The Second Coming of the KKK

by Linda Gordon

  The Klan set to work gathering signatures to create a referendum to amend the state constitution so as to require all children to attend public schools and only public schools. Using a new strategy, the Oregon Klan established a front group, the Good Government League, which united other “patriotic” societies, including the Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, the Scottish Rite Masons, the National League for the Protection of American Institutions, and the umbrella Federation of Patriotic Societies.39 When the initiative went to the polls in 1922, the Scottish Rite Masons was its named sponsor, having already mounted a national campaign against Catholic and “Bolshevist” influence in the public schools, but it was widely assumed to be a Klan initiative.40

  The Klan’s Oregon strategy deemphasized the negative side of the amendment—prohibition of Catholic schools—and emphasized instead its positive content. It argued that strengthening Americanism—that is, patriotism—required educating all children in the same public schools. It emphasized the importance of unity—that is, conformity—in what children learned. Moreover, since Oregonians tended to revere the “pioneers” who had brought Euro-Americans to the state, the Klan presented its schools initiative as furthering “the interest of those whose forefathers established the nation.”41 In an attempt to make the proposed amendment constitutional, the authors wrote it to ban all private schools, not just Catholic ones. Through these strategies, the Klan probably drew in supporters who might have opposed outright discrimination against Catholics.

  Some Klan propaganda for the “schools bill,” as it came to be called, promoted it on egalitarian grounds, condemning private schools as sites where the rich removed their children from ordinary folk. One statement declared that “we do not believe in snobbery and are just as much opposed to private schools of the so-called ‘select’ kind as we are to denominational private schools.” Advocates characterized opponents of the bill as “millionaires.”42 This argument resonated with Oregon’s strong populist traditions, including progressive populist ideas, and drew on resentment of elites. Henry George’s single-tax plan elicited considerable support in Oregon; U’ren was an advocate. (George, a radical nineteenth-century political economist, had proposed a single tax on land holdings, assuming that landownership was the base source of wealth.) But Portland, the center of support for the Klan and the schools referendum, had very few secular private schools; and in Oregon as a whole, more than 60 percent of privately schooled children were in Catholic schools. The prejudice behind the proposed amendment was nevertheless clear to all. One Catholic who saw the “Little Red Schoolhouse” float in a Klan parade (described in the opening depiction of a Klan rally) as a ten-year-old understood it perfectly: “It was a body blow.”43

  The Klan was silent as to whether public school attendance should result in conversions to Protestantism, though this was the hope. In campaigns against Catholic schools, Klan leaders frequently spoke in defense of the separation of church and state, but in fact they were simultaneously promoting Protestant religious content in public schools. “One of our purposes is to try to get the Bible back into the schools,” Rev. Sawyer announced.”44 Countless Klan political cartoons showed Catholics throwing Bibles out of schools.

  The schools campaigns also showed that Klan bigotry was differentiated, especially between anti-black and anti-Catholic agendas: the Klan wanted Catholic children in public schools, while it was determined to keep African American children out. Klan biogtry swerved between contradictory premises: that immigrants of, say, Italian, Irish, or Finnish descent could be educated to become good Americans with Protestant values (an environmental premise), while people of color, notably African Americans and Japanese Americans, were of biologically inferior stock (the eugenical, hereditarian premise) and could never become “100%.”

  Meanwhile, the referendum on the schools amendment coincided with the 1922 state election.45 Called by many Oregonians “the Klan election,” it was high drama.46 The Republican candidate for the governorship, incumbent Ben W. Olcott, refused to support the schools amendment, less from opposition to its content than because he felt it would strengthen the Klan, which he considered divisive. The Democrat, Walter M. Pierce, was an ardent Klan ally, and Exalted Cyclops Gifford campaigned and raised money for him. Olcott called the Klan a dangerous force, insidious, fanatic, aiming to “usurp the reins of government.”47 Pierce used, by contrast, a stealth strategy: rather than praising the Klan, he praised the schools bill, insisting that he was not anti-Catholic but pro-American. Still, he emphasized his Protestant lineage repeatedly: “Every one of my ancestors has been a Protestant for 300 years.”48 His platform was contradictory, as he campaigned for cutting taxes despite the fact that abolishing private schools would require higher taxes to support the public schools. Appealing to the lower middle class and to farmers, he called for a progressive income tax to reduce the burden of property taxes on smallholders.49 Astute advisers encouraged him to tailor his message to women—“better tell no religious jokes now that women are voting”—and indeed there was a record turnout of women voters.50 Despite the subterfuge of the Pierce campaign, everyone knew that the contest, called the “bitterest and closest political campaign in Oregon’s history,” was between Klan supporters and opponents.

