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Chapter Eight: Oregon Was a Klan State
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138 CHAPTER EIGHT Oregon Was a Klan State At first I thought it a frightful menace but I am coming to believe that its influence is waning. I am saddened when I think of its unintelligent, unAmerican attitude. Its presence and its activities must be taken into account, but I feel no special bitterness towards its members as I have found the same spirit of intolerance amongst the white people who are outside of the Klan; the only difference is that the Klan is organized. — Beatrice Morrow Cannady1 “Many speakers have come to Portland, made their impressions and gone on their journey,” Cannady wrote in the Advocate in May 1923. But none, she observed, had “made a deeper and more lasting impression for good upon the minds and hearts of the people than” Missouri Congressman LeonidasC.Dyer,whohadbeenmotivatedtoauthorabillmakinglynching a federal crime after a race riot in East St. Louis in 1917.2 Members of the House of Representatives passed it early in 1922 by a vote of 230 to 119, a victory the NAACP called “one of the most significant steps ever taken in the history of America.” But the organization warned against celebrating until the Senate had set its “stamp of disapproval on mob murder,” and called on citizens “to do all in [their] power” to ensure the bill passed.3 Thousands staged a “silent parade” in Washington, D.C., and a “delegation of negro women” met with President Harding to get him to “urge final Congressional action” on the measure.4 At the end of 1922, however, the New York Times reported that the bill was “dead.” Filibustering Democrats had managed to tie up the session for a week, and Republican senators finally “decided very reluctantly that it was [their] duty to set aside the Dyer bill and go on with the business of the session.”5 Five months later, the congressman was in Portland—reportedly with the Advocate’s help—where he spoke “before a representative audience at Lincoln High School auditorium” on Sunday, May 13th, “delivered a very interesting address” at Mount Olivet Baptist Church later that evening, and attended a Portland Branch meeting on May 14th. Cannady “presided” over the gathering at Lincoln, where Dyer told the audience that “the ballot and its proper, intelligent exercise” was essential for “blotting out presentday mistreatment.” Along those lines, he “took a fling” at the senators representing Oregon and urged his listeners to remember “their stand on 139 chapter eight: Oregon Was a Klan State this bill when they [ran] for re-election.” Finally, he pledged to reintroduce his bill in the next session of Congress.6 B Dyer’s visit came in the midst of a ”momentous crisis” in Oregon’s history.7 In the summer of 1921, the Ku Klux Klan “invaded” the small agricultural community of Hood River looking for “native born Americans” to join the secret organization and its fight to preserve “pure womanhood, constitutional freedoms, the common people, and public education.”8 An editorial in the Glacier suggested fighting back with “ridicule,” the “most effective weapon that can be employed against such an organization as the Ku Klux Klan.”9 Some white residents, though, voiced the need for greater protection against what they called a “relic of the dark ages.” One man, who noted that he had “never even had a popgun” in his home, told the paper that news about “such an instrument of violence” as the KKK made him feel as if he should purchase “the highest powered rifles.”10 Six weeks later, the Klan organizer who “dropped without previous announcement into the midst of Hood River” apparently left just as “mysteriously.” Some speculated that the $10 initiation fee—about $120 today—was too much for prospective members who had not yet realized returns on the apple harvest, even if they were “at first tempted by the thrill of possible adventure.”11 Hood River’s brush with the Klan ended well, but many other Oregon communities were not so fortunate. In Roseburg, a “great cross” formed on a steep hillside “cast a red glare high into the heavens” as “a class of more than 100 candidates [was] received into the invisible empire” in July 1922. A reporter for the Roseburg News-Review was deeply affected by the “awe-inspiring” event that was “witnessed … by more than a thousand klansmen [and] hundreds of spectators.” He described the ceremony in ghostly terms: “Silhouetted in the bright glare the marching figures passed in an...