Although the Ku Klux Klan is most often associated with white supremacy, the revived Klan of the 1920s was also anti-Catholic. 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. For a period in the mid-1920s, the Klan captured elements of the Maine Republican Party, even helping to elect a governor, Ralph Owen Brewster.
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. The rise of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s had led to the burning of a Catholic church in Bath, Maine, and the tarring and feathering of a Catholic priest, Father John Bapst, in Ellsworth, where complaints from Catholics about Protestant-oriented public schools had helped to 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 Democratic Irish-Catholic and French-Canadian municipal politicians in cities like Bangor, Lewiston, and Portland, ethnicity and religion increasingly helped to draw party lines.Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the politics of the 1850s (1992). Prominent Klan leaders and/or speakers included F. Eugene Farnsworth, DeForest H. Perkins, and Benjamin Bubar Sr.
Blaine Republicanism and Catholics 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-American voters by sponsoring, while still Speaker of the House of Representatives, a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution which would have outlawed the use of tax money to pay for parochial schools. While defeated in the Senate, "Blaine Amendments" were inserted into the constitutions of all but eleven states, 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 1884 presidential run is generally credited with having been defeated, in part, by Irish Catholic voters angered when a prominent Blaine supporter referred to the Democratic Party as "the party of rum, Romanism, and rebellion". Ironically, Blaine's mother was Catholic and his sister was a nun.
Maine and the Klan revival of the 1920s
The sudden growth of the Klan in the 1920s in Maine followed national trends, but was particularly strong in comparison to Klan activity elsewhere in the Northeast. Partly it revived much older Protestant/Irish-Catholic divisions, but it was mainly fueled by a newer wave of Catholic French-Canadian immigrants who worked mainly in Maine's textile mill cities, such as Lewiston, Saco, Biddeford, Brunswick, etc., and Italian, Polish, Lithuanians, and other mostly Catholic immigrants who went to work in paper mills in northern Maine cities like Millinocket and Rumford. 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. Maine's small African-American communities in Portland and Bangor had formed NAACP chapters in 1920, and the one in Bangor had protested against the third local showing of the Klan-themed film The Birth of a Nation, successfully negotiating with a local theatre-owner to edit out the most provocative scene.Joseph Conforti, Creating Portland (University Press of New England, 2007), p. 263.
Klanishness was on the mind of the people of Ellsworth, Maine as early as 1919 when 30 residents staged a surprise party for a friend. The party was all dressed in Klan regalia when they surprised their friends, Mr. and Mrs. G. N. Worden. They unrobed for the party, but dressed back up in their white hoods to walk home, according to the Ellsworth American.Ellsworth American (Ellsworth, Maine) · 10 Dec 1919, Wed · Page 5 In 1921, a member of the Boston University baseball team for injured WWI Veterans, Harry E Stumcke, was targeted in a nonviolent property crime during his summer camp stay in Ellsworth. The article reads "Six men, signing themselves 'the silent six,' and working along the plans of the Ku Klux Klan, visited the Macomber Estate on Franklin Street on Sunday evening. The party worked quietly and upset completely the room occupied by Harry E. Stumcke, a star of the B.U. nine. None of Mr. Stumcke's property was taken."Ellsworth American. Social Column. Wed. July 27, 1921. It is unclear why Mr. Stumcke was targeted as he does not seem to have been Catholic, Jewish, an immigrant, or Black.
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."Farnsworth, Former Head of Klan, Dead", Lewiston Evening Journal, March 15, 1926, p. 9. Farnsworth was born in the eastern Maine town of Columbia Falls, but traveled widely outside the state, and likely returned to Maine as an employee of the national Klan organization. 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.Lewiston Evening Journal, February 17, 1923, p. 11. 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. Besides existential targets like the Pope, the Jesuits, and the Knights of Columbus, they specifically attacked the growth of Maine's Catholic school system, as well as the presence of Catholics (and Jews) on public school boards. They credited this last development with "taking the Bible out of schools", as the Catholic population increasingly objected to the reading of the King James Bible in state-supported classrooms."Lewiston Rector Addresses Ku Klux Klan", Lewiston Evening Journal, March 24, p. 1; Lewiston Daily Sun, March 17, 1923, p. 1; "Maine City Hears KKK Leader", Christian Science Monitor, April 28, 1923.
