In Grays Harbor, Washington, which for decades made headlines for its record-setting lumber shipments and bloody labor wars, the mid-1920s witnessed the rise of a dominant Right-wing coalition with a firm grip over local politics and influence in national politics. The region was no mere backwater; in the 1920s Aberdeen—and its “Twin City” Hoquiam—were some of the Northwest’s largest and fastest-growing cities, and the Harbor’s goings on regularly turned up in major metropolitan dailies. Different branches of the Far Right and Further Right took their turn. In the early and mid-1920s, the center of right-wing activism was the hooded knights of the Ku Klux Klan. While many Americans believe that the Klan was limited to southern states, many of its deepest wells of support lay in the U.S. West and Midwest.

Ku Klux Klan parade in downtown Hoquiam, Washington.  Photo courtesy of Polson Museum, Hoquiam.

It’s not hard to find episodes of business class cooperation in United States history. Particularly when it comes to labor relations and suppressing workers’ rights, employers from different parties, industries, regions, and religions have much in common—and act accordingly. During the early twentieth century, bosses routinely expressed this solidarity by creating organizations ranging from chambers of commerce and professional associations to citizens’ committees and citizens’ alliances. The latter groups, in fact, were responsible for some of the bloodiest acts of vigilante terrorism in western U.S. history as merchants and manufacturers came together to bust unions and drive troublesome workers from their towns and workplaces. On the Pacific Coast, employer-led committees brutalized radical and militant workers in cities from the Mexican border to the Olympic Peninsula.

In Grays Harbor, Washington, which for decades made headlines for its record-setting lumber shipments and bloody labor wars, the mid-1920s witnessed the rise of a dominant Right-wing coalition with a firm grip over local politics and influence in national politics. The region was no mere backwater; in the 1920s Aberdeen—and its “Twin City” Hoquiam—were some of the Northwest’s largest and fastest-growing cities, and the Harbor’s goings on regularly turned up in major metropolitan dailies. Different branches of the Far Right and Further Right took their turn. In the early and mid-1920s, the center of right-wing activism was the hooded knights of the Ku Klux Klan. While many Americans believe that the Klan was limited to southern states, many of its deepest wells of support lay in the U.S. West and Midwest.

During the mid-1920s, a new struggle on Grays Harbor shifted from contests between the Left and Right, to a war between the Far Right and Further Right—as the Chamber of Commerce (and their citizens’ vigilante committee front groups) increasingly struggled for dominance with the KKK. Both groups had leaders drawn from the region’s employing class. Both the Chamber and the Klan had experience in politics; moreover, both groups maintained close ties with “law enforcement,” and both positioned themselves as representatives and defenders of their community. Still, if traditional politics and “justice” failed them, both groups proved willing to resort to vigilante justice to get their way.

In late 1924, the city’s municipal elections earned media attention across the region: the booming industrial city of Aberdeen, one of the Northwest’s largest municipalities, elected a Klansman to head its government. The Klan’s main rivals came from non-KKK (but pro-vigilantism) employers who showed that force worked not only for suppressing labor movements, but also for removing obnoxious elected officials.

Although the specifics of this local history are unique—perhaps a bit bizarre—they shine a bright light onto U.S. business history a century ago at a time when the Right ruled triumphant over much of American politics, culture, and economy. Counterpunch readers will likely notice the reverberations between the America of the Roaring Twenties and today’s world—exactly a century later.

Considerable ink gets spilt in discussions over divisions within the U.S. business elite, with our valiant Fourth Estate inquiring whether “Boss A supports progressive movements?” or “Will that divorce between Boss B and their spouse lead to a windfall for anti-Trump campaigns.” There are real schisms among those atop our society, but the unfortunate truth is that employers’ class interests have always attracted them toward movements of the Right. It’s this reality that makes possible what we see before us today: the schisms between the neocon Cold Warrior imperialists of the Democrat-Never Trump Republican wing of the United States; and the quasi-fascist movements lined up behind Trump. Both have billionaires and powerful institutions backing them, and both will continue their decades-long practices of harming those on this country’s—and global—margins.

What’s more, this Pacific Northwest regional history of a century past provides a useful reminder that those who run the U.S. economy and political institutions have little interest in democracy, except in finding ways to eradicate it from this “land of the free.” No fact so clearly shows the Upper Crust’s disinterest in democracy as the growth of today’s vast “union avoidance” industry, dedicated as the name suggests, to keeping workplaces non-union. Thus, the (non-union) workplace, where Americans spend so much of their lives, is as dictatorial as any authoritarian country—places where the freedoms of expression and association do not apply, and any show of critical thinking can—and often is—met with retaliation, even termination.

