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 future of the country belonged to an organization of shrouded men clinging to the past.

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

As W. E. B. Du Bois had written, behind “the yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim, lynch, and burn at the stake is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something.”

There is always some peril in seeing things in the past from a starting point of the present, as if every molecule of chance was put in place by human design.