While President, Dwight Eisenhower did not send troops into Maine to suppress the ethnic and religious bigotry of his fellow Republicans, but he sent troops to re-occupy the Democrat South for supposed ethnic bigotry. It is noteworthy that Maine Senator James G. Blaine was notorious for his postwar waving of the bloody shirt at Southerners to deny them political rights, and pushing force bills to ensure the election of carpetbag regimes and Republican dominance in the South.
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net
Ku Klux and Religious Bigotry in the Deep North:
“Although no one spoke of it, the truth was that a Roman Catholic had never been elected governor. Maine is preponderantly Protestant, and prejudice against the 270,000 Catholics runs deep, if silent. “Pope Night” in November [1954], which featured torchlight parades and was climaxed by the burning of the Pope in effigy, had continued in parts of New England almost into the twentieth century. The spread of the Ku Klux Klan followed; in the 1920s the Klan had an estimated 150,000 members in Maine, more than in any other New England state.
In Portland, the state’s largest city, the Klan flourished and in 1923 plunked down $76,500 for a Forest Avenue estate which was turned into a permanent meeting place, featuring an auditorium and a sixty-foot high electric cross. In some Maine communities the Klan was given official recognition by the town fathers. Crosses were burned across the state, some bombings and fires were blamed on Klan activity, and Jews, Catholics, and the tiny Negro population were intimidated.
To be sure, the Republicans of the 1920s denounced the Klan and its burning crosses, but the Republican party in Maine is basically Protestant in composition, while Catholics – primarily Franco-Americans in the mill cities and in the St. John Valley, along the Canadian border – have formed the nucleus of the Democratic [party] organization in the twentieth century.
[Edmund Muskie] remains the only Roman Catholic ever to be elected to major office in Maine. The prejudice exists. In the hierarchy of Maine business – in the banks, the investment houses, the giant paper companies, and the private utilities – the governing offices are almost exclusively Protestant.
As late as 1958 a young college graduate seeking a job in Boothbay Harbor was interviewed at length and then bluntly asked, “Are you a Catholic?” Two years later a wave of anti-Catholicism was a definite if immeasurable factor in the Maine defeat of John F. Kennedy.”
(Muskie, Theo Lippman, Jr., Donald Hansen, W.W. Norton, 1971, pp. 63-64)
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net
Ku Klux and Religious Bigotry in the Deep North:
“Although no one spoke of it, the truth was that a Roman Catholic had never been elected governor. Maine is preponderantly Protestant, and prejudice against the 270,000 Catholics runs deep, if silent. “Pope Night” in November [1954], which featured torchlight parades and was climaxed by the burning of the Pope in effigy, had continued in parts of New England almost into the twentieth century. The spread of the Ku Klux Klan followed; in the 1920s the Klan had an estimated 150,000 members in Maine, more than in any other New England state.
In Portland, the state’s largest city, the Klan flourished and in 1923 plunked down $76,500 for a Forest Avenue estate which was turned into a permanent meeting place, featuring an auditorium and a sixty-foot high electric cross. In some Maine communities the Klan was given official recognition by the town fathers. Crosses were burned across the state, some bombings and fires were blamed on Klan activity, and Jews, Catholics, and the tiny Negro population were intimidated.
To be sure, the Republicans of the 1920s denounced the Klan and its burning crosses, but the Republican party in Maine is basically Protestant in composition, while Catholics – primarily Franco-Americans in the mill cities and in the St. John Valley, along the Canadian border – have formed the nucleus of the Democratic [party] organization in the twentieth century.
[Edmund Muskie] remains the only Roman Catholic ever to be elected to major office in Maine. The prejudice exists. In the hierarchy of Maine business – in the banks, the investment houses, the giant paper companies, and the private utilities – the governing offices are almost exclusively Protestant.
As late as 1958 a young college graduate seeking a job in Boothbay Harbor was interviewed at length and then bluntly asked, “Are you a Catholic?” Two years later a wave of anti-Catholicism was a definite if immeasurable factor in the Maine defeat of John F. Kennedy.”
(Muskie, Theo Lippman, Jr., Donald Hansen, W.W. Norton, 1971, pp. 63-64)
Ku Klux and Religious Bigotry in the Deep North
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