A Fever in the Heartland, page 5
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The rebranded Klan was an easy sell in the South, playing to Lost Cause sympathies of aging slaveholders who passed on their prejudices to their twentieth-century grandchildren. The North was supposed to be another story. But Stephenson was now proving the skeptics wrong. His instincts told him that racial hatred did not stop at a geographic line in this country, and the top cultural draw of the day was proving him right. The Birth of a Nation had done well in the North, just as D. W. Griffith envisioned it would. There were exceptions. People threw eggs at the screen in Boston, and nearly rioted in New York. James Weldon Johnson, the prolific poet and essayist, now leader of the young National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, carried on a campaign against it. Every showing reinforced a monstrous stereotype, he said, causing “incalculable harm” to fellow African Americans. It was “propaganda of the worst and most insidious sort.” He was particularly appalled at revived 1920s showings in Washington, DC, for which theaters in the capital were bedecked with flags of the treasonous Confederacy.
In towns across Indiana, masked men rented out theaters for exclusive showings to little or no protest. At the end of the movie, the words of a title card filled the screen:
The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.
Though 195,000 Hoosiers had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, the governor had complained to Abraham Lincoln that “no other free state is so populated with Southerners.” In attitude and politics, Indiana was the most Southern of Northern states—North Dixie, it was often called—settled by people from Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. In its early constitution, Article XIII specifically prohibited free Blacks or “mulattos” from residing in the state. Near the close of the nineteenth century, Indiana’s treatment of African Americans was “as inhuman as ever characterized the cotton fields of Georgia or the rice swamps of the Carolinas,” said James M. Townsend, who served one term in the statehouse in the 1880s.
There were still men walking the streets of 1922 Indiana who had fought against the slaveholders, and who believed that liberating humans held as property had been the highest calling of their lives. Among them was William H. Stern, a white man raised on a farm north of Indianapolis. When he was nineteen years old, Billy Stern answered Lincoln’s call to join an army to crush the South, enlisting in the 39th Indiana Regiment. At the Battle of Stones River, in Middle Tennessee near Murfreesboro, Stern fought in the thick of slaughter that would take more than 20,000 casualties—wounded and killed on both sides—in the first days of 1863. He used his bayonet to stab the enemy, and when the long rifle was knocked from his hands, he wielded his bloodied fists. Stern was captured by the Confederates and dragged off to a freezing POW camp. He later escaped. Now in his eighties, Stern spent his days reminding people what he had been willing to die for. He revered Lincoln. He would never be united with his former enemies in defense of an Aryan birthright.
“The black man that sympathized, worked and fought for this great country of ours during its threatened destruction is a thousand times better than the white man that sympathized, worked, plotted and fought against it,” he told fellow Hoosiers in an open letter. But though Stern was a beloved and commanding figure in his small-town community of Hamilton County—his back upright, the huge white brush of his mustache covering his entire lip, his voice a deep baritone—his message was disregarded by thousands of people drawn to the shiny new organization being sold from town to town by D. C. Stephenson. To the astonishment of its leaders in Atlanta, the Klan birthed in Indiana—a state that had lost 25,000 men fighting the Confederacy just a half century earlier—would soon have more Klansmen than any other state.
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One of the new horse thief detectives was Steve himself. He was issued a metal badge, on which was imprinted: constable, h.t.d. ass’n. The deputized had powers that local sheriffs did not: they could cross county lines and didn’t feel a need to go to court before conducting a home raid. Steve’s armed enforcers, his private police force, complemented his spiritual enablers. He called it his military machine—or just the Machine.
Now he instructed his agents to compile dossiers on local public servants, dissenters, and troublemakers. He also ordered them to create a file on every person of voting age, with particular emphasis on those who might be enemies of the Klan. Along with “Bootleggers and Bolsheviks,” the edict singled out “All Jews, All Negroes, All Roman Catholics.” Across the state, men with badges and no uniforms took to the field as the eyes and ears of a very ambitious Klansman.
