The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  The Klan arrived in Oregon in 1921, when recruiter Luther Ivan Powell arrived from California. Simultaneously, in a contested school board election, explicitly anti-Catholic candidates beat out the slate endorsed by all three major Portland newspapers. As is so often the case when examining 1920s religious prejudice, it is hard to know how much of the vote was anti-Catholic and how much a revolt against elite political insiders.4 In any case, Klan recruiter Powell received an enthusiastic welcome. He began to gather joiners through a series of moves that were by then standard procedures for the Klan: after rounding up some Masons and other fraternal members, recruiters would arrange a public lecture by an “escaped nun”—in this case Sister Lucretia (Elizabeth Schoffen); distribute anti-Catholic pamphlets, slipped into cars and under doors; put on a lecture by a fire-and-brimstone evangelist; and persuade some ministers to endorse the Klan in sermons.5

  Powell quickly established Klaverns in Oregon’s six largest towns and soon boasted of fourteen thousand members, about 2 percent of the state’s population. He claimed a thousand members in Portland within three months, and nine thousand before long; Portlanders eventually constituted 64 percent of the state’s Klansmen. Crosses burning on Portland’s Mt. Tabor and Mt. Scott were visible for miles.6 Nearly every community with a population of one thousand or more had a Klavern.7 The small town of Auburn in eastern Oregon reported being “flooded with application blanks” in one week.8 By 1923 the state Klan professed to have fifty-eight Klaverns and as many as fifty thousand members, not including members of the WKKK or the youth groups. (These figures seem to be typical Klan exaggerations, but on the other hand they do not include the many nonmembers who supported the Klan agenda.)

  Further roiling Oregon’s traditional political alignments and contributing to Klan growth was a series of strikes in 1922, by longshoremen and railroad workers, both vital to the state economy. The IWW’s relative strength in the Pacific Northwest probably explains why the Oregon Klan emphasized anti-Communism more than in other regions. Portland’s mayor and the mainstream press warned of the “overthrow of law and order, the ruin of industry, and the Russianizing of the world.”9

  Recruiter Powell soon ceded leadership to Fred Gifford, who became Exalted Cyclops of the Portland Klan. (Powell later went on to lead a paramilitary group, the Khaki Shirts of America, which identified itself as the vanguard of US fascists; he would also join William Dudley Pelley’s fascist Silver Shirt Legion in 1933.10) An engineer, Gifford began as a telegraph operator for the Southern Pacific Railroad, then became president of an Electrical Workers union local (though after a few years he became known as one of three “$1,000 Scabs” who had betrayed striking workers), then a supervisor for the railroad, then Bell Telephone’s manager in charge of construction and maintenance for Oregon and Washington, then Northwestern Electric’s chief of transmission.

  This is the profile of an ambitious man as well as an employment biography typical of a Klan leader, moving from skilled working class to management. He was also a prominent Mason. He became a statewide power broker, able to grant or withhold support to politicians or lobbying groups eager for Klan support, and there were many such groups, including even the Oregon Automobile Association. The supposedly objective Oregon Voter weekly described his style:

  He is the type of man who knows how to keep himself in the background, while inducing activity on the part of other men by the rewards of publicity and public office. Briefly, he combines the attributes of the old-time political boss with a self-sacrificing spirit of devotion to a cause.11

  By 1923 he was the leading Klansman of the West and a member of Hiram Evans’s close circle. His office door said only “Frederick L. Gifford,” and in the anteroom candidates for office and Klan workers waited to see the Exalted Cyclops. He “is naturally an exceedingly busy man, and has to conserve his time. The job of running an entire state is a big one,” the Voter pointed out.12 His powers extended into the national political theater: Portland mayor George Baker appeared at a Klan banquet in support of Gifford’s plan to run for US Senate.13

