Today’s KKK in Maine
The President had been whining about immigrants for years. They were “vicious” and a “menace.” The country had become a “dumping ground” for the “advancing hordes.” And, of course, the “retroactive immigrant” was also a threat. The President claimed the racially pure Nordic countries got it right, because the “observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” At this point, even if you didn’t know he was paraphrasing the Ku Klux Klan when he said, “America should be kept American,” you were aware of their shared values.
Unsurprisingly, when the President finally signed his immigration bill into law, the result was thousands upon thousands of people forced to return to the dangerous and often deadly situations from which we had promised shelter. Congressional and civilian bigots alike were delighted with the President.
But this President was not Trump. It was our 30th leader, Calvin Coolidge. His immigration law was the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, and it was just as dirty and conniving as anything you’d expect to come out of the White House today. For example, it not only set “national origin” quotas, but those quotas were deliberately set according to census data from more than 30 years prior, when the U.S. population had been 45 percent smaller.
The law also created the U.S. Border Patrol, which hired many of its officers from the organization that originally established the practice of patrolling our peaceful borders with murderous intent, the Ku Klux Klan.
Here in Maine, hiring officers with those shared values wouldn’t have been a problem, because in 1924 the KKK claimed 150,141 members in this state alone. That’s more than one in five Mainers, and contrary to popular belief, KKK membership wasn’t limited to a bunch of rural rubes. It was primarily a middle- and upper-middle-class organization that drew its power from the many “pillars of the community” in its ranks. For example, DeForest Perkins was a property developer, the board secretary of the Portland Chamber of Commerce and Superintendent of Portland Public Schools before becoming the Grand Dragon of the Maine KKK in 1925.
Maine historians often try to qualify facts like these by claiming the KKK wasn’t as violent here as they were in many other states. This is a wildly disingenuous framing that neglects the fact the KKK was violent to anyone who resisted them. Since Mainers largely embraced or tolerated the Klan, they had less need for violence.
There were exceptions. Three, specifically, in 1924.
The first was that February in Greenville, when 40 Klansmen attempted to forcibly remove labor organizers from the small town. The Klan’s violent abductions — on behalf of giant paper companies — were quickly put to an end by 175 local lumberjacks.
Then, that July, Klansmen went to Fairfield. They burned a cross and picked a fight with local French-Canadian immigrants. The immigrants responded with rocks and clubs, and the cross was soon extinguished along with the Klansmen’s willpower.
The third attempt happened in Biddeford. The Klan marched, welcomed and proudly, through neighboring Saco, then decided to continue into Biddeford as a show of force against the community’s French-Canadian and Irish immigrants. The racists were turned back by what one paper at the time called “knife-wielding Frenchmen” and “Irish confetti,” my absolute favorite way to describe bricks and rocks.
The KKK eventually fell apart as a formal organization here, but its members didn’t leave the state. They didn’t have some grand epiphany or beautiful change of heart. They continued to be pillars of our communities, owning local businesses and teaching our children. Their bigotry was passed down to the next generation and the next, always excused as being of a “different time,” as if racism had ever been on the right side of history.
Now here we are, more than a century later, and another President is attempting another ethnic cleansing, and Maine is not exempt. Since Trump took office, U.S. Border Patrol has abducted hundreds of people from our state. This includes an African immigrant Uber driver who was reported by her passenger and arrested at the Biddeford/Saco border, the very spot local immigrants drove back the KKK a century ago.
What can you do? Well, before you go collecting more Irish confetti, you should know about LD 1971. It’s a bill restricting Maine police from carrying out federal immigration enforcement, and it’s sitting on Gov. Janet Mills’ desk just waiting to be signed. Another bill, LD 1259, would prohibit state and local law enforcement from entering into contracts with the KKK’s successors.
So, get in touch. Tell the governor you support our immigrant communities and that, for the good of Maine and the entire country, she should, too.
Governor Janet Mills
1 State House Station
Augusta, ME 04333
207-287-3531
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
