But his research took him to the heartland. A third-generation Pacific north-westerner, Egan, formerly an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, was originally interested in writing about Klan power in the state of Oregon, where membership rates in the 1920s were second only to Indiana. Her deathbed statement underpinned the trial against Stephenson, which forms the final section of a book Egan hopes plays out like a “historical thriller”. She died nearly a month later from mercury poisoning and an infection from the bite wounds, but not before delivering a sworn statement on what happened to her. Stephenson eventually dropped her at home and said she’d been in a car accident. Intoxicated, bleeding and held captive at a hotel, Oberholtzer asked to purchase a hat from a drug store she also bought a box of mercury chloride tablets. He and several associates put her on a train, where Stephenson raped her and gouged her body with bite marks. In March 1925, the Grand Dragon abducted Madge Oberholtzer, a 28-year-old college graduate from Indianapolis who had been meeting with him to advocate for her job in a Reading Circle program about to be slashed by budget cuts. Egan swiftly traces its astonishing spread and then its downfall in Indiana, after Stephenson did something too distasteful even for the Klan: he murdered a white woman, and got caught. In the fall of 1915, on the heels of the success of DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation – one in four Americans viewed the propaganda film depicting white women saved from brutish Black men by Klansmen – the Klan was revived outside Atlanta. The Klan was originally formed in the 1860s by Confederate veterans, but died out faced with resistance by the government during Reconstruction. ![]() “These were average white people that took an oath to forever support white supremacy.” They were not the criminal element, they were not the psychopaths, sickos and all that,” said Egan. “These were the people who held their communities together. The first third of Egan’s book charts the chilling rise of the Klan among “normal” Americans – hate sanitized and legitimized by its blatant weaving into everyday midwestern life. “The Old Man”, as he was called, told many ordinary “native-born” Hoosiers what they wanted to hear: the problem was with change, and change was anyone who was not a white Protestant of Anglo-Saxon or Nordic heritage – Black people, Jews, Catholics (especially those from southern Europe), the disabled or infirm. He got a Klan-endorsed man elected governor of the state, and commanded a private police force of 30,000 people.Ī KKK parade. But his sordid past did not stop his rise to the height of political power in Indiana – by 1925, when he was 33 years old, the Grand Dragon had grown Indiana membership to 250,000, over which he ruled near-absolutely and raked in dues. And no person in Indiana held more power than DC Stephenson, the group’s Grand Dragon, a conman who presided over the Kokomo celebration in that prop plane.ĭavid Curtis Stephenson was, among other things: a Texan by birth, a failed businessman, a drifter, a profligate spender, a serial cheater, a fabulist and a sexual sadist with a thing for biting women. By the time of the Kokomo rally in 1923, roughly one in three white males in Indiana had sworn an oath to violently uphold white supremacy – a fact surprising to many white people from the midwest, which has underplayed its history of mainstreaming the Klan in the 1920s. No state had a higher rate of participation at the height of the Klan’s powers in the 1920s than Indiana. And the 20s part of it, which was the real peak of their power, is just completely overlooked.” “You think of the Klan, you think of these toothless groups in the 60s or you think of these ex-Confederates. “It’s a history that’s been just sort of forgotten,” Egan told the Guardian. The order’s national paper, the Imperial Night-Hawk, had a larger circulation than the New York Times. As Egan notes in A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, the Klan had, by the early 1920s, 15 US senators under their influence, as well as 75 congressmen, several governors and the mayor of Anaheim, California. There were Women of the Klan leagues and Ku Klux Kiddies groups. ![]() Membership was somewhere between 2 and 5 million nationwide, and was disproportionately middle-class – doctors, lawyers, teachers, many, many policemen. That was in line with many other Indiana towns and cities in the early 1920s, when the Klan, as the author Timothy Egan recounts in a startling new book, was brazenly resurgent and mainstream across the country.
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