  At the same time, economic interests influenced the campaign. Portland’s “big three” Klansmen all worked for utilities businesses—Northwestern Electric employed Gifford; Pacific Telephone and Telegraph employed both Ole Quinn, Gifford’s right-hand man, and W. C. Elford, secretary of the Federation of Patriotic Societies—and these enterprises supported and helped fund Pierce.51 They were fighting off a demand for public power and communications. The Portland Telegram, opposing the schools bill, charged that the Klan represented “the capitalization of religious prejudice and racial animosity by public service corporations as the means of sidetracking the public mind from economic issues. With the people foolishly fighting over religion and fanning the fires of fanaticism, they have forgotten all about the agitation against 8 cent street car fares, high telephone and other service rates and reduced wage scales, that before the advent of the Klan threatened the profits of big business.”52

  Klan candidate Pierce won the governorship handily, carrying twenty-eight of Oregon’s thirty-six counties. Among Senate candidates, twelve of the thirteen endorsed by the Klan won. The Klan gained a near majority in the House, where Klansman Kubli was already the Speaker, and a strong minority in the Senate.53 The Klan delegation’s unity made it the dominant power in both houses, however. Once in office, Pierce began rewarding his supporters, Klansmen prominent among them. A Klansman from Medford, appointed to a judgeship by Pierce, oversaw the acquittal of the vigilantes in the “Oregon outrages” (discussed in chapter 6). An anti-Klan newspaper editor charged that Pierce introduced the spoils system into Oregon. Before long, his corruption became so gross that his supporters deserted him; when they circulated a recall petition, rumors spread that Klanspeople initiated it as retribution, because Pierce had not appointed enough Klansmen to government jobs.54

  Unsurprisingly, the schools amendment, shepherded by Speaker of the House Kubli, also won, but less overwhelmingly—by a 12,000-vote majority out of 210,000 votes cast. Portland gave the amendment its biggest per capita support, with the largest majorities in precincts inhabited by middle-class and skilled working-class voters. These were also the voters who had been most supportive of Prohibition, the single tax, and a ban on vaccinations. As elsewhere, the economic top and bottom were less enthusiastic about banning Catholic schools.55

  Opponents of the schools amendment resorted to the courts, of course, and won. A federal district court ruled in early 1924 that the amendment violated the US Constitution and, perhaps more weightily, that the amendment deprived “parents of their rights, private school teachers of their livelihood and private schools of their property” without due process.56 (In other words, the decision rested on property rights rather than civil liberties principles.)
Governor Pierce immediately announced an appeal to the US Supreme Court. “The people [will] not stand for any half-dozen judges telling them that an overwhelming majority cannot make their own law,” one newspaper editorialized. “We cannot understand why foreign minorities in America are ever listened to by our courts.” Former US senator George Chamberlain argued for Oregon at the Supreme Court, primarily on a states’ rights basis, but lost. In a unanimous decision the court found that the state violated the constitution, specifically the Fourteenth Amendment (which Oregon had not ratified), but also unduly interfered with parents’ rights.57

