Fever In The Heartland Quotes

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

Men talk of the Negro problem,” said Frederick Douglass in one of his last public speeches, in 1893. “There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.

When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do.

The Klan prided itself on how quickly it could spread a lie: from a kitchen table to the whole state in six hours or less.

Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.

The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction. He

They didn’t hide by day and only come out at night. They were people who held their communities together, bankers and merchants, lawyers and doctors, coaches and teachers, servants of God and shapers of opinion.

These people needed to hate something smaller than themselves as much as they needed to have faith in something greater than themselves. The Ku Klux Klan “filled a need,

the Klan birthed in Indiana—a state that had lost 25,000 men fighting the Confederacy just a half century earlier—would soon have more Klansmen than any other state.

What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.

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

Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?

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.

Stephenson had succeeded with an unusual formula for a mass movement: men were the muscle, women spread the poison, and ministers sanctified it all.

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.

Madge Oberholtzer deserves a plaque of her own.

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. —

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, 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 bedsheets for a policeman’s uniform

What many Americans heard about Jews they got from Henry Ford, operating out of a Michigan base less than three hundred miles from Indianapolis. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was a fire hose of anti-Semitism and reached a peak circulation of nearly one million readers.

At day’s end, he was sitting on his front porch when a member of the Klan walked up the steps of a house nearby and plopped into a chair on the veranda. Once the mask was off, the boy could see that the now visible congregant of the Invisible Empire was his neighbor, Mrs. Crousore.

A mob with clubs had chased a group of immigrant miners out of town in 1921. The whiff of socialism was enough to inflame the attackers. Irish laborers had helped to build the city; refugees of the Great Famine dug the ditch that would become the Wabash and Erie Canal, largest in the United States, connecting Evansville to Lake Erie, 460 miles to the north. But because of their religion, they were second-class citizens in the caste system that the Klan exploited in Evansville.

Akron, was home to almost 50,000 members, including the mayor.

By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

Indiana was the most Southern of Northern states—North Dixie,

The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should 'build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven' against immigrants.

The Klan wanted to make an example of anyone who threatened the ‘sanctity of the home.

The biggest achievement of the Oregon Klan—the vote by a majority of the people to essentially outlaw Catholic schools in the state—also fell.

These people needed to hate something smaller than themselves as much as they needed to have faith in something greater than themselves.

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

For here was a man liberated from shame, a man who not only boasted of being able to get away with any violation of human decency for his entire life, but had just proved it for all to see.

This was even harder to accept for 200,000 Black soldiers who had returned from military service in France and felt entitled to be full citizens. “The great war in Europe, its recoil on America, the ferment in the United States, all conspired to break up the stereotyped conception of the Negro’s place,” wrote James Weldon Johnson, the literary polymath, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Cities erupted in violent attacks on Black property and life. And as vigilante executions by a hangman’s noose continued without sanction in the South, Congress could not muster enough votes to pass an anti-lynching law.

In Washington, people shared the story of a woman who once sat next to Coolidge at a dinner. She told him she’d bet a friend that she could get him to speak three words that evening. “You lose,” said Coolidge

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.

Several hundred thousand Hoosiers had pledged fealty to and were effectively governed by a rapist, a murderer, a drunk, and a dictator. He was not a man of God, but a fraud. He was no protector of women’s virtue, but a violent predator.

Steve and Barr also launched poison squads, as they were known on the inside. This was a disinformation brigade—clucks and gossips, but the best-known clucks and gossips in every community, so that false stories could be plausibly true.

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.

He understood people’s fears and their need to blame others for their failures. He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction.

The preacher said Madge’s spirit belonged to Irvington, and Irvington must be there for her memory: “Let us not forget that in coming here today we have not fulfilled our obligations of friendship,” he said. In the days, weeks, and years ahead, the family “will need us as never before

The state’s racial animus dated to at least 1844, when the provisional government ordered all Black people out of the territory. After Oregon became a state in 1859, it banned nonwhites from living there. Following the Civil War, Oregon was one of only six states to refuse to ratify the 15th Amendment, which granted full voting rights to all male citizens, regardless of race. By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

All it took were a few good Hoosiers to put an end to Klan “influence” in Indiana, as it was phrased.

After dangling in a summer breeze for eight hours, the bodies were cut down by a deputy at dawn. The woman at the roadside robbery scene later said there had been no rape; she had made the story up.

