LEWISTON — In the wee hours of a Sunday morning in early August of 1924, a loud boom woke all but the heaviest sleepers on both sides of the Androscoggin River.

Badly frightened, “some hurriedly dressed and rushed outdoors to see ‘what had blown up’ while others peered cautiously out their bedroom windows,” the Lewiston Daily Sun reported.

Nearly everyone who looked outside saw a giant flaming cross illuminating the top of Mount David at the edge of Bates College.

The 12-foot high, gas-soaked timbers burned brightly for more than 10 minutes, the paper said, until “a group of Lewiston young men scaled the heights and tore down the glowing sign of the Ku Klux Klan.”

That day was an especially telling moment for the Klan. Its favored candidate had secured the Maine Republican nomination for governor at a moment when as many as 20,000 Mainers had secretly joined the vehemently anti-Catholic, anti-Black and anti-immigrant group.

Androscoggin County was a Klan hotbed.

Its meetings, mostly in Auburn, attracted Lewiston police, Bates College students, shopkeepers, preachers and hundreds of white men with deep roots in the Pine Tree State.

An elaborate charter from that era, preserved with the names of many of the Auburn chapter’s leaders boldly laid out along with their titles within the Klan, turned up in an abandoned safe deposit box decades ago. It is now in the archives of the Gerald E. Talbot Collection at the University of Southern Maine, where it serves as a permanent reminder of a menacing moment in Maine history.

Though the Klan and its hateful doctrines briefly burned bright, even electing a friendly governor, it faded into irrelevancy by 1926 after financial scandals and a barrage of criticism smothered it.

Perhaps the story of one man can help explain why the Klan grew and prospered more widely in Maine than in any other state outside the old Confederacy.

His name was the Rev. George S. Robinson.

LEWISTON MINISTER PROMOTED KLAN

Today, Trinity Episcopal Church on Bates Street calls itself “a community that centers its life on Jesus and following him into loving, liberating and life-giving relationship with God, each other and creation.”

“Whatever your race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, you are welcome here as a beloved child of God,” it proclaims.

Back in 1923, though, its minister had quite a different outlook.

In March of that year, Robinson, the church’s rector, took the stage at the first big Klan rally in Maine at Portland’s City Hall.

From the stage, before a huge audience, Robinson proclaimed that the KKK was “fighting the most beautiful fight in all the world.”

At the time, the state’s KKK proclaimed itself “a white man’s organization” whose “enemies are the colored and mongrel races.”

To join, men had to be native-born and Protestant. The group said it detested “the undesirable, hyphenated types crowded within our shores.”

In Maine, where many families with deep roots feared the growing number of French-speaking immigrants from Quebec, the KKK especially loathed Catholics.

So did Robinson.

A tall, powerfully built man, Robinson had an “attractive personality,” the Lewiston Evening Journal said. He could be blunt and ready to cut corners, it said, ever active, always alert, sometimes restless.

He apparently grew up outside Boston, attended Harvard University and graduated from General Theological Seminary in New York, the oldest Episcopal college in the United States.

Robinson wound up in northern Maine around 1900 – serving in at least Old Town, Millinocket, Houlton and Winn. In 1914, the church in Lewiston called on him.

A family man who spared no effort to help his three talented sons flourish, Robinson must have been reasonably well-liked by members of the congregation, at least initially. He was involved with the Masons, Elks and other civic groups – and championed the cause of veterans in the community.

Stepping onto the public stage just at the dawn of the Jazz Age, Robinson had such wide interests that he even complained that too many school-age boys “were frequenting pool rooms during school hours.”

IT ALL STARTED WITH PRAYER

A century after the burning cross and dynamite blast on Mount David, it seems odd that a battle that helped spur the growth of the KKK in Maine began at the Lewiston School Board.

But history takes strange paths sometimes.

Lewiston’s educational overseers agreed in 1920 to strip the public schools of the religious trappings that Protestant educators had long insisted on, including the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of the day and a variety of Bible readings lodged in the curriculum.

They said the schools ought to be secular, taking no sides in matters of religion. The new policy implemented in November 1920 called instead for silent prayer at the start of the day followed by patriotic singing.

Robinson, a school board member, was determined to keep the readings and prayer in place.

ROBINSON RAMPED UP THE FIGHT

Just before Christmas in 1920, Robinson stood before the nearly 250 members of his church to deliver a scorching Sunday sermon aimed directly at Lewiston’s School Board.

“Where is crime to end if the children of our public schools are instructed by law to pray silently, and the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer, as an unconscious daily restriction and governing power in their lives, is to be eliminated?” Robinson asked from the pulpit in the Gothic-style church.

“It is a blow direct between the eyes of Protestantism and with few exceptions, they are dumb and being led, they and their children, to the slaughter,” Robinson thundered.

He said he would rather the blood cease to flow in his veins than to allow his faith to be submerged.

