THE RHODE ISLAND CENTURY

4.26.99
In the 1920s, the Klan ruled the countryside
n The state's Klan groups drew from the skilled labor and professional classes and Klan members controlled many towns' government and police.

By ROBERT L. SMITH
Journal Staff Writer

Growing up in the Smithfield countryside, Dr. Daniel Russell glimpsed one of the seldom-told chapters in local history.

On summer Saturday nights, he and a friend would scramble up to the roof of the icehouse in the back yard and peer across Georgiaville Pond.

They climbed at dusk, because that's when the people in the field on the other side -- the adults in ghostly white -- lit the fiery cross.

''It was certainly something to see,'' recalls Russell, 79, a retired dentist. ''We couldn't hear what they were saying, but they'd have a big meeting and then they'd burn a cross. They had on these white robes and they would parade around. We used to kind of laugh.''

As the flames died, the two boys would climb down and run home, as if sensing they had witnessed something they were not meant to see. They probably need not have worried about their safety. Those hooded marchers were almost certainly neighbors.

In 1920s Rhode Island, especially in the rural towns of the Northwest, a new force captured the allegiance of townspeople. The knights of the Ku Klux Klan spread their anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and anti-black venom among a welcoming populace.

Klan gatherings were as common as clambakes and often drew a comparable crowd.

Young Daniel Russell was on his perch frequently.

Beginning in 1925, when an estimated 2,000 people assembled for the state's first Klan wedding, the Klan Field in Georgiaville drew regular gatherings. Smaller Klan groups met in Scituate churches, Burrillville barns, and the lodges of leading fraternal societies.

Their white hoods masked bankers, merchants and even town officials.

''It's sort of like a secret that people don't talk about,'' says Scituate town historian Barbara Sarkesian. ''All the movers and shakers in the community -- the Masons and the Odd Fellows -- were all members of the Klan.''

In a state founded on the principle of religious tolerance, America's foremost hate group found fertile soil, the historical record indicates.

Not all Rhode Islanders embraced the Klan. In fact, evidence suggests most rejected the secret order and expressed disgust with its ideals. But the so-called Invisible Empire was popular enough in June 1924 to draw 8,000 people to a monster rally behind Foster Town Hall.

Scituate resident Norman Smith, a retired professor of history at Rhode Island College, says such rallies must have tapped a deep well of passion.

''You can't find gatherings that size in Foster today,'' he says.

That one could witness such a crowd in 1924 spoke to the times and to the changing demographics of the Ocean State.

Rhode Island in 1920 witnessed what historians call the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan. A secret society that grew out of white Southern anger with the Civil War and its aftermath, the Klan had died out by 1870, only to be reborn at the close of World War I.

This time, recruiters roamed the North and New England states in particular, where white Protestant communities viewed with alarm the waves of arriving immigrants.

''The Klan became massively popular everywhere,'' reaching 5 million members in 1925, says Mark Potok, an editor for the Klanwatch program of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

''What they're trading on is not really black stuff anymore, but Catholics and Jews. It's the peak of immigration in the United States, and the Klan was desperately anti-Catholic.''

In 1920, Rhode Island's black population composed less than 4 percent of the state's residents. But, in 1921, about 45 percent of the state's 600,000 people were Catholic, and Klan recruiters often found a welcome mat off village lanes.

While the Klan leadership lived in and around Providence, much of its strength flowed from the countryside.

''The rural towns were where the immigrants were not,'' explains Smith, who has studied the Rhode Island Klan. ''There were already many immigrants in eastern Rhode Island, but in the west, you still had a large number of swamp Yankees and other groups, which is where most of [the Klan's] support came from.''

Rhode Island Klansmen differed from their southern brethren in several respects. The Klan was linked with Democrats in the South, but Klansmen of New England were most often associated with Republicans, the more conservative party, Smith says.

The state's Klan groups also drew largely from the business and professional classes, not the poor and uneducated. They staged gatherings flavored with familiar cultural trappings.

''Outside of New England, you didn't see many Klans celebrating at clambakes,'' says Smith.

But in western Rhode Island, men and women wore white sheets to oyster suppers, chowder dinners and tent meetings. By 1924, newspapers were announcing Klan meetings as they might a community picnic.

