A Fever in the Heartland, page 6
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As the longest nights of the year closed out 1922, crosses burned over the pure white snow covering the small towns and prairie stubble of Indiana, and smaller fires warmed the homes of fresh-minted members of the Invisible Empire. The material resolutions for Stephenson’s new year included a mansion in the suburbs, a suite of offices in downtown Indianapolis, a lake home in Ohio, a fleet of new cars. He had a staff to hire, a newspaper to run, a military machine to expand, a kingdom in the North. There remained one last building block to this emerging dynasty: women. As Stephenson and Evans envisioned it, the Klan was not just for men. The Empire had vassals in the ministry, in the press, in political office, on the judiciary, and among the ranks of many policemen. All that was missing was the family. Why not give white women a role in fortifying the white race? One of the Klan’s core principles was built around “the sacred duty of protecting womanhood.” And so a man whose life was a mockery of that principle moved ahead with his most audacious plan yet, a way to control the future. For the hand that rocks the cradle, as he knew from the old proverb, rules the world.
5.
Woman of the Year
1923
She was dazzling, born to the pulpit. The mere rumor of an appearance by Daisy Douglas Barr was enough to get working folks to put aside their labors and assemble. She was a Quaker, but a different breed of the Society of Friends. Raised in a patch of low rolling Indiana hills settled by people from Virginia and Kentucky, Daisy preached her first sermon at sixteen after a vision in a woodshed. She told stories, spoke in a simple and direct manner, and was intellectually agile. Daisy married at eighteen, had a child, and after she was ordained at age twenty embarked on a life of revival meetings. She preached in barns and garages, warehouses and theaters. At a time when women had almost no voice in the affairs of Indiana, Barr claimed to speak for half the population—and had no rival in the Midwest. As everyone said, she was the bee’s knees.
“Easy Daisy, Who’s a Daisy, Daisy Douglas Barr!” crowds chanted in affirmation.
At first, her message was moral uplift, resurrection for the ruined. Sex and alcohol were the twin demons of the age and she used her voice to put them on trial. Dance halls were venues of vice. Saloons were dungeons of depravity. She took up the cause of prostitutes and abandoned wives. But liquor was the true home-wrecker. Men spent their paychecks in bars, and stumbled back to house and hearth to batter their wives while their children went hungry. Between 1900 and 1915, the average adult consumed thirteen drinks a week—2.5 gallons of pure alcohol a year. Only with absolute temperance, a radical experiment in social engineering, could society be cured. She joined ministers across the country as a decades-long temperance wave crested with passage of the 18th Amendment. When it was enacted in 1920, Prohibition shut down the fifth-largest industry in America.
“Men will walk upright now,” said the most popular preacher in America, Billy Sunday, a former pro baseball player. “Women will smile and children will laugh.”
Prohibition, marking the first time the Constitution had been changed to take away a right, was followed one year later with a vast expansion of rights—the amendment giving women the vote in every state. Universal suffrage had long been blocked by Southern legislators who feared arming Black women with electoral power, even within the harsh restrictions of Jim Crow. But the movement to expand the vote also included people who shared the Klan’s view of using the newly enfranchised to its advantage, since whites had a far easier time at the polls.
Thus, it was a different Daisy Barr who packed grange halls and coliseums in early 1923. Her belief in voting rights and temperance had evolved into a broader vision of white supremacy maintained by the rising political strength of women. In public, the big heart that had once brimmed with benevolence for fallen humans had shriveled into a raisin of racial animus.
While campaigning against alcohol, she’d fallen in with the Anti-Saloon League, her gateway to the Ku Klux Klan. They shared many of the same values, rooted in a militant evangelism. “The father and mother of the Ku Klux Klan is the Anti-Saloon League,” said Clarence Darrow, an assertion that few would dispute. Stephenson modeled his Klan on the well-oiled Anti-Saloon League, using the same Protestant churches as his recruitment base. He envied something else about it—no lobby in America held more power over Congress. And no lobby in Indiana had a stronger grip on the statehouse. They were a moral force that became a political force behind a single issue preached to millions in a nation of dutiful churchgoers. It was “the mightiest pressure group in the nation’s history,” the historian Daniel Okrent wrote.
The Klan and temperance crusaders formed a perfect team. Any list of Prohibition violators, as Billy Sunday said, “read like a page from the directories of Italy and Greece.” Even sauerkraut was suspect because it contained 0.051 percent alcohol. And what happens to a Black man with a head full of liquor, casting his eyes on a white woman? “The strongest argument in favor of prohibition is the imperative necessity of keeping whiskey out of the reckless colored element,” said the state’s leading dry newspaper, the Patriot Phalanx. “The Negro, fairly docile and industrious, becomes, when filled with liquor, turbulent and dangerous and a menace to life, property and the repose of the community,” another paper wrote.
