A Fever in the Heartland, page 28
This was no time for Indiana to congratulate itself. “Weak-minded politicians, blowing in the wind, hastened to do homage to this grotesque personage,” Dale wrote. “Stephenson still dreams of empire. And at that, he is a remarkable man . . . Stephenson really believed he would gain permanent control of Indiana, then widen his influence until every state of the union recognized him as master, and then—but figure it out yourself.”
A few other voices followed Dale’s lead. A day after the sentencing, Democrats at their annual state meeting vowed to root out every Klansman from their party. Let the Republicans be the standard-bearers of the hooded order. “It will never do for us Democrats to compromise with this evil, unholy, un-American and un-Christian organization,” said a lawyer from the town of Lebanon. “What the Democrats must do is come out boldly and unmask them!” They needed no unmasking, as it were, since the leading officeholders, from governor to mayor of the state’s largest city, were all bound to the Invisible Empire.
The Indianapolis Times reminded Hoosiers of those inconvenient truths—that they had elected a Klansman for mayor of the capital city well after Stephenson was charged with murder. Had the Grand Dragon not been convicted, he would be dictating the affairs of state and running the city while preying on women. “He had just succeeded in placing himself in a position of more influence than any one man ever possessed in the free state of Indiana,” the paper wrote. “The most amazing and depressing feature of the whole case was not the trial, just conducted, or the episode that led to it, but the career of the defendant. That he could rise from obscurity to wealth and irresponsible power, shaping legislation and making governors is a blot on the citizenship of Indiana.”
This was not something many Hoosiers wanted to hear. In a short time, the paper lost 5,000 subscribers.
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From his cell, Stephenson corresponded with several women who appeared to idolize him. “Best wishes to my lonely boy,” wrote a stranger from San Francisco who offered to send him a fruit basket every month. A woman from South Bend took pity on Steve—a martyr, as he said—locked up for life because he was trying to fight for white people in a fast-mongrelizing nation. “My mind goes back to our association in working to make America safe for Americans,” she wrote just before Christmas. His rape of Madge was excusable, as well. “Of course, you didn’t do anything that thousands of men aren’t doing every day.” He appeared particularly close to a married woman, Martha L. Dickinson, whose husband was a well-known Klansman. She tried to visit him at least once a month, bringing him money and treats.
By the summer of 1926, Steve was getting impatient. He arranged for Court Asher to smuggle out a letter to the press. Since taking up residence behind bars, he’d yet to grant an interview with a reporter, nor had he spoken to any of the authorities gearing up probes of official corruption orchestrated by the Klan. Foremost among those investigators was Will Remy. Stephenson’s conviction was not the end of the prosecutor’s drive to crush the Empire, but a new beginning. Alas, the letter proved to be little but a headline-grabbing nudge of the governor. Steve remained silent months after the note went out. In the fall, Remy convened a grand jury and ordered him to appear.
While Remy worked the courts, a much-respected newspaperman from Vincennes, Thomas Adams, assembled a group of fellow Indiana editors to shine a light on what had happened to their state. It was a little late, but welcomed nonetheless by the lonely resisters of the Klan. Adams was invariably described as a rock-ribbed conservative and old-school Hoosier, now in declining health. In September, the press squad dropped its first bomb: a mass of documents proving that the Klan had not only run state government, but was in charge of much of the judicial system as well. O’Donnell and Dale had already reported much the same earlier. But they were dismissed as gadflies. Adams brought institutional heft, and a great many new details, to the design of the Klan’s hold on an American state.
Democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage. So now all the world knew what Stephenson had masterminded. There were two governments in Indiana: elected officials going through the motions of a representative democracy, and a dictatorship run by the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
“Our investigation has shown that Stephenson forced a super oath” on public officials, said Adams. “This super oath was greater than the oath of constitutional authority.”
The Republican Party was outraged—not at the disclosures of Stephenson’s web of graft, but at the press for reporting it. This journalism was the work of Jews, party officials implied. Clyde A. Walb, the Republican Party state chairman, said a syndicate of international bankers was trying to bring down the GOP in Indiana. The party’s Central Committee disowned Adams, a lifelong Republican.
In October 1926, Remy hauled Stephenson before his grand jury. He sat in the witness chair smoking a cigar, happy to be breathing interior air from somewhere other than his squalid cell, especially air thick with tobacco smoke. But he said nothing. He refused to answer even the most basic questions. He felt that if he sang to the prosecutor, Governor Jackson would be useless to him. Better to tighten the leash. Remy called hundreds of other witnesses, building his case to smash the Klan. By the end of the year, Adams said the Klan was in broad retreat throughout Indiana, reduced to 50,000 members—still enough Klansmen to fill a stadium. Hoosiers of conscience could breathe a sigh of relief, Adams said with no small amount of self-congratulation. “We believe we have ended Klan control in Indiana.”
