A Fever in the Heartland, page 16
A few weeks later, Evans embarked on a triumphant tour of new chapters in the West. He was given a police escort to a welcoming at City Hall in Denver, toasted by Scottish Rite Masons in Spokane, honored at the Masonic Temple in Tacoma, and feted at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in downtown Seattle. The Klan had staged large rallies in Spokane and outside Seattle over the summer. Evans was awed by the growth in the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast, while lamenting that “some of the Eastern states are lost to true Americanism.” Denver had 30,000 Klansmen; Portland at least 15,000.
In early October, more than 5,000 delegates from around the country gathered in Kansas City for the Klan’s second national convention. “This Klonvocation, held here in the great Middle West, is assembled on the battlefield of the immediate future,” said Evans. “You are of superior blood. You are leaders of the only movement in the world, at present, which exists solely to establish a civilization that will ensure these things.”
* * *
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But the Indiana Grand Dragon was not invited to Kansas City. His fight with Evans had turned to open warfare over money, power, and control. Evans had decided to oust his rival. With little public explanation, he expelled Stephenson from the national Klan. Stephenson was unbowed. Instead of taking his millions and moving on, he announced the formation of his own Northern Klan. He’d built the membership to record heights; now he wanted to formally own it. Steve had been working on expanding the Klan’s reach through his own movies and records. He’d recorded discs at Gennett studios and sold them through the Fiery Cross. He’d hired several actors and a director to put together Klan motion pictures. Now he summoned the horse thief detectives, the regional Klan captains, the politicians and ministers to assemble at Cadle Tabernacle for his second crowning.
“With ninety-two percent of its citizenship native born and of the best blood and traditions of the nation, Indiana has a contribution of her own to make instead of outside control,” Stephenson told the delegates. He named himself Grand Dragon of a new Ku Klux Klan, independent of Atlanta, answering only to him. Dues and membership money would still flow his way. But he’d also expanded his shakedown and graft schemes to such an extent that steady money was coming in from multiple sources—all of it dependent on his clutch over the nation’s largest Klan society.
“We’re going to Klux Indiana as she’s never been Kluxed before!” he shouted. He went on a tirade against Evans, implying that he was controlled by Jews and Catholics—and was a hayseed, to boot. “The present head is an ignorant, uneducated, uncouth individual who picks his nose at the table and eats his peas with his knife.”
That fall, the Grand Dragon of newly independent Indiana dispatched thousands of Klansmen to deliver a sample yellow ballot, folded and held together by a clothespin, labeled “The Right Ticket to Vote.” The instructions for the November general election were dropped at the doors of voters who’d already been put on notice by regional operatives. At the top of the ticket was Jackson. At the same time, Stephenson’s message to the Black community was a threat by masked men with torches into the heart of African American neighborhoods.
Black residents of Indianapolis were outraged. They had stood by the Republican Party since being given the vote. But the GOP of 1924 was not the party of Lincoln. When no help—not even a word—arrived from President Coolidge, the city’s Black leaders rebelled. They formed a breakaway political bloc and vowed to vote Democratic for the first time. They staged a massive march of their own down Indiana Avenue, 5,000 strong, with banners blasting the Klan. More than 7,000 people filled Tomlinson Hall for a rally and speeches—going ahead despite threats by the authorities to close the hall and arrest everyone inside. The voices of Black Republicans, whose lives, dignity, and intelligence had been insulted on a daily basis, would be muffled no more.
“The Negro and the Republican Party have come to a parting of the way,” announced the local office of the NAACP.
Johnson, the national secretary, had been urging a break for months, after Coolidge’s ongoing snub of his request that the president condemn the Klan. Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime. Both political parties were guilty of a “gentleman’s agreement,” Johnson said, that denied the vote to 4.5 million Black citizens in the South. He noted that the 18th Amendment, outlawing alcohol, was fully enforced with regular raids, while the 15th Amendment, upholding the right to vote regardless of race, was given no protection. “The federal government will use a navy to prevent a man from taking a drink, but will not empower a deputy marshal to protect the Negro’s ballot,” said Johnson.
Though neither party had taken a stand against the Klan, Republicans in the North had allied themselves with the enemy of every African American. Now it was the “duty” of Black voters everywhere to rise up against them for the first time, Johnson said. But they didn’t have to back the Democratic Party, either.
“Keep the politicians guessing,” he said.
Inspired by Johnson, George L. Knox, born enslaved twenty years before the Civil War, a business owner, newspaper publisher, and the most respected and powerful African American in the state, roused himself for one last fight. He was eighty-four and ailing.
“The Republican Party as now constituted is the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana,” he wrote in his influential paper, the Indianapolis Freeman. “The nominees for governor, house, the senate and city offices are all Klansmen.” The ballot, he said, “is the only weapon of a civilized people and it is up to the Negro to use that weapon as do other civilized groups.”
Stephenson was not impressed. The Black population was too small in number to stop the freight train he was running through the Heartland. But just in case, he bribed a handful of Black community leaders to suppress the vote. And a poison squad plant spread the word that Black federal workers, mainly postmen, would be fired if they didn’t back the Klan ticket.
