By the early 1900s, the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group founded by former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, had all but faded from existence in the U.S. Then, in 1915, a second Klan was founded in Georgia, and soon spread across the country.
By the mid-1920s, it had as many as eight million members across the U.S., including many chapters in the Pacific Northwest, and a strong base in the Midwest.
Seattle writer Timothy Egan’s most recent book, “A Fever in the Heartland,” tells the story of the rise of the Klan in the 1920s and the leader who was brought down by one woman’s deathbed testimony. We talk to Egan in front of students at McDaniel High School.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you today in front of an audience at McDaniel High School in Northeast Portland. We are spending the hour with the writer Timothy Egan.
[Audience applause]
Miller: In the 1920s, one in three white men in Indiana put hoods on their heads, put their hands on Bibles, and swore to God to forever uphold white supremacy. They were part of the nationwide resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, a wave of organized hate and terror that had a major presence in Oregon as well. Then that wave crested, partly as a result of the deathbed testimony of a woman who was a victim in a murder trial.
This is a story that the Seattle writer Timothy Egan tells in his most recent book. It’s called “A Fever in the Heartland.” It focuses on the charismatic and sadistic charlatan who led the explosive growth of the Klan in the North, as well as the brave people who fought against his deeply entrenched network of terror.
Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and the author of nine previous books. He joins us now. It’s great to have you back on Think Out Loud.
Timothy Egan: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.
Miller: I thought we could start with a question from a student in our audience. Go ahead. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: Hi, my name’s Emma. I was wondering how the process of creating “A Fever in the Heartland” and one of your other books about the Dust Bowl, “The Worst Hard Time”, differentiated from each other.
Egan: Yeah, I’ll answer that in a sec. I just want to say first of all, thank you guys for welcoming me here. I’m supposed to speak tonight before a fairly large audience at the Schnitzer Concert Hall and I’m feeling OK about that. But being here, I’m petrified, because you guys ask questions that I’m not used to getting – just like you said. It’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that you’re all AP English folks. Thank you, it’s wonderful to be in your embrace.
So this is a really hard story and I’m generally an upbeat guy. “The Worst Hard Time,” as you could tell by the title, was a hard story as well. But we have this struggle in our country about how we tell our hard stories and this is one of these examples about, does this make us a better people? My thoughts going into this book was, “If I show them how this happened, I can perhaps answer the why.” And the why is, how do seemingly average people learn to hate? How do you turn against people so much so that you will lynch them, you’ll burn their homes down, you’ll domestically terrorize them? People who are your bankers, your coaches, sorry to say, your teachers – they all joined the Klan in the 1920s.
Now, the process, to your question – I’m a Northwesterner, third generation Northwesterner, born in Seattle, grew up in Spokane, spent a ton of time down here in beautiful Oregon, climbed all your peaks … love it. But I was gonna do a book about the Klan in Oregon, that was gonna be my next story. Because I don’t know how many of you knew it, but exactly 100 years ago this decade, Oregon elected a Klan sympathetic governor. His name was Walter Pierce. And they essentially outlawed, by public vote, Catholic schools. Now why would they outlaw Catholic schools? It was because mostly immigrants went to those Catholic schools and they thought if we take away the school, we can take away the social fiber.
Miller: Italian Americans, Irish Americans …
Egan: Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Germans Americans, right. Oregon had more members of this oldest domestic terror group per capita than any state but Indiana. So you had a dentist from La Grande, Oregon – there were a lot of dentists in the Klan, for some reason – who was leading the Ku Klux Klan. You had 4th of July day parades where they had kiddies dress up in the hoods and go down the middle of Main Street in small town Oregon. You had Astoria, a place that I love, elected a Klan mayor and had a Klan convention.
So on the surface, these seemingly normal Oregonians, as you said, Dave, every one of them had to put their hand on a Bible and swear out an oath to hate their neighbors, to hate what in this country was a third of all Americans. It started with African Americans, but in the ‘20s they learned to hate Jews, and they learned to hate Catholics, and they learned to hate Asians. In Toledo, Oregon, 100 years ago this year, a mob ran Japanese Americans out of town that were working at a timber company, with the full support of the chief of police.
So I was gonna do this piece about how my beloved Oregon, which we think of as such a “woke” state, was really, it’s founding was, its DNA was white supremacy. I mean, the Oregon Constitution in the 1840s and ‘50s made it illegal for Blacks to live in the state. That’s why my state, Washington State, got the benefit from that. People voted by [an] eight to one margin in 1855 for the Oregon Constitution to not allow Blacks to live here. If you lived here more than three years you’d be subject to a whipping.