Congressman Albert Johnson, 1920. Photo courtesy of Polson Museum, Hoquiam.

Albert Johnson: King of the Right

Few men figured so prominently in the 1920s American Right as Albert Johnson, longtime publisher of the Daily Washingtonian in the lumber town of Hoquiam. Johnson rose through the ranks of western publishers and established himself in the early 1910s through his militant anti-immigrant and anti-radical politics. Following his role in crushing a strike of (primarily) immigrant lumber workers in the spring of 1912, he founded The Home Defender, self-described as: “A National Newspaper Opposed to Revolutionary Socialism.”

A fervent bigot, Johnson channeled his anti-radical and anti-immigrant views into a decades-long crusade to expand immigration restrictions. Elected to Congress as a Republican in 1912, Johnson maneuvered into House leadership and assumed his prized position atop the House Immigration Committee. He and his movement peaked a century ago, in 1924, when Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, dramatically curtailing immigration from outside northwest Europe—eugenicists’ favorite nations.

Indeed, eight decades before Grays Harbor’s Kurt Cobain brought his song “Come As You Are” into the world, Albert Johnson, the region’s other most (in)famous resident, championed laws declaring, essentially, “Unless you’re from northwest Europe, don’t come at all.”

Unsurprisingly, given his accomplishments at the national level, Johnson drew support from all sides of the Northwest business classes: the lumbermen, bankers, news editors, and others who joined Johnson in their citizens’ committees and chambers of commerce in the early years of the twentieth century. Support also came from the proto-fascist movement of the Twenties, best represented by the Ku Klux Klan. Both the traditional business Right and their upstart challengers viewed Congressman Johnson as a champion. After all, he promoted both Northwest business development and an assortment of discriminatory policies designed to, in the words of his Home Defender, “put up the bars” against immigration.

Klan Towns

The KKK organized in haste on the Harbor in the early and mid-1920s. The movement’s growth paralleled that of the national movement as by 1924 the Klan had millions of members stretching across the country. A mass organization, the KKK appealed to the racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, xenophobia, and anti-radicalism of large swaths of white, protestant America.

Across the United States, Klansmen controlled dozens of local governments, and maintained a stranglehold over officials in states such as Oregon. The organization, too, ranked among the nation’s most dedicated fighters against the “Red Menace” of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW) and Communists. In 1924, the white terrorists’ anti-labor activism reached a grim crescendo when California Klansmen descended on the San Pedro Wobbly hall, brutally assaulted attendees with guns and clubs, and burned IWW children so badly that they had to be hospitalized.

Few subjects so confound students in my classes as our discussions of the strength and composition of the “Second Ku Klux Klan” during the 1920s. They are sometimes blissfully unaware of the terror group’s existence, but more likely familiar with the oft-told legend of the Klan as a small group of hillbillies as depicted in popular media.  Indeed, Americans seem to struggle when confronted with the fact that the Klan was one of the largest and most powerful social movements of the first half of the twentieth century and that much of its membership—particularly its leadership—hailed not from the fringes of society, but instead the ranks of professional and business classes—the “Respectables” of the chamber of commerce. It’s possible that believing this mythical version of the Klan’s history is comforting for Americans, so often taught to accept anti-worker perspectives and believing that the uneducated and poor were—and are—the people most likely to hold white supremacist views.

In Grays Harbor, as across the United States, the Klan had its greatest appeal among business owners, professionals, and public officials. In Portland, Oregon, one of the largest blocs of Klansmen were police, and across the country the KKK actively recruited preachers who helped the white supremacist group reach their flocks. After observing one local Klan celebration, one Grays Harbor Wobbly claimed that the Klansmen hailed from the “gentry.” The Klan agreed. In 1921, Kleagle W.D. Norris spent four weeks recruiting in Hoquiam; he announced that most of the new members were businessmen.

Norris’s assessment was telling. Like in many other areas of Klan strength, the Harbor’s most-active KKK members included small businessmen and professionals, including several wealthy members of the owning class. Moreover, like many other groups formed by managers and professionals, the Klan demonstrated its class character as Klansmen pledged to fight intoxication, thus maintaining a sober, punctual, and hard-working labor force.

The Harbor’s best-known Klansman was Ransom Minkler. Ransom was a prolific joiner who enjoyed the networking and socializing common to fraternities and employers’ associations. By 1918, he led the Grays Harbor Dairyman’s Association; in later years he led the area’s chamber of commerce and an automobile dealers’ association.

