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

by Timothy Egan

Women of the Ku Klux Klan had grown to more than a million members nationwide.

By mid-1924, seemingly nothing could slow the march of the Invisible Empire across the United States. In cities big and small, North and South, the blazing cross had become as much a part of life as the soda fountain and the barbershop pole.

Thanks to his horse thief brigade, the Grand Dragon now had files on nearly every voter and politician. These dossiers were given to the Klan’s county leaders, who made house visits pushing the hate slate. The first big test of the Machine’s ability to control the state was in the May primary. For governor, of course, the Klan’s man was the Klansman—Ed Jackson. But another Republican, Indianapolis mayor Lew Shank, was rallying what remained of the anti-Klan forces in his party. The Klansman won the primary in a rout.

The last of the big three issues that had driven membership to unprecedented heights was resolved in the Klan’s favor. Congress passed an immigration measure that slammed the door on those who could never meet the Klan’s definition of one hundred percent American. Strict quotas on shunned countries slashed new arrivals from eastern and southern Europe to a bare trickle, shutting out Jews and olive-skinned Catholics. The new law made it impossible for someone from Japan to come to America legally, and tightened the already harsh ban on Chinese. Africa was shut out as well. After all the speeches and essays about eugenics and human imperfections, after the crusades against the criminality of the mongrel hordes, the hooded order got everything it wanted. The National Origins Act of 1924, a Klan-blessed master design for the future of America, passed in the House by an overwhelming margin and sailed through the Senate with only six dissenting votes.

The effect was immediate and dramatic. In 1921, nearly a quarter million Italians had fled their country for the United States. By 1925, that number fell by 90 percent. About 200,000 Russian Jews arrived on American shores in 1921. A year after passage of the Immigration Act, only 7,000 were let into the country. Greeks went from 46,000 in one year to a few hundred. Left behind in Poland were 3.5 million Jews who would be targeted with mass execution in little more than a decade. Also among those denied entry because of restrictions on Jews was the family of Anne Frank.

The law would shape the face of America for much of the twentieth century. Though the Klan took credit for “wielding a mighty influence” in Congress, they had plenty of help from people who never took the secret oath. Voting with the Klan was the easy thing to do, for the backlash against immigration had reached a point where a majority in office was ready to close the gates.

Once again, the head of the NAACP demanded a condemnation of the mass of swollen malignancy that was the Ku Klux Klan of 1924, something Stephenson and Evans would never stand for. The party leaders stood with the hooded order, killing an attempt to pass an anti-Klan plank in the Republican platform before it ever got to a vote.

Black residents of Indianapolis were outraged. They had stood by the Republican Party since being given the vote. But the GOP of 1924 was not the party of Lincoln. When no help—not even a word—arrived from President Coolidge, the city’s Black leaders rebelled. They formed a breakaway political bloc and vowed to vote Democratic for the first time.

“The Republican Party as now constituted is the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana,” he wrote in his influential paper, the Indianapolis Freeman. “The nominees for governor, house, the senate and city offices are all Klansmen.” The ballot, he said, “is the only weapon of a civilized people and it is up to the Negro to use that weapon as do other civilized groups.”

Elsewhere, the Empire elected not just a governor in Colorado, Clarence Morley, but a United States senator, Rice Means. In Denver, an oath-bound Klansman, Ben Stapleton, survived a recall election in a city where one in seven voters had taken the same vows. “I will work with the Klan and for the Klan,” he pledged afterward. “I shall give the Klan the kind of administration it wants.” As promised, he named a Klan police chief and filled the prosecutor’s office and law enforcement with fellow brothers under the hood. The new governor promptly launched a campaign against Catholic sacramental wine—an attempted ban that would effectively outlaw the Mass in Colorado. In Illinois, the Klan put dozens of legislators into the chamber. “We know we’re the balance of power in the state,” boasted Illinois Grand Dragon Charles Palmer, an attorney.

Across the state, every Klan-supported candidate won, from the top of the ticket on down.

Stepped-up Klan extortion schemes—Jewish, Black, and Catholic merchants paying to avoid boycotts—were a steady source of income. To avoid trouble, one large manufacturing company made membership in the Ku Klux Klan a qualification for employment. Per an unwritten agreement, city streetcars would hire only members of the hooded order. At bus stops near Indiana Avenue, Black passengers were left stranded. When they tried to board at other locations, the doors were slammed in their faces. Drivers were specifically instructed not to pick up Black bus riders. The Klan was also promoting construction of “Liberty Hall,” a community and residential center for exclusive use by white Protestants.

Not long after the 1924 general election, Remy had been at an opulent dinner inside the Severin Hotel—a ritual of Stephenson to consolidate his power. It was all men, all white, all in bow ties and tuxes, all officeholders who’d just won. In Marion County, every major elected official but two was a Klansman. The Grand Dragon sat at the head of a long, U-shaped table with the politicians circled around him. At the end of the repast, Steve clinked his glass, rose, and congratulated his supplicants on their victories.