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.

he showed no outward fear of getting caught; law enforcement couldn’t touch him. And because the Klan had made him rich, money further immunized him from justice.

Hoosier born and bred, he claimed, from an old South Bend family that made its old money in the oil business. Or maybe it was coal. Or banking.

We are the law itself—the same boast would be heard in Indiana,

Fully half the town of 30,000 belonged to the Klan, including mayor, prosecutor, police force, and school board.

But even if the Fourth of July celebrants in Kokomo knew about the Big Lie of Stephenson’s life, would it have mattered? They believed because they wanted to believe.

New York Times noted, “In no other state of the union, not even Texas, is the domination of the Ku Klux Klan so absolute as it is in Indiana.

At the time, she was too traumatized to go to the police and report a felony committed by one of the most powerful men in the state. And besides, what good would it do? The Kokomo cops were Klansmen.

Kokomo has seen with its own eyes the class of people who comprise the Klan,” the Fiery Cross wrote in its report of the biggest day in the history of the Ku Klux Klan. “It saw staunch American farmers with their wives; merchants of repute; bankers of integrity; honest and hard-working mechanics, and ministers and devout church members.

They pored over a list of Klan-backed candidates for high office next year—governors in the West, the South, and the Midwest, senators from ten more states, and the presidential ticket. About seventy members of Congress were faithful to the hooded order,

They also bombed their own headquarters—and blamed it on Catholics.

With a snicker, the cop said that the editor could always take his complaint to higher-ups—Muncie’s chief of police or the Delaware County sheriff, both Klansmen who’d recently passed by in front of them. Or he could go directly to the prosecutor, the one hidden by mask and robe at the head of the Klan parade.

Indiana had already put some of these ideas into law. For sixteen years, the state tried to keep those who were demonstrably stupid, sickly, disabled, or prone to criminality, vice, or drink from ever having children of their own. Starting in 1907, with passage of the world’s first eugenic sterilization law, Indiana attempted to cull undesirables from inside its borders—“bad seeds.” The preamble of the law stated: “Whereas heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy and imbecility . . .

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.

No one was ever charged with a lawless execution witnessed by thousands of Hoosiers in the public square.

To say that there is no causal connection between the acts of appellant and the death of Madge Oberholtzer, and that the treatment accorded her by appellant had no causal connection with the death of Madge Oberholtzer would be a travesty of justice,” the court majority wrote in 1932, upholding the murder conviction.

But at the time, she was too scared to do anything. His reach into the cops and courts, he told her, was beyond anything she could imagine.

Steve offered to pay his victim a month’s salary if she would write a statement saying he had not attacked her. She refused. But because she was engaged and worried about what her fiancé would think if she had to go through a trial with a man who would try to destroy her, she backed off. The case disappeared.

Indiana embraced him, even after news of his assault had made its way into the state.

400,000 Klan in Indiana,

STUDENTS ROUT KLANSMEN

In Muncie, the “Constitution had ceased to function,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, after the Klan had established a “super-government” not based on the rule of law.

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.

The fastest-growing faction, comprising 40 percent of all Klan members, came from just three states—Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois,

The Republican Party as now constituted is the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana,” he wrote in his influential paper, the Indianapolis Freeman. “The nominees for governor, house, the senate and city offices are all Klansmen.

The house was thick with politicians and thick with Klansmen, one and the same.

feared going to the police. No one would believe her, as he warned her afterward. And even if they did, they wouldn’t dare to go after him.

at the end of 1922, nearly one in four residents had taken an oath to a cryptic organization dedicated to the dehumanization of fellow citizens. A majority would soon elect a Klansman as their mayor.

Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known, and even encouraged,

the Klan had “changed its bed sheets for a policeman’s uniform.

The car gave her real independence.

Still, he was the leader of a violent hate group. The profile in the paper had painted the Grand Dragon as the relatively benign boss of Indiana, with Stephenson asserting that his “Klan is not based on racial, religious or other prejudice.

the police had not only given Steve a pass on Prohibition but often served as his protectors.

Middle-aged men of privilege could be seen on corner couches in the embrace of somebody not their wife. Steve usually had a photographer circulating, given free access by his boss to take pictures of the most intimate situations. The photos proved very useful and helped to ensure that those in the know would not turn on their political master—a conspiracy of silence that proved remarkably successful

He told her he “controlled every court in Indiana.” For $30, he could get someone to sign an affidavit to anything he dictated, he boasted. For $50, he could get a man killed.

