The Northern Invasion: The Ku Klux Klan's Migration into New England, 1915–1928
I. The Rebirth and the Road North
The second Ku Klux Klan emerged not as a spontaneous revival of Reconstruction-era vigilantism but as a meticulously engineered enterprise, born on Thanksgiving night 1915 atop Stone Mountain, Georgia. William Joseph Simmons, a former Methodist preacher and traveling salesman for fraternal orders, gathered fifteen men in white robes to ignite a sixteen-foot cross, an act of theater inspired by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which had premiered earlier that year. Griffith's film, a three-hour epic glorifying the first Klan as saviors of white Southern womanhood against the "horrors" of Black enfranchisement, was no mere entertainment; it was a recruitment reel, screened across the nation and attended by over 200 million viewers by 1920. Simmons, who had seen the film at a private Atlanta showing, seized the moment. Within months, he incorporated the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a Georgia business, complete with a corporate charter and a franchise model that would make any industrialist envious. Initiation fees of ten dollars—four to the local kleagle (recruiter), one and a half to the state king kleagle, and the rest to Atlanta headquarters—turned hatred into a revenue stream. Robes were rented, not sold, ensuring perpetual obligation to the Invisible Empire. By 1921, a New York World exposé revealed half a million members nationwide, with expansion rates of five thousand per week. The migration north was no afterthought; it was the plan.The Great Migration, which saw 1.6 million Black Americans flee the South for northern factories between 1910 and 1930, provided the ideological fuel. The Klan followed, recalibrating its message from Southern racial terror to a broader defense of "Nordic" Protestant supremacy against Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and the "new Negro" threatening urban order. New England, with its textile mills in Lewiston and Fall River, shoe factories in Manchester and Haverhill, and granite quarries in Barre and Barre, was a prime target. Catholic immigrants from Québec, Ireland, Italy, and Poland flooded these workplaces, diluting the region's Yankee Protestant hegemony. The Klan arrived not as foreign invaders but as self-appointed guardians of tradition, their rhetoric laced with the language of fraternal duty and Christian morality. In Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts—a rural hamlet straddling the Deerfield River in Franklin County, where the trolley trestle would soon give way to a floral monument—the winds of this migration carried the first whispers of hooded brotherhood by 1922, setting the stage for the fiery spectacle of Thanksgiving 1924.II. The Propaganda Apparatus and Cultural PenetrationThe Klan's northern success hinged on a propaganda machine as sophisticated as any of the era's advertising campaigns. The national weekly The Kourier, boasting half a million subscribers by 1924, was the core, supplemented by state organs like The Dawn in Maine and regional editions of The Fellowship Forum in Massachusetts. These publications were not mere newsletters; they were ideological incubators, filled with syndicated columns decrying the "Catholic menace" and the "Jewish question," alongside recipes for "100% American" picnics and testimonials from "redeemed" Catholics who had seen the light. Local broadsheets—The Catholic Menace, Why the Klan Marches—were distributed on church pews, in factory lunchrooms, and along village streets, their tone calibrated to the locale: in mill towns, the enemy was the parochial school siphoning children from public education; in rural villages, it was the bootlegger and the foreign-born laborer corrupting Prohibition's moral order.The Birth of a Nation was the visual spearhead, screened hundreds of times across New England from 1916 to 1925, often with kleagles waiting in the lobbies to capture audiences inflamed by Griffith's three-hour glorification of the original Klan. In Portland, Maine, the 1917 screening sparked riots between Protestant nativists and Irish Catholics; in Boston, 1922 showings drew 10,000, with Klan recruiters signing up 500 in a single night. The film's pseudo-historical framing—portraying the Reconstruction as a "Black horror" and the Klan as heroic