A Fever in the Heartland, page 9
Fear of Catholics was brought to the American shores by British Protestants steeped in dark conspiracies about the power of Papists. Though many of the colonists were fleeing religious persecution, it wasn’t long before some were practicing what had been preached against them back in Europe. In 1644, a mere twenty-five years after the first cargo hold of kidnapped and enslaved humans was brought to Virginia from Africa, the colony passed a law prohibiting Catholic settlers. In the nineteenth century, a convent was burned to the ground in Massachusetts, churches were firebombed and Catholics attacked in a riot in Philadelphia. Thomas Nast, the most influential newspaper cartoonist at the time, stoked loathing of the faith of new immigrants with sketches depicting bishops as crocodiles coming ashore.
Stephenson knew that Klansmen far outnumbered Catholics in Indiana. He sensed that the vast majority of white people in the state would not object to his kicking around a religious minority. It was a safe hunch. Instead of backing down after O’Donnell’s revelations, he reloaded. “How dare someone suggest that red-blooded Americans should conform their views with subjects of a power in Rome which is inimical to American ideals,” his paper wrote.
The campaign against Catholics was aided by one of the Klan’s strangest surrogates: Helen Jackson, who said she was an ex-nun forced into servitude by secretive sisters of the faith. Her book, Convent Cruelties, was featured prominently in the pages of the Fiery Cross. “Do you ever wonder why so many of our girls are missing?” Jackson wrote. Many had been kidnapped by nuns and taken into cloister, where they were slapped, punched, forced to drink dirty soup and take cold baths, she claimed. O’Donnell put a reporter on the ex-nun’s case. The first thing he learned was that Jackson was not an ex-nun, but a former prostitute. Nor was her name Helen Jackson.
At the same time, O’Donnell printed fresh lists of Klansmen in Michigan, Ohio, and smaller towns in Indiana. He devoted an entire issue to an unmasking, more than ten thousand names. But thus far, his campaign did not seem to be hurting the Klan.
Just the opposite.
To O’Donnell’s horror, it was backfiring. People looked to see who didn’t belong, and felt left out. There were no significant resignations beyond the state Republican chairman, no sign that average people had been shamed into giving up their sheets, no great uprising by the citizenry. Instead of mass rejection, there was a rush of new initiates. Rallies were huge—10,000 in Evansville, another 10,000 in Noblesville, just north of Indianapolis.
What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir. This was O’Donnell’s worst fear: perhaps Indiana really wanted a Klan republic. At the height of the unmasking, every week, two thousand or more men continued to don hoods and robes for the first time and swear loyalty to a group at odds with the most cherished American values. After his name was printed in Tolerance, one defiant pastor in Indianapolis even oiled up a burlap cloth and lit a cross on the front lawn of his church. Damn right, he was a Klansman. Proud of it. If all the best people in a community belonged, as Daisy Barr had said, what could be so wrong with the Ku Klux Klan? The banker who held the loan on a house, the grocer who delivered food, the preacher who baptized newborns—this Who’s Who was validating, and intimidating. If you weren’t a member, something was off, maybe foreign, about you. You were an outsider. Why not be in on the secret while holding the secret? Emboldened by swelling membership, D. C. Stephenson openly proclaimed the very principles that O’Donnell accused the Klan of holding. He turned scandal into virtue. He embraced the hate.
He expanded on “the true principles of the Klan” in the Fiery Cross on April 13, 1923, under the headline the old man’s message. Speaking to “the Klansmen of the Northland,” Stephenson urged his 200,000 readers to take on the “amalgamated enemies of America.” He didn’t have to say who those enemies were, only what the Klan was for: “my countrymen of the White Man’s Breed.” He lashed out at “the venom and virulence of Mad Pat O’Donnell,” and begged God to take him down. That same God had “consecrated a White Man’s Country, a White Man’s home, and was dedicated to a White Man’s supremacy in a White Man’s realm of honor.” The message was signed “The Old Man Himself.”