So the DNA was there. But as I looked into this story – and that goes to your process question – I drill down, I try to look for something that’ll give me some answers to this and also I’m looking to tell a story that people haven’t heard. You think of the Ku Klux Klan – and it’s easy for us to do this – as a bunch of toothless hicks from the South. And mind you, there are some toothless hicks from the South who joined the Ku Klux Klan. But in the 1920s, it was normal. As I said, it was coaches, businessmen, women’s brigade, all these seemingly pillars of the community.
I was gonna do Oregon. And as I got into looking at what happened here in Oregon, I said, “Holy cow. There’s an even bigger story in this state we think of as the quintessential American state: Indiana.” So that’s what drove me there. And on “The Worst Hard Time,” it was just … Steinbeck wrote this book called “The Grapes of Wrath” about the so-called Okies who fled the terror of the Dust Bowl, our worst environmental disaster to come to Oregon, come to Washington, come to California. But the flip side of the story was two-thirds of them didn’t go anywhere. So again, I was searching for a story that hasn’t been told. What was it like to live when the earth turned inside out?
Miller: So the heart of your book is about the resurgence, the rebirth of the Klan in the 1920s, in the teens and ‘20s. But to understand that, we can go back a little bit first. Can you tell us how it was that after the Civil War, the Klan was largely quashed? What happened before the resurgence?
Egan: Yeah, it’s an amazing story and I think one that most people didn’t know about. So what happened at the end of the Civil War, an extraordinary thing in the history of the world, almost overnight, 4 million people in the South went from being human property with no rights at all … You could get put in jail for holding a book, if you’re a slave. You could get put in jail for reading. You can get put in jail for getting married if you were enslaved. Almost overnight, these people went from property to American citizens.
It was a revolution that happened in three years’ time, that being the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Four million people, 37% of the South, Black goes from slaves to American citizens, [and] causes a backlash. And these are mostly former Confederate soldiers and officers who said, we can’t tolerate this. We can’t have these people vote, we can’t have them being educated. They would burn down schoolhouses that were trying to teach former slaves how to read and write. We can’t have them owning businesses, we can’t have them go to churches.
So they started as this underground terror group and they wanted to scare people into thinking they were ghosts from the dead Confederate soldiers. So that’s why they wore the hoods, to make people think they were ghosts, and they rode at night. And they would terrorize, rape, pillage, burn, kill. President Grant crushed them – sent federal troops down, put 10,000 of them in jail. So three years after this first big terror group in America is founded, they’re crushed, they’re gone, they’ve disappeared from time. Fifty years later, in the 1920s, they reappear. And this clan becomes the mainstream clan. This clan is so-called “average people.”
Miller: How did media play into that – the book “The Clansman” and then the movie “The Birth of a Nation” that was based on it?
Egan: We live in an age right now where everyone’s really concerned about misinformation, as we all should be, because there’s so much garbage and crap in social media. People just can’t filter through and find the truth. But the biggest piece of misinformation in the 1920s was the largest, most effective cinemagratic representation of racial stereotyping and wrong. It was a film called “The Birth of a Nation.” It played in the North and the South. One in four Americans saw this film. And what it did was it was total rewrite of what happened after the Civil War.
In this case, in the movie, the Klan was the heroes. In this case, the Blacks being given the vote and the Blacks being given power in Congress were drunk, were shiftless, where there were the images of them in the film eating chicken bones with bare feet while they’re legislating. So it completely did the stereotype … and they were rapists too. So it convinced many, many millions of people that in fact, the effort to give these freed slaves rights was the wrong thing to do. And it made the Klan into the heroes. And President Woodrow Wilson, [the] first time a film ever played in the White House, it was “Birth of a Nation.”
Miller: Let’s turn to, I think I called him, a sadistic, charismatic charlatan who’s at the center of your story, D.C. Stephenson. What can you tell us? What do we know about his early years?
Egan: As I said, I’m a fairly upbeat guy. This is one of the things that really discourages me, folks, because D.C. Stephenson is an American character. He’s a con man, he’s a charlatan, he’s a drifter. He says things that people wanna hear. He ditched his wife and kid. He roamed from town to town selling anything he could try to sell.
Then in 1921 in Southern Indiana, he found something that would make him rich. What was it? It was the Klan. It was hatred. So this guy with a really good gift of gab, this guy really knew how to make people think: your problems are not because you’re a screw up, your problems are because of these immigrants, your problems are because of these Blacks moving to the North from the South – which we were doing during the Great Migration. Your problems are because of these women like my grandmother in the 1920s, they were flappers. They were socially liberated women who went into these underground bars during prohibition and listened to Black jazz, and that was a threat to the moral fiber of society.
