Ku Klux Klan in Maine

Although the Ku Klux Klan is popularly associated with white supremacy, the revived Klan of the 1920s was also anti-Catholic. In the State of Maine, with a negligible African-American population but a burgeoning number of French-Canadian and Irish immigrants, the Klan revival of the 1920s was mainly a Protestant nativist movement directed against the Catholic minority. For a period in the mid-1920s, the Klan captured elements of the Maine Republican Party, even helping to elect a governor, Owen Brewster.

The Klan tapped into a long history of fraught relations between Maine’s Protestant ‘Yankee’ population (those descended from the original English colonials) and Irish-Catholic newcomers, who had begun immigrating in large numbers in the 1830s. The rise of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s had resulted in the burning of a Catholic church in Bath, Maine, and the tarring and feathering of a Catholic priest, Father John Bapst, in Ellsworth. Catholic complaints about Protestant-oriented public schools had helped motivate the mob that attacked Bapst. The main front in the war on immigrants before the American Civil war, however, was temperance legislation. The Maine law of 1851 was the first statewide prohibition ordinance in the country, and was perceived by Maine’s Irish-Catholic population as an attack on their culture. With the growing influence of mainly Democratic Irish-Catholic municipal politicians in cities like Bangor; Lewiston and Portland ethnicity and religion increasingly helped to draw party lines.

James G. Blaine, a leader of the Maine and national Republican parties following the Civil War, and the party’s candidate for U.S. President in 1884, helped deepen the rift between his party and Irish voters by sponsoring, while still Speaker of the US House of Representatives, a proposed amendment to the US Constitution which would have outlawed the use of tax money to pay for parochial schools. While defeated in the US Senate, “Blaine Amendments” were inserted into the constitutions of all US states but eleven, one of which was, ironically, Maine. 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. Blaine’s run for the US Presidency in 1884 is generally credited with having been defeated by Irish-Catholic voters angered when a prominent Blaine supporter referred to Democrats as “the party of rum, Romanism, and rebellion”. Ironically, Blaine's mother was Catholic and his sister was a nun.

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