Elizabeth Tyler

Who is Elizabeth Tyler?

Mary Elizabeth "Bessie" Tyler was an Atlanta public-relations professional who, starting in 1920 along with Edward Young Clarke, helped to turn the initially anemic second Ku Klux Klan into a mass-membership organization with a broader social agenda.

Tyler, born Mary Elizabeth Cornett, was first married at age 14 or 15, and then abandoned, and later married multiple times. Likely names of her husbands were Manning, Owen C. Carroll, Tyler, and Stephen Grow. In the 1910s, she was active in the "better babies" movement as a volunteer hygiene worker. With Clarke, she formed the Southern Publicity Association, which promoted temperance and public health causes such as the Anti-Saloon League and Red Cross. Like Clarke and the second Klan's initial organizer William Simmons, Tyler was active in fraternal organizations—in her case, in a women's auxiliary called the Daughters of America.

Starting in 1920, Tyler and Clarke were extremely successful in building the organization of the Klan and in promoting a broader agenda for it, including temperance, anticommunism, antisemitism, and anticatholicism. They did well for themselves financially, pocketing 80% of every new klansman's initiation fee, all the while investing in businesses that manufactured Klan robes and paraphernalia. Tyler owned the Searchlight, the Klan's newspaper. She built a large classical-revival house on fourteen acres in downtown Atlanta; the house is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places.