restorers—resonated in New England, where local histories still romanticized the abolitionist past while ignoring the nativist undercurrents of Yankee identity. The Klan's esoteric language—kleagles, klaverns, konklaves, the Kloran handbook—further mimicked Masonic rituals, appealing to men already embedded in fraternal orders. This linguistic camouflage transformed membership from a descent into vigilantism into an ascent into an exclusive brotherhood, a "moral economy" enforcing Prohibition and Protestant virtue against the perceived papal–Bolshevik threat.In Shelburne Falls, this propaganda arrived softly at first, through flyers left at the Greenfield & Turners Falls trolley station and sermons in the local Congregational church decrying the "foreign weeds" choking the Deerfield Valley's moral soil. By 1923, the whispers had hardened into invitations to IORM Tribe No. 42 in Greenfield, two miles distant, where "Red Men" pageantry—dressing as noble savages to celebrate "Americanism"—served as the perfect on-ramp for Klan recruitment. The 30–50 percent national overlap between IORM and the Klan was no anomaly; it was the franchise model at work, turning fraternal lodges into nativist incubators. In the rural hamlets of Buckland and Colrain, where trolleys ferried mill hands to Shelburne Falls for supplies and sermons, the Invisible Empire found its quiet foothold, setting the stage for the Thanksgiving 1924 spectacle that would ring the valley with fire.III. Fraternal Pipelines and the Social WebThe Klan's migration succeeded because it hijacked existing social structures, transforming fraternal lodges from harmless mutual-aid societies into pipelines for hate. The Improved Order of Red Men, founded in 1834 as a romanticized echo of the Sons of Liberty, was the most effective in New England. Its pseudo-Indigenous rituals—war whoops, tomahawk ceremonies, and "noble savage" oratory—provided a veneer of patriotic theater that masked anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant animus. Nationally, IORM–Klan overlap reached 30–50 percent; in Massachusetts, Greenfield Tribe No. 42 (chartered 1915) and similar rural lodges in the Berkshires and Franklin County became direct feeders, with members sliding from "Red Men" dues to Klan robes without missing a meeting.The Junior Order of United American Mechanics and Odd Fellows offered parallel conduits, their emphasis on "American loyalty" aligning seamlessly with the Klan's "100% Americanism." Even Masonic lodges, though officially condemning the Klan, harbored sympathetic individuals who viewed the Invisible Empire as a more vigorous defense of Protestant values. This fraternal web was not incidental; it was the Klan's secret weapon, allowing recruitment to occur in the familiar confines of lodge halls and Grange suppers, where the conversation shifted imperceptibly from temperance lectures to warnings about "papal plots."In Shelburne Falls, this web wove through the everyday fabric of valley life. The Greenfield & Turners Falls trolley line, which shuttled workers from Buckland mills to Shelburne Falls shops, carried not just passengers but pamphlets—The Catholic Menace folded into lunch pails, Why the Klan Marches slipped under Congregational hymnals. By 1923, invitations to IORM events in Greenfield had reached the husbands and brothers of the women who would soon form the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club. The IORM's romanticization of "native" Americanism—ironic given its nativist core—resonated in a town whose iron bridge spanned a river once fished by Pocumtuc weirs, now dammed for industry. The stage was set for the 1924 Thanksgiving konklave, where five crosses would blaze in Shelburne Falls alone, one on the Buckland side and one rafted downstream from above the iron bridge, a spectacle that would echo for generations in the oral histories of those who watched the hills light up.IV. State-by-State Penetration: The Regional WebThe Klan's northern conquest was not a uniform wave but a series of localized surges, each tailored to the ethnic and religious fault lines of its terrain. In Maine, the first klavern chartered in Portland in 1922 under kleagle Eugene Farnsworth, dubbed "the Maine Cyclone," exploited the French-Canadian Catholic influx into Lewiston and Biddeford mills. By 1924, the state boasted 153 klaverns and 15,000–23,000 members, the highest