 What I'm going to tell you is that Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery. And over the years, they really polished this reputation. But beneath the surface existed racism that many have chosen to ignore. Madeine Maudine Neal exposed this undercurrent in her talk about the Ku Klux Klan in Vermont. So I hope you enjoy her presentation, which is a very thorough one. And it has many pictures and many relics from the days of the Ku Klux Klan site in the 20s. So without further ado, Madeine Neal of Franklin Street in Montpelier is going to speak. We're going to do a PowerPoint first. And I will get in the process of the pictures. Now, first I want to tell you the cover of the book was designed by Wesley Herwig. Anybody here know Wesley Herwig? Susan Randolph had a little printing shop and he published the book and he designed the cover. And here we go. Did it move? Yes. What was the Ku Klux Klan? Did any of you know that ahead of time? Do you know what it was? Yeah. What was it? The Ku Klux Klan, it was an anti... It was a racist organization that believed white supremacy was a belief that they followed. Okay. And this one. I don't see very well. Trying to get so I can see it. So people thought they were protecting themselves. People thought they were protecting themselves from them. Hello, hello, hello. That was a turn on and off. Can you hear it? No. Well, I didn't touch it. There, try that. Okay, okay. Can you see that? Okay, it was started by Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not picking her up again. It keeps going out. He was a cavalry officer in the Civil War. They said he never lost a battle. I don't know myself if he did or not. Okay. Can you read that? Is that a yes or a no? Okay. Next picture. That's not the next picture. Because you're going back. You want to go this way? I know. What's happening? That's what there was another. Can you read that? Okay. That is not the clan that came to Vermont. Not that first one. Because it became a terrorist thing. In 1915, another clan was formed by Joseph Simmons. Can you read all that? Born in 1880, died in 1945. He wanted it to be a fraternal organization. And when he saw that it was becoming prejudice, he got away from it. 1924, he sold it to Hiram Evans. Hiram Evans didn't want it to be a fraternal organization. He wanted it to be a money-making thing. And you have read this now. Why was it accepted? Before you go on, would you talk about how you thought it would be a money-making organization? They were charging admission. Not a lot. $10 a person. But that's the first I know. That's the way it was done. The purpose of it is here. You can read that. Okay. Don't change it so fast. Give us a chance to read it. How did I get involved in it? I grew up in Oklahoma. And when I got out of high school, I went down to Texas. And they had an Air Force base there. And my husband was there as an airman. I met him. And we got married 70 years ago. And he was from Vermont. He was born in Berlin. I liked him a lot. And I like Vermont a lot. So here I am. But I was surprised when we were looking at his mother and I was in pictures. And I saw this big, long picture that could expand people in it and say, what is this? And she said, well, that's me right there. Thank you. She said, I'll show a big one. There'll be a big picture of it on the screen in a minute. Okay, good. Okay. So I questioned her about it. She said, oh, it was just a good time. It was a picnic and prayer and singing. Just having a good time and burning a cross. That was fun. But how many of you like a bonfire? They went to schools and gave the kids flags and different things. Unless they were Irish Catholic. In 1970, I took a Vermont history course because I've always been interested in history. And Charlie Morrissey was going to do a history course on Vermont history. So I started in. He said, everybody has to do a project, a history project. And I went to him and I said, how about if I do it on the Ku Klux Klan? And he about fell off his stool. He said, it's never been done. So, okay, I'll do it. So, where would I go to find material on the Ku Klux Klan? Where would you go if you were going to find it? Vermont Historical Society? The newspapers. You got it. Newspapers. The Historical Society had nothing. But every day in the newspaper, and they were easy to find, there was KKK headlines. Almost every day in the newspaper. So that's where I got a lot of my material. And I got a lot of it from personal interviews. A friend about that time, who had bought a new, a different house. And she said, she found in the attic some Ku Klux Klan material. Some robes and some hoods. And if you see the big banner that says Montpelier women here somewhere. It's everywhere on the table. I'll get it. But we'll see it later in the pictures. So I asked Kristen, could I take those to my class to show the teacher? Guess what I got for a grade. