an opportunity, and played on his many weaknesses. It was the volatile, precarious terrain of post-World War I America. Tyler and Clarke took Simmons's dying and broke KKK, with its two thousand to three thousand associates in Georgia and Alabama, and in a few short years swelled its membership to nearly five million, with chapters in every state of the union. Even to modern sensibilities, the extent of Tyler and Clarke's scheme is shocking: the limitlessness of their audacity; the full-scale and ongoing con of Simmons; the size of the personal fortunes they earned, amassed, stole in the process; and just how easily and expertly they exploited the particular fears and prejudices of every corner of America. You will recognize in this pair a very American sense of showmanship and an accepted, even celebrated, brash entrepreneurial hustle. And, as their story winds down, the tainted and ultimately ineffectual congressional hearings into the Klan's monumental growth."--Back cover.