A news brief on the front page of The Evening Bulletin of July 18, 1924, alerted Klansmen to a ''union meeting'' at Scituate's Advent Christian Church. Klan faithful also met at the Odd Fellows Hall in Clayville and at Eagle Schoolhouse on Gleaner Chapel Road, Sarkesian says.

More prominent were gatherings at the Grant estate in Georgiaville, where the Klan owned a farm field, in the Smithfield village of Greenville and in Foster Center.

Alabama's Sen. Thomas Heflin spoke at the Klan rally on the Old Home Day grounds in Foster on June 21, 1924, an event surpassed in size one month later.

According to the Providence Sunday Journal, more than 8,000 Klansmen and sympathizers from Providence and Kent Counties poured into the natural amphitheater behind Foster Town Hall early in the afternoon.

Car caravans arrived from Connecticut, Navy men from Newport. Local constables directed traffic.

''The exercises opened shortly after one o'clock . . . when a chowder dinner was served,'' the newspaper observed. Organizers staged a baseball game, running races, ''contests for children.''

At night, a giant cross blazed while hooded Klansmen initiated 200 members in the glow of car headlights.

The Rhode Island Klan appeared to differ from other Klan dens in one other key aspect: It was not commonly associated with violence. Newspaper reports make no mention of lynchings, floggings or brandings common in other states.

Still, it dealt in terror.

Seeking to educate black children in the spirit of Booker T. Washington, the Rev. William Holland, a black minister from Virginia, in 1922 began busing black youth from Providence to North Scituate, and boarding them at a school he called The Watchman Institute.

The trade school and summer Bible camp was seared by suspicious fires twice in the '20's. The first blaze, in 1924, destroyed a boys' dormitory wing; the second, in 1926, badly damaged the girls' dormitory. Newspapers reported the Klan was suspected, but no one was ever arrested.

Elsewhere, there were occasional cross-burnings and incidents of racist leafleting.

Meanwhile, immigrants and minorities passing through western Rhode Island could hold little faith in public officials. The Klan's tentacles reached into almost every civic group and myriad public offices.

In the mid-1920s in Hopkinton, Klansmen held 11 of 22 town offices, 4 of 5 seats on the Town Council, the Rhode Island Historical Society reported in the May 1989 issue of the journal Rhode Island History.

The police chiefs in Hopkinton, Coventry and East Greenwich belonged to the Klan. So did the sheriff of Washington County, two state senators and the master of the state Grange.

A grand cyclops, John A. Domin, lived in Smithfield.

Analyzing a report from a 1928 investigation by the state House of Representatives into the Klan, historian Joseph Sullivan determined that 63 percent of the state's known Klansmen held skilled or professional jobs. He attributed this to Klan dues, $15 a year, or about the weekly wage of a well-paid laborer.

But it meant many people delt with the Klan in the normal course of life.

The man who owned the grocery store in Daniel Russell's boyhood village belonged to the Klan. So did a neighboring farmer.

Russell recalls a big white arrow painted down the center of Farnum Pike, and words directing motorists toward the Klan field off Stillwater Road.

''That's how brazen they were,'' he said.

The state Assembly report sprang from a scandal that helped seal the Klan's demise in Rhode Island. In March 1928, The Providence Journal disclosed that the Klan had infiltrated the state militia and controlled three of the state's historic militia brigades.

A subsequent investigation helped smoke out Klan leaders and scare off potential members, historians say.

By the close of the decade, the Klan was a shadow of the group that once drew thousands to fiery gatherings in nighttime fields. But its impact probably echoed for years, insuring that, for many, the Rhode Island countryside remained a forbidding place.

Scituate town historian Sarkesian, in 1988, interviewed Mr. Holland's granddaughter, Jacqueline Holland Coffey, who grew up at the Watchman School on a small hill on the edge of the postcard village of North Scituate.

One night in the 1930s, she told the historian, the Watchman schoolchildren looked out to see a cross burning on the lawn.

North Scituate Elementary School stood just a few dozen yards away, but Jacqueline Holland Coffey was sent to elementary school in Providence.

Says Sarkesian: ''The children were not allowed to go down to the village alone.''