5

THE PEAK OF THE WOOD COUNTY KU KLUX KLAN

On the night of Monday, August 13, 1923, a group of three crosses was ignited on South Enterprise Street in the city of Bowling Green. In addition to the ritual cross burnings, an explosion occurred that “startled” and woke many members of the neighborhood on an otherwise quiet summer evening. The explosive device was so loud that buildings shook, and concerned residents phoned in dozens of calls to public safety officials.¹⁰⁹

The physical placement and timing of the burned crosses is worth exploration. The area of South Enterprise where the incident occurred was in a heavily Catholic neighborhood, and the scene of this incident happened to be within a block of St. Aloysius Catholic Church as well three blocks from the meeting room of the local Knights of Columbus group, a fraternal organization frequently attacked by Klan leaders as “evidence” of a plot by militant Catholics to impose their political will on unsuspecting “100 Percent Americans.”

The cross burnings also occurred the night before a primary election, suggesting that the demonstration may have been a form of political intimidation. While no individuals or groups officially claimed responsibility for this particular incident (the Klan admitted that rogue Klan members burned the crosses but denied any connection to the explosive device), the net result was increased tensions and a veritable war of words between Protestants and Catholics in the city of Bowling Green.

The 1923 elections in Ohio proved to be one of the high points of Klan political strength in the Buckeye State. Support from the Ku Klux Klan led to mayoral victories for candidates in cities such as Youngstown, Portsmouth, Akron and Toledo.¹¹⁰ In the city of Middletown, an entire slate of Klan candidates won at the ballot box for the board of education and the city commissioner posts.¹¹¹

Klan candidates fared especially well in eastern Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, winning mayoral campaigns in the cities of Girard, Struthers, Youngstown, Warren and Niles.¹¹² In the glow of its numerous electoral successes, Klan officials boasted that the Buckeye State was home to over 700,000 members at the time of the 1923 elections.¹¹³ Editors of the New York Times in 1923 chided politicians in the state of Ohio for “pursuing a policy of ‘silence’ in the face of the menace.”¹¹⁴

Klan members in Wood County occupied a wide range of municipal and county positions during the group’s prominence in the mid-1920s. Some political officeholders joined the Klan at some point after they became employed in elected or appointed positions, while Kluxers parlayed their Klan connections into lucrative and influential offices.

One of the early moves by the Wood County Klan was to organize an effort to close businesses on Sundays in Bowling Green. While the Klan did not advertise themselves as organizers of the unofficial “blue” movement, over three-fourths of the signatories were Klan members. Others likely agreed to close their businesses out of either philosophical agreement with the idea or under pressure from the group.

The greenhouse and florist shop owned by Klan members William and Harold Milnor. Center for Archival Collections.

The signers of the covenant vowed to close their businesses on Sunday as well as on all legal holidays. In addition, the signatories agreed to close their businesses at noon on Thursdays “during July and August, beginning at the week following the Fourth.” Finally, signers of the agreement decided to also close their businesses at “6:30 each night, except Saturday, at which time we agree to close at 10:00 pm.” Grocers were allowed to “stay open Saturday nights until all were served.” Barbers were allowed an extra half hour on top of the above closing times, ostensibly to accommodate late visitors to their shops.¹¹⁵

KLAN MEMBERS IN COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT POSITIONS

Political ad for Klan member Ray D. Avery. From the Wood County Republican.

Members of the Wood County Ku Klux Klan could be found in the highest offices of county government in the 1920s and 1930s. Kluxers at various times served as Wood County sheriffs and deputy sheriffs, Wood County commissioners, county judges, county engineers and county prosecutor. Klan members also served as local mayors, city council members, police officers, justices of the peace and village marshals.

In some cases local officials joined the Klan after they attained their political or administrative positions. Other individuals used their Klan connections as political springboards to join the ranks of the county’s political elites.

Klan members occupied a wide variety of elected and appointed positions in the various county municipalities during the 1920s and 1930s. Ray D. Avery, for example, was the prosecuting attorney for Wood County, and he was coincidentally a charter member of the Wood County Ku Klux Klan.

One method used by members of the Wood County Klan to increase the organization’s political power was utilizing the time-honored tradition of seizing control of party machinery at the grass-roots level. In Wood County, the Klan was overwhelmingly pro-Republican in orientation, and in the period from 1923 to 1926, many Klan members were elected to county Republican precinct chair positions.

