A Fever in the Heartland, page 7
The chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, Lawrence Lyons, took the Klan oath, as did Secretary of State Ed Jackson. In an early test of his influence, Stephenson persuaded lawmakers to create a “Klan Day” at the Indiana State Fair. But for all his emerging political strength, he remained a murky character. Even to those close to him, he was a whirl of mystery with a mutable backstory.
Stephenson rented a suite of offices downtown on the third floor of the Kresge Building. He hired attractive women as secretaries and greeters, and posted armed men outside the door. One of the eight phones on his desk, the white one, rang on prompting from Steve to a secretary. He would carry on an imaginary conversation with an imaginary governor, senator, or the president—always in the presence of guests. His base of operations was just a few blocks from the Capitol and Monument Circle, the oversized heart of Hoosier Nation, built around the neoclassical Soldiers and Sailors Monument—a 284-foot tower of Indiana limestone.
For entertainment and trysts, he took several rooms in the opulent Washington Hotel, a Beaux-Arts steel-frame beauty, with giant arched windows on the seventeenth floor.
His top loyalists were losers with enough cunning left in them to want to make another mark. He hired Court Asher from Muncie to be his radar for trouble and his protector. Asher was a short, pleasant-looking man who wore his hair slicked down and his revolver on the outside. He was a burglar, thief, forger, moonshine runner, and ex-con. Asher particularly hated Jews, and he liked his hate delivered with a ready paycheck. “I was making good dough and I saw what a hell of a political organization the Klan could become,” he said. He had his skills: he could fix a car, fly a plane, and smell a snitch.
Another hire was Earl Klinck, a beefy sheriff’s deputy given to gruff talk, a bit slow on the uptake. Steve had met him in Evansville. After following the top Klansman to Indianapolis, Klinck was deputized to work in the Marion County Sheriff’s Office—all while overseeing the sketchier elements of Stephenson’s operation, the bribes, bootlegging, and shakedown schemes.
Among Steve’s circle, Daisy Barr was the only woman with power. She had moved with great speed in her new role. Together they oversaw another element in the design for a family-friendly Klan: a children’s brigade. The Ku Klux Kiddies were issued small-sized robes and masks, recited pledges and songs at regular den meetings, and marched in parades. “This is a godsend to us,” one parent wrote to the Fiery Cross. “We have a son who is too young to join the Klan, and with this new order he will be able to gratify his wishes to become affiliated with a strictly American organization.”
Klan Klubs were established in high schools. Hooded teens soon had their place in yearbooks in Indiana, featured along with the Glee Club or the Debate Society among the accepted extracurriculars.
Steve and Barr also launched poison squads, as they were known on the inside. This was a disinformation brigade—clucks and gossips, but the best-known clucks and gossips in every community, so that false stories could be plausibly true. The fake news originated at the top and was planted at the bottom. It might be a whispered suggestion over a neighbor’s fence that a Black family was planning to move nearby. Or that a public servant was a Jew. The Klan prided itself on how quickly it could spread a lie: from a kitchen table to the whole state in six hours or less. The poison served a purpose—to intimidate and frighten certain businesses, as well as local politicians. After a lie took hold, particularly in a small community, some merchants were driven into bankruptcy.
If Reverend Daisy Barr knew in her heart that the leader of the Klan of the North was a soulless man, she kept it to herself. He had made her rich quickly, beyond the wildest—or most perverse—dreams of a Quaker girl from the emptiness of Grant County, Indiana. She also purchased a big house in Irvington and had a closet full of fabulous dresses. But Steve was fluent enough in Bible talk that he may have convinced her they were on the same spiritual team. He had a curious view of the deity at the center of the faith that bonded Klansmen. “I have thought about it many times,” he wrote to a friend. “My version of Jesus, the chestnut-haired boy philosopher of Galilee, is a staunch and most practical sociologist and economist.”