By year’s end, Stephenson had accomplished something that the initial Klan had not: his vigilantes were part of the system. They operated freely and openly, and their crimes were not punished, just as in Texas. And this time around, there were no federal authorities to interfere. All of it was exhilarating to the men in sheets, as a sociologist found out after reviewing questionnaires answered by individual Klansmen. “Membership in a vast mysterious empire that ‘sees and hears all’ means a sort of mystic glorification of his petty self,” wrote John Moffatt Mecklin. “The appeal is irresistible.”
4.
A Coup and a Clash
1922
The talented D. C. Stephenson had proved to be quite the prodigy, as he said so himself. He had the touch and the charm, the dexterity with words and the drive. He understood people’s fears and their need to blame others for their failures. He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction. He had once listed himself as a “lawyer” when he joined a Masonic order, though he’d never passed a bar exam. Now he began to describe himself as the world’s “foremost mass psychologist.” He became a fan of Benito Mussolini, reading up on his speeches and the parallels to his own rise. Even though he regularly disparaged “dagoes,” he considered Mussolini somewhat of a mentor. Il Duce was named prime minister of Italy in 1922, the same year Stephenson became a rising national star in the Klan and set his own sights on the highest office in the land. “Mussolini’s methods were, to his mind, the model for men of action like himself,” one writer observed in a profile of the Klansman from the Heartland.
The national press had started to take note. The leaders in Atlanta were impressed as well. Barely six months after the Indiana charter was signed, Stephenson had far exceeded expectations. Now he promised to work the same magic in Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio. His tactics would travel: At rallies, he hired oompah bands and doled out fresh lemonade. His barbershop quartets sang, “If you don’t like your Uncle Sammy / Then go back to your home across the sea / To the land from where you came / Whatever be its name.”
The mood was festive and forward-looking. All the right people were joining. At Christmastime, Klansmen played Santa Claus and made a show of delivering food to the poor. By the time Steve left Evansville for good at the end of 1922, nearly one in four residents had taken an oath to a cryptic organization dedicated to the dehumanization of fellow citizens. A majority would soon elect a Klansman as their mayor.
The other dynamo behind the far-reaching Klan map was Hiram Evans. In the Dallas he left behind, about 30 percent of white males were Klansmen. The Texas tooth doctor had become more expansive in spreading his narrow views, granting a wide range of interviews. People of different races, he explained, were like different species of animals. One must never breed with the other. His problem with Jews was “racial rather than religious,” he said, and thus there should be no mixing of their blood with the white majority. His speeches drew large crowds and his statements were widely distributed in Klan dens and mainstream newspapers. “America must close the door to the diseased minds and bodies and souls of the peoples of foreign lands,” he said about immigration. He identified these undesirables as “Italian anarchists, Irish Catholic malcontents, Russian Jews, Finns, Lithuanians and Austrians of the lowest class.” Many a United States senator said the same thing.
In Texas, Evans had worked the two avenues of violence and politics. At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid-brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known, and even encouraged, within the Blue Wall. For a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order—proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had “changed its bed sheets for a policeman’s uniform.”
The flesh burnings and beatings always happened at night. By day, the Klan gave out money to charities and churches, and even built an orphanage—Hope Cottage. The Klan swept the 1922 local elections and put a majority of supporters in the Texas statehouse. The rise of that first Klan United States senator from Texas was heralded in chapters around the nation as a harbinger of American political dominance.
Stephenson was mastermind of a similar play, organizing his forces against Albert J. Beveridge, a former United States senator who had been a Teddy Roosevelt progressive and was looking to reclaim his old seat. Steve’s man, the Klan-sympathetic Samuel Ralston, narrowly won—a shock to the political establishment. Throughout Indiana that year, the Klan had held picnics and packed churches, staged firework shows, parades, rallies. But putting people in office? That was something new.
“What the hell happened yesterday?” a newsman asked the Indiana Republican chairman the day after the election.
“It was the damn Ku Klux Klan,” he answered.
