A Fever in the Heartland, page 8
The Great Migration—African Americans fleeing one region that denied them basic human rights for another that at least held the promise of full citizenship—had changed the face of the North. The biggest draw was the oldest of American incentives: a chance to move up in life. A factory worker’s wage in Detroit, Chicago, or South Bend was three times that of a farmhand in the rural South. In the first fifteen years of the Great Migration, beginning in 1910, almost two million people left their homes for new ones in the North. In Indianapolis, the Black population grew by more than 60 percent. But many whites of the North were as unwelcoming as those in the South.
With Stephenson’s move into Indianapolis, the Klan vowed to keep Black residents in a tight geographic box. The city had fifteen African American physicians in 1923, but they were not allowed to attend to patients at the main hospital. Black medical professionals fared no better in their search for homes. When a dentist and veteran of the war, Dr. Lucian B. Meriwether, bought a big house on North Capitol Avenue, neighbors informed him that only whites were allowed to live in that part of Indianapolis. They constructed a fence surrounding his property, ten feet tall, cutting him off from the community. Meriwether sued. The neighborhood hired Stephenson’s lawyer and fixer friend, Ira Holmes, who formed the White Supremacy League—founded specifically to keep Black homeowners from white neighborhoods. When a judge ruled for Meriwether and issued an injunction against the “spite fence,” as the papers called it, whites defied the order and extended the wooden barrier, further sequestering the family behind a high wall. The Klan posted handbills throughout the city reading “Do You Want a N—— for a Neighbor?” Dr. Meriwether would not budge.
Jim Crow was able to nest comfortably in much of the North because the essential elements were already in place. More than two hundred towns in Indiana, and dozens in Kansas and Ohio, had sundown laws—named for signs at the city limits: “Black Man, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You Here.” This lawless edict could take the form of an outright pogrom. In the little mining town of Blanford, Indiana, just north of Terre Haute, whites told all Black residents in the community that they had until seven p.m. on a winter day in 1923 to leave their homes, after a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman. The ultimatum was adopted at a hastily called civic meeting. At dusk, cars and trucks stuffed with families and their possessions clogged the main road out of town.
For Black families who stayed quiet and out of sight, for those who didn’t push for equality or mingle with whites, the Klan would offer an occasional olive branch. By way of guidance, the Fiery Cross ran a piece supposedly written by an African American living in Indiana, under the headline klan is my friend if i live right, says negro.
There were more ominous warnings. One family’s home in Indianapolis was firebombed in 1922, and another’s was nearly shattered in 1924 after a grenade was thrown through the front window but didn’t go off. When an adult amateur football team of African Americans showed up to play a game in Elwood, just north of Indianapolis, the local paper announced their arrival with this headline: all black coons!
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Men talk of the Negro problem,” said Frederick Douglass in one of his last public speeches, in 1893. “There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”
Douglass died well before the horror of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob destroyed thirty-five city blocks in a part of Oklahoma known for its fine homes and businesses—the Black Wall Street. The looting, arson, and murders were sparked by a rumor printed in the local paper, later found to be untrue, that a young Black man had assaulted a teenage white girl. The cause was something much darker and deeper. Roughly 100,000 Sooners had taken an oath to the Invisible Empire. Tulsa was a hotbed of Klansmen. Though there’s little evidence that Klan leaders planned the war on their neighbors, they were certainly in the thick of the killings. The marauders burned more than 1,200 homes, five hotels, a dozen churches, thirty-one restaurants, four drugstores, a public library, a hospital, and four doctors’ offices. A police detective urged white fellow Tulsans to “get a gun and get busy and try to get a N——.” Upward of three hundred people were butchered and hastily buried in the June heat of 1921. A few of the rioters took to the sky, according to witnesses, dropping sticks of dynamite from airplanes—thought to be the first time a city in the United States was bombed by aerial assault. More than 10,000 people were left homeless.
