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By Rebecca A. Hunt
Over the past three months, I have been writing about the contributions of Northside women in helping immigrants. Now, I am going to look at the backlash that followed.
The U.S. saw rapid immigration growth in the 1890s through the 1920s. Denver drew large numbers of new arrivals, but many were not like the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who came before. Many working-class and middle-class white people feared what Italians, Latinos and even native African-Americans meant to their job prospects. They also worried that newcomers would interfere with the political power structure. Finally, many Protestants worried about the influence of the Catholic Church.
In 1893, the country, and especially Denver, were at the beginning of a major depression. At that time, the National League for the Protection of American Institutions, also known as the American Protective Association (APA), became active in the U.S. and in Colorado. It had a stronghold in northwest Denver neighborhoods.
In 1892, APA member Marion Van Horn was elected mayor of Denver. A year later, APA member Albert McIntire became governor. Because APA called for discrimination against Catholics and immigrants, Gov. McIntire immediately ordered the statewide firing of Catholic police, firefighters and teachers.
The firings hit especially hard in the Northside, where many Irish Catholics held these jobs.
Italians were also targeted. In the summer of 1893, an Italian saloon owner in North Denver was lynched because he had killed a non-Italian patron who was fighting in his saloon.
The Catholic Sisters of Charity, who ran hospitals and schools, had been granted free trolley passes. City government revoked the passes, solely due to their religion.
Even the town government of Highlands was controlled by the APA. George Means, a Northwest Denver resident, was a policeman and an ardent APA member. His son, Rice Means, grew up under that organization’s influence and later served as a leader in another group that would emerge in Denver, the Ku Klux Klan.
By the turn of the 20th century, partly because of strong push-back from publications like the Rocky Mountain News, Denver Times and Colorado Catholic, as well as from the local Democratic Party, APA influence began to wane. However, World War I and another wave of immigration renewed anti-immigrant sentiment. Politics and society once again became the battlegrounds for exclusionist ideals.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was originally an anti-Black organization formed in the South in the waning years of the Civil War. Its purpose was to keep newly freed African-Americans from building lives independent of slavery. By the mid-1870s, the U.S. government squashed it, and it ceased to exist.
But in 1915, the group reformed, this time spreading beyond the South into the Midwest and West. Two of the organization’s most successful recruiting grounds were Oregon and Colorado.
The KKK’s strength in Colorado grew so that, by 1924, both Gov. Clarence Morley and Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton were members. Rice Means rose in Republican and KKK circles to become Denver district attorney and eventually a U.S. senator. These and other leaders, following the KKK’s exclusionary beliefs, again pushed back on Catholic and immigrant influence on society and politics.
The Northside had large numbers of KKK members. A map drawn up in 1997 showed an especially high concentration in Highland and in Berkeley.
This map, based on 1923 data, shows an especially high concentration of KKK members in Highland and in Berkeley. Courtesy of Rebecca Hunt, 1997
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In 1924, the KKK pushed back against Italian Catholic orphanages by creating the Protestant Colorado Christian Home at West 29th Avenue and Tennyson Street. On a Sunday in late May, a group of robed and hooded Klansmen arrived at the Highland Christian Church at West 34rd Avenue and Bryant Street. Accompanied by uniformed Denver police, they presented a $500 check to church elders to help fund a new orphanage.
Also in the early 1920s, many Northside women, some of whom were daughters of Northside Women’s Club members, joined the Women’s KKK.
Beginning in 1926, the KKK began to lose its hold. By 1930, it had mostly disappeared from the Denver political scene. But its legacy lives on in the 21st century in other types of anti-immigrant groups.
To learn more about this history, look at Robert Goldberg’s “Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado” and Phil Goodstein’s “In The Shadow of the Klan: When the KKK Ruled Denver 1920-1926.” The Colorado KKK rolls are digitized by History Colorado at https://www.historycolorado.org/kkkledgers.
Dr. Rebecca A. Hunt has been a resident of North Denver since 1993. She worked in museums and then taught museum studies and Colorado, Denver, women’s and immigration history at the University of Colorado Denver until she retired in 2020.
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