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 deputized had powers that local sheriffs did not: they could cross county lines and didn’t feel a need to go to court before conducting a home raid.

He said, “They volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism.”

These people needed to hate something smaller than themselves as much as they needed to have faith in something greater than themselves.

“We’ve gone a long way in this country,” he said to his son. “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.

Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.

He hated the Klan, hated the way they waved the flag while hiding their faces,

W. E. B. Du Bois had written, 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.”

Democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.

But take away the courage of Madge Oberholtzer as she lay dying from poison and the sadism of Stephenson, and there is no extinguisher of the flames that enveloped the nation during the 1920s.

A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s there still, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland. The Grand Dragon was a symptom, not a cause,