By 1926, the Klan had unofficially gained control of the county Republican Party. Approximately 55 percent of precinct chairs were at one time Klan members, and many of the officers of the county party were Klansmen, including Chairman John E. Kelly and Vice-chairman Lester D. Hill.¹¹⁶ Klan members thus composed a majority of Republican Party members from Wood County sent to the state convention in 1926 and 1928.

Campaign ad for Raymond Witte, Wood County sheriff. Wood County Republican.

Despite the fact that at the national level the Ku Klux Klan was beginning to lose steam in 1926, in Wood County the November 1926 election showed that the organization was still influential. Wood County Klan members won several county commissioner seats plus the posts of county recorder and county treasurer.

In the 1926 election, the Klan also backed a winning candidate in a race that directly influenced one of their most cherished issues: Prohibition enforcement. Wood County voters elected Raymond F. Witte as county sheriff in this cycle, putting into office an individual who had been a dues-paying Klansman for at least three years prior to the November 2 election.

Witte was not alone in his status as a Wood County sheriff who had also been a Klan member. At least two other Wood County sheriffs who held the office between 1915 and 1945 at one point had been members of the Wood County Ku Klux Klan.

In keeping with the group’s focus on public education as a means of achieving “100 Percent Americanism,” it is not surprising that members of the Ku Klux Klan gravitated toward employment in public school systems during the 1920s and 1930s. Klan members could be found in a wide variety of roles in most of the public school systems in the county during the 1920s. These ranged from lower-level employees, such as teachers and maintenance staff, up to higher positions, including principals, superintendents and school board officials.

Klan members occupied many of the most important administrative positions in public school systems in Wood County in the 1920s. Chalmer B. Riggle¹¹⁷ and John A. Nietz¹¹⁸ both served as superintendents of Perrysburg Public Schools, and Roy A. Hammond served in a similar capacity in North Baltimore schools. Charles S. Harkness served as superintendent of the Wood County school system and as a member of the county board of education,¹¹⁹ while Klan member Orin Clive Treece worked as a principal at Perrysburg High School.¹²⁰

Klan member Harry O. Stout worked at Bowling Green High School as a science teacher for many years. Interestingly, Stout also served on a cooperative basis with Bowling Green State Normal College working with student teachers as they gained classroom experience as part of their education degrees.¹²¹

Like his fellow Klan member Harry Stout, teacher Elmer L. Boyles also worked at Bowling Green High School. Boyles served as a mathematics instructor for the district,¹²² and he, too, worked to train student teachers in conjunction with Bowling Green Normal College.

Interestingly, Bowling Green State Normal College (later Bowling Green State University) did not seem to be an important focus for Klan recruiters. Cross-referencing Klan membership lists with student and employee names has revealed only two students and two maintenance workers as Klan members. Four Klan members in a college community of several thousand students, staff and faculty is a much lower percentage than comparisons with other segments of the population of Wood County.

Part of this statistical anomaly regarding the relative absence of Klan members on campus might be explained by the fact that any students who happened to be Klan members might have simply belonged to a klavern in their hometowns (setting aside the issue that the Klan had greater appeal to middle-aged persons with disposable income). More importantly, though, the primacy of the field of teacher education at the college likely meant that the Klan agreed with the mission of Bowling Green Normal College, as one of the key goals of the Klan was to increase the number and quality of public schools.

KLAN MEMBERS AS UNOFFICIAL LAW ENFORCEMENT FIGURES

One of the issues that galvanized early support for the Ku Klux Klan was the spike in criminal activity connected to Prohibition. The enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act produced unintended consequences, most notably the production and distribution of alcoholic beverages by criminal groups. The national Ku Klux Klan acknowledged that Prohibition provided the group with an unexpected membership boost: “Wherever the Ku Klux Klan operates it is a clear indication that some public officers, not necessarily all of them, have previously violated their oath of office in refusing to enforce the law.”¹²³

The Ohio legislature, in an effort to provide the mechanisms by which Prohibition could be enforced, passed legislation known as the Crabbe Act. This law provided compensation for mayors, law enforcement officials and certain judicial personnel for their efforts to enforce the ban on alcohol in Ohio, and the act also extended the already considerable powers of local officials to try cases. Most cities and towns in Ohio used a form of a mayor’s court to hear cases related to Prohibition violations.¹²⁴

Like many Klan chapters in the 1920s, the Wood County Klan sought to play a role in curbing Prohibition-related criminal activity. Some of this activity took the form of simply providing information about crime to local officials, while some Klan members took on semi-official roles as adjunct support personnel with law enforcement agencies. Some Klansmen, however, took matters in their own hands and engaged in vigilante action against purported criminals.

