A Fever in the Heartland, page 12
On this day in early August, some of the most influential men in the Midwest—the governor of Ohio, a United States senator from Indiana, judges, mayors, and congressmen—had answered Steve’s engraved invitations to a lavish party aboard the Reomar II. They were there to plot next year’s elections, and for the prospect of depravity after hours. Stephenson’s Klan had just renewed its call for a Constitutional Convention to establish “the racial destiny and define a wise, safe and true Americanism” for the United States. Steve was indeed proficient at “getting the hicks to eat his bunk,” as Court Asher had put it. But he was equally skilled at catering to a different crowd—people of wealth, title, and education who believed that they were superior, the leading men of the leading race.
A few days earlier, on August 2, President Warren G. Harding had dropped dead at the age of fifty-seven, taking his last breath inside San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. His wife was reading a piece from the Saturday Evening Post to him when his heart stopped at 7:30 p.m. Four hours later, Calvin Coolidge was awakened by his father at the family homestead in Vermont and sworn in. After taking the oath of office by kerosene lamp in a house without electricity, President Coolidge went back to sleep.
Harding’s death was a shock, instantly fueling rumors of assassination by poison. He’d been on a tour of Alaska, British Columbia, and the Pacific Northwest, a hardy and hale presence on the stump. He had a deep summer tan to go with a bald eagle’s head of silver hair, enhancements of an affable Ohioan who’d been elected in part because he looked like a president. A stroke was initially said to be the cause of death. This was followed by reports of food poisoning, to which many people added: at the hand of his long-suffering wife, Florence. The president, who also liked his Prohibition-era scotch and soda, had carried on a lengthy affair with a married woman, and other dalliances as well, including one with a woman thirty-one years younger than he. Their trysts sometimes took place in a large White House broom closet. But as a later medical analysis found, Mr. Harding was not murdered by Mrs. Harding. He was most likely done in by a massive heart attack.
The Klan had tried to claim the president as one of their own—a lie, but an excellent recruiting tool, considering he’d won the presidency with 60 percent of the popular vote in 1920. A year after getting elected, Harding gave a speech in Alabama, calling for the end of lynching and racial inequality, putting him at odds with the Invisible Empire. It was lip service from a president who allowed the Klan to flourish on his watch. As a tribute after Harding’s death, Stephenson’s Klan burned a cross on the banks of the Ohio River in Evansville, and sent a five-foot-high bouquet of lilies spelling out the initials KKK to his funeral in Marion, Ohio.
Now, to pick a president in 1924. A Klan favorite was Henry Ford, the most prominent anti-Semite in the nation. But the titan of the Model T was a tease, issuing contradictory statements about his plans. He was also considered somewhat of a dim bulb, outside his expertise at factory precision. One potential candidate, Senator James “Sunny Jim” Watson, was on board the Reomar II. Steve kept a letter from Watson, assuring the Grand Dragon that he was “glad to help along the cause.” The Klan wanted Sunny Jim to be Coolidge’s vice president. Another politician aboard Steve’s floating party, Indiana secretary of state Ed Jackson, was known to everyone as an oath-bound Klansman, per the disclosure in O’Donnell’s Tolerance. He was being groomed by the Klan to run for governor next year. One of the tasks the Grand Dragon had in mind for Jackson was to bribe the current governor of Indiana, paying him to appoint a Klan-backed prosecutor in the largest county in the state, covering Steve’s base of operations. The plan was still taking shape.
The presence at the party of the Ohio governor, Victor Donahey, was further proof of Steve’s political control of the Midwest. There were nearly as many Klansmen in the Buckeye State, where it had been growing steadily in tandem with its neighbors, as in Indiana. Summit County, covering the booming tire factory town of Akron, was home to almost 50,000 members, including the mayor. A group of Klan nightriders known as the Battalion of Death had been harassing students and faculty at the University of Dayton, a Catholic college. They held a noisy rally, burning a three-story cross, jeering at students and insulting the faith of those who walked by. One night, forty carloads of hooded men rolled up to the campus and spread out. They planted twelve bombs, which went off without killing anyone. They also bombed their own headquarters—and blamed it on Catholics.
