by Linda Gordon
The fact that Sanger crossed paths with the WKKK says little about her politics; her policy was to speak to any group that would have her. Inviting her says rather more about the New Jersey Klanswomen. Because open endorsement of birth control was still a radical act at the time, and Sanger herself was controversial, inviting her suggests that these Klans-women may have been interested in reproduction control. Notably, the WKKK never joined in the “race suicide” rhetoric that denounced upscale white women who limited births. The invitation also suggests Klanswomen’s autonomy from the male leadership. Although we cannot assume that this New Jersey Klavern, located near Philadelphia, typified the WKKK, nevertheless birth control was then often in the news, and it seems likely that the power to control when and how often to be pregnant would have stirred many Klanswomen’s interest.
Some Klanswomen even challenged one of the Klan’s core premises—secrecy. All the Klan groups waffled on this principle, sometimes benefiting from the mystique of concealment, at other times from their public presence. Klanswomen, however, directly contested one kind of secrecy, that within marriage. They argued in the terms of modern, even companionate marriage that good spouses should have no secrets from each other. And they tied this complaint onto demands for economic equality. One woman complained to a Klan newspaper, “I help earn that money. I have a right to know where it goes. Yet my husband says he dares not tell me.”66
Still, other evidence shows WKKK conformity to established gender rules. Women’s sections in the Klan publication the Kluxer featured housewifely advice. “Style Tips” in one issue prescribed a dress code: no satin (despite the availability of satin robes), no fur; not too much rouge; never apply makeup in public; be attractive but conservatively so. The “Kook’s Kitchen Kabinet” column provided recipes. Amid warnings of threats to America, the Klanswoman could find “answers to everyday questions like ‘In making quick breads, how much baking powder is needed for each cup of flour?’ or . . . ‘What would you suggest as a nice plate lunch for home recruitment meeting?’ ”67 But the magazine encouraged women’s activism on matters regarding the campaign to keep Protestant prayer and “100% American” teachers in the schools. It emphasized that women could be both activists for the cause and exemplary housewives, even though “we are women and hence are not expected to be interested in certain problems of community welfare to the same extent that men should be interested.”68
Women’s Klaverns emphasized charitable work—raising money for orphanages, schools, and individual needy families or, occasionally, their members. They gave small amounts of cash, assembled gift baskets of food, and announced the names of sick members who needed visits. Southern Klans’ charitable expenditures derived not only from pity but also from political strategy: $100 to the widow of a Richmond, Virginia, policeman killed by a criminal; $1,000 to the University of Virginia endowment; $100 to enable Confederate veterans to travel to a reunion.69 The WKKK in eastern Oregon announced that it had sent fifty-four Christmas packages to “our disabled veterans.”70 Nevertheless, WKKK monetary contributions were, on the whole, negligible. Blee computed that one Klavern, by no means atypical, directed 0.7 percent of its expenditures to charity and concluded that boasts of charitable work were largely fund-raising propaganda. Moreover, much of the WKKK’s giving amounted to placing Protestant Bibles in public schools. Few of the WKKK’s or KKK’s larger projects—orphanage, school, university—ever materialized.71
Family and charity remained Klanswomen’s dominant conception of women’s duties and contributions. The exceptions, their more modern and individual-rights assertions, may simply indicate different orientations among the various chapters. But they also point to a contradiction long embedded in feminist principles: some feminisms challenge the gender order and the practice of identifying women primarily or even exclusively as mothers and wives; others, equally feminist, accept that gender order and promote women’s rights within it. (The latter perspective has been called both maternalist and essentialist, because it rests on the assumption that women are naturally nurturing and self-sacrificing, the key qualities associated with motherhood.) Both types see women as victimized by male dominance, but in different ways. Klan feminists belonged to the latter stream. Not all Klanswomen were feminists by any means, but those who were argued that women’s responsibility for raising children and protecting morals required political activism to change laws and social customs. Some Klanswomen called their charitable activism “social work,” a label then meaning reform work, in a usage common among progressive women reformers up through the 1930s.