Indiana, where truth was no defense, and the First Amendment had no force of law.

What better symbol of the Klan’s drive to soften its image and triple membership than a person known all over Indiana as Mother?

The female Klan of Indiana held its first statewide convention in July 1923, with a parade of white-robed women on horseback, bands and floats, initiation ceremonies, speeches on virtue and temperance, and a cross burning at night.

She’d also been suffering from a painful sexually transmitted disease, given her by her husband.

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.

D. C. Stephenson was telling the state’s top elected officials what to do. And they followed the Klansman’s every order.

Even though no liquor was found, the boy was hauled off to jail and charged with possessing intoxicating drink. Two months later, the teenage girl died—from “shock sustained on the day of the raid,” in the opinion of her doctor. The boy was tried in a courtroom overseen by the leader of the raid, Judge Tague, and prosecuted by another member of the invading party.

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

Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.

A Klan mayor ruled Anaheim, California; the city was nicknamed “Klanaheim.

Among the 150 members of the General Assembly of 1925, only two were women and four were Catholics; there were no Black or Jewish representatives.

To avoid trouble, one large manufacturing company made membership in the Ku Klux Klan a qualification for employment

In Marion County, every major elected official but two was a Klansman.

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.

America cannot remain half-Christian and half-agnostic.” Thereafter, the Klan lobbied for teaching the biblical story of seven days of creation in public school science classes

If they were not all Klansmen, surely they sympathized with the Klan. Their neighbors were Klan. Their kin were Klan. Their ministers were Klan. They attended churches where Klan values were preached and Klan members blessed. They shopped in stores with “TWK” stickers. They subscribed to the Fiery Cross. They voted the straight Klan ticket, following the guidance on clothespin-clipped ballots sent out by the man on trial for murder. They boycotted Catholics, berated Jews, shunned Blacks, feared immigrants.

Mayor-elect Duvall promised to stuff city hall with members of the hooded order—from the parks department to the police rolls. In hundreds of small ways these loyalists could make things worse for those who were not white Protestants. In where you could live and where you could send your kids to school, in enforcement of the law, in deciding who would be hired and who would be shunned, in garbage pickup and parade permits and health department inspection of restaurants—all of this would have to go through Klan filters. On January 1, “city hall will be turned over to the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote the Indianapolis Times.

Suicide is not a crime in Indiana,” said Holmes dismissively. “Therefore, to be an accessory before or after the fact would be no crime in Indiana.

It was a slate-gray day, featureless, drab, and cold.

could not find a lawyer in Muncie brave enough to take on his defense of free speech.

the American Breeders Association, had nothing to do with horses; its eugenics committee was headed by a man who’d been president of Indiana University, and the first president of Stanford, David S. Jordan. He taught that the human race could be improved only by preventing the disabled or certain nonwhites from reproducing

Testifying before Congress, Dr. Laughlin said sterilization laws would lead to lower taxes, lessening the burden of society to take care of people with epilepsy, the blind, the deaf, and the mentally disabled, not to mention the high cost of jailing criminals prone to music and art.

I want to put all the Catholics, Jews and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft,” said a Klan speaker in rural Whitley County, just outside Fort Wayne. His suggestion was met with wild applause.

Fighting Irish” nickname was forever set by the clash of Notre Dame against the Ku Klux Klan on May 17, 1924.

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.

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.

The fake news originated at the top and was planted at the bottom.

Simmons modeled his newly chartered Klan after the fraternal orders he knew so well, with codes, secret phrases, hand signs, titles, rituals, oaths, and a constitution. The Klan even had its own calendar and language. The guiding principle was the superiority of white, Protestant, native-born Americans over everyone else. On the point of tribal identity, there was no wavering. “We seek to create, as never before, one grand, glorious America,” Simmons wrote in a booklet. “A White Man’s nation.

proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had “changed its bed sheets for a policeman’s uniform.

In Oregon, the Klan had put their candidate, Walter Pierce, in the governor’s mansion in 1922. The same year, a majority of his state’s voters approved of a centerpiece of the hooded order: an amendment requiring all children to attend only public schools, meaning Catholic ones would dry up.

