The first American town founded west of the Rocky Mountains, Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, elected a Klan mayor in 1922, and hosted a convention of the order two years later. Ten thousand people attended. Reuben Sawyer, a Portland pastor and a student of Henry Ford’s tracts against Jews, filled churches in the Beaver State with anti-Semitic rants. “In some parts of America,” he warned one crowd, “the kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk.” Speaking to 6,000 in Portland, he said Jews were trying to establish “a government within the government.” In the
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