A Fever in the Heartland, page 10
Flush with money, the Klan dangled $350,000 before the keepers of Valpo’s withering flame—enough to fend off creditors. As Steve envisioned it, his college would not be a two-bit, backwater school, but a prominent national university, “a monument to American ideals and principles,” and not a poor man’s Harvard, as the headline had it, but a serious rival.
He still had to get Imperial Wizard Evans to sign off and pony up the rest of the money. That could be a problem. As united as the two most powerful Klansmen were in staging the coup in Atlanta, they were now fighting over the spoils of the expansive and wealth-generating machine of the new Ku Klux Klan. Evans was leery of Stephenson’s lordship over his own private college. Already, Steve’s territory was becoming an empire within the Empire. They arranged to meet in Washington, DC, at the Willard Hotel, the temporary residence of many a president-elect while waiting to move a few steps over to the White House. The setting would give Stephenson a prime view of the place he hoped to call home one day.
In mainstream quarters, the press reception to Klan U was not favorable. A newspaper in New York imagined a slogan across the school’s gateway arches: “Abandon All Brains Ye Who Enter Here.” They envisioned a commencement where degrees were awarded in “Jew-hating” and “fanaticism,” and classes in whipping, lynching, tar-and-feathering. “What a fine bunch of imbeciles will this college turn out each year with a faculty made up exclusively of Kluxers,” wrote George Dale in his Muncie Post-Democrat. Even after his lockup on the penal farm, and facing a boycott that was killing subscriptions, after vandals stole ink from his printing press and tried to foul the typesetting machine, Dale kept pounding away. “God pity the helpless youth of Indiana whose nutty parents contemplate sending them to this proposed insane asylum.”
While Evans mulled the proposal to buy a college, Stephenson staged a show of force in Dale’s hometown. A massive parade of slow-moving vehicles and horses bedecked with flags took over the main streets of Muncie on a warm spring night—“the largest crowd ever to gather” in the city, the papers noted, about 40,000 people. It wasn’t the usual Klan festival, heavy on kitschy entertainment and Americana; this one had more menace. Burly men in masks walked beside the cars, eyeballing the crowd from behind their hoods. They ordered all male spectators to remove their hats as the parade passed by. An army captain, John O’Neill, a veteran of the Great War, refused to comply as he watched from his parked car. A gang of Klansmen yanked him from his vehicle and threw him to the ground. He was pummeled into unconsciousness, his face bloodied. It took a dozen stitches to sew up the gash in his cheek.
Dale was watching it all with his daughter, terrified by the ugly display of force. Of late, the editor had been receiving death threats. When he walked down the street, women of the Klan would spit on him—as ordered by Steve. He looked spindly and frail. “He can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds at most,” a visiting reporter wrote. “Any husky 14-year-old boy could knock him down.” His house was vandalized, rocks thrown through windows, his seven children heckled and bullied. One gunshot had been fired into the Dale home. When a Klansman in the parade spotted Dale, he barked out an order: “Go get him!” Hooded men surrounded the editor and ordered him to remove his hat. A Klansman reached beneath his robe for his gun. Another one slapped Dale in the face. Dale turned to a nearby cop who’d witnessed the attack. He demanded that the officer arrest the man who had just assaulted him.
“He told me that I ought to have known better than to stand around and thus invite trouble when a Klan parade was going by,” Dale wrote. 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. “Muncie is now in a state of civil war,” Dale wrote. “An armed, masked and secret organization has taken over the government.”
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On a sultry June night in 1923, two sheriff’s deputies on motorcycles were patrolling the roads outside Columbus, Ohio. Around midnight, they spotted a Cadillac coupe parked just off the highway. They pulled up beside the car and approached with flashlights. In the back seat, two people were untangling from each other, a man with his suit pants down and a woman with her dress scrunched above her breasts.
“What’s going on?” asked the deputy, Charles M. Hoff.
D. C. Stephenson hastily pulled his pants up, slicked his hair back, and sat upright in indignation.
“Nothing’s going on,” he said.
“It looks like there’s been something going on. What are you doing there with your pants unbuttoned?”
He protested. This was an affront to a powerful man, and an insult to the young lady’s honor. “I’m going to marry this girl,” he said. She was twenty years old, hired by Steve two months earlier as a stenographer. She was reluctant to talk.
“I don’t care if you’re married now,” the officer replied. “You have violated the law. You don’t have no headlights or a taillight.”
He ordered Stephenson out of the car and said he was going to place him under arrest for indecent exposure and parking a car on the highway without displaying the proper lights.
Steve was furious. But he held his anger in check, smoothed his clothes, and tucked in his shirt. He approached the officer outside the car and motioned for him to step away.
