Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s by Mark Paul Richard (review)

Taking its title from the declaration of F. Eugene Farnsworth, King Kleagle of Maine, that “this is not a Catholic nation” (p. 23), Mark Paul Richard’s new history of the Ku Klux Klan in New England is a useful addition to the literature. This is, as Richard writes, a regional story of national phenomena, and the book persuasively illustrates how the regional mechanics of the New England Klan impact our understanding of the organization as a whole.

For Richard, the story of the Klan in New England is the story of contemporary Catholic power. Catholic political and social muscle was evident both in the conspiratorial fears that drew bigots to join the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire and in the fight against the hooded band. Passionately defending the importance of Catholic resistance for the ultimate decline of the Klan of the 1920s, Richard risks overstating his case, particularly when he also provides vivid examples of the Klan’s collapse as self-created. In Connecticut, for example, the Klan was destabilized not by external opposition but by leadership contests that led to secession and competition from new offshoots of the organization.

Richard proclaims the importance of a “stand that was firm and consistent yet not overly combative” (p.34) in defeating the Invisible Empire in Maine; yet that resistance was insufficient to prevent the election of the Klan-backed Republican Ralph Brewster as governor. The book is more convincing in its argument for Brewster’s victory as a model of the Klan’s political engagement and in lauding Brewster’s opponent, William Pattangall, as an example of principled opposition. Richard finds a less principled but more effective example of political resistance in the Irish-Catholic mayor of Boston, James Curley, who had aides secretly light flaming crosses in an effort to draw public sympathy to his campaign and tie his Republican opponent to the Klan.

This astute analysis of the Klan’s part in northeastern politics is one of the major contributions of the book. Richard makes the compelling argument that the Klan’s success in local politics, both in New England and nationally, was largely the result of opportunism—waiting to offer an endorsement until almost certain success and then claiming responsibility for the victory. He is also convincing in the assertion that, in attempting to affiliate themselves with the likely victors, the Klan largely aligned itself with the Republican Party in New England. In doing so, Richard argues, Klansmen helped drive ethnic Catholics in the northeast en masse into the Democratic Party even before Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign.

Beyond politics, Richard highlights Klan violence against Catholics, furthering the recent work of historians like Thomas Pegram to restore the contemporary controversy to the civic-activist model of Klan history. Richard goes a step further on this front, arguing that nativism and religious prejudice were more important to the group’s growth in New England than its functions as social, fraternal, or civic organization. This provocative argument is undercut somewhat, however, by the difficulty of clearly delineating these appeals. Richard’s own absorbing discussion of the Klan’s fight against parochial schooling in New England demonstrates how blurred the lines were between the Klan as civic organization and as expression of religious prejudice. Nonetheless, this is a well-researched and well-written effort to apply a new lens to the subject, and as such will be of interest to historians of the Klan and of American Catholicism more generally.