A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan (review)

Reviewed by: A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan Allen Safianow A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them By Timothy Egan (New York: Viking, 2023. Pp. xxiv, 432. Illustrations, notes, index. Clothbound, 30. 00; paperbound, 18. 00; e-book 14. 99. ) With growing public concern about racism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, and democracy's future, several important studies have appeared on America's largest nativist organization. Attracting millions of members throughout the nation, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan attained alarming size and political power in numerous states, particularly in Indiana. Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plan to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them provides a colorful and engaging account that highlights the most sensational aspects of the Klan and traces the rise and fall of its most notorious leader in Indiana, Grand Dragon David C. Stephenson. Boasting "I am the law, " Stephenson is portrayed as an endlessly ambitious con man, liar, thief, seducer, and rapist. Though the focus is on Indiana, where the Klan drew some of its greatest support, Egan often alludes to its operations in other states. He vividly describes the 1923 Kokomo Konklave, perhaps the Klan's largest gathering ever, where Stephenson was installed as Grand Dragon; the Horse Thief Detective Association, a vigilante group that worked in tandem with the Klan; the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Daisy Douglas Barr who, espousing a forerunner of today's replacement theory, claimed there was a Jewish-directed plot to replace white Protestants with supposed racial inferiors; and the 1924 Notre Dame riot where students successfully routed a Klan rally. He mentions the efforts of Klan opponents such as the NAACP and the American Unity League, whose newspaper Tolerance published secret Klan membership lists. End Page 173 The book presents a comprehensive examination of Madge Oberholtzer, the state employee who was kidnapped, brutally assaulted, and tortured by Stephenson. The dying woman left a gruesome testimony of his attack that contributed to his 1925 second-degree homicide conviction and long imprisonment. Failing to obtain a pardon, Stephenson revealed "black boxes" with documents that exposed the Klan's nefarious political grip on Indiana and the Republican Party, resulting in the indictment of Governor Edward Jackson and Indianapolis mayor John Duval. Egan makes the somewhat hyperbolic claim that Oberholtzer's testimony aborted Stephenson's grandiose ambitions of achieving national power and foiled what his book's subtitle calls "The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America. " Without Oberholtzer's courage, he asserts, "there is no extinguisher of the flames that enveloped the nation during the 1920s" (p. 344). Certainly Oberholtzer played a significant role, but by 1925 there were other important factors, including the fragmentation of the Klan into warring factions, blatant Klan corruption in communities like Kokomo, as well as scandals in states like Oregon and Colorado. Indeed, by the time of Oberholtzer's testimony, the Hiram Evans-led national Klan had already expelled Stephenson. Furthermore, the Indiana legislature was so divided into Evans and Stephenson factions that in the end the Klan was unable to achieve its most significant legislation. A Fever in the Heartland is a vivid and compelling, if not very nuanced, work. Readers might consult Thomas R. Pegram's One Hundred Percent American (2011) and Felix Harcourt's Ku Klux Kulture (2017) for a more probing examination of the Klan's complexities and contradictions. Egan claims that the Klan rejected modernism, but as Pegram and Harcourt point out, the movement skillfully utilized modern technologies like film in its sophisticated marketing efforts. Egan ends his account by relating what ultimately happened to the key players in his book but does not explore subsequent nativist and white supremacist groups in Indiana as James Madison does in The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland (2020). He does not deeply analyze the nativist movements that preceded the Klan, though to his credit he frequently refers to such movements, demonstrating that the Klan did not spring. . .