A Fever in the Heartland, page 29
As a mass movement, the Klan was finished—membership down by 90 percent nationwide in the three years since the words of Madge Oberholtzer put away the Grand Dragon. As a political force in Washington and half a dozen state capitals, it was a pariah. “As the lights were turned on again, few would admit, even sheepishly, they ever had belonged to the Klan,” recalled Harold Feightner, the reporter friend of Niblack’s. But the dead-end emotion that the priest had spoken of in Noblesville, the fog of hatred that lay over the land long after the lockup of the man who most effectively used it, had yet to lift.
On a sweltering August day in 1930, a mob stormed the Grant County jail in Marion, Indiana, a town of about 30,000 people, forty miles north of Muncie. Using crowbars and hammers, they ripped the iron doors of a cell from its hinges. Inside, three Black teenagers fell to their knees and prayed for their lives. Deputies fired tear gas at the surge of enraged men, but refused to draw their guns. The sheriff was said to be a former Klansman. Earlier that day, the three prisoners had been accused of killing a white man during a roadside robbery, and raping his girlfriend. One of the teens, Abraham Smith, was dragged into the courtyard, beaten, and stabbed, and then lynched by rope tied to the bars of the upstairs jail. A second young man, J. Thomas Shipp, was hauled to a nearby maple tree. A boisterous crowd that included many women and children chanted, “Kill the n——!” A few Klansmen circulated among the mob, veiled under white robes that had been gathering moths for several years. As the vigilantes were stringing him up, Shipp tried to struggle out of the noose. He was lowered, both of his arms were broken, and then he was pulled high above the ground as his neck snapped. Women laughed and clapped while the life was choked out of Shipp. The atmosphere was festive—like a picnic, one witness recalled.
The third prisoner, James Cameron, a sixteen-year-old who had fled the roadside crime scene before the assault began, was thrown to the ground and beaten. A woman jumped from the top of a car onto him, driving spiked heels into his back. Begging for his life, he said he was innocent. Just as a noose was tightened around his neck came the voice of a prominent white athlete: “Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or shooting of anybody.” Cameron’s life was spared.
A little while later, Smith’s body was relocated to the maple tree in the town’s main courtyard and hung next to the other dead man. All night, people posed in front of the victims, pointing and smiling for the cameras at the bloodied corpses. The murder in plain sight was the last known lynching of Black people in Indiana and possibly the last north of the Mason-Dixon Line. After dangling in a summer breeze for eight hours, the bodies were cut down by a deputy at dawn. The woman at the roadside robbery scene later said there had been no rape; she had made the story up. Though the leading citizens of Indiana professed outrage and vowed to bring the vigilante killers to justice, a Grant County grand jury refused to issue any indictments. No one was ever charged with a lawless execution witnessed by thousands of Hoosiers in the public square.
EPILOGUE
In 1998, a plaque was mounted at the entrance to the most famous courtroom in Indiana. Three years earlier, a building contractor had discovered an old steamer trunk in a barn outside Noblesville. Inside were three-by-five membership cards of more than a thousand local Klansmen, and hoods, sashes, robes, and a cross with lightbulbs. The find was an embarrassment that made national news and came as a shock to many in the state. Rather than tarnish the image of Noblesville, the Klan materials should have been burned and the names erased from memory, some of the residents said.
“Well, you can’t burn history,” the contractor told Allen Safianow, an Indiana historian. “That’s what’s wrong today.” After much wrangling, the evidence of the Klan’s hold on the town was turned over to the historical society. For the next twenty-two years the membership list would be kept secret except to scholars who agreed to certain restrictions. The townsfolk had decided it was better to focus on what happened in the courtroom, to let the world know about the momentous turn of events inside a small-town house of justice. The plaque reads:
SITE OF D.C. STEPHENSON TRIAL
A jury of Hamilton County citizens convicted Ku Klux Klan leader D.C. Stephenson in this building in November, 1925 for the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. The outcome of the trial resulted in the rapid decline of the theretofore powerful Klan influence in state government.
The heroes in this telling were those twelve average men. All it took were a few good Hoosiers to put an end to Klan “influence” in Indiana, as it was phrased. The Klan was dissolved in Noblesville a year after Stephenson was locked up, bringing some measure of relief to the town’s last surviving Union soldier from the Civil War, Bill Stern. He died in 1933, at the age of ninety-one. By inference, the system worked, good triumphed over evil, and the fever that took hold of a most quintessential American state could be time-capsulized and forgotten. The verdict was a bookend. The hysteria that led to the lynching of the Jewish factory boss Leo Frank “was the spark that ignited” the twentieth-century Klan, as historian Wyn Craig Wade wrote, and the Stephenson case “put out the fire.”
But take away the courage of Madge Oberholtzer as she lay dying from poison and the sadism of Stephenson, and there is no extinguisher of the flames that enveloped the nation during the 1920s. Without her, the dark assertion that finally shook Indiana from the grip of the Klan, the words that defined how a citizen-run government could be taken over by a silken-voiced sexual predator—I am the law—might never have been widely known. Without her, the true nature of the political puppeteer who directed a majority of Hoosiers at the polls might have remained concealed. Without her, Stephenson might have been named to that vacant United States Senate seat, and gone ahead with a run at the White House while the Klan was still ascendant. There is always some peril in seeing things in the past from a starting point of the present, as if every molecule of chance was put in place by human design. But at the least, Madge Oberholtzer deserves a plaque of her own.
