Title: A Fever in the Heartland
Rating: 5 Stars
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan began a rapid rise in, of all places, Indiana. On the surface, this seems odd. After all, especially in the 1920s, it’s not as if Indiana had that many Blacks, Catholic immigrants, or Jewish immigrants to speak of. In fact, many small towns where the KKK really flourished had virtually none.
If you think on it, it’s not that odd. It’s much easier to ‘other’ another group of people if you have relatively few dealings with them. You’re much more likely to believe in stereotypes or conspiratorial theories if the target is unknown to you. If you lived next door to a community of others, you might actually discover that they’re not that much other than you.
The 1920s were a turbulent time. Millions of men have come back from fighting a brutal war in Europe. Immigrants had been streaming to the US for decades. Women were newly discovering their independence and were fighting for outlandish rights like to vote and things like that. No longer willing to suffer under the Black code / Jim Crow of the South, millions of Black Americans were migrating North.
Given all of that, what was a white man to do? Well, apparently in the 1920s, you decide to resurrect the KKK.
It didn’t spring up out of nowhere. In 1915, DW Griffith released The Birth of a Nation. Without question, it was technically innovative. However, it was also extremely racist. Promoting The Lost Cause myth of The Civil War, Black characters, many of them white actors in Black face, were represented as dumb and sexually aggressive to white women. It glorified the rise of the original KKK. It was in the film that cross burnings first appeared (the original KKK did no such thing). In fact, the founder of the rebirth of the KKK, William Simmons, was directly inspired, along with fifteen other men, to restart the KKK after repeatedly watching the film.
At the same time, this was the time of Prohibition. The successful passage of Prohibition was due to one very single issue focused organization, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL). The ASL was particularly aggressive in going after immigrant alcohol like German beer and Italian wine. It also promoted the theory that alcohol made Black men more sexually aggressive, threatening the virtue of white women.
Indiana was a little bit special in that it had a semi-vigilante law enforcement organization already in place. This was the strangely named Horse Thief Detective Association. Formed during the times when horse thieves were actually a menace, by the 1920s this threat had mostly vanished (in one year, a grand total of four horses were reported stolen). Once the KKK restarted, this organization essentially became the enforcement adjunct to the KKK, able to burst into anyone’s house, destroy belongings, and threaten the inhabitants without warrant or any concern that law enforcement would try to stop them.
Into this steps D.C. Stephenson (nicknamed Steve). Called the Old Man, even though he was only in his thirties, he was a charismatic presence in Indiana. Sensing the KKK as a path to riches and power, he began to recruit. Joining the KKK cost $10. In addition, there was the cost of the hood and robe (apparently, you just couldn’t make your own). Steve became wealthy when he struck a deal with the national organization to receive a cut of each initiation dues and outfit.
With his efforts, the KKK grew like wildfire. In any given town, up to half of all white male residents would join. Across the state, the member count numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It was not just slack jawed yokels that were signing up either. Doctors, lawyers, police chiefs, newspaper editors, and district attorneys made up the member list.
With all of the cash rolling in, he was able to buy off politicians. Not only mayors, but Steve had control over the governor of Indiana. He had dreams of becoming a US senator with the ultimate goal of becoming President. Despite brave, solitary attempts to defeat him, Steve appeared to have an impregnable stranglehold on the state of Indiana.
There was only one problem. Steve was a monster. He abandoned a wife and child. He lied about his past. Even though he postured himself as morally upstanding, he was a raging alcoholic. Worst of all, when drunk, he committed acts of violent rape.
A local young woman, Madge Oberholtzer, caught his eye. She was a strong, independent woman that thought she could take care of herself. She went out with him a couple of times but was able to keep him at arms length. One night, after repeated calls to her house, she agreed to come over to his house. There, surrounded by drunk men, she knew she was in trouble. They pulled guns on her and forced her on a train to Chicago. While on the train, Steve savagely raped her, covering her body with bite marks.
Distraught, she begged to go home, but they wouldn’t let her. No longer wanting to live, she ingested poison. Worried that she was dying, the men brought her back to her home and dumped her on her bed. There, nursed by her parents and friends, she lingered for a month before dying a horribly painful death. Before she died, she dictated a dying declaration describing all of the events of that night.
Using that declaration, Steve was arrested for murder. This is history, so you can look up the result, but since the book is so new I don’t think that I’ll throw in any more spoilers than I’ve already done.
I did learn many new things about the 1920s KKK. First of all, not only were there women auxiliaries to the men only KKK, but there was an organization for children called the Ku Klux Kiddies.
The Republican refusal to denounce the KKK was a driving force that moved the Black vote to the Democratic party. That’s somewhat earthshattering to contemplate. The Republican party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, was formed for the primary purpose of abolition. The Democratic party, the so-called Copperheads, was the dominant party of the South. Making this switch was monumental. It was one of the early heads of the NAACP, disturbed that President Calvin Coolidge refused to denounce the resurgent KKK, that inspired the move. By 1932, some seventy percent of the Black vote went to Roosevelt.
I found one of the quotes from a KKK leader interesting. He called the undesirables “Italian anarchists, Irish Catholic malcontents, Russian Jews, Finns, Lithuanians, and Austrians of the lowest class”. Sure, anarchists, Catholics, and Jews. That’s pretty standard hate speech for the time. Finns, Lithuanians and Austrians seem to be a pretty specific call-out. It shows that anyone can be ‘othered’. With the growing right wing nationalist movements today, for those people that think that they can sit back and relax because bigotry can never reach them, understand that hatred has no rational limits.
Movements such as these need to hate something smaller to make them think that they have faith in something larger.
dorkenstein 