A Fever in the Heartland, page 14
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As the Invisible Empire approached the apex of its power, Stephenson was becoming ever more violent and sadistic. The Wizard of Indiana’s Oz, who gave long speeches on the inferiority of other races and the superiority of white Protestants, was a creation that existed only on stage or in the pages of the Fiery Cross. The half-naked satyr, the rapist, the drunken flesh-chewer, the gangster and political dictator was the true and more brazen self. And with each passing month, he felt more unrestrained and less likely to keep up the mirage of a decent man.
At the start of 1924, Steve checked into room 931 of the Deshler Hotel in Columbus, one of the premier guest palaces in the Midwest, just off the square and steps from the bustling Ohio headquarters of the Klan. He started drinking whiskey late on that morning of January 5. His companions were two men, one a former officer with the Columbus Police Department. Around noon, Steve picked up the phone and asked if he could get a manicure. He wanted it done in his room, by a woman. The hotel sent up a young manicurist. She was taken aback by what she saw when she walked into room 931. All three men were drunk. Steve was in soiled pajamas. The room had been overturned, the bed unmade, wet towels on the floor. Three half-empty whiskey bottles—quart-sized—were on a table. When the manicurist entered, the two other men stepped outside the room, leaving Stephenson alone with his prey. He told the woman to have a drink. She refused. He patted the bed forcefully, held out one hand.
“How about that manicure?”
As she tried to back away, he lunged for the woman and held her tight. He wanted sex, and he wanted it now. She squirmed and yelled no. He said he would pay for it—$100 cash, on the spot. She gathered her things and tried to leave. Visibly angry, Steve screamed at her.
“You little bitch!”
He stumbled over to a table to get his gun.
“You’ll have sex with me or I’ll kill you.”
She fled the room, running into the hallway in tears. She found a bellhop and told him what had happened. The guest in room 931 had tried to rape her, and would have assaulted her at gunpoint had she not escaped. The bellhop went to have a look. Once he was inside, Stephenson struck him in the face with his fist, knocking him to the ground. He continued to beat him as he crawled around. The bellboy got away and immediately notified security. A house detective called the police. When they arrived, he and three officers rushed upstairs to the ninth floor. The room was a mess. A large glass mirror was shattered into pieces. Chairs and bottles were smashed. The bellboy, who’d been waiting in the hallway, had welts and cuts on his bloodied face and was woozy from the whacks to his skull.
“He was as intoxicated as any man I ever saw,” the security man said of one D. C. Stephenson. “He was standing by the bed with a death grip at the foot of the bed.” The cops struggled to arrest Steve. Despite his diminished capacity, he forcefully resisted, screaming at the officers that he would not be taken; he was a powerful man, there would be hell to pay. At one point, he waved his gun at the hotel security officer. He threatened to sue the Deshler, to bring down the greatest luxury property of Columbus, Ohio. He, not the manicurist, was the victim.
The Grand Dragon spent twenty-five hours in the Columbus city jail. He vomited, passed out, wobbled back and forth, ranting and raving from behind bars. He summoned a big-time lawyer, the mayor of nearby Newark, Ohio—a prominent Klansman. His first task was to spring Steve from jail, quietly. The lawyer paid a $180 bond, and his client was released. Next the lawyer went to the Deshler and tried to ensure that none of this would get out. But it was too late. On January 6, stories of the drunken sexual assault and melee were splashed across the front pages of the Sunday editions of two Columbus papers.
Imperial Wizard Evans was furious—not so much at the criminal act of his fellow commander, but at what the story would do to the image of an organization that claimed to stand for protecting the purity of women. He ordered an internal investigation and a secret tribunal.
Because of Stephenson’s prominence, his actions “caused the public to look down upon the Klan,” Evans’s men wrote later. “He was understood, in the state of Ohio, to be the absolute authority of Klan activity and the man in whose hands the entire future of the organization rested.”