His Klan now claimed 200,000 members in Ohio, and a nearly equal amount in Michigan and Wisconsin. Even Springfield, Illinois, hometown for Lincoln during his early political career, had sprouted “one of the liveliest and fastest-growing” Klan units in the country, the Fiery Cross reported.
The mainstream press seemed not to care about O’Donnell’s revelations or the rapid spread of a closed-door political order, perhaps because it was not uncommon for journalists to join the Klan. As John Niblack recalled, a friend urged him to take the Klan oath not long after he started work at the Indianapolis Times for $18 a week.
“How would you like to be naturalized tomorrow?”
“What do you mean, naturalized?” asked Niblack.
“Well, you know, you pay ten dollars and you get naturalized.”
“I don’t have to be naturalized,” said Niblack. “I was born down by Vincennes, Indiana, and I am an American citizen and I have no reason to be naturalized, let alone paying ten dollars. I suppose you’re talking about the Ku Klux Klan?”
“You ought to join. Everybody else is joining.”
“Well tell me, my friend: what is it with you fellows in the Klan? What do you stand for?”
“We’re against the Negroes, the Catholics, the Jews and the foreigners.”
Niblack said there were ten million Black people, three million Jews, and countless Catholics in the country. What did the Klan propose to do? Kill them? Run them out of the United States? “Why don’t we live in peace and quiet?”
“You talk silly,” his friend said.
“Maybe I am silly. But I’m not going to join because I don’t believe in it. I think it’s un-American.”
That spring, Stephenson opened his office to Niblack and a handful of other reporters, fully confident about spreading the Klan message on multiple fronts. They took note of his charm, his arrogance, the snappy suit jacket draped over the broad shoulders of a man who stood five feet, eight inches, the constant, nervous roll of his fingers on the desk, and all the highfalutin words he dropped into blunt statements of his power. A sign at the entrance read: “All Bearers of Evil Tidings Shall Be Slain.” If you wanted a drink, he had the finest stuff smuggled in from Canada or gifted to him from his police allies, not the foul and dangerous white mule hooch, distilled from corn, that reporters and cops passed around in the courthouse pressroom. (It was said that two drinks of white mule would kick you into the police station, three drinks into a hospital, and four into your grave.) And certainly he didn’t have to muck around with the dehydrated blocks of grape juice sold by mail to poor lovers of wine, who added yeast, water, and sugar to bring their brick to liquid fermentation.
Steve was a name-dropper, well connected, mentioning the finest people, judges, politicians, and newspaper editors he knew. When asked about the bust of Napoleon in his office, he offered some accurate-sounding quote from the Emperor. He’d memorized enough aphorisms from history that he could sound authoritative at times. The Klansman’s personal ornaments—the attractive women out front, the pistol-packing protectors hovering around him—made a strong impression. Steve needed only to snap his fingers and Klinck or one of his other armed acolytes would jump.
He was vague about his plans and even more opaque about the Klan’s intentions. It was a God-fearing, law-and-order-loving, woman’s-purity-enforcing, patriot-heart-beating, white-supremacy-upholding, Christian-based fraternal club with chapters in every part of Indiana—certainly nothing any respectable citizen should fear. But stay tuned: the Klan had big things in the works for this year. Big things for Indiana. Big things for the Midwest. Big things for the nation. About his own background, Steve repeated some version of the narrative that had carried him so far in so little time: Hoosier native, college educated, war veteran, a descendant of seasoned wealth. Single. And then, upon further reflection, he elaborated on an earlier answer. “I am the embodiment of Napoleon.” He gave no sign he was kidding.
8.
