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

by Timothy Egan

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.

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 sterilized against their will. Nazi Germany defended its own 1936 eugenics law by pointing to the United States as a role model. In 1981, Oregon performed the nation’s last legal forced sterilization.