Ku Klux Klan in Maine
In U.S. states such as Maine, which had a very small black population but a burgeoning number of Acadian, French-Canadian and Irish immigrants, the Klan manifested primarily as a Protestant nativist movement directed against the Catholic minority as well as African-Americans.
The Klan tapped into a long history of fraught relations between Maine's established Protestant "Yankee" population (those descended from the original English colonials) and Irish-Catholic newcomers, who had begun immigrating in large numbers in the 1830s.
[citation needed] With the growing influence of Democratic Irish-Catholic and French-Canadian municipal politicians in cities like Bangor, Lewiston, and Portland, ethnicity and religion increasingly helped to draw party lines.
The absence of a Maine Blaine Amendment would be exploited by the Klan in the 1920s, as they made the spectre of state support for Catholic schools one of their wedge issues.
Irish Catholics had also made gains in municipal politics, along with a small urban Jewish community, while rural areas had declined at the expense of a few cities such as Portland, Bangor, and Lewiston.
[3] The King Kleagle (chief recruiter) of the Maine Klan was the charismatic F. Eugene Farnsworth, a former barber, stage magician (or hypnotist, accounts differ), and failed motion picture studio owner.
Beginning in 1922–23 Farnsworth began a statewide speaking tour that drew huge crowds—from 1,000 to even 5,000 at a time—many of whom were afterward inducted into the secret society after paying a $10 membership fee.
[5][full citation needed] Farnsworth would usually share the stage with a Protestant minister, and they would rail against what they perceived as growing Catholic political power in Maine.
[9][full citation needed] Although a secret society, the Klan maintained a very public image in Maine from the time recruitment started in earnest in 1923.
[23][full citation needed] (Marvin's obituary in the Portsmouth (NH) Herald, March 20, 1933, p. 7, states that he "held one of the high offices within that organization" (i.e. the Klan).
As early as 1922, Baxter had called it "an insult and an affront to American citizens" and said "I believe Maine people prefer the light of day to deeds of darkness".
King Kleagle Farnsworth, who by this time had broken with the Klan over its refusal to accept Canadian immigrants (who were prominent in the Maine ranks), died suddenly of an illness in 1926.
[4][full citation needed] He was replaced as King Kleagle of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont by Dr. Edward W. Gayer, an Indiana-born physician and graduate of Purdue University.
[33][full citation needed] Governor Brewster took the unprecedented step of denouncing the senatorial candidate of his own party, which only helped Gould's cause.
[34] The Chairman of the Republican State Committee declared that with Gould's victory, "the sinister influence of an oath-bound organization no longer threatens the welfare of Maine".
In May 1926, Mayor Ernest L. McLean of Augusta (a Democrat) caused the cancellation of a large Klan rally and parade in the state capital by prohibiting marchers from wearing hoods or otherwise covering their faces.
Also in February 1926 the sprawling headquarters of the Maine Klan in Portland was seized by the city for unpaid taxes, with the organization's affairs being described by one newspaper as "muddled".
[39] A 1928 Republican senatorial primary fight was the last time the Klan campaigned openly for a candidate, in this case for Owen Brewster against incumbent Frederick Hale.
Baxter made these and other charges in a long newspaper interview, in which he also accused Brewster of "political treachery and double-dealing" and being "unworthy of the confidence of the Republican Party".
[42][full citation needed] The victories of Hale and Gardiner, this time without the help of Democrats, proved that the Maine Klan was a spent political force, and led to the resignation of Grand Dragon Perkins.
[43][full citation needed] Brewster was eventually elected to the House of Representatives, and then the Senate, where he became a close ally of Wisconsin's Joseph McCarthy, a Roman Catholic (they were united largely by anti-communism).
In 1928 the Catholic Diocese of Maine struck a triumphalist note by naming its newly opened high school in Bangor after father John Bapst, the priest who had been tarred and feathered in Ellsworth during a previous period of anti-Catholicism.
Klan Klaverns (local chapters) lingered on in some Maine towns years after the national and state organizations had dissolved, partly kept alive by their women's auxiliaries.
