Although the Ku Klux Klan is most often associated with white supremacy, the revived Klan of the 1920s was also anti-Catholic. In the U.S. state of Maine, with a small African-American population but a burgeoning number of Acadian, French-Canadian and Irish immigrants, the Klan revival of the 1920s was 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 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 resulted in the burning of a Catholic church in Bath, Maine, and the tarring and feathering of a Catholic priest, Father John Bapst, in Ellsworth. Catholic complaints about Protestant-oriented public schools had helped 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.[citation needed] 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.[1] Prominent Klan leaders and/or speakers included F. Eugene Farnsworth, DeForest H. Perkins, and Benjamin Bubar Sr.
^Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the politics of the 1850s (1992).
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