Essay by Ed Quillen
Ku Klux Klan – April 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
MY FATHER often commented, in the course of some discussion or another, that “back in the ’20s, the Klan pretty much ran Colorado.” When I was in college, a friend who grew up in Denver’s southern suburbs had discovered that the flagpole at the old Englewood High School building (by then converted to a junior high) still bore a plaque stating that it had been donated by patriotic local Klansmen in the 1920s.
Even half a century later, though, the Invisible Empire retained some influence, as I learned at my first real newspaper job, reporting for the weekly Longmont Scene in 1972.
At the time, that city’s water department was building a new reservoir at a place called Button Rock on some tributary of the St. Vrain. I visited the site, and noticed the crumbling ruins of an old concrete dam that had been breached long ago.
Some inquiries revealed that back in the ’20s, the Klan had taken charge of Longmont’s municipal government. The Klan mayor and Klan council had given the dam job to a Klan contractor, who used inferior materials and workmanship, so that the dam washed out the first time there was a thunderstorm upstream.
Even then, I liked to write historical features, so I interviewed old-timers, pored through old city documents and perused old newspapers. Then I started writing a story about “Longmont’s first Button Rock Dam,” and the owner of the newspaper glanced over an early draft one day.
“You might as well stop typing now, Quillen,” he said, “because this story will never get published here.”
At the time, I was an idealistic 21-year-old who thought that newspapers had something to do with truth, and so I asked why there was a problem.
He pointed to one Klan name I’d found, a man who had run for city council back then as a Klan supporter. “His daughter is a stockholder in this newspaper.” He pointed to another. “His son is a major advertiser.” He pointed to a bank’s name. “Its directors and officers might have been Klan then, but it’s certainly not that way now, and people could get the wrong idea. Besides that, they can afford lawyers to sue us six ways to Sunday if there’s a comma out of place.” And that was the end of that piece of journalistic enterprise.
That was more than 30 years ago, but the Klan is still an embarrassing topic. Even when it was going strong in the 1920s, with its membership and power growing, its respectable members generally resigned quickly if they thought their membership might be revealed (newspapers and prosecuting attorneys sometimes got their hands on the membership lists).
SO IT WAS AN embarrassment then, and having a Klan ancestor isn’t something most people want to talk about now — former Salidan Orville Wright, as I discovered while trying to do some Klan research, is a rare exception.
As for people on the other side, I asked around among the established Italian families hereabouts. Some of the old-timers remembered Klan parades and rallies in Salida during their childhood, as well as harassment and taunting from their “100% American” schoolmates, but none wanted their names used. As one man put it, “You can’t really be sure the Klan is totally gone, and besides, there are those skinheads around these days. Using my name could lead to trouble I don’t need.”
I did hear that a local chapter of an ethnic fraternal organization, the Sons of Italy, was organized here in the early 1920s — probably to oppose the Salida Klavern, although nobody is sure. The Sons faded away, but revived in recent years.
[KKK parade in Salida]
As for the Klan in Salida, most of us have seen that picture of a Klan parade up F Street, so we know it was here. But look as I might, that’s about all I was able to confirm.
In 1924, Salida had two main newspapers, the Democratic Mail and the Republican Record. That January, the Mail observed that “The fiery cross, emblem of the hooded outlaws, was exhibited last night on Tenderfoot. It burned lustily for a few minutes and then quickly died, emblematic of the spasmodic way of prejudice and propaganda that occasionally sweeps over the bigoted classes in the United States. Of course, once the cross was lighted, it was deserted, further emblematic of the assertion of the principles of brotherly love and sacrifice for which the true cross stands.”
But as the 1924 election neared, the Mail seldom mentioned the Klan. In October, it did cover a Salida campaign speech by Morrison Shafroth, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate: “Mr. Shafroth began by declaring that against the advice of friends who agreed with him, he wished the people of the state to know that he is opposed to the Ku Klux Klan.”
Then the paper quoted Shafroth: “I regard the Klan as un-American…. I do not know of any outstanding public man today, who has a reputation as a leader of public thought, who is in favor of the Klan. Many earnest and sincere men have become affiliated with it, without recognizing the danger to our republic that must come from invisible government.”
The Mail’s Republican competitor, the Record, was friendly to the Klan. Its June 6, 1924 edition carried this short item:
“The Ku Klux Klan presented a petition to the mayor and council Monday for a parade of 500 Klan members. The petition stated that they would parade in peace and order and that the 500 were Salida’s most respected citizens. No action was taken by the council due to the fact that they can make no restriction against parades of any nature, provided that peace and order is kept.”
The next week, the Record reported on the parade:
“About two hundred members of the Ku Klux Klan, clad in their impressive regalia, marched thru the main street Sunday night about nine-thirty. The parade formed at Alpine Park, marching north on F street as far as Sackett Avenue, thence east and returning to the Alpine Park by way of E street.