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His letters, fulsome in praise of the recipient, had persuaded Violet Stephenson to give her husband one last chance. It had taken Stephenson’s second wife four months to recover from the beating he inflicted on her in Evansville. She had marks on her face from the deep scratching, and lasting emotional scarring as well. During her convalescence, she worked in her mother’s dressmaking shop in Akron. She’d also been suffering from a painful sexually transmitted disease, given her by her husband. Steve wanted to visit, but Violet was against it. He had never repaid the sizable amount of money he’d conned out of his mother-in-law. Violet had also been getting notices from Evansville, where her husband had stiffed numerous creditors by kiting checks. He owed the Vendome Hotel $1,000. She knew he was a fraud. But in the best of times, he was a charming fraud. And there was social pressure to keep a marriage intact, even as divorces soared in the twenties.
Now, back in Indiana in mid-1923 for one last attempt at reconciliation, she realized too late that this man she’d pledged to spend her life with would never change. Again, he berated Violet in front of his friends and openly cheated on her. He seemed to revel in her humiliation and her fear of him. His explanation, without apology, was that he was “not cut out to be a husband.” If she wanted to stay alive, Violet would have to leave him once and for all—maybe hide somewhere in a different city. He said good riddance and threw her against the wall. He would not let her go without one more beating. She sobbed and tried to defend herself, putting her arms around her head. He slapped her hands away and punched her in the face—a blow nearly strong enough to knock her out. With women, Stephenson never lost a fight. She tumbled to the ground, her vision blurred, her face bloodied. He kicked her in the ribs as he had done in Evansville, putting hard-tipped shoes to flesh, and told her to get out. She grabbed a few possessions and fled. They never saw each other again.
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In July, national leaders of the Ku Klux Klan met in Asheville, North Carolina, to celebrate their good fortune and to plan for elections, including the presidency. The year had been one of great success. By the close of 1923, Indiana would have more Klansmen than any other state—north or south. Stephenson had succeeded with an unusual formula for a mass movement: men were the muscle, women spread the poison, and ministers sanctified it all. Nationwide, the Klan had expanded to nearly three million members, and most of the growth was in the Northern states, Steve’s domain—Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Out West, Colorado and Oregon were adding to their Klan rolls just as quickly. The original terror group of the 1860s could only dream of such numbers. The new goal was ten million Americans under oath, though Evans predicted twenty million by decade’s end.
The women’s Klan had gone from nothing to nearly 250,000 in less than a year’s time. Only men were invited to Asheville, with one exception—Daisy Barr. Mother read a poem she’d written for the occasion:
I am the spirit of righteousness.
They call me the Ku Klux Klan
I am more than the uncouth robe and hood
With which I am clothed.
Yea, I am the soul of America.
6.
The Other Indiana
1923
The genesis of recorded Black jazz took place in the half-light of a gray wooden shed next to a railroad spur in a town thick with members of the Ku Klux Klan. The music was aural energy—alive and original, and it was impossible to sit still while listening to it. After it was captured on wax disc in a small town on the prairie, the world of sound and entertainment would never be the same. But it almost didn’t happen. When King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band arrived in Richmond, Indiana, after a six-hour train ride from Chicago, the musicians were lucky to find a place to stay, or even to be allowed to walk through town. The streets were packed with white-sheeted Klansmen from all over eastern Indiana and just across the state line in Dayton, Ohio. The town was hosting the largest gathering of the hooded order in that part of the Midwest. On October 5, 1923, Whitewater Klan #60 staged a parade and cross burnings that would be attended by nearly 36,000—more than the population of the city. On the same day, King Oliver’s band was scheduled to press their music into posterity. Playing cornet that day, in a style that seemed to break the sound barrier for the instrument, was twenty-two-year-old Louis Armstrong.
The six Black men and lone woman of the band couldn’t stay in any of the proper hotels of Richmond, a factory town built around the gorge of the Whitewater River. They had to find rooms at a boardinghouse in Goose Town, where Italians and Blacks lived, just blocks from the train station and not far from the Gennett recording studio. Even there, they were not free from danger. The Richmond Klan would occasionally torch a cross in Goose Town.
