By the 1920s the Dallas Morning News had become a formidable and progressive force in Dallas and in Texas, far overshadowing its parent, the Galveston Daily News, which had founded the paper in 1885 to serve the growing North Texas area. Adolph S. Ochs, the Tennessean who rescued the New York Times from virtual bankruptcy in 1896 and converted it into the nation’s most distinguished newspaper, declared in 1924 that he had received his “ideas and ideals” from the Galveston Daily News and the Dallas Morning News. Two years later, a leading national magazine recorded that the News “was, and is, an institution with a reputation for employing only the most competent of men.” Yet at the same time it was receiving national praise, the News was struggling to survive, for it was locked in a courageous battle against the powerful Ku Klux Klan.
The city on which the News and three other dailies in Dallas focused their attention was something like a gawky adolescent—reaching awkwardly toward maturity. Towering above the skyline was the new Magnolia Petroleum Building, the tallest building in the South. The prolific East Texas oil field, destined to have a profound impact on the city and nation, lay undiscovered, but oil had been found in other directions around Dallas, and as the Magnolia Building testified, Dallas already bragged with justification about being the Southwestern center for the petroleum industry. Cotton, however, still reigned supreme, and Dallas ranked as the world’s largest inland cotton market. Many if not most of the city’s residents were not far removed from agricultural endeavors, and Dallas’ economy revolved significantly around providing services, equipment, saddlery, and harnesses for the region’s farmers.
As to the mood of this city, many residents shared with much of the nation a sense of nervousness about social changes unleashed at the end of World War I. In Atlanta, an ex-preacher and fraternal organizer named William Joseph Simmons capitalized upon this mood by founding a new version of the organization that had arisen in the South after the Civil War: the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. It attracted a large number of Americans, especially in the South and Midwest, by aggressively espousing fundamentalist Protestant religious values, strong anti-crime measures, intense patriotism, and superiority of native-born Americans. The Klan seemed to have a kinship with fraternal orders, and an understanding of mutual help among its secret membership gave the organization a cachet that appealed to many others. As affiliate chapters began spreading, in few if any states was a more welcome reception given than in Texas.