“Can I talk to you alone?” Again, he told the cop he was a prominent man, well known throughout the Midwest, and couldn’t afford the publicity of an arrest.
“Is there anything that can be done?”
“What’s your official capacity?” the officer asked.
“It doesn’t make any difference.”
“What’s your name?”
He refused to identify himself, lingering in the dark for several minutes, steaming. Ohio was a second home for Steve during the warm months. He’d purchased a showcase at Buckeye Lake, where many of the wealthy and powerful of the state passed their summers. He could count on Ohio judges, prosecutors, politicians as friends of the order. Youngstown, 170 miles from the site of the police encounter, was about to elect a Klan mayor.
At the same time, the morality patrols, those peripatetic Klansmen deputized as horse thief detectives, had announced new campaigns to clean up vice. In Hammond, an Indiana city on Lake Michigan, the Klan took to monitoring dance halls, music clubs, and movie theaters for violations of clean living, most having to do with sex. “Automobile parties, stalled on county roadsides, are to be particularly watched,” wrote the Fiery Cross. Of course, the crusade didn’t apply to Steve’s automobile party on a county roadside.
Still, the cops were unmoved by the fast-talking, fleshy-faced man they’d found with his pants down in the darkened back seat of a Cadillac at midnight.
“If you don’t want to give me your name,” said Officer Hoff, “I’ll drive you down to jail and we’ll find out what your name is there.”
He shined his light on the license plate and started writing up the account for the arrest record. Steve made one last appeal.
“I’m a special deputy myself,” he said.
“Let me see some identification.”
Steve opened his wallet and pulled out an official-looking card with his name on it and a metal badge, showing him to be a deputy of the Horse Thief Detective Association. This link to the brotherhood of blue was enough to keep Steve out of jail and the incident from the papers. The wall between the private D. C. Stephenson and the public man was intact—stronger than ever, as Steve interpreted the roadside encounter in the heat of a summer night. What could hold him back? At this point, certainly nobody in law enforcement.
9.
A Master Race in the Midwest
1923
At a night rally in the summer of 1923, Stephenson gave a long speech on eugenics before a somewhat baffled crowd of coal miners. He had taken up the cause of racial purity by legislation with the confidence of a man whose convictions were shaped by the uncomplicated concision of crackpots. He claimed that ethnicity was fate: millions of people were doomed in utero to become degenerates or castoffs. “In reference to feeblemindedness, insanity, crime, epilepsy, tuberculosis and deformity, the older immigrant stocks were vastly superior to the recent.” The new Americans were “dregs from putrefied vomit,” parasites, illiterate, dumb, lawless, with overactive sex drives. Nor would young immigrants ever improve with schooling. For they are “citizens of a lower class, just as the Negro is a constant menace to the standards of civilization which Americans hold dear.”
With Prohibition on the books, and Jim Crow expanding beyond the South, the top objective of the new Klan was stopping the flow of people who could never be idealized Americans. Fixation on designing a more perfect white citizen had become an obsession of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan. At one end of life, the hooded order supported “Better Baby” contests at state fairs. There, not far from pens holding prizewinning hogs and oversized gourds, were exhibits explaining how proper breeding could lead ever upward, refining the race while keeping it pure. From animal husbandry to ideal infants—it made sense. Babies were judged on a scorecard, with points taken off for unusual ear size, the shape of a child’s head, or eyes that didn’t shine. The good-looking, glowing, exclusively white babies were awarded ribbons. Black babies and babies of immigrants were excluded from the competition. As the Indiana director who ran the contests explained: “We cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, nor can we make a citizen out of an idiot or any person who is not well-born.”
On the adult side of their campaign, the Invisible Empire joined forces with experts who issued studies on the dire threat to a race of diminishing thoroughbreds. Led by a eugenics committee, Congress was drawing up a bill to close the door on nationalities debased from birth.
Well ahead of the rest of the nation, 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 . . .” 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.
By the dawn of the 1920s, about 2,500 people in the state had been sterilized against their will. More than half of those forced into a procedure to end their bloodline were labeled “mentally deficient,” a term broad enough to include “idiots, imbeciles, and degenerates” but also “epileptic persons” and the highest grade of legal inferiority—“morons.” The law was finally struck down by the state supreme court in 1921, though a new statute was drafted soon thereafter and became a top priority of the Klan.
Both Stephenson and Imperial Wizard Evans liked to cite well-credentialed men of science to bolster their claims. Stephenson quoted extensively from the work of Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, the chief eugenicist guiding the anti-immigration forces in Congress. Laughlin came from Iowa, where he immersed himself in the mechanics of breeding livestock. Allowing strong, healthy animals to cross with weaker ones, he concluded, was no way to run a farm—or a country. He created a model human sterilization law, building on the pioneering work from Indiana, that was drafted by more than thirty states. Ultimately, about 70,000 people across the United States would be forcibly sterilized. A special category of “degenerates” was added in many of these states in order to sterilize homosexuals. 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.”