Although Minkler was not one of the Northwest’s lumber barons, he was wealthy. The Twenties was a dynamic period with vast fortunes made in the automobile industry, and Minkler cashed in. In 1927, Minkler started the Sunset Oakland Automobile Company in Aberdeen, paying for a $20,000 Hudson auto dealership.

The Klan’s message reached large audiences through its parades and mass meetings. In 1923, state Klan leaders held a gathering in Grays Harbor attended by “between 900 and 1,000 members, according to an estimate given by members who were there.” Members of the Aberdeen and Hoquiam organizations gave the “king kleagle of the Aberdeen klan” a gold knife, “in recognition of the work he is said to have done for the organization on Grays Harbor,” according to the Aberdeen Daily World. On July 4, 1925, the Klan turned out for a massive Hoquiam Independence Day parade, donning white robes for members and the horses pulling their float, as well as a large sign reading: “Americanization through Education is One of Our Objects: The Klu [sic] Klux Klan:”

The War on Vice

The Klan was an explicitly Protestant Christian organization and its membership and values connected it to elements of the temperance movement. Klansmen placed a high priority on enforcing laws that outlawed “vices” such as liquor, gambling, and prostitution. Enforcing the 18th Amendment was high-profile and often dangerous business. According to one estimate, nationally more than 1,300 persons were killed during the Twenties “in which it is known that prohibition enforcement was directly at issue. In every case one or more sworn officers of the law or their agents were involved as principals, either as the killers or the killed.”

The Harbor had its fair share of sensational dry raids; some ended in bloodshed. Klan-affiliated police directed some of the raids, as Klan members raided moonshiners’ homes, destroyed stills**,** and lobbied politicians in favor of enforcing alcohol laws.

The KKK’s campaigns against booze and prostitution distinguished it from some other right-wing business-led organizations—notably the citizens’ committees, which were more “Big Tent” operations—at least among the employing class. Those committees enrolled businessmen from “diverse” backgrounds. What really mattered to the citizens’ committees like those formed in Grays Harbor was the businessmen employers’ willingness to unify to defeat unions—using any means necessary.

At the center of Grays Harbor’s legal and extra-legal battle against the “demon rum” was the notorious “phantom dry squad” run by one of the Harbor’s most prominent Klansmen, an octogenarian Civil War veteran and constable named Albert G. Hopkins. Local governments created the dry squad to carry out a “clean-up campaign,” enrolling men such as Hopkins as constables. The press referred to the Hopkins operation as a “phantom squad,” which was likely a reference to the similarity between Klan and ghost costumes.

The dry squad activities generated attention—including dramatic news stories—as Hopkins led armed raids onto private homes and businesses across Grays Harbor—even conducting a raid at the Aberdeen mayor’s home. His brash tactics in defense of “law and order” won him supporters among large swaths of the voting public.

A KLAN MAYOR IN TIMBER TOWN

During the elections of the Roaring Twenties, in many cases, voters could choose between candidates from the Far Right and Further Right. In November 1924, the hooded knights succeeded when their chosen candidate, A.G. Hopkins, became mayor, unseating the incumbent, in the primary and winning the general election by more than 500 votes a month later.

Many Americans hold exaggerated views of their country as a bastion and beacon of democracy. The reality, of course, is more complicated—or rather—the reality is that elections in the United States have never been all that democratic. Women won the vote in the Evergreen State in 1910, ballooning voter rolls. However, the electorate remained laughably unrepresentative of the population with immigrants, itinerant laborers, and young people largely excluded from the polls. In the booming city of between fifteen and twenty thousand residents, a small minority of 4,500 voted; the new mayor received 2,562 votes. A paltry percentage of residents supported the new mayor, but of those (mostly white, native-born, older adults) who had the vote and the time to cast a ballot, the far-right proved popular.

The election of a Klan mayor made statewide news, proving an embarrassment to some of the business owners and professionals who worried about losing investments and tourism in their area. Leading the charge against the new mayor was banker William J. Patterson, one of western Washington’s wealthiest men and an old hand at dealing with sticky “problems” through extra-legal solutions. During a string of labor conflicts in 1911-1912, Patterson organized and led the citizens’ committee vigilantes as they beat, jailed, and deported men, women, and children from the Harbor.

In the interim between Patterson’s attacks on the Wobblies in 1911-1912 and the 1924 election, he reflected on his past as an anti-labor ruffian, proudly recalling: “We organized that night a vigilante committee—a Citizens’ Committee, I think we called it— to put down the strike by intimidation and force. . . . [W]e got hundreds of heavy clubs of the weight and size of pickhandles, armed our vigilantes with them, and that night raided all the IWW headquarters, rounded up as many of them as we could find, and escorted them out of town.”