But once again, Stephenson’s crime went unpunished. He tried to silence the manicurist; it was an old habit by now, buying off his victims. Without her testimony, the case would be hard to prove. He sent a man, who said he was a doctor, to explain things away to the woman. You see, he said, it wasn’t Mr. Stephenson, but the booze. “He is a dandy fellow and he would not have done what he did had he been sober.” Steve offered to pay his victim a month’s salary if she would write a statement saying he had not attacked her. She refused. But because she was engaged and worried about what her fiancé would think if she had to go through a trial with a man who would try to destroy her, she backed off.
The case disappeared. Instead of prison, the Grand Dragon went back to Indianapolis to expand his power and resume his old habits. Once again, Indiana embraced him, even after news of his assault had made its way into the state. Stephenson said it was a setup by his enemies, a smear. The papers had it all wrong. Ministers did not give up their Klan robes or turn on their leader in Sunday sermons. Elected officials did not distance themselves from their political master. Most newspapers did not condemn. Membership in the Invisible Empire did not decline. Cross burnings did not stop. All the right people did not turn down invitations to parties in Irvington. Hoosier Klansmen were not repulsed by his behavior, at least not outwardly. Many chose selective amnesia, in service to the greater good of the Invisible Empire and what it stood for. Some were even impressed. For here was a man liberated from shame, a man who not only boasted of being able to get away with any violation of human decency for his entire life, but had just proved it for all to see.
13.
Rage of the Resistance
1924
One man and his newspaper could have, most certainly would have, pummeled the Grand Dragon for what he did in Columbus. He’d have called out the political class, the evangelical supporters, the silent editors and pillars of the community. Patrick O’Donnell’s crusade to crush the Klan had become his life. But he was out of business in 1924, his paper shuttered after barely two years of operation. The year before, he had run a string of fresh exposés, revealing Klan membership throughout the Midwest under a recurring feature: “Is Your Neighbor a Kluxer?” The answer to that question drove subscriptions—Tolerance reached a peak circulation of 150,000. O’Donnell’s informants inside the highest reaches of the Klan were bringing him meaty stories and new lists of members.
“I had a conference with people who are helping me to overthrow the Ku Klux Klan,” he wrote the president of Notre Dame, the Reverend Matthew J. Walsh, in mid-1923, warning of threats against the university. “I have obtained the most secret document that has yet been obtained by any agency and it reveals the startling strength of the Klan,” O’Donnell told Walsh in another letter at year’s end. The report was from minutes of a meeting of the Klan’s other Grand Dragons, organized by D. C. Stephenson. And indeed, the numbers were staggering, even if exaggerated or counting women—nearly 400,000 Klan in Indiana, more than 200,000 in Michigan and Ohio, 75,000 in Minnesota. His sources told him that Stephenson was planning to “pull loose from the Evans crowd” in Atlanta and make the national Klan his own. Though Steve and Evans were feuding, the rift remained an inside secret. But O’Donnell caught wind of the clash that would split Klan leadership at its highest level. The Imperial Wizard’s refusal to purchase Valparaiso University had incensed Stephenson. He would not let it go. He started disparaging Evans around other Klansmen. The college was crucial to his dream of an empire in the North. It fell to the Lutherans to save the vine-covered school from bankruptcy and the clutches of Steve’s Klan.
O’Donnell warned Father Walsh that his college was still very much on the minds of Klan leadership: it was a target of a future terror attack. Through poison squad plants, the Klan was laying the groundwork, claiming that the university had a cache of weapons hidden under the campus—guns for the assault on pure Americans by papal forces. O’Donnell told the school president about a document he’d seen outlining plans to blow up Notre Dame’s Golden Dome by dropping a bomb from an airplane.
Even in South Bend, with its large number of Catholics and immigrants, Stephenson could count on thousands of Klansmen. The rallies and cross burnings near the campus increased, as did the campaign to bring down O’Donnell. The Fiery Cross published a pamphlet: “Intolerance: An Expose of Patrick H. O’Donnell.” That didn’t stop O’Donnell. It only made him more determined.