  While the amendment made its way through the courts, however, the state legislature moved to install further “Americanism” statutes. It enacted a requirement to teach the state constitution in every school, and to forbid wearing religious dress in the schools and to expel teachers who did so (some twenty nuns taught in the Oregon public schools). Prefiguring twenty-first-century battles over textbooks between historians and conservative politicians, the legislature also passed bills requiring the exclusive use of textbooks that “adequately stress the services rendered by the men who achieved our national independence, who established our form of constitutional government,” and disallowing any textbook that “speaks slightingly of the founders of the republic . . . or which belittles or undervalues their work.”58 The legislature eliminated the Columbus Day holiday because of its Catholic associations.59 After the Scopes trial, Oregon leaders, ever pragmatic, changed their strategy to campaign to have creationism taught alongside evolution.60

  The Klan also conducted a campaign to get non-Protestant teachers fired, a drive that soon extended to all government workers. A Klansman in La Grande volunteered to “talk to our school board” to make sure the school clerk was a “100% American.” The Klan complained that urban machine politicians were refusing to give jobs to white Protestants. “Former city manager Kratz had displeased Grand Dragon Gifford by refusing to cooperate with patronage appointments,” a Klavern member reported. Government jobs were plums, and for every Catholic fired, presumably a Protestant would be hired, so Klanspeople stood to gain materially from this campaign. It is impossible to know how many non-Protestants lost jobs to Klan efforts, but we have a few examples: for one, the Klan-led anti-Catholic frenzy resulted in attacks on faculty “Romanists” at the University of Oregon.61

  After defeat in the courts, figuring that prohibiting Catholic schools was no longer viable anywhere in the country, the Klan switched to promoting less wholesale bills in many other state legislatures, focusing on curricular requirements and control of teaching staff. These proposals aimed to require loyalty oaths of teachers; ban teachers from wearing religious clothing; mandate hiring only teachers trained in public schools; make a uniform textbook compulsory for parochial as well as public schools; set up a textbook commission to scrutinize all texts and license acceptable ones; require reading from the Protestant Bible each day, without comment; require schools to give pupils released time for religious study, and set aside one evening a week on which schools and churches would coordinate religious education; and require colleges and universities to grant credit for religious study in authorized churches.62

  OREGON KLANSWOMEN organized themselves very early in the Klan’s career. The WKKK recruited a thousand Portland women in one month, it reported in 1922; that this figure exactly matched Gifford’s claim about male Klan recruits suggests a bit of competitiveness. Their enthusiasm for the work led them into a conflict with their male masters so intense that it actually produced a minor physical fight, which brought them legendary local fame. The fight drew public notice, interpreted either as the response of overexcited but endearing women or as the resistance of feisty women defending their autonomy. In actuality it arose from a serious grievance against male domination.

  Portland women formed a Klan chapter, the Ladies of the Invisible Empire, known as LOTIE. They also created a youth group, the Junior Citizen’s Club, and a front group for recruitment purposes, the Camaretta Club, dedicated to organizing benefit balls for local charities.63 National Klan leaders denied that LOTIE was a Klan auxiliary, but its Oregon articles of incorporation listed four Klansmen as officers.64 With its choice of Joan of Arc as a symbol, LOTIE apparently seemed too militant or insufficiently ladylike to some Klannish women, and as a result a rival group arose, the Americanization of Public Schools Committee, composed of wives and sisters of Klansmen. Making clear that it did not aspire to full membership in Klandom, this group declared that it had no constitution, by-laws, or ritual, while LOTIE adopted a full array of Klannish practices. Hostility between the two groups grew so public that the Oregon Klan paper called on them repeatedly to make up. There was so little difference in the groups’ programs—they both supported the schools bill, the alien land and labor laws, and patriotic exercises in the schools—that their competition must have resulted from personal animosities and jealousies and/or from differing views about the degree of independence from male leaders they wished to achieve.65

  At the same time, rivalries among national Klan leaders led to proxy battles using the various female auxiliaries66—fighting, as it were, over the bodies, and dues, of women. Hiram Evans wanted all the women’s groups merged into the WKKK so as to achieve better control from the top. What emerged was a multifront battle among men who considered LOTIE as a property, much as the Klan itself was incorporated as a business.67 Three Oregonians claimed it: Exalted Cyclops Gifford, one of the incorporators of LOTIE, wanted to install his wife, Mae Gifford, as head of the WKKK. Rush Davis, another of the incorporators, declared himself “Archbishop” of the Portland LOTIE and wanted his wife to run it; he also offered to sell it to the highest bidder.68 Finally, Rev. Sawyer, the Anglo-Israelite preacher, increasingly on the outs with the Klan’s leadership, sought to lead LOTIE as an independent organization rather than a Klan auxiliary.

