Collection is open for research.
Gift of Roger Rasmussen, July 2021 (RL2021-069).
Baker Klan No. 13 records and related materials are in original order. All other materials are arranged chronologically by creation date.
Roger Rasmussen is the grandson of Walter Lee Lansing, a one-time member of Baker Klan No. 13 and an Oregon State Police officer. Rasmussen obtained Lansing's papers relating to Baker Klan No. 13 in the 1960s.
Walter Lee Lansing was born in 1897 in Pine, Oregon. After a fight with his father, he left home at age 14 and worked as a laborer; by February 1923, he was working as a deputy sheriff in Baker City, Oregon. Around this time, he also joined the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, Baker Klan No. 13. It is unclear how long he remained with the organization; he may have left after the chapter, in 1924, tried him and O. F. Coulter for unspecified offenses against the chapter. Lansing later joined the Oregon Traffic Division in 1925, and the Oregon State Police in 1931. He remained in the Oregon State Police until his retirement at the rank of captain in 1958; during his tenure he was heavily involved in traffic safety programs. Lansing died in 1962.
The white supremacist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic organization known as the Ku Klux Klan established itself in Oregon in 1921, when Klan members from the southern United States came to recruit members. By 1923, Oregon Klan leaders claimed that the state had 35,000 members in over 60 chapters. Klan members won elections for local, county, and state offices in 1922, and the organization helped elect Democrat Walter M. Pierce as governor of Oregon. Klan members and their allies in the Oregon State Legislature passed bills prohibiting foreign-born residents from owning land and prohibiting public schools from using textbooks that criticized the founders of the United States. The Klan in Oregon also helped to pass an initiative mandating that all children from ages 8 to 16 attend public school, a measure meant to target Catholic schools; this measure was never implemented, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1925. The number of Oregonians who were members of the Ku Klux Klan dwindled in the mid- and late 1920s, due both to displeasure with the leadership style of Exalted Cyclops Fred L. Gifford and multiple scandals involving the Klan in other states.
Roger Rasmussen collection of Baker Klan No. 13 records and Ku Klux Klan research materials, Coll 862, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
Baker Klan No. 13 records and related materials had been housed in a binder prior to the collection's processing. The original order of these materials was retained.
The collection consists of primary and secondary source material about the Ku Klux Klan, both in Oregon and in the United States overall, compiled by Roger Rasmussen. The bulk of this collection contains books, book excerpts, articles, theses, and newspaper clippings about the Ku Klux Klan, as well as anti-Catholicism and white supremacy in general; many of these materials are lightly annotated by Rasmussen. The collection also contains a biographical sketch of Rasmussen's grandfather Walter Lee Lansing, who belonged to Baker Klan No. 13, and research about Oregon individuals, particularly those who also belonged to Baker Klan No. 13. Original items pertaining to Baker Klan No. 13 include membership cards, correspondence, notices, stationery, manuals, a notice that Walter Lee Lansing and O. F. Coulter would be tried by the organization for unspecified offenses, and a 1931 letter from Klan leader William Joseph Simmons asking for support from former Klan members to help establish a new Klan-like organization.
The Oregon Historical Society owns the materials in the Research Library and makes available reproductions for research, publication, and other uses. The Society does not necessarily hold copyright to all materials in the collections. In some cases, permission for use may require seeking additional authorization from copyright owners.