A Fever in the Heartland, page 13
PART TWO
MONSTER OF THE MIDWAY
12.
Lord of the Manor
1924
It was an eight-minute walk from the Stephenson compound at one end of University Avenue to the home of Madge Oberholtzer at the other. Their fates and that of the Klan would soon be entwined; for now, four long blocks separated them. The air was cleaner in Irvington than the capital city’s factory haze, filtered by thick-armored hardwood trees that had taken up residence centuries ago. One native oak was nearly four hundred years old, and had such a leafy hold on the sky that it was given landmark status. Every house on the broad, winding lane had a story to tell, just like the village’s namesake, Washington Irving. The writer of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” was honored with a bust in a hushed circle off the avenue. Surely unknown to Stephenson, he had chosen to live in a town with a heritage of open-mindedness. Irvington was founded by abolitionists. After the Civil War, Black and white students attended school together. Irvington’s pride and joy, Butler, was one of the first colleges in the Midwest to enroll women, and to hire them as faculty. Catholics worshipped at Our Lady of Lourdes, a church of Gothic grandeur, soon to be a target of the Klan.
If you were lucky to live on University Avenue, with its mix of Italianate, Victorian, and Colonial Revival houses, you would never aspire to another home. The Oberholtzer residence was built for a doctor. After he died, a postal clerk at Union Station, George Oberholtzer, bought the three-floor Arts and Crafts–style house for $13,000, using his life savings and his wife’s inheritance. Inside were a massive rock fireplace and built-in cabinets. Outside, the porch was a wonderful perch, situated to catch the evening breezes.
After graduating from Manual Training High School in Indianapolis, the only daughter of George and Matilda Oberholtzer enrolled at Butler College and pledged a sorority, Pi Beta Phi. She could walk from her house, passing the Irving bust in that peaceful garden circle where she used to stage impromptu plays as a girl, to the college’s twenty-five-acre campus. Madge was bright, quick-witted, and strong-willed. She had dark, greenish eyes and was athletic—seemingly in perpetual motion. She loved dogs and made friends easily. She had shown talent as a painter, her skills honed during a scholarship at the Herron Art Institute. In college, she was mentored by suffragettes who argued in “Indiana nice” that denying women the vote deprived democracy of the wisdom of mothers and grandmothers. She was the opposite of a wallflower, as the Butler yearbook noted in a sarcastic write-up of her in 1917: “Madge is a timid little creature with a baby voice, who allows professional gruffness to frighten her into speechlessness, but once outside of the depressing influence of classroom walls she waxes adjectivorous and verbiforous and is able to hold at bay the most fluent masculine word-artist on the campus.”
Madge spent three years at Butler, leaving at the end of her junior year, in June 1917. Just three months earlier, the United States had declared war on Germany. Time, which had moved so slowly in Indiana, took off in a gallop. Boys left Butler to become men in the war machine. Women assembled socks for soldiers in a classroom converted to a small knitting factory. At home, Madge tilled a victory garden, contributed her share of handmade hosiery for the troops over there, and took Red Cross training. At the end of that year, she took advantage of a wide-open wartime job market and was hired as a high school teacher in a small town. At the close of the school term, she moved back to Indianapolis, where she had her pick of employers—better options than returning to school. She worked as a clerk, an office manager, and a state employee.
Madge didn’t need a husband or a church to tell her how to live. She dated frequently, and was selective, in no hurry to marry, though she was apparently engaged at one point. She was a woman of her age, pushing back against centuries of caged convention, game for a party, but serious about building a life of her own. In this decade of change, she could vote for a president. She could run for office. She could own property without needing a man’s permission. She could order a drink at an underground club. She could even choose when to have children (a primitive cervical cap had been available for a decade).
In 1923, Madge bought a Ford Model T coupe and taught herself how to drive. The car gave her real independence. She gave up her job and talked her friend Ermina Moore into joining her on an adventure—a slow drive across the United States to California. There was no guarantee of following asphalt all the way. The new Lincoln Highway, stitching one coast to the other for the touring motorist, was continuously paved only from New York to Iowa. They would camp at night or find rooms in roadhouses. Women drivers were still rare. And even more scarce were women traveling half the length of the country on their own. Madge’s sense of daring was matched by a cautious sense of invincibility. She pointed her way west in a machine she fired up every morning by a hand crank. She knew how to change a flat, return a steamed radiator to operation, read a bad situation at a late-night stop. The cross-country trip was exhilarating.
Two months on the open road of America drained her savings. She was much relieved, upon her return from California, to land a good job with the Young People’s Reading Circle, in the state Department of Public Instruction. She rose quickly, becoming manager of a lending library for poor school districts. And it paid well, nearly $4,000 a year. Still, to save money and help out at home, Madge lived in a big room upstairs in the dream house her parents had bought in Irvington. Her father had assumed more mortgage than he could afford. To meet the monthly bill, he took in other boarders as well.