We should also think about another cause and effect, or lack thereof. Stephenson was a charismatic con man—“the most talented psychopath ever to tread the banks of the Wabash,” as one chronicler of the age put it. But what if he’d never drifted north of the Ohio River? Would so many of Indiana’s citizens not have taken an oath to white supremacy and religious bias? Would Jews not have been harassed at their places of business? Would Catholics not have been targeted with terror? Would Black citizens not have been denied the freedom to choose where to live and eat and go to school, or protection from a mob with a rope? What if the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode it? A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s there still, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland. The Grand Dragon was a symptom, not a cause, of an age that has been mischaracterized as one of Gatsby frivolity and the mayhem of modernism. It’s entirely possible that the Klan fell apart not just because of scandals and high-level hypocrisy, but also because it had achieved all of its major goals—Prohibition, disenfranchisement of African Americans, slamming the door on immigrants whose religion or skin color didn’t match that of the majority. Long after Stephenson was put away, the ideas that his followers promoted while marching in masks behind a flaming cross prevailed as the law of the land.
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The Klan-sponsored Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply restricted the number of Jews, Catholics, southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, and Africans who could come to the United States, stayed on the books for forty-one years. During World War II, a limited number of Jewish refugees from Germany who’d been allowed into the country—as an exception to the law—formed an elite American intelligence unit, the Ritchie Boys, and helped to win the war against Hitler. The US Army estimated that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from this unit of immigrants.
In the years following World War II, Jim Crow was gradually disassembled. President Harry Truman integrated the military in 1948. The United States Supreme Court ended the doctrine of “separate but equal” with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Ten years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The schools of Indianapolis remained segregated until 1971, when a federal court ordered them to integrate.
Indiana had pioneered the world’s first compulsory sterilization law. And a new measure that Governor Jackson signed in 1927 was enforced until 1974, allowing the state to deny thousands of Hoosiers the ability to bring children into the world. The same year that the new law went into effect, the United States Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, upheld the right to sterilize a “feeble-minded” woman in a mental institution. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the majority opinion. In the years that followed, about 70,000 Americans who were deemed a threat to the national gene pool—the deaf, the blind, ethnic minorities, people with epilepsy, homosexuals, poor people, and “promiscuous” women—were sterilized against their will. Nazi Germany defended its own 1936 eugenics law by pointing to the United States as a role model. In 1981, Oregon performed the nation’s last legal forced sterilization.
Despite repeated calls to outlaw the Horse Thief Detective Association, the private militias remained a force in Indiana well after the Klan dried up. It wasn’t until 1933 that the state legislature ended the reign of vigilantes with arrest powers.
That same year, legal sales of beer, wine, and spirits returned to Indiana, as they did throughout most of the land with ratification of the 21st Amendment. After falling at the end of the decade leading up to Prohibition, per capita consumption of alcohol rose steadily during the years it was outlawed. About 5,000 people in Indiana were indicted on federal liquor charges. In 1933, the state also got rid of the Wright “Bone Dry” Law, which was responsible for the jailing of thousands of people for possession of an empty liquor bottle, medicinal spirits, or hair tonic. In 2021, Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning started selling his own bourbon in Indiana, pushing his $200-a-bottle Tennessee liquor. The Hoosier state, he said, “has a great bourbon history.”
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Over two decades, D. C. Stephenson filed more than forty appeals. When he’d exhausted his funds, he wrote many of his own briefs. Though he called himself a political prisoner, he changed his story repeatedly.
No court ever saw things his way, or disagreed with the verdict in Noblesville. The Indiana State Supreme Court found that his rape, assault, and kidnapping of Madge was responsible for her death, even if it was a suicide—a decision that is studied in law schools to this day. “To say that there is no causal connection between the acts of appellant and the death of Madge Oberholtzer, and that the treatment accorded her by appellant had no causal connection with the death of Madge Oberholtzer would be a travesty of justice,” the court majority wrote in 1932, upholding the murder conviction.
After serving nearly twenty-five years in prison, Stephenson was released in March 1950. He said he’d lined up a job in Tulsa, where he planned to live with his daughter, Florence Catherine, who was in between marriages after being divorced five times. They’d been corresponding over the years, and she was charmed by the letters from the father she never knew. But just days after moving in with the child he’d abandoned in 1916, Stephenson was kicked out of her house. “He just couldn’t adjust to the new way of living,” his daughter told reporters. He still acted as if he were the Grand Dragon of 1924.
He resettled in Illinois. Within a few months, he failed to report to his parole officer and disappeared, prompting a manhunt throughout the Midwest. He was found in a little town in Minnesota and returned to prison. After serving six years of a second term, Stephenson was set free a few days before Christmas in 1956. He was ordered to stay out of Indiana. But after a year or so of drifting, he took up residence in a large new house in Seymour, Indiana—the “small town” of John Mellencamp’s song and birth. He’d married one of his lovers and post-conviction allies, Martha Dickinson. In prison, Steve had designed a type-cleaning machine. Now the master salesman took to the road to make something off the invention. It didn’t take long for him to resume his predatory ways.