The Lewiston Evening Journal asked Charles Bickford, the school superintendent if he had any response to the minister’s words.

“Not a thing!” Bickford answered.

The newspaper cited prominent but anonymous Catholics, Jews and many others expressing opposition to the School Board’s move.

“They said in effect that the recital of this beautiful prayer could not be objectionable to the adherents of any faith,” the paper said, “and they thought eliminating it from the schools was a mistake.”

Robinson declared that students needed daily exposure to the Bible “for we are not good enough to stand without props.”

He promised to track down “the fountainhead of the objections” and pondered if perhaps heavily Catholic Lewiston had been used as a “test case” to take down public prayer generally across America.

A LOSING BATTLE

In February 1921, the School Board debated the issue again, with Robinson pleading the case for a return to the old policy. In the end, the board voted 6-3 to maintain the policy the minister opposed.

Robinson tried a new tactic: Get the Legislature in Augusta to help him out.

He called silent prayer, the newly established alternative, a joke.

“In the average mind of the average child, silent prayer means no prayer,” Robinson told the Lewiston Sun. He called for observation of “the faith of my fathers.”

“America, my creed is, for Americans. I cannot think of a Franco-American, a British-American or Irish-American or any other limited American. America to me is a free country, a free government, free institutions, a free people, a flag of freedom, a little red schoolhouse, the open Bible and the Lord’s Prayer, the foundation of all prayers,” Robinson said.

The Bible and the Lord’s Prayer, he insisted, “are national landmarks, sacred trust indeed. Woe to him who attempts to remove the least of them.”

“Justice to all,” Robinson added, but “charity beyond reason to none.”

He convinced members of the Maine House to pass a bill that would have reversed Lewiston’s prayer policy, but with Gov. Percival Baxter in opposition, the state Senate unanimously dropped the measure.

ROBINSON KEPT UP THE FIGHT

At that point, Robinson pointed the finger at the group he blamed directly for stripping prayer from public schools: the Roman Catholic Church.

“Such events paralyze the feeble-minded, but in the man of instant decision, he throws down the broken sword and takes one stronger than the other and continues to fight, having awaked a terrific power,” Robinson said.

That fall, Robinson again took to his pulpit at Trinity to propose a new approach that “none will dare oppose.”

As he laid out his argument, he accused Catholics of betraying America by forcing public schools to silence prayers, close Bibles and pursue a secular education for all students.

He vowed to renew his battle.

“You may say what is there to be?” he told the congregation. “I say that even defeat does not mean conquered. Be brave. Be loyal. Be true. Stand by your colors. Remember the blood of your ancestors that flows through your veins.”

Robinson said the Catholics who opposed him operated a parochial school system “under the direct supervision of the papacy. It is the sovereign power of the parochial schools in this country.”

“The public school system,” he said, “is under the sovereign power of the nation or state.”

“Can two systems like these side-by-side teach the highest form of American patriotism, the first owing allegiance to the pope in Rome and the other to the United States government? Answer this question,” Robinson said.

Given that Catholics have their own schools, he said, there is “only one command to give” if they try to “interfere with the course of study in our public schools and its religious worship there.”

“Hands off!” Robinson declared.

The minister said the schools “will become weaker and weaker unless the true Americans” take care to teach children “that the American flag means America. Touch our schools and you touch our flag. There is no cross in that flag and we do not want one.”

“Let no foreign power dare touch it,” Robinson said.

Robinson made it clear he had a particular target, not just a broad one: the Catholic members of the Lewiston School Board.

Robinson didn’t name them, but he was talking mainly about two priests he served with on the panel: John Kealy of St. Joseph’s Church, the oldest Roman Catholic church in the city, and Michael McDonough, state chaplain from 1910 until 1933 of the Knights of Columbus and the priest at St. Patrick’s Church.

McDonough in particular earned Robinson’s ire. Perhaps proximity didn’t help. The Catholic priest’s church on Bates Street, just across from today’s Kennedy Park, was only 300 feet from the one led by Robinson. They preached less than a minute’s walk from one another.

A REVERED CATHOLIC PRIEST

An 1881 graduate of Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, McDonough arrived at St. Patrick’s in 1908, already a seasoned veteran of the priesthood.

Recognized quickly as a learned man, those who knew him called him both saintly and great to have around.

“To know him was to love him,” the Rev. George Johnson, administrator of the Maine Roman Catholic Diocese, said when McDonough died in 1933 at age 73. He called the departed priest a beloved and beautiful flower of the church, so popular statewide that the governor attended his final Mass.

McDonough cut a wide path in Lewiston, often involved in the issues of the day.

For example, when a flu epidemic threatened to slam the city in 1918, health officials threatened to close schools and churches to protect the public — though they didn’t target the mills that employed thousands of residents.