In advance of the 1922 fall election, Stephenson had sent a questionnaire to officeholders, asking about their faith and any organizations they belonged to. But he sent his demands only to Catholics and one prominent Jew—a religious test. All were thrown from office after Steve spread the word of their otherness.
“Citizens whose family name contained a Mac or whose first name was Isidore had a hard going at the polls after that,” recalled a political reporter at the time, Harold C. Feightner.
With violence, Stephenson was more selective and secretive. He sent a man up to Muncie to muzzle a prickly newspaper editor, George Dale, whose Post-Democrat was not showing the usual passivity of the local press to Klan recruiters. Dale was Presbyterian, son of a Civil War veteran, a father of seven. He slouched and sniffed his way around town with a pencil and a notepad, a bent-over and ashen-faced little man in his late fifties with a soggy cigar in his mouth. But he roared in print, even if prone to exaggerations and misspellings. The weekly paper was his life. His weapons were satire and wit. When a local Klan den proclaimed that Jesus was a white Protestant, Dale pointed out that Jesus would have been banned from the Klan—as a Jew and an olive-skinned alien. He mocked the horse thief detectives as “a band of lawless night prowlers.” He called a local Klan judge, Clarence W. Dearth, “the most contemptible chunk of human carrion that ever disgraced the circuit bench in the state of Indiana.” And he ridiculed any Hoosier of self-professed principle who would hide under a hood. “Isn’t it grand to be 100 percent American and wear your wife’s nightie and your mother’s goose cap around the county at night,” he wrote in his front-page column.
On a chilly spring evening in 1922, Dale was out walking along Mulberry Street in Muncie with one of his sons. His paper was working on a story about the Klan’s reach into the judiciary, part of Stephenson’s plan to get political control throughout the state. A car pulled up and three black-masked men jumped Dale, beating him to the ground just a few blocks from the courthouse. A gun was shoved in his stomach. His son was pistol-whipped. The attack was led by the man Stephenson had sent to town to organize the Klan.
“That man in Muncie must be knocked off,” Steve had told the junior Klansman. “It’s up to you to see that the job is done right. Send him to the hospital.” The editor was badly hurt, ribs broken, face bloodied. But he was unbowed.
“Strange things are happening in Muncie these days,” Dale wrote after a young Black man was kidnapped and flogged, but the police refused to look into it. “Hundreds of citizens here, many of them men of high character, are joining the Ku Klux Klan.” He was off by perhaps a magnitude of ten. More than a third of white men in town would soon belong. Muncie was not an isolated farm town stuck in the amber of nineteenth-century life. It was deemed so typically American that a pair of prominent social scientists, Helen and Robert Lynd, had chosen it for their landmark study of how people lived in the 1920s, Middletown. After scouring the nation, they settled on Muncie as a place “as representative as possible of contemporary American life.” In the prosperous city of 40,000, Black people, who made up barely 5 percent of the population, were not allowed into most theaters, schools, or churches. The first suburban subdivision carried a restrictive clause against nonwhites. In Muncie’s main public park, Black children could play only in a sealed-off section. When one high school raised the prospect of allowing a Black basketball player on the court for games at the YMCA, it was forbidden. “Well, you know, it’s the sentiment here,” said an official with the Christian youth group.
But it wasn’t just parks, neighborhoods, gyms, and schools that were freezing out certain people. Dale had pieced together one of the Klan’s most daring schemes: Blacks, Jews, and Catholics were being excluded from jury service in Delaware County. The levers of this plot were pulled by the local prosecutor and judge—both Klansmen. But Dale’s revelation caused barely a stir. And when he appealed to the police to arrest the men who had violently attacked him on Mulberry Street, he ran into another wall of indifference.
The beating was not the worst of it. Dale was thrown in jail by the judge he’d mocked—imprisoned without trial for contempt of court. As he was led away to the state penal farm, Dale overheard the judge say, “They ought to take him out and hang him.” The prison was maggot-ridden and freezing. Dale slept on a hard bunk in a wooden shack with more than two hundred other inmates. In his court case, he knew that truth was an absolute defense. The editor said he could prove that the judge had allowed prosecutors to pack a jury with Klansmen during a trial of a fellow member of the order, as Dale had written. Plus, he had every right under the First Amendment to criticize the judge.