So he packaged this whole thing and he went from town to town. He had a real simple way of doing it. First, he would bribe the Protestant minister. Now, remember they hated Catholics, so they played on the Protestants. And this was an easy sell. Give them like $100, which today is about $2,000. Then the minister would preach the word of hatred from his pulpit on Sunday.
Then he had a little militia group, a little unlicensed pseudo-sheriffs, wannabe cops who would go break up speakeasies where women like my granny were dancing to jazz. So he had 30,000 people, pulling people over and going after teenagers who were kissing in cars in the dark, and sort of a Taliban light morality patrol. And then, I hate to say it, he got the press, he got the judiciary, he got many cops, basically the people who run society [to] come over to his side, because if you didn’t belong to the Klan, you were an outsider.
Miller: How did you say that he saw the KKK, among other things, as a way to get rich personally? I mean it almost seems like a little bit of a Ponzi scheme here. I mean, how was he making money from getting people to join?
Egan: I mean, that’s a great tragedy of this thing and also that’s the American story part of it. This guy [had] never made any money in his life. In three years after he got on the Klan scheme, he was a multi-millionaire. He lived in this huge mansion, which I think there’s a picture of it in the book, in this toniest suburb of Indianapolis. He had his own plane with “KKK” stitched or painted on the bottom of the biplane. He had this 98 foot yacht at which he entertained people in the Great Lakes – senators, judges and politicians. Fabulous amount of wealth that had come to him in just three years time.
And the way he did it was almost like a Ponzi scheme. So you had to pay $10 to join the Klan, which then was like a week’s worth of salary, because a lot of people only made a buck a day. That’s a lot of money. Imagine giving your whole week’s worth of salary to join the Klan. Then you had to buy the stupid uniform. You had to buy the robes and hoods, and you could only buy it through him or one of his authorized outlets. So then he made another $7 on that.
The guy was just churning out money. And he became like I said, a multimillionaire. At the bottom of it all, what was he selling? It’s fear. What was he selling? Hate. And again – I can’t stress this enough – the Klan started as an anti-Black group. Fear of former slaves having power, having rights, being able to live the American dream. And the ‘20s opened up a whole new range of hatreds. That was because there was immigration going on. It was our peak of immigration, until the last 10 years.
Miller: You mentioned fear there. You quote W. E. B. Du Bois as as writing this: “Behind the yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim, lynch and burn at the stake, is a not large or small of normal human beings. And these human beings, at heart, are desperately afraid of something.” So what exactly is the fear, were the fears that you’re talking about?
Egan: It’s an excellent question. It’s a great quote from Du Bois, and it applies to Oregon as well. So Oregon and Indiana, where I centered my story, at the time – and still now – did not have a large African American population. Oregon and Indiana, then and now, did not have a lot of Jews. Oregon, Indiana, then and now, did not have an unusually large amount of immigrants, nor did they have a large amount of Catholics. Now, those are the four groups that this clan expanded into the range of hatreds.
But why did so much Klan concentration happen in places where they didn’t have the people they were supposed to hate? It was the “outsiders are coming in to change your way of life,” that they’re looming. We have this wonderful little gig right now, a perfect community, and these new people, the immigrants were huge threats – particularly Jews coming from Eastern Europe. They’re on the East Coast now, but pretty soon they’ll be in La Grande, Oregon. I mean, why does La Grande, Oregon … that was the center of the Klan. Like I said, this dentist ran it. Why would that be the center? I mean, it didn’t have a large amount of immigrants. It was the fear of others which he’d made into … He was brilliant at speech making, by the way.
One more thing I wanna add as an aside to this. They wanted to build a master race and I have a chapter called, “The Master Race at the Midwest,” not quite in the Hitler and Nazi thing, but not far from it. So they created this eugenics law which allowed them to involuntarily sterilize a group of people who they considered shouldn’t be able to have babies. Who were those people? They were quote, “promiscuous women.” They were poor people, they were gays, they were immigrants. And you know who was the last state to finally get rid of that eugenics law? State of Oregon. So 2,751 – I looked this up yesterday – people in the state of Oregon were sterilized against their will. This all came out of the ‘20s Klan.
Now, I, like a lot of writers, try to stay away from Nazi metaphors because it always kills the conversation – “Well, Hitler would have done this.” And that usually these metaphors are facile. They just don’t work. I will just say this for the historical record: the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s. They adopted a eugenics law, a sterilization law, and they said the United States was their model.
Miller: Let’s go to a question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: Hello, my name is Josh. My question is, how do you think the events in the book during the 1920s might have been different if they had taken place in a different decade, perhaps the ‘50s or ‘60s?
