A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

In October 1923, two events coincided in Richmond, Indiana: a Klan rally of 36,000 and the arrival of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band—featuring a young Louis Armstrong—for a recording session. The town, in which 40% of men were registered Klansmen, boasted the best recording facility in the Midwest, a facility that was largely responsible for giving the world its first taste of jazz, a uniquely American art form birthed from the musical roots of the Black experience. While King Oliver’s Jazz Band recorded their blend of jazz and ragtime, Klan members—including women and children—marched in a parade down Main Street. The musicians finished their session and raced to the train depot before the Klan rally was over.

The Great Migration of Black Americans from the South changed the face of many Northern states, but many residents were just as unwelcoming as their Southern counterparts. Indianapolis boasted a robust Black business community, but as Stephenson—then headquartered there—exercised his influence, the Black middle class was isolated and prevented from owning homes in white neighborhoods. Some of these laws took the form of outright “pogroms,” banishing Black residents altogether. The Tulsa Race Massacre two years prior—an assault that claimed nearly 300 lives, “1200 homes, five hotels, a dozen churches, thirty-one restaurants, four drugstores, a public library, a hospital, and four doctor’s offices” (76)—resulted in zero prosecutions or convictions. Across wide swaths of the country, the Klan owned the justice system.

Irish attorney Patrick O’Donnell founded the American Unity League to stand in opposition to the Klan. In less than a year, 50,000 Chicagoans joined. His mission was to expose the Klan’s secrecy and to “unmask” its members to the public. Using undercover sources, the League soon published the names of several prominent members, including businessmen and a bank president. Boycotts of Klan-owned businesses ensued, and the state criminalized wearing a mask in public. O’Donnell cautioned his supporters to reject the Klan lest it take over every American civic institution. He rallied Jewish, Black, and Catholic leaders to his cause.

After a raid on Klan headquarters in Indianapolis, O’Donnell’s newspaper, Tolerance, published the names of over 12,000 members. When the state’s top Republican official was exposed, he renounced his membership. An irate Stephenson ordered state legislators not to appoint a replacement without his approval. They obeyed. Tolerance exposed the Klan’s private militia and its terror tactics, including an incident in which a young pregnant woman died after a Klan raid on her parents’ home. The paper also reported on the Klan’s anti-Catholic rhetoric fueled in part by unsubstantiated rumors and unreliable sources. O’Donnell’s crusade backfired, however. Klan membership grew. Stephenson faced the accusations head-on and embraced them as virtues.

Stephenson’s past—as he spun it—was full of gaps and falsehoods. Embarrassed by his parents and his humble upbringing—his father was an “itinerant laborer”—Stephenson rewrote his own biography, creating a sophisticated persona born of old money. He quickly learned how to use his rhetorical gifts to insinuate himself into the elite power structure. He married Jeanette Hamilton and worked a series of newspaper jobs, but when Jeanette became pregnant, Stephenson, not wanting the bother of a child, beat his wife. He was never prosecuted. After six months of marriage, he deserted her, and she gave birth alone. She tried to track him down, but he sent her a letter: “You must not try to find me” (96). In 1917, he joined the Iowa National Guard, but he gained a reputation among his platoonmates as a thief and a womanizer. He never saw active duty.

Currently “flush” with cash, the Klan, under Stephenson’s directive, attempted to buy Valparaiso University in Indiana, intent on establishing a “monument to American ideals and principles” (98). Bedeviled by Muncie newspaperman George Dale’s scathing editorials, Stephenson ordered the paper’s offices vandalized. Dale himself was threatened and assaulted, but he had no legal recourse. The police chief and district attorney were both Klansmen. When Stephenson is nearly arrested for indecent exposure, he flashed his badge as a deputy of the “Horse Thief Detective Association” (the Klan’s morality police), and walked free.

As Stephenson preached the gospel of eugenics, its discredited theories took hold at state fairs where “pure” babies were judged according to physical traits. The purest white babies won blue ribbons. Congress, led by the same debunked theories, prepared to close its borders to “nationalities debased from birth” (105). Indiana enacted a law to sterilize—against their will—people with mental health conditions, people who committed crimes, people with epilepsy, and people with alcoholism (the law was nullified by the state supreme court). The work of Harry Laughlin, Congress’s chief eugenics authority, became the template for Nazi scientists.

Meanwhile, James Johnson—composer, poet, and leader of the nascent NAACP—was a living, breathing counterargument to Stephenson’s eugenics tirades. Johnson preached his own gospel—the legacy of cultural contributions by Black artists—but eugenics advocates had all the momentum, given credibility by academics and politicians. At a rally, Stephenson framed his argument as a moral struggle for the “American race.”

The Fourth of July celebration in Kokomo, Indiana, boasted the largest gathering of Klan members in history (between 100,000-200,000). The hero worship bestowed upon Stephenson was akin to that of a cult leader, even though he was guilty of crimes “that these very people were crusading against” (116). With his skeletons tightly shuttered away, Stephenson was awarded the honorific Grand Dragon. In his speech, he argued for a more “flexible” Constitution and a Congress with the power to override the courts. At an interview, a reporter asked Stephenson about the Klan’s ultimate plan for those it deemed undesirable as well as how much money Stephenson had earned from the Klan. These questions angered Stephenson, and he ended the interview. Later that night, a drunk Stephenson tried to rape his secretary.

Years later, a Catholic resident of Kokomo, after seeing that his neighbor was a Klan member, reflected on how such hatred had infested half of his town: It was rooted, he wrote, in an “American moralistic bloodlust that is half historical determinism, and half Freud” (121).

By 1923 Stephenson owned two mansions, a private plane, and a 98-foot yacht. Aboard his yacht, Stephenson and a who’s who of political leaders planned a Constitutional Convention to “establish ‘the racial destiny and define a wise, safe, and true Americanism’ for the United States” (124). When President Warren Harding died of a heart attack—leaving Vice President Calvin Coolidge as chief executive—the Klan aimed for the White House. They selected Senator James Watson to run as Calvin Coolidge’s vice president the following year. They also had eyes on the Indiana governor’s mansion, plus the district attorney’s office to shield the Klan from criminal prosecution. Meanwhile, its on-the-ground terror tactics continued in neighboring Ohio and Pennsylvania. The governor of Oklahoma declared war on the Klan, but they had enough influence to force him from office. Anti-immigrant legislation was passed in Oregon, a state that, in 1859, denied residency to people who weren’t white.

A Klan march in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, turned violent as residents resisted. A sheriff’s deputy was trampled, and one Klansman was shot, finally dispersing the crowd. Stephenson memorialized the slain “brother” as a martyr, dying for simply being an American. He vowed to use every political connection to see the shooter—an Irish American—convicted.