If Alan Alda wins an Academy Award Sunday for his role in the “The Aviator,” one of the people he will need to thank is the man he portrayed, Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster, one of the greatest political actors in Maine history.

I use the word “greatest” advisedly, however. Most politicians exercise their theatrical abilities to simulate charisma, heroism and wisdom. Brewster often played the villain. His reputation darkens as the days go by and our national notions of political correctness evolve. What else can you say about a man who accepted the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan, palled around with Sen. Joe McCarthy, criticized the mayor of New York City for attacking Hitler, and sneaked campaign funds to Richard Nixon?

That’s only the beginning of the list. If those of Neanderthal tendencies are still not impressed, they might be interested to know that Brewster even sponsored federal legislation to create a North Woods national park!

Born in Dexter, Brewster graduated from Bowdoin and Harvard Law School. He held every major elected office Mainers had to offer him – state representative and senator, governor, congressman and U. S. senator. In order to accomplish anything approaching this record today, you have to be bland and evasive. Not Brewster. There was no mistaking where he stood. He lived in an era of bare-knuckle politics, and his knuckles were of the brass variety.

He had a “talent for advancement through controversy,” wrote a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in 1947. “No public figure in the history of … Maine has ever ridden into high office on such a chorus of damnings and catcalls as Ralph Owen Brewster.

“A bland-faced Yankee with a toothy smile for friend and foe, he has been hung in effigy; read out of his party and disowned by virtually all its state bigwigs; publicly called a political traitor and liar. … The net result is that he is generally considered unbeatable in the state of Maine today, and most of his surviving enemies are still on his bandwagon,” wrote Arthur Bartlett of that now-defunct newspaper.

But Brewster wasn’t unbeatable. He just hadn’t met Howard Hughes yet before the cameras.

There are so many good Brewster stories that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Here are some of the most interesting.

When Brewster ran for governor in 1924, he supported a constitutional amendment prohibiting the appropriation of public funds for religious schools, which sounds like a good idea today. At the time, however, the Ku Klux Klan was a powerful political force, and they liked the idea too, so they endorsed Brewster, inciting cries of bigotry and dividing the Republican Party. Brewster could have told them off, but he didn’t, unlike many other politicians of both parties at the time.

John Syrett, a history professor, summed up the latest scholarly thinking on this controversial election four years ago in the scholarly journal Maine History: “Brewster’s clever use of the Klan to secure his nomination, against the wishes of the Republican organization, was as reprehensible as the Klan’s bigotry. … Brewster genuinely believed in the separation of church and state, and many people, from various places, occupations and levels of society supported him because they believed in the principle involved. And so they supported the secret order, either by joining it or, like Brewster, remaining silent about its less commendable attributes….”

Brewster spent much of his career fighting with other Republicans. Calling Margaret Chase Smith a “New Dealer” and worse, he worked unsuccessfully to defeat her. He was the first person that red-baiting Joe McCarthy called in the 1950s in his effort to destroy the woman he loathed.

Brewster’s feud with another Maine icon was legendary.

He and Gov. Percy Baxter, who hated the Klan, quarreled over the ballot recount scandal that occurred after Brewster was elected governor. After Brewster took over the office, he blasted Baxter, inaccurately it turned out, for leaving the state in financial disarray.

Four years later, Baxter publicly accused Brewster of being a member of the KKK, a charge that was never proved. Baxter claimed that Brewster, who planned to run for the U. S. Senate, had promised him Klan support if he would run for governor again.

The dispute became increasingly trivial. In 1933, after he had created his state park, Baxter had Governor’s Spring, named originally to commemorate Brewster’s hike up Mt. Katahdin, renamed Thoreau’s Spring. Four years later, when he was in Congress, Brewster sponsored a bill to create Katahdin National Park in an effort to preempt Baxter’s great philanthropic effort.

By far, Brewster’s biggest investment in political theatrics occurred in 1947 when he took on Howard Hughes before a subcommittee of the Senate War Investigation Committee, which he chaired. The investigation was over why Hughes had received millions of dollars in government funds, thanks to President Roosevelt and his son Elliott, an Air Force colonel, but had failed to produce any airplanes for the military.

Hughes, a filmmaker as well as an industrialist, turned the tables on Brewster. Hughes claimed that at a private lunch, Brewster had attempted to “blackmail” him, offering to drop the investigation if the Texan would merge his Trans World Airlines with Pan American Airways, and support Brewster’s bill to give Pan Am a monopoly over international flight routes to Europe.

With this sensational charge and others about Brewster accepting free flights and other gratuities from Pan Am, Hughes created a media circus. Brewster ended up appearing as a witness before his own committee to defend himself. This is the event that is dramatized in “The Aviator,” with Alda as Brewster.

Hughes got the last laugh, or one of them anyway. The next year, after he acquired RKO studios, he entertained the staff there by offering Brewster a $300-a-week job as an actor. “This is twice the usual starting salary, but you are no amateur; your ability as an actor has been well demonstrated,” he wrote to the senator from Maine.

There were other controversies, the most famous involving a $10,000 check Brewster gave to Washington influence peddler Henry Grunewald to help fund the first senatorial campaign of Richard Nixon and another candidate. Brewster testified before a congressional investigating committee that he used Grunewald as a “conduit” for a loan because he was not allowed to make the transfer directly as chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee.

In 1952, Brewster had his day of reckoning when he was defeated for renomination by Gov. Frederick G. Payne. Everyone seemed to be after him. Drew Pearson, the investigative columnist, hated Brewster and wrote 50 columns attacking him in the two years before he was defeated, according to Jack Anderson, Pearson’s acolyte, in his book “Confessions of a Muckraker.”

Pearson played a role in recruiting Payne to run against Brewster and then in getting Howard Hughes to provide the campaign with $50,000 or nearly that amount. Brewster lost by 3,000 votes. Hughes had won again.

In assessing Brewster’s career, it is easy to get up on the politically correct soapbox called hindsight and condemn him as many people have done. Without the context of the times, however, including a knowledge of the trials, fears and prejudices that beset America back then, such pronouncements are pointless.

Brewster was a product of his times, no better than most of the people he represented, although he should have been. They were rough times. People harbored racism and tolerated corruption. Maine was far from the political mainstream, a bastion of right-wing politics that would make most conservatives cringe today.

Brewster was one of the last actors on this rustic stage, rousing the emotions of his audience whatever he did and wherever he went. He won some and he lost some, but he was always entertaining.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.