Hoosiers couldn’t say they didn’t know what they were voting for. Because of Stephenson, they knew exactly what they were voting for. Ten days before the election, he had issued a statement to the national press: “The eyes of the Nation are upon Indiana. Klansmen from all over the Nation are watching and wanting Indiana to win.” A screaming headline across the front of the Indianapolis Times pleaded with voters to come to their senses: no secret order shall rule indiana! The paper noted that its owner and managers were Protestants, but were appalled at the prospect of state rule by a hate group. The choice was government of the people or government by the Klan.
On the eve of the election, a reporter paid Stephenson a visit. The Grand Dragon was smoking a cigar, feet on his desk, sipping from a flask. He was asked what the outcome for governor would be on Election Day.
“We’ll win by about 80,000 votes.”
The margin was 82,000. But for the first time, the Black vote went Democratic—by three to one. It was the start of a tectonic political realignment, in Indiana and elsewhere. Johnson had forced a divorce. Never again could Republicans count on a monolithic vote from African Americans.
Elsewhere, the Empire elected not just a governor in Colorado, Clarence Morley, but a United States senator, Rice Means. In Denver, an oath-bound Klansman, Ben Stapleton, survived a recall election in a city where one in seven voters had taken the same vows. “I will work with the Klan and for the Klan,” he pledged afterward. “I shall give the Klan the kind of administration it wants.” As promised, he named a Klan police chief and filled the prosecutor’s office and law enforcement with fellow brothers under the hood. The new governor promptly launched a campaign against Catholic sacramental wine—an attempted ban that would effectively outlaw the Mass in Colorado. In Illinois, the Klan put dozens of legislators into the chamber. “We know we’re the balance of power in the state,” boasted Illinois Grand Dragon Charles Palmer, an attorney.
In the nation’s capital, the Klan purchased a building and staffed it with sixty members.
“We can control the United States Senate,” Evans told his associates. And soon, he added, get a Klan-owned president. Forty years of Jim Crow in the South and voter restrictions aimed at immigrants in the North were able to shrink the American electorate as never before: just 48.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election—an all-time low.
In Evansville, the congressman of conscience, William Wilson, lost to a Klansman, Harry Rowbottom—just as he’d predicted to his son a few months earlier. Across the state, every Klan-supported candidate won, from the top of the ticket on down.
* * *
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The Invisible Empire’s success, as Stephenson told an associate, was divinely sanctioned. Feeling the breath of God at his back, Steve opened his mansion to a hundred people one night in the late fall of that year. A string quartet played in the main room and drinks flowed freely. The house was thick with politicians and thick with Klansmen, one and the same. Lucille Fuller, who’d been hired by Steve to work as an actress in one of his Klan films, showed up with a male friend. Steve greeted her at the door with a drunken grasp, too close for comfort, as she recalled. She ran into Earl Klinck, the head of Steve’s private police force, who showed off his latest badge—from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.
Fuller’s escort was too drunk to drive her home. She asked an acquaintance for a ride and went upstairs to get her coat. As Fuller walked down toward the front door, the host came staggering back into the house, red-faced and agitated. Stephenson seemed to be blotto, but was very forceful. In a fury, he grabbed the actress by the arm and pushed her out a back door. She caught a glimpse of his girlfriend-for-the-night sobbing in the rear of the house. He dragged Fuller along the driveway, passing Klinck and another bodyguard.
Fuller cried for help. She was shoved into the garage and marched upstairs to an apartment. Stephenson locked the door, dropped his pants, and lunged for the woman. Fuller fought back, slapping and poking at him. He lost his balance and fell to the ground. He managed to bound up on his feet, and with a mighty heave threw Fuller to the bed.
Now he tried to rape Fuller, climbing atop her and pinning her. When she wriggled out of his hold, her attacker looked around for his gun.
“I should kill you,” he said. He tore her clothes, clawed at her breasts. Growing more frenzied and agitated, he bit her, ripping into her flesh with his teeth. Fuller screamed so loud it seemed to knock him back. From a crouch, dazed and drunk, he looked up at the woman and waved her off.
Like Stephenson’s other victims, Fuller feared going to the police. No one would believe her, as he warned her afterward. And even if they did, they wouldn’t dare to go after him.
Stephenson now owned a governor—for all the world to see. On January 12, 1925, he stood next to his prized possession in the receiving line of the inaugural ball. At dinner, he was again paired with Jackson, along with Steve’s escort, and Senator Watson and his wife. Seated directly across from the Grand Dragon was Madge Oberholtzer. Together with her friend Stanley Hill, who’d worked with the new governor at the secretary of state’s office, she’d helped to organize some of the logistics for the biggest political bash of the year, and slipped her name among the honored guests. They dined on a seven-course meal.
After the band played “Back Home Again in Indiana,” and then something slower, Stephenson asked Madge to join him on the dance floor. He was nonstop chatter, an open faucet of compliments. When she tried to excuse herself after the number, he insisted on a second go-round, leaving his date at the table to fend for herself.
“I like you,” he told her. “I like you very much.” A few days later, he gave her a call and asked her to come by his office.
15.