Summarizing the non-Klan business group’s opposition to Mayor Hopkins, Patterson reported that “Aberdeen would like to devote its interest to the things that will contribute to its growth and to the development of Grays Harbor country in general.” Expressing these views, the Seattle Star wrote that many businessmen “charged him [Mayor Hopkins] with causing the town to lose its former prosperity.”

Another of the charges leveled against the mayor will be eerily familiar to readers in the 2020s as our own era’s elderly and infirm elites have yet to pass power to future generations. Mayor Hopkins’s opponents claimed that the elderly man was doddering and frail, unable to overcome the many hurdles opponents put in his way. Patterson contended that “the duties of the office of mayor had become too strenuous for a man of Mr. Hopkins’ age.” Moreover, the new mayor violated political norms by replacing appointed officials with his supporters. Ransom Minkler served as chief political operative; opponents charged the KKK political duo of stacking the police force and city government with their Klansmen pals. For good measure, Mayor Hopkins crafted new police regulations, including an authoritarian measure—the mass finger-printing of anyone charged with traffic or parking violations.

The conflicts between the Harbor’s two pillars of the business elite led to an exceptionally chaotic term for Hopkins, dubbed “a bitter political strife for months” and a “civic war” by the Seattle Star. The mayor’s wealthy opponents spent weeks organizing to counter the city leader’s political maneuvers—with the goal being the mayor’s ouster. The Seattle Star summarized the period: “This town is in the throes of one of the bitterest political fights it has ever had.” This was quite the statement considering the area’s long history of bloody conflicts.

Aberdeen’s two principal newspapers – the Daily World and Grays Harbor Post – opposed the Klan and Mayor Hopkins in print. The World, though, muted its criticism, ostensibly providing a “just the facts” reporting. Notably, it did not use the same discretion when “reporting” on labor activists; instead, at times, that paper incited its readers to take up arms against working-class radicals and downplayed years of anti-labor murders, round-ups, and property destruction.

J.W. Clark, editor of the Grays Harbor Post, went much further. He condemned the Klan in the harshest language possible. The newspaper featured front-page headlines and lengthy, biting editorials denouncing the Klan as “an unlovely thing that has no place in the United States of America,” an “unhealthy mental epidemic” which “every other intelligent citizen and right minded man” should confront should help in “blotting out.” Harsh feelings were apparently mutual; one issue of Seattle-based Klan paper The Watcher in the Tower attacked the Post: “Does the editor of the Grays Harbor Post really know what an American is? He is like a lot of the present day editors, who have a limited knowledge on certain subjects and when these are presented, makes what he thinks is a bright a retort, for an answer, that stamps him for what he is quicker than any branding iron ever could.” Displeased at the attack, Clark used the entire editorial page of his weekly to issue a sharp rebuttal to the Klan.

Clark mocked the KKK’s cowardice since they “hide their identity” and “wear sheets.” He also condemned their reliance on “direct action,” which he defined as to “take what you want when you want it.” One irony of Clark’s attack, however, was that in Aberdeen, the KKK gained power through an election, while the press worried that the “Hooded Order Is Active In Election.” Moreover, Clark and his fellow employers had their own history of using violent direct action to get their way. For decades, businessmen like Clark had used guns, clubs, rope and fire to terrorize union activists who tried to inject a little democracy into “lumber capital of the world.”

Hopkins’s mayoral stint didn’t last long. Four months after the December 6 election, a group of businessmen hostile to Hopkins again used force to make change. Many of these local elites had experience with removing elected officials, although unsurprisingly they almost always trained their political guns on the left. A decade before the Klan mayor reached office and amid a strike of thousands of local lumber workers, Grays Harbor employers forced a successful recall vote against Hoquiam’s prolabor socialist mayor and simply ousted the socialist city clerk—an official in the local labor movement. Recalls have long been a tool in the belt of Washington’s business class, useful ways to rid government of the rarest of politicians—those who put the interests of the working-class majority first.

When recalls proved too slow and unpredictable for Grays Harbor employers, they resorted to more direct methods of political change. And for once, they trained their political guns on those even further to the right.

On April 3, 1925, only a few months into Hopkins’s term, the “town fathers” had had enough. That night, a group of prominent citizens—described by the Seattle Star as “business men, bankers, and the ‘open town’ element”—took the aged mayor to the Morck Hotel in Aberdeen. The Star set the scene: With “armed deputy sheriffs standing guard,” the mayor “sat dumbfounded, with no friends to counselor cheer him,” as “nearly 100 leading businessmen” hurled charges for four hours. After the lengthy period of “third degree methods,” “a paper was thrust before him to sign. It was his resignation.” Hopkins complained of being “forced to quit.”

