A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

A Fever in the Heartland: the Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
by Timothy Egan
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: April 4, 2023
Genre: non-fiction
Pages: 432
ReRead?: No

A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

This is my second non-fiction book by Timothy Egan. I previously read The Worst Hard Time, published all the way back 2005, although I didn’t read it until 2021. It won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and tells the story of the dust storms on the High Plains during the darkest years of the Great Depression in the United States. I absolutely loved it, and have recommended it to many readers since I finished it.

Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot To Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them is Egan’s most recent book, published this year in April. It shares a focus on the geographic center of the U.S. with The Worst Hard Time, but that’s really where the similarities end. In many ways, Fever in the Heartland is a work of narrative non-fiction, politics and true crime, all mixed together. It is a deeply disturbing book, that has a lot to say about authoritarianism and racism, and how the two of them have been used by irredeemably awful people to seek and consolidate power.

The Ku Klux Klan is, without question, an organization of unremitting evil. It’s shocking – today – to realize that they operated with near total impunity in many parts of the United States for decades, in total control of all elements of the community: business, government, and religious.

“No one can deny that the United States is a white Protestant country,” wrote the Fiery Cross, the weekly newspaper of the Indiana Klan. Stephenson’s press organ was filled with scare stories of those seeking to find a home in a new land. “We receive at our ports of immigration an ignorant and disreputable omnium-gatherum of scorbutic and vicious spawn, people who possess neither blood nor brain, unclean and uncomprehending foes of American ideals.” The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.”

The means always justified the ends, and the ends, for them, was nothing less than total domination of the American political system. The primary villain at the heart of the book was a man named D.C. Stephenson. Stephenson was utterly depraved: a murderous, sexually assaultive libertine who would cross any line in order to gain and maintain status, wealth and power.

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction.

The events in the book occur in Indiana, which was called the “most Southern” of the Northern States, a place where, as the book explains, the Ku Klux Klan was so deeply embedded in the communities, that:

“Our investigation has shown that Stephenson forced a super oath” on public officials, said Adams. “This super oath was greater than the oath of constitutional authority.” The Republican Party was outraged—not at the disclosures of Stephenson’s web of graft, but at the press for reporting it. This journalism was the work of Jews, party officials implied. Clyde A. Walb, the Republican Party state chairman, said a syndicate of international bankers was trying to bring down the GOP in Indiana.

The incident that finally brings down Stephenson is not for the faint of heart – what occurs to the woman of the subtitle is horrific.

From my perspective, the thing that I find most chilling about the book was the ease with which the Americans who considered themselves decent, upstanding, even (maybe especially) Christian people were persuaded to join a group that was built upon hatred. They were convinced of conspiracy theories, and they abandoned their principles without a backward glance to grant power to terrible men because they believed that the benefit to them was worth it.

“Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?” To D. C. Stephenson, it wasn’t strange at all. Steve’s 1922 epiphany in Evansville—that he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman or a member of Congress—was brilliant. And true.

I wish that this book didn’t resonate so clearly in 2023. They say that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Egan has done a service by reminding Americans of our very recent past. If only we will heed his warning.