But now Madge’s job was in jeopardy: her department was going to be eliminated by the legislative assembly. The times had gotten tougher, with a farm recession roiling businesses throughout the Midwest. In her walks, Madge had passed by the armed sentries, police dogs, and luxury cars clustered around Stephenson’s compound. She had even been inside the place, back when another sorority held pledge parties there. Of late, the big house was a source of mystery and intrigue, the drapes always tightly drawn, people coming and going at all hours. The owner did nothing to clarify things; he was not exactly neighborly by the social standards of Irvington.
The Indianapolis Star had recently carried a lengthy profile of the Grand Dragon, based on a story that first appeared in a New York paper. “Mr. Stephenson is beyond doubt the ablest and most picturesque leader the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan ever had,” the paper wrote. He was fabulously rich, as the article explained in some detail, born to wealthy parents. A college graduate. Went to law school as well. “With money to gratify any desire to entertain his retinue of friends, he enjoys his bachelorhood enormously.” Madge hit on an idea: perhaps the solution to saving her job, and keeping the income that allowed her parents to hold on to their home, was the man inside the manor at 5432 University Avenue.
The Klan, on one level, represented nearly everything that Madge had been raised to reject. Her church, Irvington’s Methodist Episcopal, supported missionaries abroad and aided poor women at home. At Butler, she had classmates who were Catholic, Black, and Jewish. Among the 304 students enrolled her freshman year were members of fourteen different faiths. She wasn’t afraid of the New America; she lived it. And she certainly had no intention of lending support to the Invisible Empire. Her plan was strictly to ask for a favor from the man who controlled the state, who also happened to be an Irvington neighbor. Still, he was the leader of a violent hate group. The profile in the paper had painted the Grand Dragon as the relatively benign boss of Indiana, with Stephenson asserting that his “Klan is not based on racial, religious or other prejudice.” That was a preposterous claim, easily disproven by a simple reading of the Klan oath. But Madge, like much of the state, like the fawning newspaper profile that dwelled on how “able” and “picturesque” he was, like those leading citizens and Bible-clutching pastors whose sleep was not disturbed by what had happened to Indiana, chose to do business with the Klansman rather than fight him.
Madge couldn’t just knock on the door and barge into the mansion. Well, she could try, and had the bravado to consider it, but she would never make it past the guards and police dogs. Someone had to make an introduction. That someone was Stanley Hill, another state worker, a man she had dated but now considered a friend. Hill had talked to Steve a couple of times about Florida real estate opportunities, a side interest to both men. And he knew a guy who knew a guy who could help them. All she needed was a foot in the door; she could take it from there. After some thought, Madge Oberholtzer decided to try to talk her way into the inner circle of the Grand Dragon of the largest Klan realm in the world.
* * *
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The parties were bacchanals of bad taste, and Stephenson spared no expense. Once through the classical columns of the mansion’s white portico, guests left behind everything they professed to stand for in anticipation of a night like no other in Indiana. The evenings started out classy. White-gloved servants handed out drinks and finger foods. There were proper toasts and proper introductions. Troupers from a musical revue entertained and a small orchestra played in the ballroom. You were sure to see politicians, perhaps a federal judge, or someone from the Indianapolis baking company that claimed it had introduced sliced loafs to the world—Wonder Bread, as it was called. Among nearly seven hundred Protestant ministers who were honorary members of the Indiana Klan in 1924, a few of them could be found inside as well, minus their clerical collars. For drinks, Steve had anything you wanted—anything. Supply was unlimited and there was no need to fear a raid of the best-dressed and highest-standing lawbreakers in Indianapolis; the police had not only given Steve a pass on Prohibition but often served as his protectors.
While still sober and standing, the Grand Dragon would offer a tour of the palace he’d purchased in 1923. The Colonial Revival house was built in 1889 on a two-acre lot. Steve added the Ionic columns to make it look more like the mansion of a Southern plantation, and built the biggest garage in Irvington—a four-car brick detached unit with a second-floor apartment. The floors were golden oak, buffed to a diamond sheen. Stained-glass windows allowed a rainbow of light to pour in during the day. A grand piano was the centerpiece of the main parlor. Only the best people lived among these leafy lanes—a college president and bank owner on one side, a newspaper publisher or prominent doctor on another. Now, look: here was an Oriental rug, worth more than the average American home, Steve noted. Upstairs, on the second of three floors, were five bedrooms, including a master with a brick-faced fireplace, and a guest chamber with walls of peacock blue and velvet drapes.
Steve liked to give speeches at these parties, though they could be hard to follow as he slurred his way through an inebriated oration. Guests remembered him predicting “a great revolution” soon to come, with Klan values dominant throughout the land, a Klan-altered Constitution guiding the country forward, and Klan politicians in control of government at every level. As the night wore on, the music got jumpier, the guests louder. Middle-aged men of privilege could be seen on corner couches in the embrace of somebody not their wife. Steve usually had a photographer circulating, given free access by his boss to take pictures of the most intimate situations. The photos proved very useful and helped to ensure that those in the know would not turn on their political master—a conspiracy of silence that proved remarkably successful. Late into the night at one party, a five-foot cake was brought in on a massive silver tray carried to the living room by four buff-looking men. Steve clapped his hands and asked the guests to circle around. After he cut the cake, a nude woman popped out.
