Orange County, California, conjures images of blue-skied citrus orchards, Space Mountain at Disneyland and “the Big A,” where the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim play. Truth to tell, most of the orange groves were long ago plowed under for asphalt and black-glass towers, yet the area still evokes sun and fun. Flash back the better part of a century and the atmosphere was decidedly darker.

Make that whiter.

The Orange County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan spent much of the 1920s waging an often violent campaign throughout the region, replete with cross burnings, death threats and torchlit mobs advocating white supremacy. The underlying demographic was different from the South, and the carnage never reached the same level of routine butchery, but it was there.

This was no fringe group. Locked away today in the Anaheim Heritage Center’s Disney Resort Reading Room is a list of 1,000-plus KKK members from the era, and the tally includes civic leaders who served on school boards and governing bodies. Still, the movement was far from universally acclaimed. Indeed, publication of the membership list in the early 1920s sparked a veritable civil war.

“Never in the history of Anaheim has such a fight been staged in its homes and its streets,” intoned the Los Angeles Times in 1925. “Ministers of the gospel, business men who have given the best part of their lives to the development of the city, ranchers who wrested wealth from the country’s fertile soil by toil and faith, students, city officials, mothers whose work has been building men and women, are, to quote both sides of the controversy, at one another’s throats.”

The struggle was temporary, but not short-lived. It took years to subdue. 

The shot heard ’round the county in this counterrevolution was fired by Alexander P. Nelson. As Orange County’s district attorney, Nelson led much of the campaign against the hooded horde. He endured veiled and not-so-veiled threats, a protracted legal battle and a Klan-induced grand jury investigation into his operations. His ultimate victory came through a combination of grit and sophistication. 

Most of what we know about Nelson comes from two sources: Samuel Armor’s 1921 History of Orange County, a compendium of paid-for biographies of area luminaries, and an ancestral record cadged from sketchy U.S. Census records. There are also press accounts from his few years of public life.

Nelson entered the world in 1866 in Barnet, Vermont, on the Connecticut River north of Hanover. He was the 11th of 12 children born to Margaret, a homemaker, and William, a retail grocer. After Dartmouth, Nelson earned a law degree, which he put to use in both the Granite State and Boston.

His trail then goes dark for a few decades, until 1911, when Nelson joined the gold rush in Alaska. In 1914 he moved to Santa Ana, California, following his marriage to Frances Kendrick, originally from Rockford, Illinois. According to the New Hampshire Marriage and Divorce Records 1659-1947, it was his second marriage—and her fifth. Nelson eventually became city attorney of Huntington Beach, California, and then the county’s deputy district attorney in 1918. Two years later he moved into the top spot.

It was a time of tumult for the county’s head cop. Prohibition had just begun and nativism was running high. Mexican migrants who fueled the local economy with cheap labor were demonized by certain city fathers, who pursued widespread segregation. Ministers, teetotalers and authoritarian politicians blamed immigrants, rarely with any proof, for much of the area’s bootlegging.

Former Civil War confederates had earlier made the region ripe for Ku Klux Klan organizing, but in 1922 a new “klavern” sought to rebrand the organization as law-abiding and mainstream patriotic. The new chapter inaugurated campaigns of intimidation, and the Los Angeles district attorney responded with a raid of the Klan’s Southern California offices, netting the first iteration of an Orange County KKK membership list. After Nelson showed up the next day to retrieve a copy, two Klan members entered his house and threatened his wife if Nelson refused to “lay off” the investigation, according to a 2012 retrospective by OC Weekly.

Although Nelson publicly deemed some members unwitting, he declared himself “absolutely opposed” to the group and revealed his possession of the membership list.

Some members renounced their affiliation. But the Klan remained active. Nelson responded by outing both the chairman of the Orange County Republican Party Central Committee and dozens of county workers in May of 1922. He scored an easy electoral victory later that fall.

As Nelson’s profile rose, the Klan’s fell. But behind the scenes it sought to seed county offices with selected “kluckers.” Cryptic graffiti began appearing around town, with the letters “K.I.G.Y.” (“Klansmen, I Greet You”) painted on pavement and stop signs—an effective dog whistle to summon the faithful.

By the spring of 1924 the KKK was back in the saddle. At the Sisters of St. Joseph in Orange, members burned a cross in front of the convent and circled the elementary school in their robes, terrorizing nuns and children alike. (The breadth of the organization’s demographic dislikes is often forgotten—extending as it did to Catholics and Jews, along with the foreign born and anyone with too much melanin.) The Klan’s furtive candidates soon enjoyed working majorities on at least three area city councils, plus robust representation on school boards. The frequency of firelit rallies spiked.

Nelson bided his time. When one Klansman foolishly advertised an upcoming event at Orange High School in a local paper, the D.A. issued an injunction at the behest of the school district. The kluckers angrily relocated across the street, drawing 1,000 attendees. A truck served as dais, the cross for the event shining with electric red light bulbs. Accounts quoted the night’s speaker declaring that Nelson’s career was over: “[He’s] headed up [the] creek, and he had better get a life preserver.”

The clash was peaking. In late July the Klan staged a rally in Anaheim that drew an estimated 20,000 attendees, one of the largest ever reported in the country. A high school teacher wrote a personal account later quoted by the L.A. Times: “Their zeal was that of religious enthusiasts. The women seemed to think they were inspiring their men folk to a holy war….Planes flew overhead displaying electronic crosses and dropping fireworks.”

Nelson was finished with finesse. With fall elections looming, he gave the Santa Ana Register the names of 20 Klan candidates. “The Ku Klux Klan as an organization is absolutely un-American,” he wrote in the Orange County Register. He also bought ads that identified Klan candidates. 

Almost every KKK contender lost.

Nelson next accepted an invitation from an anti-Klan preacher to address his congregation. “It is beyond my comprehension,” the D.A. said from the pulpit, “that men of intelligence would pay a $10 fee for the privilege of appearing in public dressed in a clown’s suit….Barnum once said that there is a ‘sucker born every minute,’ but when we look at the Klan, we are constrained to think that Barnum’s estimate was extremely conservative.”

The denouement came a few months later in February 1925, when a recall election brought 95 percent of registered voters to the polls, and all remaining Klan-affiliated members of the Anaheim City Council were ousted.

Nelson appears to have then just faded away. He did not seek reelection in 1926. The Klan held on in a couple of other communities for a number of years but never regained national traction. Nelson lived on for the better part of three decades before he died of natural causes in 1954. No known heirs survived, as his wife had predeceased him. The OC Weekly captured a fitting epigraph from an oral history maintained at California State University, Fullerton during the Klan’s reign. Fullerton city attorney Albert Launer equivocated on Nelson’s record for a bit before concluding with a concession of plain eloquence: “It took him courage to take the stand that he did.”           

Dirk Olin is director of judicial intelligence at American Lawyer Media and a senior fellow at the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy.