Stephenson vs Oberholtzer

the Indiana Klan and achieving justice

Don’t you enjoy an engrossing book? I plowed through a non-fiction account of power run amok yesterday, outlining the rise, hubris, and lawlessness of one man and an abused woman. The story also highlighted the cult enveloping thousands of officials across the country among the millions of other Americans who eschewed racial equality to attack immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and women—”others”.

Timothy Egan’s, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, is well worth your time. Egan’s uses court documents, autobiographies, diaries, newspaper clips, and oral histories as sources for conversations from a century ago. Those often dry documents come to life, however, without a sense of hyperbole.

Egan discusses the life of D.C. Stephenson, an individual who remade his fictions multiple times in several locations but who ultimately called himself the Old Man of the Ku Klux Klan. A movement born in the former Confederacy in the early years of Reconstruction to intimidate others from implementing whole of the 14th Amendment, the KKK had a resurrection early in the twentieth century as increased numbers of immigrants made their way to our shores; they sought a better life as had prior generations. Hatred of African Americans remained a core belief and provided the basis to much actual KKK activity but the desire to prevent Catholics, Jews, and Asians from living comfortably in Middle America became the aspiration for many whites. Egan’s descriptions of the steps taken against these groups, especially in Indiana, are painfully familiar.

I have moved around this country a fair amount but did spend four years in Notre Dame, Indiana, a school detached from South Bend by trees and open fields rising the grounds. The campus is located in the same town where memories of a vintage American car, the Studebaker, resurrect briefly the glory days of South Bend as home of auto innovators. I only visited the Studebaker mansion once, spending the overwhelming bulk of time as a non-Catholic graduate student in one of the most dedicated Catholic institutions in the world. I admit that the place often seemed more like the conservative Colombia of my youth than a post-Vietnam era American university. I knew South Bend had racial tensions but never really learned much about them until reading this book.

The crux of Egan’s work is the pervasiveness of corruption in so many aspects of governance in early twentieth century America. Stephenson, head of the Indiana Klan, had complete confidence he would ultimately become president of the United States, building upon the corruption, intimidation, and support of Klan members—known and covert—in many local, state, and federal offices. He brashly and often openly threatened those who opposed him, menacing anyone holding to more democratic principles.

The most disturbing aspect is the widespread willingness by so many average citizens to reject, if not entirely eradicate, people with more inclusive views across the country. No, Egan makes clear that large immigrant communities in New York, California, or a handful of other places did not align with this behavior, but he paints those places as such outliers while this country prided itself on freedom, equality, and raising up others (as we thought we were doing in China at precisely the same time, for example, through missionaries supported by their home towns and congregations).

Those courageous enough in the press to report on Stephenson or his primary national competitor, the Grand Wizard Evans, faced physical intimidation along with financial destruction of their papers; intimidating their families also occurred. A couple of men—and this was the 1920s—endured through that financial ruin but kept their eyes on Stephenson’s meteoric rise and associated behavior.

Stephenson treated women as disposable items for the trash. One of the Klan’s supposed core values was protection of women but that applied only to protecting them from unsubstantiated attack from the “others”. Stephenson was especially cruel, callous, and completely given to predatory animal behavior.

Then there was Madge Oberholtzer who proves a single person can make a difference in our country, in our political system, and in our selves.

A true case of actions and consequences with long term implications but, sadly, multiple cases of comparability to other eras.

I recommend this book as a reminder of self-delusional thinking fully a century ago. Any reader will learn a great deal about the Klan, the power of community for good and evil, and the courage we have found in individuals who seem small against the powerful and arrogant. Your local library likely has it—I borrowed it through the Libby interlibrary loan system.

I welcome any thoughts before, during, or after you read the book, if you choose to do so. I always welcome any of your reactions to these columns. I suggest you circulate the column if you find it of value. Thank you for being a reader, especially if you are a subscriber.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. New York: Penguin Random, 2023.