Great Performance !

Kennedy also found the Klan to be a slick money-making operation, at least for those near the top of the organization. Klan leaders had any number of revenue sources: thousands of dues-paying rank-and-file members; business owners who hired the Klan to scare off the unions or who paid the Klan protection money; Klan rallies that generated huge cash donations; even the occasional gunrunning or moonshine operation. Then there were rackets like the Klan’s Death Benefit Association, which sold insurance policies to Klan members and accepted only cash or personal checks made out to the Grand Dragon himself.

After just a few weeks inside the Klan, Kennedy was eager to hurt it any way he could. When he heard about Klan plans for a union-busting rally, he fed the information to a union friend. He passed along Klan information to the assistant attorney general of Georgia, an established Klan buster. After researching the Klan’s corporate charter, Kennedy wrote to the governor of Georgia suggesting the grounds upon which the charter should be revoked: the Klan had been designated a non-profit, non-political organization, but Kennedy had proof that it was clearly devoted to both profits and politics.

None of Kennedy’s efforts produced the desired effect. The Klan was so entrenched and broad-based that Kennedy felt as if he were tossing pebbles at a giant. And even if he could somehow damage the Klan in Atlanta, the thousands of other chapters around the country—the Klan was by now in the midst of a serious revival— would go untouched.

Kennedy was supremely frustrated, and out of this frustration was born a stroke of brilliance. He had noticed one day a group of young boys playing some kind of spy game in which they exchanged silly secret
passwords. It reminded him of the Klan. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, to get the Klan’s passwords and the rest of its secrets into the hands of kids all across the country? What better way to defang a secret society than to infantilize—and make public—its most secret information? (Coincidentally, in Birth of a Nation, a former Confederate soldier is inspired to start the Klan when he sees a pair of white children hide under a sheet to scare a group of black children.)

Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything