A Fever in the Heartland, page 4
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At his table inside the Vendome Hotel, D. C. Stephenson plotted a future with Joe Huffington, the Empire’s Indiana emissary. The traveling Klansman was concerned about news of the violence in Texas and elsewhere, which had given the resurgent hooded order a run of bad press. The way to win over the Heartland was with a wholesome Klan, a Klan of family and faith and Midwestern values. It would not be the Klan of the whip and the sword, but the Klan of the hearth and the Lord. “It’s a clean organization,” said Huffington, “standing for the uplift and protection of untainted Americanism.”
Steve didn’t disagree with the sentiment, though the cynic in him knew better. In his experience, you didn’t have to lead a man to hate, just show him the way and he’d do it on his own. But he had much bigger ideas and was already reaching out to Evans in Atlanta. He’d impressed national leadership with his cunning, his guile, and the size of his grandiosity. The United States was full of secretive clubs: Masons, Woodmen, Red Men, Elks, and Odd Fellows, with nearly 40 percent of adult males belonging to a fraternal order. Stephenson and Evans shared a vision: If the new Klan was going to stand out, it needed to be a player, and not just when the sun went down. Who cared what a bunch of costumed men did in a basement on Friday night? What about politics? Writing laws and enforcing the rules? Congress? The statehouse? Real power!
In the spring of 1922, Stephenson was also running for Congress, scratching the itch of his oversized ambition. But his campaign was going nowhere. For one thing, he was a heavy drinker in a state that embraced Prohibition as the 11th Commandment from God. The most influential political organization in the nation was the Anti-Saloon League, militantly dry and evangelically Christian—riding high at the peak of fundamentalist fury against the ills of alcohol. Without the support of the ASL, he was doomed. For another, he was an outsider. Who was this guy? He didn’t sound local, didn’t speak in Hoosier Twang, the northernmost extension of the South Midland dialect, despite a disciplined effort to talk as if he were from the dead center of the USA. He’d just washed up in Evansville two years earlier, a mystery man with a wife in tow—though Violet Stephenson hadn’t been seen with him of late.
What happened at the Methodist church was a turning point. Why run for a seat in Congress, which paid $7,500 a year, when there was a fortune to be made in a movement? In the same week that Klansmen handed the pastor a fistful of money, the papers announced that Stephenson was withdrawing his candidacy for office. He changed political parties, from Democrat to Republican, and pronounced himself an ardent foe of alcohol. If he could repeat the scene from Central Methodist, there’d be no stopping the hooded order. All it took was a small bribe and a bit of Bible talk. The constituency was vast. Evansville alone had seventy-two Protestant churches. In short order, he paid off a dozen or so ministers to evangelize on behalf of the Klan, spreading the word of hate along with the word of God. Those sermons were then widely reported in the Klan’s new Indiana weekly, the Fiery Cross. In Bloomington one Sunday morning, Reverend Vic Blair introduced Klan concepts to three hundred people in church while waving a copy of its constitution.
“The Klan is not against the Negro, but against social equality,” he said from the pulpit. “Not against Jews, but against only the Jews who are trying to gain control of the world; not against the Catholics, but opposed to their systems. It is time for the scum to be thrown from the melting pot. And the Invisible Empire will do the skimming!”
Stephenson presented a plan to leadership: he would conquer all of Indiana for the Ku Klux Klan, not just a bridgehead in Evansville. He’d do it through Protestant churches. He would infiltrate other fraternal organizations, natural joiners. Ministers and Masons—that was the way forward. In the America of 1922, fear of others generated a lot of anxious energy. This collective unease had only to be corralled, sanctified, and monetized. For every $10 from a new member, Steve wanted $4. He’d already done the math. He also wanted a big piece of the official uniform required of every Klansman, hood and robes made especially for members, sold only through the Klan for $6. As for using Christianity to inoculate this secret society from the charge of bigotry—it was brilliant! Simmons, the failed minister, had long felt the same way. Surely, an army of righteous preachers could never be impugned as night-riding criminals. When the Imperial Wizard signed the formal charter for Evansville in May 1922—“Klan #1 in the Realm of Indiana”—Simmons’s signature was on the top, and that of D. C. Stephenson on the bottom. The new state entity, with Steve now leading the fastest-growing chapter in the North, was formally authorized to go forth and spread “the principles of pure Patriotism, Honor, Klanishness and White Supremacy.”
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At home, Stephenson had no use for his wife of two years. Marriage was a straitjacket. He told the boys at the Vendome he was unfit for monogamy. Wasn’t it true of all great men? Violet had tried to make the union work, though her husband was constantly cheating on her and made no secret of it. He said he could get any woman he wanted with the snap of his fingers. Typically, he came home around two a.m., drunk. Or he didn’t come home at all. She had no life of her own in Evansville, no family. And what life she had was subject to a side of her husband very few people ever saw. He saved his worst for her. Violet and Steve would split up after a fight. She’d go back to her mother’s house in Akron, Ohio, and try to rebuild her world. Then Steve would write a long, loving letter or send an unusually large bouquet of flowers, and she’d return to him, against her better instincts. He was persuasive.