Women often led in the youth divisions of the Klan. They visited churches to recruit young people and to persuade parents of their duty to see that their children were imbued with the “right” values. The national Klan, possibly responding to women’s pressure, established the Junior Ku Klux Klan, for boys only, in 1923, and gave it a publication of its own, the Junior Klansmen Weekly. An adult Klavern was to supervise each Junior chapter. Soon more youth groups sprang up, and by 1924 fifteen states had chapters. The membership fee was only three dollars. The WKKK created the Tri-K Klub for girls, with its own robes, rituals, codes, and symbols. Its “katechism” (the Klan loved turning C words into K words) resembled that of the Scouts—“loyalty, obedience, selflessness, and Christian patriotism.” Girls sang a Klan song to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne:”
Beneath this flag that waves above
This cross that lights our way
You’ll always find a sister’s love
In the heart of each Tri-K.72
Like Scouting, Klan youth groups emphasized sports competitions for boys and crafts for girls. Both sexes could serve as flag bearers and could play in drum and bugle corps. Girls specialized in singing and rhythmic chanting. One festival advertised “kute girls, katchy songs, and kunning costumes.” Both Klansmen and Klanswomen adopted a maternalist line regarding the importance of bringing in girls: they would become the mothers who would produce the next generation of Klanspeople. They were to be taught not only true Americanism but also domestic skills and womanly chastity, and teenage girls could compete in beauty and popularity contests to become “Miss 100% America.”73
Still, northern Klanswomen often campaigned differently than their male comrades. They placed a higher priority on disciplining immorality than their brothers did—another priority shared with progressive women. They bragged of this orientation: with a female Klan in action “many of the moral uplift problems of the present could be solved,” one statement claimed.74 Some of them succeeded in persuading towns and counties to ban or censor not only liquor but also dance halls, films, books, magazines, and Sunday store openings. Classics like The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Dreiser’s American Tragedy, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (a British novel about lesbians), Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, any of the “pulp” publications, anything by D. H. Lawrence or Upton Sinclair, even Voltaire’s Candide could not pass Klanswomen’s test. They abhorred interracial marriage, of course, for keeping families “pure” was squarely their responsibility. But they gave this cause a feminist twist, arguing that interracial sex and marriage were examples of male lust and its destructive impact on family life.
Klanswomen were usually unsuccessful, however, in getting Klansmen to bear down on immorality that victimized women. The limits of women’s power in the Klan show in how rarely northern Klansmen acted in support of abused Klanswomen. As a Wisconsin Klan leader said, “Sometimes women would want us to go against their husbands for drinking or running around with other women. We refused to do that.”75 The leader of an Oregon Klavern warned, “If you married Klansmen insist on going out with another man’s wife be awful sure she doesn’t belong to a Klansman. You may have an occasion to meet that gentleman in the Klavern and I am sure it would be a very embarrassing position”—in other words, he was concerned more with protecting his Klavern than with upholding morals.76 Nancy MacLean found that southern Klansmen someti
mes punished men for abuse, nonsupport, and/or infidelity,77 but there is little evidence of this in the North. Perhaps northern men were less abusive. More likely, northern Klanswomen were more embarrassed to admit their victimization, or were reluctant to undercut their premise that only immigrants, Catholics, and blacks were abusive. The northern Klan also manifested greater deference to the state—at least on issues involving complaints against men considered otherwise respectable. For example, consider this excerpt from minutes of the La Grande, Oregon, Klavern: “For the third time it has been reported that E. J. Schilling, who resides at . . . , has three children by his first wife who are being neglected most shamefully and several Klansmen have advised that we take this matter up. . . . I found that his particular case should come under the jurisdiction of the county health nurse.”78
The La Grande Klavern’s reference to a county health nurse—a position created by Oregon’s Progressive Era women reformers—suggests a counterintuitive aspect of Ku Klux Klan principles. It was by no means eager to preempt state functions and sometimes sought to encourage them. It urged police to act more aggressively, and its vigilantes were quite willing to be supervised by the police, providing they operated from a Klannish perspective. (In this respect, the northern Klan was not so different from the southern, where police or sheriff collusion was involved in most lynchings.) Moreover, the northern Klan was no enemy of government welfare provision. “Taxes,” one pamphlet argued, “should be looked upon by the taxpayer as the most important bequest he can make to his own children and to humanity.”79 In this respect the Klan’s agenda resembled some aspects of women’s progressivism. Woman suffrage added to its optimism that, rather than shrink the state, it could reform state activity so as to align it with Klan values. Moreover, in 1932 Klanspeople generally supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s candidacy, despite his anti-Prohibition stance; this support may reflect the Klan’s traditional—though not consistent—alignment with the Democratic Party, but it might also reflect Klanspeople’s support for emergency relief. It was only later that they attacked FDR with anti-Semitic labels, calling him “Rosenvelt” and the like.80 These flexible principles also showed in the sharp decline of anti-Catholic rhetoric in the 1930s.
