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

Much has been written in the last few decades about the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, a national (unlike its post-Civil War predecessor) organization with an estimated four million members at its zenith. Mark Paul Richard—professor of history and Canadian studies at SUNY-Plattsburgh—has now provided an important addition to this growing historiography. The first substantive examination of the Klan in New England, Richard’s Not a Catholic Nation makes clear that the KKK was active and aggressive in the region, and that Catholics were equally active and aggressive in their resistance.

Not a Catholic Nation is organized on a state-by-state basis, starting with two chapters on Maine and then moving southward. As a result it occasionally feels repetitive, given the similarities in Klan activities and Catholic responses from state to state. That said, Not a Catholic Nation is a delight to read, in good part because Richard has mined a great variety of sources—including local and regional newspapers, including French-language newspapers, and state government documents—for details that make for a richly textured monograph. There are the 200 Klansmen who infiltrated three companies of the Rhode Island militia. There are the inebriated Vermont Klansmen who broke into Burlington’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception searching for the “‘ammunition, acid, gas, and guns’“ that could “‘blow up all the Protestants in New England”; not finding the explosive stash, they contented themselves with “stealing a crucifix, tools, vestments, and candles” (82–83). Particularly bizarre is the story of a Maine KKK leader who—in an earlier incarnation as a hypnotist—was challenged at a public demonstration to prove that his patient was really hypnotized; the future King Kleagle responded by having a large stone placed on the patient’s chest, which was then struck with a sledgehammer. As the Boston Herald reported, “the patient never came out of the trance, passing on quietly into the next world” (20).

Not a Catholic Nation rightly pays a good deal of attention to French-Canadians and their descendants as particular targets of Klan vitriol. Not surprisingly, when French Catholics were able to work together with Irish Catholics—as seems to have happened at the grass-roots level in Massachusetts—they had more success in combating the Klan than when they were divided, as in Rhode Island. Interestingly, and in an important interpretive addendum to our understanding of the Klan, Richard argues that the Klan did not see all immigrants from the north as targets. The KKK radically modified its anti-immigration stance to “enlist the support of foreign-born Protestants, such as Anglo-Canadians, as they confronted New England’s Catholic population, much of it consisting of French-Canadian descendants” (202).

While the Canada-U.S. borderlands makes this story different from the KKK story elsewhere, in the main the New England Klan looks like the Klan elsewhere. This is even true when it comes to the matter of demographics: while the author claims that “this book will challenge notions that the KKK was active . . . predominantly where white Protestant majorities existed” (4), the only state where Catholics were a majority (53.8%) was Rhode Island. It seems that the other five states of the region fit pretty well into the general argument that—outside the South—the most active Klans were to be found where there was a Protestant majority and a significant Catholic minority.

Actually, this point—that the Klan in New England was a lot like the Klan elsewhere in the North and West—is in good part what makes Not a Catholic Nation such an important work. In the introduction, Richard explicitly positions himself against scholars who have “downplayed the Protestant Klan’s expressions of hostility toward minority groups,” instead portraying the KKK as a conventional civic organization (4). As opposed to this Rotarians-with...