While traveling through Missouri in November 1961, he was arrested and charged with attempting to molest a sixteen-year-old girl. He was seventy. He had tried to force the teenager into his car. She screamed, bolted, and went to the police. He was found guilty and given a four-month suspended jail sentence because of his age, on the condition that he never set foot in the state of Missouri. Not long after the conviction, he deserted his wife Martha, the woman who had stood by him through three decades of prison visits. He vanished into the vapor of America much in the same way as he’d first appeared. His wife told friends she never heard from him again and had no idea where he had gone.
Stephenson had moved to Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee, to assume a life of aging anonymity in the Appalachian foothills. There, he married a fourth woman, Martha Murray Sutton, who was nearly twenty years younger. She had been his landlady in a house where he roomed. Technically, the marriage was illegal; Steve had never divorced his third wife. In Jonesborough, he worked as a writer and printer at the Herald & Tribune. On June 28, 1966, he suffered a seizure and fell to the ground while walking into the house—dead at the age of seventy-four. He was buried in Johnson City, Tennessee. His tombstone was a lie, claiming him as an officer who served with the infantry in World War I.
But news of his passing did not reach Indiana for many years. After his assault conviction in 1961, he’d managed to live quietly with the latest wife in a little pocket of forgotten America. Historians, journalists, lawyers, and those he’d fleeced tried to track him down, but came up empty. It wasn’t until 1978, after a three-month investigation, that reporters at the Louisville Courier-Journal solved a sixteen-year mystery dating to the time Steve left Seymour without a trace. They found the grave of the Grand Dragon and the last Mrs. Stephenson in eastern Tennessee. “I knew nothing of his background,” his widow told the paper. “He was a very wonderful person.”
Late in his prison term, Stephenson was visited by Will Remy. His old adversary asked him if he’d been serious about running for the White House. Steve said the plan was real. “You wouldn’t have called it President,” he said. “The form of government might have changed. You might have had a dictator.”
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The Klan never recovered from its collapse at the end of the 1920s, when national membership fell to below 100,000. During the Depression, Hiram Evans was forced to take a job with a Georgia construction company. He was later charged with fixing asphalt prices. In 1939, he handed over his Imperial Wizard title to Dr. James Colescott, a veterinarian from Terre Haute, Indiana—the first Northerner to wear the crown. He’d been personally trained by Stephenson, his mentor dating to the early 1920s. Colescott tried to revive the order, using some of the tricks he’d learned from the Old Man. But he was met with failure and derision. The Klan was broke, forced to sell its Imperial Palace in Atlanta to the Catholic Church, which used the former headquarters as a rectory for a new cathedral. Many Klan members were attracted to the creed of Aryan purity coming out of Nazi Germany, and left the order to join groups such as the German American Bund. In 1944, under pressure from the Internal Revenue Service, Colescott formally disbanded the second and largest iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, birthed in 1915. Evans died in 1966, the same year Stephenson took his last breath.
Court Asher, Stephenson’s bodyguard, pilot, and right-hand man, founded a weekly newspaper, the X-Ray, which was notorious for spreading anti-Semitic falsehoods and promoting Nazi Germany, out of his home base in Indiana. He also tried to prove that Jesus was never a Jew. During World War II, Asher was indicted for sedition, though he never stood trial. He died in 1967. One of Stephenson’s other top aides, Earl Gentry, who was in the top bunk while the Grand Dragon raped Madge Oberholtzer, was found murdered in a car in Wisconsin in 1938. He’d been shot in the head—a contract killing ordered by an ex-lover.
Stephenson had outlived some of the bravest few who fought him when he was invincible. George Dale died at his typewriter in 1936, from a stroke at the age of sixty-nine. Another newspaperman from the era, Harold Feightner, said in his oral history that “those who passed through that dark decade never realized the full import of what was happening.” Dale realized it at the time, and never turned off the siren.
He was able to right the scales of justice in Muncie. Clarence Dearth, the Klan judge who had jailed the editor without trial, ordered forty newsboys off the street, and temporarily shut down Dale’s Post-Democrat, was impeached and later imprisoned for contempt of court. In 1929, the same year the judge was ousted, Dale ran for mayor of Muncie. He used radio, then in nearly every home, to explain why the Klan was an evil force that had duped many a Hoosier. In print, he could sound strident. On the airwaves of Indiana, he was a folksy, reassuring old man telling tales and making common sense. On election night, Dale pulled off a major upset. A heavy turnout of Catholics, Blacks, and blue-collar workers gave him a thousand-vote margin. He promptly fired all members of the Klan-infested police department. Dale was swept into office with a wave of others who campaigned against Klan corruption, including a new mayor in Evansville. Perhaps, as an optimist in Colorado said after that state’s Klan was rejected at the polls as well, “the air of America is too friendly to permit such a disease to last.”
