A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

by Timothy Egan

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.

It would not be the Klan of the whip and the sword, but the Klan of the hearth and the Lord.

twin demons

hayley and i

“Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan.”

i need to hear this

and sent a five-foot-high bouquet of lilies spelling out the initials KKK to his funeral in Marion, Ohio.

For here was a man liberated from shame, a man who not only boasted of being able to get away with any violation of human decency for his entire life, but had just proved it for all to see.

J. Edgar Hoover,

omg from killers of the flower moon wow it’s almost like it’s actually real life!!!

“Nothing to it. I’ll never be indicted.” A day after his arrest, Stephenson was indicted

When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do.

The fear was that if evolution were accepted, it would imply that all people had a common origin. For the Klan, that meant there was “no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise,”

“The parade was grander and gaudier, by far, than anything the wizards had prophesied. It was longer, it was thicker, it was higher in tone.” The New York Times called it “the greatest demonstration ever staged by the Ku Klux Klan.”

literally all you had to do to amaze someone the 1920s is to build a tall structure or form large crowds

“We have nothing to give out to your paper,” he said. He was angered because Niblack had described him, in the prior day’s Times, as “haggard, for a well-fed fat man.”

It’s entirely possible that the Klan fell apart not just because of scandals and high-level hypocrisy, but also because it had achieved all of its major goals—Prohibition, disenfranchisement of African Americans, slamming the door on immigrants whose religion or skin color didn’t match that of the majority.