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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Timothy Egan
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February 26 - March 5, 2025
The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.
did not sell the Klan in Indiana on hatreds,” Stephenson said. “I sold it on Americanism.” These people knew what they’d signed up for: that oath before God could not have been more specific about the absolute superiority of one race and one religion and the inferiority of all others.
In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.
The guiding principle was the superiority of white, Protestant, native-born Americans over everyone else. On the point of tribal identity, there was no wavering. “We seek to create, as never before, one grand, glorious America,”
The Klan that spread to the North was steeped in homegrown Christianity practiced by everyday folks. But instead of love your neighbor, these Klansmen hated many a neighbor.
The modern Klan rejected modernism—the world was spinning too fast, and they didn’t like it one bit. When President Warren Harding, a man of refined mediocrity, was elected in 1920, he’d promised a “return to normalcy.”
The numbers of men with tin stars grew in stride with the Klan, from 8,000 deputies to 14,000 in little more than a year. While only those four horses were stolen in all of 1922, the Horse Thief Detective Association added twenty-eight chapters statewide. At the same time, they helped Stephenson swell the ranks of Indiana Klansmen, signing up fellow members of the local horse thief brigade, while distributing stickers for shopkeepers to put in their windows—“TWK, Trade With Klan.” With all these new allies, Steve was on a roll, bringing in upward of 2,000 new Klansmen every week.
The Klan and temperance crusaders formed a perfect team.
She wasn’t afraid of the New America; she lived it. And she certainly had no intention of lending support to the Invisible Empire.
News accounts of the riot would give rise to a story that still lives, that the “Fighting Irish” nickname was forever set by the clash of Notre Dame against the Ku Klux Klan on May 17, 1924.
Nationwide, when members of the secretive society opened their daily newspapers they found that their prayers to a discriminatory God had been answered. The last of the big three issues that had driven membership to unprecedented heights was resolved in the Klan’s favor. Congress passed an immigration measure that slammed the door on those who could never meet the Klan’s definition of one hundred percent American.
Though the Klan took credit for “wielding a mighty influence” in Congress, they had plenty of help from people who never took the secret oath. Voting with the Klan was the easy thing to do, for the backlash against immigration had reached a point where a majority in office was ready to close the gates.
That was a day, said Will Rogers, “when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced.”
Awesome quote.
She showed up at Stephenson’s office, a little nervous. His Klan had aggressively shamed people Madge knew. The price of doing business with him, at this point, involved a certain amount of looking away, or willful ignorance.
“Are you a Klansman?” Senator James Reed asked the mayor. “Yes,” he replied. His admission was a surprise only to those who were unwilling to read the true mood in the Heartland of the 1920s. As D. C. Stephenson had learned from his early days building the Invisible Empire along the banks of the Ohio, being a Klansman was no encumbrance in the great American midsection. When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do.
One of the few who stood out and stood up was the Civil War veteran William Stern. He was outraged at this variant of Christianity that urged people to loathe their fellow man. His faith taught him that all God’s children were equal in the eyes of the Creator.
Five days later, Stephenson was roused from his cell at four a.m., placed in an open-air car and driven by Sheriff Gooding 155 miles north to the state penitentiary in Michigan City, just off the shore of the big lake. The night before, he’d been given a haircut and shave, and one last lavish meal from the lawman’s wife. He also spoke to the press, calling his opponents “zero-intellect individuals who have arrayed themselves against me—some through envy, some through jealousy, some through fear, more through political disappointment.”
He had battered, bitten, and raped women without consequence because his power—wrapped in sanctimony from Sunday pulpits in idyllic towns, crowned in the Fourth of July glory of the cornfields of Kokomo, displayed for all to see at the governor’s inaugural ball—had insulated him.
Democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.
The Republican Party was outraged—not at the disclosures of Stephenson’s web of graft, but at the press for reporting it. This journalism was the work of Jews, party officials implied.