“A fiery cross burned on Tenderfoot Mountain.
“The line was made up of members from the Canon City, Florence, Buena Vista, and Salida districts. About fifty of the members misunderstood the orders, evidently, and assembled at Marvin Park, and discovered their mistake too late to be a part of the main line.
“Hundreds of people witnessed the demonstration which was carried on in a peaceful and orderly manner.”
The Record urged its readers to vote a straight Republican ticket that November, and the GOP candidates’ connection with the Klan had been reported after the Sept. 9 primary. The winners were Morley for governor and Rice Means for a short-term U.S. Senate seat, “both having run openly as a Klan candidate.”
Klansman Morley carried Chaffee County that November, to the surprise of the Record: “Chaffee County went for [Calvin] Coolidge and Morley, something that was wholly unexpected, and especially in the matter of the governor.”
But that’s about the size of what I could find in the local newspapers of 1924. My guess is that Salida’s Klan experience was a microcosm of Colorado’s — a major influence in 1924, but fading away thereafter, with some activity persisting into the 1930s and perhaps even into the 1940s.
SALIDA HISTORIAN Dick Dixon recalled reading of Klan activities in old papers. “They really tried to promote themselves as a philanthropic and fraternal organization. Back then, there was a community Christmas tree at the corner of F and Second streets, and the Masons and the Elks and the others all contributed to it. But the biggest contribution was always from the Klan.”
One woman recalled a Klan parade during her girlhood, noting that they had wondered if a certain prominent Salidan was a Klansman. Since the KKK always marched in hoods and robes, their identities were concealed, but “he had this little dog that followed him everywhere, and there was the dog in the parade, walking along right beside him. So we knew.”
Along the same line, a Paonia newspaper of the time even suggested that some public-spirited citizen should go around town and turn all of the dogs loose during the next Klan parade there, so that Klansmen could be identified by their canine companions.
[KKK parade in Buena Vista]
Buena Vista had a Klan chapter, and historian Suzy Kelly found a picture of Klansmen marching in the Lettuce Day Parade there.
“Judging from the cars in the picture, this was probably in the early 1930s,” she said. There as elsewhere, membership was supposed to be a secret, but “everybody knew they met on a certain night over the pool hall, so you could just watch who was going in the door that led upstairs and know who was in the Klan.” That Klavern had 15 to 20 members at its peak, she said.
I’ve found no accounts of Klan activity in Leadville or Lake County, and I think I know why. For one thing, times were hard there in the 1920s, since metal prices had collapsed in 1921 and the county was losing population. Those Protestant non-immigrants who remained — that is, people eligible for Klan membership — probably had no time for robes and rituals.
For another, the Klan zealously supported the enforcement of Prohibition, and Prohibition was not popular in Leadville. In the words of historian Edward Blair, “In the twenties the second largest business in Leadville, other than mining and smelting, was bootlegging.” Local stills supplied “much of the state” with moonshine, and the city’s “1880s reputation for villainy and transgression was not enhanced by being Central Colorado’s liquor capital in the 1920s.”
Gunnison had a few Klansmen, which I learned from old newspapers, but they don’t appear in any local histories that I’ve seen. In 1924, the city had three weekly newspapers (it may have had more, but these three survive on microfilm in the bowels of the Savage Library at Western State College). The Republican’s political stance was just that. The News-Champion was Democratic, and the Empire supported the Progressive presidential candidate, Robert “Fightin’ Bob” La Follett.
The Republican was owned and edited by Carlton Sills (who might have been the same Carlton Sills who went on to be public-relations director for the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad in the 1950s, or he might have been the father of the PR man — it’s not a common name, so I figure there must have been a connection, but I haven’t found it.)
In the Republican gubernatorial primary of 1924, Sills supported Robert Rockwell against Klansman Clarence Morley. Rockwell was from neighboring Paonia, also on the Western Slope, so part of the support was geographic, but part of it was opposition to the Klan. Sills was a loyal party member, though, so after Morley won the primary, he wrote that “Gunnison County Republicans will not find it difficult to support Morley.”
THAT WAS ABOUT the only favorable mention Morley got from Sills, however. Although Sills ran a Republican newspaper and encouraged voting the straight ticket, he gave front-page coverage to a speech by Democratic candidate: Dr. J.S. Ferris, a WSC professor who was running for the state senate on an anti-Klan ticket. His speech was called “Why no American should be a Klansman.”
Sills didn’t come out and say it, but it seems obvious he was an anti-Klan Republican — many of whom joined the Visible Government League.
J.S. Ferris, the intrepid Klan critic who won his state senate seat in 1924, was also supported by the News-Champion and the Empire. Henry Flake, Jr., published the Democratic News-Champion, but seldom wrote his own editorials; he quoted anti-Klan paragraphs from various other papers.
