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

by Timothy Egan

“We will take up the torch as it fell from the hand of William Jennings Bryan,” the Klan declared, as it burned crosses throughout the land in his memory. “America cannot remain half-Christian and half-agnostic.” 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.

What if the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode it? 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, of an age that has been mischaracterized as one of Gatsby frivolity and the mayhem of modernism. It’s entirely possible that the Klan fell apart not just because of scandals and high-level hypocrisy, but also because it had achieved all of its major goals—Prohibition, disenfranchisement of African Americans, slamming the door on immigrants whose religion or skin color didn’t match that of the majority. Long after Stephenson was put away, the ideas that his followers promoted while marching in masks behind a flaming cross prevailed as the law of the land.