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by
Timothy Egan
He paused for several minutes, soaking it all in, mass adulation for a man who’d led a life without friends, a life devoid, by his design, of contact with the family that had raised him and the family he’d created and abandoned. He needed to be told that he was loved, that the world would know he was loved, even if the love was dictated by his own hand.
But then it metastasized. “It first appealed to the ignorant, the slightly unbalanced and the venal,” Coughlan wrote, “but by the time the enlightened elements realized the danger it was already on top of them.”
“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,”
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.
that he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress—was brilliant. And true.
What if the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode 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.
