Phone photo 2929

Olympia, Washington

Ku Klux Klan - Ancestor of the Tea Baggers?

Dear readers:

My jaw dropped when I ran across this incredible front page article in the Oct. 27, 1922 issue of The Walla Walla Valley Spectator, where the Ku Klux Klan is treated as if they were like the local garden club. And we're not talking about the Deep South here, this is in Prescott, Washington. Yes, good ol' Blue State progressive Washington that has legalized pot and Gay marriage and has never voted for a Bush for President.

What really struck me as I read through this was how much the Klan spokesman sounded like one of today's Tea Party proponents.

I love Eastern Washington. I was born there. My most prolific period as a cartoonist took place there in the 1980s. It sickens me that it also has a strong element of fear-based people willing to swallow the nonsense of the Klan, "Neo" Nazis, and Tea Baggers, all birds of a feather in my thinking.

Perhaps that good, patriotic, pious Christian, that man who spreads the word of God, the Rev. Burger, was really from the Church of the Nazirene.

Yours,
A Member of the "Adverse Element."

Postcard - Ilwaco, Washington

"Port Basin - Ilwaco, Washington. Located at the mouth of the famous Columbia River. Berths for over 900 small boats, launching facilities. Area noted for silver and chinook salmon fishing. From May thru October."

Love the staccato description there. Probably from the 1960s or 1970s. Ilwaco is also known, at least to us Washington State trivia collectors, as the base for Malcolm Mark Moore, who ran for Governor in 1936 as a member of the Hitler-loving "Christian Party," otherwise known as the Silver Shirts.

Ilwaco is also the burial place of legendary muralist Joe Knowles.

Favorite Movie Quotes: Rat Race

"They're always pissed, Honey. They're Nazis. It's like it's their job." 

[Reviewed in Cheaper by the Dozen 51]

Favorite Movie Quotes: The Boys From Brazil

"Do you know what I saw on the television in my motel room at one o'clock this morning? Films of Hitler! They are showing films about the war! The movement! People are fascinated! The time is ripe! Adolf Hitler is alive! This album is full of pictures of him. Bobby Wheelock and ninety-three other boys are exact genetic duplicates of him, bred entirely from his cells. He allowed me to take half a liter of his blood and a cutting of skin from his ribs. We were in a biblical frame of mind on the twenty-third of May 1943, at the Berghof. He had denied himself children because he knew that no son could flourish in the shadow of so godlike a father! But when he heard what was theoretically possible, that I could create one day not his son, not even a carbon-copy but another original, he was thrilled by the idea! The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, 90s, 2000!"

Gregory Peck was a surprisingly disturbing villain.

The Legend of the McCleary Coulda-Been Crater

From Olympia Power & Light, September 7-20, 2011.

I still have the old fellow's fishing pole and a little stand he made.


The Legend of McCleary

50 Years Ago -- December 1941

I used to write for our local museum newsletter here in McCleary, Washington. I'll be posting a bunch of these for a bit.

Unfortunately, my favorite article, "Henry McCleary and the Land of the Rising Sun" does not seem to be in my files, which is too bad since it is one of the more visual pieces I assembled for this periodical. However, the text can be found on OlyBlog, and it does relate somewhat to this scanned essay. Also, I'll includes the actual text from OlyBlog here:

Henry McCleary & the Land of the Rising Sun

Fri, 11/11/2005 - 10:58pm — stevenl [The following article was originally published in the McCleary Museum Newsletter v. 11 issue 3 (Sept. 2001). OlyBlog seemed like a good venue for introducing this local history to the online world. For those who don't know, the town of McCleary is about 20 miles west of Olympia].

According to conventional wisdom, Henry McCleary sold his entire operation to Simpson in the last hours of Dec. 1941 due to several factors: his age, the fact that his timber was played out, the unions were closing in, and the start of another war economy. Sam Lanning quoted Henry in Jan. 1942, "Sam, I am old and I have had enough. The whole world business has gone to war and production for war needs. I have closed out and bought 22,000 acres of grazing land stocked with cattle, quite a distance from town and prefer raising beef to making bombs."

But there was another, more subtle, reason for Henry's departure. One of his chief business clients, Japan, was now our enemy. Since Henry was a man of action, leaving very little in the way of written thoughts, we can only guess what was going through his mind in Dec. 1941. Pearl Harbor has never been mentioned as one of the reasons for his selling out, but one cannot look at the McCleary-Japan relationship without concluding Henry must have felt some sense of betrayal.