The massacre was a boon for the Klan. By 1923, membership in town was setting new records. That year, more than a hundred people were horse-whipped by Tulsa Klansmen using a cat-tailed leather strap. The slaughter of an entire community, a national Klan lecturer said, was “the best thing that ever happened to Tulsa.” As in Dallas, there were no convictions of any of the killers, thieves, and firebombers, no prison terms, no retribution. The Klan of the 1920s had enough control of the legal system to ensure that those who gutted the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a mass murder of American citizens, would not face justice.
7.
The Unmasking
1923
On Saint Patrick’s Day, a crowd filled basketball-rattled Tomlinson Hall in Indianapolis to hear a fiery Irish American lawyer, Patrick H. O’Donnell. Raised by an immigrant family near Logansport—where Stephenson had first pitched a scheme of vigilantes in service to the Klan—O’Donnell had made his mark in Chicago as a criminal attorney. He was appalled when the Klan started recruiting in the Windy City in 1921. O’Donnell had grown up on stories of the British stripping his people of their culture, their religion, their language, and their civil rights in their native land. Now he saw the Klan trying to do the same thing in the country his family had fled to from Ireland.
O’Donnell organized cops, firemen, priests, Black clergy, and Jewish community leaders throughout the Midwest to make war on the Klan. They founded the American Unity League and started a weekly newspaper, Tolerance, which proclaimed its mission was to “smash the Invisible Empire.” The paper left no room for nuance: “We hate the Klan and everything it stands for.” At an “all races rally” in February, O’Donnell cited Abraham Lincoln’s words against the Know Nothings, the political party founded in the 1850s in opposition to immigrants. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal,’ ” Lincoln wrote. “We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.’ ” The mass meeting was repeated over the next five nights. And in less than a year, 50,000 people in Chicago had joined the American Unity League. There was a huge appetite, as O’Donnell had hoped, for taking down the hooded order.
Klan secrecy, and the oaths never to reveal the names of fellow members, gave O’Donnell an opening. In an internal manual, “Why We Wear the Hood,” the Klan had outlined a key to its success: “The secret of our power lies in the secrecy of our members. We can do our best work when we are not known to the public. By this means, we see and hear everything.”
Why not go after the “secret” of that power? Why not make the Invisible Empire visible, unmasking its members? O’Donnell cultivated insiders, who got him membership rolls. “We feel that the publication of the names of those who belong to the Klan will be a blow that the masked organization cannot survive,” he wrote in the inaugural issue of Tolerance, dated September 10, 1922. A week later, he made good on the promise and published the first 150 names. The paper cost a dime and sold out quickly. In the weeks that followed, more names were revealed—a prominent bank president, businessmen, civil servants. Chicago members of the Klan were listed under the headline who’s who in nightgowns. In a city where Catholics, Blacks, immigrants, and Jews combined were a majority of the population of three million, the revelations caused an uproar. Hundreds of families withdrew their money from the bank run by the Klansman. Citywide investigations followed, as did resignations. A week after publication, the city council voted to condemn the Klan and pledged to “rid the community of this organization.” It didn’t take long for many of the Who’s Who to ditch their nightgowns. And within a few months, the state passed a law making it illegal to wear a mask while parading in public.
After his success in Chicago, O’Donnell moved on to other Klan strongholds in 1923. He was an attractive man with a strong jaw, a deep voice—a muscular presence on stage. In Indianapolis on that Saint Patrick’s Day, he introduced himself as a proud Hoosier, Indiana born and bred. But what fever, what awful sickness, now gripped this great state, he wondered aloud. He noted that Indiana was number one in a category of infamy: home now to at least 315,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, “more than Texas, three times as many as Georgia!” The Klan called itself one hundred percent American, but it was “the most un-American organization in the history of the United States,” he said. “The Ku Klux Klan is secretly and powerfully assailing every one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to American citizens under the Constitution.” And if people did not act now, their city, their state, all of the country could fall into the Klan’s hands.