Among Dr. Laughlin’s colleagues, the subordination of the Black race was a settled question. The debate had moved on to whites with a shade of color. If the United States were to become “darker in pigmentation,” as the influential eugenicist Charles Davenport explained, the typical American would eventually be “smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.”
It was too late to keep out immigrants who would help shape the American Century. Rudy Valentino, a heartthrob filling movie theaters across the nation, had been born Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguella in Castellaneta, Italy. He passed through Ellis Island in 1913, after leaving one of the poorest parts of hollowed-out Puglia. Irving Berlin, born Israel Beilin, fled pogroms aimed at Jews in the shtetl where his family lived in the Russian Empire. Among the songwriter’s contributions to his adopted country was “White Christmas,” the most-recorded holiday song in history and the best-selling single of all time. Another Jewish composer and songwriter, George Gershwin, born Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz, came from a family in Russian Ukraine. His Rhapsody in Blue was created in 1924, the year Congress was finalizing legislation that would prevent millions of Jews from fleeing a Europe soon to be tyrannized by the Nazi Holocaust.
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About the same time that Stephenson was giving his speech on the inferiority of these new immigrants and disparaging American Blacks as a “constant menace” to Western civilization, James W. Johnson drew a packed house to his lecture inside the colored YMCA in Indianapolis. His title: “The Negro’s Contribution to American Culture.” A poet, Broadway lyricist, composer, educator, and columnist, Johnson was a big part of the swell of African American artistic expression sweeping the nation. He was also now well into his tenure as the leader of the fast-growing NAACP. As a field organizer, he’d helped to plant new branches across the country. Indianapolis had an active chapter, run mostly by women. They had been able to block one Klan rally in the city in 1922, and were fighting new efforts at enforcing residential segregation. Johnson was the embodiment of Black success, throwing off one institutional tether after the other. He was the first African American to pass the bar exam in Florida. As part of President Theodore Roosevelt’s informal Black Cabinet, he was a special ambassador in South America. As the first Black executive secretary of the NAACP, Johnson used both muscle and his fluency in diplomacy in the job.
But culture was his ongoing passion: it was the best argument—by example—against everything the Klan preached. He cowrote a comic opera. Hundreds of his songs were performed on Broadway. He crafted verse in Black dialect and old-fashioned iambic meter. One poem, lauded as a work of genius when it was printed in the New York Times, tried to take in the entire sweep of Black history in the New World, as this sample stanza demonstrated:
This land is ours by right of birth,
This land is ours by right of toil;
We helped to turn its virgin earth,
Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.
Johnson urged his audience of Black Hoosiers to be evangelists of culture, to shout it from the rooftop of the segregated Y. He reminded them that African Americans had given the nation its “most distinctive form of art” in the new century—jazz. Indiana, with its recording studio by the tracks in Richmond, had played a big role in bringing this sound to millions, as his listeners well knew. At a time when cities were closing off their neighborhoods, their public schools, their shared spaces to Black citizens, Johnson was amazed at the spectacle of underground clubs packed with white people “doing their best to pass for colored.”
With Johnson in town, Indiana Avenue was alive with fresh indignation and racial pride. But the eugenicists had all the political momentum. Immigration panic was in the air. So was ethnic trepidation. One club, 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. At the very top, President Harding endorsed The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against White World-Supremacy, a bestseller about fears of diminishing racial superiority, written by a Harvard PhD, Lothrop Stoddard, who was also a Klansman in high standing. Harding’s vice president, Calvin Coolidge, had penned a piece in Good Housekeeping saying that “biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.” The article was titled “Whose Country Is This?”
The Klan could not have framed it better. In Colorado, the Klan referenced “scientific evidence” as proof that “descendants of savage ancestors or the jungle environment” along with certain immigrants were unfit to ever govern the United States. Under their Grand Dragon, Dr. Locke, the newly powerful Klan of the Rocky Mountains urged passage of a forced sterilization law similar to the one Indiana had pioneered. Edward Clarke, the marketing genius hired by Simmons, had long advocated sterilizing Black men and women. Now here were university presidents and other men with advanced degrees to give these ideas a boost from on high. 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.
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As Stephenson neared the end of that night’s speech, he summarized what was at stake when “members of inferior races” were let into the United States. “This is a struggle to save America,” he said. “It’s a struggle perhaps even more serious than that between the states in the Civil War.” The hundred percenters from the Heartland were at the forefront of a war to prevent “the inevitable destruction of what may be called the American race.”
