When we moved to Indiana in 1973, I innocently believed the Ku Klux Klan was a thing of the past. That is, until a trick-or-treater arrived at our door wearing a white robe and hood. When I questioned the young boy, he replied with a racist slur. I hollered and he ran off …

In college, I remember learning about the 1915 silent film The Birth of A Nation. We were taught it was a technical breakthrough, a landmark in movie history. There was no mention, however, that it was based on a novel and play. The name?  The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.

That film lit a fire that blazed in the 1920s.

Our dad told us that his father stood up at a Klan meeting to challenge the speaker’s claims.

My oldest brother, Harry (Grandpa’s – and Dad’s – namesake), was touched by the courage it took to speak out. He wove together this bit of historical fiction based on Grandpa’s story and shared it with me this week. With his permission, we now share it with you. (Please be warned a few of the quotes include slurs that were common a century ago. Also, the newspaper headlines are from reports on similar meetings, 100 years ago.)

Georgie and Mr. Kleagle

Last week my sister, who keeps track of these things, told me that my old friend Georgie Pooler had passed away. He’d moved out of state a good sixty years ago, but news about old friends and neighbors, especially when they die, has a way of reaching her knitting circle. The next day I read in the paper about that bunch of cowards upstate who burned a cross on a colored family’s lawn. Those two events may seem unconnected, but back in the early twenties in our old hometown of Cardiff, Maine, Georgie and that group of bad apples came together one early summer’s day. I remember walking home from the mill after work with Georgie when a man on the corner thrust a handbill at us. After reading the strange name with all the Ks, I decided to try to impress Georgie a little. 

“I’m not much of a speller, but I know that the word ‘Clan’ is spelled with a C, not a K.”

Georgie and I had been pals since we were little kids growing up next door to each other. He was smart, kind of an egghead, and always got the best marks in class. Every now and then I stuck my nose up in the air a little and tried to show I was as well-educated as he was. 

His answer, as usual, showed me I was wrong.

“That’s the way it’s spelled, Leo. I don’t know why. At least, that’s the way Conan Doyle spelled it in ‘The Five Orange Pips.'”

I knew who Conan Doyle was, because Georgie was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. When we were about twelve, Georgie’s parents gave him The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for Christmas, and he was so excited he ran next door to my house to show me. He read me the story about a guy who kept a speckled snake and was using it to kill off his family. He’d told me some of the other stories that winter as we walked to school, but this new one didn’t ring a bell. 

“I don’t remember a story about orange pips. What’s a pip anyway? Besides, those are made-up stories and this is a real handbill about some group having a rally this Saturday.”

“I know, Leo,” said Georgie, sounding like the teacher he was hoping to be someday. “But Conan Doyle liked to base his stories in fact. The Orange Pips story was pretty scary, about a secret organization called the Ku Klux Klan, taking revenge against a fellow they figured had betrayed them. In the story, the Klan was a thing of the past that had come back to life, and now it seems it’s a real organization that’s come to Maine. One of my professors would have called that ‘life imitating art.’”

I was about to say they sounded like a bad bunch …

… but as if he read my mind, George continued: “Just because they’re villains in the story doesn’t mean they are in real life. The Mormons in ‘A Study in Scarlet’ were disreputable too, but last year at Orono I got to know a couple of Mormons and they were good fellows.” 

Now, if most people talked like that I’d have said they were showing off, but Georgie really did want people to know things and thought they’d be interested in whatever he had to say. Now and then he was right.

I was surprised to hear Georgie mention his year at college because he didn’t like to talk about it. I tried not to bring it up because I knew how disappointed he was, having to drop out because his family ran out of money. That’s why he was working at the paper mill with me that year, to save enough money so he could go back and finish his degree. Myself, I was happy to have a decent paying job at the mill, but that wasn’t enough for Georgie.

Some of the guys we grew up with thought he and his family were too big for their britches and had forgotten where they came from. Back in the nineties, when they weren’t much more than boys, our dads had come down together from Quebec on the Canada Road to get jobs at the mill in Cardiff, but Mr. Poulin wanted so much to be an American he changed his name to Pooler. Georgie didn’t grow up speaking French at home like most of us. He learned his French at school. I guess he spoke it okay, but it sounded too posh, like he was wearing a powdered wig at a fancy ball. The rest of us could hardly understand him.  

Georgie didn’t say why he wanted to go to the rally. Maybe all that language on the handbill about loving God and country made him want to do something patriotic. Maybe he wanted to see if life was going to imitate art. Maybe it was just something to do on a summer afternoon. Whatever the reason, that Saturday after lunch he met me at my parents’ house and we walked together to the park on top of the hill. 

There must have been a couple of hundred people at the rally, including a lot of families with little kids. There was a big tent set up in the middle of the park, and they were serving lemonade and hot dogs. It felt kind of like a church picnic, and you couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful day for it. 

After an hour or so, a big booming voice cut through the friendly chatter:

“Attention. . . ladies and gentlemen, your attention please!”

The chatter dropped down to a murmur. Beneath the tent, a fat man with an expensive suit and a megaphone thanked us all for coming and said he hoped we were enjoying ourselves. Then he said: “Will the women, children, Roman Catholics, Jews, and persons of foreign birth please withdraw from the tent? The rest of the proceedings are for white Christian men only.”