McDonough fought the plan, insisting churches are “an essential factor in the life of the community.”

“The time may come when there will be neither mills nor factories, but the time will never come when divine worship – community worship – will not be a necessity,” he told the Board of Health.

“Praise of God upon a Sunday is more essential than any other work in all the world,” he said, adding that people sitting in comfort in well-ventilated, well-heated churches for an hour a week are much safer than those spending 54 hours a week in a mill.

“Our greatest asset is the religious gathering on the Lord’s Day, and it is the least menace!” McDonough said, successfully arguing that churches should not be penalized.

AND THEN … THE KLAN

On Friday, March 23, 1923, Robinson took the stage at Portland City Hall, standing before an audience that included white men in white robes.

Billed with a question – “Does Maine Need the Ku Klux Klan?” – the session followed a mass meeting a month earlier when more than 800 people jammed inside to see 30 “masked and robed men” on the stage with the group’s major promoters, F. Eugene Farnsworth, who called himself a professor from Boston, and William Mahoney, who identified himself as a Bangor doctor from Georgia.

Robinson had a clear answer to the query that drew the largest KKK crowd to date.

The first words issued by the Lewiston minister to the fast-growing Maine branch of the hate group were, “Beware of the pope in Rome and his hierarchy.”

Calling himself “an advocate of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer,” Robinson told the crowd he expected “the whole backing of the Klan” in his effort to restore both to Lewiston’s classrooms.

The minister said “all was going peacefully” in Lewiston “until a man was elected a member of the school board who was high in the Knights of Columbus.”

Without saying his foe’s name, Robinson said McDonough “took the Bible from the schools” in a “pussyfoot way.”

Robinson vowed to fight back “as long as I have a breath of life” and to “say no to parochial schools” where the pope “pulls the wires.”

The reverend said he knew “nothing about the inner workings of the Klan” but felt he could count on its help.

Then he introduced Farnsworth, “a beautiful man” who is “beautiful in character.”

Farnsworth, in a speech in Auburn that year, declared, “This is not an Italian nation. This is not an Irish nation. And this is not a Catholic nation. It always has been and always will be a Protestant nation.”

The message found an audience. Before Thanksgiving 1923, 175 men gathered for an invitation-only Klan rally in Auburn, including 35 people from Bates College.

As the Klan grew in the Twin Cities, at least two crosses were burned in Auburn.

One, in December 1923, was set ablaze on Western Avenue near Hazel Street to celebrate the success of several Klan-based City Council candidates.

Another, in April, was set afire on West Pitch, on the Auburn side of Lewiston Falls on the Androscoggin River.

MAINE’S POWERFUL KLAN

In the weeks and months that followed Farnsworth’s rise, a huge number of Mainers joined the Klan despite Gov. Baxter’s insistence that the state’s residents were too level-headed to fall under its spell.

The charter preserved from Auburn carries the name of many local men who signed on; most of them who can be readily identified appear to have been small business owners.

In 1923 and 1924, Klan-backed candidates won elections in many towns, and a Klan sympathizer, Republican gubernatorial candidate state Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster, got elected after creating a campaign issue: whether the state should prohibit religious schools from receiving public funds.

In practice, that meant tapping Protestant worry that government money would help Catholic schools.

It was during that campaign, and in support of Brewster, that the Klan carried a cross to the top of Mount David and set it on fire in a place most everyone in Lewiston and Auburn could see it.

A group of rowdy Klansmen sped away from the scene before anyone could connect them to the blaze or the dynamite blasts that accompanied it. But they didn’t vanish.

A month later, there were more fiery cross burnings, less visible, in at least two more Lewiston locations: at the Cote farm on No Name Road and at the Steward farm on Reservoir Hill.

Police never caught any of the culprits.

Women who joined a KKK auxiliary gathered openly for a recruiting social at Bear Pond in Turner a week after the cross burning on Mount David. They brought in a few new members while enjoying a fun day together, newspapers said.

KKK’s COLLAPSE IN MAINE

In retrospect, the late summer and fall of 1924 was the high point of Klan fever in Maine. The whole sordid enterprise collapsed under growing public pressure, a spate of lawsuits and internal financial shenanigans.

Farnsworth, the state’s leader, was accused of embezzling the money that had poured into Klan coffers. In other states, Klan leaders were caught up in highly publicized criminal cases involving murder, kidnapping and more.

Klan funding, and growth, began to look to many Americans as a Ponzi scheme meant to enrich its leaders.

By 1926, the Klan’s ability to influence politicians and policy in the Pine Tree State had nearly vanished. Its rolls were down. Its finances drained. Robinson’s prominence, and his political agenda, faded away in the process.

While the KKK dwindled in Maine, the fear and hate that spurred its rise outlived the organization itself.

The image of a cross burning high above the Twin Cities is worth remembering because it continues to illuminate something that still lurks in the dark even a century later.

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