Letters

Abstract

349 Letters LETTERS To the Editor: Matthew Dennis and Samuel Reis-Dennis have presented a culturally sensitive and thoughtful exploration of the complexities involved in public memorials in “‘What’s in a name?’ The University of Oregon, De-Naming Controversies, and the Ethics of Public Memory,” published in the Summer 2019 issue. By the criteria outlined by the authors and the university, which include whether a historical figure embodied the qualities of free inquiry and tolerance that higher education seeks to uphold, the case for the recent removal of Classics professor Frederic S. Dunn’s name from a campus building is certainly strong. Yet Dunn’s liabilities lay not so much in intolerance of people of color, as his leadership of the Eugene chapter of the early 1920s Ku Klux Klan might imply at first glance, but in virulent anti-Catholicism. Responding to the postwar Klan’s near-exclusive focus on Roman Catholics and Jews as “alien” influences on American life, the Eugene KKK turned to conspiracy-mongering in a futile effort to restrict the campus activities of the University of Oregon Newman Club, the newly established religious center for Catholic students, and to ban allegedly controversial speakers from campus. Meanwhile, Dunn’s Klan engineered the dismissal of several Catholic teachers from local public schools and turned to the ballot to oust Catholic officeholders and school board members. As the team of scholars who advised university president Michael H. Schill on the controversy noted, Dunn’s main connection to racial matters lay in the national Klan’s listing of white supremacy as one of several prerequisites for membership. In this regard, the fivemillion Klansmen of the 1920s, as distinguished from their post–Civil War and post–World War II terrorist counterparts, shared racial views with contemporaries in the American Legion, the American Federation of Labor, the Scottish-Rite Masons, most white Protestant churches, and even the University of Oregon, which prohibited women students of color from rooming with white counterparts in university housing. To use a broad stroke to associate public figures with racial violence without tangible evidence is to make denials and refutations too easy and denude the threat of the most dangerous forms of racism. David A. Horowitz Portland State University To the Editor: We appreciate Professor Horowitz’s elaboration of the particular threats that the Klan posed in Oregon in the 1920s. While its antisemitism and anti-Catholicism were particularly prominent in its revival during the 1920s, the Klan continued to persecute, terrorize, and lynch African Americans nationwide. An estimated 4,700 persons were lynched in the United States between the 1880s and the Second World War, with over 3,200 fatalities. Per capita lynching rates in the West nearly equaled those in the South. The KKK perpetrated many of these lynchings; as far as we know the other organizations Professor Horowitz mentions did not lynch anyone. In our essay we do not associate Frederic Dunn with racial violence idly or anachronistically; through his own membership and leadership position in Oregon, Exalted Cyclops Dunn associated himself with racial violence. Matthew Dennis University of Oregon Samuel Reis-Dennis Albany Medical College ...