A Fever in the Heartland, page 11
His speech was reprinted in the main Klan newspaper and circulated in chapters throughout the North. It didn’t take long for the message from that night, crafted with half-baked statistics and questionable allusions to history, to take an even harder turn.
“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.
10.
Independence Day
1923
High in the Fourth of July sky over Kokomo, a small biplane came into view at midmorning, a speck in the stonewashed blue of a still and stifling day. On the ground, a mass of white-sheeted men and women, the largest crowd ever gathered in the history of the Klan, craned to get a look at what was dropping from the heavens. They had come from all over the Midwest, and their parked machines clotted roads for seven miles outward—spokes of solidarity radiating from the belly of Indiana. The hazy humidity made people sweat beneath their sheets, but few bothered to disrobe. They were one under their hoods, a prairie of white. The plane was the color of an oriole, black and orange, with two open cockpits, canvas wings, and a cross and inscription on its underside: “Evansville K.K.K. No. 1.” For an instant, it looked like the plane was going to crash, veering low to the ground and nearly clipping a tree. The crowd gasped. But then it looped upward, to applause and cheers, and climbed high enough to give the great and powerful sovereign of the Indiana Klan another look at his subjects. Of course the plane would never crash; D. C. Stephenson was indestructible.
Steve could see knee-high cornstalks wilting in the July heat, the spires of Protestant churches, the big yards of clipped grass, baseball fields and fairgrounds, a business district of hardware stores with barbers, butchers, banks, and the crowd—oh, the immensity, pilgrims of prejudice as far as the eye could see. To Steve, it was a perfect picture of small-town America on the nation’s birthday. Fully half the town of 30,000 belonged to the Klan, including mayor, prosecutor, police force, and school board. The local chapter took out ads in the Fiery Cross, bragging that the city had a higher proportion of Klansmen than any other community in Indiana. And the daily newspaper printed notices of upcoming Klan events on its front page, alongside the weather forecast.
It was the averageness of Kokomo—“the dead level typical-ness of the town,” as one native son who was there on that day recalled—that made it an ideal host for the hate group that had taken over the Heartland. The Klan made life less dull; it gave meaning, shape, and purpose to the days. Folks got their news from editors loyal to the Klan or from a gossip chain that started with a Klan poison squad plant. They took their moral guidance from preachers in the pocket of the hooded order. They were good people, or so they told themselves, of the same faith and same race, with the same fears and the same goals—though they were modest only to a point, as this showing of self-congratulatory sentiment made clear. The few who did not look like them were no trouble in Kokomo. The town mandated segregation in 1919, ordering all Black children, no matter where they lived, to attend a school set aside for nonwhites. In the chill of winter, some of the students had to walk miles in freezing weather, passing much closer schools to get to their racial cloister.
The Fourth of July gathering was advertised as “a monster rally” to discuss “the conditions of our country.” It was held along a vale of grass and shade trees around Wildcat Creek, owned by the Nathan Hale Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Visitors slept on prairie turf, in tents at the park, in hotels with people packed ten to a room. They carried flags, bunting, and signs that read “America Is for Americans.” They threw money into a huge pot—$50,000 at day’s end—for construction of a Klan-exclusive hospital, because members didn’t want to be treated at the city’s only hospital, run by Catholic sisters. On Independence morning, they marched in a parade with floats depicting Klansmen protecting women from predatory Blacks and lecherous Catholics. Then they moved on to the creek-side park, where each person had to utter a password to proceed. The Klan was still a secretive organization, after all. Reporters covering the event had to pledge not to name any of the speakers, except for a handful of well-known national officers. The hooded masses bowed their heads in unison to receive a group benediction from a Protestant minister, and then they were treated to brass bands and speeches that were equal parts uplift and condemnation.
The Klan’s official estimate of the assemblage—200,000 klansmen meet was the Fiery Cross headline—was surely an exaggeration. But even a low guess of about 100,000 by the Indianapolis Star gave credence to the Klan paper’s assertion that Kokomo had hosted “the biggest crowd of one-hundred percent Americans that ever assembled in any one place at any one time.” It was “a throng beyond the comprehension of the human mind.”
Up in the air, Steve got one last look at the multitudes. His pilot was his bodyguard, the jailbird and bootlegger Court Asher. Coming in for a landing, the plane was bouncy and uneven. Asher was a thrill devil, and the Klan plane was his favorite toy. It rumbled a few times on the hard ground before coming to a stop, the engine throttled. Steve bounded from the rear cockpit.
The crowd roared as he approached them, waving and smiling like the pope greeting the pious inside St. Peter’s Square. Many fell to their knees.
“The Old Man! It’s the Old Man!”
He mounted a platform draped in flags, red-white-and-blue bunting, and letters on a string of lights spelling out “WELCOME STEVE.”
“Some of them stretched out their arms to him like they were praying,” said Asher. “If he had told them to sprout their wings and fly, half of them would have tried it.”
