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

by Timothy Egan

All but two of the ninety-two counties had a chapter—the only state with such saturation.

Indiana

The state had passed the world’s first eugenic sterilization law, targeting “idiots, imbeciles, and confirmed criminals,” as the statute dictated. The Klan was now pushing for a more severe measure, singling out paupers, alcoholics, thieves, prostitutes, and those with epilepsy to be sterilized against their will.

Indiana

D. C. Stephenson saw an opportunity. He was the featured speaker in October 1922 at the Horse Thief Detective Association’s sixty-second annual convention in the northern Indiana town of Logansport.

He understood people’s fears and their need to blame others for their failures. 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.

Sounds very familiar in today's America

Independence Day 1923 High in the Fourth of July sky over Kokomo, a small biplane came into view at midmorning, a speck in the stonewashed blue of a still and stifling day. On the ground, a mass of white-sheeted men and women, the largest crowd ever gathered in the history of the Klan, craned to get a look at what was dropping from the heavens. They had come from all over the Midwest, and their parked machines clotted roads for seven miles outward—spokes of solidarity radiating from the belly of Indiana.

To Steve, it was a perfect picture of small-town America on the nation’s birthday. Fully half the town of 30,000 belonged to the Klan, including mayor, prosecutor, police force, and school board. The local chapter took out ads in the Fiery Cross, bragging that the city had a higher proportion of Klansmen than any other community in Indiana. And the daily newspaper printed notices of upcoming Klan events on its front page, alongside the weather forecast.

Kokomo, IN

It was the averageness of Kokomo—“the dead level typical-ness of the town,” as one native son who was there on that day recalled—that made it an ideal host for the hate group that had taken over the Heartland.

The Klan made life less dull; it gave meaning, shape, and purpose to the days. Folks got their news from editors loyal to the Klan or from a gossip chain that started with a Klan poison squad plant. They took their moral guidance from preachers in the pocket of the hooded order. 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 few who did not look like them were no trouble in Kokomo. The town mandated segregation in 1919, ordering all Black children, no matter where they lived, to attend a sc...

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.

The Klan’s official estimate of the assemblage—200,000 klansmen meet was the Fiery Cross headline—was surely an exaggeration. But even a low guess of about 100,000 by the Indianapolis Star gave credence to the Klan paper’s assertion that Kokomo had hosted “the biggest crowd of one-hundred percent Americans that ever assembled in any one place at any one time.” It was “a throng beyond the comprehension of the human mind.”

As the New York Times noted, “In no other state of the union, not even Texas, is the domination of the Ku Klux Klan so absolute as it is in Indiana.”

Stunned at the breadth of Stephenson’s makeover of the Midwest, the paper put the number of Hoosiers in hoods at half a million.

By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

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.

As darkness fell, they passed by Kokomo. The Klan had opened a fifty-bed hospital—the fruition of the funding drive started on the Fourth of July, 1923.

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.

They fully embraced the name solidified after students, including their quarterback, had routed Klansmen in South Bend in May 1924—the Fighting Irish.

Under oath, Stephenson claimed to have taken in the modern equivalent of $29 million in initiation fees for the Invisible Empire. He got at least 40 percent of that.

“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?” To D. C. Stephenson, it wasn’t strange at all. Steve’s 1922 epiphany in Evansville—that 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.

Indiana had pioneered the world’s first compulsory sterilization law. And a new measure that Governor Jackson signed in 1927 was enforced until 1974, allowing the state to deny thousands of Hoosiers the ability to bring children into the world. The same year that the new law went into effect, the United States Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, upheld the right to sterilize a “feeble-minded” woman in a mental institution.