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 dens of the Heartland were not small or isolated or insignificant by any measure. Nor were their members ignorant of the power of their beliefs. They rose to their feet and cheered speakers who called Jews “un-American parasites.” They harassed and threatened Catholic clergy and nuns. They passed laws to prevent Black people from moving into their neighborhoods, going to public schools of their choice, or marrying people of another race. They voted overwhelmingly for the Klan slate in state and local elections. On occasion, they clubbed and terrified their enemies, or ran them out of town on a few hours’ notice. They bombed homes and set fires. They didn’t hide by day and only come out at night. They were people who held their communities together, bankers and merchants, lawyers and doctors, coaches and teachers, servants of God and shapers of opinion. Their wives belonged to the Klan women’s auxiliary, and their masked children marched in parades under the banner of the Ku Klux Kiddies.

“I did not sell the Klan in Indiana on hatreds,” Stephenson said. “I sold it on Americanism.” These people knew what they’d signed up for: that oath before God could not have been more specific about the absolute superiority of one race and one religion and the inferiority of all others.

In early 1867, a Tennessee paper reported the rise of “some general and unrefined dread among Negroes of a secret order that has recently made its appearance.” And that secret order had spread beyond Pulaski. At a regional convention in Nashville, a prominent Tennessean, Nathan Bedford Forrest, declared himself the first Grand Wizard. As a Confederate general, Forrest was notorious for the Fort Pillow Massacre, the execution of about 150 Black Union soldiers who had thrown down their arms and surrendered. On his orders, they were bayoneted, clubbed to death, and “shot down like dogs,” one Confederate soldier wrote. Pardoned by Johnson of the war crime, Forrest had trouble making a living in an economy no longer built on human property.

In July 1866, a white mob backed by police stormed a Black political gathering in New Orleans, stomping men to death, shooting, stabbing, and mutilating others. More than thirty people died and 160 were seriously hurt before federal troops restored order. A similar scene bloodied the streets of Memphis that year—a three-day war that killed forty-six Black people and reduced twelve schools and four churches to ash-heaps. In Arkansas, more than 2,000 African Americans were murdered in the months leading up to the 1868 presidential election. In Lafayette County, Mississippi, thirty Black residents were driven out of their homes and forced to the water’s edge, where they were drowned. In the years that followed, people who fished the Yocona River snagged human skulls and bones from the depths.

Violence escalated: lynching, arson, beatings, a reign of orchestrated bloodshed for the last three years of Johnson’s chaotic term. The exact number of deaths has never been fully established, but one military commander, General John Reynolds, reported from Texas that murders of Black citizens were “so common as to render it impossible to keep an accurate account of them.” Sheriffs would not arrest their criminal neighbors. Witnesses were intimidated or murdered. “We can inform you that we are the law itself,” was the message delivered from a Klan unit to one teacher in Mississippi.

In the first lightning strike, the 13th Amendment, slavery was formally outlawed in 1865. In the second, passed after the president was killed, a citizen was defined in the 14th Amendment as anyone born or naturalized in the United States. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prevented states from denying voting rights based on color. Grant called the last of the three additions “the most important event that has occurred since the nation came to life.”

The enemy was “the most atrocious organization that the civilized part of the world has ever known,” Grant’s Justice Department declared. After Congress handed him the tools he needed, the president used the Ku Klux Klan Acts to hammer the hooded order. He sent federal authorities, backed by more federal troops, to prosecute what were now federal crimes. He declared martial law in places. He suspended habeas corpus. In the fall of 1869, nearly 2,000 Klansmen were arrested in South Carolina alone. By end of the next year, 3,000 were indicted across the South. A third of them were convicted and sent away with long prison terms. Acknowledging defeat, the Klan formally disbanded under an order from Forrest. He burned all records.

The church lesson of March 26, 1922—front-page news in Evansville—was not lost on D. C. Stephenson, who pored over a half-dozen papers a day looking for clues on what made modern America tick. “It was the first public appearance by the Klan,” the fledgling order announced to the press, “but it won’t be the last.” Money changing hands in a house of God was usually viewed with skepticism. But this bribe of a soul merchant was part of a pattern: the new Klan would build its foundation with the blessing of Protestant clergy.

