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.

Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Madge Oberholtzer deserves a plaque of her own.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

400,000 Klan in Indiana,

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.

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,

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.

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

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.

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.

The car gave her real independence.

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

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.

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

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.

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,

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.

STUDENTS ROUT KLANSMEN

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.

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

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.