By Timothy Egan, Viking, April 4, 2023

I finished this book at 4 a.m. That’s the endorsement. Read this book if you think we live in a divisive and violent time. The KKK knew how to sow real division. In the 1920’s, the KKK saw huge growth by dividing people and constant violence.

At times the book reads like a historical novel. That’s why I couldn’t put it down at the end. I had to find out how it happened. I knew the conclusion from the subtitle, but I wanted to see how the trial played out.

The heroes: Madge Oberholtzer, Patrick O’Donnell, George Dale, Rabbi Feuerlicht, William REmy, and many others. I was going to name the villain, but that just gives fame to the villain.

To me this quote from the book summarizes the real villain:

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 [later]. The Grand Dragon was a symptom, not a cause, of an age that has been mischaracterized as one of Gatsby frivolity and the mayhem of modernism.

It’s a painful read. The subjugation of large parts of our society through Jim Crow laws, mob violence, and daily shunning is hard to read for me. I realize that’s trite, because people had to live it but I live in different times. I can’t imagine what it was like to live then even after having read very clearly what it was like.

[k111] Hoosiers were joiners. And in 1925, if you were not a knight of the KKK, you did not belong.

[k112] The Klan owned the state, and Stephenson owned the Klan. Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors–they all answered to the Grand Dragon.

[k119] In the golden age of fraternal organizations, the Klan was the largest and most powerful of the secret societies among American men–bigger by far than the Odd Fellows, the Elks, or the Freemasons, and vastly greater in number than the original Klan born in violence just after the Civil War.

[k193] A handful of Hoosiers were heroic–two rabbis, an African American publisher born enslaved, a fearless Catholic lawyer, a small-town editor repeatedly beaten and thrown in jail, a lone prosecutor. They were aided by a gifted man of letters, a Black poet and Broadway composer who forced an epic national political realignment with his eloquent defiance.

[k292] Johnson, sworn in six weeks after Lincoln began his second term, would have none of his predecessor’s vision. He ignored pleas from civil authorities to go after the Klan, and he urged Southern politicians to balk at expanding the Constitution.

[k293] “Everyone would and must admit that the white race was superior to the Black,” he said. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a legislative attempt to extend real power to the formerly enslaved, but was overridden by a strong majority in Congress.

[k297] Violence escalated: lynching, arson, beatings, a reign of orchestrated bloodshed for the last three years of Johnson’s chaotic term.

[k301] We are the law itself–the same boast would be heard in Indiana, fifty years later, taking flight through the revelations of Madge Oberholtzer.

[k307] Grant promised to smash the Klan. There was nothing gallant or noble about these midnight marauders. The president saw them for what they were: killers in bedsheets who were “trying to reduce the colored people to a condition closely akin to that of slavery,” he said.

[k316] The enemy was “the most atrocious organization that the civilized part of the world has ever known,” Grant’s Justice Department declared. After Congress handed him the tools he needed, the president used the Ku Klux Klan Acts to hammer the hooded order.

[k321] Acknowledging defeat, the Klan formally disbanded under an order from Forrest. He burned all records.

[k380] Evansville was ripe for the Klan, the perfect place to plant the flag in the North for the second coming of the Invisible Empire. And D. C. Stephenson was the ideal missionary.

[k402] One month after the attack on the bellhop, the Klan held a large parade in downtown Dallas, marching with banners that read “Pure Womanhood, Our Little Girls Must Be Protected” and “One Hundred Percent American.”

[k405] And the abduction and near killing of Alex Johnson? “As I understand the case, the Negro was guilty of doing something which he had no right to do,” said Sheriff Dan Harston. “There will be no investigation by my department. He no doubt deserved it.”

[k414] The Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote but fell short in the Electoral College because three states were in dispute. The courts handed the mess off to Congress, which appointed a commission to decide the outcome. As a bargaining chip to get him over the line, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from obstructionist Southern states. In return, he won the highest office in the land by a single electoral vote. His presidency marked the close of Reconstruction and ushered in nearly ninety years of disenfranchisement and segregation for millions of American citizens. Shortly thereafter, Tennessee passed the nation’s first Jim Crow law, separating passengers on rail cars by skin color.

[k423] With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people.

[k425] In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.