In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right. Restaurants and grocery stores, drinking fountains and swimming pools, theaters and bars, buses and trains, playgrounds and schoolhouses, even phone booths—all were segregated by race. The Supreme Court backed the electoral disenfranchisement and the lower-class citizenship of millions, finding novel ways around the civil rights amendments to the Constitution.

On Thanksgiving night in 1915, fifty years after the close of the Civil War, Simmons and fifteen other men clambered up the granite monolith of Stone Mountain in Georgia. 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.”

The original hooded order directed most of its venom against Black people. With Jews and immigrants of an old faith based in Rome pouring into the country, the revived Klan would open up fresh categories of undesirables. Hate was tailored to the region—Asians on the Pacific coast, Mexicans in the Southwest, Mormons in the Rocky Mountains, Blacks in the South, Jews on the East Coast, and immigrants and Catholics everywhere. To this list was added sex—that is, all the new cultural expressions of sensuality.

The modern Klan rejected modernism—the world was spinning too fast, and they didn’t like it one bit. When President Warren Harding, a man of refined mediocrity, was elected in 1920, he’d promised a “return to normalcy.” But the twenties were anything but normal, especially among young adults. “Here was a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. The buildings were taller, the stocks higher, the cars faster, the parties gaudier and more excessive. People threw off the cultural remnants of the nineteenth century with abandon, even as others were relentlessly holding back the twentieth century.

The second-wave Klan could return to its roots of terror because it had survived the kind of scrutiny that would have killed off any other secret society in a democracy. A three-week exposé by the New York World in the fall of 1921 had detailed murder, flogging, iron-branding, arson—at least one hundred acts of vigilante violence nationwide. The revelations, many people thought, would horrify most Americans. The series was widely syndicated and prompted a congressional investigation. With cameras clicking and a mass of reporters in attendance, Imperial Wizard Simmons told another story in Washington. “Allow me to introduce myself: I am a churchman.”

There was nothing wrong with promoting white supremacy—it was only “race pride,” he said. “I cannot see anything anti-American in that.” He dismissed the numerous stories of violence as the work of “a paper owned and controlled by a Jew,” and imposters trying to take down the Invisible Empire. “Our masks and robe are not worn for the purpose of terrorizing people. I say before God, they are as innocent as the breath of an angel.”

No longer fearing federal oversight, the Invisible Empire planted new chapters throughout the Midwest, and up and down the West Coast. In Colorado, it was led by a physician, Dr. John Galen Locke, who operated out of the luxurious Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. Like Stephenson and Evans, Locke wanted to package the resentments of the age into a political force. And he recruited heavily among the Denver police. It was an open door.

As they moved closer into the Klan circle, recruits had to answer twenty questions from a membership checklist before becoming naturalized, including: “Are you a Gentile or a Jew? “Are you of the White race or Colored Race? “What color are your eyes? Hair? “Do you believe in the principles of pure Americanism? “Do you believe in White Supremacy?”

Finally, after being properly vetted, a new member donned a pointed hood with a tassel on top, and a white robe, and put his hand on a Bible. For many, it was a thrilling moment, a break from the tedium of daily life. “I swear that I will most zealously and valiantly shield and preserve by any and all justifiable means and methods White Supremacy. I will seal with my blood by Thou my witness, Almighty God.”

In advance of a visit to new territory, Stephenson would usually place a print ad or have a pastor promote his appearance from the pulpit. As he entered a church, a town hall, or a school gym to make his Klan sales pitch, he saw every Hoosier head as a dollar sign. “We used to look over the crowd when we first came in and try to estimate what it would net us,” recalled his right-hand man, Court Asher. “We’d hire a minister at $25 a lecture and then get their whole congregation to join at $10 a head.” The new Klan was not for poor people. That $10 initiation fee was more than the average factory worker made in a day. Plus, there were quarterly dues and uniform requirements. Stephenson got his cut of everything. In a given week, he was taking in five times more than most Americans made in a year. He was well on his way to becoming a millionaire.

Now he instructed his agents to compile dossiers on local public servants, dissenters, and troublemakers. He also ordered them to create a file on every person of voting age, with particular emphasis on those who might be enemies of the Klan. Along with “Bootleggers and Bolsheviks,” the edict singled out “All Jews, All Negroes, All Roman Catholics.” Across the state, men with badges and no uniforms took to the field as the eyes and ears of a very ambitious Klansman.