Just across the border in western Pennsylvania, the Klan came out of the shadows with a series of fright moves. The hills and hollows of that part of the state, rich with veins of coal and wells of oil, offered new life for people fleeing poverty in Poland, Italy, and Ireland. These aspiring Americans were predominantly Catholic, and were welcomed by Jewish merchants, most of them newly arrived as well from places like Russian Ukraine. But the settled order of white Protestant families was unsettled by the surge of immigrants. They also complained about the young Black people who’d recently moved to this stretch of the industrial North for factory jobs. With all of the change, the Klan had plenty to work with, and they were forceful in pressing fear out the door—issuing threats, publishing names of people under surveillance, and physically attacking others. A cross was lit on the lawn of a Black family in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a note pinned to the door. “The Kluxers have paid your disorderly house its first visit to warn you and the rest of your kind to close up and get out,” was the message. “Now listen up, you black violators, close your place and go. Erie doesn’t want you.” The threat was backed by “8,000 White American Men”—a healthy sliver of the state’s Klan. Within a year, it would claim about 125,000 members.
As overlord of expansion in the North, Stephenson urged Klan units of western Pennsylvania to become more political, part of a boundless movement, not just a network of local fraternal orders. In New Wilmington, 5,000 ghost-costumed men marched with torches under a full moon. In Punxsutawney, 1,000 Klansmen assembled not far from Gobbler’s Knob, home to a prescient winter groundhog. Five thousand Klansmen paraded through New Castle. Fights broke out, with volleys of bottles, rocks, and gunfire, when the Klan tried to torch a cross near an Italian immigrant neighborhood in Steubenville, just across the border in Ohio. A six-year-old boy, part of a family from the mountainous Abruzzo region in Italy, escaped without harm. It would be some time before the lad, Dino Paul Crocetti, would make his mark as the singer Dean Martin.
This flurry of fights, rallies, and undisguised threats had to please the most exalted guest aboard the Reomar II—Imperial Wizard Evans. After giving Stephenson his title in Kokomo, the Klan capo had decided to stick around and take a long look at the vibrant heart of the Empire. But there was now considerable tension between Stephenson and Evans, which they’d managed to keep under wraps in Kokomo. The Imperial Wizard had decided to reject the plan to buy Valparaiso University, infuriating the Indiana Grand Dragon. He also thought Steve might be making too much money from his significant skim off the top of robes sold, initiation fees paid, and annual dues levied. For his part, Stephenson was chafing at limits to his power set by the one man who could still give him orders. But the two leaders agreed on the larger aim: The Klan did not exist for neighborly lodge meetings and fraternal gibberish; it was a vast movement, political in scope.
And it was still violent and criminal when necessary. A few days before the Kokomo rally, Klansmen kidnapped a minister, Reverend Oren Van Loon, from just across the state line in a small town in Michigan. He had criticized fellow Christians, saying from the pulpit that “the cross should not be used as a symbol of terror.” Days after he disappeared, the minister was found, unconscious, with the letters KKK branded on his back.
Two weeks after the Fourth of July, a mob of 5,000 Klansmen hurled rocks and bottles at firemen trying to extinguish a burning cross in Indianapolis. Open fires were prohibited in the city; the Klan’s main ritual was no exception. But Stephenson was defiant. In violation of the ordinance, his followers torched a massive cross on a hot night. When police arrived, they drew their guns and ordered the hooded rioters to stand back. Only under armed escort could the firemen leave the scene. The Hoosier Klan had shown Evans how fierce they could be.
“I want people to be afraid of us,” he said with satisfaction.
The Imperial Wizard was even more impressed by the turnout at Buckeye Lake, a favorite getaway for people living in nearby Columbus. Even Steve had not expected upward of 75,000 people to show for a rally at the lake on July 12—the biggest Klan gathering in Ohio history.