Egan: You know, so I’m a storyteller and a time traveler. That’s what I do. That’s what a historian does. You time travel. I lived in the 1920s for three years. It was really hard during COVID to spend all this time in Indiana, I gotta say, reliving the Klan. And they were not a hidden thing. Open any newspaper in the 1920s, you saw, “Klan Holds Fourth of July Parade;” “Klan sponsors lemonade stand.” They had a Klan baseball team. They stitched “Ku Klux Klan” across their jerseys and they would play in this league.
So, I often wondered during my time traveling, why the ‘20s? I think I’ve explained it. It was also prohibition. They tried to do an audacious experiment, outlaw alcohol in every square foot of America, which completely backfired. That was a Klan thing. Klan was for prohibition, just like the schools, just like the Catholic schools. So Irish [and] Italians are brewing their own beer or making their own wine. Irish are congregating in pubs, where they learn to be citizens. They thought, oh, if we take away the booze, we’ll take away the social lubricant of these immigrants and crush their way of getting together.
Miller: It turned out everybody liked alcohol though.
Egan: Right, true. Then the 1930s comes along and the Klan is gone. Now, I argue in the book that it was largely because of the scandals and perhaps because they achieved many of the things they wanted to do. But the ‘30s comes along, Great Depression, one in four Americans is out of work, people are roaming the streets by the thousands, desperate, homeless, horrible time, eating roadkill, as I wrote about in “The Worst Hard Times.” And it’s completely different social dynamics.
Suddenly these immigrants, these Jews, these Blacks, don’t seem like such a threat when you’re trying to get a meal, so they would have been completely different then. Different periods lend themselves to different … But I will say this. I’m sorry to say this, I really am, Dave. This is a current of American thought that runs through our history. And to acknowledge it is not to say our history sucks or we’re awful people. I don’t believe in any of that. I don’t like too much of the revisionist history myself, but I think you have to recognize as an honest human being that this current runs through our story.
What a great experiment we’re doing in America. No country of our size has ever tried to have a nation this large that is not based on race, that’s not based on tribe, not based on religion. We have no state religion for a reason. It’s based on an idea, and every now and then something like the Klan comes along to break that idea, to get people to think in tribal terms.
I did this book about my people, Irish Americans, it’s called “The Immortal Irishman.” And the first object of hatred of the anti-immigration people in the history of the United States was Irish. So they had this group called the Know Nothing Party – aptly named Know Nothing Party – and they passed all these laws to keep Irish Americans from becoming citizens. And I saw that current then and then you saw in the 1920s … it just runs through our history.
Miller: I’m curious, since you brought up that book and your own Irish American heritage – something you’re very proud of for a bunch of good reasons – what did working on this book teach you or remind you about the way “Americanness” has evolved over the years? I mean, I ask this because when in the 1920s, this group of white Protestants didn’t see Catholic Irish people as an American. And in 2024, whiteness is defined very differently, where Catholic Irish Americans fit very neatly into a version of white Americanness. I’m curious how you think about these shifts over time?
Egan: Well, I’ll tell you another thing. The majority of the Supreme Court is Catholic. And that would have been unheard of 100 years ago. They wouldn’t have allowed that because they thought every Catholic answered to the Pope. The loyalty was not to the United States; it was to the Pope. I struggle with these thoughts because I want my fellow Irish … Ireland right now is a country of 5 million people, but there’s 40 million Irish Americans. I came from a big family, bred pretty quickly.
Australia … the majority of the people were sent there as convicts. And now they’re like the majority ethnic party. I try to remind my fellow Irish Americans, remember what it was like when we came here. We were the “scum.” That’s what they called us. They lived in slums and they [were] too clannish, they wouldn’t speak the language, they spoke Gaelic, many of them. They had too many kids, they were dirty and the crime … You got this term, you still probably heard it: “Oh, there’s a hooligan.” That came out of an Irish American word for criminal. Paddywagon was an Irish American word for where these “paddies” are gonna be sent.
So to your question, I think that Irish Americans now are a proud diaspora. But they should remember that we were on the other end of the stick not too long ago.
Miller: Why? What’s important in that remembering?
Egan: Because you can’t empathize with the people who are currently at the end of the stick without thinking they started with you. You were the “other.” I mean, it’s hard for me to believe this, listen to Sean Hannity or something like that. I just read the things on signs on windows that said, “No dogs or Irish.” They passed laws to keep them from becoming citizens. Again, it’s the how people become others. That’s what D.C. Stephenson was really good at, and the Irish with it. Now, they’re not it right now, but I want people to remember. That’s one of the reasons I wrote that book.
Can I add one more thing?
Miller: Please do.
Egan: Yeah. So again, I can’t write a book that’s this hard. Remember there’s a horrible crime at the center of this book and a woman. I hope we talk about her: Madge.
Miller: We will.