But what did stop him was the nation’s best-known chewing gum magnate, William Wrigley Jr. He’d made a fortune selling his own Juicy Fruit and Spearmint gum for pennies a pack. In 1920, he bought the Chicago Cubs and built a towering landmark on the north bank of the Chicago River, the Wrigley Building. In 1923, O’Donnell was handed a Klan initiation form with a signature of William Wrigley at the bottom. He rushed it into print. It was sensational news. Thousands stopped purchasing Wrigley’s gum and vowed to stay away from Cubs games. But the Klan form was a fabrication. O’Donnell had been tricked. Wrigley sued him for $50,000. After O’Donnell’s source admitted in court that the signature was forged, the anti-Klan crusader was doomed. Tolerance was forced out of business. O’Donnell lost his credibility, his money, and his voice. He was a broken man. “The opposition,” wrote the New York Times, “now appears leaderless.”
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Having defeated his most persistent enemy, Stephenson decided to make a move on Notre Dame. He called for a three-state show of Klan strength in South Bend in the spring of 1924. The Grand Dragon felt it was vital to crush the remaining pockets of resistance. “The fiery cross is going to burn at every crossroads in Indiana as long as there is a white man left in the state,” he said. He was also livid after Evans had conducted an internal investigation into his behavior, and wanted to show him that the boss of the North was not to be challenged.
The school had been founded by six priests, four of them Irish immigrants, in a clearing above the St. Joseph River in 1842. The chaplain of the storied Irish Brigade in the Civil War, Reverend William Corby, expanded the college, adding the nation’s first Catholic law school during his years as president. By 1924, Notre Dame had a campus enrollment of 1,600 students, including many veterans from the Great War. Its football team under Knute Rockne lost just a single game in 1923 and set a goal of going undefeated this year. Catholics throughout the country followed every contest. Tuition was $100 a semester. The clerics enforced mandatory morning and evening prayers on their all-male student body, and insisted on lights-out at ten p.m. The Golden Dome, rising nearly two hundred feet over South Bend, glowed throughout the night.
Klansmen started pouring into town on Friday evening, May 16, many wearing their white robes as they stepped off the train in South Bend. A group of Notre Dame students pointed them into dead ends and out toward the edge of town, deliberately misdirecting them.
“Are you here for the parade? This way.”
The Klansmen were free to assemble, but not to stage a march through town; fearing violence, the police chief had denied a permit. Father Walsh had sent out a memo confining students to campus for the weekend. He wanted no trouble. But the appearance of so many masked invaders who had slandered these young men, their faith, and their school had roused the Notre Dame student body to defy Walsh’s order.
On Saturday morning, a day darkened by brooding clouds, the Klan gave notice that they intended to stage a parade—permit be damned. The police chief notified the governor, requesting help from the National Guard. Steve showed up before noon. With two bodyguards on either side of him, he gave a speech in a park by the river, unleashing his usual churn of contempt, with an extra dose of anti-Catholicism. Then it started to rain, drowning his words and dampening the robes of the Klansmen. At midafternoon, about 2,000 wet men in white milled through the streets of downtown South Bend, passing by the memorial to those in St. Joseph County who’d been killed by the Confederacy in the Civil War. Before the Klansmen could get much farther, a flying wedge of Notre Dame students sliced into them, causing panic and knocking dozens to the ground. Guns were fired in the air. Fistfights broke out. The students tore off Klan robes and waved them high as trophies. They took the hoods and put them on their own heads—dunce caps, they said, chiding the Klansmen. One student was knocked to the ground by a baseball bat. The panicked Klansmen dashed to their headquarters in the city, a turreted building at the corner of Michigan and Wayne. They bolted the doors and rushed upstairs to the third floor, behind an electric cross lit with red bulbs. By this time, Steve had fled, making a beeline back to Indianapolis in his touring car.