In much of their agenda, and in the contradictions they expressed regarding women’s place in the polity, Klanswomen were indistinguishable from many other clubwomen, including Catholics, Jews, and African Americans. Women’s Klaverns seemed to spend more energy arranging social occasions for themselves than did the men’s. They organized teas, parties, and card games, and sometimes joint socials with nearby Klaverns. They held receptions for visiting WKKK and Klan VIPs. And of course they did much of the work for the larger Klan events. One such Indiana event involved camping out in the woods for three days81—one can only imagine how much women’s work went into those arrangements.
Still, politics and political education remained a part of WKKK activity. While accepting that they were “not expected to be interested in certain problems of community welfare to the same extent that men should be interested,” as one WKKK local put it, deferring to gender hierarchy, they nevertheless aimed to “assist all Protestant women in the study of practical politics . . . to scrutinize with impartiality the platforms of political parties.”82
Klanswomen were probably divided in their attitude toward participation in conventional politics, which they considered corrupted by immigrant non-Protestants, but united in condemnation of the rebellion against Victorian standards of modesty that was steadily gaining strength. They feared what they saw as libertine behavior and unchaste media though they rarely acknowledged that they arose from commercial enterprises. They were thoroughly, consistently unhappy with unchaste dress, with improper leisure activity, music, and movies, and with sexual and artistic radicalism. In this perspective, despite the fact that the Klan flourished in many cities, its women members considered big-city life destructive. It was undermining the multifaceted purity that was core to Klan ideology.
Where the WKKK differed most radically was not in its bigotry—for many organizations shared in that—but in how the members acted on it. Vigilante violence, of course, remained always men’s work in their world. Still, in promoting the hatreds and fears that gave rise to it, they bear moral, if not legal, responsibility along with the men. Moreover, in the political and economic warfare waged against “aliens,” Klanswomen participated equally with Klansmen.
___________
* This is a reference to the “all-seeing eye” used by Masons as symbol of truth and power.
KKK members and Royal Riders of the Red Robe, a Klan auxiliary, welcomed by a minister, Portland, Oregon. (Oregon Historical Society)
Chapter 8
OREGON AND THE ATTACK ON PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS
STARTING IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, AND extending through the mid-twentieth century, Oregon was arguably the most racist place outside the southern states, possibly even of all the states. Its legislature tried to keep it all white, excluding people of color with a host of discriminatory laws. So when the Klan arrived in 1921, its agenda fit comfortably into the state’s tradition. When I tell people that Oregon was a stronghold of the Klan, they express surprise, even shock, because of the state’s current reputation as liberal. But that is because they don’t understand its history or demography. Neither did I, although I grew up there. The fact that Portland is my hometown influenced my decision to focus on the Oregon Klan as a case study, but the Oregon case offers other advantages, too. The Klan gained particularly formidable power there, especially in Portland; Oregon shared with Indiana the distinction of having the highest per capita Klan membership. Moreover, the Oregon Klan’s muscle led it more actively into electoral politics than most other state Klans. And the Oregon case provides insight into the Klan’s class composition and trajectory.
