A Fever in the Heartland, page 20
Just outside her window, it was incongruously beautiful, the first flowering trees at full bud, the daffodils showing their color. Sunlight streamed through the big windows fronting University Avenue, giving a shine to the dark wainscoting of the living room of the Oberholtzer home. Four blocks away, the Stephenson mansion had become such a curiosity site that police were posted to keep people back. One of the papers ran a large photo of the four-car garage, under the headline where girl says she was trapped.
Beyond the rubbernecking and sympathy, many questions lingered. A Klansman, Stephenson’s subordinate, was a favorite to win the mayor’s race in Indianapolis. Did he condemn the man who’d been arrested for this monstrous crime? He was silent. The Republican chairman of the state’s most populous county, who’d worked with the Klan to run the electoral table six months earlier—did he disassociate himself from the person George Oberholtzer called “this beast”? He was silent as well. Only the national Klan—aligned with Steve’s enemy, Imperial Wizard Evans—took a public stand. Joe Huffington, who had recruited Steve to join the hooded order in Evansville four years earlier, issued a statement saying Stephenson was now banished from the national order, “for conduct unbecoming a Klansman.”
In Washington, DC, the national Klan burnished its pose as a lobby for morality, meeting with loyal senators and members of Congress on a new agenda of social issues. But elsewhere, terror was still part of the tool kit. In that spring of 1925, a posse of hooded Klansmen on horseback rode up to the house of Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a Baptist preacher who led the local chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Nebraska Klan had swelled to an all-time high, 45,000 members, with a women’s brigade and a Ku Klux Kiddies as well. The marauders waved torches and smashed windows at the house. They demanded that the preacher come out and face the mob. His pregnant wife, Louise, with three small children at her side, said her husband was not home. Had he been in the house, he might have faced a lynching. The Klansmen told her that “good Christian white people” would not tolerate a troublemaker stirring things up among “the good negroes.” They smashed every window in the house before galloping off into the night. A few days later, the preacher’s wife gave birth to a son—the boy who would become Malcolm X.
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On Monday night, April 13, Madge’s fever rose to nearly 107 degrees. She died the next morning, with her family by her bedside. She had clung to life for twenty-nine days. The Indianapolis Times carried the news with an eight-column banner across the top fold of the front page: death takes madge oberholtzer. The next day, a coroner’s inquest was convened, hearing testimony from Madge’s doctor and her father, while awaiting results of an autopsy. Funeral services were held on Thursday, at the family home on University Avenue. Her body was covered with a dark dress, on which was pinned a pearl Pi Beta Phi arrow. Eight of her sorority sisters served as honorary pallbearers. Madge’s father was catatonic with grief. Already, he’d buried his first wife, who died on his twenty-second birthday, and his first son, who died when the boy was seven, after a freak accident. The third family tragedy was almost too much.
The preacher said Madge’s spirit belonged to Irvington, and Irvington must be there for her memory: “Let us not forget that in coming here today we have not fulfilled our obligations of friendship,” he said. In the days, weeks, and years ahead, the family “will need us as never before.”
On the same day, Stephenson pleaded not guilty at a formal arraignment, along with Klinck and Gentry—the two men in custody after three days of dodging the law. He entered his plea before Marion County judge James A. Collins, who’d been identified two years earlier in the pages of O’Donnell’s Tolerance as a sworn member of the Klan.
For so brief an appearance, the courtroom was crowded. People wanted to see, in person, this presence they’d known as the Old Man. There was little evidence that his domination was diminished. One of Stephenson’s most prominent Klansmen, John L. Duvall, had welcomed the backing of the Machine in the mayor’s race. The primary was just a few weeks away. A Klan slate, pledging to prevent Black residents from moving into white neighborhoods or attend most public schools, was running for city council. A decision had already been made to build a separate high school for Black youths, a way to keep African Americans out of the city’s three other high schools. The capital, along with most other urban areas of the state, was becoming more segregated than any time since before the Civil War. Stephenson, Duvall, and the Republican County chairman had huddled at the Washington Hotel in February to plot a takeover of municipal government—a scheme that was not revealed until well after the indictment. Also kept secret was a contract that Duvall had signed with the Grand Dragon, ceding control of key positions in the city to the Klansman.
Now, for the second time in less than a year, people had a chance to vote on a Klan referendum. Once again, it was a straight choice: they were with the hooded order or against it. Barely fifteen years earlier, when Indianapolis opened its new city hall, civic leaders cited a Bible verse to characterize the average, high-minded resident: “I am myself a citizen of no mean city.” But this mean city had 40,000 Klansmen in 1925—twice as many as Atlanta. One national magazine called it “Klanopolis.”
“I want to see the people of Indianapolis rise up and put the stamp of disapproval upon this man Stephenson,” said Duvall’s chief rival in the Republican primary. “What a great disaster, what a disgrace to the Republican Party it would be, to have a man like that dominating our primaries, our candidates, our legislature.”