He paused for several minutes, soaking it all in, mass adulation for a man who’d led a life without friends, a life devoid, by his design, of contact with the family that had raised him and the family he’d created and abandoned. He needed to be told that he was loved, that the world would know he was loved, even if the love was dictated by his own hand.
The crowd could not know that their illustrious leader was a drunk and a fraud, a wife-beater and a sex predator, a serial liar and an unfettered braggart, a bootlegger and a blackmailer, caught by police barely a month earlier in an act that these very people were crusading against. They could not know that he had left behind a family in rags and distress, whom he still refused to support; that his own mother, an impoverished and widowed waitress in Oklahoma scraping by on tips at a luncheon counter, had been begging him for money. That he had stiffed merchants from Oklahoma to Kansas to Iowa to Indiana. “I have yet to find any person that had a good word to speak of him,” an investigator wrote later. “He usually left a trail of grief behind him.”
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.
“My worthy subjects, citizens of the Invisible Empire, Klansmen all—greetings!”
This Fourth of July was his coronation. For as of today, D. C. Stephenson was finally given the crown he’d been promised by Imperial Wizard Evans after the coup in Atlanta one year earlier, his payback for his part in ousting Simmons. Though he oversaw a Klan confederation of twenty-one states, Steve had not been given the formal title until now. Evans was on hand to mark the high occasion. “I have come to see what is the cause of this remarkable growth of the Klan spirit in the realm of Indiana,” said Evans. He could easily have made the same boast in Colorado, where Klansmen climbed to the top of 14,115-foot Pikes Peak on the same Fourth of July to initiate new members in a state they would soon control. Or in Oregon, where thousands of Klansmen strutted through towns in Independence Day parades. But nothing could match what was happening in the center of the country. As the 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.” Stunned at the breadth of Stephenson’s makeover of the Midwest, the paper put the number of Hoosiers in hoods at half a million.
Was all of this the doing of D. C. Stephenson? Or was it a winning gamble by a few visionary Klansmen who bet that the same hard-heartedness that stirred the men on Stone Mountain in Georgia could be found in abundance in Middle America? As the Klan philosophy took hold in the North, it was polite at first, often expressed in codes and winks. “We solicit the patronage of 100 percent Americans, who prefer being served by 100 percent American workers,” as a local Ford dealer in Indianapolis worded his ad. And then, more forcefully—as when the main bus company in Indy started refusing service to Black transit users. Today, Evans praised the Machine, the vigilantes with badges, for its “wonderful accomplishments in the interest of law enforcement.” As the crowd hushed, the Imperial Wizard read a proclamation that made D. C. Stephenson the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana.
Steve followed with a long and tedious discourse on pure Americanism and the problems of an “inflexible” Constitution. Were the Founders to return today, they would surely insist on a rewrite, he said. The Supreme Court, for one, should be reined in by new amendments giving Congress power to override judicial decisions. On and on he went, second-guessing Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson. It was good that the masses were kept hydrated by 70,000 bottles of soda that had been trucked to the rally. Even with liquid refreshments, many people fainted or were treated for heat-related stress. When Steve finally ran out of wind, a feast of epic scale was presented: more than six tons of beef, 2,500 pies, seven wagonloads of watermelon. The Klansmen and Klanswomen and Klan Kiddies could at last take off their masks and enjoy a picnic among their tribe in the shade along Wildcat Creek.
As the crowd dined, Stephenson went back into Kokomo’s business district and took a break at the best hotel in town. After he started drinking, he eyed one of his secretaries who’d made the trip from Indianapolis. For press, his handlers had screened three reporters in advance: a Catholic from the Indianapolis News, a Klansman from the Indianapolis Star, and John Niblack of the Indianapolis Times. The Klan journalist got drunk on white mule and was too wasted to conduct an interview. The Catholic got spooked by the size and sentiment of the crowd and decided to stay in his room. That left young Niblack as the sole reporter. After making his way past several armed guards, he found himself face-to-face for the second time with the Old Man, whose nose was reddened from the sun and drink. He asked him about the ultimate plan for treatment of Catholics, Jews, and Blacks—the same line of questioning he’d raised when a friend had tried to recruit him into the ranks of the Invisible Empire.
“Do you intend to kill them, run them out, or live with them?”
Stephenson didn’t answer. He sat, grim-faced, rattling his fingers on a desk.
“What is the ultimate objective of the Klan?” Niblack followed up. “And how much money have you made out of all this?”
The last question set off the newly crowned Grand Dragon. No one spoke to him this way. But Niblack had raised an overarching and obvious issue: following the Klan’s agenda to its logical end, what was the plan for the nation’s thirteen million African Americans, three million Jews, and eighteen million Catholics?
“Just stop right there,” said Stephenson. “You’re part of a national conspiracy to upset the Klan.”
