The Ku Klux Klan in Canada: A Century of Promoting Racism and Hate in the Peaceable Kingdom

by Allan Bartley

Overview

The Ku Klux Klan came to Canada thanks to some energetic American promoters who saw it as a vehicle for getting rich by selling memberships to white, mostly Protestant Canadians. In Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, the Klan found fertile ground for its message of racism and discrimination targeting African Canadians, Jews and Catholics. While its organizers fought with each other to capture the funds received from enthusiastic members, the Klan was a venue for expressions of race hatred and a cover for targeted acts of harassment and violence against minorities.

Historian Allan Bartley traces the role of the Klan in Canadian political life in the turbulent years of the 1920s and 1930s, after which its membership waned. But in the 1970s, as he relates, small extremist right- wing groups emerged in urban Canada, and sought to revive the Klan as a readily identifiable identity for hatred and racism.

The Ku Klux Klan in Canada tells the little-known story of how Canadians adopted the image and ideology of the Klan to express the racism that has played so large a role in Canadian society for the past hundred years — right up to the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459506145
Publisher:	Formac Publishing Company, Limited
Publication date:	10/13/2020
Sold by:	De Marque
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

ALLAN BARTLEY has researched the history of the KKK in Canada for over a decade. In 1995, he published the article "A Public Nuisance: The Ku Klux Klan in Ontario 1923-27" in the Journal of Canadian Studies. He is also the author of Alexander MacNeill: A Political Life and Heroes in Waiting: The 160th Battalion in the Great War. A former intelligence analyst for Canadian security agencies, he is an adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University. Allan lives in Ottawa.

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Part I 9

Chapter 1 Movie Night 11

Chapter 2 The Klan Comes to Canada 29

Chapter 3 Klan Rising (1925) 53

Chapter 4 Year of the Klan (1926) 75

Chapter 5 The Canadian Knights (1926-27) 94

Chapter 6 Moose Jaw Moment 116

Chapter 7 Getting Out the Vote (1928) 133

Chapter 8 Ontario Burning (1929-30) 151

Chapter 9 Wild Rose Country: The Klan in Alberta, 1930s 157

Chapter 10 Waiting for Hitler (1930-39) 175

Part II 185

Chapter 11 Klan Redux 187

Chapter 12 Goat Worshippers 203

Chapter 13 Island in the Sun 219

Chapter 14 To Tripoli and Beyond, the 1980s and Early 1990s 235

Chapter 15 Le Klan in Quebec, 1990s 251

Chapter 16 Klan Online in the 2000s 265

Acknowledgements 279

Endnotes 280

Index 309