Klan members were among the “other members of the raiding party” who accompanied local, state and federal law enforcement officials on a highly publicized 1923 raid. The liquor raid resulted in the arrests of twelve persons from crimes ranging from “selling liquor,” “furnishing liquor” and “giving away liquor.” Klan members appeared to act primarily as undercover informants in the operation, but they were in fact armed and present the day of the twenty-man raid of various sites in Rossford.¹²⁵

The efforts of Klan members to bolster the fight against violations of Prohibition laws were applauded by a number of members of the community. The editor of the Prairie Depot Observer noted that “hooded bands should not be necessary to enforce the laws, but the K.K.K. has done more to stop the bootlegger than all the paid officials in the land.”¹²⁶ The Wood County Republican described the Klan’s antibootlegging work as “terrorizing the lawbreaker with the fear of being detected.”¹²⁷

The Klan was instrumental in forming what became known as the Dry Federation. This coalition of members of the Ku Klux Klan, the Anti-Saloon League, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and other supporters of Prohibition laws emerged in 1924 in Wood County. The purpose of the group was to assist the government “in every way in securing respect for the Prohibition law by seeing that it was rigidly enforced.”¹²⁸

During the peak years of the Klan in Wood County, the president of the Dry Federation was Klan member Dr. Charles B. Hatfield, a physician from Bloomdale. In the period from 1924–26, the other officers of the Dry Federation were also Klan members: James M. Beard of Portage and Reverend Paul J. Gilbert of Bowling Green.¹²⁹ Klan members and their wives also heavily populated the group’s executive committee.

The Wood County Ku Klux Klan thus flexed its muscles in a wide variety of venues across the spectrum of political activity to advance its agenda. However, when united behind a political candidate, the Klan was capable of remarkable influence in individual elections.

SHOWDOWN

A Bitter Klan vs. Non-Klan Election

One of the earliest tests of the strength of the Wood County Klan occurred when the Reverend Rush A. Powell—a charter member of the local Klan klavern, a minister at Trinity United Brethren Church in Bowling Green and a regional administrator with the United Brethren Church—declared in July 1924 that he would run for a state senate seat. Powell was a newcomer to politics, having worked his entire adult life in ecclesiastical positions.

At the time of his announcement, the Wood County Republican lauded Powell in a front-page editorial as a “man of high character and ideals who at the same time has the mind and courage to make himself felt in the Ohio General Assembly.” Reverend Powell, observed the editors, possessed the “worth, ability, capacity, and desire to serve his fellows.” According to the editorial, Powell decided to run for state senate “because he was solicited by many staunch Republicans.”¹³⁰

What the Wood County Republican editors did not reveal in their ringing endorsement of Reverend Powell was that they, like Powell, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. The publisher, editor, reporters and even the printers were naturalized Kluxers. The publisher Harvey H. Sherer was a charter member of the Wood County Klan, and his sons Marshall and Glen—both of whom held important positions at the Republican—soon joined him as Kluxers. By 1924, the newspaper had evolved into a semiofficial mouthpiece for the county Klan, and the paper regularly offered the Klan front-page space for news about the group as well as for reprinted Klan propaganda from KKK newspapers and pamphlets.

The political campaign of Reverend Powell faced significant hurdles, not the least of which was the fact that Powell’s Democratic opponent, Frank Thomas, had represented the Thirty-third Senate District of Ohio since 1916. In addition to his work in the Ohio Senate, Thomas also published a newspaper of his own, the Wood County Democrat. Prior to becoming a state senator, Thomas served as a member of the Ohio House of Representatives, the Bowling Green City Council and the Wood County Board of Tax Equalization.

Thus, the election was a showdown on many levels: Republican versus Democrat, Klan versus non-Klan and newspaper versus newspaper.