Conspiracy? Niblack said he answered to nobody but his editor and his readers. He belonged to no organization but that of the alumni association of his school, Indiana University in Bloomington.
“I can see that you are not for us,” said the Klansman, now visibly angry. “You are against us. Get outta here!”
* * *
—
As darkness fell, the crowd size swelled even more in anticipation of a fireworks display equal to the occasion. A parade of men on white horses that had pranced down Main Street assembled for the show. They sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Back at his hotel, Steve was now drunk. He ordered his secretary to join him on an errand in the car. He drove a short distance, found a hideaway. Parked. Undid his pants. He crawled atop the woman and tried to rape her.
In covering the Kokomo rally in the Fiery Cross, the Klan had offered another one of its tributes to independent women. The paper saluted “fair damsels of the women’s movement for the distinguished service you are rendering to Anglo-Saxon American womanhood.” All Knights of the Klan were indebted to them. And one day soon, the Klan paper editorialized, “the rights of women will no longer be a strange sound to American ears.”
Stephenson’s ears, at that moment in the car in Kokomo, were filled with the screams of the woman he was attacking. Primed with adrenaline and drink, he tore her dress, tugged at her panties and shook her, the smell of whiskey and cigars all over her. She bolted from the vehicle, walking quickly in a daze in the dark. 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. But later, she told investigators her story. “He tried to have intercourse with me,” she said. “He was a beast when he was drunk.”
An hour after the sun went down, a giant wood cross was draped in oiled burlap and set afire. Drums rolled and Klan anthems were sung throughout the evening and into the night. “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.”
Robert Coughlan, a ten-year-old boy from a Catholic family, had watched the white-sheeted invaders take over his town, alternately fascinated and frightened. He saw them exchange cryptic, ritualistic greetings and wave at each other with three middle fingers of one hand, that secret salute of the KKK. 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. Coughlan’s family had been anxiously vigilant for two years, fearing an attack. There were rumors that their pastor at Saint Patrick’s Church would be killed, that the few Jewish merchants would be run out of town by a mob with flaming crosses, that Mr. Coughlan, a Catholic teaching at a public school, would be fired because of his faith. These fears did not take the form of their neighbor, the kindly Mrs. Crousore—until that night.
Why, Coughlan wondered later as a writer trying to come to grips with what had happened to his neighbors, “did the town take so whole-heartedly to the Klan?” His answer was rooted in “the deadly tedium of small-town life,” a militant religious fundamentalism “hot with bigotry,” and “American moralistic blood lust that is half historical determinism, and half Freud.” 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,” Coughlan concluded, “a need for Kokomo and all the big and little towns that resembled it during the early 1920s.” But then it metastasized. “It first appealed to the ignorant, the slightly unbalanced and the venal,” Coughlan wrote, “but by the time the enlightened elements realized the danger it was already on top of them.”
Steve’s pilot and wingman, Court Asher, always keen to a new con, had a more cynical explanation for the Klan’s takeover of the Heartland and beyond. No man is a hero to his own valet, as the saying goes. But Asher marveled at his boss’s talent for mass manipulation. “Billy Sunday was a great spellbinder. Steve was a better one.” He was particularly amazed at how many preachers he’d been able to fool, concluding that men of God were easy marks. “Sometimes we’d leave a wild party, slip into the robes, and go into church to pray with a bunch of new Klansmen,” he said. “Stephenson would kneel down and pray as convincingly as any minister.” He knew the Old Man’s true character. He’d seen the violent rages, the battered and bloodied women who fled hotel rooms in tears and torn clothes, the Grand Dragon passed out and smelling of bourbon and tobacco. Steve could flip on a dime, from benevolent shepherd of a vast crowd to an intoxicated monster. “It was the damndest thing I ever saw, how this guy could spread the bunk and make the hicks eat it up.”
Those he disparaged, the many thousands who’d donned a hood and put their hand on the Bible in solemn ritual, would likely disagree. They did not consider themselves hicks. And what they swore to uphold was not bunk, but something close to gospel.
11.
Governors, Guns, and God
1923
Just weeks after the coronation in Kokomo, Stephenson basked in the glow of political sycophants aboard his latest possession—a ninety-eight-foot yacht, the Reomar II. The Grand Dragon now had a floating palace on the Great Lakes to go with his chandeliered mansion in Irvington, his summer home in Ohio, and his private transport above the clouds. He was as far from the Oklahoma dugout of his youth, with its dirt floor, tarpaper walls, and leaky roof, as he could be. It was laughable, a mere two years earlier, when a drifter in a fine suit first appeared in Indiana and told people he was going to be the biggest man in the United States. Few doubted him now. He had paid more than eight times the average price of a new American home for a vessel that had been built for an auto magnate. He anchored his latest luxury on Lake Erie, at a yacht club in Toledo, Ohio. Steve had no interest in sailing. He bought the big boat to impress. A sister ship was owned by Al Capone and used by the gangster for the same purpose.