“Mark what I tell you: if they are not exposed and driven from Indiana, they, the Ku Klux Klan, will corrupt your juries, dominate your elections, elect their puppets to power and place, undermine your laws, and violate the principles of your Constitution.”
With these words, O’Donnell said what no Indianapolis paper had yet to explicitly say, what no politician of standing would reveal. A Black-owned newspaper, the Chicago Defender, had warned of the Empire’s political design, running a cartoon of a Klansman grabbing Uncle Sam by the lapel and pointing to the Capitol in Washington, DC. “Listen! I want that building for my private office,” was the caption. But O’Donnell had Stephenson’s blueprint for total control—the grand plan for the takeover of an American state by an organization rooted in terror—down cold, without a hint of exaggeration. He applied shame, fear, all of his considerable oratorical skills, to get people to rise up against this enemy of a free people.
“You people now live in a Klan republic,” he said. O’Donnell drew an analogy between Saint Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland and what people of good will must do now. “We are going to drive the Klan out of Indiana!” he thundered. “We are going to redeem Indiana and re-annex it to the American Union!”
In South Bend, on the same day that O’Donnell spoke, the Klan had a Saint Patrick’s Day message of its own: flames for Notre Dame, Roman Catholicism’s center of higher learning in America. Unlike most communities in Indiana, the city formed around the southernmost bend of the St. Joseph River was full of immigrant families—Poles, Hungarians, Irish—who found work in the Studebaker factory or one of the subsidiary businesses. Families dreamed of sending a boy to the magical campus just across the river, built around a large golden dome, with a football team coming off two undefeated seasons under coach Knute Rockne—himself an immigrant. O’Donnell had staged several rallies in South Bend, and his paper was well received, especially on campus. “Cheer up, Klansmen—the worst is yet to come,” he wrote with typical brio. O’Donnell warned the Fathers of the Holy Cross that the Klan’s aim was to destroy the school. The Klan newspaper dismissed O’Donnell as a minor menace who’d soon go away, and characterized his supporters as a “mixture of swarthy Jews, Negroes and foreigners.” On the Irish high holiday, the Klan’s cross burning in South Bend was a scalding missive from Stephenson: no place in the Midwest was free of the Ku Klux Klan.
After O’Donnell’s speech in Indianapolis, people mobbed the stage, asking what they could do to resist. The Klan’s enemies needed to join forces, he replied. “The fight against the Klan is not a Jewish fight or a Negro’s fight or a Catholic’s fight, but an American fight.” Within a few weeks, community leaders from all three camps had signed on, opening a new office of the American Unity League—an Indiana foothold inside the Klan of the North. O’Donnell was not bluffing. He would not rest until the Empire was crushed.
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In the dark early hours of April 1, two men crept through Klan headquarters in Indy and made their way to a filing cabinet. They knew what they were looking for and where to find it. They hurried out not long after entering, slipping through a back door with a prize: a list of 12,208 names. Later that day, the Indiana edition of Tolerance hit newsstands in the city. On the cover was a drawing of fishermen hauling in a large net, above a caption reading “Never mind the minnows: get the whales!” The catch was labeled “KKK senators and judges.” The headline was: indiana’s redemption begins. This Who’s Who of Hoosiers in nightgowns was only a small sample, seventy names, of what O’Donnell had obtained from the inside. He promised more to come in future issues. The tally included a former judge, law partners, bankers, business owners, Indianapolis police detectives, dozens of well-known Protestant ministers, and one big fish who flipped: Lawrence Lyons, chairman of the state Republican Party. He renounced his membership in a letter written to the Klan and published in this issue of Tolerance.
As the names spread around the state, Stephenson raged against traitors and spies inside his realm. He threw things against the wall, stubbed his cigar on the floor, screamed at subordinates until he was out of breath. Even when he wasn’t drinking, his anger storms could overturn a room. He moved swiftly into federal court, seeking an injunction to stop Tolerance from further publication.
