A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan, Viking, 2023
Reviewed by Pam Gates
And what a story this is! It may shock and embarrass us white Northerners, who like to think we have a better handle on decency in relations with “other” Americans than our Southern counterparts. This story is from America’s heartland, Indiana, though it wanders a bit into Ohio and even to places a little further north, like Wisconsin.
Another aspect that makes this story so compelling is its uncanny parallel with today, exactly one century later. The person behind the rise of the Klan in Indiana, D.C. Stephenson, had his eyes on the White House, where now another very troubling person casts phobic views and controls over a new set of decoys and scapegoats – a whole century later.
Timothy Egan is an excellent writer. This book is gripping. I usually do my reading before bed, but I had to give that up with this one; it didn’t settle me down for a peaceful night! And the sad thing is, it’s all true. Egan’s research is thorough. He prefaces his book with this author’s note: “The following story is true. Dialogue and internal monologue are verbatim from court testimony, oral histories, autobiographies, letters, diaries, and newspaper quotes.”
Egan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, chooses stories from American history that he delves into and reports on in depth, stories we have probably heard about, such as the Dust Bowl during the Depression. He writes a whole book on the topic, telling us things most of us never knew. The one about the Dust Bowl is titled The Worst Hard Time, one of nine books listed at the beginning of A Fever in the Heartland, under “Also by Timothy Egan.” Based on my experience with three of Egan’s books, I would recommend every one of them to a reader curious about different phenomena in America’s history.
But, back to Indiana and the rise of the Klan. D.C. Stephenson rolled into the state in 1922 from thoroughly undistinguished beginnings in Oklahoma. He was a complete unknown, making grandiose claims as to his background, but he built an empire, slowly exerting control over thousands, who paid dues to wear a sheet and ostracize or terrorize fellow humans of other races or religions. Bank owners, newspaper editors, state court judges, mayors, sheriffs, townsfolk — all signed up to be Klansmen. Stephenson cast a wide net that engulfed whole communities with its power.
A trial eventually brought all this to an end, a trial with powerful testimony by the woman in the subtitle. I won’t reveal more than that; you need to read it for yourself. It won’t take long! I had the book from the library on a 14-day loan, and I finished it easily in those 14 days.
But I will share with you some observations from the last chapter, just before the epilogue, as the Klan fell from grace after the trial ended in November 1925. Egan quoted a Chicago Tribune editorial that he said “sounded like a bad fairy tale”: “It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct; and a state of terror was substituted for law.”
“But,” Egan asks, “was it really an aberration?” He then describes a lynching in Marion, Ind., the last known lynching of Black people in Indiana, and possibly the last north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It took place in August 1930, five years after the Klan began its fall into ignominy. A mob pulled three young Black men from the local jail and hanged them in the public square. Thousands witnessed this. No indictments were ever issued.
Egan does a wrap-up in his epilogue, following up on those who fought the Klan throughout its rise, as well as those who led it. And he makes broader observations. “What if,” he writes, “the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode it? A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s there still, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland.”
These quotations also give you a sample of Egan’s excellent writing. I urge you to read this book!