Japanese Railroad Workers
We have no photographs of them. They never figure in written or oral recollections of our area. Newspaper accounts of them are few and far between. Yet the McCleary region was home to over two dozen Japanese railroad workers for the better part of two decades. It is believed they lived in an encampment northwest of town, on the far western end of Mohney's Prairie.

McCleary's preference for foreign labor was well known. They were inexpensive and not likely to unionize. The early community was multinational, with a considerable number of Scandinavians, Greeks, and Italians. It was a melting pot-- almost.

How the Japanese came to be hired by Henry is not known, but we do have an account of their arrival. The July 23, 1904 Elma Chronicle made a note that McCleary had hired Japanese workers, "as men are very scarce." And the Elma newspaper also noted, "On the 2:13 train, Friday, there were several Japanese workmen, brought here by the Henry McCleary Lumber Co. They were met at the depot here, compelled to re-board the train, and to go on to the next station. It is reported that arrests are to be made on the charge of intimidation."

There was no shortage of work for these workers. Henry McCleary's empire would rapidly expand during the next 25 years, and his logging railroad would grow with it. It would seem almost impossible that anyone living in McCleary during this period would not see them. But trying to uncover information about this group is very difficult.

The Japanese somehow managed to avoid being listed in the 1910 McCleary census. Fortunately, some dutiful listmaker must have taken great pains to phonetically sound out the names of the workers recorded in the 1920 McCleary census. There are 28 workers, plus the wife of the section boss, and their 4 month old daughter, apparently born in McCleary in the fall of 1919. This was in a year when Grays Harbor County had only 155 Japanese total. As low as this number seems, it was actually the high-water mark for Japanese here in the first half of the 20th century. The 1930 census counted only 29 Japanese. This was partly due to the Johnson Immigration Act. More on that later.

Business Partners
Henry's employment of workers from Japan was apparently highly unpopular among some elements of Grays Harbor County. But Henry kept them on. Of Ada McCleary, John Anderson wrote, "Mrs. McCleary didn't care what nationality anyone was, be they Greek, Italian, Irish or Swede. As far as she was concerned one could learn from every culture. Indeed all these cultures made McCleary the great place it was to live." Unlike Ada, her husband was not known as a social activist. He had a business to run, and business being business, he followed the money. If that meant taking the risk of hiring Japanese railroad workers, so be it. It also meant trading with that strange and frightening land on the other side of the Pacific, Japan itself.

Mr. McCleary, always the economic risk-taker, was rewarded for his willingness to do business with a country most others feared and misunderstood. Here's a sample: according to McCleary's car sales book, if I'm reading it right, he grossed over $2 million between Sept. 1925-Jan. 1926 from loading up Japanese ships at his Westside Olympia mill. The ships were the Clyde Maru, Milan Maru, Malta Maru, and Tasmania Maru. The Milan Maru visited twice during that slice of time. They were bound for Osaka and Kobe. As a side note, all four ships became casualties of World War II in the Pacific.

The Apr. 4, 1929 Elma Chronicle told the readers, "Henry McCleary, president of the McCleary Timber Co., left last Saturday for Japan accompanied by his son Charles of Olympia and his nephew Jack, of McCleary, sailing from Victoria on the Empress of Russia. They plan to be gone about thirty days. Most of the time in Japan will be spent at Kobi with visits to other parts of the country also included." As another side note, the Empress of Russia was noted in future McCleary businessman Al Fleming's diary when he was stationed in Vladivostok, May 18, 1919: "... The largest ship that had ever been in this port. She is a beauty. Couldn't dock as the water wasn't deep enough." The Empress was used by the Allies in the Atlantic, survived the war, but burned in drydock, Sept. 8, 1945.

A photograph of the McCleary entourage in Japan, taken by a Tokyo photographer probably during his 1929 trip, shows each man accompanied by a geisha girl. All the businessmen look very happy, except for Henry, who appears somewhat perplexed.

Even in hard times Henry kept up his ties to Japan. The very same railroad that had been laid by Japanese workers was, during the Depression, torn out. According to Kramer Adams, "Like many another operator, Henry McCleary sold his rails to Japan for conversion into steel."

The Sept. 28, 1934 McCleary Observer reported, "The next few weeks will see the end of the McCleary railroad. A crew is taking up the rails and loading them on cars for shipment to Olympia where they will be transferred to a boat destined for Japan."

