In examining the pivotal role French-Canadian Alphonse Desjardins and Franco-American parishes played in developing credit unions in the northeastern United States in the early twentieth century, this essay illustrates how issues of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism intersected successfully to shape the development of cooperative credit institutions across the international border.

During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan expanded to the northeastern United States, where it confronted Franco-American Catholics throughout Maine. In response, this ethnic population modeled an appropriate resistance to the KKK's unyielding message of Americanism and nativism, helping to precipitate the demise of this reactionary mass movement.