“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
— L.P. Hartley
They do things differently in Portland, but not because it is a foreign country, although many Americans might wish it were: At this moment, it is one national embarrassment too many. Rather, the tumults in Portland, which is a petri dish of progressivism, perhaps reveal something about Oregon’s political DNA. A century ago, the state was a bastion of reaction.
Recently in Portland, an “intersectional” feminist bookstore (“intersectionality” postulates that society’s victims — basically, everyone but white males — suffer interlocking and overlapping victimizations), which appeared in the television series “Portlandia,” closed. It blamed its failure not on a scarcity of customers but on an excess of “capitalism,” “white supremacy” and “patriarchy.”
Poor Portland progressives: So much to protest, so little time.
In the Twenties, however, Oregon was a national leader in a different flavor of nonsense, as historian Linda Gordon recounts in “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.” The Klan’s revival began in 1915 with the romanticizing of it in the film “Birth of a Nation,” adapted from the novel “The Clansman” by Thomas Dixon. He was a John Hopkins University classmate and friend of Woodrow Wilson, who as president made the movie the first one shown in the White House.
Hotbed of Klan activity
The resuscitated Klan flourished nationwide as a vehicle of post-World War I populism. It addressed grievances about national identity — pre-war immigration (too many Catholics and Jews) had diluted Anglo-Saxon purity — and disappointment with the recalcitrant world that had not been sufficiently improved by, or grateful for, U.S. involvement in the war.