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He liked it. So, we got all the things and took them to my class. Okay, are you familiar with this house in Montpelier? It's on Liberty Street. And it didn't look like this in 1920. It didn't have that top part on it. But this is where Edwin and Emma Nichols lived. And they were the head of the clan. She was the head of the women. He was the head of the men. I asked her, Charlie Nichols, our former mayor was their child, but she didn't know. I don't think they had children. She was 43 when she married him. But I didn't find any children for them. These are some things that were found in East Montpelier. And when I published my book, people started finding things all over the place. In the Vermont Historical Society, it has a getting a pretty good collection of things. So what did you publish your book what year? In 87. Here are some newspaper items that I found. Cross burning and Barnard. A big gathering in Shaw's Field. 600 to 1,000, I don't know if that's cars or people, but there were a lot of people. In the bottom is later Crawford's Auto World Land. Do you remember that in Bethel? Crawford's Auto. Nice. How were the articles presented? Was it just straight news coverage or was it expose? They were kind of against it, most of them were against it. Here's more items, there were 150 clansmen in Windsor. You can read all that, right? Yeah, give them a minute. Can you see it, Mary? Yeah. That's, okay. The last one is a cross was burned on the Catholic church steps. That brought a lot of attention because two men were arrested that did that. And they were getting ready to have, you have a question? Yes, if they were Protestant, why did they earn crosses? Why not? Crosses. I don't know why, I don't know how that developed. And I couldn't find out. What time period now are we talking about? 1920s. Okay. And that's all. All right. Well, my grandma told me that when she was a little girl living in war town as an Irish Catholic, she was told not to go near the encampment, which was down on the Bad River, right below War Town Village. That's right. Because they were stealing children. Oh, well, okay. We'll have time for comments and questions later. All day if we want to. But I want to tell you about these two men that were arrested at the Catholic church. They were getting ready to have a trial for them, but they never did. They finally had to just not do it. But the lawyer that was going to defend these two guys was named Dean Davis. Oh, wow. Who was that? Governor of the Vermont State of Vermont later. And here's some more, a lot of them. And the last one is Weston's trailer park. Oh, yeah. Do you know where that is? Sure. Well, you know Ken Weston? Well. He lived right there. His wife was a herring. And the head of the women of the clan in Montpilier was Emma Herring. And she was a cousin of Ken Weston's wife. So I expect that Ken Weston was in it too. I don't know. But they did things in his field. And this is a place on the hill where that picture of the big group was made. You familiar with that? What is that in Berlin? In Montpilier, Town Hill. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, we'll see more about the parade. So my mother-in-law told me things. Now here's another personal contact I had. Ethel Bailey, any of you know Cliff Bailey? Barry, he's a big businessman over there. His wife told me a personal story. She said, my brother was in the clan, but I didn't know it. But he and his wife took my little boy swimming one day. They all drowned because they got swept into deep water. And when they had the funeral, they were in their gowns, their clan gowns. That's the first I knew that my brother was a member. And you're here with Dr. Corson? Corson. Corson and Plainfield? He arranged the funeral for these people. Said when they marched around the grave, they were throwing flowers into the grave. Because flowers, they were throwing flowers into the grave because these were their friends, their clan people. Okay. Another personal contact I had was with a woman that lived downtown, up above Summer's Heartburst or in those apartments. They lived up there and she had a little boy and she made him a robe so he could go with them to the meetings. And she told him one night, there were seven crosses burned around town. And you see the list of them there, she didn't remember all of them, but said they really enjoyed looking out and seeing the people on the street, being really startled by all this. And this is a clan outing of some Northfield clans, more women, and the woman on the right, as you look at it, is my husband's grandmother. And the next one was his mother and two other people from Northfield. They