Egan: [She] basically brings this bastard down. I can’t write a book about this horror without looking for light, without looking for our better angels, as Lincoln called “Better Citizens.” And in the 1920s, there was a group. It was a Black publisher, a rabbi and an Irish American lawyer – sounds like the three guys walk into a bar joke. But they started this group called Tolerance, and what they did was once a week they would print lists. Remember the Klan was part of the invisible empire, that’s why they wore the hoods. They found out who they were. They had snitches inside and published names of them. They outed them. So it was this coalition that fought back. Unfortunately, it backfired.
Miller: Well, I hear you say that this is some light, but for me, this was actually … And we will, in the second half of the show, talk about Madge, about the trial and about other brave people who pushed back. But this episode was one of the darkest chapters in the entire book for me, in a book that has a lot of murder and violence. Because these brave folks, they published all these lists of Klan members saying, “Hey, you have your robe on, your mask, we will de-mask you.” It’s sort of the way it happens online right now, to this day ...
Egan: Doxing them.
Miller: Doxing, right. And yet when people in large numbers saw the even larger numbers of the Klan ranks written out in local newspapers or in this paper, and it was reprinted sometimes, as you know, it had the opposite effect. They said, “Huh, if my dentist is a Klansman, maybe the Klan isn’t all bad.” What lessons did you take from that?
Egan: That’s exactly what happened. So they would have these headlines in their newspaper called Tolerance, and the headline was “Who’s Who in Bed Sheets?” And the papers sold out because everyone [was like], “I wanna see who’s in the Klan.” Because again, in addition to swearing an oath to forever uphold white supremacy, you swore an oath to never rat out a fellow Klansman. You were supposed to be invisible, it was called the invisible empire. So they out them and they felt 100% confident this will destroy them once we’ve taken the robe off. But as you said, Dave, [it had] the opposite effect. It was validating because you looked at this list and you said, “Oh, wow. If all these people I know – my minister, my milkman, my butcher and my neighbor – I better join too. Maybe I’m the outsider, not them.”
So in Noblesville, this prototypical Midwestern town where the trial takes place of D.C. Stephenson, 40% of the whole community was Klan by the time the trial happened, because it was valid. And that’s really discouraging for me. They saw this and they thought … By the way, people knew what this is all about. Even though it seemed kind of mainstream, they knew it was still about terror. They still lynched people, had summary executions. They still firebombed people’s homes. They ran all the Blacks in this one town in Indiana, an entire town, out of town in an afternoon. A pogrom we call that. It’s what the Jews call a pogrom because they were run out of Eastern Europe. And this all happened under the watchful eye of the cops, the judiciary. There’s a judge who threw a publisher in jail for the crime of free speech, practicing the First Amendment.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: I’m Kierra. My question is, was there any one person or group that was like a vital source into doing your research for the book?
Egan: A vital source in putting together the book? Yeah, so I had to do this during COVID and I couldn’t do my usual just open doors everywhere. There were a lot of closed doors. And I was lucky in my Dust Bowl book in that I got the very last people who were alive, mostly women who were in their upper 90s, who were telling me what it was like to be a 17-year-old and have the world turned inside out. In this case, everyone’s dead. Everyone from the ‘20s is dead. There’s nothing like looking into someone’s face and saying, “Tell me a story. What was it like?” I got that in the Dust Bowl.
So lucky for me, Indiana’s done a … They buried this story, don’t get me wrong. This thing, they ran that state. It was called a “Klan republic” – all factions, press, judiciary, cops, like I said, all nine members of Congress, both of the United States Senators. Their governor was a sworn Klansman and everyone knew this. The Klanmen sent out this tab on election night to here’s who to vote for and it was all members of the secret order. So it was a big deal. They all knew this and all the press covered it. The trial of Madge and D.C. Stephenson was one of the trials of the century.
But this thing went into the memory hole. They just buried it. They don’t teach this in the schools of Indiana. I’m doing a lot of speaking in Indiana and people are like, “wow, I never knew this.” But it’s there in the archives and places like this, libraries like this. So I would go in there and the thing would just pop out. I’m like, oh, open an obscured newspaper from the 1920s … boom, there’s three headlines on the Klan. Open a diary entry from 1924, there’s a person talking about “the time we rounded up all the” so and so. So it was there, preserved. Thank God it is there and preserved, that they didn’t burn all the records.
I’ll tell you one quick story about this. I have this in the book. About 15 years ago, somebody went up into an attic of a barn near Noblesville where the trial took place. This guy just bought the farm [and] opens up the chest of drawers in the barn, and here’s a list of all the people in this charming little town who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Like, “Holy crap, that’s my grandpa. I know all these names.” So the community was freaked out because, “Oh, we almost used to think Grandpa was such a dithering, lovely old guy.” No, the guy was a member of a terror group. So they had this big debate, should they let the list get out? And you know what they did? They closed the chest of drawers and locked it up for another 15 years. And I was one of the few people that got to see it; it had recently been opened.