C.T. Rawalt edited the Progressive Empire, which suffered an arson fire that August. He first blamed his political adversaries, the “Gunnison County Commissioners, the Normal School Board [which governed the college then], and the Klan.” A few days later, he backed off a little. “We do not think the Klan had anything to do with it [the fire], as there are few members of the Klan here and we consider them harmless.”
Rawalt’s Empire was the most anti-Klan newspaper in Gunnison, and he encouraged his readers to attend Ferris’s anti-Klan speeches. He wrote that “The Klan bunch would pollute a sewer,” and “We must decide between government established by the Fathers and the ‘Invisible Empire’ sponsored by men ashamed to show their faces.”
When Colorado voters elected Morley, Rawalt used his largest type for the headline: “KU KLUX WIN ELECTION. New state policy will be inaugurated under the token of the nightshirt.” He remained optimistic, though: “Hundreds and thousands of good men join the Klan. But we do not believe that any considerable number of the good ones will stay with it long. In two more years, the Klan will be no menace in Colorado.”
IN A POLITICAL SENSE, his prediction was essentially correct. Back then, governors (and other statewide officers) served terms of only two years, rather than the current four, and Morley was replaced in the 1926 election by his strongest political opponent, State Sen. Billy Adams. (Adams deserves an article of his own one of these days. He was a powerful legislator and advocate for the San Luis Valley, and Adams State College is named for him.)
When the legislature convened in 1925, the governor was a Klansman. The House, elected every two years, had a Republican Klan majority. The Republicans had a majority in the Senate, but it wasn’t a Klan majority. The Republican holdovers (elected to four-year terms in 1922) didn’t owe the Klan anything, and they allied with the Democrats, led by Billy Adams, to block Klan bills that would have outlawed sacramental wine or eliminated civil service protection so that Morley could fill the state government with his Klan cronies.
In retaliation against Adams, the Klan Republicans refused to appropriate money for Adams State College, making for some tough times at the school. In rebuttal against the Klan, Adams ran for governor in 1926, and served for the next three terms.
That’s the gist of the public history of the Ku Klux Klan hereabouts. It was a political power for a couple of years, but once the established parties caught on and fought it, the Klan lost its political influence.
In researching the Klan, I found no accounts of overt Klan terrorism in Salida, Poncha Springs, Buena Vista, Gunnison, or hereabouts — no lynchings or whippings or tar-and-feather jobs, no crosses burned on “un-American” lawns, nothing brazen like that — but that’s not to say it never happened.
Since the Klan was a secret organization, many of its activities probably didn’t appear in newspapers. And all of this happened nearly 80 years ago, so there aren’t many people around with direct memory of its activities.
Also, since the Klan actually dominated some town boards and police departments, it’s a pretty sure bet that victims of Klan attacks often failed to report them.
Besides, the Klan is just one of those things that people don’t like to admit they have personal stories about — whether grandpa was a Klansman or somebody the Klan was trying to run out of town.
What I did find was a fad that came and went rather quickly. It had its appeals as a fraternal order — by day you might have been a mere store clerk, but at night you could be an imposing Grand Cyclops. Politically, the Klan promoted patriotism, public schools (as opposed to Catholic parochial schools, of course), and law-and-order (especially support for Prohibition) — none of which was especially controversial. Merchants who joined the Klan could post little window signs that said SWAK (for Shop With A Klansman) and get trade from their fellow members, so there was a financial incentive, too. By electing fellow Klansmen into public office, you might be in for a government job or a government contract.
Originally, the Ku Klux Klan was formed in the 1860s by southern resistors determined to defy post-war Yankee rules and regulations. Then in the 1960s, the Klan was reconstructed to challenge integration laws.
But the ’20s Klan was an organization of people trying to respond to a perceived threat by duly enacting laws and legislation. In the 1920s, klansmen were usually ordinary, respectable citizens — except they acted out of fear and a sense of exaggerated peril, and sometimes used the law to viciously intimidate their neighbors.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on them. There are always frightened citizens insisting that some group be arrested, controlled, or expelled. The trick is in knowing whether such demands are reasonable or malicious.
IS IT REASONABLE to imprison drug addicts? After all, they’ve always been with us, from romantic poets, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to great-grandma sipping her heroin-laced patent medicine.
Is it righteous to search and detain Middle Easterners? Or to confiscate suspect cash at airports? Or to enact gun control legislation? Or to include the names of suspected, but not convicted, sex-offenders on a state list? Or to seize the children of suspected child abusers? Or to impose rating systems on movies, rock-and-roll and rap music?
Or are many of our laws from prohibition to the Patriot Act actually designed to target specific, presumably undesirable groups? Which of our laws constitute justifiable precautions and which step over the line?
Opinions vary, and it no doubt gets even harder to evaluate such things when your country’s on orange alert. But history makes it clear, the world is full of Klansmen — whether they wear robes or not — and sometimes only time and distance make it obvious that their perspective was appalling.
— Ed Quillen