went to Smuggler's Notch for a picnic. Now, doesn't that sound like fun? How many of you been to Smuggler's Notch for a picnic? And here's some other members from Northfield. Mrs. Whitney, her husband ran the Northfield News. You can read the names of these people. So they were all, most of the people who were in the clan were upstanding reputable people like newspaper editors, preachers. They had a lot of meetings all over the state. The big event they had was the parade, and that was in 1927, July the 4th. Why not have a big parade? This paper is printed and it's laying on the table. You might want to read it. I'm not gonna try to read the whole thing to you, but it describes that parade, and this is the area where it was. Can you go back to that for a minute so we can just? Could you go back so people can read it a little bit longer? Oh, the whole thing? Yeah. If you take the paper over there and read it. Well, it's easier for us. Take less time. People like sitting down and seeing it in big letters. I know. I shouldn't have put that in there. It's okay. They say there was 15 to 20,000 people in town that day. And here's the leader of the parade. I would guess that that is Edwin Nichols, the head of the Montpellier Clan, and that is the Montpellier Clan's women. And Louis's aunt is kneeling down in the front row, the second from the right. That's his aunt. And she lived in Montpellier. Kerry Warren? Clara. Clara. Yeah, her name is Clara Warren. I can see it from here. Yeah, but Kerry Warren was her mother. And this is the Barrie Clan. You see their banner? And this is the Montpellier. No, this is the Northfield. And Louis's mother is standing behind the flag on the right end. That's Louis's mother, Laura. And she would have been about 27 years old. And she got married later that year. The Randolph Clan. And these are all in that big long picture, but I chopped them up because I don't know where I could get them into a picture like this. And this is the Boston Tea Party Clan. A group came up from Boston for the big Fourth of July celebration in Montpellier, Vermont. And this is the area where it was on Town Hill. Do you remember what Town Hill is? Yeah, it is. You go out Main Street to the northeast of Montpellier. That used to be the Juliana's house, you know. I'll tell you, it used to be airplane landing field. And in 1927, when they had the flood here, the bakery was running out of yeast and airplanes were dropping yeast up on the hill so they could continue their bakery. Cross funds. Yes, I did make it. My husband worked there for 10 years. The Clan, by this time, is getting a bad reputation. So they were beginning to fold up their things and hide them and deny they were ever in it. By 1930, the Clan was totally disbanded. You can read that. When I was doing my history project, a lot of younger people, which would be my age and years, didn't know that it had ever been here. Would you have known it had been here? Mary Alice did. Not a much by group, but my grandmother was much older, so she must have been in the 1900s. Yeah, well, I would just bet you that a lot of your grandmothers were in it. Well, some of us will have Irish Catholic as a background, so... I don't think that would have mattered. George. Now, this changes the whole subject right here. The witness stump. My husband was working on the neighbor's garage, and he saw this thing and mentioned to her that I had been doing Ku Klux Klan work because down in the corner, it has a KKK-32, and she gave it to him. And up in the corner, in the right-hand corner, with a pencil had been written, and it was so damn I could hardly see it, I had to use a magnifying glass to see it. It said Stan Olin, Chicago, Illinois. Hello? I'm a genealogist, so what do I have to do? I had to find him. So I went through the 1920 census, also the 1910, in the 1930, you can see it better in the 1930, that the fourth person down, Daniel Olin, he was born in Finland. His life's Alma was born in Sweden, and they have two boys, Stanley and Clifford. Here he is in the census in Illinois. I don't know if he came to Vermont and wrote his name on this witness stamp, or if he wrote it there, and then it got brought here. So I didn't find out that much about him, but I did look up a lot of his. What is a witness stamp, yeah? That we did not find out. It wasn't included in the amount of plan research, but because it said KKK down on the bottom, I wanted to put it in my story. Well, I did my research with Charlie Morrissey, and at the end of the course, I just placed my manuscript in the Historical Society, and it stayed there until 1987. It's the end of the slideshow, but I have a lot more stuff to tell you about. Do you want to turn the light off? Yeah. Okay. I have a newspaper article from the Harvard Gazette. February 8th, 