The story is there. I looked for firsthand research, so that people can’t doubt me, and let people make their own decisions by laying out the story. But it did go into oblivion. We have a thing called collective amnesia, which we do a lot for parts of our history. It’s part of the debate of how much of our history do we teach – and believe me they practice it in India.
Miller: What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: Yes, my name is Lucas. My question is sort of relating to Madge Oberholtzer and the trial. She was evidently a victim to this horrible crime that would eventually cause her death. But in the way you wrote the book, it also framed her as sort of a hero, that her actions were what brought down this person who was controlling an entire state. And I was curious, how do you feel like that impacts the theme and the message of the story and the way it should be interpreted?
Egan: Well, you guys asked great questions, so thank you for that. Madge is my hero and I was so happy I found her because I wouldn’t have written this book if I couldn’t have a counterforce. Now, most histories that you guys have been forced to read, even in AP History, are about the great men – it’s usually men – who shaped our society. I’m interested equally in the people on the margins, the people who don’t get their stories written. Madge is one of those people on the margins – an asterisk. In most of the tellings she was an asterisk. And here’s what she did, here’s what’s so impressive about her and why I think you could make a historical argument that she brought down the Klan, which is the argument I make in the book.
D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon, the dude who ran the state, the con man, he was kind of like a Wizard of Oz in his later years. He didn’t want people to even see him. He would issue these, “All powerful Klan has spoken.” He would issue these statements, but they couldn’t see him. He once dropped out of a plane in front of 200,000 people and they all bowed down to him like he was a God-like figure. So, as I said, the institutions had tried to bring them down. There’s Catholics, Jews, Blacks, the NAACP came to town and said to the Republican Party, we were your most loyal voters – which they were after Lincoln – but we’re not voting for Republicans anymore unless you do something about this Klan republic. They all failed.
D.C. Stephenson sexually assaulted several women, if not dozens of women. No prosecutions ever happened. Why? I hope we don’t hear this in the next four years. He said, “I am the law.” Not the law is the law. “I am the law. I, D.C. Stephenson.” And that’s why these other women never spoke out. They said, he’ll crush you. He owns the cops, which he did. He owns the judiciary, which he did. He owned every prosecutor but one, the guy who stood up to him and nearly paid for it with his life.
So Madge Oberholtzer alone, among all the victims of this awful, monstrous human being, decides on her deathbed, while the life is oozing out of her … She’s only 28 years old, but she’s dying day by day of the poison that she had to take when she felt she couldn’t live and the lethal action that he took against her, his own teeth marks against her. She’s dying, the whole state is following her and she makes a brave, really history changing decision. I’m gonna get this bastard, and she swears out this deathbed declaration – that’s what they called it. It still gives me chills when I read it, and her voice beyond the grave … They were allowed to read that in court. Sometimes you’re not allowed to do that because, the Constitution, you have to be able to confront your accuser. But because the accuser was dead, they read her words in court. And her words from beyond the grave … one person, he said were, “You’re nobody. You think you can bring D.C. Stephenson down? Don’t even think of it.”
So that’s why I was so attracted to her. She made a very courageous decision while she was dying to swear out this complaint.
Miller: Do you think that if a deathbed confession, a different version …
Egan: A declaration, not a confession.
Miller: A declaration had come from a Black victim of a lynching, or a Jewish or Irish Catholic victim, that it would have had the same power, that it would have swayed those 12 jurors in rural Indiana?
Egan: Fascinating question. I haven’t been given that question yet, so congratulations. It’s debatable, because Madge was a beloved member of the community. I mean, she went to this cool college that let a lot of women in, when a lot of colleges wouldn’t. She was a sorority member. She was a well known sort of person around town. She was a flapper. I mean, she was an independent woman. She didn’t feel like she had to get married because she took this road trip across the U.S.A., when that was a very strange thing for a woman to do alone.
She’s feisty, independent, but kind of apolitical. But because she was not one of the victim groups, as you outlined, probably the perfect person to make that case. Because the jurors then saw in her – and this is what the prosecutors played to – their daughters, their wives.
Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What is your name? What’s your question?
Audience Member: My name is Mabel. I was wondering, how did you decide which opponents of the Klan to focus on? You have the big people like Patrick O’Donnell who started Tolerance and everything. And then there’s these smaller people like George Dale, John Niblack and William Stern, who did small things but that pop up again and again in the book. And we feel like, as readers, we get to know them. How did you choose who to focus on for that?