By this time, of course, militarists had gained control of Japan's political system. The steel no doubt went into their imperialistic expansion. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, McClearyite Lauren Bruner would survive being burned and shot while in the crow's nest of the Arizona. One has to ponder how much the McCleary rails contributed to that attack. Henry McCleary probably wondered too. And he probably felt betrayed.

In yet another of the growing ironies in this case, after Simpson acquired McCleary's operations, they dismantled the mill where the present Beerbower Park now sits. As the Elma Chronicle for Apr. 30, 1942 reported, "Now that the Simpson Company is dismantling the long idle mill its metal salvage is going into war production. Already some carloads have been shipped to the smelters at Cleveland ..."

Madison Grant and Albert Johnson, the Aristocrat and the Redneck
The weirdest part of this story is yet to come. Madison Grant (1865-1937), a Yale-educated lawyer and promoter of Eugenics, wrote The Passing of the Great White Race in 1916, a book the Holocaust Study Center considers, "A major text of the American racist movement from 1916 until 1925." Hitler himself personally wrote Grant and thanked him for writing this work, probably due to passages like this: "[Sterilization could] be applied to an ever widening group of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types."

Substitute Grant's use of "Nordic" with Hitler's "Aryan," and it is indeed difficult to tell the two philosophies apart. Grant had Nazi ties, including Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's chief scientific advisor and leading German Eugenicist. Grant's later work, Conquest of a Continent, earned this preface in the 1937 German edition: "No one has as much reason to note the work of this man [Grant] with the keenest of attention as does a German of today in a time when the racial idea has become one of the chief foundations of National Socialist States population policies."

Grant found a kindred spirit in the person of U.S. Congressman Albert Johnson (1869-1957), a Republican who served in Congress from 1913-1933. Johnson was a midwest transplant who was publisher of Hoquiam's Grays Harbor Washingtonian. He was elected as a crusader against "radicalism" and he favored immigration restriction. In his first campaign, Johnson stated, "The greatest menace to the Republic today is the open door it affords to the ignorant hordes from Eastern and Southern Europe, whose lawlessness flourishes and civilization is ebbing into barbarism." In 1913, Johnson proposed a "Panaryan Association" to unite the "white race." As Johnson was making pronouncements of this kind, Henry McCleary was offering employment and home for the very people the congressman despised, right in Johnson's district.

Johnson became the Chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. In 1923, through his connection with Grant, he was elected the President of the Eugenics Research Association, based at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. This was, as one writer put it, "An incident that deserves at least one chapter in any full length biography of Johnson. Its title would probably be something like 'New York Aristocrat Courts Pacific Northwest Redneck,' as the 'chemistry' that brought together the patrician Madison Grant and the backwoods Congressman needs considerable explanation."

Johnson made his big move in 1924 as co-sponsor of the Johnson-Reed Act (with Sen. David Aiken Reed, R-PA), also known as the Japanese Exclusion Act. This placed quotas on immigration, rolling them back to 1890. This placed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and eliminated Japanese immigration entirely. Said Johnson, "Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed ... The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended." He was especially applauded by the KKK.

The long-range effect of the Johnson-Reed Act is that tens of thousands of Europeans attempting to escape Nazi or Stalinist oppression were denied entry to the U.S., leaving a large percentage of them to perish. That is the legacy of Albert Johnson.

Henry McCleary's Kingdom
We must wonder what Henry McCleary thought about Albert Johnson and his "Panaryan" concepts. Surely Henry knew Johnson. They were both Republicans in the same district. Henry was a delegate for Coolidge at the 1924 GOP National Convention.

But in those days, as now, East County and Aberdeen/Hoquiam were worlds apart. McCleary's camp was his own kingdom, and the antics of politicians probably didn't concern him as long as they left him alone. Henry seemed content to let fellow executive Mark Reed be the political voice for the timber industry. We don't know the circumstances of the Japanese departure from McCleary, but if it was due to the Johnson-Reed Act, Henry must have had some conflicts concerning political party loyalty.

McCleary's Japanese workers, having arrived in 1904, predate the coming of the Italians and the Greeks. By McCleary standards, they are pioneers. Being here as early as they were, it is safe to say they were part of the foundation upon which McCleary built his empire. They deserve to be recognized for their contribution to the history of our town.