Hoosier Hysteria
1925
From miles out, you could see the concrete obelisk, rising 351 feet into the mid-American sky, the largest monument in the world to a republic of slaveholders. A dream of the rebuilt and fortified twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan was to have something grand, imposing, dominant, and everlasting sprouting from the soil that gave birth to Jefferson Davis. It was designed to look exactly like the Washington Monument, the walls of its limestone foundation eight feet thick at the base, tapered into a pyramid at the summit. Davis owned at least seventy human beings when he was sworn in as president of the rebel states in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 18, 1861. Unlike the founding document of the United States, the constitution of his Confederacy specifically enshrined slavery as an irrevocable right, removing all doubt about the reason for that new nation’s existence. Davis was vanquished, indicted for treason, and forced into prison. Yet nearly sixty years after he surrendered, he was honored with the Tallest Thing in Kentucky, a state that had never joined his breakaway nation.
This solid symbol of the Lost Cause was the final shrine at the end of a newly designated route through the South that would take people from one sacred site of the Confederacy to the other. It was the pinnacle of the long effort to revise the narrative of the war. Traitors were now heroes, and slaveholders were gentlemen. More than 100,000 people had turned out to see the unveiling of the giant statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia—the first of four prominent Confederates to be immortalized barely a hundred miles from the capital they’d plotted to destroy. At the same time, Gutzon Borglum, the Klan insider and eventual sculptor of Mount Rushmore, a man Stephenson had called “my close personal friend,” started work on a marble carving of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the slave states. The Confederacy, Stephens had said, was founded “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” The carving was bound for Statuary Hall in Washington’s Capitol Rotunda, home to the most iconic totems in the nation.
Now, after seven years of construction, the Davis monument was finished in the same year of the Klan’s greatest electoral victories. To mark the occasion, masked white men burned a fiery cross from the top, to the cheers of those gathered at its base. To this day, the Jefferson Davis Monument is the tallest unreinforced concrete structure and the second-highest obelisk on the planet. It’s ninety miles south of where D. C. Stephenson built the first outpost of the Klan of the North.
As the new year dawned, Steve had no time for touring. He was Grand Dragon of the most powerful Klan in history, the only realm that had complete political control of a state. He had legislators to command, many bills to pass, and some not meant to pass at all. Among the 150 members of the General Assembly of 1925, only two were women and four were Catholics; there were no Black or Jewish representatives. It was known as the Klan Legislature, and bipartisan in that regard. Edward B. Bender, a farmer and Democratic legislator from Zionsville, had joined three years earlier as an act of political survival. Now he was all in, and didn’t mind taking orders from an outsider in a hood.
Bender’s rural Klan den would occasionally “take out” someone—using the Klan euphemism for kidnapping—often a man accused by poison squads of cheating on his wife. As Bender recalled, “They wouldn’t whip him or anything. Just warn him and we’d take him out.”
The Invisible Empire had an ambitious legislative agenda: A new eugenics law, to replace the one struck down by the courts, to prevent parents with “degenerate hereditary qualities” from having children. Abolishing parochial schools, with jail sentences for those who tried to send their kids to them. Criminal penalties for adultery or sex outside marriage. Prohibiting baseball games from being played on Sunday. State censorship of movies; films labeled “immoral” by a government commission would be banned. Mandatory Bible reading in public schools—but only the King James Version, the scripture favored by Protestants. Putting road-building contracts directly under control of the governor—Stephenson’s governor, a way to get his hands on millions. And one very curious proposal: a bill ordering nutrition education in all public schools.
“We grabbed everything there was,” said Court Asher. “We cleaned up.”
For those who could smell the rancid stench of corruption rising from the statehouse, Steve had reassuring words. “The Republican Party is in the cleanest hands and it is guided by the most lofty motives,” he wrote one party official, David Hoover, in Elkhart, Indiana. Hoover replied: “I wish to take this occasion to ask just who you are, anyway? You seem to want to be a kind of guardian in general for all of Hoosierdom. I confess that I am not aware of the state of Indiana having created any position of overlord for you.”
Indeed, the state had invented no such position. There had been no change in the constitution, nor any law written specifically for the leader of the Ku Klux Klan to run the affairs of three million people. Stephenson’s name had never appeared on a ballot. When the legislature was in session, a Klansman sat next to the majority leader—he was known as the fifty-first member of the Senate. But the real action happened in Steve’s office.
“They’d go over the bills of the day and Stephenson would say which ones would be passed and which ones would be killed,” said Asher. “There was no argument. Just an order.”
One measure that was approved with little dissent was the Wright “Bone Dry” Law, a top priority of the Klan and its chief evangelical ally, the Anti-Saloon League. The new law incentivized the authorities to snoop and seize even the tiniest amounts of liquor, awarding prosecutors a bounty of cash for every conviction. It also outlawed medicinal prescription of alcohol, a dagger to a flourishing industry. Under Prohibition, people with a doctor’s note could buy a pint for all that ailed them every ten days at a drugstore. This business made a wealthy man out of Charles Walgreen, whose Chicago-based chain of drugstores grew from nine in 1920 to 525 by the end of the decade.
