Standing tall at SW Fourth and Pine, the Multnomah Hotel was one of Portland’s grandest buildings in the 1920s, with a magnificent lobby and a ballroom of a “palatial grandeur.” The hotel (the building is now the downtown Embassy Suites) was the stomping ground of the lawyers, bankers, and merchants who ran the city, men who considered themselves a cut above the rest.

They were easy marks.

The Ku Klux Klan swept into Oregon in 1921, setting up shop in places like Portland’s Multnomah Hotel and Medford’s Masonic temples, where the Klan signed up fresh recruits for its shadowy order, plying them with an irresistible cocktail of prejudice and resentment. They took over school boards and county commissions. Before long, the KKK had police officers, judges, and politicians in its pocket. At the height of its power, the Klan boasted 60 chapters in Oregon, lit fiery crosses on Mount Tabor, and paraded through the streets of Portland in masks and robes.

Peddlers of Hate: How the Ku Klux Klan Seized Power in 1920s Oregon, a new book by Portland journalist Steve Law, is a masterful study of how a band of hucksters harnessed xenophobia to become the state’s dominant political force—a story with disturbing parallels to the Proud Boys and Make America Great Again.

The Klan’s roots stretch back to the Civil War, when a handful of disgruntled Confederate soldiers started a secret society in Pulaski, Tennessee, that was mostly an excuse to get drunk and pull pranks. In the racially polarized atmosphere of the postwar South, soaked in blood and resentment, the frat boy antics soon descended into thuggery. Masked mobs marauded through the streets, attacking Black people, setting fire to homes and businesses, and lynching thousands of innocent victims. Klan violence was so brazen that in 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant imposed martial law and imprisoned the ringleaders. The Klan disbanded and melted into obscurity.

The Klan might have lurked forever in the deep freeze of history but for Birth of a Nation, the 1915 blockbuster that romanticized Klansmen as crusading heroes saving the honor of the South. The silent film breathed life back into the Klan and inspired an Atlanta insurance salesman to revive the organization. Suddenly the Klan was back—now masquerading as a fraternal lodge.

The Klan infiltrated Oregon with ruthless efficiency. Louisiana ad salesman Luther Powell stepped off a train in Medford in 1921 and combed the roster of Masonic lodges for fresh prospects, earning a hefty commission for each member he signed up—a model known as “selling hate at $10 a package.”

Klan recruiters followed a formula: ferret out “scabs they could pick,” and latch onto them. Oregon’s hot-button issue was Prohibition—voters had approved a statewide ban on booze in 1914, but enforcement was haphazard, to the consternation of teetotalers. Perhaps more surprising, the Klan’s main targets in Oregon weren’t Black people but immigrants. Immigrants made up about 13 percent of the state’s population (today it’s 10 percent) and were far more numerous than Oregon’s tiny Black community. 

Powell cleverly mashed the two issues together. Allying with moral crusaders, he blamed Catholic immigrants for speakeasies and bootleg liquor and talked his recruits into signing up for the Invisible Empire as a way to make America great again, 1920s-style.

They lapped up the Kool-Aid. In late 1921, 6,000 people attended a Klan lecture at the Municipal Auditorium (now the Keller) to learn how “purified Americanism” would get the country back to normal.

As the Klan grew in numbers and influence, it shed its secrecy. Oregon’s top Klansman, a telegraph operator named Fred Gifford, became the political boss of the state. The Klan put an initiative on the ballot in 1922 to ban private schools, a gut punch aimed straight at Catholic institutions. The measure passed with 53 percent of the vote. (It was eventually struck down by the US Supreme Court.) Meanwhile, the Oregon Klan launched a lucrative chapter for women and even toyed with starting a Boy Scouts knockoff.

One of the most sinister themes of Law’s book is the Klan’s penchant for twisting the truth into silly putty. “Ours is not an ‘anti’ organization,” Powell proclaimed. “We uphold—not break—the law.”

Klan leaders were masters of the new science of propaganda. They whispered that nuns at St. Vincent Hospital in Portland were sexually abusing their patients. That Catholics were stashing weapons at Sacred Heart Hospital in Medford to open fire on America when the Pope gave the word. That the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic fraternal lodge) had all sworn an oath to “wage relentless war” on Protestants.

It didn’t matter that the lies were outrageous. If anything, that was why they worked so well—they grabbed the public’s attention, reframed the debate, and kept their opponents off-balance.

A veteran newsman who worked at Salem’s Statesman Journal and the Portland Tribune, Law has a knack for narrative and a sharp eye for detail. He marshals a complex story and keeps the action moving. Near the end, I found myself turning the pages, hunting for the historic forces that would finally doom the Klan to defeat. But the real story of the group’s diminishment is messier, Law explains. While many brave Oregonians fought against it, risking their lives and livelihoods, the Klan ultimately ripped itself apart. Rival factions jockeyed for power and squabbled over the spoils. Promises never materialized. Scandals engulfed the leadership. Members got tired of the bickering and quit paying their dues—particularly after the Great Depression hit in 1929.

The Klan never recovered. But it never vanished, either. As Law shows, groups like the Klan or its mutant offshoots can always find new resentments to harvest, new scapegoats to blame. Perhaps the most lasting lesson from this book is to see how pathetic the Klan’s appeasers look in hindsight—and to look ourselves in the mirror.

They Fought Back

Peddlers of Hate brims with examples of shameful acquiescence. But it also tells the story of the Oregonians who fought the Klan, sometimes risking their own lives and livelihoods to sound the alarm and rally the opposition.

Beatrice Cannady. Newspaper editor and Oregon’s foremost Black civil rights leader, she lobbied Portland City Council to prevent the screening of Birth of a Nation in 1915 and warned Gov. Ben Olcott that the Klan was riding abroad in Oregon. (Olcott shrugged. Like many political leaders, he dismissed the Klan as a joke until it was too late.) Also the first Black woman to practice law in Oregon, Cannady exposed Klan activities in her newspaper, The Advocate.

“Big Ed” Kelly. Medford lawyer and war hero who became one of the few prominent citizens in Oregon to speak out against the Klan during its rise to power. “I regard the Ku Klux Klan as the gravest menace to internal peace that has threatened this country since the Civil War,” he declared. As district attorney, he successfully petitioned the Medford City Council to ban people from wearing masks in public. He threw his support behind the embattled Jackson County sheriff, whom the Klan attempted to recall. In 1922, he ran for Jackson County circuit court judge against a Klan candidate. A scrappy Irish-American Catholic, he was beaten 2–1.

George Putnam. Editor and publisher of the Capital Journal of Salem, he documented the Klan’s sinister activities when Oregon’s bigger newspapers were cowed into silence. Although the paper’s circulation was barely 5,000, Putnam assigned a full-time reporter to cover the Klan statewide and ran dozens of exposés and searing editorials. Klansmen threatened a boycott; he defied them.

Fernwood School eighth graders. In 1926, the eighth grade at Fernwood School went to the Imperial Skating Rink to celebrate their graduation. The rink wouldn’t let George Cannady (son of Beatrice, see above) strap on roller skates because he was Black. Rather than celebrate without him, the students left the rink together.

Steve Law will read from Peddlers of Hate at Powell’s City of Books at 7pm Wednesday, August 26.