Three days later, Stephenson stumbled down his Buckeye Lake compound to a cottage that housed some of the women who worked for him. It was 3:30 a.m. He was naked but for his underpants, and so drunk he could hardly stand. He barged inside and went to the bedroom of his stenographer, a nineteen-year-old from Indianapolis who’d been an employee since April. She jumped out of bed, terrified at the sight of the glassy-eyed Klansman staggering toward her. He grabbed the girl and tried to kiss her. He was her boss; she was told when hired that she should never cross the Old Man. He threw her to the bed and lowered his underwear. As he tried to pin the woman, she squirmed out of his grasp.
“Get out!” she said. “I’m going to scream!”
Her threat, which would have awakened others, saved the young woman from the assault. It was the second time in less than two weeks that Stephenson had tried to rape someone. As in Kokomo, the police were not summoned.
* * *
—
If Evans knew that the co-architect of the blueprint for Klan control of the United States was a violent sexual predator, he never let on as the two men schemed on the deck of the Reomar II. 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, by the Klan’s tally. It had sympathetic governors in Georgia, Alabama, and California. John C. Walton, the Oklahoma governor who had declared open war on the Klan, was facing impeachment from a legislature dominated by the Invisible Empire. After Black residents were butchered in Tulsa, after a Jewish merchant was stripped and beaten to a pulp in the same city, after a bootlegger was killed at his home in Ardmore and the vigilantes found not guilty, after Klan “whipping squads” were unleashed, the governor had put the entire state of Oklahoma under martial law and called up the National Guard. But the Klan was superior, in numbers and influence. They forced Walton out.
In Oregon, the Klan had put their candidate, Walter Pierce, in the governor’s mansion in 1922. The same year, a majority of his state’s voters approved of a centerpiece of the hooded order: an amendment requiring all children to attend only public schools, meaning Catholic ones would dry up. As governor, Pierce also backed a proposal that would make it illegal for an immigrant to own land, and a second act to end the Columbus Day holiday. The property prohibition statute was aimed at Japanese immigrants; the anti-Columbus bill was an attack on Oregonians with Italian heritage.
“Every one of my ancestors has been a Protestant, for three hundred years,” said the new governor.
The Klan had taken root in both the rural side east of the Cascade Mountains and the metropolitan areas in the west, up and down the Willamette Valley. The first American town founded west of the Rocky Mountains, Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, elected a Klan mayor in 1922, and hosted a convention of the order two years later. Ten thousand people attended. Reuben Sawyer, a Portland pastor and a student of Henry Ford’s tracts against Jews, filled churches in the Beaver State with anti-Semitic rants. “In some parts of America,” he warned one crowd, “the kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk.” Speaking to 6,000 in Portland, he said Jews were trying to establish “a government within the government.” In the same city, another top Klansman told an audience that “the only way to cure a Catholic is to kill him.”
What most Oregonians knew of African Americans and Jews did not come from personal experience. Like Indiana, Oregon had only a small number of these minorities. 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.
Colorado was not far behind. Rocky Mountain Klansmen kidnapped two prominent attorneys—one a Jew who defended bootleggers, the other a Catholic whose crime was his faith—then clubbed them nearly to death. They tried to force a Black family out of their home in Grand Junction, warning that if they did not leave, their lives would be in danger. But the violence did nothing to curb popularity. The Klan mayor of Denver, elected in 1923, named fellow members of the Invisible Empire as police chief and city attorney. One night alone, the Klan set seven crosses ablaze throughout Denver. They would soon be “the largest and most cohesive, most efficiently organized political force in the state of Colorado,” wrote the Denver Post.
