Here I present some information
about how the Irish of Morrow County smashed the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920’s.
I wouldn’t have had an inkling of this had I not chanced on a very
interesting article, “The Empire and the
Editor: The Ku Klux Klan in Heppner, Oregon” by Gavin D. Cronkrite. This is
a 2015 BA thesis for the University of Oregon Department of History. I tend to
think that Heppner doesn’t attract its share of attention and it’s always
interesting to find local history. This is a short article, thirty-nine pages
of double spaced text, but rewarding to the memory of our Morrow County
ancestors in that Cronkrite portrays the county as somewhat of an outlier to
the popularity and political power of the Klan.
I have reached out to Cronkrite to
ask him why he chose this topic and Morrow county for his thesis, but have been
unsuccessful. But this is the sort of thing that you ponder in your early
schooling. What happened here, you ask yourself, when the Klan was becoming so
powerful in Oregon? What did our grandparents think and do about this? What was
going on at the time of the Klan’s singularly successful strike at Catholics with
the Oregon Compulsory Education Act of 1922.
Cronkrite spends quite a bit of
text outlining the reemergence of the Klan in this period both nationally and
in Oregon. About page 20, in the chapter titled “Shepherds in the Blue Hills”
he gets to Heppner and Morrow County, which he treats interchangeably. He notes
lack of major industry in the county, predominance of agricultural production
(Wheat, Hay, and Wool), and the influence of the Irish population as factors
related to the lack of acceptance of the Klan. He says that “The stereotypical
shepherd on the hills of Morrow County was an Irishman.”
Among his major sources are
Heppner’s two newspapers (The Gazette-Times and The Heppner Herald) and two
locals who published reminiscence articles in the Oregon Historical Quarterly
(Elinor Cohn Shank and John F Kilkenny). Cronkrite meticulously cites newspaper
coverage from about 1917 through 1924, making for an impressive four pages of
small print research notes.
The core of Cronkrite’s paper, and
I present here his complete paragraph, is
“Morrow County’s large Irish population may have helped slow the process of Klan
organization. The Irish were an integral part of county business, with some men
like John Kilkenny owning large ranches and employing community members. News
of St. Patrick day Celebrations and well-attended Ancient Order of Hibernian events
filled the local newspaper pages. While the Klan initiation ceremony in January
1923 attracted a crowd of several hundred persons, it is likely that many of
the audience members were there simply to witness the spectacle. In comparison,
Hibernian events regularly attracted attendance varying from 150 guests to
several hundred, as evidenced in the extraordinary claim that 'the promoters of
the [A. O. H.] affair expect to sell 1000 tickets of admission.' Morrow County
Klan’s thirteen person inaugural recruitment class was eclipsed by the size of
the Irish Catholic community.”
I wish there were a little more
passion and excitement in Cronkrite’s paper. For example, he tells us after
some recruiting events, that the first actual meeting of the Klan in Morrow
County was in Lexington on January 28, 1924. I would like to think that my
grandfather, James G Doherty, whose ranch was up Blackhorse Canyon a few miles outside of town was there, ready to wade in if things got out of
hand. But that’s a Walter Mitty kind of thinking, projected back a couple of generations.
I take from this paper two
messages. First is the “Heppner Spirit,” a phrase coined by the Gazette-Times
in 1918, characterizing the community as resilient and optimistic following the
flood of 1903 and subsequent disasters. Second is the leadership and prose of
Sam Pattison, Editor of the Heppner Herald beginning in 1917. Cronkrite’s take
is that …. “The Herald changed the discourse: it led Heppner residents to
examine Klan rhetoric by challenging it at its very core of Americanism.”
The article is unsurprisingly
academic and a little thin, but if you slog through it, you’ll almost certainly end with a sense
of pride in our area and our ancestors.
You can read “The Empire and the Editor” at: https://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=E211US105G91207&p=the+empire+and+the+editor