Well, I thought us Catholics were Christians. I could see Georgie’s brow furrow and figured it was time for us both to leave, but as I started to turn away I felt him grasp my elbow. ‘Let’s stick around a little longer, Leo. We’re white Christian men, aren’t we?” I let him lead me a few steps closer until we were just within the shade of the tent.

The man with the booming voice introduced another fellow with a strange name, something like Kleagle. His voice was a little softer and smoother, honeylike, but somehow more commanding than the first.

“Good Christian men of Cardiff,” he began, “Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. It was a joy for me to watch your wholesome pleasure at the picnic with your lovely wives and children. There are no treasures dearer to us than our families! And I know you would do anything to protect them from the dangers that lurk in our troubled world, and spare no sacrifice to preserve the ideals of the founders of our Nation that have made our American way of life possible.”

“This guy could sell a bottle of water to a drowning sailor,” I whispered to Georgie, who shushed me.

His frown was still there, and he seemed to concentrate on every word. I have to admit that I stopped paying attention to Mr. Kleagle’s words for a few minutes and just let the honeyed sound of his voice roll around between my ears. Then I felt George stiffen next to me, and the speaker’s words took form again:

“…time for the good white Protestant men of this country, and of this glorious state of Maine, to take back what is their own! And where do we start, you may ask?  We might start with the banks, where grasping money-grubbing Yids use your hard-won wages to line their own pockets. We might start with our neighborhoods, where niggers are trying to buy houses so they can turn their lascivious gaze upon your wives and daughters.”

This man was obviously from away and didn’t know our town very well. There were a few colored people in Cardiff, mostly workers at the tannery or the sawmill, and they all lived in Zionsville on the outskirts of town. They kept to themselves and left us alone as we left them alone. Same with the Jews. I knew a few personally: there was Reuben the junkman and Mr. Isaacson who had the tailor shop downtown. Their accents were a little strange, but they were honest men, and no one had anything against them. Once in Sunday School class, Georgie said we should respect the Jews because they wrote the Old Testament. Sister Claire changed the subject. 

But now Mr. Kleagle began to hit closer to home.

“Instead, my Christian friends, let’s think about your innocent children. Did you know that in the public schools there are teachers of the Catholic persuasion? Did you know that these teachers place loyalty to their Pope above loyalty to their country, and stand ready at any minute to carry out orders from the Pope, who sits scheming on his throne in Rome, knowing and caring nothing about the lives and concerns of the good hardworking Protestant people of the state of Maine? Are these the kind of  servants of Satan we want setting our educational policies on our school boards, or worse yet, indoctrinating our precious children in the perfidious ways of Rome?”

Well, that made me pretty uncomfortable, and when a few voices from the audience shouted out “Here, here!” I figured it was time to beat a retreat. I nudged Georgie with my elbow and tried to catch his eye, but his gaze was fixed on the speaker. His eyes were wide open and his jaw was quivering, but when the speaker paused to mop his brow his eyes narrowed and his jaw firmed up. He raised his hand as if he were still in school, removed his cap, took a step forward, and opened his mouth:

“Excuse me. . . excuse me. . .

“I’ve been listening to what you have to say, mister. All I have to say to you is, I’m a Catholic, and I know you’re wrong about us. So I guess you’re wrong about the Jews, the colored people, and probably everybody else.”

Well. . . after that second ‘excuse me’ you could hear a pin drop in that tent. The silence continued for maybe a few seconds after George stopped speaking. When Mr. Kleagle began again, he had lost his silver tongue and began to say something in an ugly tone, but I wasn’t really listening. I began to hear a dull murmuring that might have been the crowd or might have been the blood rushing to my brain. I saw a hundred pairs of eyes turn our way, not all of them friendly. I tugged at George’s sleeve and said “Come on, let’s get out of here,” but he seemed rooted to the spot. Then four or five big guys about our age moved toward us. 

Mother of God, I thought, now we’re in for it!

But the biggest guy had a look on his face that reminded me of Doctor LaFlamme when he came to our house when my mother was so sick. “Walk out with us, George, nobody will give you a hard time.” Funny, I didn’t recognize his face, but I knew that voice: Nick Butterworth, the captain of the football team the year before George and I graduated. I didn’t realize he even knew George, but he knew a brave guy when he saw one. Nick and his teammates encircled us like bodyguards and walked with us until we had left the park and arrived at the bottom on the hill. On the way down, I heard somebody holler “So long, Frenchie!” and a couple of nastier things, but nobody followed us.

George and I worked together the rest of that summer, and when fall arrived, he went back to Orono to finish his degree. I saw him a few times after that but gradually we fell out of touch. A few years later I heard he had moved out of state and was teaching French at a high school down near Boston. After all this time it’s still funny to think of him speaking that snooty French like a Parisian gentleman with his nose in the air instead of like a hardworking son of Quebec.

But he was the one who stuck up for our people that day at the Klan rally. 

I remember when we would tease George for being so quiet he would bring up his Dad’s favorite saying: “Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” I guess that day he broke his own rule by standing up to the Klan. I’m proud he did. 

~ Harry Vayo ~ 2026

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“Georgie and Mr. Kleagle” ©2026 Harold E. Vayo III. All rights reserved.

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