  A third Oregon Klan figure, this one less disciplined and more explosive, was Lem Dever, editor of the Klan’s Oregon newspaper, the Western American. Having worked for the federal government’s American Committee on Public Information, a World War I propaganda agency, he became a publicity expert and practitioner of black psywar. (He was responsible for the false oath attributed to the Knights of Columbus, mentioned in chapter 3.) To some extent he represented the pro-worker side of the Klan, promising in his paper that he would not accept advertising from open-shop (that is, anti-union) businesses and pledging his support for the AFL. At the same time, he was one of the few Klan leaders to promote anti-Communism, which he fused with racism, writing in the paper that “he had personal knowledge” of Lenin’s plans “to lead the colored hordes of the world in battle against America.”14 The Western American was stocked on newsstands, and Dever promoted it with a sales contest that offered a Reo touring car valued at $1,895 as the prize. He defamed the major Oregon newspapers as “pope-bossed, Jew-kept.”15 He used his paper to terrorize individuals, as when he defamed a Greek American for late rent payments and rejoiced when the man fled town. After a few years a feud with Gifford led Dever to quit and denounce the Klan, but not to reject its ideology or methods.16

  Two other Oregon KKK leaders, both ministers, stood out for their oratory. Reuben H. Sawyer was a representative of Anglo-Israelism; formerly a European evangelist for that sect, he founded a lively Anglo-Israelite church in Portland. This orientation made Sawyer one of the few Oregon Klansmen to prioritize anti-Semitism. His rhetoric was unusually foul: “The Klan is opposed to all groups and races which are not white. . . . It is repugnant to a true American to be bossed by a sheenie. And in some parts of America the Kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk.”17 From 1921 to 1924, he devoted himself to Klan work.18 (We will meet him again as titular head of Oregon’s female Klan group.) Then there was James R. Johnson, another evangelical, even more rabid in his anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. His speeches literally called for murder: “There is only one way . . . to convert a Catholic priest. . . . Kill the son of a gun.” Fellow Klansman Lem Dever called Johnson “the best show in town,” a reminder that in these days before television and talk radio, angry lectures were a big draw.19

  The Oregon Klan’s most effective legislator was Kaspar K. Kubli (in a linguistic coincidence, this was his real name), an Oregon native of Swiss parentage; his initials brought him an exemption from Klan dues. His father had first tried gold mining but then found better earnings, as did many failed miners, as a merchant and freight hauler, so Kubli worked in the family business and later opened a stationery supplies company. Elected to the Portland City Council in 1904, then to the state legislature in 1916, he became the Klan’s representative as Speaker of the House. Even before the Klan arrived in Oregon, he had won passage of an act providing for mandatory sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and “sexual perverts” (that is, gay men), supported excluding women from juries and using injunctions to suppress strikes, and wrote the state criminal syndicalism statute, which allowed prosecuting not only dissenters but also anyone who rented space to dissenting groups.20

  Anti-Japanese sentiment also helped build the Klan. Japanese immigrants began arriving after the federal government banned Chinese immigration in 1881, and thousands worked on constructing railroad spurs for logging companies. By 1907 Japanese immigrants constituted 40 percent of railway workers, while in Portland and other towns they ran rooming houses and restaurants and worked in canneries. Taking farm labor jobs, they also bought or rented land to farm independently. Expert cultivators, they were soon outproducing and outselling many white farmers, whose resentment built the Klan’s rural support. Near Portland, Japanese truck farmers flourished, in part because they operated through a cooperative; their productivity generated white claims that the Japanese would drive out “American” far
mers. In the Hood River valley, where anti-Japanese sentiment was particularly strong, an anti-alien organization had arisen before the Klan arrived, and it was soon joined in defaming the Japanese by the American Legion. In central Oregon, where a California developer, the Portland-Deschutes Land Company, had hired Japanese workers, protests forced it to fire them.21

  Out of Oregon’s 1920 population of about eight hundred thousand, people of Japanese origin numbered only five thousand (0.006 percent); although they were mostly rural, fewer than 2 percent owned land, totaling less than three thousand acres (0.008 percent of the land).22 But it does not require actual economic competition among ethnic groups to generate anger at alleged economic threats. Moreover, anti-Japanese sentiment grew also among the urban population. The Klan escalated this fear of “the Mongolian races.” Even the anti-Klan governor, Ben Olcott, told the legislature that “Mongolian and Malay . . . cannot amalgamate and we cannot and must not submit to the peaceful penetration of the Japanese and other Mongolian races.”23 The increasing international prestige of Japan also contributed. Oregon nativists saw the Japanese as the “threatening vanguard of a rising nation intent on . . . subverting communities.” In the 1920s in Oregon, “race relations” meant Japanese-white relations.24