The Klan and the Portland referendum of 1923 The Maine Klan scored its first political victory in 1923 when it threw its support behind a Portland referendum to abolish the mayor-and-alderman form of municipal government, which allowed Irish-Catholic and Jewish neighborhoods some influence in city politics, and substituted it with a city-manager-and-councilors form of government. In the old form, the government consisted of an elected mayor, an 18 member common council, and a 9 member board of aldermen; the new form of government reduced this to a five member city council and a city manager of their choosing, thus greatly diminishing the power of minorities.
The Portland branch of the NAACP tried to create a united front among Irish, Jewish, African-Americans, and labor unions in opposition to the change, but it was unsuccessful. Although in 1921, when the plan had first been proposed (and before the Klan had formed), the measure had lost by only 200 votes, the overwhelming margin of victory after the Klan became involved (it won by over 4,000 votes) convinced local and national politicians alike that the Maine Klan was a force to be reckoned with. Maine may also have been targeted by the national Klan organization precisely because it was considered a bellwether state in national elections ("as Maine goes, so goes the nation" was the phrase at the time). Even before the victory in Portland, Farnsworth had declared that the Klan would elect the next governor of Maine.
The Klan on parade, and cross burnings Although a secret society, the Klan maintained a very public image in Maine from the time recruitment started in earnest in 1923. Farnsworth's speeches were made in large open halls and sometimes reprinted in full in local papers. In September, 1923, the Mayor of Portland refused a Klan request for a public parade on Columbus Day, but daylight parades by hooded Klansman did take place in Portland, Sanford, Gardiner, Brewer, Milo, Dexter, East Hodgdon, and Kittery."Klan Parade in Kittery" Portsmouth (NH) Herald, August 17, 1925, p. 10 400 participated, ending their parade at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Brownville Junction among other places.Lewiston Daily Sun, September 10, 1923, p. 8; Maine Memory Network, "Ku Klux Klan Parade in Brownville Junction", 1924 In the Piscataquis County town of Milo, Farnsworth claimed "everybody" belonged to the Klan: 600 citizens, town officials, and the sheriff.Lewiston Evening Journal, September 28, 1923. The Klan parade in Milo in 1923 was the first in New England, and the first in the U.S. to take place in broad daylight.Richard K. Shaw, Brewer, Maine (Arcadia Publishing, 2000), p. 125 The first State Convention of the Klan was held in the forest outside Waterville later in 1923, and attracted 15,000. Burning crosses were in abundance.Lewiston Daily Sun, August 27, 1923.
That same year the Klan purchased a large estate in Portland (the Rollins Estate on Forest Avenue) for its headquarters, and 3,000 Klansmen from around the state gathered for the opening ceremony in February, 1924, initiating 200 new members under a burning cross.Providence News, August 23, 1923, p. 36; "New Klan Home at Portland Dedicated", Lewiston Evening Journal, February 16, 1924. The Portland 'klavern' (chapter) was named after Dr. W. H. Witham, the Grand Klud (religious leader) of the Realm of Maine.Boston Daily Globe, September 8, 1923. The Klan also claimed to have opened a 'tabernacle' in Bangor.Lewiston Daily Sun, April 19, 1923, pp. 1 & 6.
In December 1924, the local newspaper in Ellsworth, Maine republished a Letter to the Editor from the New York World regarding Klan activity in Hancock County, Maine. The writer claimed to have gone with "intensely patriotic" friends to Ellsworth's 1924 Hancock County Fair "in the rock-ribbed Yankee state of Maine". He expressed shared disbelief of his own and that of his companions at the Klan presence at the fair saying that it was "a community with an unusually large Ku Klux Klan following". The writer admonished the Klan's behavior, saying that during the National Anthem before a speech from Gov. Baxter "hundreds stood with covered heads, not allowing the anthem to interest their discourses on horses, etc." which is indeed incongruous with Klan dogma, lending likelihood that it was intended to be in protest to Baxter. The visitor summarizes his impression of the event by saying he had "never seen such flagrant disrespect to our flag."Ellsworth American. "A Slam on Hancock County" Wed. Dec. 17, 1924. Additional cross-burnings, parades, rallies, and celebrations in Trenton, Southwest Harbor, Northeast Harbor, and Bar Harbor are known to have occurred in Hancock County with a large Klan "encampment" at modern-day (as of 2025) Narrows Too Campground (formerly Barcadia Campground) on Maine State Route 3 in Trenton between the airfield and the causeway to Mount Desert Island.Bench, Raney, "History of Maine - The Rising of the Klan" (2019). Maine History Documents. 224. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mainehistory/224