By year’s end, Stephenson had accomplished something that the initial Klan had not: his vigilantes were part of the system. They operated freely and openly, and their crimes were not punished, just as in Texas. And this time around, there were no federal authorities to interfere. All of it was exhilarating to the men in sheets, as a sociologist found out after reviewing questionnaires answered by individual Klansmen. “Membership in a vast mysterious empire that ‘sees and hears all’ means a sort of mystic glorification of his petty self,” wrote John Moffatt Mecklin. “The appeal is irresistible.”

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.

Between 1900 and 1915, the average adult consumed thirteen drinks a week—2.5 gallons of pure alcohol a year.

Prohibition, marking the first time the Constitution had been changed to take away a right, was followed one year later with a vast expansion of rights—the amendment giving women the vote in every state. Universal suffrage had long been blocked by Southern legislators who feared arming Black women with electoral power, even within the harsh restrictions of Jim Crow. But the movement to expand the vote also included people who shared the Klan’s view of using the newly enfranchised to its advantage, since whites had a far easier time at the polls.

Thus, it was a different Daisy Barr who packed grange halls and coliseums in early 1923. Her belief in voting rights and temperance had evolved into a broader vision of white supremacy maintained by the rising political strength of women. In public, the big heart that had once brimmed with benevolence for fallen humans had shriveled into a raisin of racial animus.

While campaigning against alcohol, she’d fallen in with the Anti-Saloon League, her gateway to the Ku Klux Klan. They shared many of the same values, rooted in a militant evangelism. “The father and mother of the Ku Klux Klan is the Anti-Saloon League,” said Clarence Darrow, an assertion that few would dispute. Stephenson modeled his Klan on the well-oiled Anti-Saloon League, using the same Protestant churches a...

The Klansman and Mother made a pact designed to enrich both of them. Barr would get a staff of recruiters; they would work the crowds in the stands after she had worked them into a lather from the stage. She received a special robe, cape, and hood, and a title: Imperial Empress of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan.

The female Klan of Indiana held its first statewide convention in July 1923, with a parade of white-robed women on horseback, bands and floats, initiation ceremonies, speeches on virtue and temperance, and a cross burning at night. New members were fitted for hoods with cardboard inside to keep the pointy shape over fresh-coiffed hair.

Among Steve’s circle, Daisy Barr was the only woman with power. She had moved with great speed in her new role. Together they oversaw another element in the design for a family-friendly Klan: a children’s brigade. The Ku Klux Kiddies were issued small-sized robes and masks, recited pledges and songs at regular den meetings, and marched in parades. “This is a godsend to us,” one parent wrote to the Fiery Cross. “We have a son who is too young to join the Klan, and with this new order he will be able to gratify his wishes to become affiliated with a strictly American organization.”

Steve and Barr also launched poison squads, as they were known on the inside. This was a disinformation brigade—clucks and gossips, but the best-known clucks and gossips in every community, so that false stories could be plausibly true. The fake news originated at the top and was planted at the bottom. It might be a whispered suggestion over a neighbor’s fence that a Black family was planning to move nearby. Or that a public servant was a Jew. 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. The poison served a purpose—to intimidate and frighten certain businesses, as well as local politicians. After a lie took hold, particularly in a small community, some merchants were driven into bankruptcy.

Now, back in Indiana in mid-1923 for one last attempt at reconciliation, she realized too late that this man she’d pledged to spend her life with would never change. Again, he berated Violet in front of his friends and openly cheated on her. He seemed to revel in her humiliation and her fear of him. His explanation, without apology, was that he was “not cut out to be a husband.” If she wanted to stay alive, Violet would have to leave him once and for all—maybe hide somewhere in a different city. He said good riddance and threw her against the wall. He would not let her go without one more beating. She sobbed and tried to defend herself, putting her arms around her head. He slapped her hands away and punched her in the face—a blow nearly strong enough to knock her out. With women, Stephenson never lost a fight. She tumbled to the ground, her vision blurred, her face bloodied. He kicked her in the ribs as he had done in Evansville, putting hard-tipped shoes to flesh, and told her to get out. She grabbed a few possessions and fled. They never saw each other again.

Stephenson had succeeded with an unusual formula for a mass movement: men were the muscle, women spread the poison, and ministers sanctified it all.

