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

by Timothy Egan

To Evans, Nordic whites were the only true Americans and the most advanced humans on earth. All others—“Dagoes, Hunkies, Micks, Slavs, Slopes, Kikes,” in his vernacular shorthand—were filth and scum. The Nordic race, by which he meant British of Anglo-Saxon blood, Teutonic Germans, and descendants of Vikings from the north, was responsible for civilization. He hated immigrants. He hated Catholics. He hated the sexual freedom of the Jazz Age, in film and in smoky clubs.

“The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be—with the Anglo-Saxon race,”

With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people. In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.

Stephenson raged against traitors and spies inside his realm. He threw things against the wall, stubbed his cigar on the floor, screamed at subordinates until he was out of breath. Even when he wasn’t drinking, his anger storms could overturn a room. He moved swiftly into federal court, seeking an injunction to stop Tolerance from further publication.

The Klan could not have framed it better. In Colorado, the Klan referenced “scientific evidence” as proof that “descendants of savage ancestors or the jungle environment” along with certain immigrants were unfit to ever govern the United States.

“I want to put all the Catholics, Jews and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft,” said a Klan speaker in rural Whitley County, just outside Fort Wayne. His suggestion was met with wild applause.

They threw money into a huge pot—$50,000 at day’s end—for construction of a Klan-exclusive hospital, because members didn’t want to be treated at the city’s only hospital, run by Catholic sisters.

A cross was lit on the lawn of a Black family in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a note pinned to the door. “The Kluxers have paid your disorderly house its first visit to warn you and the rest of your kind to close up and get out,” was the message. “Now listen up, you black violators, close your place and go. Erie doesn’t want you.”

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. —

“Colored people throughout the United States, but especially in the North, are waiting for an unequivocal statement from you as head of the Republican Party on the Ku Klux Klan,” Johnson wrote Coolidge. The president ignored his plea. Still, Johnson would not give up.

Also among those denied entry because of restrictions on Jews was the family of Anne Frank.

The Klan was united against New York governor Al Smith, a Catholic who fought Prohibition and was favored by many Northern Democrats. Under no circumstances would the Empire allow Smith, “from Jew York City,” in the Klan’s taunt, to be the nominee.

Unlike the founding document of the United States, the constitution of his Confederacy specifically enshrined slavery as an irrevocable right, removing all doubt about the reason for that new nation’s existence.

Gutzon Borglum, the Klan insider and eventual sculptor of Mount Rushmore, a man Stephenson had called “my close personal friend,” started work on a marble carving of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the slave states.

State censorship of movies; films labeled “immoral” by a government commission would be banned. Mandatory Bible reading in public schools—but only the King James Version, the scripture favored by Protestants.

Those churchmen speaking the one hundred percent Americanism language—he was disgusted by it.

In that spring of 1925, a posse of hooded Klansmen on horseback rode up to the house of Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a Baptist preacher who led the local chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Nebraska Klan had swelled to an all-time high, 45,000 members, with a women’s brigade and a Ku Klux Kiddies as well. The marauders waved torches and smashed windows at the house. They demanded that the preacher come out and face the mob. His pregnant wife, Louise, with three small children at her side, said her husband was not home. Had he been in the house, he might have faced a lynching. The Klansmen told her that “good Christian white people” would not tolerate a troublemaker stirring things up among “the good negroes.” They smashed every window in the house before galloping off into the night. A few days later, the preacher’s wife gave birth to a son—the boy who would become Malcolm X.

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.

behind “the yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim, lynch, and burn at the stake is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something.”

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,” as the Defender, a Black newspaper in Chicago, put it.

not to foster racial hatred or harm the Negro; but to preserve the purity of the white Caucasian blood, oppose the inter-marriage of races and maintain forever the doctrine of white supremacy.”

Women were considered fragile, emotional, impractical, and unable to sustain hard thinking.

In the years following World War II, Jim Crow was gradually disassembled. President Harry Truman integrated the military in 1948. The United States Supreme Court ended the doctrine of “separate but equal” with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Ten years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The schools of Indianapolis remained segregated until 1971, when a federal court ordered them to integrate.

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the majority opinion. In the years that followed, about 70,000 Americans who were deemed a threat to the national gene pool—the deaf, the blind, ethnic minorities, people with epilepsy, homosexuals, poor people, and “promiscuous” women—were sterilized against their will. Nazi Germany defended its own 1936 eugenics law by pointing to the United States as a role model.