Some were even impressed. For here was a man liberated from shame, a man who not only boasted of being able to get away with any violation of human decency for his entire life, but had just proved it for all to see.

I want to see the people of Indianapolis rise up and put the stamp of disapproval upon this man Stephenson,” said Duvall’s chief rival in the Republican primary. “What a great disaster, what a disgrace to the Republican Party it would be, to have a man like that dominating our primaries, our candidates, our legislature.

spring of 1862, a Union victory that cost 24,000 casualties—the most of any war on the continent to that date.

The trial was a farce, “the most appalling persecution to which man has been subjected to since the days that civilization abandoned the bludgeon.” He hinted at retribution to come. “I will not be the sacrificial lamb that will be offered up as the political scapegoat

Well, you can’t burn history,” the contractor told Allen Safianow, an Indiana historian. “That’s what’s wrong today.

I am the law

no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise,

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,

Isn't it strange that with all our educational advantages, noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?

The talented D.C. Stephenson had proved to be quite the prodigy, as he said so himself. He had the touch and the charm, the dexterity with words and the drive. He understood people's fears and their need to blame other for their failures. He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it.

He called the women in the courtroom who’d hissed at him throughout the proceeding “scum.” He then switched into the third person in talking about himself, as if speaking for posterity. “Time will unfold the cold, white light of truth that D.C. Stephenson is not guilty of murder in any degree.

The fight against the Klan is not a Jewish fight or a Negro’s fight or a Catholic’s fight, but an American fight.” Within a few weeks, community leaders from all three camps had signed on, opening a new office of the American Unity League—an Indiana foothold inside the Klan of the North.

But the GOP of 1924 was not the party of Lincoln.

The Republican Party was outraged—not at the disclosures of Stephenson’s web of graft, but at the press for reporting it.

Late in his prison term, Stephenson was visited by Will Remy. His old adversary asked him if he’d been serious about running for the White House. Steve said the plan was real. “You wouldn’t have called it President,” he said. “The form of government might have changed. You might have had a dictator.

There are millions who have never joined, but who think and feel and, when called on, will fight with us," Evans wrote. "This is our real strength, and no one who ignores it can hope to understand America today.

To D. C. Stephenson, it wasn’t strange at all. Steve’s 1922 epiphany in Evansville—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.

The “odium” that Inman spoke of was the rise of protests and denunciations from women. The Irvington Women’s Club issued a strong statement, making a religious appeal very different from the one Klan preachers made to the same God on Sundays in Indiana: “Here was a crime that strikes at the very foundations of our life as Christian people. If we permit perpetrators of such acts to go unpunished it will show that our ideals have become obscured and our sense of justice has been blunted.

the best way to build a wall was to turn back the clock.

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Democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled

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...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.

The trial was a farce, “the most appalling persecution to which man has been subjected to since the days that civilization abandoned the bludgeon.

The Negro and the Republican Party have come to a parting of the way,” announced the local office of the NAACP.

The Republican Party as now constituted is the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana,” he wrote in his influential paper, the Indianapolis Freeman. “The nominees for governor, house, the senate and city offices are all Klansmen.” The ballot, he said, “is the only weapon of a civilized people and it is up to the Negro to use that weapon as do other civilized groups.

The margin was 82,000. But for the first time, the Black vote went Democratic—by three to one. It was the start of a tectonic political realignment, in Indiana and elsewhere. Johnson had forced a divorce. Never again could Republicans count on a monolithic vote from African Americans.

The Klan had taken root in both the rural side east of the Cascade Mountains and the metropolitan areas in the west, up and down the Willamette Valley. The first American town founded west of the Rocky Mountains, Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, elected a Klan mayor in 1922, and hosted a convention of the order two years later. Ten thousand people attended. Reuben Sawyer, a Portland pastor and a student of Henry Ford’s tracts against Jews, filled churches in the Beaver State with anti-Semitic rants. “In some parts of America,” he warned one crowd, “the kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk.” Speaking to 6,000 in Portland, he said Jews were trying to establish “a government within the government.” In the same city, another top Klansman told an audience that “the only way to cure a Catholic is to kill him.