He spoke too soon. That year, the Klan-dominated city council passed a new ordinance taking away the freedom of Black residents to live where they wanted in Indianapolis—formalizing a segregation system that had been building in the twenties. A crowd of more than eight hundred people showed up at city hall to ensure that Black people would never reside in white neighborhoods. “It is neither good for the whites nor the Blacks for the two races to commingle,” said the group’s leader, a lawyer with the aptonym of Omer Whiteman. The crowd hooted and stomped its feet in approval as the council voted. After Mayor Duvall signed the law, it was a civil crime for Black families to move into a white residential area without the consent of a majority of those who lived there. A few months later, a Black physician, Dr. Guy Grant, purchased a home in a white part of town. The city moved to evict him. He was able to stay in his house after the NAACP filed suit to block to the law.
The next year, 1927, Indianapolis played host to the annual meeting of Women of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a woman from Irvington whose voice from beyond the grave had knocked the Klan from the highest perch in its history. But these women from all parts of the country would show that they were not deterred. Thousands of white-robed Klanswomen assembled for two days in Tomlinson Hall. It was the very place where Patrick O’Donnell had vowed to destroy the hooded order five years earlier.
A lead speaker was the Imperial Commander of the women’s Klan, Robbie Gill Comer from Arkansas. She was the author of a book, The Equality of Women, and preached that females could be equal to males in defense of white supremacy. In Arkansas, she had been instrumental in persuading the legislature to add a fourth star to its flag, symbolizing the four years the state belonged to a Confederacy of slaveholders. In Indianapolis, Comer tried to calm the furor over corruption. “The Klan is forever out of politics,” she said. “In the future, its work will be of an invisible nature.”
Those words were contradicted the next day when Imperial Wizard Evans took to the same stage. His speech was one he had given many times, “Rum and Romanism.” But in the wake of the scandals and cratering membership, there was added urgency to his voice. The year before, in its second march down the heart of Washington, DC, the Klan had been able to attract only 15,000 people—not even a third of the multitudes who flooded the capital in 1925. The “thinned ranks” of a parade that showed “not much life” was evidence that the Klan was in a downward spiral, wrote the New York Times.
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Lick Skillet Hollow is a listless valley in the southern part of Indiana, not far from where Stephenson laid the foundation for the Klan’s empire of the North. According to local lore, the place got its name from settlers who used to leave their dirty pans on back porches to let the deer lick them clean. On July 27, 1927, John Niblack and another attorney drove the length of the state to meet a mystery man outside a barn in Lick Skillet. After three years of attending law school at night and then passing the state bar, Niblack had traded in his reporter’s notebook for subpoena power. He was now a deputy prosecutor, making $200 a month working for one of the few public officials he trusted and admired—Will Remy. Earlier that month, Stephenson had asked Governor Jackson for a ninety-day parole to gather evidence for his appeal. Jackson refused. This betrayal by his old master finally pushed the convict over the line.
Deep into his second year in prison, the Grand Dragon was falling apart. He complained of rheumatism that made it difficult to walk, and about how his thin hair was quickly going gray “due to the fiendish workings of the conspiracy” against him. He never explained with any lucidity who or what made up this network of plotters, or how it would make his hair change color. His view of his victim had gone from casual disregard to open loathing. He described Madge’s dying declaration as “a filthy document of perjury and forgery” in one court filing and implied that she may have deserved what she got “after going to the home of an unmarried man at the unconventional hour of 11 P.M.” He would shed no tears for the woman from Irvington. “I have not developed elastic sympathy for the dead.”
But he was ready to rat out the governor who’d failed to spring him. “I’ve been double-crossed for the last time,” he said. Perhaps by currying favor with the law, he could shorten his stay inside the barbed-wire enclosure in Michigan City. He gave a remarkably blunt statement to the press:
“I purchased the Marion County and state officials involved in this investigation in an open market. I paid an excessive price for them.”
He asked Remy to meet a former business partner outside a farm. There, the prosecutor’s team was handed two black metal boxes, eighteen inches long, eight inches high and wide, that had been buried beneath the ground of a round barn. The next day, Remy examined his treasure from Lick Skillet. As if combing through an archaeological find, the prosecutor spent nine hours excavating the detritus from Stephenson’s hold on the state. Some of the papers were mildewed, but the evidence was clear. Among gold cuff links and rings without their precious stones was a cache of canceled checks and pledges to Steve from top political leaders. If anyone in Indiana needed further proof of how they had turned their state over to the Klan, the boxes held many directives from the Grand Dragon. Duvall had promised that 85 percent of his hires at city hall would belong to the Klan. Ledgers and notes detailed how the Empire had used Jackson to try to bribe a former governor into naming a prosecutor owned by the Klan. He’d also been given thousands of dollars directly from Stephenson. Asked about the money, the governor said it was for a horse named Senator that he had sold to Stephenson. When reporters tried to track down the prized animal, they were told that the horse had choked to death on a corncob.