Powell and Thomas both ran unopposed and won their respective party nominations in the August 1924 primary. The two men began a heated campaign that would test the growing power of the Klan to influence county politics. Thomas made frequent use of his ownership of the Wood County Democrat to attack his opponent, especially related to the Reverend Powell’s status as a Ku Klux Klan member. Interestingly, the Democrat did not break the story on the Powell-Klan connection, though Thomas may have tipped off other local papers. The Democrat denied making the accusation, arguing that “we took it for granted that the [Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune] reporter knew what he was talking about” in reporting that the Reverend Powell was a Klansman.¹³¹

The Democrat in several issues took an almost taunting tone toward Powell in offering space in future editions of the paper for a rebuttal. The August 15, 1924 edition of the Democrat is typical of the efforts to bait Reverend Powell, and one can almost hear the smugness of Thomas and the Democrat staff in making an offer that they knew Reverend Powell could not accept, as this would betray his fellow Klansmen:

The Democrat had no intention to attack Rev. Powell as a citizen, but merely printed what the Sentinel-Tribune reporter had recorded. If Rev. Powell is not a member of the Klan, the columns of the Democrat are open to him for a denial of the report.¹³²

Thomas and the Democrat issued at least four such sarcastic offers to Reverend Powell in the ten weeks leading up to the November election. The strategy of linking the phrases “Reverend Powell” and “Ku Klux Klan” was also expanded to include placing several minor stories about the Klan next to innocuous news articles about Reverend Powell, such as a wedding announcement for his daughter being placed next to a story about a Klan gathering.¹³³

Yet despite the leak of Reverend Powell’s status as a member of the Wood County Ku Klux Klan, the November election demonstrated the political power of the KKK in the county. Powell garnered almost 75 percent of the vote in the election versus the Democratic incumbent, and while some credit for the landslide might go to the national GOP slate (Calvin Coolidge won in Ohio with 58.33 percent of the vote¹³⁴), the thousands of Klan voters in Ohio’s Thirty-third Senate District came out in droves for the minister-turned-senator.

The Wood County Republican addressed the issue of the role of the Klan during the election in a front-page editorial immediately following the election:

Rev. Rush A. Powell was overwhelmingly elected over Frank W. Thomas…This was no surprise as Thomas has been a candidate before and had held the offices of Representative and Senator both and did not prove satisfactory to the voters. He blames his defeat to the Klan, and it may be so, and it may be not.¹³⁵

As a state senator, Powell served on a number of legislative committees, including Finance, Agriculture, County Affairs, Drainage and Irrigation and Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Homes. The Wood County Republican applauded his committee assignments, noting that “the fact that he has been given a place on the finance committee bespeaks the respect for which his colleagues have for his record as a financial manager of the U.B. church.” Not surprisingly, given the interest that both Powell and the Klan had on prohibition enforcement, Reverend Powell was named chair of the Temperance Committee in the state senate.¹³⁶

While serving in the state senate, Reverend Powell won another election in 1925, this time as conference superintendent of the United Brethren Church. Powell thus assumed much greater administrative duties, supervising churches across nearly one-third of the state of Ohio for the conference.¹³⁷

At the peak of both his political and ecclesiastical careers, Reverend Powell apparently found that the workload was more than he could manage. In June 1926, right before the electoral filing deadline for the August primaries, Powell announced that he would not seek reelection to the state senate. The Wood County Republican reported that Powell “finds his new duties as superintendent so exacting that he has decided that justice to his work and to himself demands that he free himself from governmental duties.”¹³⁸

HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE KLAN TO PROMOTE BUSINESSES

One aspect of Klan life that appealed to business owners was the idea that the Ku Klux Klan—as an exclusive fraternal organization—could be used to improve the financial fortunes of members whose livelihood depended on retail sales. The Wood County Ku Klux Klan boasted as members some of the most visible and powerful business owners in the county.

Some Klan members who owned businesses preferred to keep their affiliation with the hooded order a secret out of fear of customer backlash. This would especially make sense for Klan members who owned businesses in communities with sizeable Catholic populations, such as Perrysburg, Rossford and Bowling Green.

The Commercial Bank in Bowling Green. Center for Archival Collections.

Other Klan members, however, were quite open with broadcasting their affiliations to the public. George L. Myers opened a billiard hall in North Baltimore that promised patrons a “100 Percent Pool and Billiard Hall Parlor.” In case readers missed the “100 Percent” hint, Myers added the phrase “100 Pct. American” at the bottom of the advertisement to reinforce the Klan slogan. The use of capital K letters in each corner made it highly unlikely that a reader could mistake the intent of the proprietor.