Colorado was not far behind. Rocky Mountain Klansmen kidnapped two prominent attorneys—one a Jew who defended bootleggers, the other a Catholic whose crime was his faith—then clubbed them nearly to death. They tried to force a Black family out of their home in Grand Junction, warning that if they did not leave, their lives would be in danger. But the violence did nothing to curb popularity. The Klan mayor of Denver, elected in 1923, named fellow members of the Invisible Empire as police chief and city attorney. One night alone, the Klan set seven crosses ablaze throughout Denver. They would soon be “the largest and most cohesive, most efficiently organized political force in the state of Colorado,” wrote the Denver Post.

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. “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men,” he wrote that year.

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.

When a vote was finally taken, the Klan prevailed by a single digit, getting 542 against the resolution condemning Klan values to 541 for it. That was a day, said Will Rogers, “when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced.

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. “What the Democrats must do is come out boldly and unmask them!” They needed no unmasking, as it were, since the leading officeholders, from governor to mayor of the state’s largest city, were all bound to the Invisible Empire.

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.

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.

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.

James Weldon Johnson, the literary polymath and leader of the NAACP from 1920 to 1930. When he urged Black voters to abandon the Republican ticket in 1924 because the party refused to denounce the Klan, he sparked an epic political realignment.

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” The fear was that if evolution were accepted, it would imply that all people had a common origin. For the Klan, that meant there was “no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise,” as the Defender, a Black newspaper in Chicago, put it. A part-time science teacher and high school football coach, John T. Scopes, challenged the new law. William Jennings Bryan, the aging populist and former Democratic presidential nominee, was enlisted to take up the creationist cause in what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. Bryan withered in the summer heat of the outdoor courtroom in 1925, and melted under questioning about biblical literalism from his opponent, Clarence Darrow. The trial ended with a $100 fine of the high school science teacher. Bryan died five days later.

We will take up the torch as it fell from the hand of William Jennings Bryan,” the Klan declared, as it burned crosses throughout the land in his memory. “America cannot remain half-Christian and half-agnostic.

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.

Smith had a possible solution: a “dying declaration,” made by a witness in advance of certain death. There was one major challenge. Under the confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, every criminal defendant has a right to confront the witness against him or her. A dying declaration violates that right; the words of the witness are hearsay. Still, these words could be used in court if recorded properly and approved by a judge.

The United States was full of secretive clubs: Masons, Woodmen, Red Men, Elks, and Odd Fellows, with nearly 40 percent of adult males belonging to a fraternal order.

They burned houses and churches, stole crops and food, dragged men from their farms and whipped them until they fell, ripped teachers from schoolhouses and branded their foreheads, raped women in front of their children, and shot their husbands at point-blank range.

In Kern County, California, a vast squat of irrigated farmland that had been heavily settled by people from the South, Klansmen kidnapped Dwight Mason, a white doctor, and dragged him to a baseball field for torture. In front of a hooting, clapping crowd of thirty people, Mason was hanged until he lost consciousness, whipped, tarred, and branded. He was targeted because he had filed for divorce. The Klan wanted to make an example of anyone who threatened “the sanctity of the home,” as it was put in a statement. He was also said to be performing abortions on the side.

We will stand for the things that are right at all times,” Jackson said now, to prolonged applause.

Ford saw Jewish tentacles extending to every aspect of life. After biting into a candy bar that tasted slightly off to him, he said, “The Jews have taken hold of it. They’ve cheapened it to make more money.

Finally, after being properly vetted, a new member donned a pointed hood with a tassel on top, and a white robe, and put his hand on a Bible. For many, it was a thrilling moment, a break from the tedium of daily life.

Thereafter, the Klan lobbied for teaching the biblical story of seven days of creation in public school science classes—a core demand of any politician who expected to get support from the Empire.

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

Americans be on guard,” was the message in one handbill. “The Jews control the moving pictures, jewelry and clothing industries and own us financially. The Greeks control the restaurant and confectionary business, the Italians the fruit and produce business.” Another read: “The Irish Catholics control us politically and are trying to control us religiously. The public press is controlled by Irish Catholics and Jews.

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.

After Oregon became a state in 1859, it banned nonwhites from living there. Following the Civil War, Oregon was one of only six states to refuse to ratify the 15th Amendment, which granted full voting rights to all male citizens, regardless of race. By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

By the close of 1923, Indiana would have more Klansmen than any other state—north or south.

