A Fever In The Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot To Takeover America, and The Woman Who Stopped Them, Egan - B+

                  In the mid-1920's, three governors, fifteen senators, and seventy five congressmen were Klansmen. "But the epicenter was Indiana, which was trying to shape human behavior as no state had ever done." It passed the first eugenics law. The Klan's vigilantes helped enforce the harshest anti-alcohol laws outside of the Muslim world. The state was known as the Alabama of the north. It was not just Blacks that the Klan was trying to suppress, but also Jews, Catholics of any ethnicity, and Eastern Europeans, Greeks, and Asians. The man who ran the Klan in Indiana, D.C. Stephenson, made more money than Babe Ruth, expected to be appointed to the U.S. Senate, and was a violent womanizer. His downfall would be his mistreatment of a young woman in her late 20's.

                The terror and violence wreaked upon freed slaves by the KKK after the Civil War was short-lived. The federal government fought back and the Klan was disbanded just a few years after it had been formed. The 20th century rebirth grew from the populist-nativist response to the wave of immigration around the turn of the century. The Klan was sold as the "Main Street guardian against immorality, immigrants and their foreign faiths, and African Americans who were rebelling against Jim Crow." Stephenson saw the financial opportunity afforded by the Klan's $10 entry fee and quarterly dues, and began to grow the KKK in Indiana, a deeply Protestant and conservative state. Soon Klan vigilantes were acting as the state's morality police. The Klan had millions of members around the country and its leaders dreamed of gaining control of the federal government, rolling back the civil rights amendments and restricting certain religions. They spewed vitriol and hatred in their quest to preserve white Protestantism. Stephenson was a bigamist, wife-beater, cheater, deadbeat, and a liar, who somehow charmed his way to the top of the KKK pyramid. The Klan paraded frequently, and beat, harassed, and occasionally murdered those whom they didn't like.

                Nineteen twenty-four saw the KKK at its high water mark in the US and in Indiana. Stephenson decided to take on Notre Dame University. On a Friday night in May, thousands of Klansmen descended on South Bend. Their parade was stopped by a flying wedge of young students who broke up the Klan's march and sent them scurrying off. The next day's Chicago papers carried the headline "Students Rout Klansmen." In Washington, the incredibly racist and restrictive National Origins Act was signed by President Coolidge. Throughout the country, the Klan rolled up electoral success after success. In Indiana, the governor, and all of the state's politicians owed their offices to the Klan and Stephenson. They offered him an almost feudal loyalty and homage.

               Madge Oberholtzer lived four blocks from Stephenson in an affluent suburb of Indianapolis. She worked for the state, and a Klan sponsored bill would cost her her job. So she befriended Stephenson in an attempt to save it. He asked her over one Sunday, and his henchmen forced alcohol down her throat. He beat her, bit her all over her body, and raped her. She took poison in response. Stephenson's men left her at her parent's home. Knowing she was dying, she swore out a declaration accusing Stephenson of the crimes he had committed. He was indicted based on the affidavit and soon thereafter, Madge died. The local prosecutor was one of the two or three Republican officeholders who was not in Stephenson's pocket. Stephenson and two of his men were arrested for second degree murder and held without bail.

             The indictment and the publication of the declaration began the process of chipping away at the Klan's supremacy in the state. The national chapter had broken with the Indiana Klan and Stephenson a year previously. The trial was held later in the year 1925. The judge admitted Madge's dying declaration, thus sealing Stephenson's fate. Although the Klan attempted to bribe the jurors, a guilty verdict came on Nov. 25th. The sentence was life, and the Grand Dragon was sent off to the state penitentiary in Michigan City.  

            Around the country, leading Klansmen were being sent to jail, and in Kansas the Klan was banned. In the three years after Stephenson's conviction, national KKK membership dropped by 90%. That said, the Klan had achieved Prohibition, the disenfranchisement of Blacks and the anti-immigration law. Perhaps it died out because it had succeeded. As for Stephenson, he died in 1966, a decade after being released from prison.

             I have read about Prohibition, and the post-WWI Red scare, but knew absolutely nothing about the KKK in the 1920's. This has been an eye-opener. The comparison between the KKK of a hundred years ago and today's MAGA movement is obvious. Only this time, the Catholic church is lined up with the right-wing insiders and is no longer an outcast.