We should have learned from the past. A review of A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND.

I love a good history book that focuses on the less well-known aspects of the past. The people and events at some pivotal moment that made an impact on the world, but whose lives and actions have faded into obscurity with the passage of time, and the confluence of events that followed. A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan, is certainly one of those books. I have read enough of the history of the 1920s to know that there was a resurgence of the Klan during that decade, and have seen pictures of the huge parade down Pennsylvania Avenue the Klan staged in Washington D.C. in the summer of 1925, but this book really goes behind the scenes, and reveals the who, the what, and the why, of how this most disreputable of organizations flourished at that point in time.

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND is the story of D.C. Stephenson, a gifted conman and serial liar, who helped build up the Klan in the state of Indiana in the early 1920s. The man was a gifted salesman, an entrepreneur, and possessing no small amount of charisma. He also had a Napoleonic complex with all of its attending vanity, and a true dark side as a philanderer and adulterer capable of committing depraved sexual abuse against women. A cunning opportunist with a talent for self-reinvention, Stephenson drifted into the Midwest from Texas early in the decade and quickly grasped the potential of a revitalized Ku Klux Klan, a lawless vigilante group that gained great notoriety in the defeated Confederacy after the Civil War by terrorizing the newly freed slaves. It took the actions of the federal government during Reconstruction to suppress that version of the Klan and drive it underground, but it found new adherents after World War I among White Protestants alarmed at the surge of immigrants, most of them Jews and Catholics, into America from Europe, and seemingly overnight, the Klan rose from the grave, still virulently opposed to any advancement toward equality by Black Americans, but now filled with animus toward the Jews and Catholics. It was all a grift, as someone commented on how the good citizens of Indiana could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet. Stephenson, as the Grand Dragon of Indiana, was a tireless salesman for this group, recruiting not only farmers and businessmen to his cause, but their wives and children as well.

I learned a lot from A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND, starting with how this incarnation of the Klan was far more powerful and influential in the Midwest of the time than in the Deep South, numbering among their ranks everybody from sheriffs and police chiefs to Governors, all elected on slates filled with candidates who had sworn the secret oath. This helped make Stephenson the man who pulled the strings, so much so that he could truthfully say “I am the law” in the state of Indiana. What this book also makes plain is that the Klan’s poison reached into both the Democratic and Republican parties, with office holders from both of them lining up to swear the secret oath. This refutes a talking point popular on some current right-wings who claim that the Klan was wholly an apparatus of the Democrats.

In the popular imagination, the Roaring 20s is romanticized as the Jazz Age with its flappers and high fashion, speakeasies and gin joints, where everyone looked like they just stepped out from the pages of THE GREAT GATSBY. The truth of it was that a culture war raged behind all the gaiety, and the Klan was the tip of the spear of the reactionaries who wanted no part of a changing modern America. Besides terrorizing “the other” with whippings and beatings, they also inflicted violence on bootleggers, gamblers, those committing infidelity, or anyone else suspected of violating their pious and puritanical view of society. All the while, D.C. Stephenson, a man who had deserted his first wife and child, drank continuously and pursued any woman who caught his fancy, often committing sexual battery against them behind closed doors. This was well known to the circle of hucksters and hustlers, and those who simply wanted to be near power, that surrounded him, but never said a word, easily enabling Stephenson, who they referred to as “the old man” even though he was only in his mid-30s. This sorry state of affairs came to a head in early 1925 when he kidnapped and brutalized a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer to the point where she poisoned herself in what was ultimately a successful suicide attempt to escape her tormentor. What followed was a trial where dark secrets were revealed, and justice, as much as it could be said, was done. The ensuing scandal did much to discredit the Klan in the eyes of the public. But the hate it stoked and fed off of was not defeated, it simply went into retreat, lying not very far under the placid surface of American life, ready to show itself again whenever it felt threatened by social change, easily called forth by no end of talented demagogues and hate mongers of which there were no short supply.

I found Egan’s book to be an easy read, my hardback copy coming in at a little over 350 pages, with a strong narrative voice. The author has done his research well, really making the era and the people who lived through it come alive, both the obvious villains, and the brave few who stood up to the Klan at the height of its power. Occasionally, Egan lets Progressive piety get the better of him, and a judgmental tone that I found unnecessary works its way into his writing when it would have been far better to simply let the facts speak for themselves. And I think his title is a little misleading in that it paints Madge Oberholtzer as a heroine, when to me, she clearly comes off as a victim, though a brave one.

Though Egan does not explicitly point it out, the events and persons recounted in A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND, now a century in the past, do bear a striking resemblance to the America of today. Our politics is again riven by hatred of “the other,” and cunning demagogues and serial liars stoke fear and resentment to gain power, and the wealth and fame that comes with it, while their followers and supporters hang on their every word. After the Klan had fallen out of favor and its adherents had been voted out of office, and observer back in the late 1920s said that “the air in America was too friendly” for a disease like the Klu Klux Klan to last for long. I hope that is still true.

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