What most Oregonians knew of African Americans and Jews did not come from personal experience. Like Indiana, Oregon had only a small number of these minorities. The state’s racial animus dated to at least 1844, when the provisional government ordered all Black people out of the territory. After Oregon became a state in 1859, it banned nonwhites from living there. Following the Civil War, Oregon was one of only six states to refuse to ratify the 15th Amendment, which granted full voting rights to all male citizens, regardless of race. By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

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. So now all the world knew what Stephenson had masterminded. There were two governments in Indiana: elected officials going through the motions of a representative democracy, and a dictatorship run by the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

design of the Klan’s hold on an American state. 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.

The crowd could not know that their illustrious leader was a drunk and a fraud, a wife-beater and a sex predator, a serial liar and an unfettered braggart, a bootlegger and a blackmailer, caught by police barely a month earlier in an act that these very people were crusading against. They could not know that he had left behind a family in rags and distress, whom he still refused to support; that his own mother, an impoverished and widowed waitress in Oklahoma scraping by on tips at a luncheon counter, had been begging him for money. That he had stiffed merchants from Oklahoma to Kansas to Iowa to Indiana. “I have yet to find any person that had a good word to speak of him,” an investigator wrote later. “He usually left a trail of grief behind him.

The second-wave Klan could return to its roots of terror because it had survived the kind of scrutiny that would have killed off any other secret society in a democracy

There’s nothing wrong with promoting white supremacy, it was only race pride, he said. ‘I cannot see anything anti-American in that

There’s nothing wrong with promoting white supremacy, it was only race pride, he said. ‘I cannot see anything anti-American in that.’ He dismissed the numerous stories of violence as the work of ‘a paper owned and controlled by a Jew.’ and imposters trying to take down the invisible empire

pillared white mansion

The Negro is among us and the race should be encouraged to progress, but that path should never lead to social mingling,” warned the Indianapolis Star in 1921.

Hear, hear! Thereafter, the Klan and the private militias would make common cause. The Klan that spread to the North was steeped in homegrown Christianity practiced by everyday folks. But instead of love your neighbor, these Klansmen hated many a neighbor. At

The black man that sympathized, worked and fought for this great country of ours during its threatened destruction is a thousand times better than the white man that sympathized, worked, plotted and fought against it,

And here was yet another plum: Ed Jackson, the Republican whose name had first appeared on membership rolls of the Klan in 1923, had been swept into the governor’s office. He owed it all to D. C. Stephenson.

The Klan claimed fifteen United States senators under its control, and seventy-five members of the House of Representatives. Many had sworn allegiance in secret Klan initiation rituals, becoming “naturalized,” as it was called.

The state had passed the world’s first eugenic sterilization law, targeting “idiots, imbeciles, and confirmed criminals,” as the statute dictated. The Klan was now pushing for a more severe measure, singling out paupers, alcoholics, thieves, prostitutes, and those with epilepsy to be sterilized against their will.

When the grandchildren of these leading citizens later discovered hoods in the attic, or membership lists that included their kin, they could not fathom how such a thing came to pass. They knew the Ku Klux Klan was born in the murk of blood-spilling hate, built around a racial order that would find its most ghastly expression in the laws of Nazi Germany.

I did not sell the Klan in Indiana on hatreds,” Stephenson said. “I sold it on Americanism.” These people knew what they’d signed up for: that oath before God could not have been more specific about the absolute superiority of one race and one religion and the inferiority of all others.

At the peak of his power, D. C. Stephenson wanted to wipe the dirt of the Midwest from his shoes. He would say goodbye to India-no-place, Naptown, as the swells in his circle called the capital city. This was the year to do it, depending on when that Senate seat opened. All that would stand between him and Klan control over much of the United States was Madge Oberholtzer.

The 6,000 or so Black residents were forced into tenements and shacks in Baptisttown, a shank of the city without electricity or indoor plumbing. They were constantly harassed. Memories of a 1903 slaughter—twelve Blacks murdered and four saloons burned to the ground by a white mob—still haunted.

Black innovators were the force behind a burst of cultural creativity, from the poetry of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance to the crossover dance craze of the Charleston to jazz, the soundtrack of the age—“the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” as Hughes called it.