All of this was a fine fit for Barr’s latest campaign: enlisting women in the fastest-growing movement in Indiana—the female Ku Klux Klan. An adroit assayer of people, D. C. Stephenson drew Barr into his circle not long after he saw one of her sermons. She was better, by far, than the men he’d been paying off to give a spiritual gloss to the Klan. After two decades on the circuit, Barr was an institution. What better symbol of the Klan’s drive to soften its image and triple membership than a person known all over Indiana as Mother? The Klansman and Mother made a pact designed to enrich both of them. Barr would get a staff of recruiters; they would work the crowds in the stands after she had worked them into a lather from the stage. She received a special robe, cape, and hood, and a title: Imperial Empress of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan.
Barr wasted no time using her new power. She lashed out at immigrants, the wretched masses yearning to breathe free, now unwelcome. From Sicily, an arid and impoverished island devastated by an earthquake in 1908, about 800,000 people had left in the following decade to sail to the United States—among ten million immigrants seeking to become citizens of the New World democracy in that period.
“Formerly, they were from the northern part of Europe, but our immigrants now are from southern Europe and they have not our ideals, either religious or educational,” she roared in Rushville, speaking in the largest venue in town. It was the first day of March 1923, and she was in her element. Above her, high overhead, hung a large Klan cross, lit with bulbs instead of fire. “They are idiots, insane, diseased criminals!” As Barr framed the big picture, she said, “This is a struggle for the rebirth of the White Race and the preservation of civilization.” Within a generation or two, she warned, white Protestants would be replaced by an inferior breed. The Jews were behind this plot.
Her ideas were backed by influential academics and proponents of scientific racism. Madison Grant, a Yale-educated New York zoologist, had been trying to prove for years that southern Europeans were lesser humans than those from the north; they had low foreheads, he claimed, in addition to being both slothful and oversexed—a seeming contradiction. His book The Passing of the Great Race was a favorite of many Klansmen, and was later embraced by Hitler, who called it “my bible.”
Turning to other enemies, Barr said it was well known that the Roman Catholic Church was training “100,000 Negroes” to be priests. Jews were war profiteers who’d made a fortune off the carnage of the great conflict, she asserted. There was but one thing the people of Indiana could do to reverse these ominous trends. The men could join the Ku Klux Klan. And the women? Behold, now there was a place for them in the Invisible Empire as well, a new, fast-growing Klan auxiliary: the Queens of the Golden Mask. “They are the best women in the state.”
It was true: membership in the female Klan was soaring across the country—not among outcasts, but the “best women,” just as Barr said. It was great to belong, to know your values were their values. “What a thrill when we were told to assemble at a certain place wearing our robes, then marching with others also unknown to us,” an Indiana Klanswoman recalled to the author Kathleen M. Blee. “A huge cross, set up in the village, flared up in the darkness, crowds assembled to watch . . . A hush fell on the crowd. They seemed to sense a force of something unknown.”
Members took an oath to abstain from alcohol, avoid profanity, keep a clean home, never commit adultery or share the secrets of the organization. Robed and masked, the newly empowered females not only staged parades, picnics, and rallies, but also moved into more traditional rituals—baptisms and funerals, attended while wearing the sheets. Klanswomen were given fashion tips: light on the facial rouge, never show too much ankle below the dress. But they also professed their equality with men—the segregationist as suffragette. “We believe in the mission of emancipated womanhood, freed from the shackles of old-world traditions,” stated the Creed of Klanswomen in Little Rock, Arkansas. “We believe that the current of pure American blood must be kept uncontaminated by mongrel strains and protected from racial pollution.”
The female Klan of Indiana held its first statewide convention in July 1923, with a parade of white-robed women on horseback, bands and floats, initiation ceremonies, speeches on virtue and temperance, and a cross burning at night. New members were fitted for hoods with cardboard inside to keep the pointy shape over fresh-coiffed hair.
Once a week, Barr spoke to a large gathering in Indianapolis of well-connected Klanswomen. She began these meetings with a call to God, and then another benediction of sorts: reading a roster of retailers, businesses, and service providers who were either members of the Klan or approved by the Invisible Empire. Following Mother’s word and guidance from notices printed in the Fiery Cross, women of the Klan knew where to shop. They should look for “TWK” stickers in the window. They also knew where not to shop, for Barr would also read a list of businesses to avoid, particularly those owned by Jews. “When the women should be as strongly organized as the men,” she said to cheers, “there will be no Jewish businesses left in Indianapolis!”
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With their livelihoods threatened, Jews and Catholics made common cause with Blacks, who’d long suffered the indignities of being an other in Indiana. “Intolerance was everywhere,” wrote a lifelong Hoosier, Irving Leibowitz. Jews were a tiny minority, less than 1 percent of the state’s population, 23,622 people. The 80,000 Black residents were 3 percent. And Catholics, with 312,000, were 10 percent. More than 95 percent of the population was native born, and 97 percent white. No state in the nation had a higher proportion of that mix.
German Americans also felt the Klan’s sting. They had faced the innuendo of dual loyalty during the world war, much of which lingered into the 1920s. German restaurants closed or Anglicized their names. Food was neutered: Kartoffelsalat became liberty salad. A prominent Indiana family with German heritage—the Vonneguts, founders of a well-known hardware store—felt shamed. Kurt Vonnegut, the writer, said his parents decided to bring him up “without acquainting me with the language or the literature or the music or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved.”