1923. So 1923 is when it was starting up in Vermont. And here's what the Gazette said. A Ku Klux Klan organizer, George P. Mason by name, is due to make an attempt to start something in Vermont soon. He is now already talking it up in New Hampshire and has told people in that state that he plans to organize plans all through New England and eventually control the public offices. Last week, he invaded the New Hampshire legislature where it is claimed that he enrolled membership of 20 legislators in this organization. Forewarned is forearmed. If Vermont is on the lookout for him, it may be better prepared to meet the situation when it arrives. So this is kind of warning they're coming. I'm going to tell you some more about Edwin Nichols and Emma Nichols that lived on Liberty Street in Montpeyre. Her maiden name was Herring, and there was a lot of Herrings in there. Any of you related to Herrings? There are a lot of them around. A lot of Berlin. A lot of them in Berlin, and there was a lot in Moretown at that time. And Emma Herring's father was named Charles Herring, and he was from Berlin. He was in the Civil War, and he got wounded. He was shot, and he had a brother's seldom that was with him there, and he put him on a retreating cannon. Then he put him on an ambulance, and then he put him on a baggage wagon, so he managed to save his brother. And Charles had a brother, William. He was the father of Ken Weston's wife. So I prepared a little Herring genealogy here. Okay, another incident that I found was in Southbury. A friend of mine, well, two friends of mine, Don Camp, ever hear of Don Camp? He had a farm in Southbury. Camp Street. Maybe. Well, Camp Street is where all the granite and your fracturing owners live. Yeah. Well, anyway, he was a member of the clan, and another friend was a member of the Grange, and they made a deal. If you join the Grange, I'll join the clan. So they did. Well, this friend of mine that was telling me about it, he said, I was really a joiner, so I got involved and I became an officer. They gave me a special collar to wear when I'm officiating in the office there. But one day I went to a meeting. There was a strange woman there from New Hampshire, and she said, I've got to talk to you. I understand you're harboring Jews. What would that mean? And my friend said, my Irish temper took off, I threw my robe down and I threw the collar down and I stomped out of there and I never went back. And said, they followed me to the door trying to beg me to stay. Well, the story of the Jew was that there was a woman in the community who had had a legitimate child in the past, and then she soon married a man who was a Jew, so that man who was a Jew sort of raised her little boy with her. So he might have appeared to be a Jew, but he wasn't. And when that little boy grew up, he married and had a little boy. Well, neither one of them were Jews. His wife died and he needed someone to take care of the little boy while he worked. And my friend was taken care of him. So that's why they accused her of harboring Jews. But she would have anyway, she was the kind of person that would help anybody. She didn't want to be against anybody. Another case, did you ever hear Cliff Bailey in Barry? He had a wife, Ethel Bailey, and she's the one that said that her brother was in the Klan. I guess I told you all about that, but Dr. Corson prepared the funeral. So at the end of the three month class, I wrote my paper, left it at the Historical Society. And during the time it was there, over 10 years, people were coming to me from all kinds of places. One came from Maine, had a picture just like mine, made the same day. His was number one, mine's number four. So I'm sure there's more of those in somebody's attic around. Pat Shepard is a lady from Topsum. And she wrote to me and said, my mother has a bunch of Klan stuff here. She doesn't really want it, don't know anything about it. Would you like to see it? So we went over to see it, and she ended up giving it to me. And I think there's a picture over there somewhere of all the stuff. It was a little pocket knife that said KKK on it. And there was robes and there was templates. And she gave all those to me. I gave them to the Vermont Historical Society. And you see this, the book standing here on the end is called Vermont Century Book. It's the 200th anniversary of Statehood. And the section in the, and it was kind of laid out every 10 years. The section on the 1920s has the picture of a big Klan picture. Okay, one more character here. Karen Hess was an author. She wrote children's books. And here's what she had to say later on. She said, in 1997, while returning from a speaking engagement, I spent the last minutes of my flight skimming the airline magazine. I came across a short piece about the Ku Klux Klan in Vermont in