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

by Timothy Egan

President Lincoln had established a Freedmen’s Bureau to help people who’d been held in bondage become people with tools to make a living on their own. His generals had offered reparations—forty acres and a mule, carved out of land seized from more than 70,000 slaveholders. But his successor, Andrew Johnson, had overturned the order just a few months after Lincoln was assassinated. The task of peace, as Walt Whitman had prophesied, would be more difficult than the war itself.

Samuel Ralston, narrowly won—a shock to the political establishment. Throughout Indiana that year, the Klan had held picnics and packed churches, staged firework shows, parades, rallies. But putting people in office? That was something new. “What the hell happened yesterday?” a newsman asked the Indiana Republican chairman the day after the election. “It was the damn Ku Klux Klan,” he answered.

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. He mocked the horse thief detectives as “a band of lawless night prowlers.”

And he ridiculed any Hoosier of self-professed principle who would hide under a hood. “Isn’t it grand to be 100 percent American and wear your wife’s nightie and your mother’s goose cap around the county at night,” he wrote in his front-page column.

By now, Stephenson had embraced the maxim of Machiavelli—it is better to be feared than loved.

Even Springfield, Illinois, hometown for Lincoln during his early political career, had sprouted “one of the liveliest and fastest-growing” Klan units in the country, the Fiery Cross reported.

The Klan’s official estimate of the assemblage—200,000 klansmen meet was the Fiery Cross headline—was surely an exaggeration. But even a low guess of about 100,000 by the Indianapolis Star gave credence to the Klan paper’s assertion that Kokomo had hosted “the biggest crowd of one-hundred percent Americans that ever assembled in any one place at any one time.”

The air was cleaner in Irvington than the capital city’s factory haze, filtered by thick-armored hardwood trees that had taken up residence centuries ago. One native oak was nearly four hundred years old, and had such a leafy hold on the sky that it was given landmark status. Every house on the broad, winding lane had a story to tell, just like the village’s namesake, Washington Irving. The writer of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” was honored with a bust in a hushed circle off the avenue. Surely unknown to Stephenson, he had chosen to live in a town with a heritage of open-mindedness. Irvington was founded by abolitionists. After the Civil War, Black and white students attended school together. Irvington’s pride and joy, Butler, was one of the first colleges in the Midwest to enroll women, and to hire them as faculty. Catholics worshipped at Our Lady of Lourdes, a church of Gothic grandeur, soon to be a target of the Klan.

The parties were bacchanals of bad taste, and Stephenson spared no expense. Once through the classical columns of the mansion’s white portico, guests left behind everything they professed to stand for in anticipation of a night like no other in Indiana. The evenings started out classy. White-gloved servants handed out drinks and finger foods. There were proper toasts and proper introductions. Troupers from a musical revue entertained and a small orchestra played in the ballroom. You were sure to see politicians, perhaps a federal judge, or someone from the Indianapolis baking company that claimed it had introduced sliced loafs to the world—Wonder Bread, as it was called.

Among nearly seven hundred Protestant ministers who were honorary members of the Indiana Klan in 1924, a few of them could be found inside as well, minus their clerical collars. For drinks, Steve had anything you wanted—anything. Supply was unlimited and there was no need to fear a raid of the best-dressed and highest-standing lawbreakers in Indianapolis; the police had not only given Steve a pass on Prohibition but often served as his protectors.

News accounts of the riot would give rise to a story that still lives, that the “Fighting Irish” nickname was forever set by the clash of Notre Dame against the Ku Klux Klan on May 17, 1924.

Black Hoosiers who’d come to Indiana as part of the Great Migration warned that the skirmish, as the congressman called it, was entering a dangerous new phase. Indiana was fast becoming the Alabama of the North. But maybe, some pointed out, it had long been the Alabama of the North, and it was wishful thinking to expect otherwise simply because it was outside the old Confederacy.

He understood why they joined the Ku Klux Klan—they were deeply afraid of change.

“They paid ten dollars to hate someone,” said a Denver judge, “and they were determined to get their money’s worth.”

The law’s quota system was based on the census of 1890, before most southern European and Polish Catholics, and Jewish refugees from pogroms in the East, had crossed the Atlantic. As it happened, the best way to build a wall was to turn back the clock. America would be replenished with people who looked like the ethnic face of Indiana—a blueprint for a bloodstream. 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.

Johnson, the national secretary, had been urging a break for months, after Coolidge’s ongoing snub of his request that the president condemn the Klan. Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime. 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. He noted that the 18th Amendment, outlawing alcohol, was fully enforced with regular raids, while the 15th Amendment, upholding the right to vote regardless of race, was given no protection. “The federal government will use a navy to prevent a man from taking a drink, but will not empower a deputy marshal to protect the Negro’s ballot,” said Johnson.

At the same time, Gutzon Borglum, the Klan insider and eventual sculptor of Mount Rushmore, a man Stephenson had called “my close personal friend,” started work on a marble carving of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the slave states. The Confederacy, Stephens had said, was founded “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” The carving was bound for Statuary Hall in Washington’s Capitol Rotunda, home to the most iconic totems in the 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.

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.

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.”

A day after the sentencing, Democrats at their annual state meeting vowed to root out every Klansman from their party. Let the Republicans be the standard-bearers of the hooded order. “It will never do for us Democrats to compromise with this evil, unholy, un-American and un-Christian organization,” said a lawyer from the town of Lebanon.

In 1998, a plaque was mounted at the entrance to the most famous courtroom in Indiana. Three years earlier, a building contractor had discovered an old steamer trunk in a barn outside Noblesville. Inside were three-by-five membership cards of more than a thousand local Klansmen, and hoods, sashes, robes, and a cross with lightbulbs. The find was an embarrassment that made national news and came as a shock to many in the state. Rather than tarnish the image of Noblesville, the Klan materials should have been burned and the names erased from memory, some of the residents said. “Well, you can’t burn history,” the contractor told Allen Safianow, an Indiana historian. “That’s what’s wrong today.” After much wrangling, the evidence of the Klan’s hold on the town was turned over to the historical society. For the next twenty-two years the membership list would be kept secret except to scholars who agreed to certain restrictions. The townsfolk had decided it was better to focus on what happened in the courtroom, to let the world know about the momentous turn of events inside a small-town house of justice. The plaque reads: SITE OF D.C. STEPHENSON TRIAL A jury of Hamilton County citizens convicted Ku Klux Klan leader D.C. Stephenson in this building in November, 1925 for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. The outcome of the trial resulted in the rapid decline of the theretofore powerful Klan influence in state government. The heroes in this telling were those twelve average men. All ...

Stephenson was a charismatic con man—“the most talented psychopath ever to tread the banks of the Wabash,” as one chronicler of the age put 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 Klan-sponsored Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply restricted the number of Jews, Catholics, southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, and Africans who could come to the United States, stayed on the books for forty-one years. During World War II, a limited number of Jewish refugees from Germany who’d been allowed into the country—as an exception to the law—formed an elite American intelligence unit, the Ritchie Boys, and helped to win the war against Hitler. The US Army estimated that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from this unit of immigrants.

In the years following World War II, Jim Crow was gradually disassembled. President Harry Truman integrated the military in 1948. The United States Supreme Court ended the doctrine of “separate but equal” with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Ten years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The schools of Indianapolis remained segregated until 1971, when a federal court ordered them to integrate.

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 sterili...