BIGGAR, Sask. – Waves of new immigrants from Eastern Europe eager to start a new life in Saskatchewan in the 1920s provided the Ku Klux Klan with an easy target for its campaign of intolerance.
The secret society, which grew in the southern United States from anger over losing the Civil War, turned its hate against the black population with chilling consequences.
In Canada, it found a ready audience with its criticisms of Jews, Catholics and immigrants in Vancouver and Toronto before moving to a booming young Saskatchewan.
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“The KKK were well known in the area but no one would speak of it,” said 90-year-old Alice Ellis of Biggar, a founding member of the Biggar Museum and Gallery.
Despite local reluctance to recall those dark days, the museum chose to document Biggar’s chapter of the KKK, depicted by a partially concealed burning cross.
Ellis said the KKK was divisive, pitting Catholics against Protestants, but also political as it aligned itself with local politicians with the provincial Conservative party.
Recalling a former mayor’s observations that Protestants once did not walk on the same sidewalk as Catholics, Ellis said support was predictably mixed for the introduction of a separate school division.
James Pitsula, who is writing a book about the KKK in Saskatchewan, said there was deep concern about immigration not being “British enough” for some people’s liking.
Immigration trends were shifting to non-English speaking Catholics from Eastern and Central Europe, said the University of Regina professor.
Biggar’s founding fathers, some of whom were conservative Orangemen from Ontario, had sympathies with the KKK campaign that fueled anxieties about the pope’s presence, control and influence on the Prairies.
That allowed the group to get a foothold in communities while also helping get Saskatchewan Conservatives elected.
By the time American KKK leader R. H. Hawkins arrived in Biggar, a membership drive was underway in the province. People paid what was a hefty sum then of $13 each for memberships. As many as 8,000 signed up in Moose Jaw, Sask., a hotbed of KKK activity.
By 1927, KKK organizers had left Saskatchewan and taken the money with them.
Despite the setback, people still paid 50 cents to hear emerging KKK speakers like J.J. Maloney, a defrocked Catholic priest from Ontario.
He was a compelling and influential figure who gave speeches in the town hall and movie house promoting a belief in “racial purity, separation between church and state, restrictive, selective immigration, white supremacy.”
The middle-aged man also caught the eye of local politician and businessman W.W. Millar’s teenaged daughter, Lenore. They married and had a daughter, although the marriage, like the KKK’s Saskatchewan’s stint, was short-lived.
During the height of the KKK’s time in Biggar, Elllis said there were reports of crosses set ablaze in the area. A flaming cross on the grounds of the local convent sent nuns scurrying underground to tunnels built between the parish and convent.
Nuns’ diaries also detail how stones were thrown and dogs set upon them.
“They could do anything they liked.No one knew who was behind the sheet,” Ellis said of the KKK’s cloaked escapades.
“Families were so divided; it was a very sad time.”
Ellis said most new immigrants kept a low profile because they were struggling to earn a living and learn the language.
The tide of public opinion turned when Liberal premier James Gardiner challenged Hawkins to a debate on June 28, 1928, in Lemberg, Sask.
“Gardiner was a major force,” said Ellis.
“He was one of those people who appeared at the right time.”
He attacked the KKK for spreading lies and sowing dissension with its rhetoric that targeted Roman Catholics, Slavic and Chinese immigrants for an assortment of perceived evils.
Not long afterwards, interest in the KKK started to dwindle.
Contributing to its demise was a prairie-wide drought and a dramatic turn in the economy that shut down the government’s immigration thrust and the KKK’s main rallying point.
