Klan organizer Luther I. Powell at his desk, circa 1923

When the Klan Came to Oregon: Recruiting, Politics and the 1922 School Law

ByMegan Harlow

Photo: Staff Photographer, Seattle Post-Intelligencer / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

In the early 1920s the Ku Klux Klan grew faster in Oregon than almost anywhere else outside the South. It was a short period, but it shaped state politics and left a lasting mark in constitutional law. It is also part of local history, because Klan organizers recruited in Astoria as well as in Portland, Salem, Eugene and other towns.

Recruiting as a business

The Klan revived nationally in 1915 and was run partly as a sales operation. Paid organizers known as Kleagles signed up members and kept a share of each initiation fee. They arrived in Oregon from California and the South in early 1921.

The best known was Luther I. Powell, a Louisiana native who had been organizing in California. According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, Powell swore in the first Oregon Klansmen in Medford, while other Kleagles recruited in Portland, Eugene, Salem, Astoria, Hood River, Pendleton and elsewhere. A large Portland chapter chartered in 1922 was named after Powell. Shortly afterward Powell lost a struggle for control of the Oregon organization to Fred L. Gifford and moved on to organize in Washington and Idaho.

The Klan pitched itself as a patriotic, Protestant fraternal group. Its message also played on hostility toward Catholics, immigrants and people of color. That message found an audience in a state whose early constitution had included exclusion laws aimed at Black residents. By 1923, Oregon Klan leaders claimed about 35,000 members in more than 60 local chapters, plus women’s and youth auxiliaries.

The 1922 election

The Klan’s influence peaked in the November 1922 election. Klansmen won local and county offices across Oregon, and some won seats in the Legislature. The Klan also backed Democrat Walter M. Pierce of La Grande, who was elected governor.

The same ballot carried the Compulsory Education Act, an initiative backed by the Klan and allied groups. It required children ages 8 to 16 to attend public school. It was aimed mainly at Catholic schools but would have closed almost all private and church schools. Voters approved it with about 53 percent of the vote: 115,506 in favor and 103,685 against.

Struck down in Pierce v. Society of Sisters

The law was due to take effect in 1926, but it never did. The Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, which ran Catholic schools, and Hill Military Academy, a private school in Portland, challenged it in federal court. On June 1, 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” the Court wrote. The decision is still a leading case on parents’ rights to direct their children’s education.

A quick decline

By the mid-1920s internal feuds, scandals and political backlash had shrunk the Oregon Klan. Historians generally treat the period as a short episode, but one that shows how quickly an organized movement built on fear and fees could gain political power in the state.

Further reading

  • Oregon Encyclopedia, “Ku Klux Klan” and the classroom packet “The KKK and the Compulsory Education Act of 1922”
  • University of Washington, Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, “Luther I. Powell: Northwest KKK Organizer”
  • Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925)
  • Clatsop County Historical Society, for local archives on the 1920s in Astoria

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