--Steve Willis

[2011 note: In the interests of revealing my personal bias, I should mention that Johnson's Democratic Party opponent in the 1918 congressional election was my great-grandfather, Theodore J. Hoss of Centralia. Theodore supported President Wilson's League of Nations and advocated the radical idea of equal wages for equal work for men and women. Johnson's people used Theodore's German surname against him in the campaign. Too bad Theodore didn't win]

Seattle Star

Oh, Washington my home, wherever I may roam--

Michael Dowers first published the comic tabloid Seattle Star in the mid 1980s. Most of my contributions were recycled from my books, but Michael added color to several of them. Here are the colorized versions. All the black and white stuff you guys have already seen in this blog.

I liked the fact that no matter if the comic was reprinted in color or black and white, Michael liked to use a lot of my cartoons with a Washington State or Pacific Northwest theme in keeping with the Seattle Star feel.

Before Fantagraphics moved up here in the late 1980s, Michael Dowers' Starhead Comics publishing concern was probably the main venue for outsiders to learn about comix art from the Pacific Northwest.

Brave New Nazis of the Inland Empire

Before I explain why this was one of the weirdest and potentially dangerous comix I ever produced, let me get into the printing stats.

I believe this was first published by Starhead Comix in 1985. Starhead was the baby of Michael Dowers, who lived in Seattle at the time. Since this is the first mention of Michael in these little comic profiles, I must say the only reason my work is known at all to anyone beyond the dozen or people who follow my comix was due to Michael's promotion. He always believed in my comix and spent considerable energy publishing and distributing my stuff. Including this minicomic.

The original Starhead edition was an odd size. It had the traditional spine height for a minicomic (14 cm.) but it was 1.5 centimeters less wide. I think this was due to the fact the master stats were pasted on legal instead of letter standard paper, and folded in a different way. The scanned copy presented here is from the original edition.

The entire comic was reprinted in Maximum Traffic's massive Truth Be Known in 1997 (Butler, Pennsylvania).

In June 2005, 5 1st Danger Room Reprint editions were printed with yellow covers and pink guts. These were colors picked on purpose and deemed appropriate for the subject matter.

In Sept. 2006, 10 copies were printed up as the 1st OlyBlog Reprint Ed. (5 yellow, 5 pink and yellow mixed) as Olympia was experiencing some Nazi activity. I made them as gifts to a certain pro-democracy activist.

I first became aware of local neo-Nazi activity in 1981 when, as a grad student at the University of Washington, a fellow was handing out racist literature in the neighborhood as a self-professed Nazi. He told the press the time was ripe since he felt President Reagan's policies were really not that far from his own. He felt safe at last, he said. In fact, the Ku Klux Klan had endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election.

By 1985 I was living in Pullman, Washington. The home of Washington State University (where I was a librarian and faculty member), this town was, as the natives say, "Not in the middle of Nowhere, but you can see it from here." Only a few miles from the Northern Idaho panhandle, Pullman was in wheat country. Conservative Republican country. It was also the Party School for the state. Not noted for their political awareness, the student body supported Reagan's re-election by an overwhelming margin. WSU supporters of good old boring Fritz Mondale whispered their support as if they were members of the French underground in 1942. It was with amusement I noted the pro-Reagan kids' sense of betrayal when Ron the Con cut student aid as one of his first acts in term 2.

Anyway, right across the border, there was this mentally diseased character named Richard Butler who ran some sort of Nazi compound. His minions would stand in full uniform on the WSU campus and hand out racist literature. Amazingly, well, maybe not, the WSU students blandly accepted the fliers as if given by the pep squad concerning info on the next football rally.

According to the local news, the Nazis torched parts of neighboring cities and always made some guy stay behind to tell the press he witnessed an African American running away with a gas can. Classy.

So, feeling quite politically alone out there, I drew this little minicomic as my response to the nuttiness around me. And then I did something that perhaps I shouldn't of. I sent a copy to Richard Butler as my own little pitchfork jab. Right after that I started getting weird phone calls in the wee hours like 2 am with just silence on the other end. My co-workers and neighbors told me I was asking for suicide by Nazi. Their fear was real. But somehow I wasn't all that afraid. I knew I was either not all that important, or, Butler's group was filled with incompetent failures who couldn't even hurt a mild-mannered cartoonist if they tried.

And I thought, "My God, if just a few of these yahoos can inspire such terror, imagine what a really intelligent well organized group could do!"

You can argue with these clowns all you want. They dig it when you're angry and engaged. But they really really hate being laughed at.