the 1920s. I read the item, shaking my head in disbelief. Back home, I wasted no time in attempting to disprove the article. But to my surprise, it was correct. I read Maureen Neal's book about the Klan in Vermont. I wrote to her about her research and tried to imagine how I might take this episode in history and craft a compelling story from it. Well, she did write a story about it. And it's over there, a book called Witness. She wrote the book. And shortly after that, in 2003, Vermont had a program. I don't know if they do it every year, but it was called Vermont Reads. You ever hear of that? Yeah. Every town or school, at least, wanted to read the same book that year. In 1923, the book they wanted to read was Witness. 1923? 2000. 2000. Oh, wake me up. 2000. Is that the one called? 2003. Different points of view. Pardon? Is that the book where different people talk from different points of view? Maybe. She wrote it as a play. And in Northfield, she had it performed. And when she chose the people to be the performers, she chose people that had the same background. I have a question. Okay. You talked about your mother-in-law described what the KKK was for her with the social. That's right. So, but they did do all the cross-breeding. So how many didn't evolve from kind of an innocent in Vermont? Did it evolve from kind of an innocent social event to the darker side? Or was that always there? And some people either ignored it or didn't know about it? They didn't know. Like my friend in Southbury, who was accused of harboring Jews, she didn't know she wasn't supposed to harbor a Jew. And really, she wasn't. And you came from Oklahoma. So you actually knew the Ku Klux Klan as a pretty terrible warhead. I knew to stay away from it. My father's people came from Georgia and South Carolina. And they came to Oklahoma in the 1920s. And that's when it was pretty active down there. Do you have any information about when it started over in New Hampshire? Because the people that were honoring my grandmother were coming from New Hampshire and camping out over here in probably the end of the 19th century. I think it would have probably been, Joseph Simmons started this Klan in 1915 in Georgia in his spread all over the country. So it came to- My grandmother was born in the 1800s. So I think it had started in New Hampshire long before. Well, the first Klan might have been, but I don't think it was up here, though. It was more in the south. But 1915 is when Joseph Simmons started this Klan. In Georgia, and then spread all over, right? That's right. Okay. Well, I think- Tell them about finding some of the robes in the houses in Montpelier, the story you told me when we got together. People had them in their attics. I did. I did include that, didn't I? I thought there was another one, because didn't the picture you got of the women of the Clue Cooks Klan? Women? You know that picture of the banner? I mean, didn't you have some that the woman wanted to sell and she took them back? Sorry. I don't know what you're talking about. Okay, but that's the end of my research, but I'm gonna read something to you, okay? This is by Marvin Neumauer, a German theologian. He said, first, they came for the socialists. Then they came for the trade unionists. Then they came for the Jews. In each instance, I did not speak out. As I was not one of them, then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak to me. So people had questions, and I'm gonna help me, Dean, to find- Who has heard this before? Everybody had it up in my classroom. But I think it kind of describes the Klan. Either you know what you're getting into, or you don't. Okay. And the first question is out of the blue. Can you tell me what Ku Klux Klan means? What the words? Ku Klux means circle. Klan was taken from the Scottish clans, and people who had a common interest. So Ku Klux Klan's, and they called it Ku Klux Klan. Thank you. Back to the Cape Cod sweatshirt. So I'm curious, were most people in Vermont in the Klan like your mother-in-law, there for social gathering, and weren't aware of the hatred behind it? That's right. That's exactly right. It was the man that did all the work. Well, even the man didn't know right off what it was. Black and white? In the early 1980s, I worked in Middlebury with a woman who had grown up on Route 7 in East Middlebury. She was born in 1921. And one of her earliest memories was seeing a cross burning out her bedroom window on a hill. And we had a conversation about how beautiful she thought it was, because she didn't choose so little. She didn't know what it was about. And having to switch her mind, she didn't learn what it was about, but she said after she got out of high school and someone explained to her what that was about and how she had to switch her mind from this beautiful image in