Egan: Well, it’s, it’s an old writer’s trick. But the first thing is, if you have the material. I mean, George Dale left a large volume of stuff about his fight against the Klan. John Niblack wrote a wonderful memoir about his fight against the Klan. So if neither of those people committed anything to posterity, I’d be screwed as a writer. I need that information. Part of it is, this is just the selective process of writing. If you’ve got the material you can elevate it.
But the other thing is, to your question, all the institutions did fail. And the last one to fail – this is interesting – was the University of Notre Dame. So this Catholic school. D.C. Stephenson said, “I’m gonna send 40,000 Klansmen up to South Bend to show those kids who’s who in Indiana.” And he did, he sent 40,000 Klansmen up South Bend on a May day and the students said, screw this, we are not gonna let these guys … they tell us we’re not Americans. We’re Catholics, we’re Irish. And they had a riot. They chased him with potatoes, which everyone laughed at because the Irish kids were using potatoes. And they routed them. So the next day there’s a headline in the Chicago Tribune saying, “Notre Dame kids route Klan,” and that gave birth to their name to this day: the Fighting Irish. They’re known because they fought the Klan. I liked that story not just because of the Fighting Irish origin but because it was the institution. But they ultimately failed too, because then you know they had to go back cowering in the place of this guy that ran the state.
Then you see – and this is why it’s so important to every average American – a handful of seemingly powerless people turned the tide. I mean, Dale got thrown in jail. They sick their dogs on him, he’s a little 5 foot scrawny guy. They bombed his house, shot bullets into his … tried to get his kids. And his only crime, like I said, was writing this little goofy column that made fun of the Klan. They didn’t like being made fun of.
So it’s a fine balance. As an author, I’ll just tell you, it’s much more powerful to have an interesting and complicated individual than some institution.
Miller: Let’s take another question.
Audience Member: Hi, I’m Casey. So while reading this book, I couldn’t help but to realize parallels between today’s world and the world of the ‘20s – corrupt politicians and polarization. I was curious if these connections, while implicit, were an intentional addition to the text.
Egan: Yeah, I get this question all the time. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t write a history – I’ve written a lot of histories – unless it has some relevance to today. I mean, look, if it’s a good story, that’s great, but you also want people to learn from that. It’s not a dead thing. It’s a living thing. It’s a part of our character and our past. Duh, while doing this thing, I could see all kinds of resonance to today. The echoes of time. I mean, even the slogans were the same. I won’t name names, but I think it’s pretty obvious the people and types that I’m talking about. And you see this running through our history all the time.
My thought was that if you held a press conference in Downtown Portland, like they did 100 years ago … I have a picture in the book – you should look it up – of the mayor, the chief of police of Portland, and some of the big wigs standing at a chamber of commerce lunch with a bunch of dudes in hoods and saying, “Chamber welcomes Klan, discusses future.” It’s like here’s the power structure, talking about … If you did that today, you would be run out of town.
Miller: I have it right here. It’s chilling: “Chief Kluxers Tell Law Enforcement Officers Just What Mystic Organization Proposes to Do in Portland” – from the Portland Telegram, August 2, 1921.
Egan: Yeah. That’s the power structure and it’s not, “Terror group meets with the mayor.” So here’s my point: If you did that today anywhere in America – “I’m gonna call a press conference and announce a member” – you’d be booted out of town, say, “oh, horrible Klan … " But you can say some of the same things without the rope, without the organization behind you, because a lot of the things that are being said today, by some of our harder elements of our society, are almost word for word but what the Klan said. But what’s different is you don’t show up with the robe and the hood. Yeah, great question.
Miller: Let’s go to another question from our audience. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hi, I’m Daphne. In Indiana, the Klan was in control of the police force. How do you think police are influenced by racism now? With the BLM movement just five years ago, we can see how racism is still very present in the police system. Do you think that racism in America can be demolished based on our history, all the way?
Egan: Yeah, I don’t know, that’s a tough question. I’m pro public safety, so I don’t wanna besmirch all cops. But in the ‘20s what happened … I found this great quote from Malcolm X. By the way, there’s a scene in the book – his family, they grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. They were terrorized by the Klan. The Klan showed up at night with their torches and said, “Get out of here,” and Malcolm X’s mother was then pregnant with him. At his school, he said this great quote. He said, “Well, a lot of people just exchange their Klan robes for cop uniforms.”
And certainly that was the case, I hate to say it, in many cities I researched. In Texas, some guy got totally assaulted and near lynched a Black dude. He calls the cops and the cops said, “Well he probably taught him a good lesson.” So the cops would not prosecute. They were as much terrorists as the people you go to … who’s gonna support the rule of law? The rule of law was on the wrong side.