He said, “They volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism.”
Among Jews, there were individual acts of defiance. Louis and Rose Shapiro changed the name of their American Grocery in Indianapolis to Shapiro’s Kosher Foods. And just to be clear, they put a Star of David in the window. But others, like the Cohn Brothers Clothing store, were forced out of business. The rabbi of Temple Israel in Terre Haute, Dr. Joseph L. Fink, refused to back down when the Klan sent him a letter demanding his resignation from the community chest. He was summoned to attend a nighttime rally of the Klan at a cemetery. He showed up alone, an elfin figure five feet, two inches tall, to face down three hundred hooded men in darkened mist lit by a burning cross. He told them they were cowards to cover their faces, and un-American for violating the Bill of Rights. He would not resign from public service, and would never hide his faith. He walked away, just as he had walked in, head up high.
Jews had been in Indiana since before statehood, and in the British American colonies since the 1650s. In general, they found less prejudice in the New World than the old. After the Revolutionary War, George Washington had written a warm and welcoming note to a Sephardic congregation in Rhode Island: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in the land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants.” But the flood of new immigrants in the twentieth century prompted fear and hatred in many a native heart. By 1923, nearly two million Jews had come to the United States over the previous two decades. Now they were the object of scorn and harassment. They killed Christ, Klan preachers said. They were behind the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. They cheated Gentiles. They kept their shops open on Sunday. They looked alien. And in the darkest caricature, they were lechers and murderers.
Everyone knew about Leo Frank, the superintendent of a pencil factory in Atlanta. One of his workers was thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. On April 26, 1913, her bloodied body was found in the basement of the shop with a cord tied around her neck. The police seized Frank, the last person who had seen her alive, and charged him with murder and rape. Frank was a New Yorker, a Cornell graduate, a leader of Georgia’s B’nai B’rith, one of many Jews who’d moved to newly cosmopolitan Atlanta. Though the evidence was conflicting and inconclusive, he was found guilty and sentenced to death—to the cheers of mobs that had gathered outside the courtroom, some chanting “Death to the Jew.” After the governor of Georgia commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, Atlanta blew up. On August 17, 1915, a posse that included some of the leading business and political figures broke into the state penitentiary. With help from insiders, they grabbed Frank from his cell and drove him to a farm. He was strung from a tree and hanged, a slow death by asphyxiation. Among the vigilantes who executed Frank were several of the men who would walk with William Simmons up Stone Mountain a few months later, founding the modern Ku Klux Klan.
What many Americans heard about Jews they got from Henry Ford, operating out of a Michigan base less than three hundred miles from Indianapolis. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was a fire hose of anti-Semitism and reached a peak circulation of nearly one million readers. Every issue of the weekly carried a new episode of a monstrous plan by Jews to control the world. the international jew: the world’s problem was a front-page headline. Ford bound the series into a booklet, and distributed half a million copies to auto dealers throughout North America. A new Model T came with an owner’s manual and a tract on the imaginary power of Jewish financiers. Ford saw Jewish tentacles extending to every aspect of life. After biting into a candy bar that tasted slightly off to him, he said, “The Jews have taken hold of it. They’ve cheapened it to make more money.”
Another rabbi, Morris Feuerlicht of Indianapolis, used satire in his sermons and reason in his secular speeches to counter Klan attacks. He was a proud Hoosier, a professor at Butler, the first Jew on the Indiana Board of State Charities. In his scholarship, he wrote of the influence of Judaism on the American founders. In his public addresses, he warned of the rise of a homegrown Klan that wielded “tremendous political power,” while relying on “lawbreakers and prominent business people” to do its dirty work. He tried to get the press to wake up to what was happening.
“Public opinion, comments and even news reports of the Klan’s doings could not be found” in most of the state’s newspapers, the rabbi recalled. One night, a police detective slipped Feuerlicht an undercover report on D. C. Stephenson. It tracked his rise, his connections, his Machine, the politicians in his pocket. One line was deeply chilling to the rabbi: it said that the top Klansman in the Midwest was being carefully “groomed for President.”
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In the balloons of grandeur that kept Stephenson aloft, the presidency was just a few puffs of helium away. “Boys, I’m not in this for the money,” he told his cronies. “You’re going to put me in the White House.”
He was now a rich man with rich accessories, human and otherwise. After he first spotted the large front porch and three stories of the white mansion at 5432 University Avenue in Irvington, he told an associate: “There is the imperial palace of the Klan of the North.” He remodeled it to match his monarchical vision, adding a two-story Ionic portico to replace the old porch. Steve’s compound, one of the largest homes in Irvington, was heavily protected. Even the person who mowed his lawn packed a pistol. His wealth gave him entrée into the highest reaches of society. Among his possessions were a half-dozen or so of the leading political players in the state, mindful of his army of informants with their dossiers. By now, Stephenson had embraced the maxim of Machiavelli—it is better to be feared than loved.