As Evans and Stephenson envisioned things, it should be impossible for anyone in America who opposed the Klan to be elected to high office. By sheer numbers, the Klan could use its bloc of power as a wedge to get its way. As for the issues, weren’t most Americans behind the Klan’s campaign to outlaw alcohol in every square foot of the United States? Didn’t a majority want to keep the races separate and unequal? Wasn’t there a consensus to slam the door against new immigrants? The country was 90 percent white. Consider the millions of potential new recruits, those open to an appeal to ethnic vanity and racial panic.
“There are millions who have never joined, but who think and feel and, when called on, will fight with us,” Evans wrote. “This is our real strength, and no one who ignores it can hope to understand America today.”
* * *
—
The Klan leadership had not yet settled on a presidential candidate, though William Gibbs McAdoo, son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, was saying all the right things on the Democratic side. McAdoo was born in Georgia in the midst of the Civil War. He shared his father-in-law’s sympathies to the Lost Cause and was quick to wall off Black workers in the Treasury Department he oversaw after Wilson segregated the federal workforce. He’d even allowed a cage of a sort to be assembled around one Black worker who needed to interact with his white colleagues. Coolidge, the new president, had not spoken out against the Klan, implying by his trademark silence that he would make no trouble. The party on Lake Erie ended with numerous pacts between Steve and his political lackeys, and big plans for the coming year. The Klan would be a major force at the national conventions. No one on board the Reomar II doubted that the future of the country belonged to an organization of shrouded men clinging to the past.
* * *
—
Imperial Wizard Evans had one more stopover before summer’s end. He led a Klan march into Carnegie, a small town of mostly Irish Catholic steelworkers just outside Pittsburgh. On Saturday night, August 25, about 10,000 Klansmen gathered on a hill overlooking the town, cheered the initiation of another thousand into the hooded order, and burned an enormous cross. If the blaze on the hillside was meant to provoke, it had its intended effect. As darkness deepened, people poured out of their houses and gathered on a bridge where they would make a stand against a torchlight mass of Klansmen.
The white-sheeted army moved on to another bridge, a span obstructed by a truck. They pushed the vehicle to one side. But now enough of the townspeople had arrived to block this entrance into Carnegie. They threw rocks and bricks and sticks and lumps of coal at the men in masks. The Klansmen hurled objects back at them. Glowing KKK letters were ripped from a car. A sheriff climbed atop his auto and ordered the Klansmen to disperse. They hooted at him. Evans was not going anywhere. His masked men started singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and vowed to take the town. Linking arms, they surged forward, spreading out quickly along the main street. In the stampede, one deputy nearly fell off the bridge. Another was trampled. From corners of darkness and chaos came bursts of light and gunfire, bullets zinging in both directions. Now it was a full-scale riot. Klansmen pulled guns from beneath their robes and fired them at residents of Carnegie. In the exchange, one man in a sheet was shot in the head and died on the spot. Only then did the crowd begin to disperse.
Stephenson showed up the next day to begin making a martyr of the murdered man. “Mourn, Klansmen, a brother has died,” read the tribute in the Imperial Night-Hawk. “He died because he was an American.” There would be no cooperation with police; the code of silence born in the initiation rite would prevail. Without witness help, the authorities could not charge any member of the Invisible Empire for firing weapons within the city limits. They did arrest a Carnegie undertaker, Paddy McDermott, for shooting the Klansman, but an inquest jury could not find sufficient evidence to charge him. This gave the Klan even more fodder. A decent one-hundred-percenter had died at the hands of an Irish Catholic mob in the Klan’s telling—all the more reason to keep these murderous immigrants from American small towns. At the same time, “Jewish, Catholic, Italian and Negro peoples” were allowed to march in Pittsburgh unmolested, Evans complained.
Back in Indianapolis, the Grand Dragon ordered up boldfaced headlines of the riot, claiming one hundred Klansmen had been injured, and offered a reward of $5,000 to help convict Paddy McDermott. Stephenson would use the Machine if he had to, and the uniformed police who took orders from the Klan, and all his new political minions, to bend the institutions of civil society to his will. As Asher observed, “There was no power that Stephenson feared at this time.”