In September 1927, Jackson and the top Republican in Marion County were indicted on bribery charges. Mayor Duvall and six city council members were also charged, in separate indictments, with violating the state’s corrupt practices law. Duvall was found guilty, ousted from office, and sent to jail. The council members met a similar fate. Jackson refused to step down. He stood trial in February 1928. The star witness was D. C. Stephenson. He reveled in the attention, even as most press accounts described him as haggard, aged, and diminished. Under oath, he was quarrelsome and arrogant. He was asked if his personality was so strong that he could persuade anyone to accept a bribe. He smiled at the backhanded compliment.
“I can’t answer that.”
“Do you deny that you are an egotist?”
Steve turned to the judge. “Do I have to submit to this sort of insult?”
He was questioned about the parties aboard his yacht.
“While you were on the boat, you had all you wanted to drink, yes?”
“If anyone suffered from drought,” he said, “it was his own fault.”
Testifying in another case, the Grand Dragon said weapons were passed around among Klansmen as freely as illegal hooch.
“I have never met one who didn’t have a gun, a knife or often a blackjack.”
“Why?”
“Because their minds uniformly ran to violence.”
Under oath, Stephenson claimed to have taken in the modern equivalent of $29 million in initiation fees for the Invisible Empire. He got at least 40 percent of that.
“Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?” To D. C. Stephenson, it wasn’t strange at all. Steve’s 1922 epiphany in Evansville—that he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress—was brilliant. And true.
In the end, Stephenson gave several exhaustive accounts of the bribery scheme and how he pulled the levers of power in the state. This evidence, along with testimony of other witnesses and canceled checks, proved beyond a doubt that the Klan’s governor had been guilty, as the judge said so himself in a directed verdict. But Jackson got off on a technicality: the statute of limitations had expired. He finished out his term and retired from politics.
As the governor’s trial was wrapping up, Klan secrets were spilling out of another court case, this one in Pennsylvania. Imperial Wizard Evans had sued the Pittsburgh Klan, saying it could not break away from the national group without compensating headquarters. It was a disastrous mistake. What should have been a boring back-and-forth on contracts and dues owed, instead became a national forum on Klan atrocities during the 1920s. Klansmen from Oklahoma testified about kidnappings, floggings, and hot-iron brandings. One night, a gang of Sooner State nightriders had grabbed two Jewish businessmen from New York and flogged them until they passed out. From Texas, former Klan members said they had burned a Black man at the stake—under a directive from the Imperial Wizard. Others said Evans also ordered the riot in Carnegie, hoping to force the immigrants and Catholics of western Pennsylvania into a cowering retreat. The state’s Grand Dragon encouraged new assaults, similar to Carnegie, as a recruiting tool. Another witness testified about a night when the Pittsburgh Klan grabbed a Black man, tied him up, and strung him from a tree, leaving him gasping for his life.
For years, politicians, ministers, and apologists in the press had claimed that the Klan that had become such an integral part of American life—with its six million members, its senators, governors, militias, preachers, and police chiefs—was a harmless band of brothers. They were white men in hoods bonding over a shared heritage and desire for a simpler life. That image fell apart in a court of law. At the conclusion of the Pennsylvania trial in 1928, Judge W. H. S. Thompson issued a scathing indictment. He found that the Invisible Empire of the Roaring Twenties, one that would later cast itself as a Mayberry Klan of good fellowship and high Christian values, was “an instrument of terror, oppression, violence and a menace to public peace.” He called it an “unlawful organization, so destructive of the rights and liberties of the people.” After noting that Imperial Wizard Evans and his lawyers came to the court seeking relief “with filthy hands,” he awarded them nothing.
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Whether hearts were softened and minds opened was another story. In Noblesville, after the scheduled speaker at a Kiwanis Club luncheon in 1928 canceled, a Catholic priest volunteered as a last-minute fill-in. Just a few years earlier, more than ten thousand masked men had paraded around town on a summer night, denouncing Catholics in the harshest of terms. Over chicken salad sandwiches, Father Mike Holand talked about hate as a dead-end emotion. But love was the greatest and most selfless expression. If people got to know him as a man, and not a crude stereotype, they might find something to like about him, and eventually could come to love him. He was given a standing ovation. Seventeen miles up the road, in Tipton, another Catholic was invited to give the high school commencement speech in a town that had elected an all-Klan slate to public office in 1925, one year earlier. Bishop Edwin Holt denounced the “low, vulgar people” who belittled immigrants and Jews. The foulest words a Hoosier could use, he said, were “Dago and Sheeny.” The local paper, never an ardent foe of the Klan, called the speech “one of the best addresses ever delivered in Tipton.”
Throughout the country, the Klan could no longer claim owners of banks, editors of newspapers, and judges on state courts as sworn members. Those days were gone—a shameful aberration in the American story, the Chicago Tribune wrote in the wake of the crumbling Klan. The paper sketched an outline that sounded like a bad fairy tale. “It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct, and a state of terror was substituted for a state of law.”
But was it really an aberration?