per-capita rate in the nation. Klan-backed Governor Owen Brewster (1925–1929) openly courted the vote, while school-board takeovers in Saco and Auburn banned parochial education. Violence was theatrical: over fifty cross-burnings in 1923–1924, culminating in a 5,000-person Augusta parade where hooded marchers sang "The Old Rugged Cross" amid jeers from Irish dockworkers.New Hampshire's entry came a year later in Manchester, where the 1923 klavern grew to 12,000–14,000 by 1925, fueled by anti-Irish sentiment in the Amoskeag Mills. The Klan swept municipal elections, installing a sympathetic mayor in Nashua and capturing Portsmouth's city council. Riots flared in 1925 when Catholic counter-protesters clashed with Klansmen at a Great Bay rally, leaving one hundred injured and the state police disarming both sides—a rare instance of Yankee pragmatism curbing the fire.Vermont's Klan ignited in Barre's granite quarries in 1922, targeting Italian and Polish laborers. Estimates of peak membership vary wildly from 2,000 to 14,000, but the 1924 St. Johnsbury rally drawing 2,000 hooded figures was indisputable. Montpelier's 1925 seven-cross encirclement of Hubbard Park became local legend, oral histories recalling the "social club" lure that drew farmers and shopkeepers into the fold. The July 4, 1927, statewide parade through Montpelier, with Klansmen from New Hampshire and New York, marked the high-water mark before a Burlington church vandalism scandal in 1924—Klansmen stealing vestments and firing shots—shattered the facade.Massachusetts offered the richest soil, with Boston's first klavern in 1921 exploding to 40,000–100,000 members by 1925. Kleagle Ralph W. Tarbox arrived with $10,000 seed money, screening The Birth of a Nation in Fenway Park to 10,000 spectators. The 1923 Worcester march of 15,000 was the region's largest, but rural Franklin County saw its own flare-up: the Thanksgiving 1924 cross-burning epidemic across Shelburne Falls, Colrain, Charlemont, and Griswoldville, with five in Shelburne Falls alone—one on the Buckland side of the Deerfield River, one rafted downstream from above the iron bridge. The North Adams Transcript reported it as a recruitment drive in a county with "substantial membership," the explosions preceding each blaze drawing crowds to witness the "fiery emblems."Rhode Island's Providence klavern of 1923 grew to 10,000–15,000, exploiting Portuguese and Italian mill workers in Woonsocket. The 1924 march of 3,000, with crosses on mill rooftops, was met with counter-protests, while Pawtucket's city council fell to Klan-backed candidates in 1925.Connecticut's Bridgeport klavern of 1922 peaked at 15,000–20,000, with the 1924 Waterbury rally drawing 4,000. Meriden elected a Klan mayor in 1925, but riots in 1925 between Klansmen and Italian Catholics left the state police issuing disarming orders—a harbinger of the northern Klan's overreach.V. The Political Ascendancy: From Crosses to BallotsThe Klan's true conquest was electoral, transforming symbolic terror into institutional power. School boards were the first beachhead, with Klan-backed candidates winning dozens of seats across the region to ban French-language instruction and Catholic teachers, framing parochial schools as "papal strongholds." Municipal elections delivered mayors in Portland, Nashua, Meriden, and Pawtucket, where Klan slates ran on "anti-corruption" platforms that masked anti-immigrant agendas. In state legislatures, Klan-friendly Republicans gained seats in Maine (Brewster's governorship, 1925), New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, influencing primaries and Prohibition enforcement.The 1924 Democratic National Convention—the infamous "Klanbake"—exposed the national stakes. The party's refusal to condemn the Klan by name fractured the convention, handing the election to Calvin Coolidge and proving the Invisible Empire could paralyze a major party. Locally, the Klan's ballot power waned as quickly as it waxed, undone by scandals and counter-organizing, but the precedents lingered: redlined zoning in Lewiston and Worcester, anti-Catholic ordinances in Nashua and Barre.VI. The Enemies and the Moral EconomyThe northern Klan's enemies were a regional remix of the southern playbook. Catholics—French-Canadian in Maine's mills, Irish in Boston's wards, Italian in Connecticut's factories—comprised 60 percent of hate rhetoric, portrayed