her head of this gold-firing thing to what it really meant. It was a conversation I'll never forget. That's where it was. It was a beautiful thing. I like to see a fire, a bonfire. Probably enjoy seeing a cross. Can you tell about instances of violence that you learned about? Not really. Well, you talked about the fires all over Montpelier. Yeah, the cross burnings, but those weren't violent. They were, like the girl said, greedy. But there was a case in Burlington where two men broke into the Catholic Church and stole some artifacts and they were found and that wasn't really violence, but it was mischief. So I think a lot of them were. I had heard that when they came to Montpelier that it was the mayor or it was somebody high up in the Montpelier City government and that's why they never took them to court. But there is another side of the story, all the victims and the people that had to deal with this hatred. There were Irish Catholics, there were French Catholics, those churches, all that. You didn't do any research with the people who were victims? No, I didn't. I just said what I said was in the newspapers. This was just a less than a year course and she was also raising a family. So she did more research than anybody's done, but it's hardly as exhaustive as it might be, but the resources are limited. They really didn't talk about the victims of the news. No, the newspapers wouldn't talk about it. No, but there must be several people in the community who remember from the Catholic and the Jewish side when it was like living here in those days when you had all the wasps against you. Hey, there's something for you to look up. Yeah. Find that and tell us about it. And time is short, right? All those people are. Well, I'm a Burden, I mean, I have a friend who's great for his wife's great aunt was a member of the Klan and not only was it a social club, according to this person, but it also was a Christian. It had a very strong Christian component to it and she joined and really loved all the festivities and the fire probably, but then other people said, oh, this is a terrible organization. What are you doing being a member and so they quit. So yeah, but it gets harder and harder to have those recollections because those people are all dead now. I mean, may Dean at least talk to some people when she did her research in heaven that were in either in it or their parents were in it, their relatives. Okay. Purple. Prejudice didn't just start with a claim. All right. I had ancestors that were Irish Catholic in New York in the 1900s and were signs that they were always on the building. Catholics, you know, Irish. I had a high class of the Catholic. So the Klan came up with something that existed. You can't blame everything on it. The undercurrent of racism as I called it. Do you ever hear the term wasp? Yeah, sure. What is much standoff? White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. That's what the Klan was. Growing up with Yankees that had been here since 1634 on my father's side and my mother was an Irish Catholic. So I got both sides. My father was, my grandfather was Mason and I think the Mason's had something to do with. Well, the Mason's were also a religious organization, Purple Church. Yeah. One of the interesting things about your story is you said that the group here in Montpelier had their picture taken in front of the Catholic Church. And that surprised me because I thought they didn't like Catholics, right? I didn't say they didn't have pictures in front. I said they burned across on the steps at the Catholic Church. She said they did it up on Hill Street, up on what I think it might be at the Giuliani. But they did it right on the steps of the church and nobody would do anything because they were all people who were highly up in the government. Yeah. And they said that the mark on the Catholic Church stayed there and they couldn't get it off. Any other questions from someone other than Mary Alice? No. I would just like to comment that I think we have to be aware that we're living through a time now where there are some groups, crowd voice and some of these others. Oathkeepers, just one on trial. Pardon? Oathkeepers, the president of Oathkeepers. And crowd voice. And we're seeing the same kind of prejudice stirred up that we did then. So I think we all have to be aware that it's around us and speak out against it. Absolutely. That's why I read this for you. Yes. If there are no more questions, I'm gonna try and have somebody help us get this screen off. Yeah, he tried and he wasn't... You can come and look at all of these things as long as you want to. Otherwise we should, let me be on the other side. Whatever. It's not going up there. It doesn't matter. I like to say the more I think, that's why a lot of us don't go to the North Pole. Yay!