Fever In The Heartland Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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,

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

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

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.

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.

Madge Oberholtzer deserves a plaque of her own.

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,

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.

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.

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.