(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[T]he crosses burst into flames one by one on the hills of Montpelier until seven ringed the state capital. The night of the burning crosses was a clear sign some Vermonters were in the thrall of the Ku Klux Klan.
The incident, which occurred during the mid-1920s, was recounted years later by a woman whose husband had helped light the crosses. The woman said her husband felt no need to hide his involvement. After the crosses were lit, she said, “My husband came down Main Street carrying rope and an oil can and was smudged with smoke.”
The fires set that night no doubt burned brightly but briefly, much like the Klan’s popularity in Vermont.
The unidentified woman’s quote, and indeed most of what we know about the Klan in Vermont, comes from Maudean Neill’s 1989 book “Fiery Crosses in the Green Mountains.”
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the South immediately after the Civil War. During the Reconstruction era, former Confederates saw it as a way of intimidating African-Americans and “carpetbaggers,” Northerners accused of profiting from the South’s miseries.
Fervor for the Klan died down, but then rekindled in the early 1920s as an organization with national ambitions. The Klan began sending emissaries to states far from its birthplace in the Deep South. By 1922, the Klan was winning converts in Vermont.
With few blacks to harass in Vermont, the Klan here turned its wrath on anyone who was not a white Protestant, including Catholics, Jews and recent immigrants.
Joining the Klan was simple; applicants had to answer 10 questions, including: “Are you a native-born, white, Gentile, American citizen?”; “Do you believe in the tenets of the Christian religion?”; and “Do you believe in and will you faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of white supremacy?” Ten “yes” answers and $10 and you were in. The money was divided among Klan leaders. New members also had to rent their robes and hoods.
The group’s secretiveness alienated many Vermonters. Ministers railed against the Klan from their pulpits, one stating that he had never done anything he felt so ashamed of that he’d had to hide his face.
The Legislature also attacked the Klan’s hoods, debating a bill to ban the wearing of hoods or masks. Offenders could face three months in jail and a $500 fine. When legislators realized this would have put a severe damper on Halloween and masquerade balls, they tried to write exceptions into the law. Seeing the complexity of rewriting the law, or perhaps embarrassed by their simplistic approach to a complex problem, they let the bill die.
Just a club?
The Klan burned crosses across the state — in Barre, Rutland, St. Johnsbury, Lyndon and many other communities. A gathering in St. Johnsbury in 1924 reportedly drew 2,000 people. Thousands more attended Klan rallies in Morrisville and Montpelier the following year. How many of them were actually Vermonters is unclear. Klansmen and Klanswomen from across New England attended the events, as evidenced by the many out-of-state license plates newspaper reporters noted on vehicles parked in the surrounding fields.
No one seems to doubt that hundreds of Vermonters joined the Klan. Some historians put the number as high as 10,000 to 14,000. Others believe it was no more than 2,000. What drew people to the group varied. Some were certainly drawn to its message of hatred and exclusion, that if things weren’t going well for you, it was the fault of African-Americans or Jews or immigrants or organized labor.
But others claimed they weren’t drawn by the group’s message of hate. Those Vermonters said they saw the Klan as little more than a social club, akin to the Masons or the Rotary Club. Indeed, Neill wrote her book after seeing pictures of Klan gatherings in her mother-in-law’s photo album. When she asked about the photos, her mother-in-law said that “it was just a club. A lot of her friends were in it and it seemed like fun, something social to do.”
In conducting interviews for her book, Neill found many who echoed her mother-in-law’s opinions, including a South Barre couple who were talked into joining by friends. It was part of a deal. They would join the Klan if the other couple joined the Grange. By and large, Neill found, people who joined were “community-minded, well-respected and religiously inclined.”
Photos of the day seem to bear this out. In the collection at the Vermont Historical Society, most of the Klan-related photos show people wearing the white outfits but with the hoods pulled back, faces plain to see. The photos are at once reassuring – perhaps these people didn’t quite understand the hatred the national organization stood for – and haunting, because the images run so contrary to the widely held view of Vermont as a bastion of tolerance.
Fighting back
Klan membership in Vermont in the 1920s never amounted to more than a tiny fraction of the state’s population, which at the time was slightly more than 350,000. Indeed, many communities pushed back.
Rutland and Burlington temporarily prohibited people from wearing masks and hoods in public. Rutland officials fired a police officer after learning he had attended a Klan rally, and Rutland residents boycotted businessmen who were reportedly members of the group. When Klan members held an outdoor rally in East Clarendon, a group of citizens drove a small convoy of cars to the event and scared them off.
The state’s newspapers also attacked the Klan. The Burlington Free Press declared the group was as welcome in Vermont as the plague, and the St. Albans Messenger predicted the Klan wouldn’t survive the “biting blast of Vermont common sense.”
A well-publicized crime by several Klansmen incensed many Vermonters and hastened the group’s decline in the state. In August 1924, three Klansmen, loaded with liquor and little common sense, broke into Burlington’s St. Mary’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The cathedral, one Klansman convinced the others, was the staging area for a Catholic plot. He claimed the building stood above a massive cache of guns, ammunition, poisonous gas, acid, even airplanes – enough to kill all the Protestants in northern New England.
When they found that the cathedral contained no such cache, they decided instead to steal some of the church’s vestments, a cross, some candles and other items. Police, alerted by a priest who had seen a light in the church, arrived quickly. As the burglars fled, one of them fired a revolver. The Klansmen were eventually arrested, convicted and given sentences ranging from four months to three years.
If some Vermonters’ sense of tolerance ever included acceptance of the Klan, that feeling was short-lived. After the convictions, and allegations that leaders had embezzled from the group, the Klan lost what support it once had in Vermont, and the sight of crosses burning became a thing of the past.