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Two days after Madge was buried, Irvington was rocked by an explosion at 1:30 a.m. Steve’s neighbors rushed outside to see flames and smoke rising from his compound on University Avenue. Fire trucks doused the blaze, but not before it blackened the porch with its Ionic columns and all three stories of the front of the house. The cause was no mystery: it was arson, investigators said, after finding empty containers of gasoline and oil nearby. Months earlier, the Reomar II had been shattered by an explosion, the exquisite cabinetry and mahogany planks of Steve’s yacht reduced to smoking splinters raining down on Lake Erie. Steve announced to the press that Evans was trying to kill him, a claim without evidence. Both the yacht and the mansion were covered by large insurance policies. Curiously, Steve had already moved out of the home, taking up residence at the Washington Hotel. His most valuable furniture, and the Oriental rug upstairs, had been removed just days before the fire.
Madge’s death presented the prosecutor with a new case. Will Remy was losing sleep as he assembled the pieces against Steve. A few months earlier, he and his wife had bought a house six miles north of downtown, in part to be away from the industrial smoke that hung over much of the city. But the new home was no refuge from Klan enforcers. People called in the middle of the night with blood-curdling threats to kill Remy and his wife. Because he didn’t trust the Indianapolis Police Department to protect him, he enlisted Detective McMurtry, who’d arrested Steve, to be his bodyguard. He felt the weight of the entire Indiana establishment against him. “Threatening letters poured in on me by the sackful,” he wrote. “My telephone was tapped. I was charged with framing an innocent man and even some of my best friends doubted my sanity.”
Remy went back to the grand jury and once again outlined what had happened, but with death as an outcome of the crimes. The panel returned with a fresh indictment against Stephenson and the Earls: murder in the second degree, carrying a penalty of up to life in prison. They were arrested and held without bail.
Now, for the first time, the fortress protecting D. C. Stephenson started to crumble. Women called the prosecutor’s office with stories they’d been afraid to go public with until the murder indictment. A beautician described showing up at Steve’s house one night with a male friend, for what was supposed to be a big party. The house was dark. They pushed the door open and walked in. Just then, a naked girl stumbled down the stairs. She looked underage, a child of fifteen or so, and drugged or drunk. The beautician called a cab and said the girl must be taken home.
“Sit there and keep your mouth shut,” Stephenson told his teenage captive. When the taxi arrived, he ordered everyone to keep quiet while he sent away the cab. The girl staggered upstairs. She crawled out the window, down the side of the house, and fled. A statement from the taxi company backed the story. Other women came forth and told of similar nights locked in Stephenson’s house or a hotel with him. A member of a sorority at Indiana University said he took her to Chicago, raped her, and then said they were going to get married—his old ruse.
Two weeks after Madge died, five hundred women rallied outside the Marion County Courthouse, demanding that Stephenson not be released on bail. “We would remind fathers and mothers of daughters that they have something at stake in this trial,” said one speaker. Stephenson’s legal team had insinuated through their press contacts that Madge was no paragon of virtue. She was twenty-eight years old and still unmarried, almost an old maid. She’d had a boyfriend or two or three, they whispered. Who knows what really happened in that rail car? But the women of Butler College would have none of it. Female faculty members met in the campus chapel and pledged justice for their former student. God was on Madge’s side—not with the Klan. In her three years at the school, and ten years as a resident of Irvington, Madge was “highly esteemed and beloved,” the women wrote in a resolution.
Stephenson wasn’t worried. He’d assembled the best-connected legal talent in the state, led by Ephraim Inman, a man who knew the world of Indianapolis jurisprudence like the inside of his home. It was all just furniture to be rearranged. The coroner’s report concluded Madge had died of “mercuric poisoning, self-administered.” As Inman saw it, the case was simple: Madge Oberholtzer had killed herself. You couldn’t charge a man with murder if the victim had died of suicide. Well, yes you could, Will Remy countered—if the poison was taken under duress. The Klan judge took under consideration Inman’s motion to quash the indictment.
On Election Day, May 5, police were called to break up roving mobs of Stephenson supporters among the Horse Thief Detective Association. They were out in force on the streets of Indianapolis, distributing circulars urging a vote for the Klan’s mayoral candidate, Duvall. The “Official Protestant Ticket,” as the sample ballot put it, won easily in the primary—evidence, for Stephenson, that people were willing to overlook or outright deny the charges against him. The Grand Dragon may have been under guard at the county jail, but his reach went well beyond the bars of his cell: Duvall won the primary by 7,000 votes. In Evansville, where the Indiana Klan got its start, Herbert Males took the mayor’s race. A year later, Males was called before a United States Senate committee investigating Klan corruption in local governments.
“Are you a Klansman?” Senator James Reed asked the mayor.
“Yes,” he replied. His admission was a surprise only to those who were unwilling to read the true mood in the Heartland of the 1920s. As D. C. Stephenson had learned from his early days building the Invisible Empire along the banks of the Ohio, being a Klansman was no encumbrance in the great American midsection. When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do.
PART THREE
RECKONING
19.