[k489] But what really drove the pair of promoters into the arms of the twentieth-century Klan founder was money. In 1920, Clarke and Tyler cut a deal with Simmons, granting them a significant share of every new membership. The best way to make their fortune, they realized, was to incentivize local recruiters on the ground by giving them a cut as well.

[k492] In barely a year’s time, the number of Klansmen went from 3,000 to 100,000.

[k492] In barely a year’s time, the number of Klansmen went from 3,000 to 100,000.

[k517] All it took was a small bribe and a bit of Bible talk. The constituency was vast. Evansville alone had seventy-two Protestant churches. In short order, he paid off a dozen or so ministers to evangelize on behalf of the Klan, spreading the word of hate along with the word of God.

[k526] In the America of 1922, fear of others generated a lot of anxious energy. This collective unease had only to be corralled, sanctified, and monetized.

[k535] Violet had tried to make the union work, though her husband was constantly cheating on her and made no secret of it. He said he could get any woman he wanted with the snap of his fingers.

[k584] Suddenly, members of the Horse Thief Detective Association were breaking up parties and smashing liquor joints. They blocked roads, searching vehicles for bottles, rousting those in passionate embrace. They invaded private homes, looking for alcohol or card-playing. They harassed businesses that opened on Sunday. They served as armed marshals at Klan parades, taking over public streets, directing traffic, menacing the occasional malcontent who booed at the men in white robes.

[k604] At the close of three days of testimony, following a long and impassioned soliloquy, Simmons stood and pointed his finger at his congressional interrogators–they were the ones who should be shamed for going after the family men of his organization. “I call upon the Father to forgive those who have persecuted the Klan!” he shouted. And with that, he fainted and fell to the ground. The politicians folded. Simmons believed the hearing was the best thing that ever happened to the hooded order. “It wasn’t until the newspapers began to attack the Klan that it really grew,” he said. “And then Congress gave us the best advertising we ever got.” Over the next year, the Klan expanded by 1.1 million members.

[k638] That $10 initiation fee was more than the average factory worker made in a day. Plus, there were quarterly dues and uniform requirements. Stephenson got his cut of everything.

[k644] The Birth of a Nation had done well in the North, just as D. W. Griffith envisioned it would.

[k650] At the end of the movie, the words of a title card filled the screen: The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.

[k679] By year’s end, Stephenson had accomplished something that the initial Klan had not: his vigilantes were part of the system. They operated freely and openly, and their crimes were not punished, just as in Texas.

[k687] The talented D. C. Stephenson had proved to be quite the prodigy, as he said so himself.

[k689] He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it.

[k697] expectations. Now he promised to work the same magic in Michigan, Kansas,

[k712] For a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order–proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had “changed its bed sheets for a policeman’s uniform.”

[k835] “The strongest argument in favor of prohibition is the imperative necessity of keeping whiskey out of the reckless colored element,” said the state’s leading dry newspaper, the Patriot Phalanx. “The Negro, fairly docile and industrious, becomes, when filled with liquor, turbulent and dangerous and a menace to life, property and the repose of the community,” another paper wrote.

[k857] Turning to other enemies, Barr said it was well known that the Roman Catholic Church was training “,000 Negroes” to be priests.

[k1033] What was not in dispute was the role of one town, in a state that tried to censure human pleasure, in bringing big-time recorded jazz to the world. Known as Harmony Hollow, Richmond was the only place between New York and San Francisco with a decent recording studio. The Gennett brothers, from Italian immigrant stock, ran the large Starr Piano Company.

[k1039] They also signed and promoted artists who were shunned by other studios. Jazz came to them in 1923 and would be sold on the Gennett label. So-called race records, though marketed to Black consumers, were showing a large crossover appeal.

[k1044] In late afternoon, about 6,000 hooded men assembled in a park a mile away.

[k1060] Armstrong was still new to lovers of music beyond a few precincts of New Orleans and Chicago, and new to the North by only a year. But when the disc he recorded in Richmond was released, he belonged to the ages.

[k1077] The best-known enterprise was Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, one of the most successful Black business empires in the world.

[k1079] At the peak of her success, she employed 3,000 people, mostly women, making and selling cosmetics for a population that other companies ignored. She was the first Black woman to become a millionaire, one of the first great female entrepreneurs in the United States.

[k1082] For all of Madam Walker’s accomplishments, when she went to the Isis Theater and gave the clerk her nickel to see the film, she was told the price for Black moviegoers was five times the amount, and she would have to sit in an isolated area to the side.

