extensive recruitment campaigns. 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. Through a decree on April 23, 1944, Colescott formally disbanded the Klan. Locally-sponsored groups continued to use the name but lacked the united leadership of the earlier Klan. As late as 1949, Evans served as a commentator on Klan activities, speaking as the former Imperial Wizard. He died on September 14, 1966, in Atlanta. Appraisal 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." 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." During Evans' tenure as Imperial Wizard, the New York Times characterized the Klan's leadership as "shrewd schemers". However, Rice suggests that Evans' 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." An editorial in The New York Times during Evans' tenure as Klan leader described him as "severe and logical" in his writing, but the historian Richard Hofstadter described Evans' writings as not immoderate in tone. 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' views. Evans' ideology was attacked by numerous contemporaries; these criticisms began early in his Klan career. David Lefkowitz, rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, assailed Evans' assertion that Jews did not assimilate, emphasizing American experiences shared by Jews and Christians, such as military service in World War I. James Weldon Johnson, leader of the NAACP, responded to Evans' promotion of white supremacy by contending that "all races are mixed." 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." 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