As few minutes after the Fete opened the electric lights went out and we were in comparative darkness until eleven o’clock. The lack of light interfered sadly with the beauty and effect of the Carnival and while we were seriously handicapped for a time we overcame it by commandeering all automobiles and parking them near different booths, using their headlights as a makeshift. The trouble was located in our own town, the high tension wire was cut, cut on purpose to handicap us. The bigoted vandal must have been in the employ of the Electric Light Company for he cut one of the two high tension wires that supply our town, and he must have had knowledge to choose the one that carried our circuit. He failed in his purpose for the commandeered auto lights played a useful part and only the boxing bouts were interfered with.

Article (another one) – explains that Fete is at McAleenan’s

from Claude: The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, Georgia — a deliberate revival of the Reconstruction-era organization, sparked in part by the release of D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation that same year. Where the first Klan had focused its terror primarily on Black Southerners in the aftermath of the Civil War, this new iteration cast a far wider net, targeting Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and anyone deemed a threat to white Protestant American values. At its peak in the early 1920s, membership reached an estimated three to six million Americans, with the organization operating not only across the South but with surprising strength in Northern and Midwestern states such as Indiana, Colorado, and Oregon. It functioned openly within mainstream politics, electing governors, senators, and local officials, and promoted itself to the middle class through civic pageantry and fraternal ritual under the banner of “Americanism.” Its collapse came swiftly in the late 1920s, driven by financial scandal and internal corruption — most damagingly, the conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson for rape and murder — alongside mounting public opposition that eroded both its membership and its political legitimacy.

Contextualize anti-Cathalocism in the US

Klan – “100% American” – White, Prodistant Christian, American born

“Anglo-Saxon”

On the floor of the US Senate in 1927, the notoriously racist and anti-Catholic Senator from Alabama, James Thomas Heflin, unleashed a diatribe against the Church and its role in the United States. Spewing conspiracy theories and questioning American Catholic’s loyalty to the United States. Seeming to refer to Hayes soon after his elevation from Archbishop to Cardinal, Heflin said, “When Cardinal Patrick Hayes, wearing his new red robe, dyed by matching the color to human blood, was greeted by a New York regiment, he called the regiment his “very own.” Where did he get his authority? Was it from the Constitution of the United States or from the Pope of Rome?” (CONGRESS)

Roman Catholics in America, we are opposed to the Church of Rome for its interference in our national affairs; for its treasonable opposition to our fixed principles of separation of church and state; and precedence of the Civil authority of the state over any temporal claims of the church; for its antagonlsm to the American institution that is the bulwark of our national democracy and representative government, our free public schools. We are opposed to the church of Rome because we know it is its fixed and determined policy to eventually control our national life, and that it enjoins its subjects in America to aid in this accomplishment. To this end, it seeks control of strategic positions in all walks of life and considers these leaders as captains in her papal army.

Anti-Catholic from Heroes Of The Firey Cross, exemplify the bigotry aimed at Catholics, as they were accused of working against America and Americanism due to their relationship to “Rome,” meaning the Pope, who they were accused of being more loyal to than the United States. Heroes Of The Firey Cross was written by Alma Bridwell White, founder and a bishop of the Pillar of Fire Church, who heavily aligned herself with the Klan. A letter from Hiram Wesley Evans, the Klan’s Imperial Wizard at the time, placed in the book’s front matter of the book, praises White and her work.

The images on the left and right illustrate the Klan “fending off” the American political system from Catholics. On the left it shows a member of the Klan preparing to swing a bat labeled “ballot” to his a narled hand with the word “Rome” inscribed. If you look closely, you can see that under the hand are the initals U.S.A. On the right, Al Smith, the first to win a major parties’ nomination for president, is on course to be run over by a train labled “KKK.” Smith was a Democate (hence him riding a donkey). He would go on to loose to Republican Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election.

The center image shows both anti-Catholic and antisemetic tropes, with Jewish Americans being portrayed as scheming and money hungery. In the case of Catholics and Jews, the … dehumanizing

Music – https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdclccn.30020233/?sp=10&st=image

American Protective Association Song book

News of the World Series

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y5J4ZDFE9djI-f8r35PaLivLFyX00eK3nMVf-o0fYnk/edit?tab=t.0