The next day, on Steve’s orders, the Klan paper came out with cannons firing: lyons betrays klan oath. The Republican who’d turned was characterized as a man who was “born in Hell, and inspired by Satan.” Three days later, Steve sent a telegram to leading Republicans, including judges, the Indiana treasurer, and the secretary of state, Ed Jackson. “Permit no selection to be made and permit no one to be named to succeed Lyons until I have had an opportunity to confer with you. See that Lyons hands in his resignation at earliest possible moment.” He signed it “The Old Man.”
And there it was: barely three years after setting foot in Indiana as a friendless unknown from an untraceable nowhere, D. C. Stephenson was telling the state’s top elected officials what to do. And they followed the Klansman’s every order.
O’Donnell’s sources obtained a copy of that telegram, which he printed verbatim in Tolerance. He also ran pictures of the two most notable Hoosiers revealed as members of the Invisible Empire—Secretary of State Jackson and E. Howard Cadle, whose Indianapolis Tabernacle was said to be the largest building in America devoted to religious services at the time. It was inside Cadle’s domain that the Klan gave one of its largest bribes to a minister that spring—$600. Readers of Tolerance could compare that with other Protestant payoffs, a list of preachers who’d been bought by Stephenson to spike the faith with Klan poison, the “subsidized evangelists,” as they were called by O’Donnell. Most of the ministers were handed $50 to sell souls on the Klan, but a few were given as much as $250—nearly half a year’s salary for a butcher or baker. In his Saint Patrick’s Day speech, O’Donnell could only guess at how quickly and deeply the Klan appeared to have taken over Indiana. But now, just two weeks later, he knew precisely; documents from the inside spoke volumes.
The April 1 issue of Tolerance also broke news about the Klan’s private militia—news, at least, to those who weren’t on the receiving end of the vigilantes. “Under the Horse Thief Act, Kluxers in 50 Indiana cities are trying to establish the husky nucleus of a Ku Klux state constabulary, with power to search your homes and places of business.”
A few weeks earlier, that power had been on full display outside the village of Laurel, at the little white farmhouse of Green Gabbard’s family. One of Steve’s poison squads had spread word that the Gabbards were making moonshine on their property. They were also said to be part of a fledgling group opposed to the Klan’s takeover of Franklin County. A judge, the sheriff, and several deputies of the horse thief detectives quickly organized a raid. They stormed into the Gabbard home on the night of February 23, banging down the door, overturning tables and beds, trashing the house. They screamed obscenities at the quivering white family, including a girl of seventeen, newly married and pregnant. She fainted and fell to the ground. The raiders brandished guns and threatened to shoot the young woman’s husband. Gabbard pleaded with the gunmen to call a doctor. They refused, instead accosting his son. “God damn him,” said the vigilante leader, Judge Cecil C. Tague. Even though no liquor was found, the boy was hauled off to jail and charged with possessing intoxicating drink. Two months later, the teenage girl died—from “shock sustained on the day of the raid,” in the opinion of her doctor. The boy was tried in a courtroom overseen by the leader of the raid, Judge Tague, and prosecuted by another member of the invading party. Green Gabbard and his wife, Rebecca, later swore out an affidavit telling of their night of horror, “the unlawful invasion of our home by the Ku Klux Klan.” Tolerance printed it in full.
O’Donnell was now Stephenson’s main target in the press. He fulminated against “Mad Pat” in the Fiery Cross, calling him “an Enemy of America.” He ordered Klansmen to burn a cross in the township outside Logansport, where O’Donnell grew up and some members of his family still lived. The May 11 edition of the Klan’s weekly published a Who’s Who of Catholic businessmen and their addresses on its front page. They were called out as suspect Americans, people to be boycotted and ultimately run into the ground. The ostracized included attorneys, accountants, architects, grocers, electricians, plumbers, and even the “Rome-managed Yellow Taxicab Co.”