Not in Muncie, Indiana, where truth was no defense, and the First Amendment had no force of law.
“Mr. Dale, it is none of your business if this court, the prosecutor, the grand jury and the sheriff belong to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” said Judge Dearth when he sentenced Dale to the penal farm. “It is none of your business or anybody else’s business.” This was a lesson in real power, the Stephenson model in action.
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Both Stephenson and Evans had their eyes on an even bigger prize—“control of America by peaceful methods,” as one Klan insider recounted. They wanted to stock Congress with members who’d taken dual oaths, one in conflict with the other. In turn, these political foot soldiers would start the process of adding amendments to the Constitution to take away rights given Black people after the Civil War, and to restrict the expansion of certain religions. At least that’s what many in the Klan envisioned.
Evans didn’t think much of William Simmons, the Imperial Wizard who paraded around Atlanta in a Klan costume of purple silk. The founder was incompetent, buffoonish, couldn’t hold his liquor, and lacked vision. He was more of a club man, enjoying the perks as king of the fastest-growing fraternal order in the land. He was standing in the way of the master plan of Stephenson and Evans.
In 1922, Simmons disappeared for six months, allowing internal dissent to fester and his rivals to start plotting. His most trusted pair of subordinates, Edward Clarke and Bessie Tyler, had been arrested for disorderly conduct, naked and drunk when police arrived at a hotel, as the New York World reported. Clarke was later indicted under the Mann Act, accused of bringing an underage girl across state lines for sexual exploitation. Criminal debauchery was not one of the Klan virtues the pair of promoters had spread through their powerful propagation department.
A first-ever national convention was called for Thanksgiving week in Atlanta—the seventh anniversary of the founding on Stone Mountain. Simmons thought it would be a glorious affirmation of his power. Stephenson and Evans had other ideas. Klansmen traveled from all corners of the country to fill an auditorium built on a Confederate battleground site. After taking a private train car to Atlanta, Stephenson huddled with Evans on the night before the convention, laying a trap that had been loosely organized in advance. At four a.m., Steve and another high-ranking Klansman arrived at Simmons’s mansion and roused him from bed. The Imperial Wizard was groggy from a night of drinking. They wanted him to give up his title. Simmons balked—the Klan was his! He’d brought it back from the dead, opened it up to a new range of hatreds, expanded it with the promotional schemes of Clarke and Tyler, saved it with his congressional histrionics. Ah, but this was not a demotion, as Steve explained—it was a step up. Simmons would be named Emperor for Life. He’d get an actual white throne inside the Imperial Palace. And he’d get a lifetime salary of $1,000 a month. But in case Simmons still planned to resist, the plotters had leverage—photographs of him drunk and otherwise compromised. He got the hint.
The coup was done. Evans was named Imperial Wizard, and Simmons crowned Emperor for Life. After Simmons was given his honorific, it took some time for him to realize he’d been duped. The Klan now belonged to Hiram Evans and D. C. Stephenson. For his role in the plot, Steve was given control over recruitment of twenty-one states in the North, just under half the country. Klan units were rising every week in this immense territory. And if anything happened to Evans, the upstart from Indiana would get the top job—that was the promise. But Evans would have to watch his back; his partner in the takeover was still hungry, and very impatient. From Indianapolis, Stephenson would oversee a Klan map that stretched from the Atlantic coast to well beyond the Great Lakes, from the Ohio River to the Canadian border. In a candid moment with a reporter, he had said he was “just a nobody from nowhere—but I’ve got the biggest brains.” Now he was a somebody who was everywhere. “He was indefatigable, relentless, revengeful and cruel-natured,” a close aide of Simmons wrote in an account of the doings in Atlanta. “He virtually took control of the Klan overnight.”
