The Ku Klux Klan became a powerful force in Oregon politics in the early 1920s, helping elect a governor, lawmakers and local officials while pushing a ballot measure aimed at shutting down private schools.
Retired Oregon journalist Steve Law traces the Klan’s rapid rise and fall in his new book, "Peddlers of Hate: How the Ku Klux Klan Seized Power in 1920s Oregon."
Law said Oregon was particularly receptive to the revived Klan after World War I.
“Oregon was ripe territory for the Klan,” Law wrote in his book. “The state was overwhelmingly white and Protestant with a long history of hostility toward blacks and Catholics.”
That history included Oregon’s original constitution. Adopted in 1857 and in effect when Oregon became a state in 1859, it prohibited Black people who were not already living in Oregon from residing in the state, owning property or making contracts.
The Klan that emerged nationally in the early 20th century differed from the organization founded in Tennessee after the Civil War. It operated in part as a profitable fraternal organization, with recruiters earning money by signing up new members, while promoting racism, anti-Catholicism and hostility toward immigrants.
After Klan organizer Luther I. Powell arrived in Southern Oregon in 1921, the organization spread rapidly across the state.
In Oregon, Law said, Catholics became one of the Klan’s primary targets.
“The real goal of the Scottish Rite Masons and the Klan was to ban Catholic schools, which were growing fast in Oregon at the time,” Law said. “And that became the key issue in the 1922 elections that enabled Klan candidates and Klan-supported candidates to sweep into office.”
Oregon voters approved the Compulsory Education Act in 1922, which would have required most children to attend public schools and largely eliminated private and religious schools.
The Klan also helped elect Walter Pierce as governor, and Klan member Kaspar K. Kubli became speaker of the Oregon House.
Law said the organization wielded political influence far beyond its membership.
Law estimates the Oregon Klan had no more than 15,000 to 17,000 members at any one time. But as people joined and left, he said an estimated 50,000 Oregonians belonged to the organization over several years — the second-highest share of any state's population after Indiana.
The Klan’s influence did not go unchallenged. The Medford Mail Tribune was among the Oregon newspapers that openly opposed the organization.
The compulsory school law never took effect. The U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in 1925, ruling that the state could not require children to attend only public schools.
The Klan’s political influence in Oregon also faded amid internal divisions and scandals surrounding the organization nationally.
Event
- Law will discuss Peddlers of Hate at an author talk at 7 p.m. Aug. 24 at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland.
Guest
- Steve Law, author, "Peddlers of Hate: How the Ku Klux Klan Seized Power in 1920s Oregon"