As in earlier decades with business-led vigilantism against immigrants and labor radicals, the Harbor’s businessmen got their way through force. In the mid-1920s, however, employers’ interests motivated them to target a right-wing hate group. The Klansmen’s reputations—and potentially their commitments to enforcing prohibition—threatened investments and statuses of the other businessmen who undoubtedly wanted to keep their city out of the headlines. When attacks on the old mayor’s age and policies failed to yield results, businessmen used force to get their way.

Like the KKK’s outlandish costumes and customs, the improbable story of Aberdeen’s Klan mayor’s rise and fall shouldn’t distract us from the Klan’s wider significance. Fundamentally a racist and nativist organization, the Klan embodied the culture wars of the 1920s and was right at home in the Pacific Northwest. The Klan was representative of a large swath of the nation’s (and Grays Harbor’s) white Protestant population, and as across the country, many of Grays Harbor’s elites had power in the hooded order. Indeed, many of the area’s leading citizens, including Mayor A.G. Hopkins, and (future) Chamber of Commerce President Ransom Minkler – were notable Klan members, or at least strong supporters of KKK platforms. Congressman Albert Johnson even played an important part in turning Klan beliefs into public policy; generations of migrants turned away from America’s guarded gates are part of that legacy.

AFTERWARD

Ex-Mayor Hopkins’s reputation and influence was barely (if at all) diminished by his disastrous term. Reporters sometimes turned to Hopkins for his political opinions, while a decade after his brief mayoral stint, the Seattle Daily Times celebrated Hopkins’s birthday, reporting “Aberdeen’s Lone G.A.R. Man is 90.”

More significant support went to Ransom Minkler. His years in the Klan had done little to dampen his reputation—quite the opposite—as the businessman continued to exert considerable influence. A decade after his time as political advisor made statewide news, his fellow businesspeople chose Minkler to serve as president of the Grays Harbor Chamber of Commerce. In 1940, as Grays Harbor again rose to national infamy for right-wing vigilante attacks on labor, Minkler served in the vanguard as a director of the controversial Grays Harbor Business Builders, an employers’ organization at the center of the area’s anti-labor and anti-immigrant violence.

Nationally, the Ku Klux Klan’s strength waned as the 1920s wore on. Weakened by charges of political and sexual corruption, the KKK declined from a membership in the millions in 1924, to numbering around thirty-seven thousand by 1930.

But in some parts of the country, the “secret empire” maintained itself into the 1930s. Historian David M. Chalmers viewed the Harbor as the KKK’s main base of strength in the Pacific Northwest during the late 1930s. “With the exception of the Aberdeen, Washington, Klansmen, whose stones rattled the windows of the town’s union halls, the only active realm in the West was California,” noted Chalmers.

The Klan’s persistence on Grays Harbor was at least partly due to the group’s base among employers and that class’s decades-long embrace of vigilantism. Indeed, as Depression-era workers across the United States struck and unionized by the millions, the Klan remained in some labor strongholds where they lived up to their militant anti-union reputations. The KKK played a notorious part in the opening convention of that most storied union—the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)—held in Aberdeen during April 1938. With leaders of the dynamic new union in town, Klansmen attempted to terrorize the group, leading union president Harry Bridges to condemn the KKK as union-busting “red-baiters.” In much of the country it was left to the labor-left to do battle alone against far-right groups like the Klan as police and other “peace officers” both looked the other way or collaborated with reactionary forces.

Looking back a century later, the parallels between 1920s and 2020s America are hard to miss.  Whether we’re talking about the “division” between the early twentieth century citizens’ committees (alliances) and the KKK, or the “divisions” between the billionaire-dominated Democrats and Republicans, in all cases we’re talking about elites who favor discrimination and brutality against immigrants, mass incarceration and surveillance, and a refusal to assist the working class through universal health care, pro-worker labor law reform, or even increased minimum wages.

Our own era is dominated by reactionary forces; the oppression and exploitation from the Right can appear invincible—inescapable. And while much about the current era is new, the overwhelming power of the American Right is not without precedent; instead, it’s been a feature throughout the country’s history. A century ago, it was the collective power of the working class that faced down and temporarily tamed the Right, ushering in an era of material benefits for the working-class majority. Any path that leads us out of our own era of rightwing domination is likely to emerge from similar sources—through mass unionization and societal disruptions led by a militant labor movement.

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