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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Timothy Egan
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April 11 - May 28, 2025
Calvin Coolidge, had penned a piece in Good Housekeeping saying that “biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.”
Dr. Laughlin said sterilization laws would lead to lower taxes, lessening the burden of society to take care of people with epilepsy, the blind, the deaf, and the mentally disabled, not to mention the high cost of jailing criminals prone to music and art.
construction of a Klan-exclusive hospital, because members didn’t want to be treated at the city’s only hospital, run by Catholic sisters.
rooted in “the deadly tedium of small-town life,” a militant religious fundamentalism “hot with bigotry,” and “American moralistic blood lust that is half historical determinism, and half Freud.”
this guy could spread the bunk and make the hicks eat it up.”
Governors, Guns, and God
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.
A Klan favorite was Henry Ford, the most prominent anti-Semite in the nation.
group of Klan nightriders known as the Battalion of Death had been harassing students and faculty at the University of Dayton, a Catholic college.
They held a noisy rally, burning a three-story cross, jeering at students and insulting the faith of those who walked by.
One night, forty carloads of hooded men rolled up to the campus and spread out. They planted twelve bombs, which went off without killing anyone. They also bombed thei...
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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.
After Oregon became a state in 1859, it banned nonwhites from living there.
seven hundred Protestant ministers who were honorary members of the Indiana Klan in 1924,
Indiana was fast becoming the Alabama of the North.
Congress passed an immigration measure that slammed the door on those who could never meet the Klan’s definition of one hundred percent American.
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.
Left behind in Poland were 3.5 million Jews who would be targeted with mass execution in little more than a decade.
comprising 40 percent of all Klan members, came from just three states—Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois,
“The Negro and the Republican Party have come to a parting of the way,” announced the local office of the NAACP.
Both political parties were guilty of a “gentleman’s agreement,” Johnson said, that denied the vote to 4.5 million Black citizens in the South.
“The Republican Party as now constituted is the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana,”
just 48.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election—an all-time low.
Davis was vanquished, indicted for treason, and forced into prison. Yet nearly sixty years after he surrendered, he was honored with the Tallest Thing in Kentucky, a state that had never joined his breakaway nation.
Under Prohibition, people with a doctor’s note could buy a pint for all that ailed them every ten days at a drugstore. This business made a wealthy man out of Charles Walgreen, whose Chicago-based chain of drugstores grew from nine in 1920 to 525 by the end of the decade.
one large manufacturing company made membership in the Ku Klux Klan a qualification for employment.
In Marion County, every major elected official but two was a Klansman.
When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do.
Acceptance of evolution by young minds, the Klan preached, was part of a Jewish plot.
only men, and only white men, were given a chance to sit on the panel. Women were considered fragile, emotional, impractical, and unable to sustain hard thinking.
the Klan scheduled a get-out-the-vote rally at Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis.
7,000 people packed the Klan rally at Cadle Tabernacle, singing, cheering, and passing around sample ballots for Tuesday’s general election.
Mayor-elect Duvall promised to stuff city hall with members of the hooded order—from the parks department to the police rolls. In hundreds of small ways these loyalists could make things worse for those who were not white Protestants.
On January 1, “city hall will be turned over to the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote the Indianapolis Times.
people now shed their robes and masks by the thousands, many of them choosing to burn them in backyard bonfires.
Kansas became the first state to legally oust the Klan,
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.
The Republican Party was outraged—not at the disclosures of Stephenson’s web of graft, but at the press for reporting it.
Stephenson claimed to have taken in the modern equivalent of $29 million in initiation fees for the Invisible Empire.
“Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?”
its six million members, its senators, governors, militias, preachers, and police chiefs—was
“an instrument of terror, oppression, violence and a menace to public peace.”
“As the lights were turned on again, few would admit, even sheepishly, they ever had belonged to the Klan,”
hysteria that led to the lynching of the Jewish factory boss Leo Frank “was the spark that ignited” the twentieth-century Klan,
the Stephenson case “put out the fire.”
Stephenson was a charismatic con man—“the
most talented psychopath ever to tread the banks of the Wabash,”
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.
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.
It wasn’t until 1933 that the state legislature ended the reign of vigilantes with arrest powers.