Big Man in a Small Town
SPRING 1925
In the folds of forested land that hold the meander of the White River sat an ideal-looking small town, with a snuggle of Victorian Gothic buildings on its main street, covered bridges over the waterway, a Jeffersonian courthouse in the square, and a ring of steeple-topped churches spreading out to cornfields at the edge. With 5,000 people, Noblesville had none of the commotion of Indianapolis, just to the south. By design and dedication, the town’s metabolism was set to a clock from another era. But change came in a hurry in the 1920s with the arrival of that secretive order of men calling themselves knights. In January 1923, Reverend Aubrey H. Moore took to the pulpit of his First Christian Church to answer the question from the title of a much-publicized sermon: “Is the Ku Klux Klan a Menace to America?” He was Noblesville’s most popular preacher, and this was the largest gathering in a house of worship in some years, the local paper reported—no small feat in a place known for its devotion to pew and prayer. The pastor rose now to praise the Klan. The menace was its enemies. He warned against the mingling of races, saying, “Every colored person should keep his place.” He inveighed against “the poison of the melting pot.” He attacked Jews as “untrustworthy,” and for not accepting Jesus Christ as their savior.
In closing, Reverend Moore asked God to “bless every Ku Kluxer who may be under the sound of my voice.” The congregation said Amen to that and rose with their hands in the air. “I would rather wear a white sheet in the dark,” said the preacher, “than see my country in a shroud.”
With this kind of benediction, it did not take long for the Klan to become the dominant organization in Noblesville. By the summer of that year, a Klan rally drew 12,000 people—more than twice the population of Noblesville and the largest gathering in the town’s history. They burned a cross atop the dome of the stone courthouse, waved signs proclaiming “White Supremacy,” and initiated 250 new Klansmen in a ceremony at the fairgrounds. None of this was considered un-American or cruel by most people in town.
One of the few who stood out and stood up was the Civil War veteran William Stern. He was outraged at this variant of Christianity that urged people to loathe their fellow man. His faith taught him that all God’s children were equal in the eyes of the Creator. “Now, if the Negro is human,” he argued in the Noblesville Ledger, “he is just as much human as any white man or woman who ever lived.” The Klan-sympathetic daily seemed to doubt even that, running a headline about the living curiosity who thinks colored race should be recognized same as whites. At eighty-two, the aging warrior in Lincoln’s Union Army was still a prominent presence around Noblesville, with a paintbrush of a white mustache that covered his upper lip. When the anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh rolled around, he was available to recount two nights in the mud from the spring of 1862, a Union victory that cost 24,000 casualties—the most of any war on the continent to that date. The only time he’d ever left Hamilton County was the three years when he fought against the slaveholders. And those three years had shaped a country boy into the man who would never forget what the war was about.
Years before, Stern had moved from his family farm into town, prospering as a merchant and a realtor. He knew everybody, knew their birthdays and the names of their grandkids and their favorite kind of ice cream on their pie. Now, the city attorney, four members of the town council, the chief of the fire department, and the school superintendent were all Klan. The Exalted Cyclops, as the leader of the local den of sheets was called, ran a clothing store. The treasurer was a former schoolteacher. By 1925, about 35 percent of Hamilton County’s native-born white males had taken the Klan oath—the second-highest percentage of any in the state. Noblesville’s daily paper ran a regular front-page feature, “Klan Komment,” a helpful-hints column, to publicize the virtues of the hooded order.
Where did all of this come from? What had calloused the character of so many of Stern’s neighbors? What did they want? As W. E. B. Du Bois had written, behind “the yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim, lynch, and burn at the stake is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something.” Noblesville had just a few dozen Black residents, a mere ninety-four Catholics, and no Jews or recent immigrants so far as anyone could tell. Well, there was a Greek household, the Kostos family, who ran a confectioner’s store and tried to keep a low profile after someone dropped a dead raccoon at the front door. The menace, as the preacher said, was just beyond the reassuring predictability of the town, somewhere in the urban churn and moral flexibility of the Jazz Age. And those alien forces were closing in on the Noblesvilles of America.
The biggest jolt in Noblesville’s history arrived in the form of a court order: on May 23, 1925, the trial of D. C. Stephenson and his two lieutenants was moved from Indianapolis to Noblesville. All of Indiana’s attention would be drawn to a bucolic town along the White River. The fate of the Grand Dragon would be determined by a jury from a county whose leading preacher was the Klan chaplain, a community with ten companies of horse thief detectives. It was a brilliant move by Stephenson’s attorneys, but that’s what he expected to get for his money. He had hired seven lawyers to defend him.
His lead counsel, Ephraim Inman, tall, bespectacled, silver of tongue and hair, quick on his feet, and ambidextrous in formal legal filings, had pleaded with his friend Judge Collins to move the trial out of Indianapolis. He’d also asked the judge to dismiss the indictment: there was no basis to try his client for homicide, as he’d said earlier. The words and deeds attributed to Stephenson, forming the basis of the charges, were hearsay. Furthermore, there had been too much press, especially in Madge’s final days, for his client to get a fair trial in Indianapolis. Inman blamed “the general excitement, bias and prejudice against all the defendants and the odium which attaches to the defense of said defendants.” He suggested three towns to host the trial. The Klan-backed judge came through with one big favor: Noblesville was a perfect venue for a Grand Dragon.
