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 governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.

“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.

The hooded horsemen were part of the unmoored mass of defeated Confederate soldiers, more than half a million men who’d surrendered on the condition that they not “take up arms against the United States.” Though conquered, they were free to return home, free to farm and bank and own property, eventually free to vote and hold office. For the most part, traitors were not tried.

“It’s a protective, political, military organization,”

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.

Was there a man among them who wasn’t disgusted by the immigrants brewing beer or fermenting wine in their basements? Was there a father or husband who wasn’t appalled at women in their short bobs and tapered dresses drinking bootleg gin and dancing to Black jazz—these morality-flaunting, uncorseted flappers? Was there a family protector not alarmed by the sexual promiscuity of the young in their parked machines?

Lincoln that “no other free state is so populated with Southerners.” In attitude and politics, Indiana was the most Southern of Northern states—North Dixie, it was often called—settled by people from Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas.

There were still men walking the streets of 1922 Indiana who had fought against the slaveholders, and who believed that liberating humans held as property had been the highest calling of their lives.

“The black man that sympathized, worked and fought for this great country of ours during its threatened destruction is a thousand times better than the white man that sympathized, worked, plotted and fought against it,” he told fellow Hoosiers in an open letter.

He understood people’s fears and their need to blame others for their failures.

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.

When a local Klan den proclaimed that Jesus was a white Protestant, Dale pointed out that Jesus would have been banned from the Klan—as a Jew and an olive-skinned alien.