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

by Timothy Egan

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction.

The crowd could not know that their illustrious leader was a drunk and a fraud, a wife-beater and a sex predator, a serial liar and an unfettered braggart, a bootlegger and a blackmailer, caught by police barely a month earlier in an act that these very people were crusading against.

But even if the Fourth of July celebrants in Kokomo knew about the Big Lie of Stephenson’s life, would it have mattered? They believed because they wanted to believe.

“But apparently we haven’t freed men and women of their suspicion of each other, their prejudices, their intolerance. I think it’s going to be a big battle in this century.

“They paid ten dollars to hate someone,” said a Denver judge, “and they were determined to get their money’s worth.”

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

he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress—was brilliant. And true.