Creating D. C. Stephenson
1923
In the selective biography that he rationed to the press and friends in high places, the verifiable details of Stephenson’s life story usually began in 1920. He had no past before then. No parents. No siblings. No wife or children. No friends from high school. No college chums. No former army buddies. No business associates. Where was he from? Nowhere, or on a rare occasion, somewhere. But his enemies, who were growing inside and outside the Klan, were starting to piece together the true story. The Old Man was not a Hoosier native, but born in Hill County, Texas, on August 21, 1891. His father was not a banker or keeper of old money, but an itinerant laborer, working as a sharecropper throughout hardscrabble parts of the High Plains. His mother was dead to him; from an early age, they never got along. He was embarrassed because she was gray-haired and stooped, like an old lady, by the time Steve was ten. The family had moved from place to place in a covered wagon and lived for a while in a dugout—earthen floor, six feet or more belowground, with walls of plank board and black tarpaper. At one point, Steve was enrolled in a Catholic elementary school. He had a talent for talk and inventing stories about himself, and a good memory. His formal schooling ended in eighth grade, which he left just before he turned seventeen. It was the same year, 1907, that the former Indian Territory of Oklahoma became a state.
Early on, he spent more time with girls than boys. A trick of his was to grab a girl’s breast and fondle it in front of others. The shock effect gave him power, and revealed to him at a young age that he could get away with things as others could not—simply because he dared to cross a line. He left home not long after dropping out of school and never went back. He would erase his past and blot out his family, reinventing a dirt farmer’s kid into D. C. Stephenson, a refinement from town to town. It helped if you looked the part. In reaction to his mother’s shabby clothes and his father’s soiled overalls, Steve strutted around Oklahoma farm towns in a full suit. His prominent accessory was a gun. After he got his first pistol, he was never without a firearm. Words were his passport upward. He could talk a line of silk-spun bullshit and he could write, both aided by drink. After a few pops of liquor, he had courage enough to start giving speeches—on street corners, in school gymnasiums. In one town he spoke of the evils of socialism. In another, he praised socialism. He found work in small Oklahoma newspapers, which was a way to meet women, and to ingratiate himself with the local power structure.
When he was twenty-three, Stephenson started wooing Jeanette Hamilton, a merchant’s daughter who went by “Nettie.” He was going places, he told her, with big, big, big plans. Together they could forge a magnificent life. Nettie was delighted when the newspaper in Hugo, where Steve worked as a typesetter and writer, presented her in its pages as “The Most Beautiful Girl in Oklahoma.” Steve could brag about that, and now had the photo and clipping to prove it. They married in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, on March 26, 1915. His parents were not invited. “He was the most ambitious, hardworking young man you ever saw,” said Nettie. “I thought we had a great future before us. He had the flash of a genius and I believed in him.”
But he couldn’t hold a job. He refused to pay his bills. He lied by way of respiration. He even stiffed the barber in one of the towns where he briefly touched down. He was frequently gone, spending nights with other women in the wind-raked towns of central Oklahoma, rolling in like a tumbleweed and out like a dust swirl. Just after the wedding, the couple was living in Madill, south of Oklahoma City, where the owner paid Steve $20 a week to run the weekly. He was free to print whatever he wanted. Five months into the job, Steve wrongly accused a man of a crime in the pages of the paper. This time, his lies cost him. He was fired. The Stephensons moved back to Hugo, eighty miles east, and another newspaper job. Nettie was pregnant. Her husband didn’t like the swollen belly or the cramps or the burdensome future that a child presented. One night, he exploded, slapping and punching the most beautiful girl in Oklahoma. When Nettie showed up at the paper with an eye blackened and a cheek reddened and swollen, the pregnant wife of D. C. Stephenson admitted that her husband had battered her. But he suffered no consequence. He could always beat a woman, especially if that woman was his wife.
Six months after the wedding, Stephenson deserted Nettie. He said he was going away to look for work and would summon her. He promised to send money. As her pregnancy advanced, Nettie feared for the months ahead. Her family had warned her about this man; they saw him as a person without character. He proved them right when Nettie was taken to a hospital in Oklahoma City to give birth. From her bed in the maternity ward, she wired her husband, begging him to come to her side, to help out. He said he was unable to travel the few hours on a flat road to the city. He sent her $5—the only money she ever saw from him during the pregnancy. He told her he was still planning to move back with her, and that things were going well in Cushing, the latest town as he bounced around Oklahoma. But when Nettie and her baby girl showed up, unannounced, she found a man who’d created a fictional alternative life. He hustled her over to a run-down hotel and shook her violently. He had no more use for Nettie, and none for a screaming infant. Besides, he’d wanted a boy.