  In 1923, at the peak of Klan ascendancy, the state legislature passed an alien land act, barring immigrants from owning or renting land, with exactly one negative vote. (In nearby Washington State, the legislation even prohibited American-born citizens of Japanese origin, the nisei, from renting land on behalf of their parents; the Yakima Indians, theoretically exempt from state legislation, had been renting land to Japanese farmers for decades, but the secretary of the interior ruled that they must obey the prohibition.) Oregon also banned immigrants from operating hospitality businesses, so as to make it harder for the Japanese to find places to stay. Then it imposed a literacy test that left the right to vote in the hands of local registrars whatever their bias. Even a strongly anti-Klan candidate of 1922 favored denying land ownership or control rights to “Orientals.”25

  In southern Oregon and California, the Klan also targeted Mexican Americans, as well as Mexican nationals who came north to work in agriculture. Hiram Evans dangled an anti-Communist line to hook grower support: “Thousands of Mexicans, many of them Communist, are waiting a chance to cross the Rio Grande.”26 Many of these migrant farmworkers found that they had to vary their following-the-crops routes to avoid Klan attacks. By the 1920s, West Coast agriculture depended on a labor force of Mexican origin, so the interests of large corporate growers clashed to some extent with those of the Klan, and one farmworker recalled that growers had to patrol their fields to protect their field hands because “their crops were worthless without Mexicans.” Still, Klan attacks probably made farmworkers less militant in their protests, so growers may well have appreciated the Klan’s intimidating influence.

  Klannish nativism was ever flexible, as was its ability to respond to local conditions. In Oregon, Klan efforts were almost exclusively anti-Catholic, mentioning Jews only occasionally. In the San Diego region, some Catholics even joined: members of the Catholic War Veterans and Knights of Columbus were known to be Klansmen.27 And just as the Klan bent its agenda to fit local conditions, so did the Catholic Church. In Southern California, many white Catholics supported the Klan. Mexican anthropologist Ernesto Galarza reported that the Irish American clergy “had no sympathy for Mexicans who were seen as an endangerment to traditional American values. They often ignored the Klan’s abuses toward Hispanics.”28 In Oregon, as in Maine, the Klan established an affiliate for immigrant white Protestants, the Riders of the Red Robe.

  Astoria, a coastal Oregon city, home of the world’s largest salmon cannery, provides an example of how local conditions complicated Klan activities. Astoria’s Finnish workers became a somewhat liminal group in the Klan’s universe. Finns were the largest immigrant group in Astoria, pulled in by the fishing and salmon industries there. As a group they were doubly divided: first, between Protestants and Catholics (plus some Orthodox); second, between those who supported Prohibition, and those who did not, including a substantial group of socialists. The latter group, probably a majority, refused to give up their taverns. The Klan was also divided between “moderates” and the extremists led by Lem Dever. The latter group responded aggressively. It organized a campaign that forced out the Catholic president of the Chamber of Commerce, the Finnish foremen in the salmon cannery, and all the Catholics on the school board. When the local newspaper protested, Dever threatened its editor and offered to buy the paper for the Klan. He even threatened the sheriff: “If you do not take immediate steps to clean out the so-called Whistle Inn . . . this organization will take prompt and drastic action.” Receiving no satisfactory response, fifty Klansmen raided the tavern and managed to get the owners of the building prosecuted and the sheriff recalled. When in 1922 Klansmen of the Dever faction won a majority in a local election, electing the mayor and city commissioners, other Klansmen publicly denounced the Dever group for “wire-pulling,” that is, rigging the election.29 This intra-Klan conflict was not unusual, although it arose more often around personal animosities and accusations of corruption, as we will see.