“I saw girls and young married women dancing all but unclothed, their dresses torn from them, ripped into rags and tatters amid wild streaks of glee and maudlin attempts at song,” one guest recalled. “The house rang with drunken shouts, abandoned laughter and wild outcries. Anything went.”
At another party, Steve disappeared for an hour or more. Then the Lord of the Klan’s Palace of the North reappeared in the form of a mythic satyr—his chest and sizable white belly bare, an animal’s tail pinned to his behind. A circle dance formed. Naked women designated as wood nymphs pranced around Steve as he whipped them with a light lash. This went on for some time, until only a single nude was still standing. She would be his prize for the night.
“These parties would have shamed Nero,” said Court Asher.
The new man in the big house unsettled many a nerve in Irvington. For a neighborhood that projected restrained elegance, it was jarring to have a strong-armed vulgarian move into one of the most prominent residences. People were never sure if one of their neighbors had taken the dark oath. When Klansmen were spotted in Irvington, they were impossible to identify. “They always had a hood on their head,” recalled Bernice Glass, a student at Butler College whose family home was a block from Steve’s mansion. “Nobody ever told you whether they were a member or not.”
Early on, Butler had welcomed Black applicants. One of its former students, the musician and composer Noble Sissle, had produced a hit musical in 1921, Shuffle Along, before eventually teaming up with Eubie Blake and Lena Horne. He was a classmate of Madge’s in 1915. “You didn’t think about that colored boy being at Butler—he was just one of us,” said Glass. But by the time Steve was staging his blowout parties late into the Irvington night, the Klan had infected the neighboring college, and had burned a cross of terror at the nearby Catholic church, Our Lady of Lourdes. In 1924, for the first time, the few Black students were not grouped alphabetically with all others in the Butler yearbook. They were relegated to a separate section in the back. Shortly thereafter, the school adopted a quota system, restricting Black enrollment to a tiny minority.
* * *
—
For Stephenson, the late-hours debauchery at his oversized home was political theater, a demonstration of his independence from the moral order his Klan dictated for everyone else. Ever since his groping of schoolgirls in Oklahoma, he’d been pushing the boundaries and getting away with more horrific behavior. Now he carried on with women he barely knew, while engaged to be married to several women at the same time. It required him to practice duplicity and charm in equal measure, something that had served him well since he’d set foot in Indiana. But in the spring of 1924, one of his fiancées found out about his multiple entanglements.
“It’s a dangerous thing to have two engagement rings out at the same time,” she wrote him. “I would like to know just how many girls you are keeping and just how many times a week you have them out to your house. A year ago you said, ‘How would you like to be my girl?’ Doesn’t it get monotonous when you use that on so many?” She had discerned a pattern in his life of deception. After a few dates with a woman, he would propose marriage and purchase an engagement ring. He felt that this gave him license to have sex, or to be protected from legal challenges to his predations—as he tried to show when caught by the deputies at the roadside in Ohio. “Steve, you lied to me about getting married. You lied to me about being divorced. You lied about buying me a car.” She considered telling the newspapers about the Old Man’s true self, or going to the authorities about his links to bootleggers.
His binge drinking was also catching up with him. He checked into a hospital for treatment. A few days in, he started shaking, shivering, and sweating, with an irregular heartbeat—all symptoms of delirium tremens. At about the same time, he struck up an affair with Clela Hull, a dark-haired aspiring doctor. She was charmed by Steve, by the regular deliveries of roses and written compliments, the promises and outward generosity, but also strangely drawn to the dangerous elements of his character. He always kept a gun at his bedside. He told her he “controlled every court in Indiana.” For $30, he could get someone to sign an affidavit to anything he dictated, he boasted. For $50, he could get a man killed.
Soon they were engaged as well. “I would like to go some place where there are not so many people who know me—Chicago, etc.—and just let loose,” she wrote in a late-night letter to Steve. “I am so tired of being a good little girl as I have been all my life.” In her months with the Grand Dragon, her view of humanity and the future had dimmed. “I have decided there isn’t much in life anymore so why not get all we can out of it.” But a day later, she changed her tone. “That letter was not me at all. I could never be the kind of person I said I wanted to be. I guess the devil got hold of me when I wrote that . . . Steve, I really do think a lot of you in spite of the fact that you deserted me, but unless you return the feeling I do not want to see you again. I would also like to have my umbrella I left in your car.”
One night Steve drove one of his stenographers to the house of another off-and-on girlfriend, Margaret Reynolds. He gave the young woman pills that he said would make her feel happy. Instead, she felt faint.
“Don’t let him do anything to me if I pass out,” she said.
She did pass out, and woke up alone the next morning, her clothes on the floor, strange bite marks on parts of her body and some dried blood. What was this? She wondered if Stephenson had chewed on her. He may have raped her while she was knocked out, she told investigators a year later. “I don’t know whether or not he had intercourse with me while I was unconscious,” she said. But at the time, she was too scared to do anything. His reach into the cops and courts, he told her, was beyond anything she could imagine.
