By Donna Stuart<\/b><\/p>\n
![\"portland](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/portland-klan-1024x422.png\")
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“Klan Wins Victory At Portland Polls,\u201d trumpeted\u00a0on September 11, 1923. \u201cVote Breaks All Records, Disorder Marks Election.\u201d The headlines marked the dark day when Portlanders surrendered the right to have their own elected mayor. Led by F. Eugene Farnsworth, \u201cKing Kleagle of The Imperial Satrapy of Maine,\u201d the Ku Klux Klan, headquartered in Portland at an expansive klavern on eight acres at the corner of Forest Avenue and Coyle Street, had succeeded in lobbying for this change. Formerly the Ricker Estate, the enclave included a mansion, a huge auditorium, and a 60-foot electric cross whose incandescent light was designed to be seen from miles away. More than 7,000 klansmen rallied to promote the move from an elected mayor form of government\u2013 which had invigorated Portland since 1823\u2013to the present city manager charter plan.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to 2009. This spring, Portland voters will select nine new members of the charter commission to join three city-council appointees to review the city charter. One of the most anticipated and \u00a0most watched debates will be over whether Portlanders will be able to choose a mayor by popular vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are really excited about this,\u201d says Portland city councilor Dave Marshall of the November 2008 vote that created the charter commission. \u201cWe have a chance to shape our government [in a way] that suits us for the 21st century.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust as we elect our state governor and our nation\u2019s president as chief executives of those branches of government, the largest city in Maine should be able to elect its mayor. Currently, all the executive power is in the hands of the city manager, who is hired by the city council. He\u2019s good as a manager, but because he isn\u2019t elected, he doesn\u2019t have a citywide mandate so he can\u2019t take a leadership position.\u201d Marshall feels the result across the years has been a leadership vacuum at the very top. \u201cThe council has nine members. If you have a diverse group on the council\u2013which is very healthy\u2013you\u2019re not able to speak with one voice clearly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under the current system, the mayor is elected for a one-year term from and by the council, and is essentially the council chair. According to councilor-at-large John Anton, \u201cIf not changing things is what\u2019s needed, our system serves that well. If what\u2019s needed is strong leadership and policy-setting, our current system seems to be failing us there.\u201d<\/p>\n
The origins of the present form of city government lie in a dark chapter in the state\u2019s history\u2013when crosses burned all over the state, and white-robed members of the Ku Klux Klan marched down Main Streets all over the state. It was the early 1920s, and Maine had the largest, most active KKK outside the south.<\/p>\n
When the Klan first darkened Maine\u2019s doorstep\u2013in about 1921\u2013the state was in a post-World War I economic slump. To get a foothold here, the \u201cInvisible Empire\u201d fanned the flames of economy uncertainty and fears that Catholics\u2013especially French-Canadians and other immigrants\u2013as well as Jews and blacks were taking jobs away from native-born Protestants. By 1923, the Klan had an estimated 20,000 members, many of whom were doctors, ministers, politicians, and other prominent members of the community. The KKK\u2019s agenda spilled out from pulpits, newspapers, well-publicized meetings, and in The Maine Klansman Weekly<\/em>, published in Portland.<\/p>\n While Maine saw no lynchings, the Klan threatened a Cumberland County sheriff, a Jewish doctor, and African-American women in Portland. When Republican Gov. Percival P. Baxter blasted the KKK as \u201can insult and an affront to all Maine and American citizens,\u201d \u2018KKK\u2019 was stamped in the snow on the Blaine House lawn.<\/p>\n \u201cCertain parts of the city\u2013generally the eastern wards\u2013were largely Democratic. That was primarily where the immigrant populations lived,\u201d explains Earle Shettleworth, Jr., director of Maine Historic Preservation Commission. The fewer positions these wards elected, the more power would lie with the Republicans. \u201cDiffusing the power of the Democrats was a way of getting at the immigrant political base.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, Shettleworth cautions, \u201cThere were some very \u2018high-minded\u2019 and prominent people involved in the charter change who\u00a0weren\u2019t <\/i>doing it for the same motives as the Klan. In Portland politics in the early 1900s, things had gotten partisan to the extreme. I think there was a desire to remove a lot of the graft that was part of the partisan system.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, the voters had their say. The Klan-backed change was adopted by a vote of 9,928 to 6,859. The new government without an elected mayor went into effect January 1, 1924.<\/p>\n The Klan was also credited with the election of Ralph Owen Brewster as Maine\u2019s governor. While Brewster stated emphatically that he wasn\u2019t a member of the KKK, Shettleworth maintains, \u201cI think it can be said that he actively sought their support.\u201d Although his association with the KKK cost him support with liberal Republicans, Brewster went on serve in the U.S. House and Senate, and became a close confidant of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. As chairman of a special Senate committee investigating defense procurement during World War II, Brewster came out in opposition to Howard Hughes. In the Martin Scorsese film,\u00a0The Aviator<\/em>, Brewster (played by Alan Alda) is portrayed\u2013by many accounts accurately\u2013as corrupt and in the pocket of Pan Am, the rival of Hughes\u2019s TWA.<\/p>\n Councilor Anton says that, while the history of the KKK in Portland is troubling, \u201cSometimes it distracts people in terms of the current dialogue.\u201d He hails the creation of the charter commission as a positive move. \u201cIt\u2019s good practice to look at the structure and how you do business. We may as a community decide to make extensive changes, or we may make changes on the margins, or we may make no changes, but the dialogue is healthy. The act of having the discussion challenges everyone to think about how we do things, which I believe is always to the good.\u201d<\/p>\n What does the current [non-elected] mayor, Jill Duson, a woman of color, think of all this? \u201cIt\u2019s weird, because I\u2019m sure, if not for this system, I wouldn\u2019t have been mayor [the first time] as soon as I was. But with the turn-taking every year, it was set up that the longest-serving councilor who hasn\u2019t been mayor assumes the position.\u201d While Duson leaves it up to the voters to decide if they want an elected mayor, she admits, \u201c If there ever were an elected mayor, where it was a strong [full-time] position, I\u2019d probably consider running for it, because I love what I do and I love serving Portland.\u201d<\/p>\n Out in left field: August 28, 1926: The Klan gathers in\u00a0<\/b>Portland at what is now Hadlock Field. The Portland Expo\u00a0<\/b>building is to the right rear.<\/b><\/p>\n A national concern about traitors, spies, and subversive\u00a0<\/b>agitators led to immigrants being closely watched. This sentiment\u00a0<\/b>carried into Klan activities. The Klan sought to influence\u00a0<\/b>politics and promote its ideas of \u2018nativism\u2019 and \u2018Americanism,\u2019\u00a0<\/b>explosively protesting against non-Anglo immigrants, particularly\u00a0<\/b>Franco-Americans, Italians, and Irish Catholics.<\/b><\/p>\n In 1923, over 7,000 Klansmen rallied to change city government\u00a0<\/b>structure from having an elected mayor to hiring a\u00a0<\/b>city manager. The Klan had a huge headquarters on Forest\u00a0<\/b>Avenue. Klan influence reached an all-time high here in 1924,\u00a0<\/b>when Maine had 50,000 members\u20136.2 percent of the state\u2019s\u00a0<\/b>total population.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Klan Wins Victory At Portland Polls,\u201d trumpeted on September 11, 1923. \u201cVote Breaks All Records, Disorder Marks Election.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13623"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13627,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13623\/revisions\/13627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}