Tim Egan talks about being Irish American, Oregon, Notre Dame and the collapse of the KKK
On Thursday, January 16, Timothy Egan, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, came to Portland. Egan’s one of seven kids born to an Irish Catholic-on-both-sides family in Seattle. His book, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became An American Hero was published in 2016. Irish and American warfare and politics in the middle of the Nineteenth Century drive this narrative of the life and times of Thomas Francis Meagher.
There were no empty seats when he spoke at the Schnitzer last week. Anyone who attended the Portland Hibernian Society meeting at Kells Restaurant that same evening could not possibly have heard him. But many wish they had. So, the PDX HI monitored Egan on OPB that afternoon. He talked about his latest book, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them with Thinking Out Loud host Dave Miller and a class of AP English students at McDaniel High School in Portland. Here are some excerpts.
Timothy Egan was born in Seattle in November, 1954. He was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning reporting team at the New York Times in 2001. In 2006 he won the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time.
HIS LATEST BOOK WAS TO BE BASED IN OREGON
“I was gonna do a book about the Klan in Oregon. I don’t know how many of you know it, but exactly a hundred years ago this decade Oregon elected a Klan-sympathetic Governor. His name was Walter Pierce. And they essentially outlawed – by public vote – Catholic schools. Now why would they not want Catholic schools? Because mostly immigrants went to those Catholic schools. They thought if you take away the schools, you take away the social fiber.”
Walter Pierce, a Democrat, was elected Governor of Oregon in 1922 in the same general election at which Oregon voters approved a ballot measure to shut down private schools in the state. Pierce was never a member of the Klan but he won with the support of its members.
“Oregon had more members of this domestic terror group (KKK) per capita than any state but Indiana. So, I was going to do this piece about how my beloved Oregon, which we think of as such a woke state, was really, you know, its founding was....its DNA was white supremacy. The Oregon constitution made it illegal for Blacks to live in this state. Washington state, my state, got the benefit of that. People voted in 1855 by an 8-1 margin for the Oregon constitution not to allow Blacks to live here. So, the DNA was there.
“As I started to look into Oregon I thought “Holy cow” there’s an even bigger story in the state we think of as the quintessential American state: Indiana. So that’s what drove me there.”
WHY IRISH AMERICAN HISTORY MATTERS
“I did this book – The Immortal Irishman - about my people – Irish Americans – the immigrant Irish. And the first object of the hatred of the anti-immigration people in the history of the United States was the Irish. So, the Know Nothing Party – aptly named – they passed all these laws to keep Irish Americans from becoming citizens. I saw that current then. It runs through our history.
At one point in the 1850s the Know Nothing Party sent several candidates to Congress and in 1854 held a majority of the seats in the Massachusetts Legislature.
The Immortal Irishman was published in 2016.
“The way Americanism has evolved, White Protestants didn’t see immigrants as Americans. They thought every Catholic answered to the Pope, that their loyalty was not to the United States, that it was to the Pope.
“I try to remind my Irish Americans, ‘Remember what it was like when we came here. We were the scum. That’s what they called us. ‘They live in slums.’ ‘They’re too clannish.’ ‘They wouldn’t speak the language. They speak Gaelic.’ ‘Too many kids.’ Irish Americans are a proud diaspora but they should remember that we were on the other end of the stick not too long ago.
Dave Miller: What’s important in that remembering?
“Because you can’t empathize with the people who are currently at the other end of the stick without thinking they started with you. You were the other. They (Irish Americans) are not it right now, but I want people to remember. That’s why I wrote that book.”
HOW NOTRE DAME BECAME THE FIGHTING IRISH
“University of Notre Dame. Catholic school. DC Stevens (malevolent Klan organizer in A Fever In the Heartland) said, ‘I’m gonna send 40,000 Klansmen up to South Bend to show those kids who’s who in Indiana. And he did. On a May day. (Notre Dame) Students said ‘Screw this. We’re not gonna let these guys.... they tell us we’re not Americans....we’re Catholic....we’re Irish.’ And they had a riot. They (ND students) chased them (KKKers) with potatoes. Which everyone laughed at because the Irish kids were using potatoes. And they routed them. Next day the headline in the Chicago Tribune was Kids Rout KKK. And that gave them their name to this day: The Fighting Irish. They’re known because they fought the Klan. I like that story.”
WHEN THE KLAN RAN PORTLAND
“It’s not a dead thing; it’s a living thing (the attraction of white supremacy). It’s part of our character and our past. My thought was, if you have a press conference in downtown Portland, like they did a hundred years ago...and I have a picture in the book of the mayor, the chief of police of Portland and some other bigwigs, standing at a Chamber of Commerce lunch with. bunch of dudes in hoods and it says ‘The Chamber welcomes the Klan’ and discusses the future. It’s like here’s the power structure. If you did that today, you’d be run out of town. But you can say the same things, the things that are being said today by the harder elements of society. The difference is you don’t show up in robes and a hood.”
From “Know Nothings Never Go Away” - The Mayor (George Baker) was a sucker for the photo op….and so to this day you see this photo all the time….the back story. The story behind this photo….Kim MacColl’s version….On August 1 1921 Klan recruit Luther Powell and Fred Gifford sent out invitations to local officials to a reception at the Multnomah Hotel….wasn’t clear what they were being invited to….they were standing around when a photographer asked them to form a line for a photo…at the last second Gifford and Powell photobombed the local politicians. Next day the Portland Spectator ran the photo. And you cannot get away from it. The Klan got what they wanted photographic proof that they were a bona fide civic organization. Some of the politicians complained, but not too long or too loudly. The message went out The Klan Had Arrived.
FINAL QUESTION FROM A STUDENT: WHY ARE IMPORTANT EVENTS LIKE THE ONES IN YOUR BOOK OVERLOOKED BY HISTORY?
“You don’t talk about the things that don’t reflect well on you. It’s a debate that Ken Burns and others have nicely stirred up: How much of our history that we’re uncomfortable with are we willing to discuss?
“You’d rather talk about the triumphs. I think triumphs should be celebrated. I love talking about the triumphs. But you can’t understand how great those triumphs are if you don’t also understand the bad things. That’s what makes us stronger; to understand the duality of human beings. Human beings ae good and bad. Complicated people. And if we don’t understand where we came from, we won’t understand where we’re going.”
To listen to the complete interview, Click Here.
On March 13, 2016 Tim Egan appeared on C Span to discuss The Immortal Irishman. Click here.