The best books about the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Oregon and the USA

As a writer, this book enabled me to get inside the mindset of Eastern Oregon Klan members in the 1920s. The heart of the book is the weekly meeting minutes of a local KKK chapter, which allowed me to see through the eyes of the men who made up this organization from May 1922 through April 1924. Their concerns included recruiting new members, supporting Klan-friendly political leaders at all levels of government, preventing Catholics from employment in teaching and other positions, and supporting a state bill that would ban Catholic schools. All this helped me create realistic characters with social and political views that are very different from my own.

As a fiction writer trying to depict 1920s Portland, Oregon, I found limitless inspiration from this book. Chandler and Kennedy give the background leading up to Prohibition, chronicling the women’s temperance and suffrage movements; the establishment opposition to the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies; the organized crime in the city and police corruption; and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. When George Baker became mayor in 1917, he took advantage of all these elements to control a system of corruption that kept him in power. While the book does not focus on the KKK, it offers important details about its powerful influence on this particular city at this time in history.

I couldn’t have written my trilogy without reading this book. It taught me so much about the women in the KKK, their attitudes and beliefs, their social status and background, their activities and support for the Klan, and so much more. The book is so deeply researched that it provides keen insights into the gender politics of the 1920s, the differing ways of thinking between the men in the Klan versus the women in the Klan, and their dissimilar approaches to carrying out “Klanishness.” The women that Blee describes held the typical mainstream views of white, Protestant, native-born Americans, who were the overwhelming majority in their communities. This book enhanced my understanding of Klan women so that I could create realistic Klan women characters in my novels.

I love Hill’s passion for elucidating our history in order to combat prejudice. She approaches the origins of fear and intolerance from diverse perspectives, starting with violent clashes between 1700s explorers and indigenous peoples of Oregon’s Pacific coast. She describes the long history of stealing Oregon land from natives, and how the US Civil War contributed to the exclusion of African Americans from Oregon in its state constitution. Later she shows how D. W. Griffith’s movie The Birth of a Nation was instrumental in the re-emergence of the KKK in the 1920s, and WWI propaganda against Germans and fear of Bolshevism contributed to Klan hatred of immigrants. In later chapters Hill brings us up to the present summarizing anti-LGBTQ political initiatives and the Black Lives Matter movement.

I value this book for its thorough description of the many elements that made the Klan of the 1920s so ascendant: its hostility toward immigrants, big city liberal elites, intellectuals, Jews, Catholics, and fear of the many changes in society. The author says she began writing an article about 20th-century American social movements, but because of the 2016 election, expanded it into this book. Similarly, I felt the same urgency to complete my trilogy and get it out to the public at that time. Just as I tried to portray 1920 parallels with our contentious politics today, Gordon concludes by illuminating correlations between the 1920s KKK and contemporary right-wing beliefs, and their similarities and differences regarding European fascism. Bigotry-fueled fear waxes and wanes in America.