I don’t know. I mean, today there’s bad cops. But I think we have certainly a much more professional class of cops, and I’ll say that and stand by that.
Miller: You mentioned in the middle of this conversation in passing something I want to come back to. The trial where D.C. Stephenson was convicted, and other trials actually at around the same time, that brought a lot of the Klan’s dirty deeds much more into public light, that they contributed hugely to the huge decline in Klan enrollment in that time. You also said that also the Klan achieved a lot of their aims, but we didn’t talk about what those were.
So just briefly, at the national level, what did the Klan achieve?
Egan: That was one of my biggest struggles in the book. What’s my takeaway point to the reader? And I thought I would just lay it out and let the reader decide. But yes, Madge Oberholtzer – it was a big trial covered by all the newspapers and all the newsreels – brought the Klan in Indiana down because she exposed that these seemingly nice, average people were a bunch of rapists, and con men, and liars, and criminals, and all awful adjectives you want to come up with, that’s who they were. [She] brought them down.
Same time that happened, the Oregon Grand Dragon, the dentist from Le Grande, raped and killed his dental assistant. The same thing happened in Denver – similar thing, it was a dentist again. I don’t get it, dentists and the Klan. Maybe think twice before going in for my checkup. These scandals showed America the true heart of this group that was parading down your streets on the 4th of July. But the alternative argument – which I don’t even know which side I’m on – is that the Klan dissolved, went from 6 million people, which they had at their peak … 90 members of Congress were sympathetic to them, 12 United States senators, four governors, including one here in Oregon. Imagine if we had today, this many people with them. [It] went from that to nothing, because they achieved all of their major goals.
Now, what were their major goals? Well, the first thing of course, was prohibition. No democracy had ever done this, even in Islamic countries, they don’t outlaw alcohol in every square foot, which is what they tried to do. It was a spectacular failure. The Klan wanted to do it, they achieved that. Number two, the eugenics laws I said – they want to get rid of all people who shouldn’t be able to have children because they were not going to evolve into a master race. Well, 37 states, including Oregon, passed eugenics laws with the full support of the Ku Klux Klan. Jim Crow – you all know what Jim Crow is, yeah – moved from the South, where it started, to the North. So here in Portland, Seattle, Indianapolis, they had redlining laws, kept Blacks from moving into certain neighborhoods. Success, check again.
Finally and most importantly, this is their big triumph – the 1924 immigration law, which basically said we’re gonna make an America that looks like the 1870s. A lot of Japanese coming in, a lot of Chinese coming in, a lot of Jews coming in, a lot of Greeks coming in, a lot of Southern Italians coming in. They said no, we want it to look like what it did before: white Protestants. So they passed this ‘24 law that basically made it impossible for any Asian to come to this country. Basically, made it impossible for any Jew to come to this country. And in fact during World War II, they think that upwards of 2 million Jews possibly could have been saved, had this law not been passed. So that was a huge triumph. And you know what The New York Times headline was after they passed that law? “America As a Melting Pot Comes To An End.” So that’s what it was and that was their top goal. Like, “hey, we got everything we wanted.”
The last thing they wanted, which they didn’t get, was a Klansman in the White House.
Miller: We have time for one more quick question. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hi, my name’s Jackson, and I think you touched on this earlier, but why do you think important events like the ones in your book tend to be overlooked in history?
Miller: You have one minute to answer this.
Egan: OK, it’s very simple. Do we talk about the Ducks losing to Ohio State very much? Well, I do because I’m a Husky and I saw there was a Husky there. Go dogs! Sorry … but you don’t talk about the things that don’t reflect well on you. And this is one of the debates that Ken Burns and others have nicely stirred up: how much of our history, which we’re uncomfortable with, are we willing to discuss? And that’s what happens, is that yeah, you’d rather talk about all the triumphs. And I think the triumphs should be celebrated. I love talking about the triumphs.
A lot of my books are about American triumphs and the American experiment, but you can’t understand how great those triumphs are if you don’t also understand the bad things. That’s what makes us stronger, is to understand the duality. We’re human beings. Human beings are good and bad. We have good and bad, we’re complicated people. And if we don’t understand where we came from, we won’t understand where we’re going. But it’s human nature, folks, it’s human nature. I mean, do you walk around, does anyone walk around saying, “Hey, you know, my grandpa was a Klansman,” which in Indiana, you’d scratch one in three people, that’s gonna be the case. They don’t talk about it because it reflects poorly on you. But you know this is fascinating … I’ve found in Indiana a lot of people are willing to finally embrace this.
Miller: Timothy Egan, thanks very much.
Egan: Thank you for having me.
Miller: And thanks as well to our audience here.
[Audience Applause]
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