Though actual Klan membership here in Salem tailed off in 1924, nonetheless the ideas and prejudice that animated it generally leavened Salem culture. The ways that the afternoon paper opposed the organization and style of the Klan while offering much less criticism of their beliefs and values is one example of this. Another example took place at the brand new Parrish Junior High.
The school had opened in the fall of 1924, though not every detail in construction and equipment had been fully completed. As part of its advanced tech, the school included a film projection room and theater, but the school did not have a projector.
Apparently the Ford empire presented a solution.
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| November 24th, 1924 |
In late November, students, and presumably some adults, had arranged for a subscription drive with the Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford's newspaper, in order to win "a motion picture machine."
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| December 3rd, 1924 |
About a week later a parent made complaint that
she considered the Ford paper an anti-Jewish propaganda publication seeking to stir up racial strife...and refused to allow her daughter to join the students in their solicitation for subscriptions.
The children had been "designated as slackers" and shamed as "poor citizens" for not participating.
The YMCA drive had been going on that fall, and the whole city was mobilized for it. Peer pressure was central.
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| No quitters! Oct. 16th, Oct. 17th, Oct 18th, 1924 |
The morning paper especially exhorted it.
It would give Salem a terrible black eye if this effort would fail....[Success] would enable every one of our people to take renewed courage; to have a new birth of pride in our splendid city....Our civic pride is at stake....Salem must not fail in this....[etc.]
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| Prove your Patriotism. Buy a Bond (April 16th, 1918) |
A few years earlier the campaigns for Liberty Bonds were relentless and ostracized those who did not prove they were "worthy of the name American citizen." This ethos of conformity and participation had intensified during World War I and developed further afterwards.*
The YMCA campaign and this smaller campaign for the Dearborn Independent drew on this.
But the Dearborn Independent was totally known as anti-Jewish polemic! A few years earlier both papers had editorialized on its antisemitism: "Slandering the Jews" and "Ford as Jew Baiter."
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| December 8th and November 29th, 1920 |
It was notorious then, and it is even more notorious today.
The controversy continued on into December. Indirectly, the School Board showed more support for the Dearborn Independent drive than for a Christmas Seals drive for tuberculosis awareness and charity.
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| December 10th, 1924 |
The next day students and adults halted the drive.
Parrish school officials...explained their move as a defense of the school morale against the unexpected agitation...
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| December 11th, 1924 |
The rhetoric of "agitation," it should be noted, is a Red Scare dog whistle implying objections are unfounded.
Most of the clips here are from the afternoon paper. The morning paper reported some on the controversy but not in as much detail and with more sympathy for advocates for the drive.
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| June 18th, 1925 |
A former reporter for the morning paper, Charles J. Lisle, was placing submissions in the Dearborn Independent. You might recognize his byline from the Circuit Rider dedication. This is not any direct evidence for his involvement in the Parrish drive, but it is evidence for general acceptance and even respectability of themes in the Dearborn Independent. The morning paper saw the submissions and affiliation as praise-worthy. Equally, they did not object to the subscription drive.
Finally, at the end of December, the school secured a film projector. The students had not completed the drive, and the local Ford dealer stepped in with a used and refurbished projection system.
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| December 27th, 1924 |
The subscription drive had been "called off...to prevent further complications," not because it was wrong or merited apology. Critique of the Dearborn Independent remained a private matter for individuals, and such critique swam against the cultural and political currents prevailing in Salem. The Klan as an organized force was fading, but in a somewhat weaker form prevailed more generally in culture and politics.
* See Kimberly Jensen's "Women’s “Positive Patriotic Duty” to Participate: The Practice of Female Citizenship in Oregon and the Expanding Surveillance State during the First World War and its Aftermath" for a much closer reading of compulsory fund-raising drives. This looks to be developed even more in her new book, Oregon's Others: Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State in the Early Twentieth Century.
There are other ways to interpret this episode at Parrish also. It testifies to our idolization of tech, business, and wealth leaders, and also to plutocratic purchase of media for propaganda ends and ways local representatives worked to further those ends.
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