At the base of the building was a small grocery store. The students purchased two bushels of potatoes as weapons. They hurled the spuds at the windows, trying to break the glass, or to put out the lights of the Klan’s symbol. Irish American boys rioting with the iconic food of their tribe—it was enough to make some laugh at the image. Catholics had put up with years of abuse; they’d been called un-American and told they didn’t belong in this country, and certainly not in the state of Indiana. They’d been shunned as dupes of a Roman plot, and slaves of the pope. Now they had their tormentors surrounded, hiding and fearful. The Klan had planned to force Notre Dame into submission, to let these Catholics know that even here, in the safety of their campus, they had much to fear and nowhere to hide. The opposite had happened. It was said by those in the crowd that Notre Dame’s star quarterback, Harry Stuhldreher, one of the vaunted Four Horsemen, lobbed a perfect strike upward, his potato scoring a direct hit on one of the bulbs lighting the Klan cross. A roar followed. A group of Notre Dame men broke through the door of the building and charged upstairs. Only when met by a Klansman with a drawn gun did the students retreat. By dusk, the police had made eight arrests and were able to disperse most of the crowd. The Sunday edition of the Chicago Herald and Examiner carried the news in a front-page banner, as if touting an upset win by Rockne’s footballers:
STUDENTS ROUT KLANSMEN
On Monday, about five hundred students gathered outside Klan headquarters as the building emptied. Klansmen waved their guns and threw bottles and rocks at the kids. The students heaved them back. Father Walsh put himself between the two sides. He mounted a Civil War memorial cannon, called for calm, and ordered the Notre Dame enrollees to turn the other cheek and return to campus. “Whatever insult has been offered to your religion, ignore them,” he said. It was a gutsy move by a war veteran and priest who had much to be aggrieved about after the continuous insults of the Klan. His appeal for calm didn’t prevent a flow of nasty letters to him threatening the school and deriding the campus as a haven for “mackerel-snapping anarchists.”
“Not even a Negro has done what you Roman Catholics have done to disgrace the flag,” wrote one man, who signed his letter “A Klansman.”
Another informed the school president that the college was lucky to be intact. Next time, “we’ll wipe the Notre Dame buildings off the face of the earth.”
“You dirty, un-American skunks will pay for your mob actions in South Bend,” threatened the Fiery Cross. The paper urged lawmakers to take away the school’s tax-exempt status and warned of sanctions to come. “We showed you a few tricks at the recent primary and we are going to show you more at the election in the fall.”
News accounts of the riot would give rise to a story that still lives, that the “Fighting Irish” nickname was forever set by the clash of Notre Dame against the Ku Klux Klan on May 17, 1924.
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It is a fact that few Hoosiers dared to stand up to the KKK,” wrote Irving Leibowitz, the midcentury Indiana historian. And yet there were several people who continually battled the Invisible Empire at the height of its power. In Evansville, the freshman congressman William E. Wilson spoke out forcefully. He’d been warned by Senator Ralston that if he expected to stay in office, he damn well better take a vow and bow to the Ku Klux Klan. Wilson told his son that his defiance would kill him at the polls.
“A lot of good, honest but misguided people have turned against me,” he said. But why, his boy wondered, after all he’d been able to do for his district, including bringing home federal dollars for a bridge across the Ohio River.
“It isn’t what I’ve done that counts. It’s what I refused to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Join the Klan.” The congressman’s home had been vandalized and its windows broken. Callers threatened his life and that of his family. Neighbors shunned him. People he thought he knew had shown a streak of ugliness. “We’ve gone a long way in this country,” he said to his son. “But apparently we haven’t freed men and women of their suspicion of each other, their prejudices, their intolerance. I think it’s going to be a big battle in this century. My little fight here in Indiana is just a preliminary skirmish.”
Black Hoosiers who’d come to Indiana as part of the Great Migration warned that the skirmish, as the congressman called it, was entering a dangerous new phase. Indiana was fast becoming the Alabama of the North. But maybe, some pointed out, it had long been the Alabama of the North, and it was wishful thinking to expect otherwise simply because it was outside the old Confederacy.
The NAACP drew a red line. James W. Johnson, the national secretary who’d given that rousing speech on Black culture a year earlier in Indianapolis, wrote a strong letter to Coolidge. He demanded that the president denounce what was going on in Indiana. The Klan, as he noted later, was now “blot[ting] the light from the skies for the Negro” and must be stopped before it could grow by another hooded man. As a boy growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson had first shaken the hand of a president, reaching out to touch Ulysses S. Grant during a parade in 1877. He’d considered Teddy Roosevelt a friend. He despised Woodrow Wilson for turning back the clock on progress for African Americans, and found him stiff and hypocritical in person. Coolidge was colder still, and their only meeting had been awkward.
