The difference between a Klansman and a regular civic leader was not that one was racist and the other was not; the real difference in 1920s Los Angeles usually came down to either Catholicism, alcohol, mob ties, or all three. The Klan was both virulently Anti-Catholic, and a part of the temperance reform movement, which helped create and defend the 18th amendment to the constitution, banning alcohol.
Enter John Clinton Porter. Born in Iowa, he rose to local prominence as a virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic Klan leader and close associate of “Fighting” Don Shuler. Shuler was a powerful fire-and-brimstone preacher operating out of the Southern Methodist Church, located at 1201 S. Flower St. in Downtown Los Angeles about a block away from where the Staples Center is now.
Shuler was a major figure in L.A. in the 1920s and 30s, with his radio program heard all over the state and into parts of Mexico, and his influential congregation that included prominent members of the city’s establishment. L.A. Times wrote about him frequently, including this nugget from their archives in 1930: “Unless you have been attacked by Rev. ‘Bob’ Shuler, pastor of Trinity Methodist Church South, via radio, magazine, pulpit or pamphlet (25 cents per copy) you don’t amount to much in Los Angeles.”[6] Shuler’s targets included the Los Angeles Public Library (for carrying books not fit to be read even in “heathen China or anarchistic Russia”), the YWCA (for conducting dances for girls “until the early hours of Sunday morning”), and other evangelists, including Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson.”
Shuler and Porter represented a faction in Los Angeles that was deeply racist but also against “vice,” primarily alcohol. Porter’s racist background is not what got him voted into office, it was his campaign against the LAPD for being soft on alcohol and other vices such as prostitution. This was all bundled into the “reform” movement, which sought to limit corruption that was pervasive at every level in the city government. Los Angeles was known worldwide as a place where the police and the local government was corrupt in all aspects.
The reform angle was the only one played up in the most recent L.A. Times article on Porter’s tenure, which was to last a single term. The 1997 Times piece doesn’t mention the KKK membership, referring bizarrely to Porter’s “xenophobic Protestant populism,” but notes his stewardship of the 1932 Olympic Games.