[k1090] With Stephenson’s move into Indianapolis, the Klan vowed to keep Black residents in a tight geographic box. The city had fifteen African American physicians in 1923, but they were not allowed to attend to patients at the main hospital.

[k1112] Douglass died well before the horror of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob destroyed thirty-five city blocks in a part of Oklahoma known for its fine homes and businesses–the Black Wall Street.

[k1116] Tulsa was a hotbed of Klansmen.

[k1117] The marauders burned more than 1,200 homes, five hotels, a dozen churches, thirty-one restaurants, four drugstores, a public library, a hospital, and four doctors’ offices. A police detective urged white fellow Tulsans to “get a gun and get busy and try to get a N—-.”

[k1124] As in Dallas, there were no convictions of any of the killers, thieves, and firebombers, no prison terms, no retribution. The Klan of the 1920s had enough control of the legal system to ensure that those who gutted the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a mass murder of American citizens, would not face justice.

[k1130] On Saint Patrick’s Day, a crowd filled basketball-rattled Tomlinson Hall in Indianapolis to hear a fiery Irish American lawyer, Patrick H. O’Donnell.

[k1133] O’Donnell had grown up on stories of the British stripping his people of their culture, their religion, their language, and their civil rights in their native land. Now he saw the Klan trying to do the same thing in the country his family had fled to from Ireland.

[k1143] Klan secrecy, and the oaths never to reveal the names of fellow members, gave O’Donnell an opening.

[k1146] O’Donnell cultivated insiders, who got him membership rolls. “We feel that the publication of the names of those who belong to the Klan will be a blow that the masked organization cannot survive,” he wrote in the inaugural issue of Tolerance, dated September 10, 1922.

[k1152] Hundreds of families withdrew their money from the bank run by the Klansman.

[k1171] “We are going to drive the Klan out of Indiana!” he thundered. “We are going to redeem Indiana and re-annex it to the American Union!” In South Bend, on the same day that O’Donnell spoke, the Klan had a Saint Patrick’s Day message of its own: flames for Notre Dame, Roman Catholicism’s center of higher learning in America. Unlike most communities in Indiana,

[k1225] O’Donnell was now Stephenson’s main target in the press. He fulminated against “Mad Pat” in the Fiery Cross, calling him “an Enemy of America.” He ordered Klansmen to burn a cross in the township outside Logansport, where O’Donnell grew up and some members of his family still lived.

[k1230] Fear of Catholics was brought to the American shores by British Protestants steeped in dark conspiracies about the power of Papists. Though many of the colonists were fleeing religious persecution, it wasn’t long before some were practicing what had been preached against them back in Europe.

[k1235] Thomas Nast, the most influential newspaper cartoonist at the time, stoked loathing of the faith of new immigrants with sketches depicting bishops as crocodiles coming ashore.

[k1470] Stephenson quoted extensively from the work of Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, the chief eugenicist guiding the anti-immigration forces in Congress.

[k1473] He created a model human sterilization law, building on the pioneering work from Indiana, that was drafted by more than thirty states. Ultimately, about 70,000 people across the United States would be forcibly sterilized. A special category of “degenerates” was added in many of these states in order to sterilize homosexuals. Laughlin’s law also drew strong interest from a circle of proto-Nazi scientists in Germany. Laughlin himself would later praise Hitler for understanding that “the central mission of all politics is race hygiene.”

[k1478] If the United States were to become “darker in pigmentation,” as the influential eugenicist Charles Davenport explained, the typical American would eventually be “smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.”

[k1524] As Stephenson neared the end of that night’s speech, he summarized what was at stake when “members of inferior races” were let into the United States. “This is a struggle to save America,” he said. “It’s a struggle perhaps even more serious than that between the states in the Civil War.” The hundred percenters from the Heartland were at the forefront of a war to prevent “the inevitable destruction of what may be called the American race.”

[k1650] Why, Coughlan wondered later as a writer trying to come to grips with what had happened to his neighbors, “did the town take so whole-heartedly to the Klan?” His answer was rooted in “the deadly tedium of small-town life,” a militant religious fundamentalism “hot with bigotry,” and “American moralistic blood lust that is half historical determinism, and half Freud.”

