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

by Timothy Egan

They built an altar on which they laid a Bible, an American flag, and a sword. The men set fire to a cross and shouted to the heavens an oath of allegiance to the Invisible Empire of a new age. The Ku Klux Klan had risen, Simmons proclaimed, “awakened from a slumber of a half a century.”

Madison Grant, a Yale-educated New York zoologist, had been trying to prove for years that southern Europeans were lesser humans than those from the north; they had low foreheads, he claimed, in addition to being both slothful and oversexed—a seeming contradiction. His book The Passing of the Great Race was a favorite of many Klansmen, and was later embraced by Hitler, who called it “my bible.”

The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”