Now, upstairs in his residence at the Vendome, Steve was in a foul mood, and cursed her. The room was hot and stifling, and it shrunk whenever the two of them were together inside. He hit Violet in the face with his fist and she crashed to the ground and nearly passed out. Her fall seemed to encourage his rage. He seized her, tore off her dress, clawed at her body and her cheeks with his fingernails. He kicked her in the rib cage. He grabbed her by the head and pulled out a tuft of her hair. He called her a bitch and a whore and he slapped her and scratched her face until blood flowed onto the floor of the suite at the Vendome. Crawling on the ground, trying to protect herself, Violet was terrified. She knew then that the man she had married could kill her.
3.
Men with Badges
1922
Of all the crimes troubling Indiana in the third decade of the twentieth century, stealing a horse was well down the list. Hoosiers had abandoned their steeds and went head over heels for their machines, as they called automobiles. They loved racing them, producing them, tinkering with them, showing them off. They loved honking their horns, polishing their grilles, and letting their kids jump on the running boards. At a time when America made 85 percent of the world’s cars, Studebakers rolled out of South Bend, trucks rumbled off the Graham Brothers factory line in Evansville, and assorted small manufacturers purred around the clock in Indianapolis. Anybody with a regular salary could afford a Model T Ford for under $300. In the twenties, the number of autos on the road in the United States more than tripled—from seven million to twenty-three million.
Who would steal a horse? In Indiana, there were four recorded thefts in 1922. But the organization designed to chase down such criminals was still around. Starting in the 1860s, Indiana had allowed people to form vigilante groups, lawfully deputized, for the express purpose of arresting horse thieves. As four-legged transports disappeared, the group declined for lack of purpose. In their collapse, D. C. Stephenson saw an opportunity.
He was the featured speaker in October 1922 at the Horse Thief Detective Association’s sixty-second annual convention in the northern Indiana town of Logansport. While seeding Klan dens around the state, Steve had bumped into his share of these middle-aged men playing cops. In his Logansport speech, he played to their fears, their pride, and their boredom. Was there a man among them who wasn’t disgusted by the immigrants brewing beer or fermenting wine in their basements? Was there a father or husband who wasn’t appalled at women in their short bobs and tapered dresses drinking bootleg gin and dancing to Black jazz—these morality-flaunting, uncorseted flappers? Was there a family protector not alarmed by the sexual promiscuity of the young in their parked machines? Or the filth on their movie screens, films like Flaming Youth, whose posters promoted the drama of “youth with its jazz, its flapperism, its petting parties, its reticent disregard for convention”? These pink-faced men seated before Stephenson today could do something about national decline. They could join the Ku Klux Klan, their natural brothers in spirit, faith, and Americanism. Hear, hear! Thereafter, the Klan and the private militias would make common cause.
The Klan that spread to the North was steeped in homegrown Christianity practiced by everyday folks. But instead of love your neighbor, these Klansmen hated many a neighbor. At its core, the new Invisible Empire was a religious organization with alliterative nonsense borrowed from fraternal groups, all the Klaverns, Kleagles, and Klonvocations, the Grand Goblins, Exalted Cyclops, and Imperial Klokards, the robes, rings, and rituals, the secret language and exchanges, the greetings with three fingers signifying KKK. Klansmen held study classes not unlike Sunday school, using a manual as a required textbook. From that guidebook, goals of “preserving the blood purity” of the white race, and “shielding the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood,” were drilled into new initiates, along with rituals designed to seal men to each other. And those men had to follow orders. Klansmen were bound by their oath of allegiance to obey all “decisions, decrees, edicts, mandates, rulings and instructions.”
The modern Klan rejected modernism—the world was spinning too fast, and they didn’t like it one bit. When President Warren Harding, a man of refined mediocrity, was elected in 1920, he’d promised a “return to normalcy.” But the twenties were anything but normal, especially among young adults. “Here was a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. The buildings were taller, the stocks higher, the cars faster, the parties gaudier and more excessive. People threw off the cultural remnants of the nineteenth century with abandon, even as others were relentlessly holding back the twentieth century.
Klan members had their own idea of normalcy and how to enforce it. And that’s where the vigilantes could help out. So the horse thief brigades kept their name, their badges, guns, and power, but changed their mission. They became the Klan’s morality police, the might to make right. Their targets were adulterers and young lovers, bootleggers and speakeasies, truants, vagrants, and petty thieves.
Suddenly, members of the Horse Thief Detective Association were breaking up parties and smashing liquor joints. They blocked roads, searching vehicles for bottles, rousting those in passionate embrace. They invaded private homes, looking for alcohol or card-playing. They harassed businesses that opened on Sunday. They served as armed marshals at Klan parades, taking over public streets, directing traffic, menacing the occasional malcontent who booed at the men in white robes. They posted gun-toting sentries outside polling places on Election Day, checking voters as they stepped into schoolhouses and church basements.
“They entered homes without search warrants and flogged errant husbands and wives,” wrote William E. Wilson, a white Evansville native, home from college one summer to find a changed Indiana. “They caught couples in parked cars and tried to blackmail the girls. On occasion, they branded the three K’s on bodies of people who were particularly offensive to them.”