The women’s Klan had gone from nothing to nearly 250,000 in less than a year’s time.

The first jazz recording ever, in 1917, was by an all-white band.

And there it was: barely three years after setting foot in Indiana as a friendless unknown from an untraceable nowhere, D. C. Stephenson was telling the state’s top elected officials what to do. And they followed the Klansman’s every order.

It was inside Cadle’s domain that the Klan gave one of its largest bribes to a minister that spring—$600. Readers of Tolerance could compare that with other Protestant payoffs, a list of preachers who’d been bought by Stephenson to spike the faith with Klan poison, the “subsidized evangelists,” as they were called by O’Donnell. Most of the ministers were handed $50 to sell souls on the Klan, but a few were given as much as $250—nearly half a year’s salary for a butcher or baker.

The April 1 issue of Tolerance also broke news about the Klan’s private militia—news, at least, to those who weren’t on the receiving end of the vigilantes. “Under the Horse Thief Act, Kluxers in 50 Indiana cities are trying to establish the husky nucleus of a Ku Klux state constabulary, with power to search your homes and places of business.”

About his own background, Steve repeated some version of the narrative that had carried him so far in so little time: Hoosier native, college educated, war veteran, a descendant of seasoned wealth. Single. And then, upon further reflection, he elaborated on an earlier answer. “I am the embodiment of Napoleon.” He gave no sign he was kidding.

Steve’s pilot and wingman, Court Asher, always keen to a new con, had a more cynical explanation for the Klan’s takeover of the Heartland and beyond. No man is a hero to his own valet, as the saying goes. But Asher marveled at his boss’s talent for mass manipulation. “Billy Sunday was a great spellbinder. Steve was a better one.” He was particularly amazed at how many preachers he’d been able to fool, concluding that men of God were easy marks. “Sometimes we’d leave a wild party, slip into the robes, and go into church to pray with a bunch of new Klansmen,” he said. “Stephenson would kneel down and pray as convincingly as any minister.” He knew the Old Man’s true character. He’d seen the violent rages, the battered and bloodied women who fled hotel rooms in tears and torn clothes, the Grand Dragon passed out and smelling of bourbon and tobacco. Steve could flip on a dime, from benevolent shepherd of a vast crowd to an intoxicated monster. “It was the damndest thing I ever saw, how this guy could spread the bunk and make the hicks eat it up.”

Just weeks after the coronation in Kokomo, Stephenson basked in the glow of political sycophants aboard his latest possession—a ninety-eight-foot yacht, the Reomar II. The Grand Dragon now had a floating palace on the Great Lakes to go with his chandeliered mansion in Irvington, his summer home in Ohio, and his private transport above the clouds. He was as far from the Oklahoma dugout of his youth, with its dirt floor, tarpaper walls, and leaky roof, as he could be. It was laughable, a mere two years earlier, when a drifter in a fine suit first appeared in Indiana and told people he was going to be the biggest man in the United States. Few doubted him now.

Steve was indeed proficient at “getting the hicks to eat his bunk,” as Court Asher had put it. But he was equally skilled at catering to a different crowd—people of wealth, title, and education who believed that they were superior, the leading men of the leading race.

Fights broke out, with volleys of bottles, rocks, and gunfire, when the Klan tried to torch a cross near an Italian immigrant neighborhood in Steubenville, just across the border in Ohio. A six-year-old boy, part of a family from the mountainous Abruzzo region in Italy, escaped without harm. It would be some time before the lad, Dino Paul Crocetti, would make his mark as the singer Dean Martin.

About seventy members of Congress were faithful to the hooded order, by the Klan’s tally. It had sympathetic governors in Georgia, Alabama, and California. John C. Walton, the Oklahoma governor who had declared open war on the Klan, was facing impeachment from a legislature dominated by the Invisible Empire. After Black residents were butchered in Tulsa, after a Jewish merchant was stripped and beaten to a pulp in the same city, after a bootlegger was killed at his home in Ardmore and the vigilantes found not guilty, after Klan “whipping squads” were unleashed, the governor had put the entire state of Oklahoma under martial law and called up the National Guard. But the Klan was superior, in numbers and influence. They forced Walton out.

