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.