as papal agents subverting public schools and Prohibition. Immigrants (Polish, Portuguese, Jewish) were the "Bolshevik threat," their labor unions the vanguard of anarchy. Jews, though fewer in number, were the "money power" behind it all, their synagogues vandalized in Providence and Portland. Black Americans, sparse in New England, were the ideological ghost: the Great Migration's specter justified the "Nordic supremacy" that bound the disparate hatreds.This was no random bigotry; it was a "moral economy" of vigilantism, enforcing Protestant virtue against the perceived vices of the other. Speakeasy raids in Worcester and Nashua were framed as temperance crusades, appealing to Yankee abolitionist legacies twisted into nativist zeal. The Klan's raids were not chaotic but calculated, designed to intimidate without alienating moderate Protestants—the symbolic cross-burnings encircling Montpelier or Shelburne Falls served as communal warnings, their flames visible for miles, their message clear: the valley belongs to us.VII. The Collapse and the CountercurrentsThe northern Klan's arc was a meteor: brilliant, brief, and self-destructive. By 1926 scandals engulfed it—kleagles embezzling dues, the Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson's 1925 conviction for rape and murder shattering the moral facade. Catholic counter-groups like Massachusetts' Progrès, Protestation, Punition (PPP, 400 Franco members by 1923) mirrored the Klan's tactics, surrounding klaverns in Haverhill with their own robed vigilance. Masonic lodges, Protestant churches, and newspapers turned decisively; the Burlington Free Press branded the Klan a "plague unwelcome in Vermont," while the Massachusetts Federation of Churches warned of "secret oath-bound organizations fomenting religious prejudice."State police intervened in riots, disarming both sides in Shrewsbury and Lancaster. Boycotts in Rutland and Burlington targeted Klan businesses; ministers railed from pulpits, one declaring he had "never done anything so ashamed that I needed to hide my face." Internally, rank-and-file disillusionment grew as corruption surfaced—leaders pocketing funds meant for "community programs" like library books. By 1928 the empire had shrunk to a few thousand die-hards, its northern realms reduced to whispers in Grange halls and IORM lodges.VIII. The Embers and the Palimpsest: Legacy in Shelburne FallsThe crosses ceased, but the silence endured, a palimpsest over New England's landscape. In Shelburne Falls, the 1924 Thanksgiving konklave—five crosses blazing on North Street hills, one on the Buckland side of the Deerfield River, one rafted downstream from above the iron bridge—left no martyrs but a valley reshaped by the hush that followed. The North Adams Transcript's report of "substantial membership" and a planned "canvass for new members" was the last public gasp; by 1929, the same community unveiled the Bridge of Flowers on the abandoned trolley trestle, a women's club triumph of "timeless beauty" that buried the rails under 400 varieties of bloom. The petals drifting into the Deerfield were not redemption but continuation—the floral rhetoric of the SFAWC echoing the Klan's "Americanism," both overwriting the Pocumtuc weirs drowned in 1798 and the French-Canadian mill hands targeted in 1924.The embers smoldered in redlined neighborhoods: Lewiston's HOLC "D" zones starved Catholic enclaves, Woonsocket's Portuguese wards crumbled under anti-immigrant ordinances lingering into the 1950s. Anti-Catholic school bans in Saco and Auburn, Klan-backed zoning in Nashua, the Knights of Columbus boycotts in Providence—all were the Klan's parting gifts, institutionalizing the terror in policy. In rural pockets like Shelburne Falls and Montpelier, the memory survived in oral fragments: elders recalling hills "lighting up like Judgment Night," the yellow Grange hall on Ashfield Street where robes hung in basements, the IORM's "noble savage" pageantry in Charlemont's 1932 "Hail to the Sunrise" masking the nativism that burned crosses locally.The Klan's northern invasion was a brief conflagration, but its heat warped the soil. The river carried the flames, the silence carried them farther, and the landscape—petals over rails, red lines over weirs—still bears the scorch marks. New England's "tolerant" myth rests on the very hush that allowed the crosses to burn in the first place.