The first American town founded west of the Rocky Mountains, Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, elected a Klan mayor in 1922, and hosted a convention of the order two years later. Ten thousand people attended. Reuben Sawyer, a Portland pastor and a student of Henry Ford’s tracts against Jews, filled churches in the Beaver State with anti-Semitic rants. “In some parts of America,” he warned one crowd, “the kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk.” Speaking to 6,000 in Portland, he said Jews were trying to establish “a government within the government.” In the same city, another top Klansman told an audience that “the only way to cure a Catholic is to kill him.”

Like Indiana, Oregon had only a small number of these minorities. The state’s racial animus dated to at least 1844, when the provisional government ordered all Black people out of the territory. After Oregon became a state in 1859, it banned nonwhites from living there. Following the Civil War, Oregon was one of only six states to refuse to ratify the 15th Amendment, which granted full voting rights to all male citizens, regardless of race. By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

Colorado was not far behind. Rocky Mountain Klansmen kidnapped two prominent attorneys—one a Jew who defended bootleggers, the other a Catholic whose crime was his faith—then clubbed them nearly to death. They tried to force a Black family out of their home in Grand Junction, warning that if they did not leave, their lives would be in danger. But the violence did nothing to curb popularity. The Klan mayor of Denver, elected in 1923, named fellow members of the Invisible Empire as police chief and city attorney. One night alone, the Klan set seven crosses ablaze throughout Denver. They would soon be “the largest and most cohesive, most efficiently organized political force in the state of Colorado,” wrote the Denver Post.

Steve usually had a photographer circulating, given free access by his boss to take pictures of the most intimate situations. The photos proved very useful and helped to ensure that those in the know would not turn on their political master—a conspiracy of silence that proved remarkably successful.

Early on, Butler had welcomed Black applicants. One of its former students, the musician and composer Noble Sissle, had produced a hit musical in 1921, Shuffle Along, before eventually teaming up with Eubie Blake and Lena Horne. He was a classmate of Madge’s in 1915. “You didn’t think about that colored boy being at Butler—he was just one of us,” said Glass. But by the time Steve was staging his blowout parties late into the Irvington night, the Klan had infected the neighboring college, and had burned a cross of terror at the nearby Catholic church, Our Lady of Lourdes. In 1924, for the first time, the few Black students were not grouped alphabetically with all others in the Butler yearbook. They were relegated to a separate section in the back. Shortly thereafter, the school adopted a quota system, restricting Black enrollment to a tiny minority. —

“You’ll have sex with me or I’ll kill you.” She fled the room, running into the hallway in tears. She found a bellhop and told him what had happened. The guest in room 931 had tried to rape her, and would have assaulted her at gunpoint had she not escaped. The bellhop went to have a look. Once he was inside, Stephenson struck him in the face with his fist, knocking him to the ground. He continued to beat him as he crawled around. The bellboy got away and immediately notified security. A house detective called the police. When they arrived, he and three officers rushed upstairs to the ninth floor. The room was a mess. A large glass mirror was shattered into pieces. Chairs and bottles were smashed. The bellboy, who’d been waiting in the hallway, had welts and cuts on his bloodied face and was woozy from the whacks to his skull. “He was as intoxicated as any man I ever saw,” the security man said of one D. C. Stephenson. “He was standing by the bed with a death grip at the foot of the bed.”

Once again, Indiana embraced him, even after news of his assault had made its way into the state. Stephenson said it was a setup by his enemies, a smear. The papers had it all wrong. Ministers did not give up their Klan robes or turn on their leader in Sunday sermons. Elected officials did not distance themselves from their political master. Most newspapers did not condemn. Membership in the Invisible Empire did not decline. Cross burnings did not stop. All the right people did not turn down invitations to parties in Irvington. Hoosier Klansmen were not repulsed by his behavior, at least not outwardly. Many chose selective amnesia, in service to the greater good of the Invisible Empire and what it stood for. Some were even impressed. For here was a man liberated from shame, a man who not only boasted of being able to get away with any violation of human decency for his entire life, but had just proved it for all to see.

“You dirty, un-American skunks will pay for your mob actions in South Bend,” threatened the Fiery Cross. The paper urged lawmakers to take away the school’s tax-exempt status and warned of sanctions to come. “We showed you a few tricks at the recent primary and we are going to show you more at the election in the fall.”