Klan recruiters probably understood Oregon’s potential. Like Indiana, its population of approximately eight hundred thousand in 1920 was overwhelmingly Protestant and white, and 87 percent native-born; of the foreign-born, half were US citizens. Its approximately 2,400 African Americans constituted 0.3 percent, its Catholics 8 percent, and its Jews 0.1 percent of the population, and this demography was both cause and effect of its history of bigotry. In 1844 the Oregon Territory banned slavery but at the same time required all African Americans to leave. In 1857, in the process of achieving statehood, it put two pieces of a future constitution to a referendum vote, and the same contradiction emerged: 75 percent of voters favored rejecting slavery, but 89 percent voted for excluding people of color. Meanwhile, the state offered 650- to 1,300-acre plots of land free—to white settlers. Prevented by federal law from expelling existing black residents, its constitution banned any further blacks from entering, living, voting, or owning property in Oregon (the only state to do this), to be enforced by lashings for violators. In 1862, forced to vacate the previous ban, it levied a $5 (worth $120 in 2016) annual tax on African Americans, Chinese, Hawaiians, and multiracial people who persisted in living there. The Chinese were specifically denied state citizenship. (In 1893 La Grande, Oregon, whites burned that city’s Chinatown to the ground.) Oregon refused to ratify the enfranchisement of black men by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; it only did so—and this may come as another surprise—in 1959 and 1973, respectively. In 1906 the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the prevalent racial segregation of public facilities was constitutional. Interracial marriage was prohibited until 1951.1 So except for the fact that its targets were new, Catholics in particular, the Klan could be said to be merely reviving old causes.
World War I had created a boom market for Oregon’s key products: lumber, paper, grain, and ships. As global commerce grew, so did the Port of Portland. Although 110 miles from the Pacific, it sits at the confluence of the mighty Columbia and the Willamette Rivers, which produced a valuable deep-water port. Although the 1912 federal Rivers and Harbors Act transferred authority to the Port of Portland Commission, the
port was then so important nationally that the US Army Corps of Engineers maintained it. Then a 1920s postwar recession reduced demand for Oregon products, notably lumber, just as Portland experienced a taste of the “Roaring Twenties”—dance halls, speakeasies, movies, flapper fashion. This upsurge in visible “sin” naturally produced an opposition, including an evangelical revival, which in turn built a demand for action to suppress it. The combination of economic and cultural factors and a rich vein of possible recruits contributed to the Klan’s high-velocity Oregon success.
The Klan also had a ready-made organizational base in Oregon. The Federation of Patriotic Societies (FoPS) arose in 1916 to fight Catholicism and to prevent Catholics from holding public office. Akin to the American Protective Association, it was headed by a virulently racist Presbyterian minister from South Africa. Very secretive—the Oregon Voter wrote that “the names of neither delegates nor participating bodies have so far been disclosed”—FoPS served as the political arm of seventeen fraternals, including the Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, the Scottish Rite Masons, and the Loyal Orange Order from Northern Ireland. It pressured politicians to declare their religious allegiances, thus making Protestantism a public political qualification. By 1922 FoPS would become, for all political purposes, a Klan appendage, with the Exalted Cyclops as its president.2
The film Birth of a Nation further tilled the soil for the Klan in Oregon, as it did everywhere the second Klan arose. Playing in Portland theaters first in 1915, and again in 1918 and 1922, the last showing under Klan auspices, it drew huge audiences despite the unusually high admission price of two dollars. Protests on behalf of the approximately 1,500 African Americans in Portland persuaded the mayor to draft an emergency ordinance to ban it, but the city council would not go along. Yet this very mayor joined the Klan just a few years later, posing for a formal photograph with Klansmen and the chief of police—an indication of the Klan’s power to change minds, or to intimidate.3