D. C. Stephenson was the ideal missionary. He had magnetism, unbridled energy, and a talent for bundling a set of grievances against immigrants, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Blacks into a simple unified pitch that made sense of a fast-changing America still dazed by the Great War. Not long after Stephenson joined the hooded order in early 1921, he would eclipse the man who hired him. “All

The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be—with the Anglo-Saxon race,” said the president of Alabama’s constitutional convention. Among the tools of suppression were tests that asked

On Thanksgiving night in 1915, fifty years after the close of the Civil War, Simmons and fifteen other men clambered up the granite monolith of Stone Mountain in Georgia. They built an altar on which they laid a Bible, an American flag, and a sword. The men set fire to a cross and shouted to the heavens an oath of allegiance to the Invisible Empire of a new age. The Ku Klux Klan had risen, Simmons proclaimed, “awakened from a slumber of a half a century.

The guiding principle was the superiority of white, Protestant, native-born Americans over everyone else.

There were still men walking the streets of 1922 Indiana who had fought against the slaveholders, and who believed that liberating humans held as property had been the highest calling of their lives. Among them was William H. Stern, a white man raised on a farm north of Indianapolis.

Stephenson would oversee a Klan map that stretched from the Atlantic coast to well beyond the Great Lakes, from the Ohio River to the Canadian border. In a candid moment with a reporter, he had said he was “just a nobody from nowhere—but I’ve got the biggest brains.” Now

Nationwide, the Klan had expanded to nearly three million members, and most of the growth was in the Northern states, Steve’s domain—Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Out West, Colorado and Oregon were adding to their Klan rolls just as quickly.

I am the spirit of righteousness. They call me the Ku Klux Klan I am more than the uncouth robe and hood With which I am clothed. Yea, I am the soul of America.

In the balloons of grandeur that kept Stephenson aloft, the presidency was just a few puffs of helium away. “Boys, I’m not in this for the money,” he told his cronies. “You’re going to put me in the White House.

All the right people did not turn down invitations to parties in Irvington. Hoosier Klansmen were not repulsed by his behavior, at least not outwardly. Many chose selective amnesia, in service to the greater good of the Invisible Empire and what it stood for. Some were even impressed. For here was a man liberated from shame, a man who not only boasted of being able to get away with any violation of human decency for his entire life, but had just proved it for all to see.

In attitude and politics, Indiana was the most Southern of Northern states—North Dixie, it was often called—settled by people from Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. In its early constitution, Article XIII specifically prohibited free Blacks or “mulattos” from residing in the state. Near the close of the nineteenth century, Indiana’s treatment of African Americans was “as inhuman as ever characterized the cotton fields of Georgia or the rice swamps of the Carolinas,” said James M. Townsend, who served one term in the statehouse in the 1880s.

The preamble of the law stated: “Whereas heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy and imbecility . . .” The words were a direct contradiction of the ones Hoosiers would recite on the Fourth of July, the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

David Hoover, in Elkhart, Indiana. Hoover replied: “I wish to take this occasion to ask just who you are, anyway? You seem to want to be a kind of guardian in general for all of Hoosierdom. I confess that I am not aware of the state of Indiana having created any position of overlord for you.

As Stephenson had said in one of his speeches on eugenics, science could explain why people with certain physical characteristics were born into degeneracy.

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.

It was the damndest thing I ever saw, how this guy could spread the bunk and make the hicks eat it up.

subsidized evangelists,

Fisherman's Blues" "I wish I was a fisherman Tumblin' on the seas Far away from dry land And its bitter memories Casting out my sweet line With abandonment and love No ceiling bearin' down on me Save the starry sky above With light in my head You in my arms I wish I was the brakeman On a hurtlin' fevered train Crashing a-headlong into the heartland Like a cannon in the rain With the beating of the sleepers And the burnin' of the coal Counting the towns flashing by In a night that's full of soul With light in my head You in my arms Tomorrow I will be loosened From bonds that hold me fast That the chains all hung around me Will fall away at last And on that fine and fateful day I will take thee in my hands I will ride on the train I will be the fisherman With light in my head You in my arms Light in my head You in my arms

Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?” To D. C. Stephenson, it wasn’t strange at all. Steve’s 1922 epiphany in Evansville—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.

He was the sole victim of this entire episode, he said. Again, he compared himself to Jesus, martyr of a monumental injustice. The trial was a farce, “the most appalling persecution to which man has been subjected to since the days that civilization abandoned the bludgeon.

The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” The fear was that if evolution were accepted, it would imply that all people had a common origin.

And he recruited heavily among the Denver police. It was an open door. In Indiana, the local cops were grateful to have a rogue arm of law enforcement to harass offenders of virtue.