  None of these men consulted with the LOTIE women about their desires. But Oregon LOTIE’s “Mother Counselor,” Maybelle Jette, and her group determined to protect their autonomy—as well as their money, their agenda, and their headquarters in a major downtown Portland office building. A resultant confrontation became a story told with pride among Portland’s Klanswomen, perhaps embellished, resembling a western film of the period. It began when Rush Davis invaded a LOTIE meeting, proclaimed himself the group’s “royal master,” and demanded that the women hand over their charter. When they would not do so, he sent a heavy who called himself “the Rattler” to intimidate them: “a picturesque gun-thrower from eastern Oregon, wearing a ten gallon hat . . . and carrying a six-shooter as long as a boot jack.” He tried to block the door to prevent Mother Counselor Jette from entering the weekly meeting. Her “honor guard” dared him to lay a finger on her. “He rattled, and they laughed.” So the cowboy withdrew.

  Then Davis himself came back, forcing his way in while the women were engaged in prayer, thereby doubling their outrage. He reached “the platform, where the Mother Counselor sat enthroned, surrounded by her Guard of Honor, amidst all the panoply and ritualism of that Order. In an impudent, loud and threatening manner Davis demanded the Charter . . . be surrendered instantly to him. The Ladies calmly regarded him . . . as a rare and interesting bug.” He lost his temper and grabbed the “dainty Mother Counselor by the arm and savagely twisted it, causing her to writhe in pain.” Whereupon another lady, “a small but muscular lady of the Honor Guard . . . , raised on high a heavy umbrella which she carried in her hand (do I need to say that it rains a lot in Portland?) and deliberately struck him a powerful blow on the head. . . . Other ladies . . . swarmed upon him, pummeling, pounding and hammering. Several kicked him, where it hurts the most. (!) They raised welts on his body, bumps on his head, pulled his hair, scratched his face, bloodied his nose, blackened his eyes, and gave him a thorough and unmerciful whipping.” As he fled, the Mother Counselor “led in singing of ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ ”

  The women regaled the editor of the We
stern American with this story, and it seems likely that—in their outrage, joy, and a bit of smugness—they exaggerated a bit. We know that the editor, Lem Dever (the perfect name for a cowboy western), knew how to dramatize a good story. Still, the women’s relish in describing their resistance suggests pride in their autonomy. Headlining LADIES HANDLE MAN WITHOUT POLICE AND IN DEMPSEY MANNER,* the Western American capitalized on the showdown: “Help!, Help!, Help!, yelped a certain ill conditioned citizen . . . when he undertook to be insolent to a group of Portland ladies. . . . It was the kick landing with deadly and unerring accuracy and in the tenderest spot, that cause[d] the ogler . . . to howl.” Although the LOTIEs ultimately lost and were forcibly merged into the WKKK, in publicizing their story they had humiliated the Klan leaders.

  The Klan VIPs, in turn, treated these women diplomatically—certainly a sign of grudging respect. Not only did they make no attempt to punish Jette, but she remained Portland’s WKKK Exalted Cyclops. Perhaps in an attempt to soothe, Gifford declared that “the women’s organization is an exact counterpart of the Klan itself, with no difference whatever except that of gender.” Still, some LOTIEs apparently refused to join the WKKK.69 Rush Davis was forced to sign an agreement, as “owner” of LOTIE, giving up all rights to it. His wife became treasurer of the WKKK, no doubt in exchange for that concession. Gifford’s wife received a bigger prize, becoming Imperial Commander of the Western States WKKK. Saving face, the Klan hierarchy insisted that a little family tiff had been inflated beyond the truth.