Peddlers of Hate
How the Ku Klux Klan Seized Power in 1920s Oregon
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oregon State University
Publishing:11th Aug '26
£22.99
This title is due to be published on 11th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The revived Knights of the Ku Klux Klan flourished in Oregon in the early 1920s. With more than sixty chapters established in both large and small communities like Portland, Medford, Astoria, and La Grande, the Klan's power escalated in the region. Klan salesmen, working on commission, successfully enlisted Oregonians with a message of religious prejudice and racism. At the Klan's peak, Portland was home to the sixth largest chapter in the country and there were more members per capita in Oregon than in any other state except one.
In Peddlers of Hate, journalist Steve Law draws on published and unpublished sources, new research, and interviews with leading scholars to provide a comprehensive account of how Oregon became one of the Klan's strongest outposts. Representing the Klan as merely a fraternal lodge, Klan recruiters were trained to vilify Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and Jews. They gained wide support, toppling an incumbent governor and congressman, persuading voters to ban Catholic schools, and winning control of the legislature and several local governments. From stories of "escaped nuns" to fiery crosses at mass Klan rallies at Salem's state fairgrounds and Portland's Mount Tabor Park, Law examines this divisive and forgotten time in Oregon's history. He shows how it was finally greed, hypocrisy, and corruption that spurred the hate group's demise—providing historical lessons that will resonate today.
"Peddlers of Hate provides a penetrating look into the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in the Beaver State. Meticulously researched and written in a lively style, the book places Oregon's once-powerful KKK into its proper national context. Steve Law thoroughly explores in detail major personalities and events that marked the Oregon Klan's rapid rise and its subsequent decline." —Jeffrey Max LaLande, author of The Jackson County Rebellion: A Populist Uprising in Depression-Era Oregon
"In the Ku Klux Klan's ascent to power between 1921 and 1924 the Klan could command audiences of thousands to attend its rallies, lectures, parades, and cross burnings in every nook, cranny, city, town, and village throughout the state of Oregon. Steve Law's powerful new book, Peddlers of Hate, documents these events in intimate detail, naming names, dates, locations for all to see. It is a scary story." —Darrell Millner, Black Studies professor emeritus, Portland State University
"In this thickly researched work, Steve Law brings together the complex strands of the second KKK's presence in Oregon. Instead of night-riders and murderous vigilantes, readers are introduced to a political and social movement that combines white Protestant nationalism, immigration restrictionism, and support for Prohibition with the defense of public education, gestures of community service, and the rituals of a fraternal lodge." —David A. Horowitz, editor of Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of a Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s
"Peddlers of Hate provides today's justice advocates with a meaningful insight into the fissures of American democracy that will continue to be exploited until the cores of bigotry, xenophobia, and white supremacy are met with the same understanding of history as the operators of oppression. Law's warnings are to be heeded lest the heirs to the Klan ride to power once again." —Taylor Stewart, executive director of the Oregon Remembrance Project
ISBN: 9781962645706
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm
Weight: 426g
292 pages