In Chicago, the hot jazz and up-tempo ragtime produced by King Oliver had created a sensation, and made local celebrities of the musicians. Lincoln Gardens, the band’s club on the South Side, was so packed that even Babe Ruth was lucky to get a seat when he was in town. “King Oliver and I got so popular blending that jive together that pretty soon all the white musicians from downtown Chicago would come there after their work and stay until the place closed,” Armstrong recalled. In the chill of a Chicago winter night, the door would open and out would spill another season—the warmth of music fused to motion.
But in Indiana in the fall of 1923, the musicians were just another half-dozen or so Blacks trying to avoid trouble in a town menaced by men in masks. The Richmond Klan, put together by Stephenson and a local minister’s son a year earlier, had become one of his greatest early successes. Nearly 40 percent of white men joined. He recruited out of the churches and a Main Street shop. On that same Main Street, Black customers could no longer buy a cup of coffee from dime stores. Their kids were not allowed to be newspaper carriers or play varsity sports. When a white lawyer tried to help a Black friend join the county bar association, the Klan burned a cross on his lawn and threatened to kill his children. To soften its image, the Richmond Klan gave out Bibles to every public school and made a show of donating money at Christmas to the Salvation Army.
The recording shed was situated out of sight along the hardworking river. For years, it had been a kiln for drying wood to make pianos, a small appendage to a row of smoke-belching brick factories.
“We were all very nervous,” said Baby Dodds, who played drums. “Perspiration as big as a thumb dropped off of us.”
This was Armstrong’s second trip to Richmond, after an earlier visit in May of that year. It was about the same time, and in the same makeshift studio, that Morton, he of the diamond front tooth and fingers that jumped across piano keys like an ersatz gymnast, made the first ever recording of a white jazz band led by a Black soloist. Until then, what played on phonographs in scratchy monotone were mostly classical music bits, Bible readings, Broadway songs, and speeches of politicians like William Jennings Bryan, a regular at the Gennett studio. The first jazz recording ever, in 1917, was by an all-white band. Jelly Roll, who said he was named for a woman’s sweet spot, broke the racial barrier with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Jelly Roll also claimed to have invented jazz as a child prodigy in 1902, though plenty of people took issue with that boast.
What was not in dispute was the role of one town, in a state that tried to censure human pleasure, in bringing big-time recorded jazz to the world. Known as Harmony Hollow, Richmond was the only place between New York and San Francisco with a decent recording studio. The Gennett brothers, from Italian immigrant stock, ran the large Starr Piano Company. At one point, the seven hundred workers at the factories in the gorge turned out a piano every twelve minutes, feeding consumer demand for an instrument that was at the center of middle-class family entertainment before radio took off. In 1916, the Gennetts started recording music at the former kiln house. They stuffed the walls with sawdust for soundproofing, and tacked rugs to the ceiling. They didn’t discriminate. Anyone who could pay could record—cash for sound, no questions asked. They also signed and promoted artists who were shunned by other studios. Jazz came to them in 1923 and would be sold on the Gennett label. So-called race records, though marketed to Black consumers, were showing a large crossover appeal.
King Oliver’s band dropped their instruments off in the shed and went to work. When a train rumbled by, they had to stop, wait for it to pass, and start the song all over again. The room was unventilated, the temperature well above 80 degrees, and windowless. The musicians were perched on stools and packing crates. They’d allowed themselves just a single day to record, then planned to get out of town before the Klansmen were set loose after their parade.
In late afternoon, about 6,000 hooded men assembled in a park a mile away. They marched down Main Street, in the direction of the studio. Many carried torches and waved placards proclaiming white supremacy. At least 30,000 people lined the streets to cheer them on. Traffic was blocked by vigilantes of the Horse Thief Detective Association, pistols at their hips. At the front of the parade were Klansmen on robed horses. Close overhead, to the gasp of the crowd, buzzed a biplane with an illuminated electric cross on its underbelly. The marchers were accompanied by Ku Klux Kiddies and at least a dozen bands, including one from Earlham College, where Daisy Barr’s son had recruited many underclassmen into the Klan. At the end of the route, several thousand initiates clustered around another park to swear fealty to the Klan—“the oath of Americanism,” as the Fiery Cross reported.
