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 Klan prided itself on how quickly it could spread a lie: from a kitchen table to the whole state in six hours or less.

By the dawn of the 1920s, about 2,500 people in the state had been sterilized against their will. More than half of those forced into a procedure to end their bloodline were labeled “mentally deficient,” a term broad enough to include “idiots, imbeciles, and degenerates” but also “epileptic persons” and the highest grade of legal inferiority—“morons.” The law was finally struck down by the state supreme court in 1921, though a new statute was drafted soon thereafter and became a top priority of the Klan.

“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 were good people, or so they told themselves, of the same faith and same race, with the same fears and the same goals—though they were modest only to a point, as this showing of self-congratulatory sentiment made clear.

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.

Sounds like someone else we know hmmmm

A group of Notre Dame students pointed them into dead ends and out toward the edge of town, deliberately misdirecting them.

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.

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

When no help—not even a word—arrived from President Coolidge, the city’s Black leaders rebelled. They formed a breakaway political bloc and vowed to vote Democratic for the first time. They staged a massive march of their own down Indiana Avenue, 5,000 strong, with banners blasting the Klan.

The margin was 82,000. But for the first time, the Black vote went Democratic—by three to one. It was the start of a tectonic political realignment, in Indiana and elsewhere. Johnson had forced a divorce. Never again could Republicans count on a monolithic vote from African Americans.

side. But he’d never dreamed that one of the women he’d kicked around could bring him down, especially not a schoolteacher, a postal clerk’s kid—this girl.

“Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?”

As a mass movement, the Klan was finished—membership down by 90 percent nationwide in the three years since the words of Madge Oberholtzer put away the Grand Dragon.

In 2022, Congress finally passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a bill making lynching a federal crime—122 years after the first such legislation was introduced.

Absolutely INSANE that this was only 3 years ago.