[k2188] In cities big and small, North and South, the blazing cross had become as much a part of life as the soda fountain and the barbershop pole. More than 10,000 turned out for a Klan picnic in Colorado. The Klan terrorized Jewish, Italian, Black, and Latino neighborhoods in Denver, and could count on brothers under the sheets in law enforcement to avoid arrest. “They paid ten dollars to hate someone,” said a Denver judge, “and they were determined to get their money’s worth.”

[k2210] The National Origins Act of 1924, a Klan-blessed master design for the future of America, passed in the House by an overwhelming margin and sailed through the Senate with only six dissenting votes.

[k2302] 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.

[k2325] Elsewhere, the Empire elected not just a governor in Colorado, Clarence Morley, but a United States senator, Rice Means. In Denver, an oath-bound Klansman, Ben Stapleton, survived a recall election in a city where one in seven voters had taken the same vows. “I will work with the Klan and for the Klan,” he pledged afterward. “I shall give the Klan the kind of administration it wants.”

[k2333] Forty years of Jim Crow in the South and voter restrictions aimed at immigrants in the North were able to shrink the American electorate as never before: just 48.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election–an all-time low.

[k2413] 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.

[k2492] At bus stops near Indiana Avenue, Black passengers were left stranded. When they tried to board at other locations, the doors were slammed in their faces. Drivers were specifically instructed not to pick up Black bus riders.

[k3184] “We’ve passed this immigration bill and built a stone wall around the nation so tall, so deep, so strong, that the scum and riff-raff of the old world cannot get into our gates,” he said.

[k4043] Across the country, another prominent Klansman was embroiled in a sordid tale that defied the hooded order’s professed values. Dr. Ellis O. Willson, a dentist who’d been a leader of the large Klan chapter in La Grande, Oregon, was charged with raping his clerical assistant, and then killing her accidentally during a botched abortion.

[k4049] In Colorado, three Klansmen were charged in separate cases of child molestation and statutory rape. The Grand Dragon, Dr. John Galen Locke, was implicated in the kidnapping of a nineteen-year-old who had refused to marry his pregnant girlfriend–a violation of the Klan’s professed values of sexual purity and the sanctity of marriage.

[k4096] Democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.

[k4101] The Republican Party was outraged–not at the disclosures of Stephenson’s web of graft, but at the press for reporting it. This journalism was the work of Jews, party officials implied. Clyde A. Walb, the Republican Party state chairman, said a syndicate of international bankers was trying to bring down the GOP in Indiana. The party’s Central Committee disowned Adams, a lifelong Republican.

[k4173] In the end, Stephenson gave several exhaustive accounts of the bribery scheme and how he pulled the levers of power in the state. This evidence, along with testimony of other witnesses and canceled checks, proved beyond a doubt that the Klan’s governor had been guilty, as the judge said so himself in a directed verdict. But Jackson got off on a technicality: the statute of limitations had expired. He finished out his term and retired from politics.

[k4188] At the conclusion of the Pennsylvania trial in 1928, Judge W. H. S. Thompson issued a scathing indictment. He found that the Invisible Empire of the Roaring Twenties, one that would later cast itself as a Mayberry Klan of good fellowship and high Christian values, was “an instrument of terror, oppression, violence and a menace to public peace.” He called it an “unlawful organization, so destructive of the rights and liberties of the people.” After noting that Imperial Wizard Evans and his lawyers came to the court seeking relief “with filthy hands,” he awarded them nothing.

[k4203] Those days were gone–a shameful aberration in the American story, the Chicago Tribune wrote in the wake of the crumbling Klan. The paper sketched an outline that sounded like a bad fairy tale. “It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct, and a state of terror was substituted for a state of law.” But was it really an aberration?

[k4250] But take away the courage of Madge Oberholtzer as she lay dying from poison and the sadism of Stephenson, and there is no extinguisher of the flames that enveloped the nation during the 1920s.

[k4255] Without her, Stephenson might have been named to that vacant United States Senate seat, and gone ahead with a run at the White House while the Klan was still ascendant. 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.

[k4258] We should also think about another cause and effect, or lack thereof. 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.

[k4263] 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 Grand Dragon was a symptom, not a cause, of an age that has been mischaracterized as one of Gatsby frivolity and the mayhem of modernism.

[k4270] 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.

[k4278] 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.

[k4360] In 2022, Congress finally passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a bill making lynching a federal crime–122 years after the first such legislation was introduced. According to the NAACP, nearly 5,000 lynchings took place between 1882 and 1968.