Advertising campaigns such as the “100 Percent Pool and Billiard Hall” opened by George Myers served purposes other than building sales through tapping into the potential economic power of Klan membership. Such an advertisement more subtly informed Catholics, African Americans and immigrants that they were not allowed in the establishment, serving as an informal method of segregation by religion, race and/or birth origin status.

“100 Percent American” pool hall advertisement. From the North Baltimore Times.

An intriguing number of bank officials and bank employees joined the Wood County Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. In particular, many Klan members could be found among the officers and boards of directors for the Bank of Wood County, the Commercial Bank & Savings of Bowling Green, and the State Bank of Bowling Green. The desire of these individuals to join the Klan might reflect concerns about crime in the community, or they may have viewed the Ku Klux Klan as another opportunity to network and develop bank business.

Business owners who were Klan members ranged from those who operated small retail establishments—like Fred Hale’s newsstand in Bowling Green—to those who owned larger businesses, such as Gus Keller’s freight line company. Klan members owned pharmacies, operated construction companies, ran consumer-related businesses and owned industrial firms like tile factories and electrical supply warehouses.

VIGILANTE KLAN ACTIVITY

Despite the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan to promote itself as a law-abiding organization, Klan members in Wood County occasionally took it upon themselves to engage in vigilantism. Local newspapers during the 1920s detailed a wide range of vigilante activities in the county, though the Wood County Klan often denied its involvement or attributed the extra-legal actions to rogue elements within the group.

The North Baltimore Times recounted a violent incident in which individuals who uttered disparaging comments at a memorial for the late president Warren G. Harding experienced a “near lynching.” The two “radicals” were residents of New York City, described by the Times as “the hot-bed of foreign, radical, and bolshevist agitation.” The angry crowd forced the couple into a vehicle and drove them into the countryside, where ropes were strung from a tree. The couple was spared when the man “begged to be allowed to kiss the flag,” at which point the mob relented and warned the couple to leave the state.¹³⁹

On the Wood-Seneca County line simmered a long-running dispute between regional Klan members and the publisher of the Bettsville Taxpayer, Stanley Feasel, who was a Wood County resident in Liberty Township. As the name of the Taxpayer implies, this was an anti-tax publication that took a strident stand against the use of tax dollars for public education. Given the Klan’s high degree of emphasis on public education as a means to “Americanize” immigrants and break up the perceived power of Catholic parochial schools, it is not surprising that Feasel would incur the wrath of the Klan.

Feasel’s first altercation occurred in March 1923, when he received a threatening letter signed by the “Kansas K.K. Klan.” Kansas Station was an unincorporated village several miles east of the county line, and the writer of the letter was angry about Feasel’s stance against a tax levy for a new public school building. The letter also included a drawing of Feasel “being torn to pieces.” Feasel told a correspondent from the Prairie Depot Observer that he “slept well last night” after the warning but added that “some of my friends are worried for my welfare.”¹⁴⁰

The culmination of the feud occurred when Feasel drove home from Tiffin, Ohio, on the evening of August 13, 1924. The Bloomfield Derrick reported that Feasel’s vehicle was fired on by an unknown assailant, and the bullet “pierced the side of his automobile and missed hitting him by a few inches.” Moments prior to the shooting the driver of a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction “had attempted to block the road,” but Feasel averted the roadblock. Fragments of glass from the shattered window wound up in Feasel’s shirt pocket.¹⁴¹

Klan members orchestrated a botched 1923 raid on a suspected gambling den in a news report printed in the North Baltimore Times. The Klan members in full regalia entered a Montpelier pool hall and went to the second-story rooms, where gambling was alleged to have occurred. In an attempt to catch the gamblers by surprise, the Klan members turned out the lights.

In the chaos that ensued, “shots rang out,” and a bullet hit one of the gamblers. Three Klansmen were arrested for the incident, and one of the Klan members was charged with attempted murder. The Klansmen claimed that the Montpelier mayor and law enforcement officials endorsed the raid, described as an “action by the Klan and other public-spirited officials.”¹⁴²

Other vigilante actions by Wood County Klan members included the destruction of illegal stills and alcohol caches, physical intimidation and violence against suspected bootleggers and still operators and breaking into private property to investigate alleged liquor law violations. Newspapers hint at yet further vigilante actions, but illegal and extra-legal actions by a secret society are notoriously difficult to document. These individuals knew their actions could result in personal and organization legal problems that even highly placed friends might not be able to solve.