“Don’t tell anyone we’re married,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone!”
She was stunned.
“I said, ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re my wife.’ I don’t have a wife.”
At the time, he was living with another woman, the bookkeeper at the local paper, in an apartment above a garage. He’d told everyone in Cushing that he was a single man. The next day, he fled. It took a while for Nettie to track him down. But after months of sending letters begging for child support, she finally got a response from her husband, the only time she ever heard from him after he’d abandoned her. “You must not try to find me,” he wrote. He would not see the mother of his only child for eleven years.
Facing the draft when the United States entered the war against Germany in 1917, Steve joined the Iowa National Guard. He gained a reputation as a carouser, a gasbag, a petty thief. He borrowed money and never repaid it. He stole flasks of liquor from beneath the pillows of other men. His fellow soldiers hated him so much that they petitioned their superior officer to transfer him out of their unit. He was moved to Camp Devens, Massachusetts. After being discharged, he returned to Iowa, working as a traveling salesman. He told people he was a war hero, an officer, and a gentleman. In fact, he had never set foot overseas. It was then that he met his second wife, Violet, in 1920. Not long afterward, he borrowed a large sum of money from her mother. When he married Violet, he wrote on the Ohio marriage certificate that he had no prior wives.
In the months before Stephenson nearly killed Violet with his fists, she came to the conclusion that he had married her only to get at her mother’s cash. She never saw empathy or regret from him. He was a cipher.
* * *
—
Just because he never went to college didn’t mean that Stephenson, or his Klan, couldn’t own a college. What the American race needed, he believed, was a place to turn out purebloods with a solid academic foundation. It would be a factory of sorts, shaping young men who were in some way duplicates of the D. C. Stephenson he had created from scratch. He set his sights on Valparaiso University, sixty miles from Chicago and equally distant from what was emerging as the Klan’s biggest institutional enemy in Indiana: Notre Dame. The Gothic-towered, cobblestoned lanes of Valpo, as it was called, were ideal. The school had a storied history: founded by Methodists in 1859, admitting women well before most colleges went coed, and second only to Harvard, at one time, in rankings of largest private school enrollment. But the world war drained Valpo of young men, and it ran into further troubles with accreditation. By 1923, the university was nearly bankrupt, and the board of trustees considered shuttering the school.
KLAN WILL TAKE OVER “POOR MAN’S HARVARD”
The headline from the Daily Republican, in Rushville, Indiana, was still aspirational, but not by much. The story noted that “the institution will be non-sectarian, but Negroes will not be admitted.” The Klan promised a “one hundred percent American” curriculum. Stephenson sent his man, Milt Elrod, editor of the Fiery Cross, up to the northwest corner of the state to seal the deal. The city of Valparaiso was already Klan friendly. When Stephenson had tested the waters with a rally in May, the Klan parade drew 5,000 ghost-sheeted marchers and another 30,000 spectators. No doubt, the turnout was aided by the appearance of tight-wire walkers, bronco-busting Texas cowboys, twenty brass bands, and a massive barbecue. Steve knew how to throw a hatefest. Every Friday night throughout that summer, a hooded horseman would lead a column of Klansmen from Main Street downtown to the Porter County Fairgrounds, where a rousing round of race-baiting and immigrant and Catholic bashing was followed by the lighting of a large cross. In other towns, a rally might be designed around a high-dive competition, men jumping into a net from a hundred-foot tower. He also staged baseball games, burning a cross while fans ate hot dogs and slurped sodas after the games. He may have picked up this idea from Evans, whose Texas order had fielded a baseball team with Ku Klux Klan stitched across the front of their flannel uniforms.