In Washington, DC, the national Klan burnished its pose as a lobby for morality, meeting with loyal senators and members of Congress on a new agenda of social issues. But elsewhere, terror was still part of the tool kit. 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.

When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do.

In January 1923, Reverend Aubrey H. Moore took to the pulpit of his First Christian Church to answer the question from the title of a much-publicized sermon: “Is the Ku Klux Klan a Menace to America?” He was Noblesville’s most popular preacher, and this was the largest gathering in a house of worship in some years, the local paper reported—no small feat in a place known for its devotion to pew and prayer. The pastor rose now to praise the Klan. The menace was its enemies. He warned against the mingling of races, saying, “Every colored person should keep his place.” He inveighed against “the poison of the melting pot.” He attacked Jews as “untrustworthy,” and for not accepting Jesus Christ as their savior.

With this kind of benediction, it did not take long for the Klan to become the dominant organization in Noblesville. By the summer of that year, a Klan rally drew 12,000 people—more than twice the population of Noblesville and the largest gathering in the town’s history. They burned a cross atop the dome of the stone courthouse, waved signs proclaiming “White Supremacy,” and initiated 250 new Klansmen in a ceremony at the fairgrounds. None of this was considered un-American or cruel by most people in town.

To the major victories of outlawing alcohol, disenfranchising Black voters, and closing the door on most new immigrants, the Klan now hoped to set up a parallel government in the capital, just as it had done in Indiana.

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” The fear was that if evolution were accepted, it would imply that all people had a common origin. For the Klan, that meant there was “no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise,” as the Defender, a Black newspaper in Chicago, put it.

Thereafter, the Klan lobbied for teaching the biblical story of seven days of creation in public school science classes—a core demand of any politician who expected to get support from the Empire. Acceptance of evolution by young minds, the Klan preached, was part of a Jewish plot.

In politics, the Old Man always said, the only sure way to win an election was with suitcases of “cold, hard cash,” as he’d shown with his bribe attempt in the mayor’s race. He’d spent a quarter of a million dollars getting Jackson the governor’s seat. The same held true in a criminal trial. Throughout October and into November, Stephenson was moving money around the jailhouse. He bribed Sheriff Gooding, giving him enough to pay off the mortgage on his Noblesville house. To show his gratitude, the county’s top cop not only kept the good food coming to the man on trial for murder but also allowed anyone inside his prisoner wanted to see. Women spent the night with him, sharing his fine liquor and home-cooked suppers. While Niblack of the Times had refused the Grand Dragon’s hundred-dollar bill, Stephenson managed to pay off other reporters. It showed in coverage that highlighted the doubts his legal team had raised thus far. But more needed to be done. He had to bring down the sainted Madge. Stephenson planted stories of her personal life, hoping one would be messy enough to send her voice back to the grave. He told people she was part of a plot by his Klan rival, Evans. She was a flapper, a party girl, a lush, begging for Steve’s affections. The poisoning was a clumsy attempt to give herself an abortion.

He also rushed out a pamphlet—“The Klan: Defender of Americanism”—restating the guiding principles of this far-reaching brotherhood of hate. “We believe that the pioneers who built America bequeathed to their own children a priority right to it, the control of it and its future,” he wrote. “Also, we believe that races of men are as distinct as breeds of animals; that any mixture between races of any great divergence is evil; that the American stock, which was bred under highly selective surroundings, has proved its value and should not be mongrelized.”

The Klan still stood for hatred of the other, for ranking humans by skin color and faith and place of birth, this elaborate caste system that was no liability in many quarters. But now it also stood for rape, murder, political corruption, for the monster of the Midway and his huddle of gangsters.

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.

“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.

Throughout the country, the Klan could no longer claim owners of banks, editors of newspapers, and judges on state courts as sworn members. Those days were gone—a shameful aberration in the American story, the Chicago Tribune wrote in the wake of the crumbling Klan. The paper sketched an outline that sounded like a bad fairy tale. “It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct, and a state of terror was substituted for a state of law.”

“Well, you can’t burn history,” the contractor told Allen Safianow, an Indiana historian. “That’s what’s wrong today.”

“Seattle's formal redlining laws were ended in June 1977 when Washington Governor Dixy Lee Ray signed House Bill 323, which made it unlawful for financial institutions to deny or vary loan terms based on a property's neighborhood. While the federal Fair Housing Act in 1968 had already made racial discrimination in housing illegal, state law in Washington specifically outlawed redlining practices by lenders in 1977. “ -Google

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. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the majority opinion. In the years that followed, about 70,000 Americans who were deemed a threat to the national gene pool—the deaf, the blind, ethnic minorities, people with epilepsy, homosexuals, poor people, and “promiscuous” women—were sterilized against their will. Nazi Germany defended its own 1936 eugenics law by pointing to the United States as a role model. In 1981, Oregon performed the nation’s last legal forced sterilization.