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“Only A Passing Idiocy”: The Ku Klux Klan In Maine State Politics, Erin Best

Honors Program Theses and Projects

During the late the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French Canadians migrated to the United States to fill existing labor gaps in New England’s textile mills. By the 1920s, French Canadians and Franco-Americans dominated textile labor in Maine. Despite its general rural cultural landscape, the modernism of the 1920s did come to influence the lived-experience of Maine’s French-speaking population. Urban centers like Lewiston-Auburn, Portland, and Bangor were urban-industrial towns that tended to be oppositional to the state’s more rural and conservative demographic. This sparked a general counter-movement among Maine’s conservative Protestant population. Similar to other rural regions in the United …