The Legion of White Decency

The Legion of White Decency was the Northern counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan, active in industrial cities and manufacturing areas across New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, and Portsmouth. In Maine, the Legion found its strongest foothold in Derry, where it became a vehicle for the town's entrenched racial hatred. Unlike the Klan's Southern focus on black populations, the Legion in Lewiston, Maine, directed its violence against tramps, hobos, and unemployed men, stuffing poison ivy down their pants or setting their shirts on fire. In Derry, however, the organization's primary target was the black soldiers of Company E, stationed at the Derry Army Air Corps Base.

Origins and Structure

The Legion of White Decency was organized in chapters, with Derry's branch drawing its membership from the town's old-line families and lumber barons. The organization marched in white sheets, burned crosses, and wrote hate-notes to black families perceived as rising above their station. In churches where preachers advocated racial equality, Legion members sometimes planted dynamite charges. The Derry chapter was particularly powerful because it was a "regular rich-man's club," drawing its leadership from the same West Broadway families who controlled the town's economy and politics. The organization's influence was such that after the Black Spot fire, the perpetrators simply "laid away their sheets and lied each other up," and the event was "papered over" in the town's official memory.

The Black Spot Fire

The Legion's most notorious act was the firebombing of the Black Spot, a club built by the black soldiers of Company E in an old requisition shed on the base. The club had become unexpectedly popular with white townspeople, who brought their own liquor and danced to the soldiers' jazz band. On a Saturday night in early November 1930, Legion members in white sheets gathered, some arriving in a brand-new Packard automobile, carrying torches and gasoline. They surrounded the club and set it ablaze. The single door became a death trap as panicked patrons jammed against it, unable to pull it open against the weight of those behind them. The fire killed over sixty people, including eighteen from Company E, four members of a jazz band, and numerous white civilians. The survivors included Will Hanlon, Mike Hanlon's father, who was pulled from the burning building by his friends Trevor Dawson and Dick Hallorann.

Connection to Derry's Cycle of Evil

Mike Hanlon's research into the Legion's history led him to conclude that the organization's virulence in Derry was not merely a matter of local prejudice but was nourished by the same malevolent soil that sustained the entity It. As Will Hanlon told his son, "bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town." The Black Spot fire, like the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks in 1906 and the execution of the Bradley Gang in 1929, served as a massive sacrifice that ended each twenty-seven-year cycle of supernatural violence, sending It back into its long hibernation. The Legion's members, acting as human agents of a deeper evil, provided the bloodshed necessary to quiet the force that haunted Derry.

Aftermath and Legacy

Following the fire, the Legion of White Decency was effectively finished in Derry. The violence had escalated beyond what the town's respectable citizens could countenance. Thousands of people turned out for the funerals of both black and white victims; businesses closed for nearly a week; hospitals treated the injured free of charge. The army dispersed the remaining soldiers of Company E to other bases. But no one was ever prosecuted for the arson and murder. The perpetrators, drawn from Derry's most powerful families, simply returned to their lives on West Broadway, and the event was gradually erased from the town's official history. The Legion's legacy persisted in the racial hatred passed from fathers to sons, most notably in the Bowers family, where Butch Bowers's obsessive hatred of the Hanlons was inherited by his son Henry, who would become one of the Losers' Club's most dangerous human adversaries.