White Robes and “Lady Operators”: Stitching Together the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

The Atlanta Manufacturers’ exhibition opened to the public in 1912 with the high hopes of “showing Atlantans just what their city [could] make.”⁠ This claim of renewal presented the city as an industrial and commercial center of the New South. One of the exhibitors was the W. E. Floding Co., a small lodge supply manufacturer trying to meet the extensive demand for fraternal regalia nationwide. Three years later, the Floding company entered another market: producing robes worn by members of the newly revived Ku Klux Klan. The Floding Co. was one of three Atlanta factories that made these garments between 1915 and 1937.

The symbolic resonance of Klan regalia has overshadowed the daily operations of these factories in historical records. Given this lack of archival materials, examinations of extant industrially produced Klan regalia are central to understanding how the labor of these garment workers fit into Klan leaders’ ideas about the value of this work. Using these findings, as well as demographic data about the lives of laborers like Fronia Whitlow, a stitcher and forelady at two of the regalia factories, this paper traces the evolution of Klan regalia production alongside efforts to remake the capital of the New South.

This paper argues that the Klan’s project of national expansion was modeled on the aspirations of Atlanta manufacturers attempting to remake the city through industrial growth. Envisioned by a small group of powerful men, this ideal was enacted by a group of women garment workers who were active participants in the reproduction of an ideological system. The “lady operators” working in these factories were responsible for producing garments that shaped the bodies of men across the country, transforming individuals from Butte, MT and Portland, ME, into Klansmen representative of a mass political movement.