He quickly rose through the ranks and was part of a group that ousted William Joseph Simmons from the position of Imperial Wizard, the national leader, in November 1922.

Evans had led the kidnapping and torture of a black man while leader of the Dallas Klan, but as Imperial Wizard, he publicly discouraged vigilante actions for fear that they would hinder his attempts to gain political influence.

In addition to his white supremacist ideology, he fiercely condemned Catholicism, trade unionism, and communism, which he associated with recent immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

[13] According to a contemporary report in the Denton Record-Chronicle, Johnson was a "Negro bus boy" who was being investigated by the police after he had been discovered in the room of a white woman guest at the hotel.

[15][16] The same year, Evans was appointed to the position of "great titan" (executive) of the "Realm of Texas" and proceeded to lead a successful membership drive for the state's Klan.

[15] Atlanta-based leaders pressured Evans to curb racial violence in Dallas; around then, the Texas Klan had received significant negative publicity after castrating an African-American doctor.

[19] Although Evans was not morally opposed to violence against minorities,[20] he publicly condemned vigilante activity because he feared that it would attract government scrutiny and hinder potential Klan-backed political campaigning.

[19] Although Evans later took credit for a decrease in lynchings in the Southern United States during the 1920s,[21] several Klan members claimed that he surreptitiously encouraged and presided over acts of violence against minorities.

[17][8] In 1922, the group's leadership made Evans the "Imperial kligrapp", a role similar to national secretary, in which capacity he oversaw operations in 13 states.

[28] As the leader of the Klan, Evans advanced a form of nativist, white supremacy that cast Protestantism as a fundamental part of American patriotism.

[30] He maintained the belief that white Protestants had the exclusive right to govern the US because they were the descendants of the early colonists,[32] whom he described as fleeing Europe for the US to escape its societal bounds.

[38] Evans borrowed numerous concepts from the writings of Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, American writers of the period who promoted eugenics and scientific racism,[39] and he attempted to cast his platforms as if they were based on science.

"[44] Evans also argued against miscegenation, and Catholic and Jewish immigration on the grounds that they were threats to genetic "good stock,"[40] a racial division that was widely supported among white Americans.

[51] Historian Leonard Joseph Moore of McGill University contends that Evans paid particular attention to the Indiana Klan out of financial self-interest since it was the largest state branch.

[71] After a sensational trial, Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder and given a life sentence; the publicity about the leader's behavior caused thousands of members to abandon the Klan.

[75] Evans changed the way that chapter leaders were paid by insisting that they receive a fixed salary, rather than commissions based on membership fees, in a move that lowered their income.

[81] In 1922, Evans supported the successful U.S. Senate candidacy of Texas Democrat Earle Bradford Mayfield, an event that demonstrated that Klan-supported candidates could win prominent offices.

[89][90] In his writings on the subject, he cited the nation's illiteracy rate as evidence that American public schools were failing, and he considered low teacher salaries and child labor key obstacles to reform.

Evans's suit was unsuccessful and, as many newspapers reported the scandalous allegations aired in court, the Pennsylvania Klan suffered a serious decline in membership and support.

[122] In 1934, Evans encountered public controversy after it was revealed that he intended to travel to Louisiana to campaign against the Democratic governor Huey Long, who planned to run in the 1936 presidential election.

[130] Chester L. Quarles, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi, argues that Evans repudiated anti-Catholicism because of his desire to fight unions and communism and his fear of having too many enemies at one time.

[131] His attendance at the service was his last significant public appearance as Imperial Wizard: he stepped down soon afterwards,[129] having become deeply unpopular with members of the Klan, who felt that he had embraced their enemies.

At the same time, he was a staunch supporter of Georgia Governor Eurith D. Rivers,[136] a liberal pro-New Deal Democrat whom he had previously employed as a lecturer.

[134] Despite concerns by opponents that the Klan would regain full force after the conclusion of World War II, it was unable to improve its membership and was under pressure from the Internal Revenue Service for failure to pay taxes.

[1][141] David A. Horowitz, a historian at Portland State University, credits Evans with changing the Klan "from a confederation of local vigilantes into a centralized and powerful political movement.

"[9] Fellow historian William D. Jenkins of Youngstown State University maintains that Evans was "personally corrupt and more interested in money or power than a cause.

[143] However, Rice suggests that Evans's reforms would never have been successful, as the Klan remained a white supremacist organization that "automatically made enemies of ... anyone who happened to be foreign-born, Negro, Catholic, Jewish, or opposed to bigotry and chauvinism.

The communications specialist Nicolas Rangel Jr. of the University of Houston–Downtown suggests that the vernacular prevented some Americans from recognizing the extremist nature of Evans's views.

"[147] Other well-known adversaries of Evans included the minister and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who opposed the Klan in Detroit in 1925, describing them as "one of the worst specific social phenomena which the religious pride of a people has ever developed.

"[148] The Dallas Morning News publisher George Dealey and Atlanta journalist Ralph McGill opposed him, the latter deriding him for his hypocrisy and false claims about minorities.