a thriving multiracial community. Children only notice things by contrast, so at such a young age, I didn’t realize that my birthplace and my parents’ social circle comprised such a broad color spectrum. But when we moved to the Pacific Northwest (I was six), I famously asked my mom where “all the tan people” had disappeared to; I couldn’t seem to spot any. She admitted to me that they didn’t appear to live hereabouts. Longview, it seemed, was preternaturally pale save for a smattering of taquerias and a Thai restaurant run by a wonderful Cambodian family. The event that really drove this point home, however, was when my bronzed California complexion and I sat down in a church pew at Vacation Bible School, and the kid next to me stared in unvarnished horror into my very, very dark brown eyes.
“Eeeeeeew,” he said with conviction. “I don’t want to sit next to a Japanese girl.”
Granted, I was only six, but I was old enough to know three things. First off, that I wasn’t Japanese. Second, that anyone who was in fact Japanese must have been having a tough go of it. And third, that something was seriously amok with racial perceptions in my new town.
The first Oregon settlers envisioned an unspoiled paradise free from strife, crime, and poverty—and from racial diversity. As early as 1844, prior to statehood, the Legislative Committee thought it prudent to pass a provision sentencing any blacks who refused to leave the territory to a flogging every six months until they found the environment inhospitable enough to vamoose. Oregon’s founding ideal was that of an all-white utopia. When it came time to write a constitution, it forbade blacks from living or working in the state. And it would be easy to just cluck ruefully at the fact that Oregon was the only state among the fifty ever to explicitly deny blacks the right to live and work there if the effects of such sweeping intolerance weren’t still being felt. Oregon was also one of only six states that refused to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment (which guaranteed people of color the right to vote) when it passed in 1870. Thankfully, they quickly saw the error of their ways and ratified blacks’ voting rights on February 24, 1959, a mere eighty-nine years later. According to a July 2016 article in The Atlantic titled “The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America,” at the time of its publication, Portland was 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent African American. I grew up thereabouts and, while I can’t claim to have counted heads, I can attest this is accurate. And that statistic is the direct result of oppressive policy and culture, not of random accident; during the 1920s, when The Paragon Hotel takes place, Oregon boasted the biggest Ku Klux Klan organization west of the Mississippi River.
Americans enjoy pretending that the KKK has always been a predominantly Southern problem, breeding only where slavery once thrived. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 1924, a Dartmouth sociologist named John Moffatt Mecklin wrote in The Ku-Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind, “The Klan draws its members chiefly from the descendants of the old American stock living in the villages and small towns of those sections of the country where this old stock has been least disturbed by immigration, on the one hand, and the disruptive effect of industrialism, on the other.” The principle holds true to this day; of the people I know who are mistrustful of all Muslims, for example, most of them have never met one.
This rampant national paranoia all too often led to violence, and Dr. Doddridge Pendleton’s fate in this novel is based on two real accounts. In the first place, in 1902, a black man named Alonso Tucker who was shot while trying to escape a lynch mob accusing him of rape in Marshfield, Oregon (now Coos Bay), died while being dragged to the scene of the crime, and his body was hanged by the neck from a bridge. In the second, in 1924, another black Marshfield citizen by the name of Timothy Pettis was murdered and tossed into the bay. It was only after the black community insisted on a second autopsy that the public learned the testicles had been stripped from Pettis’s body. Such atrocities are often glossed over as “unthinkable” aberrations, when their roots can be traced all too clearly. Following World War One, America experienced rapid societal shifts, as