By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Immaturity and inexperience—including ignorance about history—often cause the mistakes of youth. That’s what happened one night long ago during my high school years in Northern Utah.
I was attending and enjoying a festive gathering with my fellow young Catholics. Suddenly, several members of the Ku Klux Klan crashed our party.
OK, that’s not exactly true.
It was a Halloween celebration and some classmates (but not me) wore sheets and hoods as their version of a scary costume. It was surprising, and even jarring, but we were immature and stupid. We all laughed it off as youthful folly and went on with our party.
That was the wrong response, and I doubt that any of us would act the same way today. One reason, of course, is the long racist history of the KKK, which should’ve been considered back then.
Another reason is my greater knowledge today of a more obscure history…some of the Klan’s most blatant acts of hate and discrimination against Catholics happened a century ago this year.
My old high school Halloween memories came rushing back to mind recently when I read Timothy Egan’s 2023 book, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. Egan chronicles the post-Civil War resurrection of the Klan in Indiana and other states in the early 1920s.
At its height, several hundred thousand persons belonged to the KKK in Indiana. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors, and senators there and across the country proudly proclaimed their Klan membership.
(I’m proud that students at my alma mater Notre Dame reacted the exact opposite way to the Klan, including at one point unhooding members and pelting them with potatoes when they tried to march in South Bend, see: Fighting for…Tolerance.)
A charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson spearheaded the growth of the Indiana Klan. Stephenson was not so much an ideological adherent as he was a shrewd and avaricious businessman who took advantage of a unique opportunity to make money.
A skilled salesman, Stephenson rebranded the Klan as a mainstream civic group and enriched himself with a cut of each new member enrollment fee and hood/robe sale. His KKK, however, regurgitated the same hatred of blacks, immigrants, Jews, and Catholics as had the original iteration.
By using such tactics the Klan eventually got a strong foothold in many Midwestern and Western states. Fortunately, Utah was not one of them.
Klansmen disliked Latter-day Saints as much as they did Catholics. There were some incidents of Klan terror here, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spoke out loudly against the KKK and that opposition significantly limited Klan influence.
Such was not the case in neighboring Western states like Colorado and Oregon.
Colorado actually tried to ban sacramental wine in 1924. The state had just elected a new governor named Clarence Morley. He was a Klansman.
It was the Prohibition Era. Much to the chagrin of the Klan and Morley, the federal Volstead Act (passed by Congress in 1919) made exceptions to the nationwide alcohol ban for sacramental wine used during the Catholic Mass.
During his inaugural speech, Governor Morley proposed banning sacramental wine too. No mere temperance measure, it was a clever ploy by virulently anti-Catholic and anti-immigration forces to undermine a central religious practice and drive Catholics out of the state.
The Governor’s allies introduced a ban bill during the next legislative session. Catholics mobilized in opposition, joined by other religious groups, including Colorado’s Episcopalians.
The controversial bill eventually died in committee. Morley served only one two year term as governor and then moved to Indiana. He later was convicted of mail fraud and served five years in a federal prison.
Oregon and its Klan-endorsed Governor Walter Pierce took a different, but equally disturbing, approach to undermining Catholic practice and teaching. They tried to ban parochial schools.
The KKK saw Catholic schools as institutions largely run by and for foreigners. The Klan wanted to “Americanize” education and ensure it promoted “American values,” which for the KKK meant keeping the country as White and Protestant as possible.
When Oregon voters elected Pierce in 1922, they also approved the Compulsory Education Act he supported. The act required all children from age 8-16 to attend the public schools near where they lived.
Seemingly benign, it actually would’ve gutted Catholic schools if it took effect as planned in 1926. It probably also would have compelled many Catholics to move elsewhere, which was the real goal.
With support from local and national groups, the Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary—a group of nuns who operated several parochial schools and orphanages in Oregon—sued the governor.
A federal court struck down the law a century ago in 1924. A year later in 1925, the United States Supreme Court affirmed that landmark ruling.
In a unanimous decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Supreme Court stated, “The fundamental liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”
In addition to recognizing the rights of parents to choose how to educate their children, today the ruling is seen as a sort of “Magna Carta” for private schools, safeguarding both faith-based and non-public secular education institutions.
We need all the Magna Cartas we can in 2024 get as we note such infamous anti-Catholic centennial Klanniversaries.
A hundred years ago, the Ku Klux Klan swept into unprecedented power all over the United States preaching a message of exclusion, intolerance, and hate under the guise of patriotism and religious virtue. They targeted Blacks, Asians, immigrants, Jews, and Latter-day Saints.
And the Klan targeted Catholics too.
I think if, some fifty years ago, my high school colleagues had understood this bitter history a little better, they would never have shown up at a Catholic Halloween party wearing the ignominious robes of the KKK.
And if I knew then what I know now, I would not have laughed at their joke.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