Elsewhere, the Klan encouraged vigilantes on similar morality patrols that took things even further. In Kern County, California, a vast squat of irrigated farmland that had been heavily settled by people from the South, Klansmen kidnapped Dwight Mason, a white doctor, and dragged him to a baseball field for torture. In front of a hooting, clapping crowd of thirty people, Mason was hanged until he lost consciousness, whipped, tarred, and branded. He was targeted because he had filed for divorce. The Klan wanted to make an example of anyone who threatened “the sanctity of the home,” as it was put in a statement. He was also said to be performing abortions on the side.
The second-wave Klan could return to its roots of terror because it had survived the kind of scrutiny that would have killed off any other secret society in a democracy. A three-week exposé by the New York World in the fall of 1921 had detailed murder, flogging, iron-branding, arson—at least one hundred acts of vigilante violence nationwide. The revelations, many people thought, would horrify most Americans. The series was widely syndicated and prompted a congressional investigation. With cameras clicking and a mass of reporters in attendance, Imperial Wizard Simmons told another story in Washington. “Allow me to introduce myself: I am a churchman.”
There was nothing wrong with promoting white supremacy—it was only “race pride,” he said. “I cannot see anything anti-American in that.” He dismissed the numerous stories of violence as the work of “a paper owned and controlled by a Jew,” and imposters trying to take down the Invisible Empire. “Our masks and robe are not worn for the purpose of terrorizing people. I say before God, they are as innocent as the breath of an angel.”
At the close of three days of testimony, following a long and impassioned soliloquy, Simmons stood and pointed his finger at his congressional interrogators—they were the ones who should be shamed for going after the family men of his organization. “I call upon the Father to forgive those who have persecuted the Klan!” he shouted. And with that, he fainted and fell to the ground. The politicians folded. Simmons believed the hearing was the best thing that ever happened to the hooded order. “It wasn’t until the newspapers began to attack the Klan that it really grew,” he said. “And then Congress gave us the best advertising we ever got.” Over the next year, the Klan expanded by 1.1 million members.
No longer fearing federal oversight, the Invisible Empire planted new chapters throughout the Midwest, and up and down the West Coast. In Colorado, it was led by a physician, Dr. John Galen Locke, who operated out of the luxurious Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. Like Stephenson and Evans, Locke wanted to package the resentments of the age into a political force. And he recruited heavily among the Denver police. It was an open door.
In Indiana, the local cops were grateful to have a rogue arm of law enforcement to harass offenders of virtue. “They form an unofficial constabulary helping the police,” one newspaper wrote approvingly. The numbers of men with tin stars grew in stride with the Klan, from 8,000 deputies to 14,000 in little more than a year. While only those four horses were stolen in all of 1922, the Horse Thief Detective Association added twenty-eight chapters statewide. At the same time, they helped Stephenson swell the ranks of Indiana Klansmen, signing up fellow members of the local horse thief brigade, while distributing stickers for shopkeepers to put in their windows—“TWK, Trade With Klan.” With all these new allies, Steve was on a roll, bringing in upward of 2,000 new Klansmen every week.
Potential initiates were usually contacted anonymously. They would receive a note:
“You are being weighed in the balance! The call is coming! Are you able and qualified to respond? Discuss this matter with no one.”
A few days later would come another mystery letter, more intriguing:
“You may have heard from us because we believe in you. Are you a real man? Lift your eyes up to the Fiery Cross and falter no more!”
As they moved closer into the Klan circle, recruits had to answer twenty questions from a membership checklist before becoming naturalized, including:
“Are you a Gentile or a Jew?
“Are you of the White race or Colored Race?
“What color are your eyes? Hair?
“Do you believe in the principles of pure Americanism?
“Do you believe in White Supremacy?”
Finally, after being properly vetted, a new member donned a pointed hood with a tassel on top, and a white robe, and put his hand on a Bible. For many, it was a thrilling moment, a break from the tedium of daily life.
“I swear that I will most zealously and valiantly shield and preserve by any and all justifiable means and methods White Supremacy. I will seal with my blood by Thou my witness, Almighty God.”
Stephenson organized recruiters in all parts of the state and trained them to appeal to three things:
Love of mystery and ritual.
Pride of race and religion.
Hatred.
But first, a sweetener. He suggested that new Klan chapters do something “for the betterment of the community,” and make sure the local papers covered it. The winning combination was fabulously lucrative. In advance of a visit to new territory, Stephenson would usually place a print ad or have a pastor promote his appearance from the pulpit. As he entered a church, a town hall, or a school gym to make his Klan sales pitch, he saw every Hoosier head as a dollar sign. “We used to look over the crowd when we first came in and try to estimate what it would net us,” recalled his right-hand man, Court Asher. “We’d hire a minister at $25 a lecture and then get their whole congregation to join at $10 a head.” The new Klan was not for poor people. That $10 initiation fee was more than the average factory worker made in a day. Plus, there were quarterly dues and uniform requirements. Stephenson got his cut of everything. In a given week, he was taking in five times more than most Americans made in a year. He was well on his way to becoming a millionaire.