In the same studio where King Oliver cut his record, the Klan had made several recordings of its own—vanity productions not under the Gennett imprint, which Stephenson hoped to sell across the Midwest. Some of his speeches were recorded as well. Their discs were pressed with red labels and KKK letters and an assurance that all musicians were “100 percent Americans.” They did “Onward, Christian Klansmen” and “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan.”
On this October day, the jazz musicians went through some of the numbers that had sent dancers to the floor of Lincoln Gardens. They played “Workingman’s Blues” and “Zulu Ball.” Armstrong’s trumpet was so strong that he was placed near the back of the room, away from the large horn that picked up the music, so as not to dominate the recording. But it was impossible to hide Louis Armstrong in the fold. He drove “Krooked Blues” and “Alligator Hop,” among other songs. Then the musicians packed up quickly and dashed down side streets to get out of town, a circuitous route that would avoid the Klan parade. By dusk they’d made it to the train depot.
Armstrong was still new to lovers of music beyond a few precincts of New Orleans and Chicago, and new to the North by only a year. But when the disc he recorded in Richmond was released, he belonged to the ages.
One of those who heard the record, and then made a pilgrimage from Indiana University in Bloomington to the club in Chicago, was Hoagy Carmichael, a white student of law and disciple of original sound. In 1927, in the same shack, he recorded “Stardust,” the song that made him famous. But he always credited the Black performers who came before him. While Daisy Barr was praising the Ku Klux Klan as “the soul of America,” Carmichael, one of the most gifted singers and songwriters of the twentieth century, found the soul in places Barr would condemn. It was a small miracle of the times that a uniquely American music, brought to its finest form by people judged inferior from birth, would spread from an off-plumb little warehouse in a city fogged by fear of others.
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About seventy miles from Richmond, just blocks from Stephenson’s headquarters in downtown Indianapolis, jazz kept underground clubs jumping at all hours on a mile-long stretch of the liveliest street in the state—Indiana Avenue. At least two dozen basement joints fed a need to drink, dance, and hear the most infectious music of the age. Speakeasies had opened in every corner of the country. And in those places, unlike the saloons when drinking was legal, women joined men. The flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919 had taken the lives of 675,000 Americans. The Great War had killed another 116,000. Those who’d been shut in and shut out, who’d rationed food and hope, who became too intimate at too young an age with death, were ready to cut loose and regain human touch. As Willa Cather said, “Nobody stays at home anymore.”
The Avenue was a refuge of good times in a puritanical capital city. It was also a bustling commercial center, home for businesses that served the city’s 34,000 Black residents. African American restaurateurs, doctors, newspaper publishers, and merchants catered to people who could not get served in much of the city. Their papers carried notices of Sunday sermons and ads for hair straighteners and skin lighteners. The best-known enterprise was Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, one of the most successful Black business empires in the world. The daughter of a formerly enslaved woman, orphaned at six, married at fourteen, a widow at twenty, Madam Walker started a hair products company catering to Black customers. At the peak of her success, she employed 3,000 people, mostly women, making and selling cosmetics for a population that other companies ignored. She was the first Black woman to become a millionaire, one of the first great female entrepreneurs in the United States. She drove herself around town in a sparkling new Model T and hosted Booker T. Washington after another town in Indiana would not allow him to set foot inside the city limits. For all of Madam Walker’s accomplishments, when she went to the Isis Theater and gave the clerk her nickel to see the film, she was told the price for Black moviegoers was five times the amount, and she would have to sit in an isolated area to the side. She moved to New York and died just before Stephenson set up operations in her former city.