  Portland dominated the Oregon Klan both absolutely and proportionately. The five-thousand-seat public auditorium filled time after time for Klan rallies. At one lecture by Rev. Sawyer, the more than fifteen hundred who could not get in “surged” angrily through the center city; eighty-three policemen and fourteen deputy sheriffs were required to control them. Hysterical speeches by “escaped” nuns and priests could be assured of thrilled audiences.30 The Portland police department became entirely KKKized: it established the Portland Police Vigilantes, a hundred-man group appointed by Gifford and commissioned as police deputies, while a nine-man Black Patrol used violence with total impunity; in 1923, it rounded up suspected IWW members and drove them out of the city.31

  WHILE OREGON’S RACIAL resentments seethed, and while local Klaverns continued to agitate about local issues, a single campaign soon became the Klan’s Oregon priority: getting rid of Catholic schools through a constitutional amendment. This was also a top item on the national Klan agenda, and similar bills were proposed in California, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, and Alberta, Canada. Promoters of a ban on Catholic schools saw Oregon as a test case, and hoped it would lead the way, because of its demography and history. Advocates admitted that there was no “immediate and particular danger” from Catholic or Jewish immigrants in Oregon, “but in the East the number of foreign-born and indifferent [sic] people is so overwhelming that such a bill as this one could never be put through.” Oregon would “set the example for the rest of the country,” argued supporters. They drew on Oregonians’ nostalgic romance with the common schools of “pioneer” days; a key pamphlet, “The Old Cedar School,” made the one-room schoolhouse a winning symbol.32

  The Klan charged that the pope was using parochial schools in his plot to take over America. The Klan did not initiate this conspiracy theory; nineteenth-century nativists did. Even Lyman Beecher, once the country’s most revered evangelical, had made this charge in 1835.33 Standard textbooks, the Klan alleged, “were loaded with Catholicism. The Pope was dictating what was being taught to the children.”34 Thus in its campaign against Catholic schools, the Klan could claim to be fighting a defensive, not offensive, battle35—positioning Protestant Anglo-Saxons as victims.

  But the Klan also argued that public schools needed improvement. Imperial Wizard Evans cited the results of the World War I draft, in which 24 percent of young men were found to be illiterate.36 Presumably this resulted from Catholic subversion of public education. Anti-Catholicism thus made Klansfolk into ardent supporters of public education. Like Progressives, they called for more spending on the schools; unlike later conservatives, the Klan did not make cutting taxes or “small government” part of its agenda. It also called for a federal department of education, another agenda item s
hared with progressive reformers. This was not an original idea. The Sterling-Towner bill of 1919 had first called for creating such a department, raising educational standards, and providing federal funding for schools. That bill also aligned with Klan views that schools should promote “Americanization,” then the liberal version of anti-immigrant policy. The national Klan also supported increased spending on public schools, higher pay for teachers, and literacy programs; when Sterling-Towner was reintroduced (as the Towner-Sterling and then Sterling-Reed bills) in 1921 and 1924, the Klan supported it. Ironically, conservative opponents of these proposals, aligned against the Klan on this issue, called the bills “a bagful of bolshevism.”37

  Amending the state constitution to make public schooling compulsory required a referendum. Progressive Era reforms had provided for referendums, initiatives, and recalls in many states; their primary motive was to counter the power of wealthy corporations, especially railroads, that controlled many western states in the 1890s. Oregon was one of the first states to allow these citizen initiatives, in 1902. (Others included South Dakota, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, Washington, Michigan, Kansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.) Starting in 1894, Oregon’s remarkable radical leader William U’ren created a coalition of farmer, labor, and women’s groups campaigning for these direct-democracy provisions. Stymied at first by the political machine that controlled the legislature, he got himself elected a state representative and from that position organized a revolt against the leadership, by exploiting faction fights within the Republican Party. His coalition got a direct-democracy amendment approved, appropriately, by direct vote; it won overwhelmingly, 62,024 to 5,668.38 The anti-Catholic school bill that triumphed twenty years later thus signals the complex political meaning of these citizen initiatives: aimed at empowering citizens against political machines, they often provided mechanisms for making illiberal and intolerant law.